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THE INHUMAN ROAR WAS too close. The trees were dense, and the rolling uneven terrain made it difficult to tell where the sound had come from. Definitely somewhere behind them, and definitely too close.
Johnny "Shrub" Kieterman was in his element—even in the dark, he followed the game trails and pushed through the dense underbrush always at the point of least resistance. His buddy, "Doc" Lewis, was the medic for the eight-man Special Forces team, but right now he leaned on Shrub's shoulder. Doc’s right leg was held together by a field splint and a tourniquet. When Shrub glanced over at him, Doc's face was so pale he almost glowed in the starlight that filtered through the trees.
"Leave me here. With my back against that mound. I can hold that thing off here. You gotta make it to extraction, Shrub. We can't lose our team for nothing. That case has gotta get to the Lab Coats!" Doc said across several breaths through gritted teeth.
"Right, Doc. We'll be back for you—you just blow holes through that shitberry til it's string and sweat."
Shrub leaned Doc against a low rise of dirt. He pulled out all six of his remaining 30-round clips, dropping them next to Doc in a pile. Doc pulled the lever back on top of his MAC-10, and flicked the safety off.
"You gotta a popper, Shrub? Last resort, you know?"
Shrub took two grenades and a smoke canister off his tac-belt and set them next to the clips.
"You rip this smoke when you hear the chopper, Doc," Shrub said, looking over his shoulder as he heard cracking underbrush. He thought he could just barely hear wet, gurgling panting too. "Shit, Doc, you end that thing, OK? We'll be back for you."
Shrub grabbed the aluminum sample case and scrambled over the rise. He glanced down and saw Doc slam a morphine-autoject into his leg with his left hand, lining the clips up within reach with his right. Shrub crossed himself and ran off. He ducked branches and leaped entangling roots by instinct born of growing up with the swamps of the bayou as his playground.
He hadn't gone more than twenty meters before he heard the steady brap-brap of Doc's MAC-10, followed by a momentary pause as Doc slammed another clip in, brap-brap, repeat. This close, the roar of the creature was filled with the sounds of wet mucus and loose flesh.
***
IT WAS JUST MINUTES ago that they first saw the thing, and Shrub had no idea what it was, even though he had seen it and heard it up close. Way too close. He had been standing watch while Doc collected the samples from the sinkhole.
It must have been stalking them, because it appeared out of nowhere, rising up, a massive mound of leaking pus-engorged flesh. One massive gangrenous blackened claw slammed Shrub off his feet and knocked him at least four meters into the trunk of a white pine. His body armor saved him from the claw, but the impact knocked the wind out of him. His vision was a sea of red mist and white flashes. He tried to warn Doc, whose head and right arm were down in the sinkhole with a collection vial. The creature was FAST; by the time Shrub’s hoarse cry registered and Doc's head whipped up and around, the thing had run over him.
Shrub didn't think it even saw Doc lying there next to the hole. It was loping toward Rock and Fuzzy, Team Alpha, who were on inner-perimeter watch on the other side of the hole. They must have heard Shrub crash through the brush on his flight to the tree trunk, because they moved in with their submachine guns blazing. Shrub knew they couldn't have missed at that range, but that thing just kept coming. It slammed Rock through the air and into Fuzzy like a bowling ball clearing a split.
Shrub concentrated on breathing to clear his head while he crawled over to Doc. The creature moved off deeper into the surrounding trees, hunting the other two teams that were softly calling signals to each other.
Doc looked bad, real bad. It looked like that thing's rear claw almost ripped Doc's lower right leg clean off. Shrub dug through Doc's pack and got a syringe of morphine in him right away, then put on a tourniquet to keep him from bleeding out. Doc was coherent enough by then to get the field splint on himself. Shrub, snapped open the aluminum sample case, and pushed the vials Doc had collected into their foam rubber slots. At the outer perimeter distance, Shrub heard the Team Beta open fire. Moments later, only silence.
Shrub lifted Doc up and pulled his arm over his shoulder. Doc yanked his Cry Baby from his tac-belt, pressing the button and tossing it to the ground as they moved quickly away. Like a high-powered avalanche beacon, it was non-directional, but it would let the extraction team know everything had gone tits-up and they were coming into a hot zone.
***
SHRUB HEARD THE EXPLOSION as Doc blew a grenade back at the low rise. The second grenade went off immediately after.
Shrub was alone now.
