The Colorado Rockies – Late March

Agent Seven, “Ruthless” Ruth Donlevy

I stood at the threshold of the alien lab gobsmacked, unable to speak. My heart pounded in my ears, and my breath echoed inside my gas mask.

Throughout the cavern before us stretched a vast array of machinery like I’d never seen before. Some of it looked familiar—vats and tubes—but other elements… I couldn’t even guess their purpose.

Many cylinders filled with green, bubbling liquid, were growing giant bugs, new recruits for the battle against humanity. But other vats held people, a few of whom I recognized: the late Dr. Hedison, Sister Starlight, and Agent Eight’s wife Donna, who we’d last seen as a fifty-foot giant.

The machines were being tended by sentient greenish globs, like the one we’d fought in Blackwell, Pennsylvania. An eerie shiver ran down my spine.

Were these strange invaders what the U.S. Science Bureau had been fighting all this time?

Pressed against the tunnel wall nearby, my brother, Agent Six—“Roughhouse” Rick Donlevy—caught my eye and mouthed: “What the hell, Ruth?”

What the hell, indeed.

The voice of Agent Five—Nelson “Deadeye” Corrigan—hissed over our secure headsets. “Aliens…!”

Our leader Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler, motioned for us to fan out and attack this monstrous lab from numerous directions.

The blobs didn’t seem to notice as we snuck from the tunnel into the cavern laboratory complex—not too surprising, as the aliens had no sensory organs that I could see.

Ray began a silent countdown: Three… Two…

A lightning bug buzzing up near the cavern’s ceiling spotted our strike team and hurtled toward Agent Three.

“Suzanne… Look out!” Ray cried.

He dived in front of Three just as the bug let loose with a fearsome blast of electricity.

ZZAPPP!

Ray went down, his limp body smoking, but we didn’t have time to check on him, because at that moment every monster in the room turned toward us, and the giant bugs attacked.

“Banzai!” shouted Agent Eight, “Wild Bill” Hayes. He machine gunned both equipment and bugs. Pale blue smoke and reddish sparks quickly filled the chamber, but Bill advanced single-mindedly toward the huge cylinder holding his wife.

“Form up on me,” Agent Three, Suzanne “Rocky” Rockford ordered. “Protect Agent One.”

The rest of us formed a defensive circle, but Wild Bill wasn’t listening. One of the lightning bugs dived at him.

Boom!

A sniper shot from Deadeye turned that firefly into bright green goo, probably saving the life of Donna’s husband. But I didn’t feel too sure about the rest of us, grouped around Ray.

“Heads up!” Agent Four, Alec, shouted and tossed something into the swarm of fireflies descending on us from above.

PFOOF!

I’d thought we were out of T-grenades, but I should have known that “Boom Boom” would keep something in reserve. The bug bomb detonated right in the middle of our enemies, and the insects died shrieking. That left only a few for Deadeye and Rick to pick off at long range… Plus the alien globs.

Bill reached the cylinder holding Donna, defending it while a car-sized glob undulated toward a nearby instrument panel.

The alien jelly wailed eerily as Bill’s slugs ripped into its inhuman flesh, but the thing turned and—with amazing quickness—oozed toward him. The glob deftly avoided the weird, severed cables that writhed nearby, spitting red sparks.

I rushed toward the alien, clutching my nearly empty spray cannister of Compound T. “Hey!” I shouted. “How do you like this?!” I let the blob have it.

Turned out, the alien liked Compound T just fine. It reached a pseudopod right through the “deadly” stream of bug killer and grabbed my combat boot—which immediately started to dissolve.

“Holy—!” I cut the laces and pulled my foot out of the boot, just in time.

The glob undulated after me.

I might have died then, but the rest of our team finished blasting the fireflies to pieces and turned their fire on the aliens.

A hail of bullets backed off my foe enough for me to scuttle away.

It also gave me time to notice something: our enemies were avoiding the red sparks from those felled cables. I shouted: “They don’t like whatever power they’re feeding those machines!”

Suzanne immediately wheeled and blasted one of the strange electrical lines snaking overhead.

It fell atop the glob that had been chasing me.

The thing shrieked like a short-circuited theremin as crimson sparks danced across its quivering surface. I’ve never seen a blob run before, but it flowed back, PDQ, rejoining a pair of its kind near a large control panel.

BOOM!

Deadeye put a rifle-fired grenade into the middle of them.

Two of the aliens howled and disintegrated into puddles, but the larger one, its surface burning, slithered toward the final glob, a smaller one still working some kind of controls.

The big one crashed into the little one, which wailed as the larger one absorbed it.

“Concentrate fire!” Suzanne commanded, and we all riddled the remaining invader with forty-five-caliber slugs from our greasers.

