SNAFU: Hunters

Non-Zero Sum R.P.L. Johnson

Sealed inside his suit and strapped inside a Stryker armored vehicle that was itself trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the belly of a C17 Globemaster transport plane, Adam Blake thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t claustrophobic. Then again, given he’d probably be coughing his lungs out onto the desert sand within forty-eight hours, maybe a little honest phobia wasn’t such a bad thing.

He passed the time reviewing their mission briefing, even though he’d had all the details memorized an hour ago. It helped to occupy his mind and stop his thoughts from wandering back to that image that had dominated every television channel for the past four hours — the mushroom cloud rising up over the Arizona horizon.

Sergeant Blake was part of the Marine’s Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force, as was every man in his team. Almost every man, he corrected himself. Even though his team was cobbled together from half a dozen squads — volunteers all, single men with no dependants — he had a nodding acquaintance with all of them. But the two new additions, he didn’t know them at all, not even in passing, and they weren’t the kind of guys you forgot in a hurry.

The younger man, the one that had been introduced as Burrows, was obviously a spook — CIA or NSA probably. Not that Blake held that against him. Whoever he was, he had volunteered for a one-way mission in service of his country and that had to count for something. Like the rest of them he wore the loose-fitting JSLIST protective suit over his battledress uniform, but his bore no name or rank insignia. It was also suspiciously new, as if the man was modelling it for the cover of the Marine Times.

The spook’s buddy was never going to grace any magazine covers. Blake guessed he must be pushing seventy, and age had dried him out like leather stretched over knotted wood. His JSLIST was new too, but he wore it open at the throat and Blake could see the old combat jacket beneath. It bore the name Carroll on faded name tape. Blake was pretty sure they hadn’t used that camouflage pattern since Vietnam. As well as the old man’s dog tags, the chain around the thick neck held half a dozen medallions of various saints and a big pewter crucifix.

The old dude carried a bolt action rifle that looked every day as old as its owner. The wood stock was worn smooth from decades of use, but the barrel and the upper receiver looked freshly blued. The damn thing was huge.

Blake’s pride and joy was a 1969 Pontiac Judge; he guessed that the exhaust on the old muscle car was bigger than the barrel on that rifle, but it would be a close run thing.

The old man caught him staring at the weapon.

“Many elephants where you’re from?” Blake shouted above the roar of the plane.

The old man smiled. “Not any more,” he said.

“That thing standard issue back in your day?”

“Son, this is a modified 600 Overkill. It’ll send a nine-hundred grain bullet downrange at twenty-four-hundred feet per second. ‘Standard’ is not the word I’d use.”

A nine hundred grain bullet! The rounds in Blake’s M4 weighed only sixty-two grains.

The noise from the Globemaster’s engines rose in pitch as the big plane fought for altitude.

“Hold onto your lunches, Marines,” said the pilot’s voice over the intercom. “We’re going to climb above the worst of the cloud. No point getting cooked before we get to the drop zone.”

Yeah, plenty of time for that later. Blake knew this was a one-way mission. Even the aircrew on the Globemaster were taking a hell of a risk getting this close to the cloud. But they needed data; they needed to know who had done this to them, and that meant sending in the Marines from the ‘BIRF.

Their best intelligence so far had concluded the bomb had come in by truck from Mexico. The target had probably been Phoenix, although so far every terrorist cell that had claimed responsibility had been dismissed as mere attention seekers. Thankfully, the complexities of maintaining a thermonuclear device had proved to be too much and the bomb had detonated prematurely in the Sonoran Desert.

They had caught a break, for sure, but it was still a devastating breach of security. They needed to know who had done this and whether they had the capacity to do it again, perhaps more successfully.

The engine note changed again. They were decelerating, getting ready for the drop. Deploying a Stryker by airdrop was unusual. Dropping the big, eight-wheeled vehicle with its crew and passengers inside was unheard of, but this was a special case. Their time on the ground was limited and precious. To maximize their mission time they were going to drop right through the cloud and land as close to the hypocentre of the explosion as they could. The Stryker’s thick armour and self-contained atmosphere would give them some protection as they plummeted through the thick smog of radioactive particles thrown up by the explosion.

Blake heard the rear door open and the noise, which had been deafening before, became ear-splitting.

“Drogue chute deployed,” said the Loadmaster over the ‘com and the Stryker started to quiver like a racehorse in the stalls. Blake pictured the little chute fluttering behind the open rear door of the Globemaster. Its job was to pull the main chutes, all eight of them, out of their sleeves.

“Brace yourselves people,” Blake shouted above the din. “The next one’s going to be a real kick in the ass.”

“Primary chutes deploying in three… two… one…”

When the primaries opened, Blake felt like someone had driven the Stryker at full speed into the side of a cliff. He was thrown against his harness by the sudden deceleration as an acre of parachute yanked the Stryker out of the back of the speeding plane. He couldn’t see out, but the dirty sunlight that slanted in through the hardened viewing slits scythed around the inside of the cramped vehicle as it spun.

This isn’t right. They shouldn’t be spinning like this. He felt a momentary stab of fear as the steel cage and everyone inside it plummeted toward the desert that was still a mile below. It was stupid; they’d all be dead soon enough anyway, but dying in a botched airdrop would mean they had failed. It would mean they would learn nothing about the attack, at least not without sending more men to their deaths. He remembered the billowing, radioactive cloud rolling upwards and outwards like a cancer eating up the sky. Blake took the fear and twisted it into anger, a cold resolve.

The Stryker swung like a pendulum until down became somewhere closer to where it ought to be. They were still spinning, but they were level and Blake could feel the deceleration pressing up through his boots as the giant chutes slowed their descent. They were safe, for now.

