LeRoy Clary - Humanaty's Blight

Their first problem was that the surface of the pier was probably twenty feet higher than the water. A few metal ladders would let them climb up, one by one. The first gunboats cruised past the pier as the men aboard fired automatics and the machine guns on the bow in our direction. Everyone hit the ground, but I didn’t see any casualties.

A gunboat pulled up to each ladder as five ran aground on the beach to the south side of the pier and men piled out. We had men positioned near there and a war broke out. As each invader reached the top of the ladders, he was met with a dozen shots, some of them fatal, despite the body-armor. After a few deaths at each ladder, no more appeared. The gunboats backed off and streaked past time after time, spraying a lot of bullets in our direction, with few hits.

At the edge of the pier, a man, one of ours stood up, a long green tube held to his shoulder. He peered through an eyepiece, steadied the unit, and pulled his trigger. A streak of flame shot from the rear, as well as another from the front. A spear of fire lanced a half-mile to the closest ship.

It hit ten feet above the waterline, blowing a hole large enough to drive a pickup through. A concussion loud enough to physically jar us came next. But it was too far above the waterline to let the sea rush inside. I hoped we had a hundred more rockets stored close to the waterfront.

Flames erupted inside the darkness within the ship and quickly spread. The black hole turned orange. Another small explosion told us the shell must have found something else to blow up or the flames reached explosives, fuel, or the like.

More flames licked the outer part of the hull and as the man reloaded his weapon, the first flames reached the main deck. The second shell entered the side of the next ship, entering below where the gunboats had emerged, very near the waterline. Cheering broke out behind me.

There was the initial explosion again, quickly followed by another, far larger. The side of the ship was torn open and water poured inside. In no time, the ship listed to one side, and men by the hundreds were leaping into the water from it.

The pier broke out in louder cheers and jeers. The fire on the first ship rose up the superstructure as men with firehoses fought to extinguish it and lost the battle. A few of them leaped off, then more.

Sue jabbed me with her elbow at me and pointed to the man with the rocket launcher. “Why isn’t he firing again?”

I turned to Major Dundee and asked, “What’s happening?”

“He only had two rockets.”

Another man leaped to his feet and raced to the end of the pier, lugging what looked like a six-foot-long green tube. Another followed behind a green canvas sack over his shoulder. The first shouldered the bazooka, a weapon I recognized from the war games on my game console in the basement.

The second man inserted a shell and the first fired at the cluster of three ships behind the smoke and flames of the first two. The shell fell far short. He tried again, this time after his partner pounded his shoulder to tell him to fire at will, the bazooka was tilted much higher. The second shell fell short by a hundred yards or more.

They turned and ran, in our direction. A few bullets struck uncomfortably close, which caused them to zig and zag. They made it safely.

I asked, “Do you have more shells?”

“About a dozen,” the second man said.

“Good try, but no sense in wasting them. Maybe we can get you closer.”

They both nodded eagerly.

The second ship, the one that had taken a rocket where the water rushed in, listed so far to one side, it looked ready to roll over. The number of men leaping from the first ship increased. The water was dotted with them. Firing from the beach at the edge of the pier was almost continuous.

I turned to look. The gunboat crews were pinned down at the beach. All the shooting had brought more people from Everett to find out what was happening. Many had chosen to join in. We now had hundreds perched on the hillside, all waiting for any of them to expose themselves.

The white-haired SEAL carried a green kayak balanced on his head as he jogged our way. Behind him, others tried to keep up. I estimated darkness would fall in a few hours. The kayaks would head out then.

The SEAL put his kayak down and motioned for the others to do the same in a semi-circle around him. He started a lecture, probably teaching them how to attach the magnets with the C4 to the hulls, the best places to do it, and how to approach the ships. He didn’t need my input.

More gunboats from the other seventeen ships appeared and raced for the shore to support those pinned down there. I motioned to the man with the bazooka. He jogged to me. “Listen, those gunboats are going to land and they will give us hell. Can you and your buddy go blow up the gunboats that are already here?”

He cracked a crooked smile. “If they blow up, those others will think twice about landing there, right?”

“Can you do it?” It became a rhetorical question and the pair of them quickly covered the few hundred yards to where the fighting was, and where five gunboats and their crews were attempting to gain a foothold on the beach.

Our men ducked behind a cinderblock shed and loaded the bazooka. With the tube raised, the first stepped out, took quick aim, and fired. He leaped back under cover. The shell struck the gunboat in the midst of the other four. The explosion threw flames twenty feet into the air. A secondary explosion that I took to be a second shot fired by the bazooka, but was not, came within seconds. Then another. It was not a video game.

Two of the gunboats no longer existed. Another was burning. Soldiers were scattered, some looked dead. Others cried for help in a language I didn’t understand. I puked and splashed vomit on my feet and still bare ankles. Those people nearest me moved a step or two away.

The bazooka holder stepped into the open again and fired another shell at the two boats least damaged. More explosions and fires. He and the man carrying more shells turned and raced back to where I stood wiping my chin with the back of my sleeve.

A man I hadn’t seen before approached and saluted stiffly. I could get used to the respect they showed. I returned it, hitting my forehead too hard with my fingers and flinching.

He said, “The Commodore of that enemy fleet is on the radio. He wants to speak with you.”

“Where’s the radio?”

“Follow me, sir.”

I followed. There were five men, all with radios in front of them under a brown tent set up well back from the action. The firing of rifles was still almost constant. I accepted the preferred microphone and squeezed the transmit button. I paused.

“Captain Bill,” Sue prompted. “Tell them who you are.”

“Captain Bill here,” I said in a pompous voice. “To whom am I speaking?”

An echoey voice replied in perfectly enunciated English. “Surrender now and you may live.”

When I didn’t respond, Sue reached out, squeezed the button on the mic again and said in a husky voice that she pretended to be mine, “Surrender, and your ship may still be floating in an hour, ass hole.” The exact words he’d used, all but the two at the end.

“I have ten thousand trained soldiers in this harbor. You have no chance.”

Sue still held my hand with the mic. She transmitted again, “Maybe you had that many a while ago, but a lot of them are swimming right now, so you can’t count them.”

“I order you to surrender or we will storm your shores and take no prisoners.”

Sue puffed out her chest and said gruffly, “Have you looked up in the sky lately? If not, Captain Bill says you should. He’s called in an airstrike on your ships. Their ETA is about ten minutes.”