Grunt Traitor Read online

  “Because when I went to the mall to sign up, the other offices were closed.”

  I snorted.

  “I swear. So I became an oh-three-eleven. Know what that is?”

  I nodded. “Infantry. Rifleman. It’s what I am, except I’m an eleven bravo in the Army.”

  Now it was time for his eyes to narrow.

  “What did I say?”

  “You used present tense. You said I’m an eleven bravo in the Army.”

  “I did, didn’t I? The Army... OMBRA. Not much difference I suppose. Back to your story.”

  “So I went to Iraq and ended up in the Kurdish region in support of Operation Provide Comfort.”

  That was before my time, but I remembered there had been a no-fly zone in place and the US had provided support to the Kurds shortly after the first Gulf War.

  “When I was there I noted that several tribes refused to use medicine provided by UN doctors, instead insisting on local remedies. Bottom line, I was struck that they were so healthy. As it turned out, they’d discovered the medicinal values of the local flora, something that many indigenous groups used. Like how the American Indians discovered that willow bark produced a substance that could relieve pain and inflammation. What we now call aspirin.

  “So when I got out, I got a veteran’s loan and went to school. I might have been slow to find out what I wanted to do, but I figured it out eventually.”

  “And then the aliens invaded.”

  That grin again. “Know the difference between an ethnobotanist and a xenobotanist?”

  I shook my head.

  “Aliens. Now that there are actually card-carrying aliens bringing their own flora, I can spend my time figuring out what the flora is, and what sort of relationship the flora has with the aliens, and what sort of relationship it will have with us.”

  “Relationship, huh?” I chuckled. “Whatever it is, it’s a weapon.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They’re not going to import something just because it’s pretty or it smells good. When we traveled to Afghanistan we had limited space on the aircraft. I imagine it’s the same situation with the aliens. Limited space. They probably brought seeds and then dispersed them in urban environments. Mark my words, it was to do something bad to us.”

  That grin.

  “You keep smiling. You do realize that this is the end of the world, right?”

  He kept smiling even as he shook his head slowly. “Not the end, just the beginning of something new. Yeah, I’m smiling. It’s a golden time. I’m at the pinnacle of my career. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of is within a thirty-mile reach. Yeah, it’s fucked up what happened, but I’m about moving forward, not looking behind.”

  “Did you lose anyone?”

  His grin tightened. “I told you, I’m not looking behind.”

  I suddenly got it. He had to be happy. He had to be positive. After all, the opposite was far worse. He approached happiness like it was a job, and to him it probably was. Who knew what his story was? Whatever had happened, he desperately didn’t want to think about it. I’d respect his privacy. We were all a little broken. We all had something we didn’t want to think about. We all had something to hide.

  “We’ll sleep in four-hour breaks. I’ll take the first shift. I’ll wake you at nine.”

  He nodded, rolled over so he faced the couch, then was still.

  I turned to stare out the window and watched as the sun rose over my alien-infested planet.

  Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun. Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, Never! Never!

  Tecumseh Shawnee

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DRUMS BEAT IN a darkness so dense it held me in its cloying grasp. I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t blink. I wasn’t even sure if my eyes were open. The drums grew louder and louder—

  I awoke with a start.

  Dupree stood unmoving at the window, staring out.

  “What is it?” I uncurled myself from the chair, my back protesting.

  “Golf,” was all he said, but the word held a mystical quality it shouldn’t have.

  I jumped to my feet and went to the window. Sure enough, three old men were out there playing golf. I pegged them to be in their seventies. They were all rail thin. One wore red paisley pants; another wore orange paisley. The third wore pants with neon green alligators on them. They all wore polo golf shirts, two-tone golf shoes and golf caps.

  I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

  “How long have they been there?”

  “Looks like they played all eighteen.” He pointed. “This is the last hole.”

  The grass looked too long to play in, but as I thought that, my eyes began to pick up some details they’d missed before. Here and there were spaces where the grass was short, as if someone had come and cut it, or in this case, hit a ball from it.

  “I bet they do this every day.”

  They were playing directly towards us. The green was beneath our window. The one with orange paisley pants selected a club and began to look our way and address the ball. Oh, shit! I grabbed Dupree and hit the deck. My hand slipped free and he remained standing.

  “Get down. They’ll see us.”

  He shook his head. “They can’t. The window is mirrored.”

  I got slowly to my feet. “How do you know?”

  He stood transfixed on the sight. “During my first shift, I decided to make a round of the building just to be sure.”

  The old man hit the ball.

