Chapter Fifteen: The Fighting Escalates

“A soldier must do everything he can to win the battle and most the things he can’t.”

-Military Saying

            “Helen?” he said, pausing at the first sheltered corner he found. “We’re okay. You, uh, you need to let go now.”  

            He could feel her trembling against him, and her breathing was very shallow and fast. But, after a few seconds, she slowly unraveled herself from him and collapsed onto the floor.

            “There you go,” he said, sinking down next to her. “Isn’t that better?”

            She didn’t answer. She just kept breathing.

            They sat that way for some time, neither saying anything, as Helen’s breathing slowly began to return to its normal rate.

            “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I just made a bit of a fool of myself, didn’t I?”

            “It’s perfectly understandable,” said Hendricks. “Actually, I might have expected you to do it before now.”

            “It was just that one moment,” she said. “When I missed the chain, and I thought that was it. It seemed so, so clear, so inevitable. And I just…just lost my mind for a second. It’s like when the shark had me; that feeling of utter helplessness, but it was even worse this time. I thought ‘I’m going to watch myself falling into molten steel, and there’s nothing at all that I can do about it.”

            She looked at him, and her face still had that wide, terrified expression.

            “I don’t want to ever feel like that again,” she said.

            Hendricks took her hand and gripped it.

            “You won’t,” he said. “I…”

            “Don’t promise!” she snapped. “You can’t promise that! You have no way of preventing something like that from happening again, and you know it!”

            “Okay,” he said, shocked by her outburst.

            “Look,” she said. “Let’s get something out of the way right now; never promise me anything that you can’t keep, alright? I hate when people break promises!”

            “Okay, I promise,” he said.

            She looked at him, and her expression softened a little. 

            “I think ordinarily I would laugh at that,” she said.

            “Next time, then.”

            She nodded in lieu of a smile, and by an unspoken agreement, they got up and continued on.

            “You know Helen,” said Hendricks after a few minutes silence. “For what it’s worth, I know how you feel.”

            “You do?” she said with an edge of skepticism.

            “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “I never told you why I’m leaving the force, did I?”

            “You said because you were a coward,” she said.

            “What happened was this; I’ve been with the Miami PD for about a year. About a week ago my partner and I got a call about some thug making trouble at a convenience store. So, we drove over there. We get out. The next thing I know, he’s opening up on us with an assault rifle.

            “I dove back into the car, curled under the seat, and didn’t move for three hours. My partner took the guy down, but took a bullet to the hip in the process. The paramedics came, back up came, everyone, but I just stayed there. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I could barely think. I was just too terrified by what had happened.

            “Finally, my boss, Chief Kelton, showed up, and he managed to talk me out of it, and I went with the paramedics and spent the night in the ambulance. Meanwhile all the other guys, who never had much opinion of me to begin with, are watching me go with…well, not looking very pleased with me, let’s say.

            “And that,” he concluded. “Is how I ended up here. I was given two week’s leave, told to go ‘relax’ somewhere, and here I am. Relaxing.”

            “Wow,” said Helen. “I’m sorry to hear all that. For what it’s worth, though, you’ve not been much of a coward lately.”

            “Well, thanks,” he said.

            “No, thank you,” she said, actually managing a half-a-smile.

            The metal passageway they were going through (which Hendricks vaguely suspected was a maintenance shaft), kept winding its way along without much change. It was like being in a maze; the passage would run about six feet, then turn a sharp corner and run on for about the same distance before turning another corner. Finally, though, it ended in another door. Without pausing to concur, they opened it.

            They found themselves in a large, dim, high-ceilinged room. Boxes, barrels, and crates were piled all around, and a small shed jutted out from the opposite wall. What caught their eye immediately, however, was a row of large boxes standing along the wall to their left. There were about six of them, all off-white in color, and each one stood on thin legs, like a coffee table.

            Hendricks was just trying to think what it reminded him of when Helen gasped.

            “Oh, my God,” she whispered.  “It…It’s an apiary.”

            They looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing; an apiary on Matoul could not mean anything good.

            “Let’s…get out of here,” Hendricks muttered. “Come on, quickly, but…don’t make any sudden movements.

