Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion (28 page)

“Pull your cavalry back,” he ordered Simms. “Send word for those Shit-Hooks to turn around and pick up the Engineering brigade. Hell, might as well have them mine the airport while they’re there.”

“But, sir, what about General Rhodes?”

“Cassy, what do you want to do? Try and take on that pocket with what we’ve got? I’ve got shit here. Even with the 13
^th
it was a crap shoot. Without them it’s not possible. I’m not going to throw away these boys for nothing. Phil is—well, General Rhodes is a lost cause.”

“Sir…”

“Cassy, don’t make me go sayin’ it again because it tasted pretty damn bad the first time.”

“No, sir,” her voice rose to a near shout,
“Look.”
And she pointed to the east.

He looked first to his column of vehicles. He saw the men waking from their naps, dropping their canteens and chow, and moving away from the cool shadows of their rides into the sunbaked fields to behold something further behind.

To General Jerry Shepherd, it appeared as if the horizon actually moved; like ripples in water as a wave curls toward the beach. That wave kept coming, pouring over the trampled fields, secondary roads, and farm house ruins strewn about the plains.

He kept his eyes east and climbed from the cupola until standing on the deck of the disabled Abrams tank. Captain Rheimmer poked his head out.

“What’s going on?”

For a moment Jerry Shepherd worried that The Order managed to deploy one of their pseudo-biological weapons to their rear; that his rescue mission had become a trap. His heart raced. The sweat already pouring from his forehead due to the heat doubled.

The swarm came without end. A tremble shook the ground and did not stop. A drone filled the air as the stampede closed.

Soldiers climbed aboard their armored vehicles; some drew their weapons but no one fired as they realized what approached.

Shepherd’s mouth fell open. He yanked off his hat and held it against his chest. In a moment of total awe he gasped, “Oh—oh God.”

They came seemingly without end, a gigantic horde of dogs: the Grenadier warriors who had saved Trevor’s life in the early days, done his bidding at New Winnabow, and now marched as one great army, side by side, packed in columns. Forget individual breeds; that did not matter. Claws and fangs rumbling forward as if one horrible beast.

The march of the Grenadiers reached the armored column and gently parted in the right places to flow around the men and machines. Shepherd watched them pass and realized that of all the onlookers, Cassy Simms’ horses appeared most at ease.

Nature’s attempt to protect its own.

Those words from Trevor’s attempt at an explanation forced their way into Shepherd’s thoughts, cutting through the wonder—and yes—the fear. He felt as if he stood in front of a tornado, or watched a volcano erupt, or felt the ground shake from an Earthquake.

Only nature can do something this big. Trevor had sent the K9s to enforce his will at New Winnabow, but now nature sent a hundred thousand canines to do its bidding.

The constant pounding of paws into the ground generated clouds of dust and created a roar that made it nearly impossible to speak, but Shep heard General Simms’ panicked cry, “What is going on! What is this?”

General Jerry Shepherd saw it clearly at that point. The K9s served as nature’s anti-bodies. Never in history had Earth’s ecosystem been invaded by an outside force. Indeed, not only an outside force but one led by Voggoth and his Order, the antithesis of life.

Nature moved to counter the threat; a threat to the entire body of the planet. Somehow these Grenadiers—these anti-bodies—connected to Trevor via the genetic chain on which he served as a link.

Throughout history, dogs demonstrated sensitivity to human feelings, as evident in breeds ranging from care dogs to seeing eye dogs to guard dogs. Armageddon had grown that sensitivity to the point that the dogs were born better trained than ever thought possible.

And what have the K9s sensed of late from their human masters?

Desperation. Fear. All of it focused on Voggoth’s advancing legions.

One last great mustering of power. The war would be humanity’s to win or lose, but the fantastic Grenadiers offered one final contribution. The only type of contribution they could make in a conflict that had grown into air power and armor and artillery: a deluge aimed at The Order’s lines surrounding General Rhodes’ trapped unit.

