The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm Read online

  The Bounty Hunter – Into The Swarm

  By Joseph Anderson

  The Bounty Hunter – Into The Swarm

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Anderson

  Also by Joseph Anderson:

  Interstellar Soldiers

  The Wizard and the Dragon

  Bounty Hunter Series

  The Bounty Hunter Series One, Complete

  Revenge

  Redemption

  Vampire

  Into The Swarm

  Reckoning

  Author’s Note:

  The Bounty Hunter stories are a series of novellas. Each story is intended to be self-contained, like an episode of a television series. Although some names and references are made to prior events, each story can be enjoyed on its own.

  If, however, you prefer to read things in order, the series begins with The Bounty Hunter’s Revenge.

  Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy the story.

  Into The Swarm

  Jack Porter was killed the same day that humans gave up on reclaiming Earth. He had been fighting a losing battle for years, against an enemy that seemed to only grow and expand no matter how many he stopped and killed. The aliens were like savage animals, too primitive to communicate or make demands. They simply spread over the planet with ceaselessly growing numbers, devouring everything in their path.

  The dross moved on four legs and were longer than they were tall. The size of each individual varied, but most had colossal claws at the end of each leg that looked almost too big for the rest of their bodies. In the early days of the war, they were covered in hairless, green skin that clung tightly to their flesh. Over time, some had mutated tufts of hair and other shades of pale skin. Some had heads that resembled a lizard while others were closer to that of a lion, a long extinct creature that Jack learned about in school. He knew now that the same thing could be said for any of Earth’s animals. Anything that didn’t live in the ocean had been wiped out.

  The aliens tunnelled massive underground networks, a trait that had made them exceedingly difficult to exterminate. Over the years, Jack had collapsed dozens of those tunnels. He had been the bait for those operations: a lure for the dross to follow while the tunnels were breached and nuked, cracking open the earth but destroying its invaders. The victories had never been enough. They reproduced too quickly and attacked without regard of their own well-being. There was no morale to crush or leadership to assassinate; no population centres to eradicate. There were only the swarming hordes that avalanched over the planet’s surface.

  There were scarce few strongholds left on the planet. Most of the human’s forces were deployed from space, where ships constantly bombarded Earth wherever there was nothing left to save. Most of the surface bases were on remote islands where the alien tunnellers had yet to reach, but rare fortifications scraped by in North America, Africa, and Europe. Australia was the only remaining place with a civilian presence, and it was on the day that the dross broke into the continent that humans gave up on the planet that birthed them.

  The alarm wailed through the ship and Jack ran through its corridors along with every other marine on board. They rushed through the ship’s armories, scrambling to equip themselves before cramming into drop pods. Orders echoed through the ship and squad leaders lectured along with them. It didn’t matter. Each marine that was still alive had been through an emergency drop many times before. It had been months since they received reinforcements. They were the last of the dwindling remains of Earth’s defense.

  The drop pods jettisoned from the ship and fell down toward the planet. There were no windows or displays for the marines inside and for good reason. Although he had been launched down to the planet many times, Jack’s stomach still heaved as he plummeted down with the handful of other warriors in his pod. A window would have given him a reference point to look at, to know how the pod spiralled and rolled during its descent.

  Five kilometers above Australia, the pod began burning through its small tank of fuel to stabilize and land safely. The process took a few minutes and the marines inside knew how valuable that time was: when the pod’s doors dropped open they needed to be ready. They needed to unfasten themselves from the interior walls of the pod, arm their rifles, and be steady enough to fight their way out if the pod landed next to a group of dross.

  Jack felt the pod shudder as it hit the ground. He tore away from the wall and brought his rifle up to his shoulder. There were eight other marines around him doing the same. The doors opened and their senses were assaulted by the light, heat, and noise. The pod had been dark and their eyes ached in the outside light, but none of them dared to look away. It was late December on the planet, and the Australian summer heat rushed in to smother them. The noise was the worst. Gunfire was already filling the air, mingling with the howls of the dross. They always screamed when they fought. Whether they were killing or being killed, they never stopped screaming.

  He ran out to see how far they landed from the evacuation site. The walled base was on the horizon and he knew he would have to run to make it there safely. The sky above it was alive with descending ships and drop pods, leaving streaks of fire and smokey trails behind them. From every direction he both felt and heard the deep percussion of pods slamming into the earth, temporarily drowning out the screams and gunfire. He knew there were dozens of such evacuation sites spread over the continent. The one he had been assigned to was far away from major cities but was closer to the dross breach. He had landed on the front line of the alien’s advance.

