CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cassandra lay curled up under a faded plaid blanket, snuggled warmly near the smoldering remains of a small fire.
The cool springtime air filled the room and she shivered as she unconsciously attempted to stay warm in between the frayed edges of the blanket.
She tucked herself in a little closer to Lewis, who wrapped his arm around her. Cassandra opened her eyes slightly and smiled. She glanced around and noticed that most of the people in the room were sleeping. Carlos was draped across one of the few chairs in the area, mouth open as he slept.
She shut her eyes again as she noted that the morning watchmen were sitting casually, quietly talking to each other, not concerned about any predators on the outside. This was now their routine. This was their method of survival.
Cassandra, Lewis, and Carlos had stayed alive so long because of it. Those in the group that harbored in a former multi-million dollar mansion were alive because of the routine, because they had adjusted to the new way of life that had taken over the world.
Those that had died, Cassandra could not afford to spend any time considering.
The war was done. The creatures; the bugs, the serpents, the devil, whatever one of the hundreds of names she had heard applied to them, now ruled the world that she knew.
The human race, as far as Cassandra knew, had usurped it supplies and had no corner of the Earth to run to without the bugs pressing in.
With every new person or pair or group that Cassandra encountered there always came a new rush of hope, a new rumor, a new whisper about a working radio network or a plan of attack, but nothing ever came to be.
Entire cities had been transformed into massive hives, and as survivors migrated and ran into each other, rumors were spread far and wide of hives so large there were two queens in them. This massive, egg producing creatures, standing easily sixteen feet tall, more than twice the height of their hellish offspring, were as intelligent as they were deadly.
The Queen cared about only one thing; her precious children. She could control them, direct them, and she seemed to know her prey well. When she was involved in any fight, humans were almost always doomed. It was luck and determination combined with massive amounts of ammunition and heavy loss of life that would bring down a queen.
Despite only encountering a queen a few times, Cassandra had learned very quickly to respect their power and fear their wrath. She prayed silently to never encounter another one again.
She considered herself quite lucky to have survived through all that she had been through, but she knew she couldn't have done it without Lewis' guidance and friendship. He had helped her escape from bad situations where she might have otherwise cowered in fear and cried herself until death.
The injuries that she had sustained over the winter months could have been fatal if not for Carlos's care, she thought, too, as she rubbed her left thigh, where a large claw mark was forever engraved into her skin, just up from the holes in her leg that had been punctured straight into bone from an earlier attack.
The humans had learned, after months of cold and hardship, to avoid the heavily infested areas and the bugs would lay dormant.
Apparently the animals did not need to eat to survive; they existed only to procreate in their most deadly of fashions. If the surviving bands of humans stayed quiet and far enough away from hives, survival was possible.
Life, if you could call it that, went on as best as it could. Babies were born. People got sick. Some died of injuries and malnutrition.
Any buildings that were still standing had been heavily raided, and supplies had run nearly completely out in almost every town Cassandra followed Lewis in to.
The new routine of life was rotating guard duty around the clock, making sure that groups scanned every conceivable point of attack.
They had learned much about the creatures in all this time. They had figured out the entire life cycle of the creature, they had begun to understand the Queen and her mentality.
They understood their enemy well enough to know that humans, running short on weapons, and food and utilizing almost all their energy to stay warm and well, could not beat the bugs. The only way to survive was to hide and run and hide more.
So, Lewis led his group and the changing faces within it, to survival, not to battle.
The idea of heading to warmer climates had long since been forgotten. They had not traveled far in months, trapped and cut off by hordes of drones and hives, surviving in any way they could became priority.
It was nearly impossible to find vehicles with fuel, and clear roads to drive them on. The animals could easily outrun a speeding car over a short distance, and it was too difficult to speed a long distance without hitting into a traffic jam or impassible roads.
When the human survivors needed food, supplies or safety, all travel was done on foot. With children, adults, a few elderly, and some pregnant women or new mothers cradling young infants, foot travel was difficult and slow, and often traded for huddled comfort inside a home, a factory, or a shopping mall while smaller and faster runners braved the dangers to gather supplies for everyone else.
When the group did travel, they carried what they could and what they needed, and they had a pre-planned escape pattern for every situation, custom designed for each new building or house they harbored in.
They tried their best to conserve ammunition, and if they were lucky to find any, they would stock up. While feeding themselves was a difficult task, feeding ammunition to their weapons was a top priority.
Stress, desolation, and daily fear of death created difficult situations, fights, and human on human killings.
Saving the human race, one person at a time was the only mission, and while supporting a group was not without challenges, it still made Cassandra feel like she had something of a family.
