Hell on Earth Read online

  Arlene interrupted, as usual. “When we fought them on Phobos and Deimos, they were comfortable with higher radiation levels than a human being; but that doesn’t mean they could survive H-bomb fallout.”

  For a moment I thought the President was going to bite her head off, but then he controlled his temper. “We have antiradiation pills for you to take and wrist bands that will glow red if you get a near-lethal dose. In addition, you’ll have some protective gear if you require it. And any weapons you can bear, of course.”

  “How do we get to L.A.?” I asked.

  “Take the train,” answered Albert.

  “Great. How do we get to the tracks? I thought they were all ripped up.”

  “Not all the track was destroyed,” said the President. “You can take one of our Humvees south, following the railroad track to a good spot for getting aboard the train.” Getting aboard . . . How easily he breezed over that slight difficulty!

  And another small difficulty. “Um . . . the aliens are going to let us drive right out in a Humvee?”

  Albert snorted. The President glowered at him, then returned to the question. “Of course not. You’ll leave here and pass underneath enemy lines. The Humvee is hidden in a safe location—Albert knows where it is.”

  “I do?”

  “Where you hid after blowing the tracks three weeks ago.”

  “Ah.” Albert nodded, remembering the spot. Well, that made one of us.

  “Underneath the aliens,” I asked, “you have a tunnel?”

  “It’s always wise to build in a way to expedite escape,” said Albert. “All our safe houses use them—including this facility. Usually exit from a basement, dive down thirty or forty feet, then continue a long way, miles perhaps.”

  “How did you build all that without anyone knowing?”

  “We had a lot of time on our hands.” He grinned. “And a lot of members in street maintenance positions.”

  “You must ride the train into Phoenix,” continued the President, producing a pointer and stabbing Phoenix.

  “Why Phoenix?” asked Arlene.

  “The train that goes from Phoenix into L.A. can’t be stopped and can’t be boarded; Phoenix is under demonic possession. If you stow away before Phoenix and escape detection, you might not be boarded. Then it’s smooth riding all the way into L.A.” He put down the pointer with a flourish.

  Jill laughed. She sounded a lot older than she was, listening to the scorn in her laugh; it suggested a lifetime of frustration.

  The President did not act as defensive as I would have expected. “I know it’s a long shot,” he said. “I’m open to any better suggestions.”

  “I wish I had one,” said Albert.

  I expected Jill to launch into a tirade, but instead she kept her mouth taped.

  “The plan sounds workable to me,” I said. “Everything is a long shot from now on.”

  At no point had anyone talked about who would lead this mission; I suspected the President would want his own man in charge, and I prepared myself for an argument.

  Then Albert surprised me: “Corporal Taggart is in charge, of course.” He surprised the President too, who started to object, then bit off whatever he’d been about to say. Leadership was clearly already determined.

  The President allowed us to pick our own weapons: a double-barreled scattergun for me, and a .41 caliber hunting rifle with a scope for long-range work. Arlene was back to her perennial AB-10 machine pistol and a scoped .30-30. Albert surprised me by picking some foreign-made Uzi clone I’d never seen before; I didn’t think a Marine would go in for that kind of flash. But I guess it wasn’t really different from Arlene’s AB-10, though a bit bigger; and even that might give it more stability in a firefight. Albert said he would just use Arlene’s .30-30 for any sniping . . . and Jill already had her AR-19, of course.

  We also took pistols, ammo, grenades, day-to-night goggles—we had to be careful to conserve the battery power, using them only when absolutely necessary; no recharges—and one of the more exotic energy weapons I never liked; not a BFG, which they’d never heard of, but a gas-plasma pulse rifle. We packed food and blankets and other useful items, including a complement of mountaineering (or wall-scaling) equipment: knotted rope, a grappling hook, crampons and pitons, the usual usual.

  The Humvee waited—God and Albert knew where. Would we find it? Would it run if we did? I tried not to think about such questions as, with great solemnity, the President of the Twelve led us through the inner compound to a small, cinder-block building . . . and to the escape tunnel.

