SNAFU: Hunters

“The energy doesn’t freeze. The life force gets replaced.” Carroll’s frown persisted. “At the moment of detonation, when the forces are strong enough to tear open the portal between dimensions, any life extinguished here gets replaced from over there. That’s it. There is no freezing.” He shook his head “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is something new.”

“Man, that is so not what I wanted to hear,” said Lyons.

“Okay,” said Blake. “Here’s how this is going to work. We sweep the town. You know the drill. We’re still on the clock and no matter what we’ve seen today, remember how this all started. Some asshole tried to drive a nuclear truck bomb into downtown Phoenix.” He pointed to the old man. “Now Carroll here is going to do his thing and we’re going to do ours. I want any intel bagged and tagged. I want samples and I want a vehicle. We’re going to have to get outside the radius of this…” he struggled to find the words. “Of whatever the fuck is happening around here and we’re going to do our jobs and get that intel back to HQ. Everyone got that?”

“Ooh rah!”

The marines pressed forward through the shattered building. It seemed to have been occupied fairly recently; Blake noted clothing and food that still looked fresh, all caught at the same frozen moment in the midst of the explosion.

He spotted movement out the street and dropped, making his way through the shattered room on his belly.

The main square of the old ghost town was a shattered bramble of broken shards of wood. Every building looked to have burst outward, growing up and away from what must have been the center of the explosion that had turned the buildings around the square into a crown of thorns.

But that was nothing compared to what lay at its centre.

A fused circle of black glass surrounded a central pit that glowed with otherworldly light. It flickered like the reflection of something constantly in motion. Across the surface of the black glass lay a twisted skein of tendrils. So dense were they, it looked like the floor was carpeted with black worms. Each was no thicker than Blake’s thumb, but so long their ends were lost among their tangled brethren.

They spread from the central pit, crawling up the walls of nearby buildings like ivy. Only there, at the farthest perimeter of the writhing mass could the tips of the tendrils be seen waving in the air like the fronds of some unimaginable sea monster. In some places they had fused together into sheets of motile tissue, flat and tough as dry kelp washed up on a beach.

Blake followed them back to the pit. From his vantage point he couldn’t quite see inside – he was glad. What little he could see hinted at something vast moving in the darkness beneath.

Other creatures surrounded the pit, and Blake counted half a dozen of the swift moving creatures – like the one Carroll had killed – as well as two of the big Stryker-killers.

“It’s the portal,” Carroll said in disbelief.

“What?”

“I’ve seen pictures from the tests. High-speed photography at the moment of the explosion. The portal looked like that,” Carroll said, pointing.

“But it’s supposed to be closed,” Blake shouted. “You said it was only open for the instant of the explosion!”

As he said the words, Blake knew the door between worlds was still open because the loss of life here had been much greater than in any mere test. This had been a town once – undocumented and off the maps, and probably the base of some smuggling operation – but still a concentration of life energy. When the bomb had gone off it had allowed something big to gain a foothold in this world. That many-tendriled thing that flowed from the portal like a mass of mating snakes was caught between two worlds, keeping the portal open.

“We need to get out of here,” Carroll said. Pale, his eyes darted left then right, and the man wore every one of his sixty-plus years on his haggard face. This was way more than he had signed up for.

“You hang in there, Marine,” Blake said, but the old man was right. This was more than they could handle. He had no idea what the powers-that-be could do about a portal to another dimension, but that wasn’t his problem. The biggest contribution he could make right now would be to get this information back to the outside world.

Movement out of the corner of his eye.

A creature was crawling up the wall. No bigger than a possum, its many-jointed legs told Blake exactly where it had come from.

“It’s okay,” said Lyons as he drew his knife from the kydex sheath slipped to his chest rig. “I got this one.”

“Wait!” Blake hissed, but it was too late.

Lyons slammed his knife into the creature, pinning it to the wall, but the thing wasn’t about to go quietly. It screeched and thrashed against the blade that pinned it to the wall, smearing black blood against the timbers.