The alien keened and hissed, but it didn’t die. It slithered up the wall to a foot-wide ventilation opening I hadn’t noticed before. In an instant, it squeezed its enormous bulk into the hole and vanished from sight.

Suzanne pointed at the vent. “Alec, seal that up. Ruth, open up those cylinders. We need to get those people the hell out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alec and I replied.

Though part of me wanted to stay, vacating the alien lab seemed a good idea. Our battle had left the place riddled with sparking conduits, and the weird equipment was burning, filling the air with caustic black smoke. I’d seldom been more grateful for our gas masks, but I feared they might not protect us for long.

Brute force popped open the big tubes quick enough, and—surprisingly—all the people inside them were alive, even Dr. Hedison, who we thought we’d accidentally killed months ago.

Spotting my confusion, Suzanne shook her head. “Figure it out later, Ruth. Let’s go! Out the way we came!”

There were six human captives, which meant one for each team member.

Bill carried Donna, naturally, while I frog-walked Dr. Hedison, and the other captives stumbled along with the team’s assistance. Peaches hefted Ray, who still wasn’t moving.

I prayed we wouldn’t encounter the same type of trouble going out as we had on the way in.

My brother helped two victims, briefly, while Alec went back to finish off the lab.

“Just in case those suckers try to ambush us again,” Boom Boom explained.

The resulting explosion shook the mountain and rained reddish dust and pelting stones down around our heads. Once the echoes and temblors died down, Suzanne called a halt.

“I hear something up ahead…”

But it was only Agent Thirteen, “Lucky” Lucy Ryan leading reinforcements from Tarantula company into the hive.

With their help, we quickly reached the surface.

When I pulled off my gas mask, fresh air had never smelled sweeter—despite the lingering pong of gunpowder.

“Everybody’s out,” Lucy radioed to HQ. “And you wouldn’t believe who they found!”

“Thank God.” Gigi Brock’s voice came back over our headphones. “Is everyone okay?”

But as she asked it, the mountain shook and a big chunk of the west face erupted and cascaded into the valley below.

From the dust rose two flying saucers. The craft glowed green, just like the aliens inside the hidden lab.

Then, another familiar voice called: “Orb-Weavers, on me!” and Agent Two, “Ace” Freeman, fresh from his hospital bed, led the attack squadron in pursuit of the retreating enemy.

The cannons of the USSB Mustangs and Banshees blew the smaller saucer to hell, but the big one shot straight up and vanished, leaving behind only an earth-shaking sonic boom.

Our battle was over—for now.

Epilogue

Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler

“Ray, can you hear me?”

Suzanne’s soothing voice drifted through the darkness. I vaguely remembered she had another name, too… Rocky…? Agent Three…?

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I couldn’t seem to speak coherently, either—though I could mumble with the best of them.

“It’s okay, you’re going to be all right.”

Her voice was comforting. I felt relieved to hear it.

All at once, the last time I’d seen her rushed back to me: the alien lab… a lightning bug angling to kill her…

I forced my weary eyes open. “Suzanne… You’re all right.”

Her smile warmed me all the way to the tips of my aching toes.

She laid a gentle hand against my scorched face. “I’m fine. And the docs say you’ll be walking out of here in a couple of days.”

“Did we win?”

“We kicked the snot out of them!” The peppier voice made me realize that Suzanne and I weren’t alone. Gigi Brock, enthusiastic, as always, sat in a chair behind Agent Three. “Spider Squadron is mopping up what’s left of the alien base. Agent Seven and the Teragons think this might be the end of the giant bug invasion. Though this flying saucer thing…?”

“What flying saucer thing?” I asked.

“You remember the alien blobs in the base…?” Suzanne asked; I nodded, which hurt. “After we killed their bugs, they high-tailed it. Then, pair of flying saucers flew out of the ruins of the mountain. Ace shot one down; the other got away. The Teragons think the globs were piloting those UFOs. But since the one Ace killed disintegrated, we can’t be sure.”

That reminded me of something else I’d seen before I got zapped. “What about… the people?”

“All safe and sound,” Gigi piped. “Even Donna.”

“Including Dr. Hedison,” Suzanne added. “Sister Starlight, too—and a few others as well. Don’t ask me how Hedison is alive. We haven’t figured that out yet. But he had a full physical and seems okay. None of the people from the tubes remember anything from the base. Ruth thinks their minds were being tapped, somehow, to create duplicates.”

“Like giant-sized Donna? I asked.

Suzanne nodded. “I guess that didn’t work out as the aliens intended, but Bill is very glad to have his wife—his normal wife—back, let me tell you.”

I laughed, which started a coughing fit. “I bet. So, Tanya was telling the truth. Russia really didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Looks like,” Gigi said. “She got released in some kind of U.S.–USSR prisoner deal.”

“What?!” I blurted, surprised.

