ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #47: Assault on the Final Hive

The Colorado Rockies – Late March

Agent Three, Suzanne “Rocky” Rockford

I clutched my M3 submachine gun tight as Agent Four—Alec “Boom Boom” Murphy—planted the explosive on the steel door in the mountainside. We didn’t know what lay behind that camouflaged portal, but our intelligence said it could be the headquarters of our mysterious enemy.

My heart pounded despite my years in the U.S. Science Bureau and fighting in the European Resistance during World War II. Alec lit the short fuse and our unit took cover.

KA-WHOOM!

The door vanished in a gout of white smoke and crumpling metal.

The air smelled like sour gunpowder, and something noxious I couldn’t identify, as Agent One and I rushed through the newly made opening.

The rest of the USSB team—Agents Four through Nine—followed close behind, ready for action.

As our eyes adjusted to the tunnel’s darkness, Agent One—Raymond “Ray” Tyler, the USSB’s top agent and commander of our little strike force—signaled a quick halt. The light from our headlamps showed a rough-hewn passage running straight toward the center of the mountain. But twenty yards ahead stood a swarm of giant ants.

Agent Eight—”Wild Bill” Hayes—voiced what we were all thinking: “Oh… Crud!”

The enemy’s doll-like eyes and their segmented black carapaces gleamed in the semi-darkness. Their wicked mandibles clacked hungrily, and their eerie hunting trill echoed down the tunnel.

For a moment, agents and bugs studied each other.

Then Ray dropped to one knee and aimed his M3. “Attack formation… FIRE!”

I dropped, too, and our grease guns chattered, as the rank behind us—Alec and Bill—fired over our heads into the enemy.

The first ant went down in our volley, and then the one behind it. The narrow tunnel gave us an advantage; we could fight two wide and double stacked while only one of the huge mutants could attack us at a time. With constant, coordinated fire, we cut them down as they advanced. Our machine guns filled the tunnel with deadly thunder, the stench of gunpowder, and the ammonia-like reek of our dying foes.

Then, the mountain shook again, and reddish dust cascaded from the ceiling.

“We got trouble back here!” Agent Six, “Roughhouse” Rick Donlevy, called over our agency’s super-science headsets.

“Report!” I ordered as I changed clips and continued firing.

“Hatches opened in the mountainside,” replied Agent Seven, “Ruthless” Ruth Donlevy, Rick’s sister. “Ants are streaming out…fireflies, too!”

“Looks like they were ready for us,” I remarked grimly.

“Not ready enough, I hope,” Ray said. “Spider Squadron will deal with the bugs outside. Keep moving into the hive. Close order… Masks on. Switch to Compound T and gas the corridor.”

Before the ants could scramble past their rapidly decaying fellows, our team pulled on gas masks and switched to our newly developed “bug spray” weapons.

Roughhouse and Agent Nine—Connor “Peaches” Muldoon—lobbed grenades back at the tunnel entrance, filling it with yellowish clouds fatal to any bug it touched.

At the same time, Agent Five—Nelson “Deadeye” Corrigan—shot a T-grenade deep into the tunnel ahead of us. The trilling squeal of dying ants was music to our ears. Our masks quickly turned the thick odors of the lair into breathable air with a slight rubbery tang.

Ray, my dauntless commander and friend, radioed home base.

“Gigi, what’s the ETA on air support?”

The perky office assistant’s voice came back through a wave of static. “Two minutes out. Tarantula company says they can hold on until Orb Weaver arrives.”

“Keep us posted. Tyler, out. Team… advance.”

As we marched over the gooey, disintegrating bodies of our insect enemies, and the dispersing clouds from our weapons, I wondered if even our Teragon-enhanced headsets would reach the surface much longer.

Roughhouse and Peaches lobbed T-grenades behind us as we went, keeping the enemy off our backs, while Deadeye shot grenades forward, softening up the ants ahead of us.

The few mutant insects that survived the clouds, we finished off with liquid jets of Compound T from backpacks the science division had rigged up.

We came to another steel door, and Alec cracked it for us.

WHOOM!

But the bugs were waiting.

As they lunged, we fell back, filling the corridor with our deadly gas, but only a crack rifle shot from Deadeye saved Ray and me from the jaws of the lead ant.

“Thanks!” I called.

