Molters, p.6
Molters, page 6
part #1 of The Molting Series
“What’s wrong?” Gil said. He turned to Sharon. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon said.
Daisy’s eyes rolled back, and she fell backward onto her pillow, as if her brain had been disconnected and plucked out of her skull. There was a tearing sound, and a line of blood formed down the middle of her face. It quickly turned into running globules that wet her cheeks and ran into her hair. It was almost as if her heart had sped up and was trying to expel all of her blood out of her body as quickly as possible.
Her skin split then. Danielle and Sharon backed away.
“Get away from it!” Sharon yelled.
“But it’s Daisy!” Gil said.
Moments later, they witnessed a creature form out of someone who was once their friend. The Molter grabbed handfuls of Daisy’s flesh and violently tugged at it. Strands of bloody flesh stretched until they snapped, and then it pulled what remained of Daisy off itself. Her skin splattered thickly as it hit the carpet. It had used Daisy to create itself, to mutate. It had stretched and pulled, molding her bones, organs, and every molecule into what it needed so as to become what it was.
It stood shakily onto its feet, like a newborn. Sharon thought it looked remarkably similar to a human in shape. She remembered their confusion about what they had seen right before the accident on the road. Except this wasn’t a human at all. Its skin was white, deep, and corrugated. Its skull was pronounced and square. It was strong, with no hint of the gorgeous woman it was born from.
Its mouth hung open, with lips that could barely hold its large, sharp teeth. It had small white eyes that were sunken beneath a pronounced brow. A large tongue stuck out and tasted the air, as if its eyes were useless, even though it had them.
“Run,” Sharon said as she and Danielle slowly backed toward the hallway.
Gil didn’t move.
“Gil, run!”
Reality hit, and all three ran out into the hallway. They didn’t get far. The Molter got its grip into Sharon’s arm.
She wished Jonah were there.
*
It was dark, and Molters had been periodically appearing and chasing the roadster, but they couldn’t keep up with it. It hugged the road securely as Jonah sped toward the barracks as fast as he could.
The sleek vehicle had been locked when he’d first come to it. It looked like it had just been washed. Luckily, he saw that the keys were in the ignition. He couldn’t understand why someone would abandon a vehicle but lock the doors—probably out of habit.
It was unquestionably an exquisite piece of machinery, but it didn’t take Jonah long to decide to break a window. He’d chosen the one on the passenger side. The car started up immediately, and he noticed it still had nearly a half a tank of gas.
Molters appeared in front of him, but his bumper finished them off easily. One slammed its arm against the rear window as he passed, and the glass spider-webbed immediately. A few were smart and jumped from the trees, but most missed. One landed on the roof, but the sheer speed of the car was too fast, and it fell off the back. Jonah snickered.
Then one got extremely lucky. It somehow landed on the hood and hung on. It crawled its way to the driver’s side, using the mirror to hold onto. Jonah was glad it didn’t notice the broken window that it could have crawled into on the passenger side.
He aimed his 9mm and calmly pushed the button to the window. It lowered with an expensive purr. The thing lurched forward with its jaws stretched open, and Jonah fired five shots into its face before it fell off the car, the muzzle flashes igniting the darkness.
*
Gil knew the Molter was moments away from finding him. He’d run and hid after he’d seen what it did to the girls. Poor Sharon; her screams had been awful. Danielle had tried to help—to get the thing off of Sharon—except that while it drained Sharon of blood, it grabbed her too. Danielle struggled and yelled for Gil, yanking against the Molter’s iron grip to no avail. When it was finished with Sharon, it buried its face into Danielle’s neck.
Gil had run far before hiding under the staircase, but he could still hear Danielle. He had no idea a woman could scream so loudly. The Molter was coming, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He tried desperately to think of thoughts that would stop him from taking his breath in quick gasps, thoughts that wouldn’t give him away. He tried to think of the way things were before the trip, except he kept remembering Daisy’s skin splitting. He couldn’t get the gruesome sight out of his mind. He was going to pass out, and he felt twice as heavy as he actually was, as if liquid steel coursed through his veins instead of blood. He held his breath.