  14

  Other members of the community gathered around us before we departed. Somewhere back in my mind, I wondered why we weren’t hearing a heroic anthem to speed us on our way. Where was the brass band? Where were the speeches? In my mind, I heard fragments of the speech: “Never before have so few faced so many in the defense of so few.” Well, that wasn’t exactly right.

  There were a large number of heavy barrels of fuel oil in the building, seemingly stacked somewhat haphazardly. A pair of soldiers approached one particular barrel carrying an odd tool that looked like a giant-sized jar opener.

  They lowered the prongs over the barrel and pushed levers forward, running steel rods through the lip. Then they put their shoulders to the two ends of the “jar opener” and walked counterclockwise. Rather than tip over, the barrel unscrewed like a light bulb; they lifted the heavy, false barrel from the narrow tunnel, just barely wide enough to admit a single man of my size.

  Arlene took point. She tchked and winked at the President and blew him a kiss; his face flushed bright red. Then she held her AB-10 pointed straight down and dropped out of sight. Albert followed, then Jill; I went last.

  We dropped into what looked at first like pitch-dark; then, as our eyes adjusted, we found the slight ambient light adequate to see a few meters ahead and behind.

  The light came from phosphorescent mold, and the tunnel was deliberately carved to look natural, a fissure meandering left and right but mainly going straight northwest. It was wide enough for two abreast, and Arlene and Albert walked the point—Albert because he alone knew the route. I took tail-end Charlie, leaving Jill reasonably protected in the center.

  Before we started, I cautioned the crew: “From here on, no talking, not even for emergencies. We’ll use the Marine Corps hand language; Jill, you just watch me. They may have listening devices, hunting for tunnels. Let’s not make it easy on them, all right?”

  The tunnel was cool and dark, a relief from the hot sun of the Utah desert; at night, I hoped it would also insulate us from the freezing overnight temps. We could be underground for . . . how many klicks?

  Eight kilometers, signed Albert in response to my silent question.

  Six passed by at breakneck speed . . . well, as breakneck as you can get shimmying through underground caverns with rough, natural-hewn floors in limited light. Took us more than six hours, in fact, not much of a speed record. But the end was in sight, metaphorically speaking. We had just finished our fourth rest and were ready to tackle the final quarter.

  As Arlene ducked and stepped under an archway, I heard a sound that chilled me to the marrow: the startled hiss of an imp.

  We were not alone.

  Reacting to the sound, Arlene backpedaled; she stuck her arm out and caught Albert on her way back, knocking both of them to the ground.

  The move saved their lives; a flaming ball of mucus hurled past where they had stood but an instant before and splattered explosively against the wall. Arlene didn’t bother rising; she raised her machine pistol and fired from supine. I swung my shotgun around and unloaded the outside barrel; between the two of us, we blew the spiny apart.

  It had buddies. As Arlene and Albert scrambled to their feet, and the latter fumbled his Uzi clone, swearing under his breath in a most un-Mormonlike manner, I pushed Jill to the ground and unloaded my second barrel, decapitating a zombie who wielded a machete.

  I cracked and reload
ed; Albert finally got everything pointed in the right direction and loosed a volley of lead.

  We had surprised the bastards, and now they weren’t even sure where we were shooting from. To make things worse, the zombie troops had zeroed in on the imps, catching them in a cross fire with us.

  I pushed Arlene forward, and she charged, taking advantage of the distraction. Yanking Jill to her feet, I followed; but we were several steps behind our teammates.

  Arlene broke left and Albert kept on straight, taking after the two clumps of spinys—who made the fatal mistake of turning their attention to their own pathetic troops.

  To my horror, I realized what this resistance meant: the tunnel was breached; if the aliens knew about the tunnel, then soon troops would come pouring down the pipe, lurching directly into the heart of the last human enclave for hundreds of klicks!

  Albert must have realized the terrible danger at the same moment. He took advantage of a lull to flash a frantic sign: explosives—tunnel—blow up—hurry!