            Doing their best to follow both pieces of advice, they edged along the wall towards the nearest door. There was no reaction from the boxes, which Hendricks took to be a good sign. As a matter of fact, he was just beginning to think that they might get away without incident when the door opened and three guards came in, their rifles raised.

            “Oh, come on!” Helen exclaimed.

            Whatever the guards had come in for, it apparently wasn’t because they were looking for the two of them. But, now that they realized they were there, the guards took the opportunity to follow their orders and opened fire. Helen and Hendricks dove in opposite directions; she ducked behind a pile of crates, he went behind a set of plastic barrels. The bullets, intended for them, instead hit the boxes.

A second later the air was rent by a horrible noise, like a hundred chainsaws all starting together. Out of the boxes rose what Hendricks thought for a fleeting moment was smoke; the heaviest, blackest smoke he had ever seen. Then he saw what it was:

            Wasps.

            Thousands of them; each one over an inch long, jet-black with grey wings, their hard little bodies gleaming, they flew at the humans who had dared to invade their territory.

            The guards screamed and opened fire. A few wasps fell, but the swarm soon enveloped them like a flood. Their screams rose to a pitch for maybe thirty seconds, and then were silenced.

            Meanwhile Helen and Hendricks bolted. Helen, losing her head completely, dove into a large crate with four walls made of wire mesh. Hendricks did little better; he ran into the little shed and slammed the door.

            The wasps, having finished off their first victims, rose in a fury and went for the next person they could see; Helen. She realized immediately how precarious her defenses were as the swarm surrounded her and began trying to push, chew, and sting their way through the mesh.

            “Oh, no,” she gasped. “Help! Hendricks!”

            From the shed, Hendricks heard her screaming. He didn’t think he had ever felt so helpless; she was trapped and near death, but what could he possibly do against the swarm? His crowbar would be useless, and the moment he stepped outside the swarm would kill him in an instant. His breathing came in shallow gasps, and he began to feel the first stages of panic.

            No! he thought. You can’t panic now! Not now!

            But the more he tried to force himself not to panic, the closer he came to panicking. It was just like that night; it was the same damn…

            “Help me! Please!”

            You worthless sack of crap! He shouted at himself. Will you just shut up do something? Improvise, goddamnit!

            Hendricks looked wildly around the shed. There were some cans of insecticide, a few heavy hazmat suits, buckets of paint, and a number of fly-swatters.

            “HENDRICKS!” Helen screamed.

            Then, like an explosion, or as though something inside him had burst, out of his desperation and terror a kind of madness came over him…

            Helen, meanwhile, remained curled up in the middle of the crate, trying hard to remain still while all the while she was trembling violently at the thought of what would happen if the wasps go in. They completely covered the crate now, and she could see them pressing against the mess, thrusting their stringers through in their attempt to get at her. The noise was incredible; the closest she had ever experienced to it had been when she had accompanied her mother on a tour of a hydro-plant with the enormous turbines throbbing non-stop. But this was much, much worse. It beat upon her ears as though there were a hundred drums inside them. She covered her head and screamed in pain and fear. The wasps looked as though they would tear through the mesh any second, and then…

            Suddenly, the wasps abandoned Helen, collected themselves into a solid mass, and flew off. The reason became clear the moment she opened her eyes. Hendricks, double-armored in heavy rubber suits spattered with bright red and orange paint and wielding a can of insecticide in each hand, had burst out of the shack screaming like a berserker and attacked the swarm.

The first wave fell almost instantly, cut down by whatever terrible chemical Prosser’s men had concocted to contain their monstrous creations. Then the second, then the third. But Hendricks couldn’t spray fast enough to kill them all, and soon the wasps covered him, trying to pierce his armor with their stingers. In a few places he felt a horrific, burning pain that told him they had succeeded.

He turned the insecticides upon himself and the wasps fell from him like leaves. In a moment, he had cleared his whole upper body, but now his cans were dry. The wasps, however, didn’t dare try to land on him while he was coated with the deadly toxin, and so they focused their attention on his still-unprotected legs.

