Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (34 page)

“As long as both lines don’t get cut we’re golden,” Phil said, prophetically.

“What happens if they both get cut?” Roy asked.

“We’re fucked,” Louis said curtly, still peering over the sight of the M2.

“We’ll handle it,” Brad said. “We’re still going to have enough firepower to kill a dragon. Now, let’s get it all out of the truck.”

There was a lot. We’d all brought, if not everything in our personal arsenal, than most. It’s easier to change weapons than magazines if you’re in a fixed position. We’d even gotten some sandbags and set them up as mini-bunkers. We were set.

The last thing we unloaded was the Ma Deuce. We had to break it down and we didn’t want to do that until we were fully set. It was sort of like a security blanket. We were all nervous as hell and with the exception of Roy trying not to show it.

“Are we sure it’s going to stop the shelob?” Roy asked as he was unloading .50 ammo. “Shouldn’t we have the flamethrowers, just in case?”

“That’s a lot of C4,” Phil said. “It’ll stop an elephant. And if we use the flame throwers, the fire will burn the connections and the trap won’t blow.”

“But what if—” Roy said.

“Roy,” I finally said. “Will you just shut your yob? Please? We all know the risks. We all know what can go wrong. Better than you. We can get killed by one of the claymore plates. We can get killed by ricochets. We can get killed by one or our grenades going off on our vest. We can get wrapped up and turned into spider Kool-Aid. There’s a thousand ways to die in this business, none of them good. If you weren’t up for that, you shouldn’t have raised your hand.”

“Roy, if you’re not up for this, you can go,” Brad said, placidly. “No problem, no issues. No hard feelings even. But decide. And if you’re staying then, yeah, shut your yob. You’re not helping.”

Roy shut his yob, for a while at least.

“So what’s the PUFF on a shelob, anyway?” Phil asked.

“Based on fang length,” Brad said. “Minimum I’ve ever seen was two fifty. And that was for a baby.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars? For a spider queen?”

“Two hundred and fifty
thousand
, Roy.”

“Quarter mil,” Phil said in a satisfied tone.

“Ooooh.”

Finally we were done getting everything in place.

“Hand, take the truck back,” Brad said. He could tell I was on my last nerve with Roy. “Get a hand-line. No radios from now on. It can set off the electrical circuit. Drive it out, walk back.”

We weren’t going to leave the truck there. It still had about two hundred and ninety pounds of C4 in the back.

“What about the flamethrowers?” I asked.

“Leave one,” Brad said, shrugging. “No silver suits, though. And make sure it’s full and the replace the pressure tank.”

The napalm was driven out under pressure by a nitrogen pressure tank. Nitrogen was a nonflammable, mostly inert, gas.

We prepped the flamethrower and I drove the truck back out. I was in for a long walk in the spider haunted darkness. Wasn’t looking forward to that.

“We’re going to need a phone,” I said when I found the city engineer. “How’s it going up here?”

“We’re still getting people out of their houses,” he said. “We’ve got phones that will reach. You’ll have to carry a long wire spool.”

“Yep,” I said.

“I’ll get somebody on it.”

Lieutenant Shaw was out managing the clearance of the innocents. Which really sucked. I’d have liked to have, you know, said hello and good bye sort of thing.

When the phone and wire turned up I headed back into the spider-haunted darkness.

* * *

The spiders were coming off the ceiling in a shit brown waterfall.

The ethanol had worked. Too well.

We were overrun. MCB was going to have to handle this. Portland was going to be overrun. The mechanical ambush had failed.

Maybe.

Military explosives are very stable. You can set them on fire. You can stomp them, knock them and shoot them. Even det cord is surprisingly stable.

Generally. Mostly. In the main.

Detonators, not so much. Detonators ride on the knife edge between “bit unstable” and “stable enough.” Every explosive expert knows to be careful with detonators.

Hit one with a .50 caliber round and it’s going to blow up. Take the claymore with it? Maybe. And then the daisy chain would start and that led all the way to the C4 the shelob was still occupying.

The problem being a detonator is a little tube of metal about the length of a woman’s pinky and the thickness of a pencil. One of those gimmicky narrow pencils. And the nearest one was nearly a hundred yards away. Even for a Marine this was going to be a tough shot. With spiders already on our position and fangs inches from my body.