Before the Molter got a hold of him with its powerful grasp, he could have sworn it said his name in a grumbly tone. He was surprised by its strength, the kind no human was capable of, especially because it was smaller than he was. It reminded him of the stories he’d heard of how strong apes were. This thing had to be even stronger.
As it plunged its teeth into his neck, Gil heard a vehicle. Maybe it was Jonah. It didn’t matter anymore. He didn’t care if he lived. He would never be with Daisy. Well, not in the way he spent years fantasizing about. It was fitting to him that the creature that was once her was the one that was going to kill him, and it saddened him that it would be the closest he’d ever be to her.
*
Night had come quickly. The Molters often didn’t show until a few hours after nightfall, and Jonah felt hope until he got inside the barracks. The Molter had Gil in its arms. Upon seeing Jonah, it withdrew its teeth from Gil’s neck. The mouth suction popped off sickeningly. The Molter growled, a deep grumble. It drooled blood, glared coldly, and then let Gil’s drained body drop. It took small steps, trying to sneak up on Jonah. He raised his automatic rifle and fired the entire magazine into the Molter until it fell dead.
The weapon fire attracted more Molters. He heard them running outside, trying to find a way in and scampering over the rooftops. Jonah would have to take care of his friends’ remains in the morning.
He easily made it to the arms room. No other Molters had found their way in by the time he made it downstairs. He locked the door for the night.
Jonah didn’t sleep well. The Molters eventually found their way inside. The scuffling, growling, and howling of them outside the door angered him and made it difficult to close his eyes.
Everything he’d feared would happen had happened. The fact that he came back for his friends was for nothing. He should have never left. His friends were dead, and it was his fault. He had briefly considered abandoning them earlier. He might as well have.
CHAPTER 19
Jonah took a step into the hallway at 7:30 a.m. Once the sun was up, he was safe. He was dreading what he had to do, which was why he’d motivated himself to start as early as possible. He’d wrapped Sharon, Danielle, and Gil’s bodies in bedsheets and loaded them into the UV. Molters hadn’t had the chance to bury them.
He found what must have been Daisy, though it was hard to tell. The only definitive way was from her clothing. The rest was just flesh, broken bones, and blood—like the flesh piles he’d seen in the headquarters building. He put her remains in a bedsheet too.
*
He used the entrenching tool to dig graves next to where he’d found Eric’s body. He’d taken his time, and after a few hours his friends were in the ground.
The Molter he’d killed must have come out of Daisy. It was smaller than the others he’d seen. Maybe size was relative to what it scraped its nutrients from. If one were born from a man who was seven feet tall, would the Molter be close to that height?
Most people were sucked dry. Why some were picked to become Molters and some weren’t, Jonah could only guess. Maybe it was random, or maybe it had to do with their genetic integrity. What he did know was that there were Molters, leaders he hadn’t seen—according to the man on the road—and ones that seemed to be able to infect others and make more. He’d never seen one, but Eric had. He said there’d been a small animal on Daisy. Maybe the one that had infected her was born from a small animal.
What was happening in the rest of the world? How many more Molters were there? How far had they spread? There were too many questions about them. He wished he knew the answers.
He thought of his family. He hadn’t talked to his parents in weeks. He had an older brother and two younger sisters…and they had children.
Jonah wasn’t sure how he was going to wipe out all of the Molters on the base, but he was going to try his best to do just that. He could hunt during the day; they only seemed to come out at night, and he knew where they were coming from…where he’d dreaded going.
*
Jonah looked up at the words painted on the side of the barracks: MOLTERS ATTACKED 9/18 BEHEMOTH SPOTTED I.
“In tunnel,” he finished.
Constructed under the base, the tunnels had multiple tasks during the war, including hiding gold and other treasures stolen from citizens, weapons, equipment, or even soldiers. The tunnels were even used for secret technology and experiments.