Hendricks dropped violently to his knees, squashing a large number of the insects beneath him, but also hurting himself badly on the concrete floor. He drew another pair of cans that he had stuck inside his belt and sprayed some more, but the swarm hadn’t lost more than a third of its strength and redoubled its attack. A huge group would swarm him, stinging wherever they could get through, then die from the chemicals coating his suits, but then another group would take their place immediately. They knew that he couldn’t keep spraying forever, and they were happy to sacrifice some of their number if it meant the rest could kill him.

The second set of cans ran dry. Hendricks threw them aside and now drew two fly-swatters. Screaming in a kind of reckless fury, he attacked the swarm with these, knocking dozens out of the sky at once. Any that hit the floor he would stomp on, or savagely beat with the swatters. Any that happened to fly near some surface or other were fair game. Yet still there were hundreds more.

Hendricks kept fighting, dealing vicious strokes, spinning around, dancing and leaping about as he tried to step on as many of the little monsters as possible. The wasps for their part continued their strategy of wearing him down with superior numbers; sacrificing themselves against his poison-coated suits to try to clear enough of it to start stinging in earnest. And it didn’t take Hendricks long to realize that this was likely to be a very effective strategy indeed. Already fewer and fewer wasps were dying upon contact, and more and more were latching on and stinging as hard as they could.
            Hendricks realized he would have to change up his strategy, so he threw himself onto the floor and rolled over and over as he had learned in fire-safety training. Some of the wasps were squashed beneath him, others merely danced on and off him as he went. He rolled up back onto his feet and began slashing and swatting at them once again.

And so it went; whenever Hendricks felt the wasps beginning to swarm over him he dropped and rolled, and once they were either dead or shaken off he would get back up and fight with his fly-swatters. But he couldn’t keep it up forever. The swarm seemed endless, and already the wasps were beginning to get through his suits. Besides, he was quickly growing exhausted, and he wouldn’t be able to continue dropping and rising up again much longer. Already he couldn’t dance and leap about as he had when the battle had begun.

Then, as he rose to his feet for what felt like the hundredth time, his strength seemed to give out and he stumbled and staggered sideways into the wall. The wasps, apparently sensing weakness, drove themselves at him without mercy as he flailed helplessly with the fly-swatters, his arms burning, feeling as though he hadn’t the strength for one more stroke…

Leaning against the wall, gasping for breath as he swung, Hendricks did not immediately notice the large junction box right next to him. A particularly wide, though enfeebled swing, however, caused him to turn and see it and the label just above it:

“EMERGENCY INSECTICIDE RELEASE”

Hendricks turned back to the battle, praying silently for the strength to go on…then he realized what he had just read and slammed the switch down so hard he nearly broke it off.

A cloud of chemicals burst out of the pipes lining the ceiling, drenching the whole room in the deadly gas. The wasps fell almost the moment it touched them, and when the smoke cleared Hendricks and Helen found themselves alone with three dead humans and a veritable carpet of dead wasps.

Shaking with exhaustion, racked with pain, Hendricks took the helmet off and sank to the floor, his back leaning against the wall. Helen slowly emerged from her hiding spot, an expression of unutterable amazement on her face.

“That,” she said weakly. “Was the most insane thing I have ever seen. And that’s including your wrestling a shark yesterday!”

Hendricks wasn’t sure how to take this until she rushed across the room and hugged him tightly.  

“Of course,” he gasped. “If I had bothered to look around I wouldn’t have needed to make such a fool of myself with these.”

He held up the bent and heavily stained fly-swatters.

“Yeah, it was kind of stupid,” Helen confessed with a radiant smile. “But in a good way. Besides, seeing as how you just saved my life for about the fifth time, I’m not in much position to complain.”

            Hendricks didn’t know what to say to this, so he settled for climbing to his feet and going over to the dead guards to see if there was anything they could use.

            “Do you know how to use guns?” he asked.

            “Kind of,” she said. “I’ve been shooting.”

            “Okay,” he said, picking up one of the AKs and showing it to her. “Here’s the bolt, here’s the safety. Probably want to keep that on for now. This is the selective fire button. Keep it on semi-auto; full-auto’s too dangerous, and it’s not as useful as you’d think. Got it?”

