Crysis Escalation

The Goat





Chinatown, New York, 2034

FUBAR. Clusterf*ck. There were so many good ways to describe what had just happened to them, Chino thought. The Brits, the f*cking Brits, had let them down. Left them badly blowing in the wind. It had been foolish to trust them.

CELL had played it smart. Let them come in to the city proper. Let them get in underneath the framework of the dome they were building over the city destroyed by the Ceph incursion. Then the CELL gun emplacements had started up. They’d torn into people on the street. The rounds had ripped through cover. The fire had been so intense it had brought buildings down on top of the resistance fighters inside.

The gun emplacements broke them, split them, sent them running. Then CELL moved in on the ground, supported by VTOLs and helicopter gunships in the air. Their spec ops teams had gone after the resistance’s hard core and the leadership. The rest they had left to the rank and file. What they used to call contractors, now they were more like indentured gunmen. The resistance fighters, most of whom were experienced soldiers, many with special forces backgrounds, tore into the CELL gunmen, but there were just so many of them and they had air and fire support.

The resistance had been broken. Chino knew that. He didn’t know who was alive or who was dead. Had any been captured? It hadn’t looked like CELL were taking prisoners. They had risked checking the Macronet feed when they’d been hiding. There were purges going on all over the word. CELL forces assisted by local police and military were arresting or killing the so-called “terrorists” in every country the resistance operated in. It looked like they had been betrayed. They had put too many of their eggs in one basket. Put too much trust in people they shouldn’t have. The operation had been too much about hope and not enough about their actual capabilities. CELL were never going to let them get close to their NY operation. They had far too much to lose here.

And his man Dane hadn’t come back from the Robin Hood. He wondered if the Brits had f*cked him too. Betrayed him. Handed him over to CELL. In the cold nights to come, Chino was going to keep himself warm by thinking about what he would like to do to Captain f*cking-Harper of the Royal-f*cking-Navy. What kind of candy-assed outfit calls itself ‘royal’ anyway, he wondered bitterly, delusions of f*cking grandeur, is what that is?

They had spent the day lying low. They had hidden in partially destroyed buildings. It had made Chino nervous. The last time he had been in Manhattan it had been crawling with dangerous alien killing machines. CELL had apparently cleared all the Ceph out. That was their justification for the heavy-duty gun emplacements, not that they really needed an excuse. They owned New York now.

There were eight of them still together, in two inflatable raiding craft. They were making their way down the Bowery heading south for the time being. CELL would expect them to run to the north, so they hadn’t. They would either double back or find another exfiltration route when the opportunity presented itself.

Chino was lying across the prow of the IRC, his Marshall pump-action shotgun pointing out from under the scrim they had lain across the top of the boat. The scrim was laced with a type of foil that was supposed to confuse thermal imagery. Chino, however, was not willing to bet his life on it.

Behind him, also lying down on the boat, their weapons just pointing out from under the scrim, were Earl and Hank.

Earl was on the left hand side of the boat, covering the Bowery and over into the Lower East Side. He had to be in his mid-forties at least but the x-Delta sniper had looked after himself. The quiet Missourian was wiry with leathery skin and still carried an ancient M14 rifle. Chino’s weird, nanosuited friend, Lazy Dane, went way back with Earl. They had both served in D squadron’s recce/sniper troop in Delta Force.

Hank, another southerner, had been 1st Marine. He had known Alcatraz briefly during the evacuation of New York. Earl had then ended up going to work for CELL. The thoughtful bucktoothed Georgian had witnessed what CELL was like first hand and deserted after finding that the terms and conditions had been altered so much that he was effectively going to end up a lifelong indentured servant of the multinational company. Hank’s Mk 60 medium machine gun was pointing out the right side of the boat. Into what had been Chinatown.

Davis was an outspoken self-proclaimed Irish-African American and southie from Boston. He had been part of the Navy’s SEAL delivery vehicle team and was the best boatman that Chino had ever seen. He was lying down in the back of the IRC, piloting it via a periscope sticking through the scrim and with the aid of guidance from Chino on the prow.

Davis’ suggestion for exfiltration was to head to a dive store he knew in Downtown, scavenge it for working closed circuit or SCUBA diving gear and head to Brooklyn subsurface. As a plan went it wasn’t for the fainthearted, and it was problematic in that Earl wasn’t dive qualified. Nor were two of the members of Sarah’s crew in the other IRC that was trailing them.

