ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #45: Grizzly Rescue

The Colorado Rockies – Late March

Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler

The twin forward guns on Agent Two’s A-24 Banshee blasted the flying giant ant from the sky, sending the insect careening into the glowing flying saucer that had been circling the dogfight.

The bug smacked into the UFO, splashing a trail of sickly green globules into the afternoon sky. The dying mutated ant fell toward the forested mountainside, hidden in the clouds below.

A normal aircraft would’ve gone down with the bug, but instead, the damaged flying saucer accelerated into a kamikaze dive.

Another flier might have died then, but Two banked his plane at the last moment in the kind of near-impossible maneuver that had helped earn him the World War II nickname “Ace” Freeman.

Barely missing a head-on collision, the UFO slammed into the plane’s left side.

Fire blazed from the Banshee’s engine. For a long moment, both craft spiraled downward together. Then, the saucer disintegrated into glowing fragments, and the plane carrying Ace and his USSB tail gunner, Agent Eighteen—David “the Kid” Daniels—vanished into the clouds over the Rockies.

I radioed them repeatedly, but our wingmates never answered.

No one had heard from them since.

*

“Why don’t you ever invite me somewhere nice and sunny?” Agent Five’s complaint snapped me from my reverie. He pulled his parka tighter against the blizzard as we halted our “Frigid Flyers” on the forested mountainside. The Motor Toboggan “snowmobiles” looked ungainly, but they were lighter and faster than the M29 Weasels we had coming.

“Did you think every U.S. Science Bureau assignment would be in Hawaii, Deadeye?” My reply came out nastier than I meant it, but I still felt guilty for what had happened to Ace and the Kid, less than twenty-four hours ago. If only I’d gotten a better shot at that UFO, or taken out that giant flying ant earlier, or…!

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Not many people would have volunteered to locate a downed plane in this kind of weather, but USSB agents had arrived from all over the country to help search. We all hoped that our fliers might still be alive.

Every agent we could muster, along with a company from Spider Squadron, were combing the mountains west of Colorado’s White River National Forest for our people. Agent Thirteen, “Lucky” Lucy Ryan, was even flying above the storm hoping to spot something through any break in the cloud cover.

So far, no such luck. The March blizzard just got worse and worse, which left me and Five, Nelson “Deadeye” Corrigan, and the rest of my teams in increasing danger.

I’d be damned if I’d give up looking, though. Not only was Ace one of our top agents, he was also one of my best friends. To have any chance of finding him and the Kid alive, we needed to locate them soon.

Five peered through his sniper scope into the storm; he trusted that gunsight more than binoculars. “Ray… See anything on that ridge over there?”

I trained my field glasses where he pointed, but blowing snow obscured my view. “Nothing. If you see something, take the lead.”

Five nodded, and we fired up our snowmobiles, me falling in behind.

We roared across the slopes, half blind from the storm, trying to avoid hidden ravines or other hazards, until Five called a stop once more.

He raised his scope again. “That’s a wrecked Banshee all right. I’ll call it in.” He dug out his radio while I trained my binoculars where he’d indicated.

Details were difficult to make out through the snow, but the plane seemed to have come down on a relatively flat area between two ridges. How Ace had spotted this makeshift landing strip while falling through the cloud cover, I don’t know.

The A-24’s fuselage looked relatively intact, though its wings had been torn off, and the nose looked badly scorched where the engine had caught fire after the collision with the flying saucer.

I saw no signs of life, but it seemed possible that Two and Eighteen could have survived. If they’d trekked away from the wreckage, though, we might never find them—or their bodies—in this storm.

Just then, something moved upslope from the plane. I called Five’s attention to it.

“Not good,” he declared. “It’s big. Could be a bear, but…”

“We better reach that wreckage before whatever-it-is does.”

We gunned our engines and raced to the crash site, me silently praying we’d arrive first.

We didn’t.

A massive, shadowy shape tore into the Banshee’s rear fuselage, the sounds of rending metal audible even above the roar of our snowmobiles.

The blizzard blinded me momentarily as the thing dragged a body from the wreckage and tore it limb from limb.

Deadeye stopped, aimed, and fired while I raced ahead, screaming.

“Nooooooo!”

BOOM!

Five’s shot didn’t stop the carnage, but it did catch the thing’s attention.

The brute turned toward us, the largest grizzly bear I’d ever seen, big enough to squash a Volkswagen Beetle—or tear a downed USSB flier to pieces. Its eyes glowed green, blazing preternaturally through the snowstorm.

I barreled straight for it.

It left the wreckage and charged me.

I skidded the snowmobile into a sideways halt, pulled out my M3 submachine gun and let the beast have it.

The greaser’s forty-five-caliber slugs slammed into the enormous hairy body, and drops of glowing greenish blood spattered into the snow-filled air, but it was like trying to slow down a freight train with a pop gun.

I bailed off the Motor Toboggan just as the giant bear rammed it.

My machine toppled sideways, barely missed my legs, and rolled a couple of times before landing on its side.

The bear’s huge bulk and momentum kept it going. It piled up a mountain of powder—like a living snowplow—before stopping and turning its baleful gaze on me once more.

BOOM!

More fur and greenish blood flew as Deadeye nailed it again. The monster grizzly just shook its shaggy coat and came after me. Its breath billowed in great white clouds, reeking of rotten meat.