“Ooh rah!” he shouted and his team answered, even the old dude. Only the spook stayed silent.

From somewhere at the back a voice mimicked the cry of a child at a county fair. “Again… Again!”

Even with eight chutes, touchdown was hard.

Although their Stryker was a reconnaissance vehicle and carried more instruments than armaments, it shared the eight massive all-terrain tyres and rugged, armored chassis of its more aggressive cousins. Despite that, they hit the desert like a fifteen-ton sledgehammer.

Blake unstrapped and made his way up the narrow aisle to the front cabin where their driver, PFC Kareem Lyons was already gunning the Stryker’s Caterpillar turbo-diesel power plant to life.

The cabin was even more cramped than the troop transport bay behind. The driver and navigator sat in front of twin steering yokes staring through narrow viewports at the swirling dust storm outside.

“Bearing, Sergeant?” Lyons asked.

Blake checked the GPS, but as he had expected contact with the satellites above was patchy at best.

“North forty-five degrees west,” Blake replied, that should get them close enough. “Or as near as the terrain will let you.”

Lyons nodded, gunned the engine and the Stryker lurched forward, rocking like a ship.

They drove for about twenty minutes while Blake and his team of specialists took readings from the mass spectrometer and Geiger counter. The explosion had created its own weather system: the rising column of super-heated air had built what the meteorologists called a thermal low, not unlike a tropical cyclone. With so much heat to dissipate, Blake guessed the dust storm around them would last for days, maybe even weeks. The swirling sand was also building up a significant amount of static electricity that was playing hell with their instruments. The radio was useless. They had a communications laser that could squirt data up to the satellite, but the bandwidth was limited and even that would probably be greatly attenuated by the swirling dust.

Blake started to weigh the alternatives. They would just have to collect as much data as possible and either hope for a break in the storm, or haul ass for its edge once the effects of radiation sickness looked like ending the mission.

“Sergeant, we need to stop for a moment.” It was the spook, Burrows.

“Sir, we’re still several clicks from the hypocenter.”

“I’m aware of that, Sergeant. Now pull over.”

Blake knew not to argue, although looking out through the cabin’s toughened-glass ports he was damned if he could make out the reason for it. The dust storm still raged. He couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction but what he could see was just Arizona scrub. The readings on the spectrometer hadn’t spiked and the shallow valley between sand dunes they were traversing had been an unremarkable shithole even before the detonation.

“We’re going out,” Burrows said. “Ready the airlock.”

Burrows sealed his suit and pulled the bulky mask down over his face before pulling the hood of his JSLIST suit tight around it. His old companion was already suited up and standing at the rear door with that equally ancient elephant gun.

Blake gave the order and the collapsible airlock — little more than a thick rubber tent that folded out from the Stryker’s rear hatch — was erected. The two men entered and closed the armored hatch behind them before unzipping the outer door and stepping out into the dust storm.

Blake followed them on the video camera built into a hardened pod on the outside of the hull, panning it around with a tiny joystick built into the console until he had them both in frame.

“What the fuck are they doing out there?” Blake muttered.

Carroll, the old man, was easily recognizable as he towered above his much slighter CIA handler. The man took something out of the thigh pocket of his suit — it looked like a metal snake. When Carroll unwrapped it, Blake saw that it was a long length of motorcycle chain, the sort of thing greasers used to beat the crap out of each other back in the sixties. The chain was crimped together at its ends so that it made a circle. Carroll spun it around and then cast it into the dirt with a flick of his wrist so that its rotation pulled the heavy chain out into a perfect circle.

When it landed in the dirt, Carroll took a second to sprinkle it with some water from his canteen before sitting inside the circle, cross-legged like some goddam Indian guru. He pulled some more objects from his pocket and laid those out against the perimeter of the circle in front of him.

The dust storm and the camera’s shitty resolution meant Blake couldn’t make out any of the objects. He did notice that Carroll kept that big rifle close at all times.

“Williams, you reading anything?” Blake asked.

PFC DeShawn Williams manning the spectrometer shrugged. “I’m reading plenty,” he said, “but it’s all the same shit I’ve been seeing for the last five miles.”

What the hell were they doing? They had pin-pointed the center of the explosion seconds after the bomb had detonated. They knew exactly where it was and even in the storm, they knew exactly where they were in relation to it. If there was anything to find, any tell-tale concentration of residual elements that might give some clue as to the origin of the bomb then their best chance of finding it was miles away.

This was needless exposure, and as for the old man singing Kumbayah in the dirt, Blake started to wonder if they hadn’t all had more of a radiation dose than they thought.

“Okay Sergeant, we’re done here,” said Burrows over the com. Even at such short range, his voice sounded distant and scratchy.

“Roger that, sir. Readying the decontamination shower now.”

“No need for that, Sergeant.”

“Sir, I can’t let you back in without decontamination. The dust on your suit would contaminate the whole vehicle.”

“I know that, Sergeant. We’re going to hitch a ride on the outside. I need you to continue toward the hypocenter.”

They continued across the desert, stopping half a dozen times for the old man to throw his chain in the dust and rest his old bones inside the circle. Sometimes, after performing their little ritual, Blake got new orders: either a new direction to take or an instruction to take readings on the mass spectrometer. Blake tracked their progress on his map, it was painfully slow. Their path picked a meandering line in a rough direction about two points west of the center of the explosion. At this rate they would be testing the limits of their air reserves before they even reached their goal.

The rest of the team was growing impatient too. They all knew theirs was a one-way mission. They had to feel like it meant something; that their sacrifice wasn’t going to be in vain.

Blake did his best to keep them focused. “Williams, get on the periscope,” he ordered. “Keep an eye out for any survivors.”