Chinatown’s getting weird, Chino thought. He’d been in New York when it had been close to a hundred per cent humidity before but the mist was new. The lower part of Manhattan was still under about ten feet of water. It covered the first storey of most of the buildings. Plant life had returned in a big way, flourishing in the moist environment, returning the city to its roots as a swampy island, Chino guessed. Trees, mosses and other climbing plants crept up the side of buildings, obscuring once glowing signs in Hanzi script. It reminded Chino a little of the swamps of Florida and the Bayous of Louisiana. He was half expecting to see an alligator slither out the second storey window of a laundry and swim across in front of them.

The moonlight shining through the thick mist gave the whole place an eerie, haunted feeling. Haunted would be right, Chino thought, a lot of people died on these streets. He immediately thought back to his brother-resistance fighter, Lazy Dane, and all the dead people the nanosuited soldier saw. He hoped Dane was okay.

Then it sounded like the world was ending. He was soaked as water was kicked up in a line stretching out in front of him. He glanced behind to see Sarah’s boat. The IRC looked like it had been folded down the middle. The thirty millimetre tracers from the gun emplacements looked like stars tumbling out of the night sky at them.

Chino heard the muffled outboard engine rev up as Davis took the boat wide out into the Bowery, behind the line of fire, and slewed it right into a tiny alley that Chino was sure it couldn’t fit down. The boat was a tight fit, Earl and Hank had to roll off the side and into the well but Davis made the turn and gunned the motor, accelerating as fast as he could.

Behind them the rounds started flying through the walls as the auto-cannons tried to walk their aim in on the flimsy boat. Chino hated this. This wasn’t a fight for someone who was basically infantry. All he could do was watch, shout warnings and hope that a thirty millimetre round didn’t cut him in two.

Parts of the buildings on one side of the alleyway collapsed into the water under the intensity of the incoming rounds. Chino was almost thrown off the boat as it hit something, probably a sunken truck just under the waterline. The boat jumped but kept going. Davis was sat up now, having pushed the scrim aside. Earl and Hank, like Chino, were just holding on for dear life.

As Davis shot across Elizabeth Street, Chino caught a glance of the incoming tracers again. They were a broken line of lights pointing at them.

F*ck off, Chino silently screamed.

They were in another alley. Rubble raining down on them as the heavy fire all but bisected buildings. The boat bounced off another submerged obstacle and almost went into the wall. Davis fought with it and kept the craft under control. He slewed the craft hard right onto Mott Street and headed up it, past sunken shop fronts and old signs, the undergrowth whipping at their faces, their passage making eddies in the thick mist. Chino glanced back at Davis. The guy couldn’t have been able to see further than he could but he hadn’t guided them wrong yet.

In the middle of Mott Street the boatman suddenly slewed left, straight towards a building.

‘Down!’ Davis barked. Chino scrabbled back and lay on the floor, sure they were about to collide with a brick wall. The IRC slid into the building through the top of an arched two-storey window. There wasn’t much glass left in the frame but what there was rained down on them. Davis reversed the engine, it howled in protest and they still hit the opposite wall. They found themselves floating quite close to exposed beams, just under the ceiling.

Davis unclipped the outboard and then lifted it up and dumped it into the water.

‘What the f*ck!?’ Hank protested.

‘Heat,’ Davis told him. ‘Don’t worry, it’s sealed man. We don’t die in the next thirty seconds, I’ll go down and get it.’

It was only then that Chino realised the firing had stopped.

‘If they’ve lost us then they’ll send patrols in,’ Chino said, for something to say. His heart was beating very quickly. He wanted to break the tension.

‘Patrols we can handle,’ Davis said. Davis and Chino were both motor mouths in comparison with the two southerners in their four-man recon team.

Davis was sat on the edge of the boat, looking around at the peeling paint and the creeping plant life of the building they were floating in.

‘This used to be a really good restaurant, they did awesome . . .’ Davis disappeared into the water. Water which was churning up and red now. Part of the front of the boat was missing. Even Earl was surprised. There’s something in the water was all Chino had time to think before he realised the boat was crumpling up like a used condom and sinking rapidly.

Chino tried to leap up but felt the boat give way underneath him. His fingers just grasped the wood of the exposed ceiling beams, scrabbling for purchase. He felt something brush against his boot and let out an involuntary scream. He swung his legs up, almost kicking Earl in the face, and managed to wrap them around the beam. His shotgun was hanging down on its slung. He felt something grab it and try and pull him back into the water. Chino just reached down and pulled the trigger. The shotgun firing sounded deafening, even after the barrage they had just experienced. The pull on the weapon disappeared, however. The shotgun bucked up and bounced off Chino’s body armour. Chino swung himself up onto the beam and readied the shotgun, pointing it down into the water.

Earl had an old H&K .45 in one hand. He was helping Hank up onto the beam with the other.

