ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #46: Gimantis

The Colorado Rockies, West of Denver – Late March

Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler

“Is Tarantula company in place?” I asked Agent Three, Suzanne “Rocky” Rockford.  We huddled with the rest of our team on a remote pine-dappled slope in the Rocky Mountains, ready to give our all for our country and the U.S. Science Bureau.

My second-in-command nodded.  “They radioed they’re set and waiting for go orders.”

I adjusted my flak jacket and state-of-the art helmet headset.  “Good.  General Brock’s okayed me to call it.”

“We think there’s an entrance to the hive in the mountainside… There.”  Rocky handed me a pair of field glasses.  “Peaches is keeping an eye on it, but says he hasn’t seen any movement.”

Connor “Peaches” Muldoon, Agent Nine, was the bureau’s top surveillance expert and cameraman. Every agent with a lower number than his—except Two—stood beside me.  We’d brought all of the USSB’s best.

I took a deep breath.

Today was do or die.

*

Agent Two, Buster “Ace” Freeman, was lucky to be alive.  His wingmate had been killed getting the info the U.S. Science Bureau needed for this assault.  They’d pinpointed a source of radio interference so strong that the Teragons believed it could only come from the enemy’s main hive—the wellspring of the giant invaders plaguing our nation.

The Teragons’ research had proven that our oversized enemies had been manufactured and weren’t the result of natural or atomic mutations.  So, this target might be the lab that made the giant bugs.

What we’d find inside—whether Soviets, Red Chinese, or some other foe—not even Professor Teragon or Doc knew.

I didn’t much care, so long as we shut down our monster problems—for good.

It took a week to muster every available force to throw against the enemy.  We set up a command base in Denver, one hundred and sixty-five miles west of our target, and brought in agents from all over the U.S.  Gigi Brock would be running communications from there, under the command of her dad, the general, with Shannon Teragon on standby to swoop in and assess the situation once we’d breached the enemy position.

Wolf and Huntsman companies of Spider Squadron had ongoing missions battling nests of giant insects in the southwest, but we recruited all of Tarantula and even the fledgling Orb-Weaver air wing for the raid.  Once Orb-Weaver brought in full air support, we’d strike.

Until then, it’d be just us agency grunts and the Tarantulas.  We’d lost some planes to hostiles, so we couldn’t risk any more fly-overs to scout the enemy position.  To get front-line info, Agent Three had led a small ground-based observation team into the mountains.

The terrain was too steep for tanks, so as the Tarantulas edged into final position with their herd of specially equipped jeeps, the rest of our agents—including me—would parachute in from a Flying Boxcar piloted by Agent Thirteen, “Lucky” Lucy Ryan.

My buddy Ace wanted to bring his Mustang as air support, too, but the bureau’s doctors in Denver hadn’t cleared him to fly yet.

After visiting Ace in the hospital, I had one last stop to make before suiting up for the big mission.

Tanya Ruhoff—the Soviet spy once known as reporter Tammy Rubens—was being held at a secure location in our makeshift HQ.  I hoped she might provide some last-minute info helpful to our side.

She sighed theatrically as I glared at her.

“Ray, It’s like I’ve told every interrogator you’ve sent in here: the USSR has nothing to do with the mutant bugs.  We don’t know any more about them than you do.  Would I have risked my neck in your country if we knew what’s going on?”

“You might if you were helping to run the operation.  This scheme feels like something your Soviet masters would pull.”

“I thought after I’d saved your life from the giant shrews, it’d have been obvious we’re on the same side.”

I shook my head.  “Fighting alongside me could be a clever ploy to get in my good graces—allowing you to burrow into our organization.”

Tanya laughed.  “The USSB has a paper trail a mile wide.  It’s practically an open book.  Anything we want to know about you, we already know.  That’s why you should take me with you today.”

“What?!”

“Ray, I know you’re mounting an important mission.  Take me along.  I can help.  You know I’m a crack shot.”

“True.  But I don’t know who you’d be aiming at.  Sorry, Tanya, you’re sitting out the rest of this little war.”

She had some choice words for me after that, but I left her to stew and suited up.

*

Two hours later, I’d parachuted into the Rockies and met up with Agent Three and the rest of our bureau strike force.  Lucky Lucy wanted to tag along—not only because she likes a good brawl, but also as payback for what had happened to Ace and the Kid—but she couldn’t both fly the transport plane and hook up with the rest of us on the ground.