“Survivors? For real?”

“We’re still outside the kill zone, Private.”

“Sergeant’s right, DeShawn,” said Lyons from the driver’s seat. “At Hiroshima they found survivors just a few hundred meters from the hypocenter.”

“This wasn’t no fuckin’ airburst, man. This was a bad-ass truck bomb. Anyone inside a few hundred meters would have been atomized. We’re probably driving through a cloud of your ‘survivors’ right now.”

“Contact right!” shouted Lyons.

“Halt!” Blake ordered while DeShawn Williams panned around with the short periscope on the Stryker’s roof.

“Contact, my ass. There ain’t nothin’ out there.”

“What did you see, Marine?”

“A person, I think. It was real quick. They looked like they were crawling… like they were on all fours.”

“What’s up?” asked Borrows over the ‘com. “Why have we stopped?”

“Sir, we have a possible survivor. Lyons saw—”

“Where?” This time it was Carroll. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

“It was only for a second,” Lyons said. “Something moving in the dust storm.”

“Williams, you stay on that scope,” Blake ordered. “Fernandez, Howard, you’re with me. Prep the portable decontamination shower and get a spare suit ready. If there’s anyone alive out there I want to get as much dust off them as possible and get them inside a suit and breathing clean air.”

“Roger that,” said the two marines in unison.

After buttoning up their JSLIST suits and checking each other for breaches, they stepped out through the airlock into the radioactive storm. Blake made his way carefully around to the right of the Stryker, where Lyons had said he had seen his survivor. The wind was almost strong enough to knock him off his feet. It was like being sandblasted; all he could see was the swirling brown dust, and his ears were filled with a sound like static from countless tiny impacts.

“Williams, do you have eyes-on?” Blake asked over the ‘com.

“Negative, Sergeant.”

“Roger that. Switch to thermal, see if that helps.”

“Switching to thermal imaging.”

Blake scanned his surrounds, but could see nothing except the swirling dust until Carroll and Burrows advanced around the Stryker’s nose — both had their rifles raised. Blake imagined what the Stryker would look like to a survivor, let alone the five strange figures, armed and masked with bulky re-breathers. Whoever was out there would be scared shitless.

“Lower your weapons,” Blake said over the ‘com.

“Son, you’d better get back inside,” said Carroll. His voice was deep and calm, like the measured tones of a news anchorman.

Blake ignored him. “How’s the thermal camera looking, Marine?”

“Still sketchy. Wait… I got a signal but it’s moving too fast. Doesn’t look like— Holy shit!”

Blake caught movement at the edge of his visor — a flash of white cutting through the swirling storm, then it was on him.

It rode him down to the dirt. Hands clawed at him, gouging and ripping at the tough rubber of the JSLIST suit. A flailing limb caught his re-breather and knocked his whole mask upwards so the heavy rubber seal was across his eyes. He tasted dust. I’m exposed!

He pushed upwards, trying to free himself. Around the obscuring mask he caught fragments of his assailant: a white, hairless head with a terrible wound where the eyes should be — a wet crater above a mouth that was too wide and filled with broken ridges of what might once have been teeth. Long fingers encircled his throat. He wanted to gag from the sand in his mouth but he couldn’t muster the breath. The sand got inside his mask making the world dark… or maybe it wasn’t the sand.

The sound of a shot cut through his foggy senses. The weight and pressure left him and he sucked in a great gulp of air only to cough it back out as the sand hit the back of his throat. Blake rolled to his knees, hacking and spluttering. Then someone was at his side squirting water into his mouth and yelling at him to spit. He managed to clear his mouth while the boom of Carroll’s big calibre rifle echoed around him. Specialist Howard slapped an oxygen mask over Blake’s mouth and he took his first clean breath. His head cleared enough for him to cleanse and re-set his own mask.

When he turned around Carroll and Burrows were standing over the body of the survivor.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Blake yelled. “You just shot a fucking civilian.”

They both looked back at him, inscrutable behind their masks.

“Look at it, son,” Carroll said.

Blake ignored him. “Some goddamn farmer or hitchhiker manages to ride out the shockwave from a nuclear blast, poor bastard, and then you come along with your big-ass elephant gun and blow half a dozen holes through him. What the fuck do you think we’re doing here?”

“Just look at it.”

Blake dropped his gaze to the body sprawled in the dirt. It was naked, clothes burned off, Blake guessed. It lay sprawled at an unnatural angle — the legs bent back as if on broken knees. How could it have moved so fast with injuries like that? It was impossible and yet it had happened.

“Jesus!” Howard said from somewhere behind Blake. “What could do that to a person? The blast? The heat pulse? Dude’s fucked up.”

“It’s not a person,” Carroll said. Burrows shot a glance at the man, but said nothing.

“What do you mean?” Blake asked. “If it’s not a person then what the hell is it?”

“Careful, Carroll,” Burrows said.

“What does it matter?” The old dude said, “they’re all dead anyway. The least we can do is let them die knowing they done some good.”

Blake looked at the thing again. The knees weren’t broken, they bent backwards like a dog’s hind legs and the wound on its face wasn’t a wound at all. The fleshy crater that took up most of its ‘face’ above the gaping mouth was pink and ridged with frills of tissue like the inside of a bat’s ear. But whatever it was, it didn’t look damaged. It was meant to look like that, like some kind of a cross between a giant nostril and a radar dish.

“You know what happens at the center of a thermonuclear explosion?” Carroll asked.

Blake thought of the twinned horrors at the heart of a thermonuclear bomb: the first fission explosion was terrible enough, but it was only a detonator, a way of driving the pressure high enough to cause fusion and unleash the terrible forces that powered the Sun itself.

“I know the basics.”