“Yep,” Suzanne confirmed. “They gave the Soviets our bug spray formula in the swap, too—”

“Which they’re now claiming they created,” Gigi put in. She rolled her eyes.

“—So the Russians can clean up their own bug problems,” Suzanne finished. “The Teragons figured the world needed fewer giant bugs—even in the Eastern Bloc. By the way… Thanks for saving my life, Ray.” She leaned in and kissed me.

I was too surprised to kiss back. “So, aliens were behind all of this…?”

“Sure looks like it,” she replied. “Unless there’s a Glob-Land somewhere on Earth that we don’t know about.”

That didn’t seem to make sense, though maybe I was still shell shocked. “But… Why?”

“I hope we never find out,” Gigi opined. “I hope they’re gone for good, and we never see a flying saucer again. I hope this is the end.”

Suzanne laughed. “This is the USSB, Gigi. Don’t you know by now? The fight never ends.”

I leaned back in my hospital bed, exhaustion overwhelming me. “Well, I hope before the shooting starts up again, we can get some rest. I don’t know about you ladies, but I need a vacation!”

THE END!

About “Agents vs. Invaders”

So that’s it. That’s the story I’ve been planning to tell almost from the moment that I realized I had more giant bug stories to tell than just “A Sci-Ant-ific Problem.”

The tale grew along the way—a lot. I think when I first started taking notes on 50-foot-tall women, giant bees, the Mansect, and all the rest that I figured maybe I’d end up with a dozen episodes.

As I began creating the post-Sci-Ant yarns, and dropping in new things I wanted to write, I started to believe that I’d maybe wrap up the whole thing in twenty-four episodes.

But one of the things I should have learned after writing Daikaiju Attack and Dr. Cushing’s Chamber of Horrors as serials: these things always become longer than I expect.

Even when writers know where they’re going—and I’ve told you in these after-stories that I knew the end of this epic from the start—serialized stories grow in the telling.

Daikaiju Attack was fairly under control, even as serials go, but Dr. Cushing ended up being the longest piece of writing I’d ever done.

That held true until I wrote the Monster Shark on a Nude Beach serial, which easily surpassed the good doctor. And if you take Atomic Tales: Strange Invaders as one whole story, it clocks right in with those other two monster-sized novels. We’re talking Stephen King-like doorstop books here, if they were normal paperback size rather than the larger trade paperbacks I like to publish. (Bigger pages and larger type for old eyes.)

And now that I’ve jumped in over my head and done two of these babies at once (this and Monster Shark…), I know what the “secret” is to taming that page length: plot the whole thing out in advance.

Because in both series, even though I’ve known where they’d end, and had many of the “mile markers” in my head along the way, there’s always temptation to add another twist, another character, another monster into the mix.

Thus, this story that I thought might run as long as twenty-four tales actually ended up being forty-eight episodes. (Fewer, if you count the last three eps as just one story—which it kind of is… and kind of isn’t.)

And I’m happy with that.

Because I’ve had a blast doing this series and managed to fit in pretty much everything that I wanted to say along the way—plus the proverbial kitchen sink.

In future, though, I think I’ll try to do full plots before I start writing, which I’ve always done with my novels if not with the serials.

Maybe serials need that kind of full-plot discipline, too.

I realize that, now that I can step back from the stressful week-to-week, month-to-month grind of these epics. (And doing two at once, plus other projects, was a lot like trying to keep five balls in the air while juggling!)

But, truth be told, diving into a serial and just going full steam ahead with my destination in mind is part of the fun.

Though to paraphrase what a lot of my friends are saying as we enter our retirement years: “I’m getting too old for this… stuff.”

I’d always imagined a big battle in the alien base at the end of this story—like in a James Bond movie. From Russia with Love is the second movie I ever remember seeing as a kid, but only because it came second on the drive-in’s double bill that night. (The first was A Boy Ten Feet Tall, a film I’ve not seen since.)

No doubt my parents thought I’d be long asleep by the time the racy, action-filled Bond film, which they really wanted to see, came on screen that night. But I still remember pieces of that first-run viewing, especially the sewer network under the city, the gypsy fight, the boat chase, Rosa Klebb’s shoe dagger, and dropping the incriminating film into the Venice canal as the credits rolled.

With that as part of my storytelling foundation, it’s no wonder I like a big blow off to finish my work.

So, in this case we get the battle both inside and outside the mountain, the alien lab blowing up, and the parting shot with the flying saucers fleeing—hinting that there may be more to come. Plus, just a smidge of romance.

I’ve had a blast, and I hope you have, too.

But like Agent One, I need a break. At least for now.

Drop me a line via email, Facebook, or even corner me at a convention and let me know if you want to see more USSB stories.

Should my next project be Atomic Tales: UFOs Attack?

You can help me decide.

Keep watching the skies.

—Steve Sullivan

April 2023 & January–April 2024