I scanned the target area with Three’s binoculars.  Steep ridges surrounded a bowl-like valley here, filled with dense stands of evergreens and dotted with boulders and occasional scrub clearings.  Last week’s blizzard had thawed into a warm Colorado spring.  The scents of budding greenery, pines, snow melt, and fresh earth filled the late morning air, but everything lay eerily silent.  The mountainside across from us looked innocuous—normal, even.  Though patches of snow dappled the landscape, the terrain to our objective didn’t appear difficult.

The entrance Suzanne had noticed was a shallow depression in the rocky slope.  If any giant bugs lurked there, they remained well hidden.

“You sure this is the place?”

She nodded.  “There’s definitely a strong bug signal coming from that mountain.”

“We gonna get this thing going?”  Agent Four, Alec “Boom Boom” Murphy, didn’t like to sit on his hands.

I checked the other seven members of my team, Agents Three Through Nine: Rocky, Boom Boom, Deadeye, Roughhouse, Ruthless, Wild Bill, and Peaches.  “Ready?”

They all nodded.

I turned on my command headset and spoke to all the troops.  “Operation Bug Out is a go, repeat, GO.  Orb-Weaver arrives in fifteen.  They’ll be hard to miss, so my team will try to catch any guards napping before then.  No sign of the enemy so far, but keep us covered.  Spiders, hold your positions, and wait for my command.”

My team crept from our hidden ridge toward the objective.

It went like a cake walk until we got within five hundred yards.

“Too quiet…”  Agent Five’s eyes narrowed.  He swapped his M3 submachine gun for his sniper rifle and peered through the scope.  “Ray, that hill is moving.”

I signaled a halt.  “What part of it?”

“The whole damn thing.”

As Deadeye spoke. The mountainside heaved, the ground shook, and a roar like thunder split the air.  Trees toppled, cracking like matchsticks, and landslides rumbled toward the valley floor.  A serrated spike, at least five stories tall, thrust out of the snowy ground…  A second one followed…

“Ambush!” I shouted.  “Take cover!”

My team scattered, sheltering behind thick trees and large boulders.

Between the spikes, the earth heaved up in a gigantic mound, and two smaller, twitching barbs appeared.  What we’d thought was a hill kept rising, heaving aside the red Colorado soil.  Four huge pillars—vast segmented legs—lanced outward, and the very earth trembled as the monster emerged and righted itself.

Over us towered largest insect I’d ever seen: a titanic praying mantis.

The thing had to be easily two hundred and fifty feet tall.  It rose from the mountainside like some ghoulish, bug-eyed specter, shaking snow and earth off its massive carapace.

Agent Seven, “Ruthless” Ruth Donlevy, gasped.  “It’s half the size of the Washington Monument!”

Agent Eight, “Wild Bill” Hayes, stepped from behind a boulder, brandishing his M3.  “Gimantis be damned!  This is for Donna!”  He let rip with the grease gun, though, at this distance, his chance of hitting the enormous bug, never mind hurting it, seemed tiny.

But the monstrosity stood between us and our objective.

Silently cursing Bill’s hot-headedness, I shouted into my headset:  “Fire at will!  Light that thing up!  Lure it away from the front door!  Strike team, follow me—that includes you, Bill!”

Though Bill’s machine gun burst had initially attracted the behemoth’s interest, heavier fire from Tarantula company quickly diverted its attention.

Jeep-mounted M2’s pounded fifty-caliber shells into the thing’s belly.  Mortars and bazooka fire raked its hide, but nothing Spider Squadron threw against it seemed to have any effect.  The immense mantis lumbered on stilt-like legs taller than Sitka spruces towards our puny forces.

As my team reached cover behind an escarpment of rock, Deadeye sneered at Bill.  “And you thought you were going to hurt it with that peashooter!”

“Give him a break,” Ruth shot back.  “If your wife got replaced with a giant duplicate, you’d be pretty angry, too.”

Five seemed about to reply, but I headed him off.  “Cut the chatter.  We need to reach that entrance while the Gimantis is busy.”

“That won’t be long,” Agent Four, Alec “Boom Boom” Murphy, put in.

As he spoke, the mantis picked up one of our jeeps and cracked it in half, like an eggshell.  Two jeep-mounted fire hoses doused the monster’s legs in gouts of Compound T, but the thing’s exoskeleton must have been too thick for our new bug spray to affect it.  Even our flamethrowers seemed to do little more than annoy our colossal foe.