Deadeye nodded. “Don’t mention it.”

As the monster’s body crumbled into greenish goo, we rallied with our bug sprayers. The ambushing ants died in screeching droves.

We cleared the corridor again, but our chemical advantage wouldn’t last forever; our supply of Compound T was running low.

Ray must have read my mind, because he ordered: “Switch to conventional arms. Save the bug spray for emergencies. Use flamethrowers on the rear guard.”

“Check!” the team responded. We swapped weapons and kept advancing.

The fighting got tougher, and the chatter of our M3s shook the tunnel like an earthquake. But bullets killed bugs almost as well as Compound T, if not as fast.

“Which way, Ruth?” Ray asked after we’d cleared a four-way intersection.

Agent Seven checked one of her scientific gizmos. “The signal’s strongest to the left.”

“Maybe there’s just more bugs that way,” Roughhouse, her brother, offered.

Despite our grim situation, Ruthless Ruth laughed. “Probably more bugs at their command center.”

“Left it is.” Ray led us that way, and we quickly came to another steel door.

“I don’t think the ants have the smarts to build these doors,” Boom Boom noted as he prepared another portal-shattering explosive.

“That means we’re heading in the right direction,” I surmised.

“Alec, set a bug bomb to go off when that door comes down,” Ray commanded. “I don’t want us getting ambushed ag—”

“Look out!” Ruth cried as a mass of ants, now crawling on the ceiling and walls as well as the floor, charged our rear.

Our flamethrowers roared, but that didn’t stop the first wave.

The burning ants kept coming, knocking Peaches into the wall and nearly flattening Roughhouse.

Just then, the door in front of us retracted into the ceiling, and the ants waiting on the other side charged through.

Fortunately, Alec had the good sense to set off the bug bomb he’d been prepping—PFOOF!—though the explosion of yellowish gas knocked him to the ground.

The burst of bug spray bought Ray and me enough time to bring our greasers to bear on an ant crawling on the ceiling, past the Compound T cloud.

We hammered it with slugs, while Ruth and Deadeye cut down the blazing monsters to our rear.

“Incoming!” Bill chucked a T-grenade into the back ranks, where a new pair of ants had forced their way past their burning and rapidly decomposing comrades.

PFOOF!

“Stay in the clouds! Keep fighting!” Ray shouted.

Alec recovered enough to chuck the explosive he’d intended for the door down the corridor ahead, into the midst of the ant reinforcements.

KA-WHOOM!

Most of those bugs went down, their armored bodies quickly turning into goo, but the explosion brought down part of the ceiling, too.

“I’ll mop up the ones ahead, Suzanne,” Ray told me. “Help the others.”

As he went into sharpshooter mode, I turned my fire to the rear.

Protected by the cloud of Compound T, Roughhouse and Peaches rejoined the fight, though both looked pretty banged up.

The mass of ants coming from the rear must have been huge, because cutting them down took forever. For each one we killed, another shambled over the disintegrating body to take its place.

The tunnel filled with gas explosions, the roar of flamethrowers, gunfire, and the angry shrieking trill of our enemies.

At some point—I’m not exactly sure when—Deadeye joined the front rank with Ray, helping slay the ants trying to push past the debris Alec had blown from the ceiling.

“Last one!” Ruth called, throwing a T-grenade into the jumbled remnants at our rear.

The weapon went off, and the bugs within its yellowish cloud perished…

Everything fell eerily silent.

For long moments, the only sound in the tunnel was the labored breathing and soft moans of our team.

“I think we got ’em all,” Ray said. “Who’s hurt?”

“Just a little banged up,” Roughhouse declared. “Nothing we can’t handle. Right, Peaches?” He slugged our photographer and surveillance expert in the shoulder; Peaches grunted and nodded in reply.

Ray tried to raise HQ, but nothing came back. He drew a deep breath. “Looks like we’re on our own.”

“As usual,” Deadeye quipped.

Ray inched toward the rockfall, which had held back the bugs attacking from that direction. “Everybody keep quiet. If we’re lucky, they may think we’ve died in this mess.”

Nearly silently, he led us over the explosion-born barricade to the passage beyond.

I squinted into the headlamp-lit darkness, sweating, but glad for the gas mask that was keeping the dust and the remnants of Compound T out of my lungs. “Is that a light up ahead?”

