SNAFU: Hunters

“Fuck!” Lyons shouted. He grabbed the thrashing monstrosity and pulled his knife out ready for another blow, but the creature was too strong. It twisted out of his grip with desperate strength and skittered away out onto the street, still screeching.

“We need to move, now!” Blake ordered.

There was a heavy thump as something landed on the ceiling above them, then another.

Blake looked up. Half of the shattered room was open to the sky and peering over the lip of the lattice of ruined joists were two of the demons, their cratered faces tracking Lyons and Blake like radar dishes.

“Contact!” Blake shouted and fired up through the boards. No need for subtlety now. This would have to be a fighting retreat.

The hail of bullets should have shredded the timbers, and torn into the creatures above, but Blake had not accounted for the unnatural strength of the stasis-locked structure. His rounds just stopped as if they had hit armored plate, and fell as squashed mushrooms of lead to mingle with the brass of his spent shell casings.

One of the creatures jumped down, slamming into Lyons who still had his knife out. The marine stabbed the creature again and again, but it seemed to have no regard for its own safety. It ignored Lyon’s blows and concentrated on delivering its own. It clawed through his JSLIST, talons snagging on the tough MOLLE webbing of the man’s chest rig.

Blake didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting his squad mate, and watched in horror as the monster’s mouth opened impossibly wide and closed on Lyons’ head, crushing mask and skull beneath.

Pollin and Blake opened fire at the same time, both knowing their teammate was dead and both wanting to exact revenge on his other-worldly killer.

The second creature landed in the room, but Fernandez was ready for it. He fired at point blank range. Rounds chewed into the creature, but it seemed to be made out of spring steel and Kevlar. Fernandez’ rifle finally clicked down onto an empty chamber, but the creature was still very much alive. It swiped at him, raking clawed appendages across his throat like a quartet of switchblades.

Blake kicked the creature and grabbed Fernandez by the hood of his suit, hauling the marine toward the back of the house. He expected the creature to come leaping back, but although it screeched in fury, no attack came his way. He checked over his shoulder; the creature squirmed in mid-air, clutching at a sliver of timber protruding from its chest. Blake’s kick had impaled the creature on a fragment of the shattered structure like some alien bug in a collection.

He fired one handed, aiming for the sense organ at the centre of the creatures head. It thrashed once then was still.

The ground shook. The mass of writhing tentacles surged from the portal, and hidden in its fronds was another of the creatures. It wriggled free of the tendrils and took its first breath in its new world.

“It’s no good!” Carroll shouted. “You kill one and another just takes its place.”

A zero-sum game. Every scrap of life-energy lost on this side of the portal was immediately replaced from the other side of that bridge between worlds. It was like trying to bail out a boat that was already half sunk – for every bucketful of water emptied over the side, more just flowed in to take its place.

Blake knew what had to be done. There was no point killing the creatures on this side; they would have to cross over. Killing these demons on their home turf would have the opposite effect, sucking life from this world into the next.

Blake grabbed one of the bags they had brought with them from the Stryker. Inside were three half-pound blocks of C4 used for controlled explosions of enemy munitions.

“Get as far away as you can,” he shouted and ran straight toward the pit. He made a mental tally of his remaining ammunition – he was going to raise hell. Those demonic bastards had no idea what was about to hit them.

He raced across the carpet of tendrils, and they squirmed underfoot. One of the bigger creatures started to lumber toward him, but it was too slow. Blake would reach the pit before it got near him.

The portal yawned in front of him, and for the first time he was able to look down into it… and the horrors it contained.

“We never cracked the walls of heaven,” Carroll had said. “Never saw no cherubs.”

No cherubs indeed, but surely no religion had ever envisioned a hell such as this.

The world beyond the portal seemed to be made of nothing but writhing tendrils. There was no other Earth, nothing so normal as a planet orbiting some other sun. This was a world of flesh – a twisted inter-weaving skein of black tendrils thicker than any jungle canopy. Other things moved within the darkness. The only light came from the flickering around the edges of the portal. Hundreds of creatures swarmed through the mass like clownfish through an anemone’s fronds, making their home on the body of this thing that was their entire world.