Anthony DeCosmo - Empire

They drove through the remains of the Jellyfish battle heading south on North Front Street. They passed a cluster of satellite dishes outside a television station and crossed an overpass that traveled above a parking lot where ten Grenadiers surrounded a trio of three-foot-tall bipedal ‘Gremlins’ resembling a cross between monkeys and wingless bats. The things shrieked as the dogs tore them to pieces.

A block further along, the Humvee stopped in the heart of Cape Fear Community College. Nina watched twenty or so K9s with handlers-including one with a flamethrower-invade the college’s administration building. Two vans hurried to a stop on the sidewalk outside the main entrance and black-BDU clad people unloaded boxes, crates, and folding tables.

Nina radioed, “Juliet Four, get those buildings clear and set up operations. We know there are some people living locally and I want somewhere to put them.”

“Juliet Four, hard copy all. We should be open for business in thirty-minutes.”

Nina heard a gun shot, a bark, and the dying scream of something unworldly come from the building entered by the Hunter-Killers but gave it no consideration; at this point she knew how to distinguish the nuances in gun shots, barks, and alien screams that made the difference between things going according to plan and things going awry.

Instead, she gazed ahead. Front Street narrowed with address after address of retail shops and small businesses, each a potential breeding ground for nasty little things. It would take hours to clear this quadrant, but she would push as hard as necessary to finish the job by day’s end. After all, Shep counted on her.

“Romeo Command to Boss, you copy?”

“Go ahead, Romeo Command.”

“Romeo 5 reports Stumphide tracks heading south. Ah, looks like it’s nesting up here but hunting downtown.”

“Hard copy, Romeo Command. I’ll get reconnaissance on it.”

She leaned to the navigator and asked, “What’s the book say on a Stumphide?”

While the navigator thought, the driver answered, “About one mile hunting radius.”

The navigator consulted his map, ran his finger in several directions, and said, “Well it’s not going to cross the river. Odds are it’s either in our sector or somewhere to the east.” Nina raised her radio and transmitted, “Boss to Overwatch, you copy?”

After a few seconds, a muffled voice replied, “Overwatch, copy, Boss. Go ahead.”

She looked to the sky and, in the distance to the southwest, saw the helicopter flying over the river.

“Need you to scout downtown. We’ve got a Stumphide somewhere in our sector. Need you to spot it before it spots us.”

“Understood, Boss, we’re on it.”

The chopper banked hard to the east.

A flurry of frantic automatic gunfire reached her ears. Radio chatter confirmed that these sounds belonged to the ‘things going awry’ category.

“J-5 Delta, requesting immediate heavy assistance.”

“Juliet Command to five-Delta, what is the nature-”

“Those damn statue things! Jesus, small arms barely chipping them!”

She radioed, “Boss here, J-5 Delta report your position.”

“Most of my K9s are dead and we’ve-”

“REPORT your position, J-5 Delta.”

“We, um-shit, look out! Back in the house! Get inside! Um, J-5 Delta here, we’re hiding out in this museum house or some old shit, on Market Street, ah, on the corner with Third. Need heavies-”

A loud crash cut off the transmission.

Nina patted the driver on his black baseball cap and pointed forward. He did not need further instruction, the Humvee surged south at a fast pace, slowing only to swerve around toppled cars and fallen shade trees.

“Juliet One,” Nina radioed, “send your K9s south to Third and Market.”

A sound of chewing gum garbled the, “Roger that,” reply.

The Humvee turned hard left on to Market Street and raced east. Pops of gunfire and the clap of a grenade explosion helped direct them to the battle. Nina ignored a ball of eel-things sliding out from an old nightclub as well as a big hairy ‘Type A’ Sloth eating tree leaves outside a bank building as they hurried to help the endangered Hunter-Killer team.

Smoke from skidding tires erupted from the front of the vehicle and Nina nearly fell over forward as the driver brought them to a sudden stop.

Big, muddy tracks led across Market Street, over a pulverized white picket fence, and between the cracked and broken remains of a pair of trees creating an easy-to-follow trail on to the rear grounds of a Colonial-era homestead.

Three fifteen-foot tall giants attacked the rear of that home, swinging swords in slow but powerful strikes. To Nina’s eye, the attackers resembled Roman Legionnaires or a similar warrior from the ancient past. However, these warriors were made entirely of stone, like statues come to life.

Nina, the driver, and the navigator jumped from the car.

“One each,” Nina said as she slid crates from the Humvee’s open-air cargo hold. “Don’t waste them; you’ve got one shot and these things are like gold these days.”

CRASH. A nice chunk of the museum fell. Dogs barked. Bullets ricocheted off the Stone Soldiers as the HK team hiding in the house tried in vain to wound their assailants.

Nina raised her radio and transmitted, “J-5 Delta, get your heads down. We’re hitting these things with AT4s in about three seconds.”

She did not wait for a reply. She could not be sure the handlers even heard her orders but it did not matter; they needed to destroy the Stone Soldiers with the anti-tank rockets or the monsters would kill every human and dog in the museum.

One by one, the rescuers opened the crates holding forty-inch long tubes decorated with all manner of warning labels. Nina and the two men grabbed one each and followed the giant, muddy footsteps into the backyard and over flattened hedgerows as well as the equally flattened bodies of three Rottweilers.

They passed a historical plaque detailing Lord Cornwallis’ stay at the home during the Revolutionary War and stopped thirty feet behind the walking statues that systematically tore apart the outer wall of the museum, exposing the rooms inside and making it resemble a child’s open dollhouse.

Nina saw movement among the collapsed walls. She heard shouts; she heard barks. At least some of J-5 Delta remained, but they would not last much longer.

“Clear behind!” She yelled and then fired with the weapon propped on her shoulder.

While a smoky fire ejected from the back end, a deadly projectile shot forward, aimed only by her eye but aimed well nonetheless. The missile hit one of the Stone Soldiers in its block-shaped ass, sending chunks of rock everywhere. The creature-with no apparent innards other than chalky rock-collapsed into a pile of gravel.

The driver and the navigator fired in succession, each of their shots hit true turning those targets into similar piles.

Nina dropped the now-useless tube and fell to a knee with both hands on her ears. The vibration and the roar disorientated her senses and made her body feel like quivering Jell-O for several seconds. The driver stumbled around and the navigator hunched over with hands on his knees.

As the trio of rescuers regained their composure, a pair of black-clad Hunter-Killer handlers stumbled from the ruins of the museum as well as a bunch of German shepherds and Rottweilers.

“I hate things like that,” Nina’s driver said as he wiggled a finger in his ear to clear away the ringing bell.

“Things like what?” The navigator asked.

“They don’t serve no purpose, it’s not like they’re animals,” the driver answered as he took to stretching his mouth in a series of yawns in another attempt to clear the ringing. “The Sloths and the Stumphides…they’re just animals. But things like those statues, they don’t eat, they don’t shit, they just walk around trying to clobber us.”