Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion (51 page)

A dry, cool wind blew across the scene. The sleeves of empty jackets waved.

“What the hell happened to them?” Armand asked.

“They disappeared,” Trevor answered. “It was happening all the time right before the invasion started. Remember?”

Gaston said, “I have heard that during those first days the central government lost contact with villages and towns along the Urals and that elements of the 34
^th
Motor Rifle Division were on a training maneuver near here. They were probably dispatched to ascertain the situation.”

“So what happened to them?” Alexander alternated his attention from Trevor to Gaston and back again. “What does it mean?”

Armand quickly shot, “It means more fuel and bullets for us, I would think. Don’t you?”

Trevor pinched his nose as if trying to sort through a chaotic collection of thoughts. He managed to simplify and told them, “Look, it doesn’t matter much right about now. Armand is right, see what your people can scavenge from the wreck. We have bigger things to think about.”

“The buildings down there,” Alexander stepped closer to Trevor. “Is that what we’ve come for?”

“Buildings?” Armand wanted in on the conversation. “What buildings?” Apparently he thought the remains of a vanished Russian regiment served as the day’s biggest revelations.

Jorgie, perhaps trying to chase away concerns over what was to come, hurried to Armand and took hold of his hand. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

With one arm holding his stuffed bunny and the other leading the Frenchman, Jorgie Benjamin Stone led the group away from the abandoned military equipment, through the orchard of skeletal trees, and to the ledge overlooking the dead plain where Voggoth’s temple waited.

The rumbling mass of charcoal-colored clouds sprung to life with a sudden blast of energy. Lightning sizzled. Thunder boomed.

“You can see it all from here, Mr. Armand,” Jorgie tried to sound cheerful; a stark contrast to everything around him. “It’s right there.”

Jorgie stopped speaking as they reached the cliff and gazed across the earth toward the monstrous wall of mountain. The plain there—the one stretching from the observation point to the temple—was no longer empty.

All around the temple lay thousands of blobs of green goo of various sizes and shapes. Trevor could not be sure, but he thought he saw puffs of smoke—maybe steam—rising from the things. Perhaps cooling or sizzling after their journey through time and space.

“My god…” Armand’s voice trailed off.

One by one—repeated a thousand times—the green bubbles ripped and popped and parted. The barbed legs and jagged fangs and sharp claws of thousands of monsters of more shapes and sizes than any nightmare could conjure poked and pushed free from the capsules.

Trevor recalled how humans taken in the vessels had been found unconscious, but Voggoth’s demons traveled with no such limitations. No doubt the discrepancy lay in the difference between life and lifeless. Regardless, Voggoth had brought an army to face them. An army, Trevor felt certain, that a moment ago infested the cities and towns of middle America in years past.

Those creatures could have done no good against Dreadnoughts and armored divisions, K9 corps and jet fighters. But there in the shadow of the Urals they could serve Voggoth as a last-gasp stopgap against the surprise strike of the European force.

“My god, what do we do?” Alexander’s shock and surprise cut through his more rational tendencies.

Armand coolly answered the obvious, “We bring the army up. We fight.”

“But if Voggoth could do this once, he may very well keep doing it.”

Trevor told Alexander, “Let’s hope so.”

Even Armand found that answer surprising.

Trevor said, “After we cut through these things, Voggoth will send more. And then more. And then more. He will keep sending them until he can stop us from doing what we came here to do. I think that each time he brings these things through space and time it disrupts the natural order of things, like splashes in a quiet pond. I think the other beings who are involved in all this know that he should not be making those splashes, but they’ve either not noticed or ignored him so far. Let him keep sending them until those splashes can’t be ignored. If he does it enough, maybe someone will listen to me.”

Alexander and Armand shared a look and then Alexander asked, “
Who
will listen to you, Trevor?”

He did not answer Alexander’s question. Instead he knelt and rested his hands on his son’s shoulders. With his eyes settling smoothly on Jorgie, Trevor said to the others, “We have to get in that temple. Armand, I’m counting on you to get us past all that. Can you do that?”