‘What the f*ck!?’ Chino demanded. The boat had gone and what was left of Davis was a dark cloud of blood spreading on the surface of the water, though limbs and other body parts were starting to bob to the surface.

Something exploded out of the water and grabbed the beam they were all on. Chino fired, worked the shotgun’s slide and fired again. He was dimly aware of a .45 being fired faster than he’d ever heard one fired before. The beam broke. The water rushed up to meet him.

Chino broke the surface of the water screaming, with his knife/machete cross in his hand, shaking. He hadn’t been able to make out what it was that had leapt out of the water but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t human.

Earl was on the surface as well. The old guy also had his knife out. Hank, shit, Chino thought. The ex-Jarine was weighed down with an MMG and about half a tonne of ammunition.

‘Did we get it?’ Chino asked.

‘Dunno,’ Earl said. Chino wasn’t sure if Earl was just being calm or was, in fact, adrenalin deficient.

‘I’m going down for Hank,’ Chino told him. Earl nodded. It was instinct. Get your people out. It was only when he dived under the surface of the bloody water that he realised that he would be in there with . . . with whatever the f*cking thing that had attacked them was.

It was pitch dark in the water. He grabbed his torch and flicked it on. He saw the ex-marine panicking, trying to unclip his MMG and drag off the belts of ammunition at the same time. He was between two of the tables on the floor of the submerged Chinese restaurant. Chino kicked down quickly. He grabbed Hank a little too hard before realising his mistake, as it just freaked Hank out further. He got the marine’s attention, signalled for him to calm down, and then used his thumb to motion upwards.

Chino glanced up. He couldn’t see Earl. He helped Hank out of the weighty ammunition, made sure he had hold of his MMG and then pushed him upwards before kicking off himself. As he assisted Hank’s ascent he caught the sensation of movement behind him, from somewhere out in the water on Mott Street. He glanced back but all he saw was beams of moonlight refracting through the water.

‘Over here!’ Earl called as they broke the surface. Earl was on a flight of stairs that led up into another level of the building. Chino was all but dragging Hank with him towards the stairs. He felt something brush against him under the water, panicked and redoubled his pace, swimming in a frenzy towards the steps. He felt Earl grab Hank and pull the marine out of the water. Chino all but crawled up the wooden stairs.

It smashed through the stairs beneath Chino. He felt blades dig into his leg and open his flesh as it tried to drag him under the water. Earl threw himself bodily down the stairs, grabbed Chino as he was being dragged back into the water. Earl’s other hand smoothly brought up the H&K Mk 23 pistol. Earl fired the pistol rapidly. The slide went back on an empty magazine. Chino realised there was nothing trying to drag him into the water anymore. He all but climbed over Earl, scrambling up the stairs. He burst through a doorway at the top of the stairs and collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. Earl appeared in the doorway behind him.

‘Grenade,’ the Missourian told them and then turned and dropped a fragmentation grenade into the submerged restaurant. There was a subdued explosion and water slopped into the room.

Hank rose up looking furious, and went and stood in the doorway and started shooting the MMG wildly into the water. Earl put a hand on the ex-marine’s shoulder. Hank stopped firing.

‘Easy now brother, bullets are no good in water.’

Hank nodded. Chino realised that the Georgian wasn’t furious. He was terrified. Hank was shaking like a leaf. Earl ejected the magazine from his Mk 23 and replaced it with a new one, working the slide to chamber a round and then holstering it with the safety off. He started to dry his M14.

‘You need to dry your weapons as best you can,’ he told them.

‘You see what it was?’ Chino asked, looking around. It looked like they were in the restaurant’s wine storage area. Chino repressed the borderline-hysterical urge to have a drink to steady his nerves. Earl shrugged.

‘Alien I guess, don’t know, never seen one before, zombies I seen but not aliens.’ Hank and Chino stared at Earl. It was one of the longest things Earl had ever said to them that hadn’t been strictly operational. ‘I’m going to have a look around. You need to look to that leg.’ He told Chino. ‘And one of you needs to watch the door.’

‘I’m on it,’ Hank told him, still stood in the doorway, MMG at the ready.

‘Move back a little, ese, don’t silhouette yourself in the doorway,’ Chino said. He knew that Hank knew this, just like he knew that the marine was shaken up despite being a New York veteran and, apparently, having seen some shit in Russia whilst working for CELL.

Earl brought the M14 up, took the condom off the end of the barrel and disappeared into the mists.

Chino pulled the med kit out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He cleaned and then dressed the wounds. His leg hurt like a sonofabitch and one of the wounds was a through-and-through but he had got lucky, or at least as lucky as you can get when having sharp things pushed through your flesh. Whatever had attacked them had only pierced meat. It hadn’t got anything vital and Chino would still be able to move.

