Eden's Twilight

“What about the box?” Roberto asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

“It was right near a rusted-out old Caddy, and guess what? The name on the tires was Firestone.”

“Son of a bitch,” Quinn muttered, casting a furtive look at the doomie. But if Yates heard, or cared, there was no indication.

“What’s inside?” Jessica demanded into her own mike.

“Tell you soon,” the crewman replied. There was a brief crackle of static and the words were lost.

“Say again, what did you find?” Roberto demanded.

“Well, hang me for a mutie, Chief,” the man replied excitedly. “I’m holding the damn thing in my hand! It’s true. The legends are all true!”

“Well, get your butts back down here,” Roberto said, grinning widely. “I wanna see for myself!”

“Break out the good shine, we’re on the way…What the frag?”

There was no noise from the radio, but tiny flashes of light could be seen coming from on top of the bridge. Blaster fire!

“What the frag is going on up there?” Diana demanded loudly over the radio. “Jefferson, report, goddamn it! Have you been jacked?” But there was only a thick silence.

Then there came the dull thud of a gren, and a body tumbled over the edge to hit the misty ground with a hard thump.

“Holy shit, that was Jefferson!” Quinn cried out, standing at his station.

“All right, let’s go!” Jessica directed, grabbing an AK-47 and stumbling for the hallway.

“You stay!” Roberto boomed, gesturing with the hand holding the mike. “Jimmy, go get our people!”

Paused alongside the exit door, the woman radiated a controlled fury as the other crew members grimly streamed outside. Silently, the trader and his second in command held a private conversation, and she grudgingly limped back to her chair, an arm cradling her bandaged ribs. Just because he was right, didn’t mean she had to like sitting on her ass.

As the crews from War Wags One, Two and Three rushed toward the ropes dangling off the bridge, they could see more flashes on top and heard the telltale boom of another gren. The recce squad appeared, scrambling along the outside edge of the bridge, firing their rapidfires at something unseen above and behind them. The crewmen on the ground raised their longblasters, but there was nothing in sight. What the frags were the others shooting at, thin air?

Reaching the rope, the recce squad grabbed it one after the other and insanely dived off the structure, swinging wildly as they slid down the nylon length with smoke rising from their gloved fists.

As they got close to the ground, the first crewman released the rope and jumped away, the others arriving only moments later. Most landed hard, but came up running. However, one crewman went sprawling and there was an audible crack of breaking bone. Grimacing in pain, he rolled onto his stomach and started crawling for the wags. Pausing in their flight, two of his companions went back, grabbed the wounded man under the arms and hauled him along, their faces pale with fright.

“Vine puppets!” a running crewman yelled, his shirt covered with blood. “The whole fragging bridge is infested with vine puppets!”

The words sent cold knives into the guts of everybody present, and they looked up just in time to see a row of naked people appear along the edge of the bridge. Incredibly, the men and women simply stepped off the edge. But they did not fall. Instead, they gracefully eased downward as if gliding on invisible wings.

However, as they got closer, the crewmen on the ground could see the leafy vines embedded throughout their nude forms, the mouths slack and drooling, the wide eyes horribly alive and shrieking in wordless torment.

Snarling curses, the crew cut loose with concentrated blasterfire from the Kalashnikovs, the 7.62 mm rounds tearing the naked people apart. But instead of red blood, a thin green sap oozed from the gaping wounds, along with hair-thin tendrils resembling pale roots.

Then the puppets landed, and the tattered corpses began walking toward the norms, the flexing ivy still connected to the animated corpses.

As the crew hastily dropped back, the M-60 machine guns of Two and Three cut loose, the big .308 rounds chewing the bodies into pieces. Shaking off the lumps of flesh, the green vines snaked out after the fleeing norms, catching the crippled crewman in the back. Instantly he went stiff, his eyes rolling in unimaginable agony.

Releasing his arms, the other crewmen fired point-blank, blowing out the back of his head, the pink brain already full of wiggling tendrils.

Not bothering to open the backpacks on the misty ground, the panting crewmen peppered the canvas bags with blasterfire until the Molotov cocktails inside ignited. Engulfed in flames, the puppets kept walking onward until the ivy blackened and jerked out of the bodies to lash around madly. Throwing off charred leaves, the greenery began to shrivel, then the vines snapped in two, the undamaged sections retreating to the bridge, the rest of the hellish plant consigned to deadly flames.

Only now more vines came snaking down from the bridge from every side, some with puppets attached and some without, obviously on the hunt for new slaves.

“Fucking mutie!” Jefferson screamed, blowing thunder at the moving greenery.

Throwing down more Molotovs, the crew tried to form a wall between them and the vines, and the plants disappeared. But then vines erupted from the ground well past the conflagration and surged forward.

Any semblance of organized resistance disappeared at that, and everybody took off, firing and running in a near panic.

Pausing to pull the arming ring from a gren, a crew member dropped her explosive charge as a vine whipped around her throat and entered her cursing mouth. Gagging, she tried to chew it out, then went oddly stiff and turned to face the other norm fumbling to work the gren in his clumsy hands.

Ruthlessly, the others cut her down, then ran for their lives.

Charging out of War Wag One, Abduhl strode into view, the pressurized canisters of a portable flamethrower strapped to his back.