It’s one of those times when the words “Don’t panic” go through your head. You have to do a series of steps very carefully and very quickly or you’re going to die. Take a prone position. Get a good butt-to-cheek-to-shoulder weld. Place finger on trigger. Let breath settle. Take careful aim. Adjust for distance. No wind in a tunnel. Ignore the screams as Roy turns and runs, dropping his shotgun, the fucking coward. Ignore the legs of the spiders in the way, they don’t matter. Focus on the target. Will the round to…

The sear let go without me even thinking about it. Then the world fell in.

I’d known it was going to be a big boom. It was like a string of God’s own firecrackers. In the enclosed space it was positively painful. All the spiders on the ceiling and bulkheads, even the ones that were past the last claymore, fell off. The compression wave stunned most of them, even the ones that got to our position.

I didn’t notice. I was back on my feet in an instant, laying in with my Uzi. I could not reload fast enough. There was smoke and dust everywhere. The tunnel had partially collapsed to the right of our position. Freaking spiders were still twitching in every direction.

I laid in with .45, standard hollow-point expanding rounds. Full auto as I’d been taught, when the ambush triggered and the air was filled with dust, mag empty, reload without thinking, thousands of hours of practice making the moves fluid.

The last spiders were down. The wave was gone. My smoking Uzi was out of rounds and I was out of mags in my pouches.

I drew my 1911 and walked over to one of the spasming monstrosities. It was on its back and thrashing its horrible legs.

I pumped a full magazine into it and reloaded. It was still quivering, the fucker. I was pretty sure it was dead. Not sure enough. I shot it twice more.

“Shit!”
I screamed, holstering the .45 with shaking hands. “Shit, shit, shit…”

“Anybody hit?” Brad called. “Anybody hurt?”

“Jesse’s down!” Phil screamed.

One of the last spiders had gotten a bite in up and under his body armor. Right in the abdomen.

“Oh, fuck no,” I said, slumping to the floor. My friend, my best friend, was shivering as the poison worked through his veins.

“Ch…Cha…” he said, trying to reach for me.

“I know, buddy,” I knew what he was asking. We all knew the deal with spider bites.

I thought about the kappa. Too far and they were bone doctors. Joan the Sasquatch. But I knew the truth. There was no mystical cure. There was no miracle this time. Doctors would try, so hard, to save him. The miracles of modern medicine would keep him alive in screaming agony for days, weeks, maybe a month. With the hit where it was, more like weeks. And that would be all she wrote. Weeks of agony for nothing.

I pulled Jesse’s head and shoulders onto my lap and drew my .45.

“It’s the most beautiful place you can imagine, buddy,” I said, tears making it hard to see. “
So
green. Every day is stalking that perfect buck. That one you know is too wily to catch. And right at dusk, when you’ve finally given up, he walks into your sights…You can go hunting with your dad again. He’ll like that. It’s
so
much better than this hellhole…”

And I blew my best friend’s head off.

Nothing says “I love you” like double-aught to the face.

* * *

As I laid Jesse down on the floor the smoke was starting to clear.

The tunnel was littered with bits and pieces of spider bodies. Sections had partially collapsed. Every claymore and bit of C4 had detonated.

The “shelob” trap, though, had detonated behind the massive arachnid. And the shelob, leaking fluids from every side, most of its legs blown off, peppered by claymore pellets, blind from having its eyes blown out, was still crawling down the tunnel.

“What does it take to
kill
that thing?” Phil asked, stunned.

“Hand, ammo for the fifty,” Brad said.

I didn’t hear him. I just stood up and started striding down the corridor towards the shelob.

“Ah, hell,” Louis said. “Target’s kind of blocked.”

“Let him get his mad out,” Brad said. “Phil, provide him some cover fire. Some of them are bound to still be alive.”

I didn’t hear any of it. I didn’t hear the order. I couldn’t have heard the explosion again. I couldn’t see or think. My world was red rage.

When I was half-way to the wounded shelob, Mo No Ken came whispering out of the sheath. And I started running.

“ASSSSSSEI!”

The main neural junction on a spider is on the fore-part of its abdomen. That is the “sweet spot” for killing a spider. The head just has sensory and food organs on it. And the fangs, of course. No real brain per se.