Keeping one eye on Hank and the doorway, Chino dried off his shotgun and the Majestic revolver, which wasn’t waterproofed. He oiled both weapons as best he could but he didn’t have the time to strip and clean them.

‘Did you recognise it?’ Hank finally asked.

‘Didn’t see enough of it, you?’

Hank shook his head. ‘It was fast, though. Definitely Ceph, you think?’

Chino laughed humourlessly. ‘Man, I don’t even want to think about there being another f*cked-up alien species in New York.’

‘I guess CELL didn’t kill them all after all,’ Hank mused.

‘CELL lie? Say it ain’t so.’

Hank let out a little laugh. There wasn’t much humour in it. Chino slid two shells into the shotgun to replace the ones he’d fired. He worked the slide to make sure there was a round in the pipe. He heard the whistle and looked around. Earl came stalking out of the mist.

‘What you see, what you hear man?’ Chino asked. Hank glanced around and then went back to keeping watch. Earl put a finger over his lips and then touched his ear.

Chino listened. He could hear the lapping of the water, a slight breeze through the branches of the trees outside. He started to shake his head and then he heard it. It sounded like a hiccough followed by a series of clicks. He opened his mouth to say something, but Earl held his finger over his lips again. There was an answering hooting noise coming from somewhere else but both had been close by.

‘We’re being hunted,’ Earl told him. Chino felt himself go cold. Somehow it was the more chilling because it was Earl who was telling him this. If rumours were true then Earl had spent the last ten years off the grid, living in the wilds, self-sufficient. ‘If’n we want to move then we either go up onto the roof or back into the water, those are our choices.’

‘We go onto the roof then we’ll get picked off by the guns,’ Hank said.

‘Only if we draw attention to ourselves,’ Chino pointed out. ‘If we keep hidden then we’ll be OK.’

‘And if we meet those things up there?’

‘So you want to go back into the water then?’

Hank gave this some thought. ‘Let’s head up to the roof.’

There was the sound of breaking glass from above them. The three soldiers looked at each other. Earl turned and led the way, heading back the direction he had come from, his weapon at the ready. Hank fell in behind him, the butt of the MMG nestled against his shoulder. Chino followed. Checking behind them all the way.

Three floors up they found the stairway had collapsed. Earl didn’t waste time examining it, he just opened the next door he found, taking them out into an open plan office space.

They saw half a skeleton lying close to one of the windows. Chino guessed that it had been a victim of the Manhattan Virus that had only partially liquefied. There wasn’t even much in the way of damage, though the plant life was starting to creep in and the broken windows let in tendrils of the creeping mist.

Chino thought he heard movement below them.

‘Earl,’ Chino said quietly. There was definitely movement below them. He heard a crash. Now that they knew what to listen for they had been hearing more of the clicks and hooting noises. They had seemed to be getting closer, and it sounded like they were all around them now. ‘As much as I appreciate and support your one shot, one kill ethos . . .’ There was a sound behind them. Chino spun around, shotgun at the ready. ‘If you’ve not fought these things before then I think you should know that it might take more than one shot . . .’

Chino caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He spun around but there was nothing. Something fell over to his left. He spun around and caught more movement but no viable target.

The door they had just came through slammed open. Chino spun back to it. He caught the shadow of a figure moving behind a partition. His finger tightened around the shotgun’s trigger but there was still no viable target.

Behind him Earl started firing the M14 single shot, steadily and repeatedly. Next to him Hank started firing the MMG.

There, Chino saw it! It was a tall, thin, jagged, misshapen figure, still hidden by the darkness. It looked like it was made of sharp angles. Even in the darkness, as it ran through the tendrils of mist, he could make out the swaying tentacle. It looked like a massive rubbery tail sticking out the centre of its back.

Chino squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked. He was working the slide already. The creature staggered, bits flew off it. Another round chambered. The shotgun’s muzzle flash flared again. The creature staggered but kept running. And again. The creature hit the ground and slid towards Chino, dead on the floor.

There were more sprinting at him. Chino shifted aim to his right, firing once, then again. The Ceph staggered with the impact of the first shot and the second shot knocked it out the window. He swung to his left. Two more of the things were trying to flank them. The muzzle flash from the MMG made the aliens look like they were caught in a strobe light.

Chino fired another three rounds and the closest one dropped. He fired two more rounds from the shotgun, one hit staggering the Ceph, the other missing. Chino let the empty shotgun drop on its sling. He moved forwards, drawing the big Majestic revolver from its holster. Aiming carefully, he squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked in his hand. About two foot of muzzle flash leapt out of the end of the barrel. The .50 calibre compact round hit the soft part of the Ceph and then exploded.