“Ray, they’re going to be slaughtered!” Suzanne blurted.

“Then we’d better complete our mission.  C’mon!”

My team followed as I sprinted across the rocky ground with the screams of Spider Squadron’s soldiers echoing in our headsets.  The Tarantulas fought bravely, but Suzanne was right; Orb’s airplanes were still ten minutes away, and without air support, our people didn’t stand a chance.

Ten yards from the concealed entrance, a loud buzzing filled the air.

Bill looked up in terror.  “Not more bugs!”

But instead of a squadron of bees or flying ants, what dived out of the late morning sun was the agency’s C-119 Flying Boxcar.

“Yeee-haaaaa!” Thirteen yelled as she drove all twenty tons of the bulky aircraft into Gimantis’ big bug eyes.

The insect’s head exploded into shards of carapace and green goo, and its scythe-like arms flailed aimlessly, totally missing Lucky Lucy, who’d parachuted out just before impact.

A mountain-shaking cheer went up from the battered grunts of Spider Squadron as my team rushed what we now saw was a large, camouflaged steel door in the mountainside.

“Four… Hit it!”

My explosive expert had his infernal device planted against the metal even before I finished the command.

“Take cover!” Alec warned.

We’d barely reached shelter as the door went up.

KA-WHOOM!

The blast shook the mountainside, filling the air with thick, white smoke.

“Let’s go!” I ordered, leading the charge.

My team raced through the dissipating smoke, spirits soaring, weapons ready…

But as we crossed the threshold, a familiar screeching sound brought us up short.

The three-yard wide tunnel before us stretched deep into the mountain, but dead ahead, blocking our way, lay a whole swarm of giant ants.

Wild Bill spoke for all of us when he whispered: “Oh… Crud!”

TO BE CONTINUED…

About “Gimantis”

Did you believe me last time when I said we were about to blast off for a rocket ride to the finish of Atomic Tales: Strange Invaders?

Do you believe me now?

If nothing else, the huge cast of characters in this story should convince you.  If you’re listening to the audios of these stories, it should be even more obvious.  And the roll call is getting even longer for the next episode.

I guess the big question at this point is: Will our intrepid USSB agents get out of this alive?

Because this is The Big One, and there are more challenges ahead than any of them can expect—and hopefully more than any of you, our faithful fans, can guess.

I’m sure it will surprise no one that this story was inspired by the 1957 film The Deadly Mantis.  DM is considered one of the least of the Universal SciFi/Horror films—and for good reason.  When I watched it the other night (after writing the story but before writing this “about’ piece), I was stunned to find that the main characters don’t even appear until about twenty minutes into the film, and almost equally shocked to realize how many of the minutes before then are made up of stock footage.

I didn’t do any actual counting, but I’d be willing to bet that—across the whole film—DM contains more minutes of stock footage than any of the other Universal classics.  And yes, despite that, I still consider Deadly Mantis a classic (if a minor one) because it contains numerous cool and memorable scenes.

Not only did it inspire this episode of AT, but its tunnel sequence also inspired the giant bee stories in this series, including the climactic “Hive of the Queen Bee.”  Did you notice?

Someone else must have thought highly of it, too, because Deadly Mantis is one of the books in the seminal Crestwood House Monster Series, that wonderful collection of little hardbound volumes that brought classic monsters to many a middle school library in the 1980s.

If you’ve been reading these “About” sections, you also won’t be surprised that the influence of the Hamilton’s Invaders toy line also looms large in this—and the stories to follow as well.

So, if you think “Gimantis” was fun… Just wait until next episode!

You can listen to this story produced by Christopher R. Mihm from SaintEuphoria.com!

Click here to listen.  (MME1xx) Story begins about 1:15:00 from the start.

Click here to read and listen to more ATOMIC TALES!

About Steve Sullivan 439 Articles
Stephen D. Sullivan is an award-winning author, artist, and editor. Since 1980, he has worked on a wide variety of properties, including well-known licenses and original work. Some of his best know projects include Dungeons & Dragons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dragonlance, Iron Man, Legend of the Five Rings, Speed Racer, the Tolkien RPG, Disney Afternoons, Star Wars, The Twilight Empire (Robinson's War), Uncanny Radio, Martian Knights, Tournament of Death, and The Blue Kingdoms (with his friend Jean Rabe).

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