Cassandra spent little time thinking about the inevitable extinction of the human race. Still, though, she knew it would come.
It was an unspoken truth within the group; there was simply no reason to verbally revisit the idea. If they weren't killed outright, eventually the human race would die by attrition, with the difficulties and dangers of bearing and raising a child in a world overrun by an alien animal no one understood.
"I will tell you one thing, though," one of the women in the group Cassandra sat with said with a light laugh.
The five women chatted lightly before the small fire in the fireplace in the middle of the kitchen, sipping hot tea and finishing up a warm soup lunch.
"I never thought the apocalypse would be so good for my figure!"
They group laughed loudly. Cassandra thought it felt good to laugh; it wasn't something people seemed to do often anymore. It was nearly impossible to be in good spirits while struggling to survive, but the last week in the mansion had been recuperative for everyone, and it showed.
"Seriously!" The woman added in after a good laugh. "I mean, I can't get my manicures anymore, but I'm finally on the diet and exercise program my doctor kept telling me I needed. I've never looked better!"
As the shifts changed, Cassandra woke up and took to her duty, serving as lookout with Lewis and another man, for a few hours in the afternoon.
The large home, one of three at the end of a cul-de-sac in a once wealthy subdivision, though suffering from moths of neglect, had an air of the beauty it once possessed. Over five dozen people made the three homes their own.
The winter passed slowly, but eventually, little whitish pink blossoms on trees in the yard began to emerge in stark contrast to the dark and dreary skies and cold rains that seemed to fall every other day.
Cassandra walked up the winding staircase of the elaborate home and down a lengthy corridor past two bedrooms towards her posted watch spot on a balcony.
She silently knew that at some point they would be forced out of this home just as they had been time and time again. She perched herself on the balcony outside the master bedroom while Lewis and the other man, Scott, took different vantage points in the room's other windows.
She glanced quietly across the vast lawn and let her eyes scan the trees and the roads in the sprawling subdivision. The homes bordered a former golf course, providing a long view of open, flat land, which made guard duty easier.
There was no activity and the group was enjoying more than a week of rest and recovery before they would start walking again. It was a wise choice they had made to forget about trying to hide out in cities, nearer to everything useful.
Larger cities led to bigger hives and more death and destruction and Cassandra had had more than enough encounters with hives for one lifetime, she decided.
She sighed and glanced solemnly over the lawn, noting that despite the death that surrounding every moment of life everywhere, flowers were beginning to shoot green stalks up through the unkempt grounds in search of sunlight.
Little sprouts were peeking out from the ground all around and the world, rotating on as it always did, turned to green as spring marched in. The weather had been a nearly non stop steady drizzle for the last week, only periodically pausing enough for brief intervals of teasing sunlight.
Cassandra found herself idly wondering how nature could just simply roll on so blind to all that was happening, but she shrugged and shook her head. It was silly to think such things as though nature could opt to change its way if it could, or put an end to the infestation that had taken place.
She found herself suddenly picturing a world locked in darkness and rain or an eternal winter, because nature lost hope and stopped. Before she realized it she was finding herself jealous of nature for not stopping its normal progression of life in the face of the terror that had overtaken the planet.
She began to wish for something that she had not caught herself wishing for in quite a while, a time and place where life was the way it should be.
She imagined herself and Stephanie just beginning to shape their dreams of their lives. She sighed and rolled her eyes back into her head as she forced such foolish thoughts from her mind. She purged the memory of Stephanie from her thoughts, and with it, any thoughts of a life she once led.
She glanced back behind her into the bedroom and caught Lewis's eye. They exchanged small smiles and then turned to continue monitoring the outside world for the remainder of their rotation.
She tried to pretend she hadn't overheard his conversation with Scott about why the two of them hadn't 'hooked up' as of yet. Cassandra knew Lewis was disappointed. She considered him a dear friend. He and Carlos had been with her since nearly the beginning. They were as tight as any family could get.
Over the months, the long migrations for miles a day, the supply runs, the battles, the scuffles amongst members of the group, the cold nights huddled together for warmth, there were always stray looks, gentle touches, and warm advances.
Cassandra glanced over to Lewis who was smiling casually as he chatted with Scott. She had thought about being with him, but there was reservation in her heart. She had watched people, families and lovers, struggle to survive over the many passing months.
She had watched three marriages, four births, and countless deaths. The new way of life was one of struggle to survive; there wasn't much room for anything else.
She watched Lewis quietly, and tried to picture herself with him, but she only saw blood and sadness and death. She sighed and looked back out across the sprawling views of the golf course beyond the subdivision.