He hung off the gargoyle one handed, his feet against the stone of the old building. He could see the flickering light and hear the sounds. The flashes threw grotesque shadows in their brief but repeated moments of existence. He too wanted to hunt. He wanted to hunt like a shikari, but he needed to find a place to worship the night sun. He wanted to see the sky burn again. He looked around at his brothers, sadly.

‘Clear!’ Hank shouted.

‘Not f*cking here it isn’t!’ Chino shouted as he fired the last shot from the Majestic. Both he and Hank spun round, exchanging positions. Hank started firing the MMG again immediately. The machine gun’s rounds were blowing chunks out of the creatures as they leapt from desk to desk or just powered through them.

Chino flipped out the revolver’s wheel, grabbing a speed loader with six of the huge .50 calibre explosive rounds. It was faster to reload the revolver than it was the shotgun.

Earl let the M14 drop on its sling and fast drew the Mk. 23, already firing as he brought it up to eye level in a two-handed grip. In front of the sniper, five of the things lay dead or twitching on the ground.

Chino watched in horror as Earl’s pistol rounds sparked off the charging Ceph’s armour. He flipped the revolver’s wheel closed. He knew he was going to be too slow as the Ceph closed with Earl. It was like it was happening in slow motion. He watched the creature raise its bone-like arm blade. Earl was still firing. Chino was raising the Majestic. The alien’s bone blade took Earl straight through the centre of his head. It shot out the back of the sniper’s skull in an explosion of bone, blood and brain matter, splattering Hank. Chino all but put the Majestic up against the soft matter on the creature’s back and pulled the trigger. The Ceph bioform hit the ground, taking Earl’s corpse down with him and battering the body into Hank.

Chino wanted to cry, freak out, but he’d seen this before. He knew what happened when humans tried to fight these things up close and personal. They needed to be like Dane or Alcatraz if they were going to have a chance. If he wanted to live they needed to move. He couldn’t see an exit from this floor other than the one he’d come through, and yet more Ceph were gathering there. He fired the massive revolver twice and one of them went down, staggering and then stumbling out the window.

He knew what they were now. The grunts had nicknamed them Stalkers. Fast-moving, close-in killers. But these ones looked different. Devolved somehow, feral. Purer. It seemed they had lost their ability to think tactically, but now, if anything, they were faster, and hunting like a pack, albeit one with deeply suicidal tendencies.

Chino had a really stupid idea.

‘Hank, I need you to trust me and follow me!’ he shouted.

‘Where we going?’ Hank shouted back and then continued firing burst after burst.

‘Out the window. We’re going to jump to the building opposite, it’s really close,’ Chino lied. Hank didn’t answer.

Chino ran at one of the broken full-length windows. He fired the Majestic one-handed, as he ran, at the Stalker close to the window. The first shot missed. He had a moment to reflect on the stupidity of basically charging one of these things and fired the second shot when he was practically on top of the thing. The muzzle flash illuminated its alien countenance. It staggered back but didn’t go down, swung at Chino with its bone blade. The blade tore into Chino’s arm as he left the ground, turning him slightly in the air. His blood flew out of the wound in an arc, looking black in the moonlight.

He was in the air, jumping through the mist. He had no idea if there was a building nearby. He knew that many of the streets and alleys in Chinatown were narrow. He knew that many of the buildings were lower than the one he had jumped from and had flat roofs. And he knew that if there was no roof then the streets below him were submerged under ten feet of water. Falling through the air didn’t seem quite the calculated risk it had moments before, when he was about to get torn apart by the stalkers.

The roof hit him hard. He screamed as he went down on his already injured leg and collapsed onto the surface of the roof, losing more skin from his arms as he slid and tumbled across it.

He sat up and looked behind him. The building he’d just jumped from was obscured in the mist. It even distorted the constant staccato hammering of Hank’s MMG. All Chino could see was the muzzle flash from the Georgian’s weapon illuminating the mist from within whenever it fired.

‘C’mon man!’ Chino shouted, mostly to himself. ‘Jump, bitch!’

He had holstered his Majestic and was sliding a shell into his shotgun when the firing stopped. He heard Hank screaming. It was getting closer. Chino saw the ex-marine appear through the mist. He impacted at chest height against the edge of the building, spitting out blood. Chino reached for him. A Stalker appeared out of the mist right behind him, flying towards them.

Chino brought the shotgun up one-handed and fired the only round the weapon had in it. The recoil almost took his arm off. The blast caught the Stalker, spinning it in mid air. It hit the side of the building and bounced. Chino reached for Hank, who in turn was reaching for him. The second Stalker practically landed on Hank’s back. Chino let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Majestic. The Stalker was repeatedly stabbing Hank with its blades, holding onto him with its strangely jointed legs. Hank let go of the building. Chino moved to the edge. He saw his buddy disappear into the mist below, the Stalker still savaging him. He didn’t even hear the splash.

