Infected

Made from the same strange fibrous material, the construct had the primitive, ominous aura of a Stonehenge or an Aztec temple. The four crossing lines, the ones that ran east-west, were high arches, the apex of the smallest one near the construct’s center reaching just over ten feet. The tallest arch, the one at the open end, rose a good twenty feet into the night sky. The four arches looked like a framework cone half buried in the frozen forest ground.

He didn’t know what the freakish thing was made of, but at least it wasn’t people.

The two parallel pieces of the tail — for lack of a better word — stretched back some thirty yards from the arches. They were each as thick as a log and had a line of thin, spiky growths running down their lengths.

The hatchlings crawled about the ma.s.sive construct, clinging with their tentacle legs, a moving ma.s.s scampering across the strand-maze with the ease of darting wolf spiders. They splashed through the suddenly muddy forest floor — the heat from the construct had melted all the snow around the two oak trees.

Dew and Ogden were about fifty yards from the construct, staring straight into the cavern created by the arches.

"How far out are the Apaches?" Dew asked Ogden. Ogden waved to his radioman, who quietly moved over and handed Ogden a handset. Ogden whispered for a few seconds, then said, "ETA two minutes."

The seconds ticked by. Dew heard the faint approach of the Apaches’ rotors. The hatchlings suddenly scattered from the skeletal green construct, some taking refuge in the sprawling oak trees, others staying on the ground.

"What’s happening?" Ogden asked. "Did they hear the choppers?"

"Maybe so. Let your men know it’s go time. We might have to..." Dew’s voice trailed off; the construct started to glow.

The fibrous arches illuminated the oak branches and the forest floor with a suffused white light. Faint at first, barely discernible, the glow quickly grew so bright that Dew couldn’t look through the night-vision binoculars.

"Dew, what the h.e.l.l is going on in there?"

Dew shook his head. "I don’t

Ogden softly called out orders. Dew rose to a crouch and quickly moved forward, ignoring his popping knees. The snow crunched and dry branches snapped underfoot. He was painfully aware of how quiet the Airborne soldiers were in comparison, almost silent despite the noisy footing. Once upon a time, Dew would have moved through the woods without a sound — getting old was a b.i.t.c.h-and-a-half.

He stopped after advancing thirty yards. The cover of night was gone. The construct’s glow lit up the two oaks as bright as day. Long shadows radiated away into the forest. The very ground itself seemed to vibrate with an ominous rhythm, a rapidly pulsing heartbeat of some monstrous evil. Dew felt a sense of trepidation, of wrongness, like he’d never known before.

This s.h.i.+t’s going south in a d.a.m.n hurry.

"Give me some normal binoculars," Dew snapped. Someone handed him a pair that were, of course, army-green. He stared into the depths of

the archway, where the light was brighter than anywhere else, so bright it hurt his eyes and he had to squint to see anything at all. "Ogden, ETA on the Apaches?"

"Sixty seconds."

A blast of anxiety ripped through Dew’s body. He’d never felt fear like this, never felt anything like this. Even in the midst of the hand-tohand fighting that had wiped out his platoon back in ’Nam, even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t been this scared; he couldn’t say why.

The construct grew still brighter. One of the soldiers suddenly dropped his M4 rifle and ran, screaming, back into the forest. Several of the others slowly stepped backward, fear wrapped up in their young faces.

"Hold your positions!" Ogden shouted. "Next man to run gets shot in the back! Now get down!"

The bounce of long shadows betrayed the motion of the hatchlings sprinting toward the platoon. Their strange, pyramid bodies slid through the woods. Like swarming insects, they’d detected a threat and were rus.h.i.+ng out to meet it, to protect the hive.

"Ogden, we’ve got company!"

"Squads Four and Five, hold this position!" Ogden shouted. "All other squads move forward to support! Fire at will!" Gunfire erupted before he finished the last sentence.

Dew didn’t move. The construct’s glow didn’t fade, but it changed, sliding from the blinding white to a deep emerald-green glow. Suddenly Dew realized he was looking not just into the arch, but beyond it — the field of green reached far off into the distance.

Stunned, he glanced up from the binoculars. The construct hadn’t moved; neither had the woods behind it. He again peered through the binoculars. The field of green was inside the arch but stretched back for what must have been miles. But that was impossible, simply impossible.

M4 carbines and M249 machine guns roared all around him, but Dew remained steadfast. A man’s scream filled the night as one of the hatchlings made it past the hail of bullets. Dew didn’t flinch, or even notice, because he saw something in that field of green.

He saw movement.

Not the movement of a single hatchling, but movement so ma.s.sive that it was the field of green. His eyes picked out individual creatures a

fraction of a second at a time, like seeing a single ant in the midst of a swarming, angry hill. It was an ocean of creatures, reaching for the archway, pouring forward from some impossible distance.