When Jonah had been stationed there, the entrances to the tunnels were padlocked shut. Now they were wide open. This should have jogged his memory earlier, and guilt flooded him. They shouldn’t have stayed. Then again, according to the man on the road, the creatures were everywhere, in every town.
He parked a UV at the entrance to one of the tunnels. He tied five-fifty cord to the bumper and then to his belt. He had taped a flashlight to the end of his automatic rifle. As Jonah headed inside, light splashed through the darkness, illuminating enough space in front of him to navigate the old war relic.
The tunnels stretched the entire length of the base, with crisscrossing paths. Jonah wouldn’t get lost as long as he kept hold of the cord. He didn’t have to go far.
He found the first cocoon almost immediately. The Molters hung by their feet using a sticky residue, like amber. They were clearly dead, and their skin was a leathery shell and slightly transparent. He could see their innards breaking down and slowly liquefying, like an ice cube set out on hot pavement. He needed a ladder to reach them.
From deep in the tunnel, something bellowed. It wasn’t a Molter; he was sure of it. It was something bigger—probably the thing the man on the road had described.
It was particularly annoying that there was no ladder in the barracks he was staying in or in the first two that he’d checked. Then Jonah remembered the headquarters building. The ladders had probably been taken there, and the soldiers who had used them were no longer alive, which was why they weren’t returned to the barracks they were taken from. Fortunately, he did find one ladder in the broom closet on the first floor of Charlie battery. He’d have to work fast. It would be night soon.
Back at the tunnel, he climbed up the ladder and forced a paint scraper deep into the residue. He took a small hammer and pounded the end of it, and the cocoon fell. Then he climbed up to the next one. He’d only need a few more.
He tied the cocoons together with the five-fifty cord that was attached to his belt. Whatever was deep in the tunnel bellowed again, this time rumbling the walls as if it knew Jonah was there. He felt the air shift, and he could tell something was moving toward him.
He shined his flashlight, its brightness eating up the darkness before it. It flashed over something, but the thing was far away. The fact that the light picked up on it from his distance showed how large it actually was. No time to investigate. Jonah knew his curiosity might get him killed. There was no fighting room in the tunnels, and he wasn’t familiar enough with their layout, so he headed for the entrance.
He dragged the three cocoons out of the tunnel. There wasn’t much time. Night was coming. His preparations had taken him longer than expected, and he had a lot more to do. Jonah had been lucky in his assumption that the Molters were nocturnal. He slashed one of the cocoons with a knife, and as its gooey contents spilled out; the cocoon collapsed and deflated like a balloon.
*
Jonah saw that a fully automatic grenade launcher was inoperable under the vehicle that had been flipped over. This was disappointing. It was an astoundingly destructive weapon system, and he’d used one on a few occasions during the war. The squad automatic rifle would have to do. He’d called it “SAR” for short.
The UVs still had a multitude of weapon choices. There were three rocket launchers, night-vision goggles—he’d take a pair, which he probably wouldn’t need, but if he did, he’d just have to remember to take them off before firing a weapon—and plenty of ammo, including tracer rounds. Perfect.
He investigated another vehicle and hit the jackpot: two mine bandoleers, never set to blow. There had probably been more, but they were no doubt used outside the headquarters building, considering the damage.
He found a crate of incendiary grenades and decided to save them for another battle. He was hopeful there would be one. He’d have to be careful, though; he’d seen these grenades explode, and it was an easy way to get trapped and burn to death.
Finding weapons wasn’t what concerned him. The problem was that he was going to have to fight on his own, which he’d barely trained for. He had only been in the military for a few years, not enough time to cover every aspect of training. Going into battle was bearable, at minimum, if you had your buddies.
Jonah figured his best plan of action would be to lead the creature on as long of a path as possible and do his best to kill it along the way. It seemed like a good plan.