Part of the building seemed to explode, throwing fragments into the air that tore into Chino’s exposed flesh on his arms and face. The heavy calibre tracers looked slow far away, but a trick of perception made them seem to accelerate the closer they got. More than one gun emplacement was targeting the roof he was on. Chino staggered to his feet and took off at a limping run, parts of the roof collapsing behind him.

‘Give me a break, you f*ckers!’ Chino reached the other side of the roof and jumped.

The fire was daring the lesser gods to strike him down. They didn’t. He smeared the ash on his face, covering it. Making it grey. He would become one of the dead.

His prey hung from the partially destroyed false ceiling of the open plan office he’d found. He pushed the knife into exposed flesh and forced it down, trying to gut it like it was Earthly, though its kind had been here longer than humanity.

The blood wasn’t a different colour to his but it was thicker somehow, more viscous. He collected it in an oversized novelty NYC mug.

‘Sorry, brother,’ he told his prey. ‘I need to take your spirit so I can hunt.’

As he used the blood to make a horizontal line across the ash on his face, over his eyes, he saw them. The dead surrounded him. Those he’d seen die, those he’d killed, human, Ceph, it didn’t matter. Aztec and Jester stood at the fore. They said nothing, they just watched him.

‘There’s still shackles on the human spirit, brothers. Our enemy’s hiding in the same place it always has. Inside.’ They said nothing, watching him, judging him. Dane looked away first. ‘I’m waiting for the Sun King,’ he told them. He knew it wasn’t enough, though he’d seen the sky catch fire.

Chino reflected on the training that kept him fighting against inevitability.

He’d jumped, blindly, fallen about five storeys into water. The water had slowed him significantly but he’d still hit the street under it hard. Pain had shot through his already wounded leg and he’d all but kneed himself in the jaw.

He found a place to lie low but he could still hear the hooting and the clicking. There was movement in the water and movement through the surrounding buildings. They were still hunting him.

But they’re a pack, he told himself, packs are finite.

He had dried, stripped, cleaned and reloaded the Marshall shotgun and the Majestic revolver. Then, moving as stealthily as he could, he had gone looking for a place for his last stand.

What he’d found, tactically speaking, was a shit place for a last stand. It was surrounded on all sides by high buildings. Chino was hoping that the narrow street would shield him from the CELL gun emplacements.

He slid into the water quietly. I’m the alligator, he thought inanely, overcoming the urge to giggle brought on by tension. He did the breaststroke out to the submerged delivery van. Most of it was under the water. Only the roof showed over the surface. By using this at least I have a moat, he thought. The Stalkers would have to swim to him, or jump, he thought. During the New York incursion the Stalkers had had some kind of ranged weapon. He hadn’t seen these new ones use it yet. Either they’d run out of ammunition or this purer form preferred the blades. He was banking on that. If they could engage him at range he was screwed.

‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ Chino muttered to himself. He lit two road flares and held them up high. They illuminated the dark, narrow, Chinatown street with their phosphorescent, flickering, red glare.

Whatever happens tonight some other motherf*ckers are dying with me, he thought.

He looked up, searching for the moon, and howled at the broken cityscape.

Then he waited, listened and watched.

He heard the clicking and the hooting first. Then the sound of water gently rippling against the side of the sunken delivery van. Then the sound of blades scraping against stone. He could see them now, dark shapes in the water. Dark shapes clinging to the side of buildings, moving towards him.

He dropped one of the road flares into the water. It spiralled down to the bottom, illuminating alien shapes moving sinuously towards the submerged delivery van.

Chino took an M17 fragmentation grenade out of one of the pouches on his webbing. He removed the pin and let the spoon flip off. He started counting. On three-Mississippi he tossed the second flare into the water on the other side of the van. It illuminated more shapes in the water. He needed them out of the water, ballistics were for shit in liquids. On four-Mississippi he held the grenade just a bit longer. For a less than a moment he remembered playing softball in the park with his brothers and sisters in East LA during family cookouts. Then he threw.

With less than a second left on the fuse, the grenade exploded in the air. Fragments tore into alien flesh. Concussive force battered and broke their forms, bounced them off the wall and into the water.

Chino had turned his back and put his hand over the back of his head. Fragments imbedded themselves in his body armour and tore into his arm, but he barely felt it. The force of the explosion staggered him. He went down on one knee.

