FATEFUL LIGHTNING

Manderson’s tall frame jutted out from the foxhole to his right. Next to him, a fire crew, outfitted in biosuits, manned a couple of hoses in front of their truck. The rest of Crowe’s men were spread along the side of the highway to his left. He had asked for volunteers from the Green, Orange, and Yellow Teams, and forty of the forty-eight members of those teams had flown in since the Christmas Day disaster, joining Red and Blue Teams, now dug in along the highway.

Already the streetlamps along the highway were clouded. They were on the edge of the mist.

Crowe raised his weapon. Not his usual XM8, but a common industrial water blaster. The gas-powered engine throbbed away behind him.

He made sure the setting was on its highest power and tried a short burst. The jet of water shot clear across the highway. Up and down the line, there were occasional bursts as other troopers tried out theirs.

Overhead, the tiny shapes of the crop dusters circled, waiting for instructions from the command center.

Crowe didn’t want to use them, possibly his most potent weapon, until he was sure of his targets.

The streetlights disappeared into the thickening fog, yellow halos forming around the bright stars of the bulbs. The mist lapped at the edge of his foxhole, then drifted slowly down into it, wrapping around his legs and waist as he knelt in the shallow dugout.

The fear seemed to be a part of the mist. It was palpable, so real that he thought he would choke on it. He wanted to turn, jump out of the hole, and run for his life back down the motorway toward the city.

There was something about the mist that went beyond the usual fear of going into combat. It held the fear of the unknown, and something else, too. It was impossible to describe. It was as if, not just his mind, but his very body was afraid of the mist. As if the cells that formed the structures of his being were quivering at the approach of the creeping fog.

But he could not run. This was it. This was the moment of truth for Auckland, and possibly for the human race. Right here. Right now.

Crowe knew that if he was feeling the terror, then the rest of his men, and the Kiwis ready to fight alongside them, would be feeling it, too.

A voice sounded in his earpiece, Manderson’s voice. He turned. His friend was singing. The song was an old one. Once the stirring hymn that had led the soldiers of the North against the Confederates in the American Civil War and later the battle cry of U.S. soldiers in the First and Second World Wars: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.”

Other voices were joining in now, from up and down the line. First the rest of the USABRF agents in their black combat biosuits. Then a few hesitant Kiwi accents.

He switched on his throat mike and added his voice to the chorus.

“Glory, glory! Hallelujah! Glory, glory! Hallelujah! Glory, glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.”

The fog swirled up around them, and the first jellyfish struck out of the darkness before the chorus had finished. The hymn trailed off into a ragged end as the men slapped at the creatures, whose tentacles were writhing into the fabric of the biosuits.

They came straight out of the dark fog. No searching, no seeking. Guided missiles locked onto their targets, arrowing through the mist, their fine tentacles trailing behind them.

Men hammered at them, squashing them, wrenching them off the arms and bodies of their biosuits. The air was suddenly thick with the swarming creatures.

Crowe twisted the nozzle of his water blaster around to “spray” and pulled the trigger, aiming in the air above them. Five or six of the jellyfish dropped out of the air and began squirming on the ground in front of him. The surface, the skin, if that was what it was, of the creatures was fizzing and bubbling. That was the salt, Crowe realized.

“Take that, you bloodsuckers!” Manderson cried to his right.

Crowe tried another spray and sent an instruction to the crews of the fire engines.

More of the jellyfish dropped to the ground, and he saw the fire crew to his right raise one of their nozzles. A curtain of salty water appeared in front of them. A mist of their own.

The jellyfish were dropping and fizzing by the hundreds, perhaps thousands. The roadway in front of them was covered in them, wriggling for a few moments, then lying still.

The ones he had sprayed earlier were still there, he noted. The outer surface had hardened, calcified into a pale white shell. They had not absorbed back into the mist!

“Here they come!” someone called in his earpiece, and he strained his eyes to see the first of the snowmen lumbering out of the fog toward them. The noise they made was no longer a hiss. Here in the thinned-out mist, they moved more slowly and the sound was like that of wind around a house on a stormy night.

At first he saw just a few, gradually solidifying out of the mist. Then more appeared behind them; and more behind them. Suddenly they seemed to be everywhere, marching across the gray asphalt toward them.

“My God!” Manderson murmured.

“Water blasters hold till they are closer,” Crowe ordered. “Hose crews, fire at will.”

The fire hoses to his right swelled and burst forth in two heavy streams of seawater. Long wet arms that reached through the fog across the highway to the hordes of creatures that approached.

Where the high-pressure water struck, the snowmen exploded, great globs of their substance flying into the air.

Crowe watched as the closest of the creatures were all but cut in half by the saltwater jets from the fire hoses.

And yet still they marched forward.

Crowe keyed his throat mike. “Bring in the dusters, right down the highway. Right over our heads.”

There was a roar above him as the first plane made its low-level run, just above the fog, and the mist intensified as the salty sea spray drifted down around and in front of them.

Clouds of jellyfish dropped down through the mist, piling up on the highway, but the snowmen still marched forward. Their skin, too, was shriveling and bubbling with the salt, but it did not halt them.

The fire hoses were sweeping back and forth, ripping the creatures to shreds, but the fire crews were spread too thinly.

“Water blasters, pick your targets,” Crowe yelled. “Make it count!”

More tankers were already on their way, but the water was still a limited supply. Thank God, or thank Rebecca, for the salt, which prevented the fog from reclaiming its own.

A white, sluglike creature lurched toward him. Crowe sighted along the barrel of the black plastic and metal rod of the water blaster and squeezed the trigger.

The jet of water shot out, and he directed it across the chest of the creature. It punched a hole straight through the spongy material, and Crowe sawed the blade of water back and forth, cutting the creature into pieces. Manderson was doing the same.

This close, and in the lighter mist, Crowe finally came face to face with the enemy. He could see why the first to sight them had referred to them as snowmen. They looked like puffed-up human beings, inflated somehow from within, and covered in a white, gelatinous substance. They had faces, he realized. Almost human, with mouths, noses, and even eyes, but all formed from the same white spongy substance. The eyeballs, the eyelids, were white. The eyelids did not blink. The terror that had welled up in him before intensified, but he stood his ground.

He cut another couple of the creatures down, taking the legs off one and slicing through the neck of another.

The creatures dropped.

The jet from the fire hose swept across in front of him then, and the ragged line of snowmen faltered for the first time. Crowe hacked at the creatures with the blast of water from his weapon and found he was whooping with exhilaration.

They were winning. The line was holding!

“The mist is thickening,” Manderson called, next to him.

“Get those fighters in here,” Crowe shouted. “Close support. Light up the other side of the road, see if we can thin out the mist a little.”

The fog was indeed thickening, he realized, and the creatures were starting to move faster. He ripped another couple apart. The mass of the creatures’ flesh was filling the roadway. Overhead, the crop dusters swooped, covering the bodies of the creatures with brine, shriveling and fizzing.

Across the highway, lightning flashed and he ducked down into his foxhole for a moment as the shock wave of multiple explosions shook the ground around them.

Lucy Southwell’s voice on the radio then, from the command center, three hundred feet behind the line.

“Crowe, this is Lucy. The evacuation is nearly complete, but we’ve lost all contact with the easternmost sections of the line.”

“My God!” Manderson said for the second time that night, only this time it sounded like a prayer.