SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

But then the worm flopped down onto the man, mashing him and two of his fellow guards into the ground, before another gust of wind obscured her view with a river of white snow. The gust curved down toward the ground and then straight up into the sky, like a geyser.

“I’ve got nothing you can fight them with,” Aleman said over the comm, “short of immense doses of electricity or dousing the region with chemicals from above — things we don’t have. Get out of there, Bishop.”

“We have one more thing that can do the trick,” Knight yelled, as the ground rumbled.

Rook turned in time to see — and then side-step away from — another giant worm. This one looked fatter, but shorter than the first. Twenty feet at the thickest part, just past the head, and then tapering down to ten feet in diameter, over forty feet away, down by its tail end. It was a darker, richer red than the first. Not as shiny, and without as many defined ribs. This one also had another unusual feature.

Knight was hanging from its side.

With one hand, he clung to one of the bomb-spikes, which he had manually impaled in the creature’s side. The worm was moving fast, and Knight was fifteen feet off the ground, as the creature rushed past, spiraling higher, so that Knight was lifted up and on top of it.

7

Anna Beck raced after the runaway death worm and its precious cargo. The thing was moving at a good clip, and the ground — covered with random clumps of hardy vegetation or craggy rocks — made for treacherous footing.

The plan had been simple. Knight had raced after the second worm, bomb-spike in hand. He hadn’t had a chance to load it into his launcher, and instead had run on foot toward the side of the massive creature. He should have impaled it and dropped away, so she could detonate the bomb once he was clear. Instead, Knight had held onto the spike, and been hoisted for a ride on the top of the charging worm.

“What the hell are you doing, Knight?” she asked, huffing, as she ran full out behind him. “You were supposed to spike it and get off, not go all rodeo.”

She knew the transmitters for the detonators on the jury-rigged spikes had a limited range, so she needed to be close enough to the creature to kill it, but she needed to get Knight and herself far enough from it that the blast didn’t injure them, too.

“Getting elevation,” he said. “There are more of them.”

She heard the distinctive crack of his sniper rifle go off, over the howl of the wind on her exterior speaker. Then she turned her head and saw a third worm — this one a mottled brown and white — suddenly veer away from its previous course. Knight had just shattered its control box. If he hadn’t, she never would have known it was pursuing her until it was too late. Now the brown creature made a lazy turn heading back toward the destroyed lab.

“How many more?” Aleman asked in her ear.

“Enough,” Knight said, his voice terse as he concentrated on firing again. Beck knew his voice well enough to tell when he was aiming.

“Team, if you can kill those things with the bomb-spikes, you need to do it,” Aleman said, hesitating as he said it, as if he were doing three other things on the computer at the same time.

“King said to bug out, Blue,” Rook said over the comms. “Bish and I are already moving toward the LZ.” Everyone knew that King made the final calls when the team was in the field.

“Those things already have a taste for human flesh, if the guards have been using them for security. If even one of them survives, it could rampage across the countryside, devouring nomads — or worse, it might pilgrimage to a population center like Beijing.”

“Blue is right,” King’s voice came over the comms, his teeth still chattering. “We’re nearly at the chopper. I’ll be fine. Sending Queen back for support.”

“I’ll take the brown one, then,” Pawn said, changing direction and pursuing the large mottled worm. As she ran, she mounted one of the two bomb-spikes Knight had handed her into her spear gun. She planned to chase the thing into range and then simply fire the weapon at it, but the lumbering creature turned instead of continuing straight. It performed a slow loop back to the north, and then in the direction Knight had gone, riding on the back of the brick red worm.

The ground shook with each leaping step she took, and she found it easier to run in the patches of loose sand than on the vibrating rock. As the thing changed direction again, cutting across her path, her distance to it was shortened, and she soon got within spear-gun range. As she loosed a spike from the weapon, the visibility increased yet again, and she saw the brick worm, Knight squatting on its back, charging straight for her mottled brown worm. The two would either attack each other, or pass right next to each other, like speeding trains. Unsure of which it would be, and what Knight would need, she continued racing for the collision site.

As she ran, she saw Knight stand up.