Armand snorted a chuckle.

“Can I do that? Trevor, it is what I was born to do.”

The mortar shell exploded in the midst of a group of charging, four-legged horse-sized creatures covered in metal-like armor with horns and jagged barbs everywhere. The concussion from the blast knocked three of the things over but they each regained their feet fast. A fourth was not so lucky. Shrapnel hit it square in its relatively unprotected face; a face covered in pin-sized lights that might be eyes arranged above a screaming, elongated jaw from which bellowed one last ghastly death-scream as the blast tore away its blood-red flesh.

Not far from them, a swarm of things best described as mutated alligators—dozens of them—charged at the northern flank of the European lines. Their spines glowed white from some unearthly energy bottled inside; their snouts snapped open and shut, flashing hooked teeth. The rest of their bodies were covered in constant slither as thousands of tiny parasites—worms of a hellish sort—lived on the hides of the devilish things.

A tripod mounted machine gun behind a wall of toppled boulders met the monsters hitting those in the lead snuffing whatever spark of motivation masqueraded as life within the damned animals. Still, more than half of the alligator-beasts crashed into the machine gun nest. One German soldier was caught between jaws from behind as he abandoned his post a second too late. Another managed to break free thanks to covering fire provided from Turkish assault rifles, but one of the warped alligators spat a stream of fire from its belly and incinerated the man.

Similar scenes repeated across the battle field as the lead elements of the European army arrived soldier by soldier, truck by truck and the legion of monsters guarding the temple moved to meet them.

To the south at the foot of the ridge overlooking the black plains, a line of Spanish infantrymen with light arms and grenades waded into a sea of half-metal devil dogs the size of small cars.

To the north a brave charge of Italian horse soldiers violently collided with rhinoceros-like beasts sporting twin horns from which arced electrical bolts capable of microwaving a man.

Across the center raged a chaotic battle. Polish fighters on foot and in light trucks advanced with Danish regulars on their flanks. They hit the enemy with assault rifles and mounted machine guns. That enemy hit back with burning balls of screaming fire flying like comets and dropping napalm on the human ranks; with axe-wielding ten-foot-tall crimson-colored octopuses slashing the attackers in an insane fury; with bipedal yellow-eyed fur-covered mammals resembling upright tigers capable of leaping fifty feet in one bound.

On the ridge to the west, mankind’s reinforcements kept coming as the stretched army arrived at its destination piece by piece. Military vehicles with machine gun and anti-tank mounts re-fueled and deployed toward the action; towed artillery assembled and prepared to fire; fighters ranging from young and old, amateur to professional grabbed rifles and pistols and raced toward the action.

To the east beneath the wall of rock cut out of the Urals, bolts of lightning reached from the charred heavens to the Temple of Voggoth. Every few minutes those flashes illuminated yet another crop of green sarcophagi appearing on the plains around the blasphemous building. Those bulbs burst open and more claws, mandibles, and walking horrors joined Voggoth’s defenses.

The battle raged in the sky. The Euro Tiger helicopter strafed the demonic mobs with cannon fire. Giant flying insects swooped into the chaos and plucked hapless victims from the carnage like gulls snatching fish from the sea.

This was no pitched battle. It was the nature of war itself: bloody, anarchic, and merciless. The wonder weapons of man’s futuristic arsenal played no role. Bullets fired at close range—explosives tearing apart apparitions—sharp and blunt weapons, fists and kicks battled talons and jaws, breath of fire, spitting acid, and swinging clubs.

A V-shaped formation of motorcycles cut through the madness. Heavy cavalry led the charge with lances knocking aside and skewering any beast that dared block the path. Guns blasted; swords swung. Armand’s riders led the way like a plow clearing a snow-covered road.

In the middle of the formation, Rick Hauser drove the heavily armored van Trevor and JB had called home during three weeks of travel from France to Eurasia.