Suddenly a massive boom resounded through the air, it echoed through the empty subdivision and bounced off the sides of the hills as it reverberated through her ears.
Lewis jumped and ran out onto the patio next to Cassandra as they both stared over the trees down the rolling hill, towards the city that they had long since evacuated.
Their eyes grew wide as they watched massive flames shoot up from a great blue flash of light. A thick circle of deep blueish gray smoke rose up in a mushroom cloud and was immediately chased by a blaze of bright blue and orange flames that looked large enough to engulf the whole city.
Everyone in the house was rushing with excitement out onto the hillside front lawn to see the light show against the rainy early afternoon sky.
As though the burst of fire and flames was a well-planned and long awaited attack, the people on the lawn below began to howl and cheer, cursing at the creatures that had overtaken the city far beyond their encampment.
Lewis, Cassandra, and many others from the second floor scampered down the stairs and joined their companions on the front lawn, watching the flames spread for hours, each talking excitedly about what triggered the massive explosion.
As evening set, the group had fallen into a deep discussion about what happened. Some simply believed that the creatures accidently set off a gas line fire and blew up the city and their hive with it in a massive accident.
Lewis and a few others thought the mushroom shaped cloud looked very similar to a nuclear bomb, and suspected that perhaps the creatures inadvertently ignited some leftover weapon that could have remained there from a military organized attack from so long ago.
It was also possible, others suspected, that the animals had inadvertently brought such a weapon back with them into their hive and triggered it somehow.
Of course, the widest hope was that the massive explosion was a sign of a renewed effort to destroy the animals and reclaim the planet for humans.
There was concern over radiation fallout, but figuring they had to die of something sooner or later, by nightfall the group had agreed that at daybreak, they would start on a journey towards the city to see for themselves what exactly happened.
When morning came, Cassandra and most of the others were waiting on the front lawn, bouncing like excited children on Christmas morning.
The idea of an entire city-sized hive having been destroyed was almost too much to handle. Hate and curiosity urged the group to see it all more clearly and as some waited for the rest to prepare for the trek down the side of the mountain in into the city miles away, they found themselves almost unable to control their excitement.
Once organized, the group marched away from the wealthy estate and down the access road off the side of the mountain.
They wound down the mountain and marched through the empty streets, cautiously scanning their surroundings as they walked for signs of their enemies, but also keeping an eye towards the still rising smoke as though it was some illusion brought on by massive boredom or excited imaginations and might disappear if they stopped looking towards it.
It took the group hours to reach the edge of the city. Lewis led the group to a slower pace and looked around the destruction.
They carefully navigated the streets between the heavily damaged buildings, studying their surroundings habitually, expecting an attack from any angle.
The city seemed deserted of both man and beast, and now was nothing more than a few smoldering cinder blocks and piles of rubble.
The heat from the remains was almost unbearable, and some of the piles of rubble still had a core lit to a bright blue from the heat burning within.
Cassandra stared at it all with wide eyes but remained quiet; it was hard to believe what she was even seeing. The amount of destruction truly did look like a nuclear bomb had gone off, not that she had actually seen one to know.
It was difficult to imagine how the animals could have done such a thing to themselves, and as the group walked on through block after block of decimation, they pondered aloud the same questions.
Some of the group still cheered and howled their delight at the destruction of the bugs. Regardless of how it happened, the end result was the same.
"There's no way anything could have survived this blast. The whole hive has to be dead." Lewis whispered in soft shock.
Cassandra glanced at Carlos and Lewis, both of whom seemed utterly perplexed by what caused such a massive explosion. The sights around them were surreal.
There was still a thick smoke that enveloped many leveled blocks of the city. The grayish smoke lingered in the air making it difficult to see but a few feet, while within some of the still smoldering piles of charred remains of the buildings that once stood in the city, glowed a hot blue core that created a hazy halo in the smoky fog.
Silently, Cassandra walked through, over, and around the wreckage. The powerful stench of thousands, perhaps more, disintegrated bodies of both bugs and humans filled her nostrils and brought tears to her eyes.
The creature's acidic blood released a foul sulfur-like odor into the smoke that stung her face and permeated her body as she walked.
Slowly, the group of excited, perplexed, and apprehensive people shifted their way through the remains of the city until they soon came upon what even the most inexperience layperson could recognize as the point of origin of the blast that leveled the city-hive.
A massive crater at least an entire city block in circumference was embedded into the roadways and rubble around it. Blackened streaks from the center of the pit sprawled out from the very center most point of the hole, pinpointing the location of the device that had ruptured.