One of them shot out of the water next to him. The barrel of the shotgun was almost touching the fleshy matter behind its jagged biosteel head and shoulder armour. He pulled the trigger. The alien flesh exploded. Chino stood up and helped the Stalker back into the water with the toe of his boot, as he worked the slide on his shotgun. He felt calm.

Another Stalker burst out of the water at the opposite end of the van. He raised the shotgun, aimed for flesh. Shot sparked off armour as he worked the slide again. He fired. The Stalker fell back into the water. Another shot out of the water to his left. He walked at it, taking his time, aiming the shotgun. He felt its bone blade hit his armour. He shot it at point blank range. It flew backwards, the dark water engulfing it.

One of them stabbed at him from the water, overextending itself. He stepped back, pushed the shotgun against its tentacled back hump and pulled the trigger.

For a moment he was on top of the van on his own. He took a moment to fire four rounds at the dark shapes crawling across the sides of the nearest building. One of them fell off. Others started leaping. The shotgun was empty.

Now it gets interesting.

He let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the Majestic. He was peripherally aware of the gun emplacements firing again, more than one of them. There was tracer fire raining in from multiple directions. Chunks of the buildings were being blown off. Rents were torn through concrete and brick by the heavy calibre fire, but it was inaccurate. They had no eyes on the target, not when the target was down between the buildings on a street this narrow. It was just a fireworks display. The backdrop for his death.

It was beautiful. Yesterday he had seen the sun fall from the sky. Now it was the stars.

One and then another landed on the roof. Chino moved at them, firing. Two shots and the first fell, the huge .50 calibre rounds exploding inside it. The second he killed with just one round. He swung on a third. Its head exploded as he raised the revolver. He didn’t have a moment to be surprised. More of them were landing on the van and climbing out of the water. After all, they were a reactive species. They’d worked out that they could get him in a rush.

The next one he killed by putting the barrel of the big revolver against its flesh and pulling the trigger. Then something heavy and sharp hit him. Took him down onto the roof of the van. He angled the revolver up and almost broke his wrist firing the final two shots. He dropped the revolver and rolled into a crouch. Another died charging him, shot through the head by someone unseen, giving him the moment he needed to draw his large knife.

He looked through the tech scope at the Stalkers clambering onto the roof of the sunken delivery van. He squeezed the trigger. The electromagnetic field generated by the coils shot the ten-millimetre armour piercing solid slug out of the barrel of the gauss sniper rifle at hypersonic speeds. The slug shot though the armour and then the flesh of a Stalker. It was dropping as he moved to the next target. That one fell. Then the next. Reload.

His goat was doing well, he reflected, or at least his goat was still alive.

Another one died before it reached him. A Stalker threw itself at Chino and he rolled with it, coming up on top. Screaming, he repeatedly stabbed at the creature with his knife. Alien blood spattered all over him. He could taste it.

I killed one hand-to-hand he exulted, then he was torn off his victim. Chino screamed as he was lifted high into the air, a bone blade through his left arm and another through his right side.

He was moving now. Running through the falling stars’ impacts. He was an invisible ghost. He saw his goat lifted high up into the air. He stopped and fired.

The Stalker lifting him up collapsed under him. Chino did some screaming as the bone blades moved in his flesh. He was stuck, impaled. More of them were climbing out of the water and another landed on the roof. They towered over the ex-marine as they moved towards him.

‘Yeah, f*ck you! I killed more of you than you killed of me!’

He should be in agony, he knew, but there was only anger and tears of frustration. He’d fought too hard. He didn’t deserve this.

Something landed on the roof of the submerged delivery van. The night air moved strangely behind one of the Stalkers. The Ceph stopped and seemed to shake. The bloody point of a knife appeared through its flesh. The armoured figure appeared behind it and threw the dying creature against the wall of one of the buildings that lined the narrow street. It’s like watching a demigod move amongst mortals and monsters, Chino thought.

One of the Stalkers swung at Dane. Dane stepped back and then rammed his bloody knife into a soft part of the alien. He left the knife there. He kicked the alien, knocking it back and then drawing his Hammer II automatic, which he shot twice at point blank range. The Stalker hit the roof of the van and slid into the water.

Chino could feel the pain now. His vision was getting hazy but it looked like Dane was fighting with his visor down. He had painted his face like a corpse and smeared blood across it. Dane turned round and grabbed a bone blade that had been thrust at him, broke the blade, and then shot the Ceph three times. Chino could see that there was something wrong with the back of Dane’s armour. It looked like it had been partially melted, somehow, and had only been able to repair some of the damage.

Dane made the killing of the remaining Stalker look very casual.

Chino blacked out.

He came to with Dane’s bizarre visage leaning over him.

‘I’ve got to lift you off its blades. Sorry, brother, this is going to hurt.’

