Стефани Перри - SNAFU - Survival of the Fittest

Bishop, Rook and Queen had all set up at the northeast corner of the building, past the big, wooden front doors. While Bishop inserted a new drum into the machine gun, the others were firing above King’s head at the pursuing creature. The worm had continued well past the corner. It clearly couldn’t turn effectively, and King was grateful for the brief reprieve.

“Boss, your suit’s smoking, like it’s gonna melt,” Rook said.

Bishop opened fire on the creature, this time able to strafe the worm’s full forty-foot-long side, as it slowly arced around the open desert floor.

“It sounds like a Mongolian Death Worm,” Aleman said over their comms.

“Oh that’s helpful,” Rook said. “It couldn’t be the Mongolian Fluffy Rainbow-Pooping Worm?” He dropped a magazine and slotted a fresh one into his SCAR, but then let the weapon hang. It wasn’t doing any damage to the giant ribbed creature. He’d wait until it closed the distance, and then he’d try his ‘Girls’ – a pair of IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols. He’d had several pairs over the years, some getting lost in different skirmishes. He hadn’t yet come across anything, no matter how big, that wouldn’t feel a few slugs from the handguns at close range.

“He has a point,” King said, perturbed. “How to kill it would be better than a name.”

“It’s a mythical cryptid. Supposed to be about four feet long,” Aleman said.

“Bigger,” Queen said. “Much bigger. Twelve-foot diameter. Forty feet long.”

King pulled free his KA-BAR knife, a 7-inch blade like Queen’s, and slid it into the boiling, formerly fur-covered sleeve of his environment suit’s fabric, slicing it open, then he dropped the smoking knife on the ground. He’d tried to cut away the burning part of the suit, but had failed. “Rook.”

It was all he had to say. As he flipped off the helmet and hood of the suit, breathing in the freezing air, Rook moved forward to grab the outer fabric of the suit in places where it hadn’t been coated in the creature’s deadly venom. He pulled the fabric taut as King disentangled himself from the outer garment, being sure to lean as far from the smoking side as possible.

Rook instantly saw King’s breath add a cloud of vapor to the already rising ribbon of steam from the cooking fur on the ruined suit.

“It’s supposed to be able to spit venom,” Aleman continued.

“Think we can confirm that one,” Rook said.

Queen fired a sustained burst with her SCAR as Bishop reloaded the machine gun. The creature had finished its wide loop and was homing in on the team, at their new location.

“We need a plan,” Queen urged.

“There’s nothing about how to kill them. No one has ever even had a confirmed sighting of one...” Aleman sounded frantic.

“Then give me some other intel,” King said, his teeth beginning to chatter. “How long do I have in just the wetsuit in temps like these?” He had shed the outer garment, now smoking on the ground like a dead animal on a charnel heap. He wore just the under-suit, which was a special gel-heated neoprene, and he had been able to salvage his boots and the furry gloves from the outer suit.

Rook thought he looked strange in white, fur-clad boots and gloves, but a black body suit and hood. Like some kind of snow bunny at the Winter games, but this one had an automatic rifle and was collecting the bomb-spikes for his spear gun from the pile of quickly discarded equipment.

“Your suit? Oh crap. Um...if you keep active, any part or your skin that’s exposed might be able to withstand frostbite for...around ten minutes. Maybe less.”

King turned to see the approaching worm was just a few yards away, and it was beginning to rise up in the air, like a cobra poised to strike.

“There!” King pointed the barrel of his SCAR and fired an unrestrained, fully automatic burst, holding down the trigger. “Under its neck.”

The others instantly saw what he was targeting. Just under the rim of the creature’s black mouth, which lacked teeth but had short one-foot-long wriggling tentacles, like insect feelers or kelp waving in an undersea current, was a small metal box affixed to the creature’s crimson skin. It looked to be the size of an old metal lunchbox, and King’s bullets pounded the can, pinging off of it. Then Bishop opened with a sustained burst from the 240, and the box, as well as the slick, wet-looking skin below it, disintegrated.

The giant worm dropped down from its attack position, its heft slamming into the ground and sending a shockwave underfoot. Then it turned and headed away from the building, and the surprised team.

“Control mechanism?” Queen asked.

“Possibly,” King said. “Blue, we need a pickup, ASAP.”

“They can’t, King.” Aleman’s voice was apologetic. “The chopper is still on the other side of the storm. It’s no longer blowing where you are, but it still stretches for forty miles. No way for them to get to you. You’ll have to hump it out to the LZ.”

“Knight?” King asked.

“Proceeding. We’ll catch up.”

Knowing he had to keep moving, and even then his time was limited, King made the decision. “Move out.”

The team picked up and headed toward the distant cloud that marked the edge of the storm, back the way they had come. The wind had stopped blowing in their location, but they could still see a far off wall of white and swirling brown. They double-timed it for the raging storm, keeping an eye on the receding worm, as it wandered aimlessly south and then west again, back from whence it had come.

The team made it halfway from the castle to the edge of the cloud when the rocks around them pinged with the ricochets of missed rifle fire. They each dropped, and rolled to the sides, then faced back toward the strange brown fortress. But the shots hadn’t come from that direction. They were coming from a small team – maybe ten strong – of additional guards to the north. They were still a few hundred yards away, their rifles only just inside the effective firing range.

Queen glanced at King and saw that he wasn’t reacting as quickly as she would have expected. His lips hadn’t turned blue, but they had lost their color, and his face looked pale against the black neoprene hood lining. “Rook, Bishop. Take this. I’m getting King to the LZ.”

Rook raised his SCAR and fired off a few rounds at the approaching men. The weapon had a much longer range, but at the distance, any kills would be simple luck. “Watch out for the Jumbo Fire Turd.”

“Nice,” Queen said, grabbing King by the arm and starting to run with him toward the nearby wall of the storm. “You kiss me with that mouth, remember.”

“Only because you ask me to—” Rook started to say, before his body was violently flung to the ground. Bishop had opened up on the approaching guards with the machine gun, but she stopped immediately and turned to Rook. The left arm of his suit’s fur was a deep maroon. “Shit in the milk carton! That stings like bastard.”

Bishop started opening a portable med kit they each carried, which was strapped to their stomachs, over the environment suits, but as she unzipped it, Rook spoke again.

“Just a through and through,” he growled. “I’ll be alright.”

Bishop lunged back to her trigger, trusting Rook’s self-assessment. They had all taken minor grazes from bullets – or worse – at this point in their careers. She laid down a suppressing fire that had the new group of guards diving for cover or simply dropping dead with tufts of crimson mist staining the white clouds around them. She counted ten men, but their number was dwindling under her constant stream of automatic fire.