Wastelands Read online

  He grimaced and continued. “There is, of course, no runway. No airport, and no possibility of landing. In a normal battle, in a mission like this, we would send highly trained paratroopers in behind enemy lines to attack them from all sides. Unfortunately, all our highly trained men are either dead or deployed elsewhere, which means it’s all up to you!”

  I heard the contempt in his voice, but apparently some of the others didn’t. They thought he was joking and laughed.

  The Sarge waited for the noise to die down. “That said, the mission is still the same. You’ve had your training. Some of it may have even soaked in. So it’s time to get out there and make these bastards pay!”

  He glared around at the recruits as if daring anyone to defy him. “Do you have any questions?” he demanded.

  Usually such a statement would be rewarded with silence or a “No, sir!” But this shit was, as the Sarge himself had said, about to get real.

  “Sir, are there any wraiths on the ground?” a man asked.

  The Sarge turned a baleful glare on the man, but it was a valid question. The goblins were bad enough, but the wraiths were much worse. As far as I knew, no one had managed to kill even one, and the things they could do with their magic–well, you didn’t want to find out firsthand.

  “There have been none reported,” the Sarge replied. “Whether that will remain the case when you sorry excuses for soldiers touch the ground, I couldn’t say. It depends on whether they think you’re much of a threat.”

  Again came a smattering of laughter, and this time the Sarge responded with a wolfish grin of his own, as if he had actually tried to be funny. I thought that he fell short of the mark by some margin.

  “Anyone else?” he asked, in apparent acknowledgement that questions were important.

  “If there’s one of their ships above the town, how will we get close enough to do any good?”

  The wolfish grin grew sour. “We’re going to fly under it,” the Sarge replied.

  Under it? I thought. Holy fuck.

  But the Sarge hadn’t finished. “In fact, we’re close to being there now. The brain boys figured out a way to jam their sensors, and we lucky ones have the honor and privilege of testing it out. All going well, you boys and girls will be able to drop in before that big old ship even knows we’re there.”

  Well, that was good news at least, I thought.

  But someone else didn’t think so. “If that’s the case, then why don’t we just bomb the shit out of the ships? Let the air force boys clean it up.”

  The Sarge was obviously getting annoyed by the questions. “How the fuck would I know?” he asked in a tone that clearly said that decisions like those were well above his pay grade.

  “Now, if you’re all done testing my patience, it’s time to move!” He checked his watch. “In one minute, the doors will open. If you’re not hooked on by then, I would strongly suggest that you learn how to fly.”

  And just like that, the relative calm inside the plane turned into chaos.

  Perhaps in a more normal world, the military would have run more smoothly, without raw recruits resorting to elbows and fists to fight their way to the front of the line. I certainly remembered more order in my first go around.

  I was jostled and shoved close to the back, but not all the way, solely because I’d been sitting close to the doors.

  As for the landing, I knew I would be lucky to get up and walk away from this. If I fell wrong, the pain was likely to nearly knock me out. And then a goblin would come along and blow my head off without any trouble whatsoever. Yet I was damned if I was going to leave this world as a coward. I’d been lying about the pain for months, hoping to get a shot at coming back to the fight.

  And here I was, getting exactly what I’d asked for.

  Lying in a hospital bed and doing round upon round of physical therapy while others fought and died just wasn’t in me. Sure, the docs could have taken my leg years ago, and saved me all the extra surgeries and therapy, but I’d begged and begged to keep it because amputation was an automatic discharge. And because it was borderline, the doctors had honored my request and tried to repair it.

  So, with my heart pounding in my chest and determination clenching my jaw, I stood my ground and hooked myself in place, ready to take my turn at hurling myself out the door.

  “Ready in Five! Four! Three!” the Sarge yelled, but that was as far as he got. I don’t know if the tech he’d mentioned to hide us from the alien sensors didn’t work, or if one of the goblins from the ground had simply looked up and seen us.

  Either way, we had not gone undetected. The plane shuddered and groaned as bolts of energy pierced the fuselage from multiple directions at once.

  It was simply bad luck that one of those bolts caught the Sarge squarely under the chin and tore off half his face.

  4

  The recruits yelled in anger and fear, and then started shouting for the door to be opened. Someone at the front of the line must have listened, because suddenly, we began to move. There was a brief sense of relief throughout the plane.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  The entire left side of the plane seemed to vanish, and with it, a dozen men went screaming into the air. And then it seemed like everything was on fire. People were shouting, and I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life.

  This was it, I thought. I was going to die without ever getting a chance for revenge. It was shitty luck. All the surgeries and rehab for nothing.

  Except that the plane, while not as stable as before, didn’t seem to be about to crash. We were buffeted about like there was heavy turbulence, but were not careening to the ground. And my line of recruits was still moving, still leaving out the door in an orderly fashion, still able to do their jobs.

  I was close to the door now, just a couple of people away, and it seemed I might actually make it. The guy behind me was growling at me to hurry up, and I could see why. The flames were getting closer and would be on us in seconds. As the man in front of me reached the door and stepped out, the plane shuddered violently. I didn’t want to think about what that might mean, and really didn’t want to think about the way the floor seemed to drop away, and so I reached for the door and pulled myself toward it.