            “I think so,” she said, taking the gun and putting it to her shoulder.

            Each guard also carried two spare magazines, meaning that Helen and Hendricks got three each. Hendricks also unbuckled one of the guard’s side arm and strapped it around his own waist. He hesitated, then took the radio as well.

            “It’s probably best to know what they’re saying,” he commented. “Actually…what if we just went full out and, you know, disguised ourselves?”

            “Well,” said Helen. “I don’t think that would work, seeing as how the smallest one of these guys is about three times my size.”

            “Oh, right. Never mind.”

            “What about the grenades?” she said.

            “Eh, I’m not sure I really want to mess with those,” he said. “I don’t have any grenade training.”

            “How hard can it be?” she said. “You just pull the pin and throw. Did you ever play baseball?”

            “Yes, in high school,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t very good. And I think ‘how hard can it be?’ have been too many people’s last words.”

            “We’re on an island full of monsters,” she pointed out. “I think explosives are called for.”

            “Yeah, and I think we’ve got enough problems without carrying around a bunch of high explosives that we don’t know how to use.”

            They argued about it for several minutes, but in the end Hendricks gave in and they took a grenade apiece.

             This done, they left the apiary and continued down the corridor, going slowly and cautiously, their guns held at the ready. But they met no one, and before long they found themselves facing a set of double doors, beyond which they found the most glorious sight they had ever beheld.          

            It was, unmistakably, a lobby. A lobby with large windows set high in the wall across from them. Sunlight; real, beautiful sunlight was pouring through those windows. Hendricks, stepping out into the lobby with a moan of relief, never would have imagined he could have enjoyed the feel of it so much. Next to him, Helen shut her eyes and stood simply feeling it warming her skin.

            The trouble was, they weren’t the only ones there.

            The door they had entered protruded a little into the lobby, so they couldn’t immediately see the corners of the room. A low hiss alerted them to this fact, and they slowly turned to see Boa lying curled up in a patch of sunlight staring at them with her large yellow eyes. She flicked out her tongue, and they both knew immediately that the only reason they weren’t already dead was that she had been napping when they entered. But now she was quickly waking up again, and in a moment she would be on them.

            Hendricks instinctively began to raise his rifle, but Helen stopped him, shaking her head. Of course, it would be useless. She, for her part, was drawing out her grenade.

            Boa’s body was tensing up as they watched. She opened her mouth and hissed menacingly at them, and her deadly tail twitched in front of her.

            All at once, Helen went for broke. She pulled out the pin in two tries and threw the grenade as hard as she could at Boa, then seized Hendricks’s hand and made a dash for the door. The grenade landed and bounced up against Boa’s scales as the snake struck. She snapped at the spot they had vacated a second before, recovered, and was just about to attack again when the grenade went off directly below her.

            She shrieked in surprise and pain, and Helen thought for a moment that she had actually succeeded in killing the beast, but she didn’t dare pause to look. She and Hendricks flew out of the door and into the sunlight.

            About twenty guards, some barricaded behind sandbags, some on jeeps armed with heavy machine guns, were waiting for them just outside. Like Boa, they were caught off guard by their sudden appearance, which was the only reason Helen and Hendricks weren’t killed immediately.

            There was about half a second of silence as Helen and Hendricks tried to comprehend the magnitude of their predicament. Then, yelling in terror and frustration, they dove sideways into the bushes just as Boa slammed through the doorway behind them shrieking in rage.

            The air seemed to explode with the roar of twenty assault rifles and two machine guns firing at once. Helen and Hendricks crawled on their stomachs, trying to get out of the line of fire, but all the bullets were concentrated on the snake. And every single one of them simply ricocheted off of her.

            Boa shrieked again and charged, hitting the line of guards like a sledgehammer. She scooped up two men in her jaws, crushed them, and spat them back out. Her huge, thick body slammed into the sandbags, sending them flying as the men scrambled back, still pouring fire uselessly into her.

            Crouched in the bushes, Hendricks and Helen watched, their own guns in their hands, as Boa tore into the guards. Her tail was out of the building now, and she swept it down onto one of the jeeps, slicing it cleanly in two. It exploded a moment later. She swung it again and the other jeep exploded. She swung a third time, and it cut through a half-a-dozen men at once.