One of the Royal Marines sat in the passenger seat alongside Hauser. Trevor and JB huddled behind gripping the van’s cargo nets as the vehicle bounced and wobbled over rough terrain and dead bodies. Through the windshield Trevor could see Armand on his Ducati zipping side to side and adding his FAMAS fire wherever the battle needed it.

The scene outside the van’s windows reminded Trevor of the Battle of Five Armies, albeit on a much grander scale. The shots of gunfire, the thumps of explosions, the clang of armor, and the screams of victims filtered to his ears but the sounds were hollowed by the insulation of the van’s walls. It gave the noise an unreal edge; as if it might come from a radio broadcast.

He glanced at his boy. Jorgie held the cargo net in a death-grip. Water streamed from his eyes.

“Jorgie, what is it?”

A stupid question, of course. Nine-year-old boys did not belong in the midst of such carnage. Still, Jorgie looked more sad than afraid.

“Father—this is so—this is very bad…”

Trevor slung an arm on his son’s shoulders.

“Yes, it is,” he felt it important that his mysterious son realize as much. “People are dying out there. Lives are being lost, Jorgie. Fathers and sons; even mothers and daughters. That’s why we have to stop it.”

Trevor waited for a response from the boy who had often thought battle a glorious endeavor.

Jorgie mumbled only, “Yes.”

The vehicle took a particularly nasty jolt and a side of the van bent in from an exterior impact. Trevor glanced out and saw, through the tiny windows at the rear, a motorcycle spin out of control into a mob of dog-sized worms. A second later that bike detonated in a flash of yellow and orange.

Trevor turned his attention forward. He saw Armand balancing his FAMAS in one hand while steering his bike with the other. The man shot a flying thing that tried to dive bomb the formation.

Inside the van, Hauser—struggling with keeping control on the rocks, uneven ground, and bodies passing beneath the wheels—said, “We’re almost to the front entrance. Get ready.”

At that moment one of the heavy cavalry riders in bulky body armor tumbled end over end, separating person from bike. Trevor saw something akin to a horned turtle standing where the rider had been but he caught only a glimpse as the spearhead continued on at a rapid pace leaving both the turtle-thing and the rider to their fates.

Trevor leaned forward to see above the fray. And yes, there loomed the massive Temple of Voggoth beneath boiling black clouds.

“Just drop us off, Rick. Then you and the rest get out of here.”

“Sir, I signed on for the whole ride.”

“Thanks, but you can’t help us inside and if you stay outside you’ll be overrun. Get back to the main lines and help Armand and Alexander keep the fight going.”

BAM!

The van flew and landed on the driver’s side. Crates, buckets, Jorgie’s cot, ammo boxes, canned food, Trevor and JB all fell in a jumble against the toppled side of the van which slid and spun several more feet. From outside came the roar of something very big. And gunfire.

Trevor immediately found his son. Jorgie appeared dazed but in one piece. Then he leaned forward to check on Rick Hauser and the Royal Marine. With the exception of the indignity of having fallen on top of one another, the two men up front remained uninjured.

“Something big came out of the ground,” Hauser said as he struggled to right himself “We have got to get you moving. Is JB okay?”

“Yeah. We’re ready.”

“Wait here,” the Marine said as he produced an SA80 bullpup assault rifle and reached up for the passenger door. “I’ll pop open the back.”

Hauser used his hands to help hoist the soldier up and out through the passenger side door that was now at the ‘top’ of the overturned vehicle.. Then he, too, went in that direction.

More gunfire rang out from the immediate vicinity as Armand’s riders dealt with whatever had flipped the van.

Trevor found an HK MP5 and urgently grasped it in one hand. Jorgie did something similar, except he grasped his wrapped bunny albeit with even more urgency.

The rear of the van opened. Hauser motioned them out while the stoic Royal Marine stood nearby pointing his gun at something. Judging by the way he craned his neck, that something was rather tall.