“No you don’t. Plenty of people thought they did, thought they understood the physics, and maybe they did up to a point, but they never stopped to think whether something else was happening. Something beyond physics… something metaphysical.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The concentration of energy at the center of the explosion is too much for the universe to handle. For a fraction of a second, it’s actually enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time. It tears a hole in reality itself.”

“Bullshit!”

“That ain’t even the crazy part,” Carroll said with a shake of his head. “You see ours ain’t the only universe. We’re not the only game in town and when the hole opens, it allows things to cross over. When there’s a loss of life in this reality, like those killed in those nano-seconds when the hole exists, it’s like there’s a kind of suction. It’s like opening a door on a plane at thirty-thousand feet. There’s a difference in pressure. Loss of life in this universe pulls life across from the other side: new life… different life.”

“I still say bullshit,” Blake said, glancing between Carroll and Burrows. “Next you’ll be telling me that’s where Godzilla came from — just stepped through one of these holes at Hiroshima.”

“That was just an A-bomb, not thermonuclear, not powerful enough. Good job, too. That many lives lost… who knows what might have come through. Look,” Carroll said, as he calmly wiped the receiver of his rifle with an oiled rag. “I know this sounds hard to believe, but look at that thing and tell me it’s from this Earth. I hunted these things for twenty years, ever since the Bowline tests in ’69. Usually, what comes through is no bigger than a jack rabbit. We try to minimize the loss of life but we can’t clear every bird and mosquito out of the test area so there’s always some negative pressure. Hell, even the bacteria in the soil have life energy, and there’s more biomass in soil and rock than you’d think. But there hasn’t been much call for guys like me recently, not since the test bans.”

“So let me get this straight,” Blake said, trying to make sense of what he’d heard. “You’re saying these terrorists smuggled a nuclear weapon across the border and when it detonated and killed them it sucked this… this demon through from another dimension?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Sergeant…” said Williams from inside the Stryker.

“So we’re not here to gather intelligence about the bomb. We’re… Ghostbusters or some shit.”

“No. You can gather all the intel you like. This was still a terrorist attack on US soil and you need to do your job. I’m the Ghostbuster.”

“Sarge, you need to see this,” Williams repeated.

For the first time Blake noticed the ring of steel in the dust, Carroll’s motorcycle chain and the small collection of items he’d placed inside its perimeter. One of the items was a candle — four inches of white wax like the kind kept in kitchen drawers across the country in case of a blackout. This one was stuck into the sand and despite the swirling dust storm it was still aflame.

“What is it, Williams?” Blake said into the ‘com.

“Another thermal trace, Sergeant. Bigger than the last one, and hot.”

“A vehicle?”

“I don’t think so.”

Blake noticed that although the candle didn’t seem to be affected by the storm, it was certainly being affected by something. The flame wasn’t burning straight up, nor was it guttering in the wind. It was horizontal. A little finger of flame pointing northwest.”

“Williams, what’s the bearing on that heat trace?”

“Northwest, Sergeant. About fifty yards and closing.”

Carroll focused on the flame then looked out into the storm following its point. The man reloaded the Overkill with a handful of its massive rounds.

Blake heard something above the roar of the wind that set ice in his veins. He unsnapped the quick-release buckles on the sling of his M4 and raised the carbine to his shoulder.

A shadow raised itself against the back of the swirling dust — grey and huge. Carroll’s Overkill boomed in a steady rhythm. Blake wanted to see what it was before he started shooting.

Then he wished he hadn’t.

The creature was enormous, taller than the Stryker and massively muscled. Like the smaller creature Carroll had killed, it lacked anything Blake could call a face. The blunt head with its wet crater of a sense-organ sat between hunched slabs of muscle that banded its shoulders. Twin ridges of bone, halfway between horns and blade-like plates, ran back across its brow from above where the eyes would have been on any Earthly creature, to meet at a central ridge that ran along its back.

Blake flipped his M4 to fully automatic and began to fire at the creature in short controlled bursts. Howard was doing the same, even Burrows joined in as a hail of lead rained down on the creature. They couldn’t miss, not with a target this big, not at this range. And yet it kept coming. They had already thrown enough lead at the thing to shred a bull elephant, but it hadn’t even slowed.

It charged, forcing them to scatter or be trampled under its massive, clawed feet.

“Williams,” Blake shouted into the ‘com. “Get on that .50 cal. now!”

“Sergeant, there’s no airlock on the top hatch, the Stryker will be contaminated.”

“Do you see that fucking thing? Forget the rads, if we don’t stop it none of us will live long enough to get cancer.”

Blake slid into the dust under the angular nose of the Stryker, switched magazines and kept up his fire at the creature. It must have hide like steel plate. The storm of 5.56mm rounds didn’t seem to bother it at all. Only Carroll’s huge calibre rifle seemed to have any effect.

The creature lashed out at Burrows with a huge hand. Its fingers were almost human, except the central pair was fused into on massive digit, the nail overgrown into a six-inch claw.

It caught Burrows on that terrible hook, lifting him off his feet and flinging him away like a child’s toy.

The effect on Carroll was dramatic. He stopped shooting and just stared at where Burrow’s body lay in the dust, the dead man’s guts drawn out along the furrow his carcass had carved in the sand.

Carroll stepped backward into his steel circle and sat, his rifle lying silent across his knees.

“Keep shooting, Goddamn it!” Blake shouted at the man but Carroll ignored him.

The creature turned on Carroll, swiping one huge arm around, clawed fingers scything through the air.

Blake expected to see Carroll’s body ripped in two, but the creature’s arm never seemed to make contact. It slashed and swiped at Carroll, but its blows were deflected as if by an unseen wall that extended upwards from the ring of steel around Carroll’s feet.