            An explosion burst against her scales, and she shrieked in pain, rocking back and seeking her opponent. More guards were racing in, presumably from other posts around the facility. Among them were another few jeeps, one of which had a grenade launcher mounted on it. It fired again, but this time she ducked and the grenade instead hit the side of the facility.

            Helen and Hendricks both screamed and covered their heads as bits of glass rained down on them from the shattered windows.

            “Let’s go!” Hendricks called to her, though where they might go, he had no idea. They crawled along, making for a thicker clump of bushes a little ways from the facility wall.

            Meanwhile, Boa was making short work of the newcomers. Time after time her tail whipped through the air, and each time she sliced through a jeep, or killed five men at a time. Time after time her head darted forward and crushed men by threes or fours. They were no match for her.

            Suddenly, with a roar two helicopter gunships soared overhead, pouring fire onto the snake, who screamed in fury and turned to meet her new foes.

            “He has gunships?!” Helen shouted in amazement.

            “Now!” Hendricks called back. “While she’s distracted!”

            He clambered to his feet and took off running, Helen right behind him.

            “Where are we going?!” Helen yelled as Boa dodge a rocket which blew a huge chunk out of the facility wall.

            “What?” Hendricks called back as Boa sent the flaming remains of a jeep flying with the flat of her tail.

            “I said, where are we going!?”

            “Somewhere else!” He answered.

            The two Hueys continued to fire on Boa, carefully keeping out of range of her deadly tail, and they seemed to be having some effect at last. In any case, she was being forced back, hissing and shrieking in pain and rage under their relentless assault.

            Then, as Helen and Hendricks ran across a stretch of open ground making for a big maintenance shed that they had a vague idea of using for cover, one of the gunships suddenly pealed off from its fellow and turned it fire upon them.

            They redoubled their speed and reached cover behind the shed just ahead of the stream of bullets, which tore into the concrete shed, but fortunately couldn’t pierce it. Hendricks flipped his gun onto full auto, ducked around the corner and fired at the chopper. It responded with another burst of minigun fire, which he only just managed to get out of the way of.

            “Now what?” Helen asked. Her eyes had a dead, hopeless look to them. Hendricks thought his own must look much the same.

            Before he could come up with an answer, assuming there was one, the helicopter appeared around the corner, firing. Ducking and yelling, they raced around the next corner. The helicopter reversed direction and circled around to catch them, forcing them back the way they came. It was like a horrible game of tag, in which the person who was ‘it’ was armed with a minigun.

            The chopper swung around the corner again. But, in its determination to catch them, it had made a fatal mistake. Boa had hit the other chopper with the remains of a destroyed jeep, which meant that this one was the only thing left the challenge her. And it had just come in range of her tail, which sliced through the air, shattering its main rotor, the pieces of which whipped through the air and embedded themselves in the concrete wall. The helicopter dropped immediately, spinning helplessly, and finally crashed into fiery ruin.

            From out of this wreck a burning figure rose slowly, like a demon from Hell. In all the smoke and fire, no features could be discerned, but both Helen and Hendricks knew him at once. Charles Simon had a very distinctive outline.

            He brushed the fire off of his face as though it were dust as he leapt down from the ruined chopper, moving purposefully in their direction. Hendricks, knowing it was no good, lifted his rifle and fired everything left in his magazine. Helen did the same. The bullets kicked up dirt around Charles, and they saw him jerk and flinch as they struck him, but he didn’t so much as slow down.

            What stopped him was the fact that Boa’s tail swept through the air behind him, knocking the wreckage of his helicopter aside as she loomed out of the smoke and haze, hissing menacingly, her red scales blending in with the fire so that she appeared to be made out of it. Charles turned, still burning, to face her: the last piece of resistance on the battlefield.

             Helen and Hendricks decided at once not to stay to find out who would win. They turned their backs on the battle and ran for it. Helen only turned back once, just in time to see Charles dodging an axe-like blow from Boa’s tail. 

Next Week:

Chapter Sixteen: The Spider