  The impatient man behind couldn’t wait. “Get out!” he shouted, and physically pushed me the last half a step.

  I pushed off, away from the plane as I had been trained to do, pulling my arms in tight as I fell. The hook, still attached to the plane, pulled my ripcord, and I felt my parachute open with a jolt.

  And then I watched the horror unfold beside me.

  The last shudder I’d felt had been fatal. The plane had lost an entire wing and was falling to the ground faster than I was. The man behind me was still at the door, engulfed in flames, and I was amazed that I could even register such a small detail. And then I knew I’d never forget it.

  I watched in a state of shocked disbelief as the whole plane, together with the fifty or so recruits still on board, erupted into spectacular fire. One of the fuel tanks must have ruptured. Either that, or it had suddenly turned into the Hindenburg.

  It seemed I was one of the lucky ones. If it could be considered lucky to be one of the survivors drifting down over the town of Lauder Hill while the alien assholes took pot shots at us from the ground.

  Dangling in the air, I could only watch as the remains of the plane crashed into a hospital below, turning it all into a fireball. I heard the muffled explosion at the same time as I heard curses and more from the other recruits. Someone nearby was wailing, panicking that they were going to die, and I couldn’t refute their logic.

  All I could do was swear and look about, hoping that the breeze wasn’t going to take me into the flames below, and hoping that the goblins would choose other targets to shoot.

  “Fuck,” I said to myself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The word came out automatically, a reflex action just like the way I was gripping the straps of my chute with ever
ything I had and looking wildly around as if I had even the slimmest chance of avoiding any danger I happened to see.

  “Fuck this for a joke,” I muttered. “Fuck!”

  I was drifting closer and closer to the flames, which seemed very bright in the dim light. I couldn’t tell yet if I was going to land in the middle of them, but the way my luck in battle went, it seemed more than likely. At least I had dropped down far enough that the goblins on the ground no longer seemed to view me as a target.

  At the same time, I found myself wondering at the darkness. Surely it was still daytime?

  Had the flight been longer than I thought?

  No. It had not. The sun was still shining, but there was something between it and the ground.

  That something was an honest-to-fuck spaceship.

  A massive thing hovering in the air high above, it would have been a disappointment to many Hollywood special effects departments. Instead of being made up of a million different sections, giving the whole thing texture and depth, the goblins’ ship was nothing more than a smooth, featureless disk big enough to block out the sun over half a city. It wasn’t even metallic, instead appearing to be some sort of dark ceramic.

  I couldn’t figure out how it had deployed the goblins, or for that matter, how it managed to hold itself in the air. For all I knew, it could have relied on some anti-gravity device, or on the magic of those in control.

  As the wind blew me closer, I figured there was about an eighty percent chance I was going to land in the flames and burn up on the spot. As for the other twenty percent–well, the goblins would finish me off.

  My life was likely measured in minutes. Yet for some reason, that didn’t stop my brain from offering an old quote from a science fiction writer.

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.”

  Or something like that. It wasn’t like I had a laptop open with Wikipedia there on the screen for me to check. But there was some logic to the idea. At the same time, it missed a key truth. Because, from what we had all seen on the news, the wraiths weren’t employing any sort of technology at all.

  They were employing real live magic.

  I was pretty sure that sufficiently advanced technology would one day get to the point of being able to duplicate that magic, but that wasn’t the point. I’d never believed in clairvoyance. Tarot readers, magicians, psychics. The Asian chi masters who seemed to be able to do superhuman things.

  In my head, all of that was rubbish. Magic wasn’t real. Nor were ghosts, and if there was some supernatural event that couldn’t be explained by science, that was just because science hadn’t progressed far enough yet.

  To that list of things I didn’t believe in, UFO sightings weren’t number one, but they were certainly up there.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I said, casting all my philosophical thoughts aside. The chances of landing in the flames had just increased to about ninety-five percent. I was heading straight for them and was close enough that I could smell the fumes as the fire hungrily awaited my arrival. Wood, metal, paint, and a bunch of other odors, combined with an acrid smoke that made my eyes water. I was sweating, and my curses turned into a singular wail of fear as I reached up and pulled on the straps with everything I had, raising my feet at the same time.

  I could have gone splat into the burning side of the hospital, but I think the heat of the fire helped to save me. It created an updraft that sent me bobbing along just above the flames. The heat was still intense, and the smoke was unbearable.

  The gust of wind pushed me along, across the flaming hospital roof, and when that wasn’t enough to keep me aloft, I kinda hobbled across it for a bit and then kicked off again.

  It was just enough. My chute didn’t let me down. It kept me aloft, mostly away from the flames, although my right boot caught fire for a moment. Then, within a handful of seconds, I was down on the ground in a parking lot that had been turned into a war zone. I did manage to land on the left side of my body, but my fucking right leg still hurt like hell.