He hadn’t lied. Chino did some screaming and then passed out.

There was a fire. It didn’t smell good. It had the sort of acrid quality to it that came with burning man-made fibres. There was still a lot of pain. Chino was hoping he was stabilised, as he had some morphine ampules in his med kit that he was going to treat himself to.

Even looking around was painful. He broke into a cold sweat. They were on one of the higher floors of a skyscraper somewhere in Midtown. He could see the glow of the lights from CELL’s various construction sites around the ruined city. The rest of what was left of New York was quiet and dark.

Dane was sat around a campfire he’d made in the centre of an open plan office. There was a gutted Stalker hanging down from the ceiling. That stank as well.

‘The guns, they’ll see the fire, man,’ Chino managed. ‘F*cking Psycho. Where is he?’

Dane shook his head sadly.

‘Psycho’s gone, man, somewhere I can’t see or reach.’ The armoured figure moved over and knelt by Chino.

‘I’ve bound your wounds. You’re messed up, but you’ll live.’

‘What happened? Where were you, man?’

Dane looked at him as if making a decision.

‘I saw the sky catch fire,’ he finally told Chino.

More crazy Lazy Dane shit, Chino thought.

‘The f*cking Brits sold us out,’ Chino said, pained. Dane was shaking his head.

‘No, they were true, righteous. The sun fell to Earth. They walk with me now.’

Chino tried to make sense of this.

‘Shit,’ he finally said. ‘It’s over then.’

Dane shrugged.

‘Nothing’s ever over man, we just change state.’

Chino closed his eyes. It had all been for nothing, the fighting, the pain, all the dead. CELL would win. The world was theirs now. It probably had been for a while.

‘You know what this place is?’

‘A graveyard?’ Chino suggested, giving into his pain and the despair.

‘It’s a necropolis. All of them. Our guys, CELL , the victims of the disease and everyone back to when this was a swamp and it belonged to the first people. They’re all still here. Ceph too, human and alien living together, it’s beautiful man. It’s dead and it’s beautiful.’

Chino said nothing. There wasn’t much he could say to a crazy person’s ramblings.

‘Thank you,’ Dane said.

‘For what, man? You saved me.’

‘For being my goat.’

Chino stared at him. ‘Your what?’

‘When a shikari hunts a tiger he . . .’

‘Tethers a goat to a tree and bleeds it a little to get the tiger’s attention.’

Dane nodded. Chino stared at him. He doesn’t think he’s one of us anymore. He thinks we’re playthings, mere mortals.

Chino spat in his face.

Maybe if the nanosuit hadn’t been so badly damaged Dane would have heard their comms. If Chino hadn’t been so badly hurt, if both of them had been alert, then maybe they would have heard them moving around beneath them.

They had been pinpointed by thermographics. The fire hadn’t helped.

The floor of the open plan office exploded in a circle around Dane and Chino. They fell through to the floor below them. The impact made Chino scream as multiple wounds were badly jarred and he started to piss blood again. The campfire exploded in a shower of sparks.

Dane was moving. Disappearing, becoming transparent, fading into the background. Then he was wreathed in lighting. Electrostatically charged pellets fired from K-Volt weapons stuck to Lazy Dane’s suit. The pellets dropped the cloak, making him visible. More and more of the pellets stuck to him. The voltage he was receiving grew and grew. The damaged suit’s systems were overloaded. They started shutting down. The pellets were electrocuting Dane as he tried to move. There were four members of the CELL spec ops armed with K-volts. They continued laying on the fire.

Dane looked like he was made of electricity as he stood up. Members of the spec ops team took a step back.

Chino saw his Majestic. He was reaching for his big revolver when someone stood on his hand and then kicked him in the face, hard. He saw lights and felt sick. He felt darkness swimming up to claim him.

‘Reloading,’ the first K-Volt gunner said as he ran out of pellets. There was only a hint of panic in the man’s voice. He swapped out the magazine as the next, and then the next gunner, ran out of pellets as well. Dane took a step forwards.

Reloaded, they started firing again. Dane took another step forwards through the electricity crackling all around him and then toppled over.

‘Don’t stop firing, the Commander ordered.’ They didn’t.

Chino came to again. He glanced over and saw Dane being dragged out. A VTOL was circling the building, using its spotlight to provide light for the spec ops team. Chino wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone so singularly bound with restraints as Lazy Dane.

‘Commander, he’s awake,’ a CELL commando standing over Chino said. The Commander of the Spec Ops team turned to look at her subordinate. She shrugged.

‘He’s surplus to requirement.’

Chino looked up at the gun barrel. He saw the finger tightening around the trigger.

He felt calm.