  We watched it sail through the air and land on the green, which I now noted had been cut. The ball hit, backspun, and ran towards the flag, only to stop three inches shy. This guy was no slacker. Then again, the threesome had probably played the game at this club every day, if not multiple times a day, since the invasion. I couldn’t help smiling. I’d joked about it earlier, but to play golf at the end of the world was to laugh in the face of the invasion. I was reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where soldiers are surfing even though artillery rounds are raining down in the water near them. I never understood the scene until I went to war. I’d always thought that when Colonel Kilgore had his men surf it was an indulgence of the director. Now I knew better. What was it he’d said to Sheen’s character? “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, Captain, it’s safe to surf this beach.” I’d always thought of it as a horrible demonstration of hubris, but now I knew, just as these three old men golfed in the face of the demise of the human race, it was motivation to continue. For these three old men, golf was their septuagenarian middle finger to the alien race trying to orchestrate not only their demise, but the end of the game forever.

  I clapped in appreciation.

  Dupree joined in and as two more balls hit the green and backpedaled to make a handsome triangle surrounding the cup, we continued clapping, an obtuse soundtrack to an ignoble event.

  The man with alligator pants must have heard something. He pulled a compound bow from his golf bag and nocked an arrow. He turned, tracked something just out of our view, then shot.

  A deer stumbled forward and face-planted. It was a doe—an illegal kill back when there were laws, but now, when the markets were closed, meat was at a premium.

  The other two golfers patted the shooter on the back as he fist-pumped the air. The moment lasted exactly five seconds, then fear carjacked their happiness. They grabbed their bags and began to run in our direction.

  We strained to see what they’d seen, but it soon became evident as two humans loped into view. Each held pieces of wood which they used to hit the deer over and over, splattering its head and crushing its ribs. Even wh
en the head was unrecognizable, they didn’t stop.

  I ran to my bag and grabbed a Leupold Mark 4 CQT scope and centered in on them. They were average height. Both with brown hair. Their clothes were ripped and torn. One was naked except for a single shoe. As they bashed the dead deer over and over, it was as if they were mindless, like... zombies.

  As soon as I thought the word, I hated it. To think that aliens would turn the end of the world into a bad Walking Dead rerun didn’t wash. There had to be something else going on here.

  I noticed their chests, shoulders, and necks. What I’d originally thought of as pieces of material looked like something else in the scope’s magnification. Spots, maybe. Or growths.

  Suddenly they stopped beating on the deer. Their attention jerked to the old man with alligators on his pants as he ran back to pick up a club he’d dropped. They took off after him. I took one look at their speed and knew the guy had no chance. I grabbed my rifle and ran for the side door. I heard Dupree following close behind. I shoved my scope into my pocket as I ran. When I hit the door to the outside, I turned right and jumped down the five stairs and onto the grass. I spun around the side of the building and brought up my rifle. I was too late. They’d caught the old guy and were drumming him with the wood just as they’d done the deer.

  I shot one in the head.

  The other turned to see where the sound had come from.

  When we locked eyes, I knew I’d have to pull the trigger again. I made sure he went down.

  Then I saw the other two old men, huddled near the far side of the building. I waved them over.

  They came, giving the dead a wide stare.

  “Where’d you come from?” asked the one in the orange paisley pants. Up close, I saw he wore a soiled gray polo shirt. He’d grown a beard that seemed as if it had never seen scissors.

  The other one stared forlornly at the body. “Damn it, Gene. Why’d you have to go back for the club?”

  Orange paisley apparently felt the need to explain. “It was his favorite.”

  “That killed him,” I added.

  Orange paisley nodded.

  Meanwhile, Dupree had moved to the two dead men and knelt on the ground. “Now this is interesting.”

  I glanced over at the old man named Gene, his eyes staring wide to the sky.

  “Careful of the fungees,” orange paisley warned. The word sounded like funjeez.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “We don’t know. They come from the Hive Zone and kill everything they see.”

  Dupree whistled. “Fungees, huh? Not a bad name, I suppose.” He turned to me. “Mason, let me show you something.”

  I kept my eyes on the two men. Neither looked as if they were armed. Approaching them, I noticed there were growths around their chests, shoulders and necks. They looked like skin tags, but were too large.

  “This has to be from the family Ophiocordycipitaceae. It’s a family of parasitic fungi.” He moved to the other body and began inspecting it, never touching it.

  I took a broken piece of stick from the ground and prodded the flesh around these growths, then began poking the sacs. One of the sacs opened, releasing a barely perceptible whiff of spores.

  Dupree saw what I’d done and backed quickly away. “Get away, Mason.” He frowned as he pulled me away. “Never do that again.”

  I moved with him. “What’s it going to do?”

  “Your prodding released some spores. I think if we breathe them in, we’ll end up like those two.” He turned to the old men. “What do you call them? Fungees?”

  They nodded.

  Red paisley pointed to his neck. “They look like mushrooms.”

  Dupree nodded. “Very similar.” To me, he said, “Let’s get back inside.”

  “Are you two going to be okay?” I held my weapon in low ready, with the butt still next to my shoulder, but the barrel pointing towards the ground, so I could bring it up and pop off a few rounds if I had to... not that they seemed the type to want to overpower me. Still, better safe than dead.