  And that breeze wasn’t done. My chute caught another gust and tried to rip me off my feet. I had to run and skip to stay upright, and narrowly avoided careening into an ambulance that for some reason had tipped over onto its side.

  “Fuck!” I said yet again, picturing my grandmother’s disapproving expression as the word slipped out. With a convulsive effort, I hit the release button and my chute tumbled off into the distance.

  I was puffing and panting as if I’d run a marathon. But I was alive. Un-shot, unburnt, and not caught in the wreckage of the plane, some of which I could see scattered in the parking lot around me.

  I needed to sit down, so I did, leaning against the hood of the ambulance on its side. Somehow, I’d managed to come down all alone. There were no other recruits near me. And if there were any goblins or wraiths, I couldn’t see them.

  I had survived. For now. After a moment or two to catch my breath, I thumbed my comms unit.

  “Private Rogan Ward reporting,” I said. “Awaiting orders. Over.”

  5

  Of course, the only response I got was a few indecipherable words and static, barely audible over the explosions that were still shaking the ground not far away.

  “Hello?” I said. “Is anyone there? Over.”

  More static. Another few words, something that sounded like a curse.

  “Fuck,” I said again, and thumbed the comms unit off. Maybe I was in a dead zone, I thought. Or maybe that son-of-a-bitch spaceship was blocking our comms somehow, instead of us blocking their sensors, as if that wasn’t one of the biggest fucking jokes I’d never heard.

  Another fun joke was that I was all by myself in an unfamiliar city that was under attack by a goblin army. My best chance to do anything meaningful was to find others from my unit and go from there, and try not to die while looking for them.

  A quick glance at the sky showed me there were no other soldiers still on their way down. I figured that I’d been blown further off course than anyone else, so if they were anywhere, my unit would be on the other side of the hospital.

  It was as good a goal as any.

  With that, I did a quick check of myself and my gear, just to see what festering piece of cosmic bad luck had latched onto me this time. But miracle upon miracles, I hadn’t broken or twisted or strained anything new, and all my gear seemed intact. My only injury came in the form of a fine set of blisters on the palms of my hands, courtesy of my efforts with my straps of the chute.

  Painful, but hardly debilitating beyond what I was used to dealing with. It didn’t stop me from activating my AC lens and looking around at a world suddenly as bright as ordinary day.

  The AC lens was a new development, a remarkable tool that hadn’t been available until a few days ago. The clever guys in research and development figured we needed to know what we were always up against. So they put together a tool that looked for all the world like a set of Google glasses and which had a number of very interesting functions.

  The first was the one I’d just activated. They could help us see in low light, almost as clearly as day. But the other functions were more impressive.

  The goblins came in different types, wearing different sorts of armor. My AC lens could scan anyone in range and return a readout of their attributes and characteristics. It could tell me within the blink of an eye if I was looking at a human, a goblin, a wraith, and what level, armor, and attributes it had.

  Theoretically, I could then use that information to plan my attack, based on the known strengths and weaknesses of what I was facing.

  “Okay, Rogan, you unlucky shit,” I said to myself. “What are you gonna do? Stay here behind the ambulance until you piss your pants and a squad of goblins turns up to put you out of your misery? Or are you going to kill some of them before you die?”

  It wasn’t good odds either way. Guys who got separated from their teams didn’t usually last long. But doing something was better than n
othing. So I stood, looked about, and set off at a hobbling jog that would have had the Sarge yelling his face off and made even the new recruits laugh.

  The Sergeant. What a hardass. Not that it had helped him in the end. I figured his burning corpse was somewhere nearby, in the wreckage of the plane, but I had no intention of looking for it. Still, as I tried the comms again without any response, I felt a sense of regret.

  We’d lost too many in this war, and we didn’t have many more able-bodied people left to lose. Then I laughed at myself, remembering my leg. Maybe the last of the able-bodied ones had gone down with that plane.

  So it was up to me with my fucked-up leg. Then I laughed again. That was great, just great.

  I was almost to the emergency entrance of the hospital—the only section still standing and not on fire—when a screaming woman burst out of the door carrying a small child clasped to her front.

  She wore only a hospital gown with single-use plastic booties on her feet, and as soon as she saw me, she charged in my direction as if I was her personal savior. Her screaming became a more coherent wail.

  “Help!” she hollered. “Help us, please help!”

  Before I could respond, however, I saw something that was worse than fire chasing her out of the hospital.

  Behind the woman and her child, stepping out of the emergency entrance as if he had a right to be there, was a goblin.

  An alien invader in full body armor, carrying one of their energy rifles in both hands.

  6

  My AC lens clicked into action, showing me the following stats:

  Class: Goblin

  Level: II

  Armor: Grade III

  Weapon: Energy rifle

  Capability: None apparent

  It was a bit like stats from a role-playing game, except that ‘Goblin’ wasn’t listed as a race. With these alien assholes, there were only two–that we knew of at least–so it didn’t make sense to include that. To me, a Goblin was just like a Fighter, and a Wraith was some kind of magic user, a Sorcerer maybe.