Blake heard the clang of the Stryker’s top hatch being flung open and Williams opened up on the creature with the roof-mounted machine gun.

It roared in pain and anger and turned its attention from Carroll to this new threat.

“Watch out!” Blake yelled as the creature charged the armoured personnel carrier. Howard was crushed between the fiend and the steel wall of the Stryker as it slammed into the Stryker’s side. It lifted all four wheels on its left side off the ground, and fifteen tons of steel pivoted upwards. The creature roared again, its huge claws digging into the thick rubber of the Stryker’s all-terrain tires and lifted. The vehicle — their home and only safe haven in the radioactive storm that swirled around them — toppled first onto its side then turned full turtle onto its roof.

Williams screamed as he was crushed half in-half out of the remote weapons station on the Stryker’s top.

The airlock ripped away from the rear doors and two suited soldiers stumbled out. The creature lashed out, picking them up with one swipe of its massive arm. One, Blake couldn’t tell who, slammed into the side of the upturned Stryker with bone-crushing force while the other was flung a dozen yards.

The creature turned back to Carroll and charged, trying to skewer the man on the thorny plates of its head. Whatever it was that had held the creature back before held firm again. It grappled against an invisible wall; clawed hands tried and failed to find purchase on the mysterious barrier.

Now that Blake knew what to look for, he thought he could see the barrier in the swirling dust. A column of still, dust-free air surrounded Carroll, and the old man sat at its center with hands pressed against the sides of his head like a child wishing the world would go away.

Damn him! Carroll had a shield and the most effective weapon against this brute and all he was doing was cowering in fear.

Carroll had a shield… but maybe Blake could use it as well. While the creature hammered away at the invisible barrier, Blake sprinted past, keeping Carroll and whatever field the man had conjured between himself and the monster. Blake pressed his face to it and felt its strange, unyielding nothingness.

“Fight, damn you!” Blake shouted at Carroll, but the old man gave no indication of having heard him. It was as impenetrable to sound as it was to the creature’s attacks.

Blake smiled as an idea formed. He hoped the barrier really was is impenetrable as it appeared. Taking out a grenade, he pulled the safety clip and, keeping his thumb mashed down on the spoon, he pulled the ring from the fuse assembly.

When he let go, the spoon sprang free, igniting the fuse. A wisp of smoke rose from the fuse assembly as it burned down toward detonation. With the fuse-delay of about four to five seconds, Blake was trusting his life to its accuracy.

He counted down the seconds:

One Mississippi…

Two Mississippi…

Three Mississip–

Blake stepped from behind the barrier, threw the grenade straight at the fleshy concavity of the creature’s face and crouched back behind Carroll in one smooth motion.

The grenade detonated right in front of the creature’s face, sending jagged shards of scorched metal casing through its flesh.

The front of the creature’s head disappeared in a red mist. It collapsed forward, hung for a moment, slumped against the invisible column surrounding Carroll like a drunk leaning against a lamp post before sliding sideways and crashing into the dust.

Blake stepped from behind the barrier and fired a few shots into the bloody stump that was all that was left of the monster’s head. The grenade at point blank range had done its work, as had the invisible barrier, protecting Carroll from the blast as well as deflecting the blast around Blake.

Satisfied it was dead, Blake went to check on his team mates. Lyons was alive and still strapped into the driver’s seat of the upturned Stryker. Williams, Howard and Specialist Brad Hickman were dead, but Wyatt Pollin had survived being flung twenty feet by the monster’s blow although Blake suspected he had a couple of cracked ribs and some torn ligaments in his shoulder from where he had failed to stick the landing.

Blake turned his attention back to Carroll. “Get up, Carroll!” he demanded. “Get up and start talking. I’ve got three dead marines plus Burrows, and a wrecked vehicle. No more secrets! What the hell was that?”

Carroll eventually raised his head then reached out a hand. The instant it passed above the encircling chain, the barrier disappeared — Blake felt it as rush of stale wind.

“Couldn’t shoot,” Carroll said. “Would’ve broken the circle.”

“Fuck your circle, Carroll. What about the rest of us? What about fighting for your team? Your mission? I heard you in the Stryker when we dropped. ‘Ooh-Rah’. You’re a marine. Since when do marines run and hide like that?”

“You don’t understand,” the man muttered.

“Enlighten me.”

Carroll stared at the body of Nathan Burrows sprawled in the sand. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m a dead man.”

“You knew what this mission was about,” Blake snapped. “We’re all dead men.”

“Not me,” Carroll said with a shake of his head. “Burrows was going to get me out. That was our deal. One last hunt.”

“Bullshit. Get you out? Out of where? You’ve already absorbed enough rads to kill you. Die here or die in a Navy hospital, what difference does it make?”

“You don’t get it. I wasn’t going to die. Burrows was going to get me frozen. Cryogenics, just like Walt fuckin’ Disney.”

For a moment Blake was taken aback. “Why?”

“Twenty years, I been huntin’ those things. Twenty years of watching the tests and cleaning up afterwards and we never once cracked the walls of heaven. Never saw no cherubs, just those… things,” he gestured toward the monster’s carcass before taking a step toward Blake. “You see, I figured it out. There’s no heaven, only hell. Just us and them. I’ve seen the truth. I know where we go when we die and I ain’t planning on dying.”

The old man was clearly crazy, but then so was this whole situation and unfortunately Carroll was the closest thing Blake had to an expert on this stuff, so he was just going to have to deal with the old man.

“Look, I’m sure whatever deal Burrows promised you is still on the table. We just need to complete our mission and get clear of this storm so we can contact base.”

That wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. Not without a vehicle. “Lyons! What’s the news on the Stryker?”

