SNAFU: Hunters

The creature was enormous, taller than the Stryker and massively muscled. Like the smaller creature Carroll had killed, it lacked anything Blake could call a face. The blunt head with its wet crater of a sense-organ sat between hunched slabs of muscle that banded its shoulders. Twin ridges of bone, halfway between horns and blade-like plates, ran back across its brow from above where the eyes would have been on any Earthly creature, to meet at a central ridge that ran along its back.

Blake flipped his M4 to fully automatic and began to fire at the creature in short controlled bursts. Howard was doing the same, even Burrows joined in as a hail of lead rained down on the creature. They couldn’t miss, not with a target this big, not at this range. And yet it kept coming. They had already thrown enough lead at the thing to shred a bull elephant, but it hadn’t even slowed.

It charged, forcing them to scatter or be trampled under its massive, clawed feet.

“Williams,” Blake shouted into the ‘com. “Get on that .50 cal. now!”

“Sergeant, there’s no airlock on the top hatch, the Stryker will be contaminated.”

“Do you see that fucking thing? Forget the rads, if we don’t stop it none of us will live long enough to get cancer.”

Blake slid into the dust under the angular nose of the Stryker, switched magazines and kept up his fire at the creature. It must have hide like steel plate. The storm of 5.56mm rounds didn’t seem to bother it at all. Only Carroll’s huge calibre rifle seemed to have any effect.

The creature lashed out at Burrows with a huge hand. Its fingers were almost human, except the central pair was fused into on massive digit, the nail overgrown into a six-inch claw.

It caught Burrows on that terrible hook, lifting him off his feet and flinging him away like a child’s toy.

The effect on Carroll was dramatic. He stopped shooting and just stared at where Burrow’s body lay in the dust, the dead man’s guts drawn out along the furrow his carcass had carved in the sand.

Carroll stepped backward into his steel circle and sat, his rifle lying silent across his knees.

“Keep shooting, Goddamn it!” Blake shouted at the man but Carroll ignored him.

The creature turned on Carroll, swiping one huge arm around, clawed fingers scything through the air.

Blake expected to see Carroll’s body ripped in two, but the creature’s arm never seemed to make contact. It slashed and swiped at Carroll, but its blows were deflected as if by an unseen wall that extended upwards from the ring of steel around Carroll’s feet.

Blake heard the clang of the Stryker’s top hatch being flung open and Williams opened up on the creature with the roof-mounted machine gun.

It roared in pain and anger and turned its attention from Carroll to this new threat.

“Watch out!” Blake yelled as the creature charged the armoured personnel carrier. Howard was crushed between the fiend and the steel wall of the Stryker as it slammed into the Stryker’s side. It lifted all four wheels on its left side off the ground, and fifteen tons of steel pivoted upwards. The creature roared again, its huge claws digging into the thick rubber of the Stryker’s all-terrain tires and lifted. The vehicle – their home and only safe haven in the radioactive storm that swirled around them – toppled first onto its side then turned full turtle onto its roof.

Williams screamed as he was crushed half in-half out of the remote weapons station on the Stryker’s top.

The airlock ripped away from the rear doors and two suited soldiers stumbled out. The creature lashed out, picking them up with one swipe of its massive arm. One, Blake couldn’t tell who, slammed into the side of the upturned Stryker with bone-crushing force while the other was flung a dozen yards.

The creature turned back to Carroll and charged, trying to skewer the man on the thorny plates of its head. Whatever it was that had held the creature back before held firm again. It grappled against an invisible wall; clawed hands tried and failed to find purchase on the mysterious barrier.

Now that Blake knew what to look for, he thought he could see the barrier in the swirling dust. A column of still, dust-free air surrounded Carroll, and the old man sat at its center with hands pressed against the sides of his head like a child wishing the world would go away.

Damn him! Carroll had a shield and the most effective weapon against this brute and all he was doing was cowering in fear.

Carroll had a shield… but maybe Blake could use it as well. While the creature hammered away at the invisible barrier, Blake sprinted past, keeping Carroll and whatever field the man had conjured between himself and the monster. Blake pressed his face to it and felt its strange, unyielding nothingness.

“Fight, damn you!” Blake shouted at Carroll, but the old man gave no indication of having heard him. It was as impenetrable to sound as it was to the creature’s attacks.