Anthony DeCosmo - Fusion

And then-on the morning of June 20 ^ th — they moved as if of one mind and marched to battle.

The last battle.

The ground and the sky shared much in common: both charred black. Overhead that came in the form of storm clouds seemingly made from swirling soot. They shielded the land from the summer sun; it felt more like a frosty fall day.

Below, the terrain might have once been full of fruitful foothills, but now lay covered in a fine grain of charcoal dirt lacking any fertility. Even the smattering of weeds scattered here and there were long dead.

Ahead of Trevor the land rose to a lip of rock like the outer rim of a crater. The map identified the area as Satka, Russia, but some great upheaval had terra-formed the land into something an astronomer might expect to find on the harsh worlds of Mars or Venus. It felt wrong. Warped. Diseased. Dead. And devoid of hope.

He stepped to the parapet with JB at his side. It dropped away in a soft slope of gravel and more black dirt. A few dozen feet below the ground leveled again. Trevor reconsidered. This did not appear to be a crater, but a place where a great mass of Earth had sunk.

At the bottom of the hill the land stretched east on a plain of black soil and dried stalks that might have once been trees. Something had flattened the foothills approaching the Urals. No sign of Satka remained. No crushed buildings. No rubble. No stretches of street, no lamp posts, no trees-nothing.

The mountains themselves also suffered the devil’s touch. Trevor saw a massive wall stretching hundreds of feet in the air like a frozen tidal wave of rock devoid of color; as if a God’s bulldozer had dug apart the land, turning it into something cold and harsh; a fitting landscape for a circle in Dante’s Inferno.

Three miles across the stamped-flat plains at the foot of the barrier wall of rock waited the Temple of Voggoth: an infection of green and red bubbling from the surface of a cancer-ridden Earth. Spires of twisted vine reached hundreds of feet into the air from a convex roof lined with ribs. Wisps of smoke or steam slipped into the evening sky from hidden vents.

Smaller buildings-some round, some square, some domes-flanked the main hall like a cluster of foul warts.

Through a set of field glasses, Trevor spied a small group of defenders-mainly Spider Sentries-positioned around the facility; nothing that could not be handled in a few short minutes by Alexander’s approaching army.

“Is that where it is, Father?”

Trevor lowered his binoculars and found his son’s eyes.

“Yes, JB. Are you-are you afraid?”

Jorgie did not answer at first but his eyes wavered. He told his dad, “I trust you, Father.”

“Trevor!” Alexander’s voice interrupted. “You have to see this. Come here.”

The Englishman beckoned them away from the cliff and off the dusty path that had served as the main road to their destination. As they followed Alexander, Trevor took stock of his forces. They came from the west, a line of headlights spaced between packs of horses and carts, motorbikes and trucks. The collective sound of their engines made the ground tremble and filled a dark sky-far too dark for early evening-with a steady roar. Somewhere off in that dark sky a helicopter whirred.

He knew they would keep coming. In the ten days since marching through Zhytomyr, Alexander managed to tighten their formations a great deal. Yet still, the long snake of an army stretched for miles and they would arrive piecemeal at a continuous rate for the rest of the day, if not longer.

“Come on, Trevor! You have to see this!”

With Royal Marines on their flanks, Trevor and JB followed Alexander through an orchard of small trees that were now nothing more than tall sticks. It appeared to Trevor that something had sucked the life out of the plants so fast that they did not have time to fall. He saw what amounted to be tree skeletons propped upright in neat lines.

At the end of the orchard they came to a gentle hill that sloped away to the south forming a huge bowl of sorts ringed on all sides by more hills.

Gaston-the lanky black man who scouted for the Europeans-stood at the top of that gentle knoll with Armand and a small group of biker-cavalry.

“Father? What is it?”

Trevor made out things of various shapes and sizes filling the small valley, but no movement.

“My God,” Armand-standing next to his ride in his biker’s leather-muttered. “I think I have never seen the like. Am I really seeing this?”

Trevor raised his binoculars for a better view. His eyes managed to adjust to the darkness and as they did, he understood what he saw.

The tanks stood out the most. About a half-dozen Russian T-72s as still as statues. Their green armor had faded in several spots and thin coats of black dust settled across the cupolas. Their thick treads and long barrels made Trevor see them as something akin to T-Rex fossils: harmless at the moment, but fearsome to behold.

An additional pair of tracked vehicles shared the same fate as the tanks. It took Trevor’s collection of genetic memories a moment to identify them as Akatsiya self-propelled artillery pieces. Several wheeled vehicles in the form of BTR APCs also shared the graveyard of armor.

Yet it was not the tanks, APCs, or self-propelled artillery that piqued Trevor’s interest the most. That honor fell upon the dozens of empty-and some collapsed-tents, the boxes upon boxes of supply crates, the trio of tanker trucks, the collection of assault rifles and carbines lying about and-most important of all-the Russian army jackets, shirts, pants and boots scattered by the hundreds throughout the field. Enough clothes for a small army.

Gaston-who once worked for Russian intelligence-murmured loud enough for all to hear: “The 276 ^ th motorized rifle regiment. Part of the 34 ^ th Motor Rifle Division.”

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.