Lyons came over shaking his head. “We could maybe right it if we had time. We can dig her out and try to roll her with the jack, but she’s got two shredded wheels and the front axle is busted.” He glanced back at the Stryker. “We could maybe remove the wheels from that axle and use them to replace the shredded tyres but that’s a hell of a job in the field.”

Blake nodded. “Okay. Better get started then. Everyone’s going to have to pitch in. That means you too, Carroll!”

But Carroll wasn’t looking at him. He was staring down at the candle that still burned despite the raging storm. Its flame was a brilliant white tongue of fire almost six inches long and pointing in the direction of the hypocenter. It seemed their mission was far from over.

They followed the direction set by the candle’s flame. It was tough going. The JSLIST suits had not been designed with operator comfort in mind and they were weighed down with as much equipment from the Stryker as they could carry.

Blake almost had to physically carry Carroll too. The old man seemed truly terrified of dying. Once he had realized this was no normal hunt, his whole demeanor had changed. But the man realized being alone was no guarantee of safety either, so he had eventually agreed to come with them.

Blake tried to keep him talking, asking him all kinds of questions about his time at the Nevada Proving Grounds. It helped to lighten his mood somewhat and it was all useful information.

“What about that shield thing?” Blake asked. “How does that work?”

“It’s called a circle of protection. It’s a holy space. Things work differently inside it, like the candle.”

“And the bad guys can’t get in?” Blake asked as they trudged on.

“Nothing can get in until the circle is broken from the inside.”

“Hey, Sarge!” said Lyons. “How do I get me one of those?”

“It won’t work for just anyone, son,” Carroll replied. “It takes practise and something to focus your faith on.”

“The chain?” Blake asked.

“Chain, chalk… it doesn’t really matter.”

The storm grew stronger until pushing through the wind felt like trying to walk underwater. Then, without warning it was gone.

Something else disappeared too; the constant clicking from their portable Geiger counter. Just seconds ago it had been so fast that it had sounded like the white noise between radio stations. Blake had just tuned it out. Now it was gone altogether.

Blake looked to Pollin who was holding the small instrument. “Fault?”

“No, Sergeant, not that I can tell. Just no reading. Not even normal background radiation.”

Blake spotted something glinting ahead; Howard had seen it too.

“What the hell is that?” the marine asked.

It hung, glinting in mid-air. It appeared to be metal — twisted and ridged like a section of spine from some metal beast.

“It’s a crankshaft,” Lyons said. “Part of one anyway.”

He was right. It had been scoured clean and gleamed like it was freshly-milled. It hung impossibly in the air. Blake waved his rifle barrel above and below it and then to the sides, but there was nothing holding it up. It was hovering.

He looked to Carroll. “You want to fill us in on why gravity seems to have taken a day off?”

“Search me,” Carroll replied with a shrug. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Blake reached out and carefully touched the crankshaft. It felt entirely normal and entirely solid. After his first tentative touch he wrapped a fist around it and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. He would have had more of a chance to right the fifteen-ton Stryker than to budge the floating crankshaft.

“There’s more over here,” Fernandez said. Blake looked over and saw a tiny metal leaf floating in mid-air — a piece of torn metal plate with viciously sharp and jagged edges.

“There’s paint underneath,” Fernandez said.

Blake peered beneath; in a hollow protected from the wind, some of the original paint remained.

They moved onwards through a cloud of suspended debris — not just metal, but also splinters of charred wood and what looked like shards of black glass fused from the Arizona sand itself.

The debris grew thicker, forcing them to weave through a three-dimensional maze of immovable particles until they eventually came to the source.

It was a house, or rather the remains of one. It seemed to have been caught mid — explosion. The troupe faced the back wall of the property. It was still relatively intact; the door was fixed in its frame, hanging open. A rear window hung like a shattered cloud just outside its frame. The front of the house was just gone. Through the open door Blake could see the front rooms standing open to the street, its contents pushed against the walls as if a great broom had swept through and cleaned the room furniture and all.

To the left and right other houses defined the edge of a dirt road.

“What the hell is this place?” Pollin asked.

“Ghost town,” Fernandez said. “I saw one on Sixty Minutes. There’re ghost towns all over this county, old mining towns just abandoned after the silver dried up. Nothing else out here worth staying for, so folks just up and walked away.”

“Not everyone,” Lyons said, pointing to a car beside the house. Like everything else, it had been frozen at the moment of the explosion. The car stood almost upright in a permanent, impossible pirouette around one of its front wheels, but apart from that it looked to be fairly new and in good condition. It was certainly better than any abandoned vehicle should be after years in the desert.

“Looks like someone set up here. You think it was the terrorists?” Blake asked.

“Drug runners more like, or maybe organised people smugglers,” Fernandez replied.

Blake glanced at Carroll and noted the look of alarm on his face. “Carroll, you got any idea how much energy it would take to freeze a town like this?”

“The energy doesn’t freeze. The life force gets replaced.” Carroll’s frown persisted. “At the moment of detonation, when the forces are strong enough to tear open the portal between dimensions, any life extinguished here gets replaced from over there. That’s it. There is no freezing.” He shook his head “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is something new.”

“Man, that is so not what I wanted to hear,” said Lyons.

“Okay,” said Blake. “Here’s how this is going to work. We sweep the town. You know the drill. We’re still on the clock and no matter what we’ve seen today, remember how this all started. Some asshole tried to drive a nuclear truck bomb into downtown Phoenix.” He pointed to the old man. “Now Carroll here is going to do his thing and we’re going to do ours. I want any intel bagged and tagged. I want samples and I want a vehicle. We’re going to have to get outside the radius of this…” he struggled to find the words. “Of whatever the fuck is happening around here and we’re going to do our jobs and get that intel back to HQ. Everyone got that?”