He loaded all the weapons into the vehicle, drove it across the physical-training field, parked in front of the mailroom, and unloaded the weapons inside, except for the SAR, which he kept at the gunner’s hatch.
He went out and climbed up the gunner’s hatch and aimed the SAR across the field toward the road. There were two ammo boxes filled with four hundred rounds each. He pulled the cocking handle to the rear, lifted the cover, inserted the ammo belt from the box, closed the cover, pulled the trigger, and eased the bolt forward to the firing position—locked, cocked, and ready to rock.
He pushed the legs of both mines into the soft grass next to the front and rear tires of the UV. He knew he had a safe distance of about twenty meters for the back blast, so he grabbed two sets of firing-wire spools and attached them to the mines. Then he trailed both sets into the mailroom, where he attached their firing devices.
He was going to keep his automatic rifle there. He wouldn’t need it unless he made it back. In fact, there were points along his plan of attack where he’d only have a knife on him due to the fact that he needed to stay light and mobile. It wasn’t often that a soldier went into battle so ill-equipped.
Jonah grabbed all three rocket launchers and started jogging. He dropped one in the middle of the field, dropped another halfway down the main road, and slung the last one over his shoulder. Each launcher had one rocket.
Jonah sank his knife into one of the cocoons and dragged it from the opening to the Nazi tunnel to the inside hallway of the barracks, the contents of it spilling along the way, leaving a thick, gelatinous trail.
Jonah sat on a bench in front of the barracks, smoking a cigarette from one of the packs Eric had bought him when they were all at the club. Eric had known he didn’t care for the brand, so he’d bought it to mess with him. Jonah smiled.
Then his smile faded. His friend was gone. All of the people he was close to were dead because of those creatures. Jonah checked his watch. It was about an hour until sundown.
CHAPTER 20
Jonah was across from the Alpha battery barracks, just to the side of the tunnel’s exit. Camouflage paint covered his face, and he’d pulled tree brush around and over his position.
He’d showered after the smoke; it was a cold one that came out in a trickle. He didn’t use any soap. He didn’t know how well—or even if—those things could smell, but he didn’t want to give away his position because he couldn’t resist a butt before battle.
He wore earplugs in case he didn’t die. His ears already rang. It was hardly noticeable when out in the world, but if he was in a quiet room, it sounded like the constant buzz of a mosquito. He remembered asking a doctor in the military if there were anything that could be done about it. The doctor had said to turn a fan on to drown out the ringing in his ears.
He sensed something was coming, the way you know when there’s someone in a room with you even if you haven’t spotted him yet. From the exit to the tunnel, legs appeared, all squashed together like a spider’s, waiting as if testing whether it was safe to come out.
Jonah raised the rocket launcher and aimed it at the barracks, waiting for the creature to cross his line of fire. His heart raced, and he hoped he didn’t die, but if he did, he hoped to take it with him.
The Behemoth squeezed itself out of the tunnel. All of it. Jonah gasped. It was much larger than he thought it would be, or imagined it could be. It was probably close to thirty feet high. It had many legs that always seemed to be moving, propelling its body forward. Its black frame was centered around its gruesome head, which was remarkably similar to that of the other Molters, just a lot bigger. It had dark stripes that reached like fingers toward the center of its face, in contrast to the rest of its head, which was white.
Luckily, it didn’t see Jonah and slowly glided across the street, following the slick trail of its food. When it was in front of the barracks, Jonah pressed down on the rocket launcher’s trigger.
The Behemoth flittered backward, and the rocket smashed into the front door of the barracks, blowing it apart. The explosion echoed through the quiet night. At first the Behemoth didn’t move, shocked at the power of the weapon. Then it suddenly whipped its head in Jonah’s direction. He could see it bare its large teeth at him. Jonah ran. The Behemoth let out a low hiss, like an engine revving up for speed, and went after him.
Jonah had hoped that it would have been hit, killed, or at least disoriented from the rocket. Its surprise was only momentary. It was too fast for Jonah, and he was barely able to escape from being scooped up into its many legs.
