SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

The team made it halfway from the castle to the edge of the cloud when the rocks around them pinged with the ricochets of missed rifle fire. They each dropped, and rolled to the sides, then faced back toward the strange brown fortress. But the shots hadn’t come from that direction. They were coming from a small team — maybe ten strong — of additional guards to the north. They were still a few hundred yards away, their rifles only just inside the effective firing range.

Queen glanced at King and saw that he wasn’t reacting as quickly as she would have expected. His lips hadn’t turned blue, but they had lost their color, and his face looked pale against the black neoprene hood lining. “Rook, Bishop. Take this. I’m getting King to the LZ.”

Rook raised his SCAR and fired off a few rounds at the approaching men. The weapon had a much longer range, but at the distance, any kills would be simple luck. “Watch out for the Jumbo Fire Turd.”

“Nice,” Queen said, grabbing King by the arm and starting to run with him toward the nearby wall of the storm. “You kiss me with that mouth, remember.”

“Only because you ask me to—” Rook started to say, before his body was violently flung to the ground. Bishop had opened up on the approaching guards with the machine gun, but she stopped immediately and turned to Rook. The left arm of his suit’s fur was a deep maroon. “Shit in the milk carton! That stings like bastard.”

Bishop started opening a portable med kit they each carried, which was strapped to their stomachs, over the environment suits, but as she unzipped it, Rook spoke again.

“Just a through and through,” he growled. “I’ll be alright.”

Bishop lunged back to her trigger, trusting Rook’s self-assessment. They had all taken minor grazes from bullets — or worse — at this point in their careers. She laid down a suppressing fire that had the new group of guards diving for cover or simply dropping dead with tufts of crimson mist staining the white clouds around them. She counted ten men, but their number was dwindling under her constant stream of automatic fire.

Rook rolled over, pulling up his rifle and adding his bullets to hers. They had the guards, all of them wrapped in their brown furs, pinned just behind a small ridge of rock. But then two things happened at once.

The wind picked up again, the storm having shifted enough to cover them in waves of sand and snow. Their visibility was lost completely.

Then the building, so reminiscent of China’s greatest architectural accomplishment, detonated. The chemical reaction made the explosion far stronger than the bomb-spikes should have done alone.

A howling burst of flame ripped horizontally across the ground, with a pressure wave so strong that it rolled Rook’s body across the rocky ground, crushing him into Bishop’s prone form, and the two of them slammed into a low ridge of crumbling rock. The wall of flame came next, flashing across their bodies and whipping across the fur coatings on their environment suits until they were singed clean. The shrieking wind carried the rest of the destruction away.

“I think I just got a tan,” Bishop said, shoving Rook’s body off of her.

“You got off light,” Rook complained. “I think I just lost my nut hairs.”

“Aww, both of them?” Bishop said. She started to look for the machine gun, but found the barrel had been coated in small pebbles and sand, the grit having invaded the open gas ports. Attempting to fire it now would result in a misfire at best or another explosion in her face at worst. She left it, and hauled Rook to his feet. As she did, a huge wall of red flashed by on her right, just where she had been lying.

The death worm had returned.

The massive creature worked its way past them like a shark blitzing past its prey. It was so close she could reach out and touch it. It blurred by like a subway car if she had been standing too close on the platform. She could see the ragged gouges and holes in its scarlet hide, where she had riddled it with the 240 earlier.

The blasting wind slowed, and she could see once again in the direction of the small group of pinned guards. She wished she couldn’t. The worm ran straight for the men, snatching one guard up with its black tentacles, and flipping him into the air. The beast rose up again, close to twenty feet straight up in the air, like it was performing an old Indian rope trick. Then it grabbed the man before he reached the apex of his flight, and swallowed him down in one gulp. Again, Bishop was reminded of a shark.

She saw one of the other guards banging his heavily gloved fingers on an oversized remote control with a three foot long silver antenna. It reminded her of the controllers she had seen boys in Russia use on remote controlled toy cars. “They are controlling the worms.”