“Ooh rah!”

The marines pressed forward through the shattered building. It seemed to have been occupied fairly recently; Blake noted clothing and food that still looked fresh, all caught at the same frozen moment in the midst of the explosion.

He spotted movement out the street and dropped, making his way through the shattered room on his belly.

The main square of the old ghost town was a shattered bramble of broken shards of wood. Every building looked to have burst outward, growing up and away from what must have been the center of the explosion that had turned the buildings around the square into a crown of thorns.

But that was nothing compared to what lay at its centre.

A fused circle of black glass surrounded a central pit that glowed with otherworldly light. It flickered like the reflection of something constantly in motion. Across the surface of the black glass lay a twisted skein of tendrils. So dense were they, it looked like the floor was carpeted with black worms. Each was no thicker than Blake’s thumb, but so long their ends were lost among their tangled brethren.

They spread from the central pit, crawling up the walls of nearby buildings like ivy. Only there, at the farthest perimeter of the writhing mass could the tips of the tendrils be seen waving in the air like the fronds of some unimaginable sea monster. In some places they had fused together into sheets of motile tissue, flat and tough as dry kelp washed up on a beach.

Blake followed them back to the pit. From his vantage point he couldn’t quite see inside — he was glad. What little he could see hinted at something vast moving in the darkness beneath.

Other creatures surrounded the pit, and Blake counted half a dozen of the swift moving creatures — like the one Carroll had killed — as well as two of the big Stryker-killers.

“It’s the portal,” Carroll said in disbelief.

“What?”

“I’ve seen pictures from the tests. High-speed photography at the moment of the explosion. The portal looked like that,” Carroll said, pointing.

“But it’s supposed to be closed,” Blake shouted. “You said it was only open for the instant of the explosion!”

As he said the words, Blake knew the door between worlds was still open because the loss of life here had been much greater than in any mere test. This had been a town once — undocumented and off the maps, and probably the base of some smuggling operation — but still a concentration of life energy. When the bomb had gone off it had allowed something big to gain a foothold in this world. That many-tendriled thing that flowed from the portal like a mass of mating snakes was caught between two worlds, keeping the portal open.

“We need to get out of here,” Carroll said. Pale, his eyes darted left then right, and the man wore every one of his sixty-plus years on his haggard face. This was way more than he had signed up for.

“You hang in there, Marine,” Blake said, but the old man was right. This was more than they could handle. He had no idea what the powers-that-be could do about a portal to another dimension, but that wasn’t his problem. The biggest contribution he could make right now would be to get this information back to the outside world.

Movement out of the corner of his eye.

A creature was crawling up the wall. No bigger than a possum, its many-jointed legs told Blake exactly where it had come from.

“It’s okay,” said Lyons as he drew his knife from the kydex sheath slipped to his chest rig. “I got this one.”

“Wait!” Blake hissed, but it was too late.

Lyons slammed his knife into the creature, pinning it to the wall, but the thing wasn’t about to go quietly. It screeched and thrashed against the blade that pinned it to the wall, smearing black blood against the timbers.

“Fuck!” Lyons shouted. He grabbed the thrashing monstrosity and pulled his knife out ready for another blow, but the creature was too strong. It twisted out of his grip with desperate strength and skittered away out onto the street, still screeching.

“We need to move, now!” Blake ordered.

There was a heavy thump as something landed on the ceiling above them, then another.

Blake looked up. Half of the shattered room was open to the sky and peering over the lip of the lattice of ruined joists were two of the demons, their cratered faces tracking Lyons and Blake like radar dishes.

“Contact!” Blake shouted and fired up through the boards. No need for subtlety now. This would have to be a fighting retreat.

The hail of bullets should have shredded the timbers, and torn into the creatures above, but Blake had not accounted for the unnatural strength of the stasis-locked structure. His rounds just stopped as if they had hit armored plate, and fell as squashed mushrooms of lead to mingle with the brass of his spent shell casings.

One of the creatures jumped down, slamming into Lyons who still had his knife out. The marine stabbed the creature again and again, but it seemed to have no regard for its own safety. It ignored Lyon’s blows and concentrated on delivering its own. It clawed through his JSLIST, talons snagging on the tough MOLLE webbing of the man’s chest rig.

Blake didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting his squad mate, and watched in horror as the monster’s mouth opened impossibly wide and closed on Lyons’ head, crushing mask and skull beneath.

Pollin and Blake opened fire at the same time, both knowing their teammate was dead and both wanting to exact revenge on his other-worldly killer.

The second creature landed in the room, but Fernandez was ready for it. He fired at point blank range. Rounds chewed into the creature, but it seemed to be made out of spring steel and Kevlar. Fernandez’ rifle finally clicked down onto an empty chamber, but the creature was still very much alive. It swiped at him, raking clawed appendages across his throat like a quartet of switchblades.

Blake kicked the creature and grabbed Fernandez by the hood of his suit, hauling the marine toward the back of the house. He expected the creature to come leaping back, but although it screeched in fury, no attack came his way. He checked over his shoulder; the creature squirmed in mid-air, clutching at a sliver of timber protruding from its chest. Blake’s kick had impaled the creature on a fragment of the shattered structure like some alien bug in a collection.

He fired one handed, aiming for the sense organ at the centre of the creatures head. It thrashed once then was still.

The ground shook. The mass of writhing tentacles surged from the portal, and hidden in its fronds was another of the creatures. It wriggled free of the tendrils and took its first breath in its new world.

“It’s no good!” Carroll shouted. “You kill one and another just takes its place.”