  Other marines, fresh out of pods that had landed before his, were already in formation and prepared to fire on the encroaching dross. Jack and his squad had been given the task of securing as many people as possible and then fortifying the nearest evacuation site. As other groups stopped and began to fire, he rushed with his marines to the site’s walls in the distance. They looked for each new squad as it landed, ready to help if they landed in the middle of a group of enemies.

  The sound of gunfire rattled closer behind them as they ran, the dross seemingly pressing on unperturbed by the humans blocking them. Someone roared out in pain from nearby and was cut short with the sound of splattering blood and tearing flesh. Jack stopped and whipped around with his squad to face the three aliens that had slaughtered their way through a gap in the marine’s line behind them. He shouldered his rifle and fired.

  He had lost count of how many he had killed over the years when he reached the thousands. He was one of the few remaining soldiers that had been on Earth since the start of the infestation. Despite his experience, even in his last battle the appearance of the dross still horrified him. They had too many teeth and eyes that were uniform red, with the barest dots for pupils. Their tails were a combined writhing mass of thin, sharply pointed whips that lashed anything that attacked them from behind. To Jack they never looked like aliens. They always looked like monsters.

  He centered his rifle’s sights on the alien’s heads. Their legs were too thick and protected with their claws to slow them down. Their bodies could take nearly a whole magazine’s worth of rounds to kill and a few less to stop. Head shots were best, and he had fought enough dross to anticipate their movements. The sound of his squad’s rifles made the aliens flatten to the ground and then pounce forward. Jack followed his target smoothly with the rifle and killed it before it left the ground. He switched quickly to the other beside it and sent three shots into its ribcage before it hit the floor.

  The rest of his squad finished off the others without casualties but they had no time to celebrate. The ships above them were closer now and dominated the sky. They were firing as they d
escended, blasting quick flashes of light as their artillery cannons shelled the battlefield. The thundering booms from the ships reached them as the shock waves from the impacts did, coming together as a louder crackling explosion. Jack knew that if they were firing so quickly that the situation was desperate.

  They resumed their run and quickly saw the reason for the ship’s early bombardment. The ground opened up in scattered places a few seconds after the artillery made contact. The force of the impact on the ground was disturbing the dross underneath it, and they quickly came to surface and were met by the marines that they were attempting to tunnel passed. Jack readied his rifle as a hole emerged near them. Their tails came first, as they always did, slapping around the rim of the opening, checking to see if it was safe. When the first dross popped its head up he made it a bloodied pulp and sent it limply falling back underground.

  A pod fell near another open tunnel and was swarmed with five of the aliens before the doors could open. Jack and his squad were a few minutes from the walls of the evacuation site but they stopped, firing as they spread out and surrounded the ambushed pod. The dross clawed at the outside of it as they were fired upon, shaving layers of the reinforced metal away but not fast enough to get inside before they were filled with bullets. The pod doors fell open and flattened one of the alien’s corpses. The marines inside met Jack’s stare with brief nods of their heads and then joined with his squad behind him.

  They reached the wall and were let inside by shaken civilians that had been herded into the center of the site. They were the people that had volunteered to stay behind and help with the fight. The evacuation sites had been set up as a precaution: smaller fortified positions near settlements that could be defended temporarily until rescue ships could reach them. Others were in cities where abandoned homes had been demolished for such sites. Jack had been assigned to one of the sites on the outskirts of those cities, where people thought they were safer away from major population clusters. Now that they were one of the closest to the advancing dross, the people were panicked and crazed.

  Jack saw that he was the first to reach the site and assigned his marines to secure it. He put a man and a woman on the gate to watch for other soldiers and let them in. He directed two others to round up the civilians near the landing pad in the middle of the site and away from the walls. By the end of the fight he didn’t know how long they could hold the site and a few extra seconds worth of space might mean a few lives. He knew if the transport ships saw too many attackers and too much disarray on the ground that they would pass over them. He had no intention of letting that happen to the people he had been told to save.

  At the top of the wall he faced back over the battlefield he had run through. More pods were still dropping as the ships continued blasting craters into the landscape. He could see groups of soldiers firing at the front runners of the dross but he felt his skin crawl when he saw the masses of the alien army in the distance. They made the ground look like it was alive and squirming to life to smother the human defenders. The ships were firing into the heart of that group, smashing the dead bodies of aliens through the air on impact. Infernos were left in the wake of the artillery blasts, pockets of fire that the dross were too tightly packed to avoid as they were swept up in the surge of the entire force.

