“According to Watchtower, we gotta wait thirteen more minutes to find out.” McLeod lowered his weapon and turned back toward the wooded area near where the helicopters had landed. Beyond the mound of curved metal of the modified Bell, McLeod could barely make out the lights of civilization. It was a lot closer than he liked.
“I gotta be honest,” McLeod said, “I’m not loving this situation.”
As if karma was just waiting for this admission, the moment the words came out of his mouth, all hell broke loose.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy SHIT!”
McLeod stopped cold. He had heard the voice simultaneously in his headset and over the cool night air.
“What the fuck was that?” came the next voice. The shouts were abrupt and high pitched, and McLeod couldn’t nail down who was saying what. Silenced thumps of automatic fire echoed in his ears, and he threw himself into a dead run, pounding over the long grass between the fallen train car and the treeline ahead.
“Landry and Wilcox, on my six!” he shouted, and the other two broke off, charging after him.
“Williamson! Report!” As he ran, he flipped the night vision goggles down over his eyes, casting the area in front of him in a transparent green haze. Off in the distance, he could see the vague thermal forms of his team as they dashed maniacally through the trees, swinging their weapons around at what appeared to be nothing at all.
Williamson backpedaled, his weapon pulled tight as a vague shape charged sideways in front of him. His night vision hadn’t picked it up, and he had barely heard it before it charged from the trees at him and Berger.
Stopping his backward motion, he lifted his weapon and trailed the shape as it crashed through the trees and flattened the grass. Pulling on the trigger in four swift strokes, the M4 bucked in his grip and sent gunfire searing through the trees and grass, but it slammed harmlessly into the soft ground, with one last round careening noisily off of a rock.
“Dammit!”
The woods were silent.
“McLeod, this is Williamson. We’re here. But something else is here, too.”
“I’m on approach!”
About fifteen yards away, Tree and Inman walked between the thick trees, their own weapons raised and drifting back and forth, covering their immediate vicinity.
“What do you see, Inman?” Tree asked, his eyes narrowed behind the night vision goggles.
“Two things: jack and shit,” he snarled, taking each step slow and calculating.
“What the fuck were they screaming about?” Tree asked in a hushed voice. His heart was pounding underneath his thick vest. Tree was once a squad leader in Delta Force and had dealt with all manner of shit during his time there, but he was used to threats on two legs, not four. And whatever Williamson had seen hadn’t sounded human.
The night had drawn suddenly still, quiet, and very, very cold. Tree raised a swift left hand, palm facing out, and Inman halted, regulating his breathing. A pale white moon hung high in the sky, only three-quarters full, so the vague glow it shone upon the dark trees was low and dull. There was the slightest rustle of branches ten feet forward and to their right.
“Fuck me,” Inman groused. His finger tensed on the trigger. Unlike many of his teammates, Inman had never been in the military. He had been a contractor since day one, drifting through law enforcement for a few years before taking hold with an overseas security company. In the end, he’d served a decade through various locations in the Middle East and gotten his pedigree. To some, his lack of a military background made him tougher to control, but to others, that same lack of protocol set him a little more free.
The entire forest seemed to be dipped in black paint and as quiet as a tomb. The brief rustling started, then stopped. Through the green fuzz of his night vision, he saw three of his squad mates pushing forward amid the trees in a neat, organized formation, covering the distance of these dark woods. Farther away, the other three approached slowly, weapons at a slight downward angle as they drew near.
Tree halted his forward motion and extended his arm. “Hold up.”
Inman froze. He heard no noise. He felt no breeze. Everything just stopped cold.
“You smell that?” Tree asked, a trace of disgust dripping from his words.
Inman sniffed, then screwed up his nose in a repulsed snarl. “What the hell?”
Tree stepped forward carefully. “How close to the ocean are we?”
Inman followed, their weapons moving in calculated motions, covering the empty space where the other couldn’t. “Not very. Not close enough to be smelling that.”
It was a dank, saltwater smell. The stink of low tide where the ocean had pulled away, leaving slime-covered seaweed behind like the trail of a mammoth slug. It was a unique and distinctive smell and felt entirely out of place here in the woods, even if the ocean was only about 20 miles south.
Just ahead, the trees shuffled again, a pushing sound, low to the ground.
The two men stopped walking, and both of their rifles swung instantaneously to the source of the sound. Through the night vision, there was a rippling fog of something... but not something they could easily make out.
“You see that?” Inman asked.
“Yup,” Tree replied. “Can’t tell you what that is, though.”
Twenty feet away, McLeod came up to Williamson and Berger, who were still crouch-walking through the wooded area, weapons trained.
“What did you see, Duck?” McLeod asked, using Williamson’s nickname. His long gray beard and penchant for wearing camouflage, even when not on duty, had earned him the nickname after reality show Duck Dynasty.
“It moved quick,” he replied. “Too quick to get a trace on. Real low to the ground, and fucking fast as shit.”
“Which way did it go?”
Williamson jerked his rifle barrel forwards, directing it vaguely towards where Tree and Inman were walking. McLeod opened the channel in his headset.
“Careful boys, something might be coming your way.”
Inman took a cautious step forward, glaring down toward the formless green blob near the ground. Without warning, a flare of orange lit up the night vision, like a cooled oven flaring to life. A brown blur leapt from its place on the grass, scorching through the air and screaming. Oh god, the screaming.
“Jesus!” Tree stumbled backward, swiveling his weapon even as the brown blur struck Inman full on in the chest, knocking him backwards and sending his rifle spiraling from suddenly relaxed fingers.
Inman screamed, scrambling with the strange creature on top of him. “Shoot it! Shoot it! Fucking shoot it!”
“Dammit, Inman get free!” Tree shouted, tracing the rolling, intertwined bodies with his automatic, his fingers tightly clutching the front grip. “Shadows, converge! This thing’s got Inman!”
Eric Inman thrashed and shouted as the large form brought its full weight down on top of him, knocking him to the ground. With fifteen years of hand-to-hand combat experience, Inman was a certified self-defense instructor, but the creature was suddenly striking from everywhere. Claws slashed across his ribcage, shredding his tactical vest, snarling through the cloth of his commando sweater, and tearing ragged grooves in his skin. A massive object struck at his head and shoulders, slamming repeatedly, and at first the Shadow thought the creature was head butting him, but then he realized it was some sort of tail reaching up from behind it like a scorpion, coiling, and punching at him. Both the claws and the tail were secondary, though... the real threat was the teeth. Scores of needle like fangs which chomped relentlessly on his left shoulder and face, then struggled for his neck. A sudden and unrelenting barrage of pin picks over and over and over...