A zero-sum game. Every scrap of life-energy lost on this side of the portal was immediately replaced from the other side of that bridge between worlds. It was like trying to bail out a boat that was already half sunk — for every bucketful of water emptied over the side, more just flowed in to take its place.

Blake knew what had to be done. There was no point killing the creatures on this side; they would have to cross over. Killing these demons on their home turf would have the opposite effect, sucking life from this world into the next.

Blake grabbed one of the bags they had brought with them from the Stryker. Inside were three half-pound blocks of C4 used for controlled explosions of enemy munitions.

“Get as far away as you can,” he shouted and ran straight toward the pit. He made a mental tally of his remaining ammunition — he was going to raise hell. Those demonic bastards had no idea what was about to hit them.

He raced across the carpet of tendrils, and they squirmed underfoot. One of the bigger creatures started to lumber toward him, but it was too slow. Blake would reach the pit before it got near him.

The portal yawned in front of him, and for the first time he was able to look down into it… and the horrors it contained.

“We never cracked the walls of heaven,” Carroll had said. “Never saw no cherubs.”

No cherubs indeed, but surely no religion had ever envisioned a hell such as this.

The world beyond the portal seemed to be made of nothing but writhing tendrils. There was no other Earth, nothing so normal as a planet orbiting some other sun. This was a world of flesh — a twisted inter-weaving skein of black tendrils thicker than any jungle canopy. Other things moved within the darkness. The only light came from the flickering around the edges of the portal. Hundreds of creatures swarmed through the mass like clownfish through an anemone’s fronds, making their home on the body of this thing that was their entire world.

Was Carroll right? Was this Hell? And what would happen to a soul that died there, as he knew he would? Blake had never been a particularly God-fearing man, and the day’s events certainly didn’t fit into anything he’d been taught at his childhood Sunday School. But he still believed there had to be more to the universe than this.

Blake knew in his heart that Carroll was wrong. The world was not a zero-sum game. There was somewhere else, somewhere they hadn’t yet seen; somewhere that gave them strength and that powered the strange rites Carroll had used. A holy space — that was how Carroll had described his protective circle. Well what made it holy? Blake didn’t know but he was sure the answer lay somewhere other than the charnel pit of a world beyond the portal.

Clutching the bag of explosives, he leaped into the portal…

…and hit a solid wall.

The heavy bag ripped from his grip and tumbled down into the darkness as Blake staggered to his feet, standing on nothing at all.

Something was blocking the portal. Something as unyielding as Carroll’s circle of protection.

Of course he couldn’t pass through. The life energy in the joined world was equal. If the titanic might of the world-creature beyond the portal couldn’t pull itself through, then of course Mr and Mrs Blake’s little boy wasn’t just going to be able to jump across.

“Shit!” he swore. He had lost the bag. Far below he could see it caught in a particularly knotted tangle of dark fronds. He saw something open under it, something he would hesitate to cause a mouth but for which there existed no other word in any sane reality.

Blake unslung his rifle and fired.

His rounds tore through the closing teeth and into the bag beyond.

The world-creature spasmed as the high explosives tore into its body. The creatures living in its fronds died in their dozens as the blast wave rolled outwards.

Blake felt the barrier give way beneath his feet and at the same time, some otherworldly suction, more than mere gravity started to pull him into the pit.

Life energy had been lost.

It would have to be replaced.

The blast wave from the detonation billowed upward. The cloud of expanding gasses was not troubled by the metaphysical barrier, and lifted Blake, throwing him clear of the pit.

He scrambled to his feet; he had been willing to die, but damned if he was going to give up a second chance at life.

He turned to run but dizziness swept in as his eyes and other senses fed him contradictory information. It was like a shift in gravity; down was no longer toward the sand beneath his boots but rather behind him as the other-worldly force pulled him toward the portal.

He wasn’t the only one affected by the strange pull. The vast creature at its center screamed and struggled as it was sucked back into the rift. Its tendrils writhed, thrashing and wrapping around each other to form thick cables of living tissue that whipped around entire buildings. The living ropes pulled tight, tension slicing through the blast-damaged structures like a garrotte. Wood splintered, adding to the cacophony as the enormous creature fought to maintain its beachhead in this world.

One of the smaller creatures could resist no longer and fell, screeching toward the pit. Its cartwheeling fall careened into the fore-limb of one of the bigger creatures with a sickening crunch, knocking it from its precarious hold and they both fell across the glistening threshold of the gate between worlds.

Blake kept running but it was as if he was on a treadmill. As fast as he ran, the tendrils sliding beneath his feet meant all he could do was slow his advance toward oblivion.

He saw the shattered house in front of him, saw Carroll and the others clinging to its timbers, but they too were being sucked toward this terrible maw.

Blake felt dirt beneath his boots. He hardly dared look back but he had to see what was coming. The portal was smaller now, barely half its former size and plugged with tentacles. They whipped around, desperately trying to cling on, but the world creature was lost. Too much of it was back in its own dimension. As more and more of it was sucked back through, it had less strength to force the portal open. The universe was trying to right itself.

The glittering circle that marked the boundary between worlds shrunk until it was just a few yards across. The last of the tentacles whipped through like a child sucking up the last strands of spaghetti and the glittering circle fell to a brilliant point of light.

The energy that had been held in stasis suddenly erupted. The point of light burst outward again and everything that had been frozen halfway through the original explosion was freed in a titanic detonation. The circle of destruction raced outwards, scattering the buildings into atoms, the shock-front racing away from them in all directions, chasing away the cloud in an ever-expanding circle half a mile high.

For the first time in hours, Blake saw the sun. It beamed down on him and Carroll and Pollin and the injured Fernandez.

Blake had seen Hell and maybe this world wasn’t heaven, but it was good enough for now.