The edge of the tree line that demarcated the extraction-point meadow was just visible ahead. He leaped a low bush, and his feet crashed through the deadfall at the base of a tree but didn't stop. His momentum carried his body forward, hyperextending his knees.
The ground was wet and hollow, and both feet sank in deep. It felt gelatinous and warm to his booted feet. His boots were caught on something as he tried to pull them out.
He snapped down his AN/PVS-5 light-intensifying goggles to see how to free himself. There wasn't enough starlight filtering through the branches to light up shit. He reached up and snapped on the IR LED, switching the goggles to active-vision. Looking down, Shrub saw filaments glowing in the infrared, filling the hole, looking like spider webs or arteries. He could see and feel the stuff undulating and writhing around his calves.
"Shit. Shit. Shit." Shrub tugged at his legs, pulling up at his right knee with both hands. His leg remained stuck. He yanked his tac-knife from the sheath on his thigh and jabbed and sawed into the glowing threads. In the green light, more glowing white goo leaked from everywhere along the sides of the hole, staining his pants, blade and hands. He cut with his right and dug and pulled at the filaments with his left. The hole seemed to be filling with the thin webbing faster than he could cut it away. As he watched, a thicker vein of material as big around as his gloved thumb slithered and jerked out of the muddy side, flopping wetly from side to side, twisting and moving like a worm freshly baited on a hook.
Shrub's breath came hot and fast now as panic set in. He could see the thick, white, probing thing twisting closer to his boot. As soon as it touched the canvas and leather, it pulsed out from the side of the hole, twisting, wrapping and entwining from the heel of his boot up his calf. The pointed tip, glowing wetly in the artificial light appeared to back up, then jabbed into the back of his knee, right between the straps of his knee pad. Pain shot through Shrub's leg, like alcohol poured on an open wound.
The pain urging him on, Shrub sliced through the pulsing thumb-thick appendage and hauled his feet out of the grip of the thrumming webs. He fell backwards, knocking the AN/PVS-5 off his helmet. Gooseflesh raised across his skin; He scraped and rubbed with both hands where the white root had penetrated his knee. He grabbed the sample case again and tried to race for the tree line. His knees weren't working at all, so he shuffled on his thighs and forearms, his knife still gripped in his right hand. With his left, he dragged the case.
Painful heat was spreading out from the wound. The tree line was getting closer.
His eye caught his pale reflection in the knife blade. His face a grimace of pain and determination, and what the fuck? He looked at his reflected eye, and he could see the red veins from the corner to iris bulging, even pulsing. His sclera writhed with motion beneath the surface.
"Oh shit!"
Shrub grabbed the red smoke grenade from his tac-belt. The bad-shit-is-going-down red smoke. He pulled the paper-tabbed wire ring with his teeth and threw it as hard as he could through the trees and out into the clearing. He could see the red puffs beginning to billow and spread from the aluminum can. His arms twitching and not quite responding, he pulled the silver sample case up and back to the side. He saw the flesh of his forearm start to bubble. Lumps rose and fell, tracks of raised, web-like tracings sliding and moving just below the skin.
His last coherent thought, "Throw," traveled like tree sap down to his cocked hand, and he threw the case side-arm.
It sailed, spinning, out into the tall grass of the clearing.
***
THE SEARCHLIGHT FROM the Cobra attack helicopter, picked out the sample case shining in the grass near where the wash from the rotors blew the red smoke away from the sputtering grenade.
Red smoke.
Team lost.
Hostiles incoming.
Shrub's vision was blurry and indistinct. His thoughts were making little sense, but he saw the second searchlight snap on and play across the tree line where he hid in the shadows of the trunks. The 'copter sank to maybe five meters above the ground. A zip line arced down from the right side, and a soldier slid fast to the ground. Running low, he grabbed the case, his MAC-10 sliding back and forth across the tree line. Once he had the case, he turned to run back to the helicopter. A ladder unfurled from the helicopter as the zip line pulled up.
Shrub felt his body lurch from the shadows, his flesh sagging yet strong as it pushed a half-ton boulder to the side. He loped out. His confused mind warred between a desire to destroy everything he was seeing, and the last of his humanity that tried to grab an HE grenade to off himself. Humanity lost. Shrub broke from the trees.
The searchlight caught Shrub at the tree line a half second before the first 50 caliber shell ripped through his body. A half second after that, the first of three HE rockets fired from the Cobra exploded the former Shrub into a red and white mist.