They continued to come, stretching from horizon in the east to horizon in the west. Easily a hundred thousand four-legged warriors.

“Cassy!”

General Simms kept her glazed eyes on the Grenadier army as its tail end passed.

“General Simms!”

“What? Huh?”

“Get to your cavalry. Saddle up. I’m going to call in air support and give Rhodes the heads up. We have to move.
Now!”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

For the first time in days, General Shepherd smiled in a cocky grin. He thought of their old departed friend Stonewall McAllister and answered in words that might have come from that gallant gentleman’s vocabulary. “We’ve got a battle to fight, General. And it’s going to be glorious.”

A line of twenty alien turrets stood alongside Highway 135 mirroring the telephone poles sharing that stretch of road. They reached as tall as a street light and resembled the upper half of the letter ‘S’ in design with steel-like ribs lining their frames. The outer surface mixed black metal and red flesh. Coils and tubes wrapped around each turret rising from a belt of white-glowing energy sacks. Mounds of dirt surrounded the base of each turret, a tribute to how recently they had burrowed into the ground.

Behind this line rose a trio of hastily-grown structures resembling dead trees with trunks and limbs several feet in diameter. Holes like honeycombs encircled their ‘trunks’, iron pipes created a sort of exoskeleton around the entire structure, and morbid seed-shaped growths hung from the branches.

Thus stood the eastern most mark of Voggoth’s advance and the outer ring of encirclement around the 13
^th
Mechanized Division.

The Grenadiers—the ocean of K9s stretching back to the horizon—poured across the fields of Kansas toward that line. The ground shook; a rumble filled the air.

At 500 yards, a light at the top of one turret, then another, then all blinked on and a muffled, moaning alarm echoed along the perimeter.

The turrets went into action firing short, sharp bursts of energy like shiny daggers cutting overtop the plains and slicing into the attackers. The bolts cut dogs in two, tore off legs, and decapitated more. But the great mob kept coming.

The tree-like dispenser buildings activated. From the honeycombs rolled dozens of balls that stopped, sprouted legs, and grew into the Spider Sentries encountered wherever The Order lurked. The Daddy-long-legs-like creatures grew twin rows of tiny gun barrels on the round orbs that served as heads as well as a pointed ‘nose’ attached to a rope-like skewer for close-combat.

From the seed-like sacks on the ‘limbs’ of the dispensers drooped large green bulbs easily mistaken for discolored bees nests or the rotting remains of Gypsy Moth cocoons.

The bulbs hit the ground where they shimmied and curled open with a soft crackle. Vile liquid dripped in long, stringy strands as greenish spheres birthed from the sickly wombs.

From each of the spheres lying among the dead grass of the field sprouted a trio of sharp and boney protrusions. They hinged at an unseen joint and returned to the ground, stabbing into the brown land. At the center of each rose a glowing yellow orb alongside a fleshy cylinder sitting on a tendon-like shoulder.

The Heavy Duty Spider Sentries –as classified by The Empire—joined their base-model brethren and filled the gaps between the turrets. While the latter met the canine army with lethal rapid-fire pellet guns, the Heavy Duty versions launched more powerful shot from their shoulder-mounted weapons. The blasts could penetrate the skin of armored vehicles so when they hit K9 bodies those bodies vanished in splashes of gore.

Grenadiers fell, were cut to shreds, and disintegrated into blobs of fir and bone, but the attack did not waver; the line kept coming as more and more dogs stepped over and around wounded and dead comrades with no sense of fear, no falter in their pace.

Voggoth’s turrets glowed red; the Spider Sentries rocked back and forth on their spindly legs. The wave of dogs came to the highway and swept beyond.

One by one the turrets pulled free of the ground and walked on four short legs in retreat, firing as they staggered back. Dogs scrambled onto their bases chewing and gnawing at the tubes and coils until causing fatal malfunctions. One—two—ten fell over like toppling towers.

