David Golemon - Event

Suddenly one of the men held up a hand and made a fist, then opened it and gestured for them to lie low. He then waved for Sarah to come forward.

"What is it?" she asked in a low tone.

"Listen, sounds like a freight train," the Delta sergeant said.

Sarah placed a gloved hand to the smooth wall, then she removed her helmet with her other hand and listened.

"Whatever it is, it's coming this way," the commando said in a whisper.

"And coming fast," added Sarah as she stepped back from the wall and removed the safety on the XM8, making the deadly automatic ready to fire.

The remaining thirteen members of her team did the same. They took up various positions for defense, using the four-man pack defense they had discussed. The one thing they did that was exactly the same was to point their weapons at the far wall as the vibration grew lou4er in the tunnel. Dirt and sand started to slowly come off the roof of the unnatural cave in soft splatters, then in whole chunks.

"It has to be the mother" Sarah said softly, almost speaking to herself. "It's too damn big to be the smaller ones. Look at the VDF, it's off the scale."

As quickly as the vibration started, it stopped. Whatever was on the other side of the tunnel wall was only feet from where they were standing. Sarah and the others could feel it, it was a palpable thing. Most of the soldiers brought their automatic weapons up to eye level, focusing on the spot. As they did, the vibration and noise of the displacement of soil began again, coming closer. It seemed to have turned their way and was coming on in small advances. They felt it in their feet first, then the vibration caused by the movement traveled up their calves to the thighs. Then it stopped. As they watched the wall, small pieces began to fall. They were still and quiet.

"Hear it?" Sarah whispered. "It's right there," pointing the muzzle of her weapon to her right. "It's definitely the mother."

Suddenly a roar shook the air and brought an avalanche of dirt and rock down upon them. Then the noise started growing fainter. It was moving away, back up the mountain.

"What the hell?" the Delta sergeant asked. "Why didn't she attack?"

"I don't know. This thing has to have senses that should have felt our heartbeats through the soil. It should have attacked."

Suddenly a horrible thought crossed Sarah's mind as she was shaking dirt off herself and she froze. They had been briefed on the animal and how it would adapt to whatever it was up against. Now that, coupled with the fact it was heading away from the desert floor and traveling up the mountain, seared the answer to the sergeant's question in her mind. Not only was it going after a bigger target, it was going after the target that was controlling the fight against it and its offspring: the crash site and all the support personnel gathered there. The thought of Lisa, Virginia, and the unsuspecting Event teams working at the site raced through her mind. She quickly hit the transmit switch on her radio, hooked to her web gear at her side.

"Site One, come in. Site One, come in!" she said loudly into the mike just inches from her mouth.

The other members of her tunnel team quickly realized what she was thinking. The sergeant grabbed Sarah by the arm and turned her roughly as they started running back the way they had come. They knew down to a man they had been outmaneuvered.

Lisa sat in the communications tent with Virginia. They had heard little in the last few minutes, and from what they had monitored, a massive slaughter was obviously taking place beneath the surface of the earth. Lisa had tried for forty minutes to recall all the tunnel teams after the initial attack just outside one of the town holes. But thus far, she hadn't been able to raise a single team. Being deep underground was taxing the systems they currently had. As usual, the army had delayed sending the more reliable M-2786 radios out from Fort Carson, radios that were in use in caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. Lisa wished now they had at least had time to run antenna relays throughout the tunnels; they could have been placed as the troops went deeper, like bread crumbs. Now the softball-sized ground-penetrating radar units were not furnishing anything on the animals' movements as they had obviously caught on to the attacks and moved deeper under the ground, thus defeating the weak signals of the small units.

"S... t... ne, Si... One, come... !"

The static was cutting off whoever was calling. Lisa took a chance.

"This is Site One. Repeat, this is Site One, over."

"Get the hell... o... of there, the mother... heading... way."

"That sounded like Sarah," Virginia said.

Lisa didn't wait as she clearly understood the broken message. She threw off the headset and ran for the front of the tent. She hit a large red button on the way out that had been mounted to the main support pole, and a Klaxon started sounding throughout the crash site.

Colonel Sam Fielding was standing on a rock with field glasses pointing toward the valley floor when the alarm started. He immediately jumped from his perch and ran to organize the Event staff and remaining Rangers and Airborne personnel.

The state troopers or what remained of them drew their nine millimeters again and started scanning the area.

Gus grabbed Mahjtic and heard him say one word in a frightened voice with its eyes larger than normal: "Destroyer!"

Lisa grabbed an M16 from the arms locker and started back for the COMM tent. On the way she yelled at the remaining state troopers, "Get your asses over here and get something with a little more kick to it than those potato guns!"

They all immediately ran for the arms locker where Lisa had been a moment before. Trooper Dills arrived first and grabbed for an M79 grenade launcher. He smiled as he hefted a bandolier of grenades over his shoulder, saying, "Payback is a motherfucker!"

Fielding slammed into the COMM tent and yelled, "Get the goddamn Apaches up here, now!"

Lisa immediately put the M16 down beside the radio gear and started calling for reinforcements. Everyone from the White House situation room, Nellis, and the Event Center, to a few of the newly surfaced and severely damaged tunnel teams, heard Lisa's call for assistance.

The remaining Event staff were starting to run from the saucer's crash area to the tent site. Before most of them made it clear of the debris field, the ground rumbled beneath their feet and a high-pitched whine came to their ears. Suddenly, the ground exploded in the middle of the site, and the large, thick-haired form of the mother burst from the hole, sending pieces of the broken saucer flying in all directions, with some of the debris striking a few of the technicians, knocking them from their feet. The large beast roared, flaring her neck armor, and immediately went on the attack.

Virginia ran out of the tent in time to see Dr. Thorsen from the anthropology department picked up and torn in two by the massive animal. He was ripped like a rag doll and tossed aside. But still she couldn't bring herself to look away. The brutal life-form was horrible, but still a mesmerizing sight to the scientist in her.

The mother quickly grabbed two of the staff as they tried to dodge the towering beast. The mouth opened and the mandibles worked at an incredible speed, almost undetectable. The tail swiped at another doctor as she ran the opposite way, sinking the stinger deep into her back. As the barbed tip pulled free, it took with it most of her coverall and about eight inches of flesh. She collapsed and her skin instantaneously shriveled and collapsed in on the bone, as her insides, including the hard muscles, were reduced to jelly by the alien's venom.