I lobbed a grenade filled with Compound T—the newest weapon in our arsenal—right into its face.

WA-SHOOM!

The bug-grenade exploded into a rain of deadly fragments and a cloud of corrosive, yellow gas.

The grizzly slowed, but lumbered through it. The weird green light in its hateful eyes dimmed, but it didn’t die.

I cursed as I scrambled to my vehicle, hauled it upright, and kickstarted it. Doc Teragon had warned us that Compound T might only work against mutant bugs and “other constructs,” not things like the shrews and the yeti—and apparently this bear.

BOOM! Five blasted it again with another thirty-ought-six round, but the beast just looked more annoyed.

It roared and charged me again just as I gunned the snowmobile.

THWAK!

One huge paw connected with the rear of my machine, sending the toboggan spinning and me sprawling into the snowpack.

Stars whirled in my head. I managed to sit up, draw my twin Colts and blast them into the onrushing grizzly’s face.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

I took out one of its eyes, but that seemed to only enrage the mutant bear further.

BOOM! A shot from Five tore off a chunk of flesh behind its head.

I backpedaled, pushing my butt across the snow, trying to stay out of reach as the grizzly’s jaws gaped.

Blam! Blam! Blam! BOOM!

It loomed over me, remaining eye blazing with hatred.

I threw up my left arm, hoping that sacrificing the limb might buy me time to empty the rest of my ammo into it.

With a rumbling groan, the monster landed on top of me.

I kept shooting—Blam! Blam! Blam!—but it did no good.

I lay half frozen, crushed into the snowbank, blinded by the blizzard, waiting to die.

Agent Five appeared over the monster’s shoulder. He sneered. “Some things are just too damn stupid to know when they’re dead.”

I couldn’t even speak.

Between the two of us, we managed to heave the enormous carcass off me. It smelled like rotten meat, wet fur, and sour formic acid from the bug bomb. The blood leaking from the bear’s many wounds was green, but the glow was already fading.

When my heart stopped pounding, I finally noticed the gore on its muzzle. “The crash… Ace…! The Kid…!”

Deadeye shook his head. “Kid’s dead. Torn apart, but no blood splatter. Must have died on impact.”

“What about Ace?”

“Busy rescuing you. Didn’t have time to check.”

We hurried through the snow to the crash site.

The grizzly had torn open the rear of the plane, including the tail gunner’s station. The front of the Banshee looked badly scorched, but the pilot’s compartment remained intact.

Five and I quickly forced the canopy open.

Buster “Ace” Freeman sat with his chin resting on his chest. His dark skin looked deathly pale, but he stirred when we opened the cockpit.

“’Bout time you got here.” His voice came out thick and slurred. “Get this control panel off me, wouldja?”

The Banshee’s controls had collapsed onto his lap, trapping him inside the plane. If the bear had reached him, he’d have been a sitting duck. He looked in pretty bad shape anyway.

“Hang on, buddy,” I said. “We’ll have you out in no time.” Five was already radioing rescue HQ that we’d found him.

As I leaned in to free him, Ace grabbed my lapel. “Never mind me, Ray… I found it!”

He seemed delirious. I tried to lift the damaged panel, but it hardly budged. Maybe Deadeye and I would be able to move it together. “Found what, Ace?”

“Just before I… went down… We homed in on the source of the radio interference. Signal so big it can’t be anything else… We found the bugs’ main base!”

My jaw dropped,

Ace managed a low chuckle.

“We’ve got a target now, Ray… We can take the fight to them!”

THE END

About “Grizzly Rescue”

I had this story planned and plotted well before I’d ever heard of the movie Cocaine Bear. As I write this, I still haven’t seen that film, though maybe I’ll sneak it in before my story rewrites. (I did. I loved it.)

Bear attack tales have quite a history in the movies, and maybe in literature—though I don’t read enough Jack London or western stories to know for sure. There was even a spate of killer bear movies in the 1970s, when animal-attack films were all the rage because of the ecology movement. We even got a mutant bear in Prophecy, which was a date movie for me, and which I like a lot more now than I did then. (Back at the time, it was too icky for my date, IIRC.)

This… er… grizzly tale wraps up the cliffhanger that I left y’all with last time, when Ace and the Kid’s badly damaged Banshee spiraled toward the ground and vanished into the cloud cover over the Rocky Mountains.

This episode, we get another desperate fight in the snow, not only because that’s how the Atomic Tales timeline worked out—still at the edge of winter—but also because a blizzard makes a fight more dramatic. Right?

Sadly, we also bid adieu to Agent Eighteen, David “the Kid” Daniels. (Named for two of Chris and Stephanie Mihm’s children.) Alas, Kid, we hardly knew you! Mostly because you were created for this specific task: to remind us all that our agents are mortal, and because I didn’t want to put one of our existing cast into the back seat of the doomed Banshee that Ace was flying.

After giving Eighteen a cool name and nickname, I did briefly consider keeping him alive. But then, who would the giant mutant grizzly have torn to pieces?

And with Ace’s revelation at the end of this tale, we light the fuse on what’s sure to be a rocket ride to the end of the Atomic Tales: Strange Invaders series.

Strap yourselves in!