Rick Carter's First Big Adventure (Pete's Barbecue Book 1) (39 page)

     “Look at this.”  He pointed to the first viewer where the cluster of spiders had amassed to such a point on the east side of the building that individual spiders could no longer be discerned.  It was just one solid black wreathing mass of legs and bodies.  Dennis moved his finger over to the next monitor.  It was the south side of the building, and the mass was the same.  Then he moved his finger to the next and the next.  All four sides showed the same thing, a wall of spiders waiting about twenty yards out.  “I’ve been watching this for about twenty minutes.  They stopped attacking individually and started this business, gathering, clustering and waiting.”

      “For what?” Pete asked as he leaned over and watched the monitors.

      “I don’t know,” Dennis said.  “But, I can tell you what I would guess if that were a group of enemy combatants gathering at my front door.”

      Pete looked at him.  “You sayin’..?”

      “They look like they’re preparing a full assault.  They’re massing for a coordinated assault.”  Dennis answered for him.

       Pete looked back at the monitors.  “Dat’s sometin’ new, for sure.  Dey never did dat before.”

      Dennis glanced upward at the ceiling.  “I don’t know how much the Pot can stand keeping out something that determined.”

      “De walls are three feet concrete, reinforced.  Ceiling is five feet.  Even if dey knock de building down on top o’ us dey can’t get tru all dat.”  Pete reassured him.  “We safe for now.”

      “Normally I would agree with you,” Dennis said with a cold analytical tone. “This not being normal I’ve been keeping an eye out for something different.”

      “And?”  Pete quickly asked.

      “I found this.”  Dennis said as he pressed one of the buttons on the bank of feeds.  The first camera switched to another location, one across the street and a little to the south.  In the glow of the fires, underneath the dark overcast smoke and gloom, there marched two columns of giant white termites with red heads and pincers moving slowly but steadily toward the Pot.  “I’m thinking that’s the Engineer Corps coming up from the south.  Termites dig, don’t they?”  

     Pete looked at the small screen and breathed heavily.  As he was watching the termites in their mindless steady march, the enormous mass of spiders finally swarmed the surface structure of the building.  It was one swift, overwhelming move and the mass was on top of the structure.  The other feeds blurred out from the wreathing black bodies. The whole building shook with the force all the way down to the foundations.  Small pieces of concrete fell from the ceiling onto the screens in front of them.  Pete looked up.  “Well der it goes.”  He calmly said. 

      Through the thick concrete and steel, the sound of the building coming down could be heard.  It fell like a stack of pancakes, reminiscent of another more famous building collapse just a few years earlier, except there was a lot less of the Honey Pot to come down.  The few floors that composed the top of the structure crumbled into chunks of concrete and debris that washed outward like it was semi-solid.  Down below, in the last functioning control room, the lights momentarily flickered as large pieces of concrete and dust rained down.  Pete found himself gripping the sides of the console for support.

      “No, we can’t let dis happen,” Pete said.

      Dennis understood.  “Send it, Boss.”  He said with an air of still and intense calm.

      Pete stared ahead for a few seconds as the spiders overhead finished off the last portions of the remaining walls.  “We got to buy de Company some time.  Dey inbound, I know.  Ball said so.”

     Dennis shook his head. “They seem to be taking their time.  They can travel through reality; I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

      “Have you tried a send out?”  Pete asked.

       “Coms are down,”  Dennis answered.

       Pete stood erect and gently patted his round stomach.  “Den it up to us, Dennis.  We got to hold dis ting off and buy some time for everybody down below.”

      “What have you got in mind, Boss?”  Dennis instinctively knew Pete was grabbing at final resolutions in his old warrior’s mind.

       Pete suddenly looked at Dennis in a flash.  “I want you to go down below, get my cousins, Rolland, Deppie and de utters.  You know who I talkin’ about.  Get dim boys and bring dem up here.”

     “I don’t understand.”  Dennis stood up from his chair.