  I got the message. The Mormons had intelligently lined their own escape tunnel with high explosive; if we could somehow find the detonator, we could collapse the tunnel, saving the compound.

  But how? Where? I doubted even Albert knew where the nearest fuse lay—and wouldn’t blowing the tunnel blow us up as well?

  But considering that it was I who brought this trouble upon them, it was clearly my duty to do it . . . even at the loss of my own life in the explosion.

  But first we’d have to take care of these brown, leathery bastards.

  Arlene had gone left and Albert straight; but one imp suddenly lurched out of the darkness to our right out of nowhere. I caught it out of the corner of my eye.

  “Jill!” I shouted, violating my own orders. “Look out!”

  Fortunately, like Rikki Tikki Tavi, she knew better than to waste time looking. She hit the deck face first as I unloaded both barrels over her body.

  The imp landed nearly on top of the girl. If it had, it probably would have crushed her to death: those damned demons mass 150 kilograms!

  Arlene and Albert finished killing their targets, and I started to relax.

  Then I noticed what the imp I had just killed held in its claws. Damn, but it sure looked suspiciously like a satchel charge.

  For an instant I froze, then that little voice behind my eyeballs whispered, Fly, you know, standing like a statue might not be the best career move right about now . . .

  “RUN!” I bellowed, bolting straight forward, picking up Jill on the fly. I ran right up to the imp and right over it, gritting my teeth against the expected blast.

  It didn’t blow up. Not until we had all made about ten meters down the tunnel.

  The explosion was loud, but not deafening; it was the sequence of seven or eight explosions after the satchel charge that rattled my brains.

  We kept running like bloody lunatics as we heard the loudest report yet. It sounded like it was directly over our heads—and the tunnel began to collapse.

  A million tons of rock and dirt crashed down on my head, and something hard and remarkably bricklike cracked my skull. I was hurled to the ground by the concussion . . . and when I swam back to consciousness, I found myself lying half underneath a huge pile of collapsed tunnel roof. Had we been just a few footfalls slower, we’d have all been buried under it.

  A steel brace arched up from our position, slightly bent. About five meters overhead I saw daylight; but ahead of us there was only rubble.

  “Congratulations,” gasped Arlene, picking herself up and choking in the dust. “You found the only door frame for a hundred meters in each direction! You sure you never lived in L.A., say during an earthquake?”

  No one was crippled; Jill needed first aid for a nasty cut on her forehead, and I needed about five or six Tylenols.

  Albert stared forward into the collapse, then up at the sky. “Course correction, Corporal,” he said. “I think it’s time we rose above all this.”

  We made a human ladder: I stood at the bottom, then Albert on my shoulders, then Arlene on his. Reaching up, she caught hold of the bracing beam and held herself steady for Jill to climb like a monkey up and out. She secured a rope and threw the end back down for the rest of us.

  Outside, the sun was just setting, a faint flash of green in the western sky. The exploding, collapsing tunnel left a long, plowed furrow running jaggedly along the hard-packed dirt of the desert floor.

  We hurried away from the site, found a rocky hill and lay on our bellies on its top. When the stars appeared, Albert sighted on Polaris, then pointed the direction we should journey. “The ranch is another four klicks yonder,” he said. “We ought to be there before midnight.”

  Three hours later we skulked onto the deserted, burned-out ranch. Near the barn was a huge haystack. Inside the haystack, covered in a yellow, plastic tarp, was a surprise.

  Ordinarily, I’d have rather run during the night and holed up in the daylight; but the aliens were more active at night. And more important, we were all utterly spent. Arranging a three-way watch over Jill’s protest, we collapsed into sleep. Despite her threat, Jill didn’t awaken until Arlene shook her the next morning.

  The engine of the Humvee groaned into life, the coughing gradually diminishing. The thing might actually run, I thought. Jill almost jumped up and down with excitement as the machine started to move. She was a kid again, forgetting all the crap of the universe in the presence of a new toy. The little things that bothered her sense of dignity vanished.