The core of the blast was in the middle of the road, just a few feet from where there would have been buildings on either side. While it was evident that gas lines below ground had exploded and helped to keep the fires blazing throughout most of the night, neither Lewis nor the rest of the group could identify the actual source of the explosion just from overlooking the blast site.
"Maybe they spontaneously combusted?" Someone asked.
"Yeah, maybe they'll all just explode and die." Another added wishfully.
Cassandra could not keep her lips from cracking the slightest of a smile at the thought of the deadly creatures suddenly calling off the infestation and self-destructing, ridding the world of the threat they brought with them.
She looked to Lewis who seemed deep in thought as he stared intently at the empty burned crater in the road. His eyebrows sank into a deep frown and his lips were moving ever so slightly.
"What are you thinking?" Cassandra asked.
Lewis glanced at her and then back to the crater.
"I want to know what they did. Maybe… we can use it to our advantage, maybe we can repeat it - kill them all. Blow the whole damn planet up." He answered with a definable tone of hatred in his voice.
Cassandra opened her mouth to say a word, but catching a glace from Carlos on the other side of Lewis, she closed her jaws and stared on in silence.
Once each person in the group had absorbed their fill of the destruction of the hive, they began to fan out and explore the damage in every direction.
By the time they had all met again in a partially unaffected area at the far edge of the explosion to report their findings to one another, the group had totaled that a thirty block radius had been affected by the explosion.
While the center of the area suffered the most damage and was nothing more than a disintegrated pile of charred rubble, the buildings and businesses a dozen blocks away in every direction were burned.
Cassandra had walked through many blocks that had roadways covered in glass shards blown out from the windows and doors of the buildings along the streets. The sides of the still standing buildings were discolored to black from the blast and some had large chunks blown out of their sides.
Other, smaller buildings, not able to withstand the damage to them, collapsed. The roadways all around had fractured and some of the still standing buildings shifted sideways.
As they had walked on, Cassandra and the others came to halt in a small park that had seen only slight damage from the events of the night before.
The group gathered in the park once their curiosity had been temporarily appeased within the remnants of the city. For some time, they discussed what they saw and what they thought had happened.
Cassandra listened quietly to the details about the destruction of the hive and the city surrounding it. If any of the creatures had indeed survived the blast, they had obviously fled for their lives.
The thought of the frightened creatures fleeing their home comforted Cassandra and many others for a short while, allowing for a few more cheerful praises of the explosion that destroyed the hive.
Cassandra deeply hoped that the apparently intelligent animals were smart enough to appreciate how it felt to be forced from home because of a great uprising. Somehow she doubted it, but she decided to play with that thought anyway.
As the months had passed, mankind as a whole and each individual person Cassandra had encountered had been waging war against the creatures that had mysteriously appeared on the face of the planet in the middle of the night.
At first, the threat was approached with slight caution and mild curiosity from a mass of naive people that underestimated the effects of the monstrous creatures. As time passed and the battle turned bitter and millions of people were forced to flee their homes, hope had been lost.
Cassandra had no idea how many just like her were currently living in small or large clusters, simply trying to survive. She did not even know what all those people were surviving for.
She wondered to herself if it was just pure instinct that created the will to live, or if it was the fear of death that kept all those people just like her alive. Perhaps, she imagined, they lived on with some hope in their hearts for an end to the infestation, the plague; this war.
She did not know for certain what drove any of the people around her to stay alive and had indeed forgotten what motivated herself to live, she just simply did, and at some point, she adjusted to the new way of life without question.
She had done things she was not proud of, all to survive just one more day. She had hid in corners shaking and crying, she clung to a life that was no longer meant to be. She had killed to protect herself from what she feared, and she had murdered those who were simply unable to manage to survive.
She did not know what she had become, and she tried not to think about it. It had not even been nine months since the first reports started up, and it just those few short months, life as she knew it had completely ended.
She did not know what kind of life there would be after victory, but what she did know was that this little victory, whatever the cause, was the first blueish tinged ray of hope she and so many others had seen in an impossibly long amount of time. She needed it, and wanted more.
As the energy of the group continued on, she began to feel her own heart beat harder and faster, not out of fear, but from hope, excitement.
They were feelings that were perhaps more powerful than the fear that had welled in her heart for so long. They swept over her like a refreshing burst of peace and tranquility, like something so unexpected amongst the plague of death and destruction that it nearly felt like a dream.
She shut her eyes and allowed a faint smile to forge on her face, savoring the now sweet smell of the burning hive that wafted past her nostrils.
After a few minutes of absorbing the joy of the destruction of the hive, Cassandra was brought back into reality as the embedded cautions in the minds of the group presented themselves.
