Their base communications operator kept in constant radio contact to insure their retransmitters were situated to maintain a signal. They fed back continuous data streams, including infrared video images.
The on-site CO was in a command truck in the parking lot outside the cavern, and he couldn’t see anything in the images except for an occasional rock and a grunt’s foot. After an hour the CO called in personally.
“What’s the terrain like?”
“It’s like a sidewalk in Central Park,” Gerhard explained. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess we were on a part of the paved walkway for the regular cavern tours.”
“Blasted?” the CO asked.
“Worn,” Gerhard radioed back.
“You mean eroded, like by water?” the lieutenant commander said.
“No, sir, I mean worn. By foot traffic.”
“Oh”
“Our worst problem is the litter. Shoes. Personal effects such as wallets and keys. Soon as the air started getting hot we started seeing a lot of clothes. Sweaters and jackets, then shirts and bras and torn pant legs. Now short pants, socks, everything. The victims must be just about naked. Hold on.”
There was a pause as the team went into silent running and the CO went into tense sweating in his command truck. Naked victims? Foot-worn pathways? How much foot traffic did it take to wear a path into the rock floor of cave? He didn’t know, but he knew it was no small amount.
Gerhard spoke from miles away below the surface of the green earth. “Sir, we have a body.”
“Show it!”
Gerhard pointed his helmet-mounted lipstick video pickup. The body was revealed in the imperfect infrared signal.
“Holy mother of Jesus, what is it?”
“This ain’t one of the victims, sir. This ain’t even a human.”
The CO couldn’t take his eyes off the naked, gaunt creature sprawled in a crevice off the side of the trail. its upper torso and his hips twisted unnaturally away from each other.
“There’s another up the trail. Watch it, grunts!” They advanced barely a foot at a time, and the lieutenant colonel could almost feel what it was like to be down there, nerves in a razor edge, adrenaline pumping, senses tuned to every real and imagined movement. The cavern opened and many bodies came into view, sprawled in the jagged crevices, facedown in a deep trench with its trickle of water.
Gerhard halted the grunts and called for silence, then ordered an audio sweep of the cavern. The CO heard the amplified whimpers on the open communications feed.
“We got voices, sir,” the grunt told Gerhard. “Can’t tell if it’s our civilians.”
“This smells like an ambush,” Gerhard declared. “Yeep, give me some death certificates.”
Grunt Yeepod switched his lipstick video pickup to thermal, and the image became a green sea of warm stone. He advanced into the open cavern, sweeping the roof’s hidden recesses, and finding nothing but rock. He lingered on a pool of cool air in a corner of the cavern, and the CO topside was fascinated by the liquid-like signature of the cool air seeping from a hidden vent behind a pile of toppled boulders. He even stepped closer to glance into the shallow pool of stone where the cool air collected like water in a pool. It was a perfect hiding place, but empty.
Yeep moved across to the strewed corpses and gave them the once-over with the thermal video pickup. “Dead,” he reported in a whisper.
“Check again, Yeep,” Gerhard snapped. “They ain’t people. They might be colder’n us, even when they’re alive.”
“They’re close enough, Ger. They might be a little colder but they ain’t that much colder.”
Yeep checked again. Sure enough, the thermal images showed piles of cool semihuman creatures. “Definitely dead,” Yeep reported.
The CO, observing all of it, had a strange sense of suspicion. Something was bothering him, but he couldn’t put a label on it. Should he tell Gerhard?
Hell, Gerhard was a professional and the lieutenant colonel had never actually spent any time in, er, the field.
Gerhard moved the grunts into the cavern, rechecking the crevices and every possible hiding place. The CO felt itchy all over. “Did the other grunts see Yeep’s thermal video feed?” he asked the operator.
“’Course not, sir.” The operator never looked up from his signal booster adjustments.
“Even Gerhard?”
“No way he could, sir. They don’t have displays, just pickups.”
So only Yeep and the colonel had actually seen the thermal images, and only Yeep and the colonel knew about the cool airstream that filled the pool alongside the footpath, and Yeep hadn’t found anything to fear in it.
It was empty, right? The natural ventilation shaft was blocked by boulders, so what danger could it possibly pose?
The whimpering on the grunts’ audio pickups became clearer when they were about to enter the confines of a tight corridor.
The lieutenant colonel knew he’d be a laughingstock if he did this, but he just had to do it.
“Gerhard!”
“Sir?” he whispered, bringing the grunts to a halt.
“Captain, I think something’s wrong. I have a bad feeling about all this.”
“You have a bad feeling, sir?” Gerhard could barely contain his scorn. Gerhard and the grunts had heard the rumors about the lieutenant colonel’s so-called field experience.
“Call it instinct,” the CO said.
“Maybe call it intuition,” one of the grunts said.
Oh, great, now he was going to be known as the special forces commander who had women’s intuition instead of battlefield instinct. “Listen, Gerhard, I have a feeling this is some kind of an ambush.”
“I’ll take your feelings under advisement, sir,” Gerhard replied.
Gerhard started to say something else just as every telephone inside the truck started ringing and then the grunts’ signal died. Audio, video, data, it all stopped coming into the command center in the parking lot. Only then did the lieutenant commander figure out what was bothering him.
“They’re dead,” he declared hollowly.
The operator was cursing his equipment as he tried to restore communications. “Could you get that, sir?”
The lieutenant colonel absently picked up the closest of the ringing phones, but they all stopped ringing.
There was nobody there.
Mark Howard and Harold W. Smith didn’t speak. Smith laid the phone in its cradle. He had been calling to tell the idiot in charge to pull his men back, but then the signal died. It was too late. Gerhard and his grunts were beyond saving.
Gerhard never knew fear until he saw the dead men crawling out of the gash in the rock and coming for him.
This was not war—it was monstrous, and it was an unclean way to die. The grunts began firing and attempted to push back into the cavern, but the dead things were coming too fast. The grunts were bottled in tight. Only two of them could fire at once, and the dead things were shielding themselves with big slabs of shale they found sitting around. The rounds from the grunts’ rifles started ricocheting noisily.
“More from the rear!” one of the grunts shouted, and gunfire filled the cavern in the rear.
Trapped. Like rats. Gerhard gave the order for a full-throttle retreat, and he triggered his rifle into the approaching horde of dead things. His rounds, smashed their shields and tore into their bodies, killing them again, but there were too, many, and soon they mobbed the tunnel entrance, ignoring the brutal barrage and their wounded companions. The shale shields were brought together in a V-shape that…
“Shit!” Gerhard tried to pull back on his trigger but he wasn’t fast enough, and a half-dozen rounds bounced off the shale slabs and came back at the grunts, bouncing crazily inside the tight corridor. Two of the deformed bullets chopped through Gerhard and another grunt.