I knew that. I didn’t care. I was going to get to the central neural processor by blending the head onto the floor of the tunnel.

At the first slash of the blade the shelob reared up, trying to bite. First one fang then the other hit the floor. The poison sack burst down my blade as I stabbed upwards. I slashed across and the head was cut in half. The shelob writhed in agony, trying to back up, trying to escape the pain.

I cut and cut in a fury that was primal. This thing had killed my friend. The shelob might not have touched him but it was her fault. She was going to pay. She was going to die in pain.

I cut until Mo No Ken was starting to, unbelievably, blunt. And I kept cutting. I literally cut myself half way through a shelob. I chopped that bitch to pieces. I was covered in spider ichor. I was standing in spider guts.

None of it brought Jesse back.

Brad finally came up behind me and gently put his hands on me as I was futilely swinging Mo No Ken, trying to get some of the spider ichor and guts and whatever the hell else off the blade.

“Chad,” Brad said. “We’ve got stuff to do. We need you back here.”

“Roger, sir,” I said, automatically.

“I sent Louis back for the truck,” he said. “We need to break down the fifty and start preparing to pull out the gear for clearance and clean-up.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said, turning away from the shelob.

“Let me take the sword,” Brad said.

“Sir…”

“Chad,” Brad said, placing his hand gently on the hand that still held Mo No Ken. “I’ve been around katanas for years. I’ll clean it up. You go break down the fifty, Marine.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said, releasing Sword of Mourning.

Mo No Ken. Sword of Mourning. The irony burned like the enzymes splattered on my face.

* * *

Louis had found Roy half way back to the surface, sitting against the wall with his chrome-plated .45 in hand, sobbing. Louis had carefully led him back to the surface then gotten the truck.

Phil and I had everything ready to pack up by the time he got there. Including Jesse. We’d brought body bags just in case.

Brad made me wash some of the goo off. The enzymes from the burst poison sack really did burn. We had a cream for that. We packed up. I rode out in the back of the truck, door up, with my buddy.

Clearing the shelob carcass was a pain. Clearing all the carcasses was a pain. MCB finally allowed a handful of fire-fighters to get read in. They came in with hooks and pulled out the carcasses. We provided security. It took a tow-truck to pull out the shelob and the body kept falling apart.

One hundred and eighty-three sassus males. Maybe some more up in the tubes we never recovered. One mature sassus female. The PUFF for our five-man team cleared three quarters of a million dollars. And, yes, Roy got part of that as his severance bonus.

Still didn’t bring Jesse back. His mom had already lost her husband. Now we were going to send his remains home in an urn with some bullshit cover story and a check.

Didn’t seem fair.

There were only three of us left to clear the cistern. We went back in with airpacks sans silver suits and with flamethrowers. We fired them up at the bend, just in case. Then got blown on our ass when the ethanol exploded in the most gentle explosion of all time. No injuries. Jesse would have laughed his ass off. None of us laughed.

All of the spiders had been in the assault. We found not one in the cistern. Nor did we find any survivors. Lots of web. Big pile of bodies. Not only human. Rat, dog, cat, even a few deer and rabbits.

I didn’t find that out then. Found it out later. Didn’t really care, then. No human survivors. Jesse’s still dead. What’d you say again? I was thinking about something else.

Doctors Nelson showed up at some point, having cut their vacation short. They shouldn’t have. We had this.

They should have. They needed to. We didn’t have this, it had us. We were all shell-shocked. Not just about Jesse. Even tough, stoic, Brad was in a daze. We were working on muscle memory and could barely form a coherent sentence. And it was just us three left. But we had this. We’d hold the line or die trying. We hold the line!
Hold this line
, Marine! Stand your ground! Not one step back, Marine! Do you understand me? Chad! Chad! You there, Chad?

What do you mean, we already won?

We were all still in the spider haunted darkness.

The Nelsons took over working with MCB and the locals. Amazingly enough, Special Agent Mathis was not being a prick when we came out of the tunnels. He could see the horror in our eyes. He also knew we were both necessary and crunch toast. So he called MHI and they called the Nelsons and the Nelsons got on a chartered jet, courtesy of MHI, and flew back in champagne class.