Mark Tufo - Whistlers

Something was flying past me, many of them in fact. I could see the ground tearing up where they made contact. It was obviously projectiles of some sort. I felt a searing pain in my shoulder as one scraped over the top of my arm. I heard Jack’s cry of “thirty”. It seemed too close to me, but who was I to argue? I was being shot at and, sooner rather than later, one of them was bound to catch up with me. I was getting ready to spin around when I was pushed into the ground. I’d been hit. The pain was manageable and, from what I could tell, all of my extremities still worked. Maybe it was a neurotoxin, and I only had a few seconds left. Fine, I was going out in a blaze of glory.

I spun, dropped to one knee, took a second to line up on a motorcycle, and fired. One of the beings that was closest turned to watch as the rocket shot past him. I was still thinking this was close for thirty yards as the grenade lodged itself into the chassis of the motorcycle.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I sighed.

My heart was racing and only a little bit from the run. The monster-thing was right in front of me, and I needed to deal with it before it realized I was still in front of it. Outrunning it was not going to be an option. I dropped the RPG to the ground and was just pulling my M-16 around. A couple of things happened at once. The first was that I realized why I wasn’t dead. My rifle was split in two, it had taken a shot right where my butt stock met up with the business end and severed the rifle neatly in two. The second, and this would have been hard to miss, was the massive explosion that sent me to the ground with pieces of my pursuer raining down on me. My ears were ringing from both the blast and from the scream-speak of the ‘whistlers.’ That was what I was going to call this newest beast that would forever haunt my thoughts.

When I was confident nothing more was going to crash down on me, I began to check my rifle to see if it would still shoot without exploding in my hands, finishing off what the whistlers had started. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jack getting up. He looked to be bleeding from a half dozen spots. There was no way I could tell if any of them were lethal, but he was firing his weapon, and he still needed help. Out of the forty-something whistlers, the RPG had killed more than half of them. There were still more than enough left to kill us a few times over.

Two things come to mind. The first is that Mike did it. I didn’t think it was going to work. I had hoped so, but I wasn’t really sure. The second is my incredibly bad timing. There are burning and stinging sensations all over my body. It feels like I have jumped into a nest of fire ants and am rolling around in them. I do a quick mental check and am reasonably sure most everything still works. The things that don’t…well…I’ll find and deal with those later.

Rising into a sitting position on the concrete pad where I’d been thrown, I notice scraps of metal lying about. Below, most of the monsters are dead, dying, or wandering around in a daze. It looks like the blast has taken more than half of them out. That is the good news. The bad, there are still some alive, more than enough to overwhelm us.

The concussion from the blast, magnified under the bridge, has them stumbling around like drunks at Mardi Gras. They will recover in a short period of time. I need to make sure that’s a luxury they don’t get.

I wonder if Mike knows about Mardi Gras?

Thinking of Mike, I look back. He’s on the ground covered in gore and blood; most of it is that black substance pumping through the creatures. In the midst, I see spots of red and know that he’s been hit. He sits up and grabs for his M-16, staring down at it as he realizes that he’s holding the butt stock in one hand, and the rest of it in the other.

Well, hopefully he can get the hell out of here. I’ll take down as many as I can to give him and Trip a chance.

Turning my attention back to the monsters, it is time to get to business. I rise and sight in on the nearest creature, sending two rounds out on a delivery. It stumbles one more time and falls over like a drunk trying to pass a sobriety test. I advance down the pad, firing at one target after another. There are still a lot of them on their feet and it is only a matter of time before the shooting gallery turns into a firefight.

The high-pitched scream erupts again. It is like someone dragging a needle across my eardrum. I keep moving and firing, hoping to hit whoever, or whatever, is making that god-awful noise. If I can just shut that up, I won’t care what happens afterward. I just don’t want that sound to be the last I ever hear.

I’m not going to be able to take them all down in time, I think, changing my mag.

The leader is rallying his troops, and they are responding in quick fashion.

Well, I just hope that I buy Mike enough time .

I never was a fan of pistols. I always liked the comforting feel of a butt stock firmly entrenched in my shoulder for control. Right now, I didn’t have an option as I fire my unwieldy weapon. The 5.56 isn’t a heavy round by any stretch of the imagination, but when you’re firing on fully automatic without proper technique…well…enough said. Although, my first spray did disintegrate the leader’s head into a fountain of gelatinous mass. I held down the trigger, blasting through my magazine in a couple of seconds at most. I had scattered all my rounds into as many whistlers as I could. I’d fallen several short. It was nice to have back-up as Jack moved among the whistler survivors like a black plague, dispatching unmitigated justice until they all lay on the ground unmoving. My head was pounding, and I felt light-headed. I reached a hand behind me and pulled it back in front to find it coated in blood, and not of the black variety.

“I’m hit,” I said.

Jack put a couple more rounds into a few of the whistlers that were still moving before coming over. He skidded to a stop behind me.

“Yeah, you’re shot. I’m going to need to take this damn poncho off so I can see what I’m dealing with. Does it hurt much?” Jack asked.

“Did you really just ask me that question?” I responded, disbelievingly.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to figure out what in the hell the monsters are shooting.”

“Whistlers.”

“What?”

“I’m calling them whistlers.”

“Fair enough. What is that?” he asked as he carefully pulled my garments over my head.

“Please tell me it isn’t moving,” I said.

“Why would it be moving? No, it looks kind of like an industrial staple, or something like it.”

“I got shot with a staple gun. Are you kidding me?”

“That staple gun would have killed you if not for a lucky hit on your rifle. I mean, look at it. It’s completely sheared through.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I’m going to have to pry it out. There a part that’s sticking out. Hang on.”

“Jack, just give me a sec…OWWWWWW…motherfucker!!!!!”

“Fuck me! And here I was about to call you a baby until I realized this thing has two prongs, and they’re each about two and a half inches long. That’s a nasty little bit of business,” he said as he handed me what did look like a staple. Albeit maybe the world’s largest staple ever created. That I’d survived the attack was a miracle, and I told him as much.

“You getting a tattoo?” Trip asked. He was a few feet away, stretching and yawning. “Looks like a rager of a party. What’d I miss?”

“It’s not a tattoo, Trip, I’ve been shot.”