     “We gonna break open de last armory,” Pete said softly.

     “Wait a minute,” Dennis interjected.  “Are you planning on going on the offensive?”

        Pete looked down.  “Not, much choice now.”  He answered.

       “Boss, you want to take a handful of untrained guys, throw some artillery on them and send them out into that?”  He pointed over at the blacked-out view screens.

       “We got to hold ‘em, for a little while, Dennis.  Till de Company or Mel gets back to us.”  Pete said.

       “Boss. There’s no cover, no backup, no armor.  And no reserves.”  Dennis methodically painted the drastic tactical situation in his usual precise way.

       Pete smiled.  “De building is all over de place up dere, Dennis.  I tink der’s plenty o’ cover.  An’ back up on de way. You see.  Trust ole Pete.”

      Dennis took a deep breath.  “You know me, Boss.  I’ll go anywhere with you nothing but a water pistol and a pack of chewing gum.  But, do you think those guys below can handle this?’

      Pete’s smile grew wider.  “De Chamorro, boy.  Just wait an’ see what de can do.”  He said reassuringly.

     Once again Mel was tumbling through the reality stream untethered and out of control.   He had been just as abruptly reinserted into the streams as he had been yanked out.  But, that wasn’t his current problem.   The terrifying story he had been told by the disembodied voice had left him with a distinct feeling of queasiness that he was not at all comfortable with.  There were new variables to the whole screwed up mess that was making an already complicated problem almost unbearable.  New variables were never fun, however often they seemed to just suddenly pitch up. Before the strange meeting with the weird dude in the concrete cell, Mel felt like he had a good handle on things like he knew what was going on and had even formulated a rudimentary plan to deal with it.  It wasn’t a great plan, admittedly, but it was a plan.  Now, all of that had to be tossed for of what?  For extermination?  It just made no sense.

     Mel felt the inevitable tug of reality as his body began to slide out of the streams.  He was hoping this wasn’t going to be an unpleasant landing, perhaps even an unpainful one.  Much to his surprise, he landed on his feet, on solid ground with all of his limbs intact.  The pleasantness ended there, however. He was, most decidedly, in the dark, literally, not figuratively.  There was a strong acidic stench in the air of burning rubber and wood and other oddities mixed in to produce a very unpleasant odor.  And the sound coming from everywhere was like a thousand helicopters hovering ten feet over his head.  When he quickly turned he realized he was in a room and that an open doorway was behind him.  He walked over and leaned out.  It was a room on the second floor of some building that now lay in ruin all around him.  The door was ripped from the frame and lying several feet away.  There was so much rubble around the door that it formed a sort of ramp down to ground level.  In front of him were fire, disaster, ruin, carnage and mayhem.  Ahh, back on Guam again, he thought.  Best be getting to business.  He began to work his way down the rubble ramp to street level, or what he thought had been the street.  The crashed cars and broken palms and strewn glass and concrete made it hard to tell.  Amid the debris and the sound and the smoke, he could tell he had miraculously landed in a building just across the street and down a few hundred feet from the remains of the Honey Pot.  He knew for sure it was the Honey Pot because, despite the utter destruction the building had suffered and that it was covered in the largest mound of giant spiders he had ever seen, or ever wanted to see, one lone spider huddled happily munching on the remains of a sign that clearly read Micronesia Emporium.  Fortunately, none of the thousands of arachnids could find the time to look his way.  They were too busy digging into the giant mound of what had once been the Honey Pot to notice anything else.