  She was why we would win the war against the monsters, no matter how many battles were lost. And no matter what happened to us.

  “Here we go,” said Albert, holding an Auto Club map as if it were a dagger. He was a lot more dashing than the President.

  “Let’s kick some monster butt,” said the old Arlene.

  After two hours of a steady, off-road seventy kilometers per hour, we’d seen no signs of the changed world; but I knew this illusion couldn’t last. While it did, I enjoyed every minute of it. An empty landscape is the most beautiful sight in the world when it doesn’t contain smashed buildings, burning remains of civilization, and fields of human corpses. Of course, it would have been nice to see a bird, or hear one.

  There was a long line of straight road ahead, so I asked Jill if she would like to drive the Humvee.

  “Cool,” she said. “What do I do?”

  I let her hold the wheel, and she seemed satisfied. A Humvee is a big horse, and I wasn’t about to put the whole thing in her charge. But she seemed comfortable, as if she had driven large vehicles before . . . possibly a tractor?

  Our first stop was for a bathroom break. That’s when I saw the first evidence that Earth wasn’t what it used to be: a human skull all by itself, half buried in the dirt. Nothing else around it—no signs of a struggle. But dislodging it with my shoe revealed a small patch of clotted scalp still on the bone. The ants crawling over this spot provided the final touch. What was this fresh skull doing here all by itself?

  “Ick,” said Jill, catching sight of my find. I could say nothing to improve on that.

  “What’s that odor?” asked Arlene.

  “It’s coming from up ahead,” observed Albert.

  It was the familiar, old sour lemon smell . . . unmistakable bouquet of finer zombies everywhere.

  As we resumed the journey, the terrain altered. There were twisted shapes on the horizon made of something pink and white that glistened in the sun. They reminded me of the flesh blocks that might still be pounding endlessly up and down on Deimos. These were shaped more like the stalagmites I’d seen in my spelunking days. They didn’t belong out here.

  The whiff of sour lemon grew stronger, which meant zombies shambling nearby or rotting in a ditch somewhere close. My stomach churned in a way it hadn’t since Deimos.

  The sky altered as well. The blue slowly shaded into a sickly green with a few red streaks, as if pools of green sludge were leaking into the sky.

&n
bsp; We were all quiet now, fearing that to say anything was to ruin that last glow of quiet friendship before the storm. I glanced at Jill. She wore a determined expression better than the President of the Council of Twelve wore his gun.

  Arlene and Albert checked out the ammo and guns, more for something to do. Jill was content to stay up front and help drive the vehicle.

  Arlene finally broke silence: “You know, Fly, they gave us more than we can pack with us when we dump the Humvee, if we’re going to be able to stow aboard the damned train when it slows down.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Take what you can.”

  Jill looked over her shoulder. “Can I help?” she asked.

  “We’re doing okay,” said Albert.

  “You’re not throwing out my machine gun, are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  Albert laughed, the first sound of happiness since we crossed over into what I was already dubbing Infernal Earth. “Honey, we’ll toss food and water before we let go of a good weapon.”

  “My name’s not—” she started to say, then noticed Albert’s friendly expression. Context and tone of voice made a difference. I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t the first people in her life to treat her like a person.

  There was the sound of an explosion to the west. “Is that thunder?” asked Jill. She stared to the right, but there was nothing to see.

  “No,” I said. “Someone is playing with firecrackers.”

  “Something, more likely,” said Arlene.

  “Behold,” said Albert in a low voice, obviously speaking to himself, “that great city Zarahemla have I burned with fire, and the inhabitants thereof.”

  Jill suddenly surprised me by turning around and facing Albert, asking: “Are you saying the monsters are a judgment of God against the human race?”

  “No,” he said, “I think it is a testing.”

  Arlene had promised not to talk religion with the boss. Now the circumstances had changed. Albert was a comrade. She’d talk about anything to a comrade.

  “Would you say what the Nazis did to the Jews was a testing?” she asked angrily.