Ray whispered back: “Yeah. Green… Like a whole lot of bug goo. Switch off your lamps and stay alert. This could be their command center.”

He motioned us into single file, pressed against the right-hand wall as we tiptoed forward.

The green light grew stronger, and ahead the tunnel widened into a cave at least ten yards tall, stretching off into the distance.

I know that I wasn’t the only one whose jaw dropped when we glimpsed what was inside…

Strange machinery filled the cavern.

It reminded me of the labs at USSB HQ, but the equipment looked like nothing I’d seen before: all curves, weird angles, and glowing panels… Pulsing, snakelike things that might have been tubes or thick wiring… Huge, boiling transparent vats and tubes sprung from a mad scientist’s fever dream…

The whole place was lit not only by the eerie paneling, but also by huge lightning bugs that flitted here and there, like hideous carrier pigeons, near the ceiling.

Bubbling green liquid filled huge cylinders lining the walls. Some contained the giant ants and other bugs apparently being grown in this hellish factory, but others…

Others contained human beings!

My heart pounded, and I heard Bill gasp as all of us recognized some of the people in the tubes: Dr. Hedison… Sister Starlight, and… Bill’s wife, Donna.

Bill would have charged in right then, but Alec held him back, and Ray motioned everyone to stay silent.

But as horrible as this human menagerie was, one further shock greeted us.

Moving amid the machinery, like scientists in a nightmare lab, were a collection of green… globs, like the one that had run amok in Pennsylvania.

The things formed limbs as needed while working the strange equipment. They seemed to have no eyes or other sense organs. The three or four I spotted looked to be nothing more than ambient, living jelly, some nearly human in size, one almost as large as an elephant.

Their movements and manipulations of the machines indicated a high degree of intelligence. Clearly, this was no Soviet plot, but something far worse.

Deadeye hissed the word that all of us had to be thinking: “Aliens…!”

Ray shot him a stern glance, then indicated via hand signal how we should enter and attack this alien lab.

We crept forward, fanning out.

The globs didn’t seem to notice us.

Ray started a silent countdown with his fingers… Three… Two…

Then his eyes went wide, and he yelled:

“Suzanne… Look out!”

TO BE CONCLUDED…

About “Assault on the Final Hive”

Did I take you by surprise?

Or did you expect to find alien globs at the end of this storyline all along?

I’ve been writing Atomic Tales: Strange Invaders in pieces over the years, but this finale is what I’ve been working toward since the start—and that includes our heroes raiding an alien lab buried in a mountainside for the big final battle.

The nature of the strange invaders has been hinted at from the beginning. And while not everything has been revealed yet, probably you can see some foreshadowing if you look back now: the UFOs, the bugs circumventing the cube-square law and disintegrating into glowing ooze, the green blood of the mutant animals, the “voices” that spoke to Dr. Hedison, Dr. Mihm, and Donna Hayes, and of course, the saucer that crashed and the glob that wrecked a small town in Pennsylvania. What was in that saucer? Now you know.

But there were plenty more hints, and there are plenty more mysteries still to solve.

Will all be revealed in this series? Probably not. Mostly because I’ve got a sequel planned. And I need some secrets left for that set of stories; don’t I?

But even if my future schemes never come to fruition, hopefully by the end of AT:SI you’ll have enough answers and enough action to feel satisfied.

Oh! For those of you interested, here’s the “marching order” I was using for our heroes in this story:

RANK 1 – Ray, Rocky

RANK 2 – Boom Boom, Wild Bill

RANK 3 – Ruthless, Deadeye

RANK 4 – Roughhouse, Peaches

Hopefully that’ll be enough for those of you wanting to play out the scenario with miniatures or in your favorite Role Playing Games. (Aside from the standards, I recommend the great RPGS being put out by my friend Lester Smith, especially his D6xD6 system and his super simple but deep and versatile Bookmark No Hit Point RPG, the rules for which fit on a bookmark—or if you prefer, a playing card. I’ve run a few Atomic Tales games in BNHP, and I’m even thinking of doing a game supplement.)

Playing your own tabletop version of AT should keep you all busy until next time.

I’ve known from the start, and you’ve probably suspected, that all this would end in a big blow out…

And the final blast is next!

See you then!