"We better get a move on back. It'll be dark soon." Lewis called out over the conversations of the others. "Don't want to be out in the open too long, even they do all seem gone."
With that, everyone seemed to be brought out of their glorious high, but each man and woman knew Lewis was right. Cassandra opened her eyes and sprung to her feet as the group prepared for their journey back to the wealthy hillside estate.
They had learned never to underestimate their enemy in the least. While they might seem absent from an area, the creatures had an uncanny ability to appear in mass force with almost no warning.
They were nearly equal tacticians as the most hardened and experienced battle experts, and much more deadly. It did absolutely no good at all to linger in the open for so long.
Cassandra imagined that it would only be a matter of time, minutes perhaps, before they were engaged in yet another battle with the vicious creatures that they might not live through. Death was always around the next corner.
They started off towards the distant mountainside, taking the easier but longer path around the destructed area in the center of the city.
Quietly, the group walked down partially shrapnel covered streets between mildly scorched buildings making a wide arc around the burned site.
As they wove through the streets, Cassandra glanced about from building to building scanning the glass-less windows instinctively awaiting movement from the nightmarish monsters that she was sure were silently lurking, planning their attack with whatever sinister intelligence they utilized.
Cassandra could easily remember a time in the not quite so distant past when this living nightmare began that she walked from make shift shelter to shelter fearful of the beasts that longed to drag her to their terrible hive.
She could remember the hairs on her arms and nape of her neck standing straight up from the goose bumps that ruffled her skin as she walked in fear through dangerous grounds in anticipation of an attack.
Now, oddly, Cassandra noticed her heart was beating in that same heavy, excited fashion and once again the hairs on her body stood at attention. She felt a chill crawl down her spine and her skin tingled with the sensation.
Though, the feelings were not being caused by fear of the creatures. She had almost become so used to walking through dangerous territories and battling the monstrous creatures that an attack at any given moment would be familiar, normal, and routine than the still air of a destroyed town and empty hive.
Her hair was standing on guard because of the eerie emptiness of the streets. Where once a massive hive had been erected, now only a charbroiled hole remained and not a breath of wind, nor a distant shriek from the bugs that once dominated the city was in the air. It was the still silence and quiet peace that it brought that Cassandra found to be uncomfortably and sinister.
She took a deep breath and continued on in stride with her group, close to Lewis.
She tried to remind herself that this was an accident and the bugs were probably more likely than not scared away from the area by the blast and would certainly be back.
She could sense the tension and awe and wonder from Lewis, Carlos, and the others as she glanced around. The explosion was something of a spectacle, and it was hard to remember that it was probably an isolated accident, and not a renewed war effort of some kind.
Not only were there no bugs to be found, there were also no signs of a human uprising either. Whatever had happened, happened, and was done.
Suddenly, something twisted, torturous and shiny black with a heavy acid smell caught her attention a few blocks away. She did not stop to consider if anyone else had seen it too.
The black bodies filled her eyes for a split second and she jumped into action so quickly it startled Lewis and a few others around her.
As the others wielded their weapons around to the same direction, Cassandra was already poised, aiming her rifle and ready to take a final stand against the hordes of creatures she saw. So used to being assaulted by large numbers of the beasts was she that it took a few second glances to allow her mind to register on what she was actually seeing.
Straight ahead about three not-so-charred blocks away, there was indeed a massive number of the terrible creatures, but astoundingly enough, they were all dead.
The group took several long, breathless looks at the massive graveyard site before one person moved forward. Blindly driven by curiosity and amazement, combined with just enough fear and apprehension to keep her on her toes, Cassandra inched her way closer to the slaughter field, putting several feet of distance between herself and her companions before any one of them joined her.
Slowly and cautiously, they all began to walk forward. Not trusting their own eyes or their stunned and confused senses, each member of the group carried their weapons ready to use and scanned the streets and buildings around them waiting for the creatures they eyed to jump up and move in on them as though it was all a ploy to lure the humans in with a false sense of security.
As Cassandra neared the cadavers, she began to notice the countless number of bodies stretched on for blocks, down every street. As she pulled to a halt at the very edge of the first acid burned hole in the street under the first of the bodies, she took a moment to evaluate the tattered corpse.
At first glance, from blocks away it looked as though the creatures simply dropped dead. Cassandra could hear others whispering similar thoughts, thinking that the creatures had just fallen over and died.
Perhaps the cause of death was the explosion or something resulting from it, some of the group had suspected. Perhaps the animals had hit the end of their natural life span or died off because of some bacteria or pathogen in the air that they could not tolerate.
But as they drew closer, the group could tell by the acid burns to the streets and buildings and the tattered remains strewn all over, that the animals had actually been slaughtered.