      Mel decided stealthily to move out into the street and weave in between the blocks of broken concrete and destroyed cars to a smaller street that ran in behind the former Emporium.  It looked less cluttered, and there were fewer bugs to deal with in that direction.  Plus there was a hidden entrance there into the lower Honey Pot that he was hoping was free of debris.  He had no worries that Pete and company were well entrenched inside the lower levels of his fortress.  It was just a matter of getting to him.   Unfortunately, less debris in the backstreet meant less large pieces of debris to hide behind and a lot more exposed areas in between.  With each move, he found himself having to dash further distances to reach something he could hide behind.  As he was crouching behind an overturned burned out, car the sound of gunfire erupted from nearby.  It was several guns, different types, all firing at once.  There was an immediate response from all the bugs as they squealed louder and went into a frenzy.   He peaked out around the bumper to see what was going on. All the activity and the shooting was coming from the front of the building, opposite from where he now took refuge.  He couldn’t see what it was; it was too far away, and there were too many things in the way, including the remains of a three-story building loaded down with a lot of angry spiders who were intent on killing something.  Then, just as suddenly as the shooting had started an unusually loud boom interrupted everything and everybody and startled him behind his refuge.  It sounded like a canon going off.  Remarkably the boom resulted in an instantaneous quietness that dropped like a huge lid slamming on a coffin.  Everything, bugs, shooting and general destruction stopped in a strange sudden and complete silence.  The sudden sharp decrease in decibels made his ears hurt.  Then just as suddenly and startling as it all stopped an explosion erupted nearby, probably the front of where the Emporium had been, and he was nearly thrown back by the shockwave.  This event was immediately followed by the sound of rapid gunfire erupting again and by smaller explosions and fire and general chaos.  The mass of bugs went crazy again, squealing and wreathing.  They fell back in an attempt to get away from this strange new attack.  Mel squinted as the smoke began to make his eyes water and he was losing focus.  As usual chaos, pandemonium and a blood-curdling apocalyptic death were the general plan of the day.  Some things never change, he thought.  Roger where are you?

     The tank came to a slow stop.  Tormodis was still in the hatch, oversized helmet nearly down to his eyes, hands firmly gripped on the edge of the hatch to steady himself.  He’d been in that position through all eight cars that Margaret saw fit to run over on the way.  But, now as the tank rocked gently back and forth from the deceleration he stood there with eyes wide, mouth opened staring ahead at the scene of destruction that waited for them.  He was about to call for Roger to point out where the Honey pot was when the mound of thousands of spiders on top of the remains of a collapsed building convinced him they were in the right spot.  They were still about two hundred yards out but the magnitude of the sound of the squealing, the stench of the fires, the dark overhead billowing clouds that blocked out the sky plus the long line of giant termites approaching the spiders was enough.   Suddenly the sound of the forward hatch opening jerked his attention away from the nightmarish scene ahead.  It was Roger poking his head out to see what was going on.  He, too, was transfixed by the scene before them that was lit only by the glow of sparse fires scattered about.  The glow was like something out of Dante. 

      Tormodis stared unblinkingly at the sight of thousands of spiders inter-twined in a sickening ball of movement.  He watched as they wreathed and crawled and tore at anything they could reach, while the termites were starting to line up to begin their digging.  And then he looked down at their tank, which seemed small and insignificant now.  He had no allegiances to these people.  He had no emotional connections to all of this madness.  He owed no favors to anyone here.  And he didn’t like putting his wife at risk, no matter what kind of sphere protected them.  Admittedly the tank was fun.  Meeting Daniel Boone had been a real treat.  But, all of this escalating chaos was a whole new ball game for him and his bride.  They had never encountered anything remotely like this in their travels.  Their motto was always the less seen, the better end.  Well, there was no avoiding being seen in all this, and there was no avoiding how events had sucked them further in at each turn.  What was he going to do?  What were
they
going to do?  How much could he do in the end, even with an M1 Abrams and a wife with a surprising knack for driving heavy armor?

  He looked over at Roger, who had turned his head around in the small hatch and was looking back at him with a uniquely sane expression on his face.   “Please,” he simply said, “we can’t leave them like that.”

     Tormodis surprised himself by nodding in agreement.  “Get back down ya crazy bastard and figure out how to load this thing.”  He said.  

     Roger grinned in reply and started back down before he suddenly stopped and asked.  “With what?”