Bugs By Eric S. Brown and Steven Lloyd
The forest was alive with gunfire. Bullets zipped by Danny’s face as he hurled himself behind the cover of a thick tree. He heard the impacts as rounds struck and shattered its bark on the opposite side. Danny watched Brent, his platoon leader, get caught in the stream of an enemy flamethrower as the Viet-Cong pushed forward on their position. Brent’s flesh bubbled and turned black as he howled, yet somehow, Brent remained standing, firing into the advancing enemy ranks. Finally, Brent’s bald and charred form toppled to the wet mud with a splash.
Things were not going well. Danny knew his platoon was badly outnumbered. His mind raced. He had to do something, get the hell out of here, or he’d end up as dead as his commanding officer. Danny broke from the cover of the tree, his legs pumping, as he ran without looking back. A round caught him in his right leg and sent him rolling down the bank of the river he’d been running towards. Blackness took him as his body struck the water and was swept up in its currents.
When Danny opened his eyes, the sun was gone. He lay washed up on the river bank miles from where the firefight had taken place. He turned on to his side, coughing, and vomited into the dirt. A twinge of pain ripped through his body from the wound on his thigh as he jarred it. The world seemed to swirl around him. It was hard to focus. He imagined he’d lost a lot of blood. He collapsed back onto the shore and looked up at the stars above the jungle. He hadn’t signed on for any of this. He had been drafted. His only desire was to make it home alive. Danny didn’t give a crap which side won or lost the war, none of that mattered to him.
Something moved in the jungle on the opposite shore. Danny filled with panic as he realized he’d lost his weapon. He thought about reaching for the handgun still holstered to his belt but thought better of it. He lay perfectly still, barely daring to breathe. He hoped he was covered in enough mud to blend into the river bank in the dim light of the stars and that whatever was out there would over look him and move on.
Voices came out of the darkness. At least he thought they were voices but the language was not Vietnamese and it certainly wasn’t English. The words sounded more like clicking noise than actual speech. Yet there was no doubt in his mind that the sounds were indeed some sort of conversation. He could tell from the rhythm in which they flowed and the pause in-between them that they were some sort of speech.
The oddness of it overpowered him and gave him the nerve to open his eyes and ever so slightly turn his head towards the noise. He could barely make out two shapes on the opposite bank. One seemed to be squatting beside the water while the other stood over it. As his eyes adjusted once more to the low light and could see them more clearly, Danny almost screamed. The two shapes were not men at all though they were bipedal. They looked like giant cockroaches. Between their main arms and legs a second set of miniature limbs protruded from their shell-encased torsos which looked like an extra set of tiny arms. Their eyes were large bulbous mounds that rested on the sides of their heads and the clicking noises came not from their mouths but rather from pairs of large, razor like mandibles extending from their faces like an ant’s.
One of the things held a glowing round object in its second set of hands and both of the creatures seemed to be studying it. Danny wondered if he was simply dying and delusional but the pain in his leg reminded him sharply that he was alive and awake.
Being shot was the least of his worries. Oblivious to Danny, the 70-foot drop had broken both legs, forcing the bones upward through soft bruised tissues. Plummeting in a mess of limbs, the last things he recalled was free falling, the birth of his son, and his wedding day to Nicole. Everything there after went black.
Alone on the riverbank his midsection felt as though it had been packed with rocks, and the ever-unpleasant taste of copper plagued the interior of his mouth. At first the pain came in irregular stabs, and then searing as it cloaked him like clawed hands raking its nine-inch nails down his mangled legs.
Any other night the river was teaming with patrol crafts, but not tonight. Tonight the river was silent. Looking at the immense size of the creatures, he knew this couldn’t be right. At that instant Danny prayed for an enemy patrol craft to veer around the bend. This didn’t happen. Instead, the clicking sounds amplified, as the two glooming figures studied the disc in heated discussion.
Time seemed to ice over. The jungle began to animate and Danny rested in complete silence not sure what to do. A fish unexpectedly tore through the murky surface of the river, causing the shell-backed creatures to act in response. In that moment, Danny locked eyes with them, their clicking conversation long forgotten.
As Danny became more alert he realized that the trees around him were charred, and that this was some sort of crash site. Buried deep within the jungle reaching two hundred feet in length, he saw something unexplainable, something aglow and smoldering among shattered overgrowth and foliage. He could feel the thudding of his heart, and the panic rising to a new untouchable level.
The things began their advance toward him.
CLICKCLICKCLICKCKICK!
His place of solitude known, he rose up to run, but was forced down by the pain. “Sweet Jesus!” He struggled with his holstered pistol as he watched the mammoth sized roaches break the waters surface.
Danny could see their hard-shelled backs as they proceeded in his direction until they vanished below the waters surface. Pain in his legs forgotten, Danny scrambled backward fearing to see just how close they were. The gap, he knew, was closing fast.
Freeing his pistol, his mud-encrusted hands griped the metallic stock. With his other hand he pulled the chamber back.
Nearly to the point of loosing it all together, he tired climbing the steep embankment on his belly using only his arms. I’ll not die here! Not like this. He heard the splashing from behind, and dug his free hand into the moist soil, but to no avail. The sludge consumed his hand and sent him sliding several inches downward.
His mind pleaded for him to scream for help, but who would possibly hear his cries. The Viet-Cong? Would his death be lesser than what awaited him at the bottom of the embankment?
With his last attempt for survival, Danny rotated onto his back, leveled his weapon, and fired continually at the things coming for him. The shots rang out in the night, as the bullets sparked like fireworks, ricocheting off the creatures. Everything seemed to be in slow motion to him, but what he saw before landing at the base of the embankment was more horrifying than anything of war.
Despite their hard-shelled backs, there flesh was black as night and bubbling, and their bodies, no matter how unbelievable, opened with human sized mouths with rows upon rows of sharp teeth.
Danny muffled a cry, empting the pistol, as their mouths opened and sucked them in with wet smacking sounds.
The roach like creatures fell on him quickly reaping and tearing. The pain so intense, Danny felt and heard their mouths opening and closing over his weak and battered tissue. No time to scream. No time to reload, he welcomed his death and closed his eyes.
The creatures removed themselves from the strange organism. With their ship useless, the creatures returned to their damaged craft where twelve more identical beings waited. This deed would not go unpunished.
Assembling in a mass about the craft, they knew reaching home was without a solution. In addition to five gapping cavities in the belly, and rifled with holes from Danny’s primitive projectile weapon, anger blistered inside of them, a rage unknown to man began to open.
The round circular disk they had been holding and inspecting all along was discarded. The beckon was their last hope for signaling home. It was no use to them. Destroyed in the crash, they clicking sounds grew in maddening frenzy.
All fourteen creatures sidestepped out of the way of each other, giving way for sufficient room in support for what was about to ensue. Standing virtually eight feet tall, their thick-shelled backs flourished into immense wings extending nearly six feet in length.
A maddening hum vibrated through the untamed jungle as their wings stirred the earth. They took to the dark sky as a black cloud.
A new enemy was joining the battle. The Vietnam war was about to become bloodier.
Eric S. Brown is the author of the paperback collections Dying Days, Portals of Terror, Madmen's Dreams, and Space Stations and Graveyards. His fifith collection Waking Nightmares will be released later this year and his first novel is due out in Oct. from Mundania Books. His books are available from places like http://www.amazon.com/ or http://www.shocklines.com/. This story was previously published in Seasons in the Night #3.
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