14.2. Denton Wyle

Calder Farris opened his eyes to a nightmare. Somehow, someway, he’d gotten himself into the middle of a battlefield. He wasted only seconds on confusion. His body had been in war before and it took control, shoving away anything irrelevant to survival like, for example, questions about what the fuck he was doing here.

He began panting, heart pumping fresh blood double-time, nerves responding to the fire alarm, all systems go. Stress kills, but bullets kill quicker. The body makes the expedient choice.

It was daylight, but the light was dim from smoke and heavy cloud cover. There was an icy drizzle that struck his face and hands like tiny chips of ice flung hard. It was freezing. All around him were the explosions of heavy artillery and the crack of rifles. He saw no one, had no idea where he was in relation to the line, but the sound of bullets whizzing through the air told him he was not anyplace he wanted to be.

He dropped to the frost-crusted earth, began crawling on his belly, stopped. Which way? Was he crawling toward the enemy or away from them?

Who was the enemy?

The fact that he knew none of these things caused a moment of panic. He got it under rigid control and began crawling perpendicular to the shots, hoping to work his way out the side of the line. He elbowed his way past a corpse wearing a thick, heavy uniform in a silver color. He paused to look at it, hoping for information. The jacket was well made and was decorated with elaborate insignia he didn’t recognize. At all. He blinked at it for a moment, stupidly, then grabbed the rifle from the dead man’s hands. Long barrel, foreign. He didn’t stop to examine it, just kept crawling.

Two massive explosions battered his eardrums and sent earthen projectiles into the air, hitting his back. It was only dirt, but it was moving fast enough to cut. Blood dripped into an eye.

Voices shouted. He didn’t recognize the language. He saw shadowy figures moving to his right. The line was advancing. He crawled faster.

The panic was returning, slowly, but with every intent to stay this time. He knew he wasn’t dreaming. The smell and sounds of war were too real; the physical sensations of the ground and of his own body, too real. And he had no idea where he was or why. He had just been…

Tracking Dr. Talcott through the woods. Had that happened years ago? Had a head injury erased his memory of more recent events, like this war? He hazarded a glance down at himself. If he belonged in this battle, why was he still dressed in civilian clothes? In his black trench coat?

He heard movement to his left—the advancing line, close now, and he was right in its path. He looked around desperately and saw a mounded darkness a few feet away that he prayed was a bunker. He reached out to grope its perimeters and slipped inside like a snake. It was a tiny hole and thankfully empty. Troops were creeping up on all sides, stealthy, moving low. He shrank down inside the hole, his breath steaming against the frosted dirt near his face.

Oh god, he was terrified. Absolutely fucking terrified. He felt a rising urge to scream and had to use all of his training to get it under control. His eyes darted, ears strained. He could figure this out, goddamn it. He just needed information.

He picked up two voices nearby, speaking in hushed whispers. Through the smoke, he detected two men crouching together, a flash of silver uniforms, heavy braids on a shoulder. He recognized the scene—it was a commander giving orders for the advance. But he didn’t recognize the uniforms or the language. It wasn’t the U.S. Army, so he must be behind enemy lines. How the hell had he gotten behind enemy lines?

A freezing current of wind cleared the smoke a little and he saw the two figures clearly. Caucasian, very Caucasian, with white-blond hair. They wore heavy black boots, highly polished, with a square-toed design. Their uniforms were similar to the one on the corpse.

Words wafted to him between explosions. He strained to identify them. Not German. Not Russian. Not Serbian… Not Arabic. Not Chinese.

Fear shot through him then, a whole new level of it, deep and churning in his bowels. He had been fucking trained by the fucking Pentagon. Anyone dressed in uniforms of this quality, this organized of an army, this white of an army, carrying heavy artillery like this—he should recognize the damn language.

He must have made a sound. The officer’s head swiveled toward him, eyes searching the gloom.

Calder panicked. He slipped from the hole and began running. He knew he didn’t have a prayer, but it still was a shock when the mortar hit, blasting the earth beneath his feet.

And then he was flying through the air like Superman, mind peculiarly free.

14.3. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott

“Jump!” Jill screamed.

They were not in Poland, not in the snowy woods, not in the dark, but on some red rock plateau in the middle of a hot and sunny desert. That in itself was strange enough, but they were also surrounded by enormous insects. The insects were as large as medium-sized dogs, heads antennaed like ants, and entirely disgusting. Their iridescent eyes mirrored Jill and Nate like a semicircle of fun-house mirrors as they backed toward the edge of the plateau.

Nate followed Jill’s glance behind them. It was a good thirty-foot drop to the desert floor and he was already cradling an injured arm. “Are you nuts? We’ll break something. We’ll break everything.”

But the insects were advancing, their flanks swinging in, and Jill had no intention of letting those things get any closer.

She grabbed Nate’s hand and launched herself off the cliff.

“Not that arm!” he screamed in pain as they fell through the air.

They landed hard on the sand—but not that hard.

“What the…?” Nate had even managed to keep his feet, his right arm protectively cupping his left. “Shouldn’t we be lunch meat? And weren’t we just in snow? You aren’t a figment of my imagination, are you?”

“Why can’t you be a figment of my imagination?”

“Good. It must be you; I’d never say that.”

Jill, who had three different kinds of Raid under her sink at home, was busy looking up. The insects had been peeking over the edge of the cliff at them, but now they retreated, presumably coming down the easy way. She took Nate’s good arm to get him walking.

“How’d you know we could make that jump?” he asked.

“Can’t you feel it? Low gravity.” There was a catch of excitement in her voice.

Nate waved his good arm, jumped up, and settled back down with magical sluggishness. “Jesus! I thought I was just light-headed. Jill, what the heck is going on? You don’t suppose we could be… You don’t think we’re…”

“Dead?”

“That’s the word I was looking for, yes.”

She shook her head firmly. “Not possible. There is no life after death.”

“Right,” Nate said ironically. “I forgot.”

The insects appeared around the bend at the base of the plateau, moving in formation. Jill pulled Nate forward, both of them stumbling over their floating feet.

They found the reason for their reception committee not far away. The plateau was near a colony of the giant insects. The structure was built from the reddish sand, hardened with saliva or water. It was the size of a football field, its walls folding upward in narrowing bands like a wedding cake. Round holes in the walls opened into tunnels. The entire thing had a mathematical precision and, seeing it, Jill thought the creatures must be intelligent. Then she realized that insect nests on Earth had this kind of logic, too—anthills, for example. She’d just never seen one on this scale.