  They nodded.

  “Then get out of here. If you want, you can come back for your friend tomorrow.”

  They started to back away.

  “Wait a minute,” Dupree said. “How many of these have you seen?”

  They exchanged a look, and it was orange paisley who finally spoke. “First one we saw was a few weeks ago. Then one or two every couple of days since.”

  “Have they shown the same behavior as these?”

  “If you mean did they try and kill anything that moved, then the answer is yes. At first we thought they were zombies by the way they acted, but then zombies eat flesh, right? And since these things don’t eat flesh, they can’t be zombies, right?”

  Dupree grinned. “Right. They are definitely not zombies. At least not like the ones we came to know and love in pre-invasion popular culture.”

  Respecting your opponent is the key to winning any bout. Hold your enemy in contempt and you may miss the strategy behind his moves.

  David H. Hackworth

  CHAPTER NINE

  BACK INSIDE I asked, “What did you mean when you said not the kind of zombies we know?”

  He sat on the couch, making notes in a small green notebook with a stubby pencil. “Ever heard of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis?”

  “I can’t even spell it.”

  Dupree glanced at me. Always that grin. “You’re funny, Mason.”

  “Didn’t that bother you, out there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure did.” He was drawing something.

  “But you’re smiling.”

  He paused in his drawing, but didn’t look at me. “Know the difference between smiling and gritting your teeth?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, sometimes.” He finished the drawing and showed it to me. “This is a badly drawn representation of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.”

  It looked like an ant with a periscope, and I told him so.

  He turned it sideways, then back again. “It does, doesn’t it? But of course it’s not. So here’s what you’re seeing. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is an entomopathogenic fungus—a fungus that is parasitic in nature and can kill or seriously harm the host. It’s also known as the zombie fungus. These fungi usually attach to the external body surface in the form of microscopic spores, like the ones you probably released from that sac.” He shook his head and made a face. “The spores germinate and colonize the epidermis, eventually boring through it to reach the body cavity. Then the fungal cells proliferate in the host body cavity, usually as walled hyphae or in the form of wall-less protoplasts.”

  “What does all that mean?”

  “This fungus enters the body of a specific ant in the Amazon. It takes root, then removes all motor control from the ant. Once the ‘periscope,’ as you call it, grows, the fungus then forces the ant to climb to a position so that the fungus can anchor it there. Then after a few days, the ant sprouts fruiting bodies that disperse the spores over a larger area, thanks to the height the ant reached before death.”

  I stared at the drawing, then at Dupree. “Are you fucking serious?”

  This time he didn’t smile. “Serious.”

  “Could these be terrestrial in origin?”

  “We’ve never see it in humans, not that it isn’t possible. There’d have to be some sort of genetic manipulation, though. What concerns me is the apparent territorial drive.”

  “The what?”

  “Based solely on the pair we saw, it appears that the hosts attack those who aren’t infected. This could be a species imperative or a territorial drive. Either way it’s bad for those who aren’t infected, since the infected humans are the vector for this fungus.”

  “But how do they know? How can they tell us apart?”

  “Cancelling out the idea of a hive mind, I’d say it would be purely visual. The growths identify a host to another host.”

  I thought about this for a second. “So if we want
ed to move among them, maybe travel deeper into their territory, we could fabricate some of these growths and wear them. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It could be possible, but we should try it under laboratory conditions first.”

  The sun was going down; we had to get ready to move. With the two old golfers aware of our location we were no longer safe anyway. There was no telling whether they lived alone, or with a commune of flesh-loving octogenarians keen to have a little fresh meat between their dentures.

  I packed up my things and prepared to move out.

  Dupree had yet to move.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The scientist had been making rapid calculations on the pad. He was sweating even though it was cool. He glanced at me, worry in his eyes. “If this is the next battlefront, then we’re in serious trouble.” He tapped the paper with his pencil. “We’ve had reports that this urban flora is growing at a rate of one foot every hour. Such a growth rate is unprecedented. We need to find it and find it fast.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  He talked fast and low. “The fungus has to come from somewhere. My guess is it’s being delivered from an alien plant. This means that there’s now a third fauna species out there, pollinating this plant. What it does and what it looks like we don’t know. But it could be as or more deadly than the fungus.”

  I set my teeth. I was used to bad news. This was nothing new. “Then come on and let’s go. We have miles to make and I want to get to Azusa at the very least before daybreak.”

  “How far is that?”

  “It’s only twelve miles on the freeway. But it’s going to be more like twenty, hugging the mountains.”

  The sound of a door opening made me spin. Rookie move. I must not have locked it. I knelt and readied to fire. Footsteps shuffled closer. When I got a visual, I almost pulled the trigger. Orange paisley stepped through the door.

  “Do not move,” I ordered.

  He held up his hands. Tears had scored clean rivers through the grime on his face. “Don’t shoot.”