A new rush of excitement swept over the group as they stared in wonder at the nearly endless field of dead bugs.
"Who did this? And what did they do it with?" Someone whispered aloud from the stunned group.
It was the question silently on everyone's minds. Cassandra slipped forward inch by inch taking in more details of the carcasses and long silent battlefield that sprawled half a dozen blocks.
"I don't see…" Carlos whispered as examined one of the carcasses.
He and Lewis almost simultaneously finished the thought as Cassandra re-registered the scene to realize they were right.
"…any bullets."
"There's no shells."
Lewis knelt down just far enough away from one creature to keep a healthy distance and stared at it though a frowning face. Carlos quietly whispered to him as Cassandra listened in, keeping her eyes locked on the tattered corpse.
She ran her eyes over the dismantled body repeatedly, each time absorbing what she saw in a little more detail.
"Maybe they did just die?"
"These creatures did not just die," Carlos said with certainty.
"It looks like they were ripped apart." Someone else said through gaping jaws.
The creatures had definitely not simply grown old and keeled over, nor had it withered up from boredom or starvation. Something, something external, had torn through the thing's body and nearly shredded it.
The creature Lewis knelt next to had one arm missing and several of its thick spinous processes on its back were torn clean off. It had part of its narrow bony chest seared away.
Cassandra finally lifted her eyes and scanned some of the other bodies for similar damage. Indeed, nearly every creature she saw was in some way dismembered or otherwise blasted into pieces.
Bodyless tails, heads, arms and other pieces were strewn in the street, amongst over and under the tattered corpses like someone was throwing bug-confetti in all directions.
She felt the hairs on her neck stand up once more and a renewed chill run through her body. Cassandra realized that she was not standing at the edge of a massive graveyard; she was staring at a slaughter.
"What in the name of hell could do this to these creatures?" One person whispered with an astonished tone.
"No bullets." Someone else said softly. "How can there be no bullets?"
Lewis stood and stepped out further into the street, walking slowly and carefully between the torn cadavers to avoid the congealed clots of deadly acid. Cassandra followed along cautiously.
The street reeked of death, perhaps more so than any other place Cassandra could recall. Some of the smells in the air were familiar; the acid blood, the scent of death, while other smells were definitely absent.
Cassandra could not smell any gunpowder. There was no hint of residue from any weapon she was familiar with through the whole scene.
Her senses picked up others smells that she wasn't familiar with and could not quite define. Others noticed the lingering odors, too, and questioned them in hushed voices. There was a definite musk in the air unlike anything she could recognize.
"What caused this?" One person, who Cassandra didn't even notice had wandered off, questioned aloud.
Everyone turned and eyed a building across the street, diagonal from where the group was standing. She pointed out a burn mark clean through the side of a building, large enough to easily fit a human head through with room to spare, that offered a clear view of what appeared to be blast damage inside the opposite corner of the interior room.
"Some kind of grenade maybe?" Lewis questioned with a tone that definitely suggested he did not think he was correct.
"Do you see this?" One of the other group members called and again everyone turned to face him.
He was standing in the middle of the intersection of Lavelle Rd. and Arnold Street, according to the dangling street sign on the post above Cassandra's head. He stood and indicated all around him to the carcasses piled high in a splayed out manner from that one area.
"Someone… or something… was standing here," he gestured to the whole middle of the intersection.
He didn't need to finish his thought, because it was so clearly obvious now that he pointed it out. A massive pile of tattered corpses was strewn in a full circle at least ten meters from the spot where he stood.
It looked as though they had all rushed towards a single spot and were tossed back, shredded and mangled by whatever had fought them off.
Whoever had fought and killed the monsters must have indeed been victorious or they had been defeated and carried away to a new hive, for there were no bodies other than the bugs in sight at all.
Cassandra found herself fleetingly impressed with humanity for being capable after so long, to launch such an attack.
She did not even think there was a large enough group of people armed or daring enough to accomplish such a victory, but as she looked around it was obvious there was.
"They destroyed an entire hive, and killed hundreds of drones…" Lewis said quietly.
"In a night." Cassandra added as she looked around the battlefield.
"Who could do this?" One woman gasped.
"How could anyone fight them with no bullets and massacre them?"
"Whatever happened here, we need to find out."
The voices quickly turned into a murmur full of excitement, curiosity, and a healthy dose of fear. It was obvious the battle was long done, and whoever or whatever had killed the bug army and destroyed a hive was long gone.
The murmuring whispered turned to all out discussions and half the group was split between searching for the victors of the battle and heading back to get the rest of the group before they moved on.