The Spiders—heavy duty and otherwise—stammered backwards. Dead dog bodies piled up in front of them like sandbags along a river but the Grenadiers kept coming! Relentless! Fearless!

They grabbed onto legs and bit. The nose cones of the Spider Sentries—like spears on a hose—darted out and impaled dogs one after another but they still came; they piled on and over one another searching for an opening to wound the vile monsters. Sentries toppled and disappeared beneath the mob.

Despite killing thousands of K9s, The Order’s line of defense splintered and was swallowed like a rotting beachside boardwalk in a tsunami…

On the northern flank of the Grenadier army, Cassy Simms and 100 of her best riders moved into the bedroom communities south of Newtown. They occupied the burned out duplexes, toppled colonials, and overgrown cul-de-sacs where they dismounted and dug in with machine guns and short-range mortars.

Voggoth’s version of airborne commandos—who had dropped into Newtown during The Order’s move to encircle Rhodes’ unit—marched south intending to hit the attacking K9s and slow their advance. They looked like skeletons of bronze with pulsating innards resembling a combination of clockworks and biological organs. Their solitary round eyes glowed red and they moved on two metallic legs with a combination foot and rubber wheel at the bottom.

The commandos fired from metal tubes mounted on their forearms. A few of their number sported small shoulder-mounted bazookas. During their assault on Newton they had glided to Earth via black bat wings but had since discarded them.

Two hundred of the warped commandos marched into the ruins unaware of the cavalry until they were caught in a well-orchestrated cross fire. Carbine rounds and well-placed pistol shots felled the metallic fighters; mortar shells and fragmentation grenades destroyed more.

The alien beings communicated in voices coming from unseen mouths in a language of static and screeches. Moving fast and agile thanks to the wheels incorporated into their metal feet, the commandos moved between cover, lobbed explosive charges, and returned small arms fire with the same.

Cassy’s fighters eliminated nearly one-third of the unsuspecting enemy in the initial exchange, but the rest found refuge among the ruins and settled into a static battle line. Cassy knew hundreds more enemy reinforcements would come from Newton; she only hoped to buy time…

A rail line ran southwest away from Newtown and, eight miles later, reached the small town of Sedgwick, Kansas. This line—about two miles behind Highway 135—served as the second perimeter of defense and the inner-most ring of containment trapping General Rhodes. The Order situated units all along the line and had established their version of a Forward Operating Base around the Hillside Cemetery on the eastern fringes of town.

Originally, Shep planned to form all his forces into one sharp instrument to punch a hole through the enemy lines that stretched between Newtown and Sedgwick. Things had changed with the Grenadiers’ arrival.

For his first move he had sent Cassy Simms north to the outskirts of Newton to hold off the rather effective enemy commandos and their support units stationed there. He knew she could not delay them forever, but if she could bog them down for a short time the new plan should work, especially considering the size of the hole the K9s aimed to punch in the pocket.

Shepherd led his column south and then west toward Sedgwick on Route 588. Like Cassy Simms to the north, he aimed to draw off a threat to the Grenadiers’ flank and buy time for Rhodes—trapped at Halstead seven miles west of the rail line—to fight his way east to the dogs.

This revised plan paid immediate dividends. Shep’s armor caught The Order in the middle of organizing a counter-attack toward the Grenadiers. Abrams tanks directed by William Rheimmer smashed into a column of the van-sized, six-legged robots known as Roachbots.

Powered by harvested human brains and well-armed for mobile combat, the Roachbots exhibited one trait that made them both more dangerous and less predictable: insanity.

The creatures wore tubular metal frames, a pair of red eyes that mimicked LED displays, and a mouth-like speaker on a front face plate to either side of which rested Gatling guns mounted on swiveling round bases providing a wide firing arc.

In addition to the standard drones, the Roachbot column included Mortarbots. These silver walking mechanical artillery pieces resembled 18
^th
century cannon wobbling along on a pair of metal legs with their barrels pointing skyward. A face plate similar to those found on a drone was affixed to the bottom of the automatons.