Reinvigorated, the group found themselves circling around the battlefield, scanning over the dead drone bodies that littered every street, halfway running, in search of the fighters that they wished to join.
As the group marched quickly, they let their voiced rise and their guns lower, confident that humanity had taken a winning step against the alien creatures.
Exuberantly discussing the methods by which the group of freedom fighters had accomplished this victory, the members of the group unanimously raised their energy and excitement level as each person hoped to find whoever did this and join them in the winning battle.
Cassandra found herself smiling as she fantasized with the rest about a massive force of tanks and weaponry gnawing away at the drone numbers.
They let their thoughts rattle on aloud until finally, the group was discussing in detail a great celebration as they butchered the last of the bug Queens on the final battlefield and lit a huge bonfire to dance around and drink and dine like kings and queens as they reclaimed their planet for themselves.
The thought of having a night's rest where she did not have to worry about being startled into action in the middle of her sleep by an invading force of the deadly monsters sounded so fantastically unrealistic to Cassandra it didn't even seem like it could be possible, but she still allowed her mind to think on it anyway.
They turned a corner and their eyes were greeted by a welcome and newly familiar sight of yet more carcasses of defeated drone beasts. However, instead of marching joyously past that particular block of tattered serpent carcasses, Lewis brought the group to a halt to evaluate this particular battle field in closer detail.
Perhaps at first glance that block seemed in no way different than any of the others they had spent the last forty minutes striding through, but Cassandra let her eyes lower to the ground where Carlos and Lewis were pointing.
Frowning, she too stared in uncertainness at the twisted serpent corpse near their feet. The creature's shiny black hide was covered in a fluid that contrasted greatly with the rest of it.
A splattering of neon green fluid was dried on to the creatures' body shell. The bright green fluid, which looked almost like paint or antifreeze from a vehicle was splattered onto the creature and the sidewalk and roadway around it.
Perplexed, the group stared in hushed awe trying to understand what they were looking at. There was no vehicle nearby, certainly not one fresh enough to have lost its engine coolant in last night
"It can't be antifreeze, it's too thick." One man said with certainty.
"Is that paint?" Another asked.
"Oh, all this time, and who knew we just needed to fight them off with paint guns." Someone sassed.
Cassandra pressed her lips together in an amused smile. Bravely, Carlos dipped two of his fingers in a thick pile of the green stuff on the sidewalk.
Though nearly all dry, there was still a liquidy spot in the center.
Carlos retraced his fingers and closer evaluated the goop on them. He rubbed his fingers together and pulled them apart slowly, watching a sinuousy line of the fluid tract between his thumb and forefinger until he extended his fingertips so far that the thin green line snapped away, leaving a slightly oozing trail on his hand.
"This stuff isn't drying," Carlos said quietly but clearly to the group around him. "It's clotting."
"What?" Lewis asked with a slight laugh in his voice.
"You mean its blood?" Cassandra questioned.
"This is blood." Carlos said, confused but yet certain at the same time.
"It can't be. There's nothing on this planet that has neon blood." Someone responded dismissively.
"Well, I don't think these things are from this planet." Lewis added.
"Yea, but their blood isn't that color, and that's not acidic." Cassandra pointed out.
"Well, it's not acidic anymore…" Lewis started. "So if it is blood from these things, how come we've never seen it before like this?"
"Well, maybe we just never noticed" someone in the group responded. "I mean, it's not like we spend lots of time hanging out in bug zones."
"There's a trail," Cassandra whispered, looking halfway down the block.
She could see another glowing spot of the bright green blood on the ground in the middle of the street, and again on another bug cadaver or two futher down the road, as though something that was bleeding, had stepped over the fallen bug bodies.
Slowly, she began to walk towards the spot, followed by the curious remainder of the group. She glanced around and saw seven more bugs, but nothing else.
A few feet beyond, she saw another spot of blood, which was quite bigger than the first two, and had a thick trail leading to the edge of the street and around the corner into an alleyway. Cautiously, Cassandra and the others followed the trail where they halted once more.
Each person dropped their eyes to the ground, gasping and cursing as they tried to comprehend what they were looking at. Cassandra stared quietly, unable to even blink. She let her eyes take in every detail but she still was not sure she understood what she was seeing.
Laying on the in the middle of the alley, not far from the sidewalk, was a creature unlike anything Cassandra could have ever imagined in her wildest dreams or nightmares.
The gigantic creature being even topped the bugs as far as astounding shock factor was concerned.
The creature was built like a large man, she estimated that the thing was probably seven feet tall but she could not guess its weight. It had two arms, two legs, a torso, a head on its neck between its shoulders, but there the similarities between it and a human being ended.
It was obvious now where the blood had come from. The dead creature on the ground at the groups' feet had a very large portion of its right thigh missing.
Its bare chest had claw marks dug into it and the being's face and head were torn apart. It was hard to tell what the creature's facial features were supposed to look like under the blood and damage to its skull, but Cassandra definitely noted protruding mandibles on the top and bottom of its mouth. Each mandible was crowned with a long, sharp tooth, like a tusk. The mandible on the lower left side of the things face was gone completely, along with most of the rest of its lower jaw.
The creature's jet black smooth hair look like dread locks. They were strewn out around the body and splashed with its green blood.
Cassandra noted the creatures' muscular build and long talons at the ends of its fingers and toes.
Even under the bloody blanket that covered the being, along with armor that sat upon its shoulders, waist, and lower legs and arms, it was easy to tell that the creature was ripe with muscles and a fit fighter, and obviously armed for a battle.
Cassandra also assumed that the thing was male, since it had no breasts on its exposed but slashed chest.
Whatever he was, he was a fighter. She was not sure if the thing had managed to kill all of those drones by himself before he fell on that bloody spot, but she thought him a hero anyway for trying.
"This things' not human," someone in the group said after a short while.
"Really? Hadn't noticed," another responded.
"What in the hell is it?" A concerned voice called out.
"I don't know," Lewis mumbled quietly.
"These things don't turn into that do they?" Someone else questioned.
"No, they couldn't. They wouldn't have killed their own kind," Carlos suspected.
"No, he's different. He was killing them." Cassandra responded in an awe struck whisper.
"Well where in the hell did he come from?"
The group continued for some time discussing the creature that laid in his own blood at their feet. No one moved or even looked around to scan for approaching drones.
All attention was cast to the new creature, the alien, and what he was and what his purpose there was.
Carlos knelt next to it and gently prodded the cadaver with a piece of concrete shard, after several hissed warnings from the group about the potential acid blood. When it was obvious that the alien male's blood was not acidic, Carlos took a closer look at the creature while all eyes fell upon him.
"Well… uh… this," Carlos stammered as he looked over the alien, "this guy came for a fight."
"Do you think he killed all of those things by himself?" Someone asked, exactly what Cassandra had been silently pondering.
"Who knows."
"There could be more of them. We should leave. It's getting late." Lewis added in finally.
Without even realizing it, the group had spent the entire day away from their shelter. Dusk was quickly approaching as the discussions raged on.
Cassandra sighed deeply and stepped back finally pulling her eyes from the bloody cadaver on the ground. She stalked slowly away to the back of the group and scanned the street around her.
She found herself casting a watchful eye up to the dusky spring sky, wondering to herself where the alien on the ground had come from and whether or not there were more of his kind to be found.
Her thoughts drifted but she suddenly became aware of a flash vaguely reflecting off the front of a building two blocks away. She frowned and watched the glass front of the building, awaiting the next flicker of reflection.
In a moment there was a flash of whitish blue reflection onto the building and was gone again. It looked as though someone was flashing a searchlight on and off and the angle of it allowed for part of the light to hit the building. Something was definitely moving, but she wasn't sure where exactly.
Curious and excited, without a word Cassandra started off towards the building that was catching the light. She heard Lewis call to her, but never slowed her steps.
Over and over the building lit up and as she drew nearer to it and became aware that she was being followed by the group, she scanned around the street looking for the source of the light.
Repeatedly the light flickered and reflected off the building. Cassandra turned her head when someone in the group gasped and cursed.
Her eyes cast past the people standing near her, and she scanned down the hill that they were standing at the peak of.
Between the trees and the buildings that lined the street down the hill, Cassandra saw the most incredible sight she had ever witnessed.
Hordes of the bugs were charging forth, attacking with endless fury against a small army of the alien fighters.
The blue lights flashed from the weapons the aliens seemed to have mounted to their armor at their shoulder. From the distance she was at, it was a little hard for Cassandra to see the battle in complete detail, but it was obvious that the dozen or so alien fighters were destroying the hordes with what looked like little effort at all.
Two by two or more, the black creatures fell as they tried to penetrate the line of warriors and failed.
The scene brought a wild wondered smile to Cassandra's face and she felt the group simultaneously gasp and hold their breath for a moment when the battle at the bottom of the hill filled their eyes.
"Holy God, what the hell are they?" A stunned Lewis questioned.
Cassandra felt herself answer before she could even hold it in. She did not who or what the aliens were, but it was obvious what they were they doing. She responded in an excited whispering voice.
"They're saving us."