  Jack saw immediately that it wouldn’t be enough. The aliens pushed on into a wave that was ready to crash through the line of marines like they were nothing. There was a moment when the ships above them went quiet as they received new coordinates from the marines below. They were dead and they knew it. They used their own communication signals as a stronger target for the artillery cannons, and raised their rifles in the air as if they beckoned the wrath of the ships down on them.

  The dross slammed into the marines and the line of them erupted in fire. The earth below them cracked from the force of it. Jack was nearly knocked over from the shock wave that hit the wall. For a few minutes, there was nothing but the sound of hissing fire as the aliens were consumed by it. More pods dropped from the ships that were closer now, low enough to target the reinforcements precisely at the evacuation sites. Two landed outside the walls of Jack’s position and they were let in just as the dross pushed through the wall of fire and rushed toward them.

  The ship’s bombardment had thinned their numbers but they swarmed tighter together as they pressed through the fire. The gates were closed immediately after the last of the marines made it through, but more drop pods continued to come down. They landed in the midst of the attackers, ripped apart as the doors were opened no matter how many of Jack’s soldiers fired from the wall. The torn body parts were lost as the number of dross increased. He couldn’t see the ground as the first of them slammed into the wall.

  He leaned over the wall and started firing. Usually he would have shot at those further in the back, making an obstacle for the waves of dross; however, the walls of the site were weaker than those of the other bases he had fought at and needed to be protected. The giant claws of the dross would have trouble breaking through the walls but there were hundreds of them and more ready to replace those who died. As the corpses piled up at the base of the wall, he knew it was a race against what would happen first: the wall collapsing, or the piles of body stacking high enough that they could climb over it.

  The sights of his rifle moved from head to head of the aliens. He fired in quick bursts, squeezing three to five shots into the skull of each dross and killing it instantly. Others jumped up at them, futilely clamping their jaws a few meters short of the marines but getting closer with each jump. Jack focused on those when he saw them, as if he was punishing each of the jumping aliens for being so bold. Their bodies fell dead on top of the living ones at the bottom, quickly shrugged off and lost as new living ones clambered over it.

  The ships still fired into the masses of aliens. Their numbers stretched out further than Jack could see in every direction. There may have been an end to them somewhere, but the smoke from the bombardment masked it from his view. Despite the force of constant impacts into the earth, some of the dross risked tunnelling under the wall. The structure had been built down through the earth but it didn’t extend far. Jack knew that it would hold as the aliens had to burrow farther down than usual and then claw their way back up on the other side. He hoped it would be long enough.

  He roared orders to the rest of the marines every few minutes: a coordinated blast at the base of the wall with a grenade from each of them to clear away the bodies. They ducked at the top of the wall after dropping the explosives and, even as close as they were, the sound of them popping open made them seem like children’s toys in comparison to the artillery that rained overhead. They resumed their positions quickly afterwards, splattering new layers of blood over the blackened, singed corpses of the dross around the wall.

  Jack heard the warning through his helmet. The evacuation ship would be landing shortly and couldn’t stay for long. Everyone would need to be ready to immediately board it. He looked back and saw the huddled families around the landing pad. Parents were covering their children’s ears as they cried, the fuel that had fed their nightmares since the infestation began abruptly coming to life around them. The marine he had assigned to keep them close to the pad had done their job well. They would be ready when the ship arrived.

  He heard the dross howl from the wall and he whipped back around to face them. More of them were tunnelling down now, too many to be searching for a way under the wall, and Jack knew that one of them was about to break through. He screamed for the marines to abandon the wall and jumped down onto the ground of the site just as the earth began to rupture and the aliens poured through.

  The thought that he had failed shuddered through him and he resisted it, determined to salvage what he could. He saw the evacuation ship coming in over the wall and he fired as the aliens climbed up. He sent two, dead, falling back down their hole and hoped the other soldiers around him were doing the same. If they could keep the dross suppr
essed for a little longer, it would be enough for the ship to land.

  People began to scream but he kept his eyes down the sights of his rifle. Each time a dross clawed its way up he sent a bullet to punch it back down again. The screaming grew louder, laced with gurgling cries as throats were torn and lungs filled up with blood. He glanced once around the site and saw that too many tunnels were open and not being suppressed. Too many marines had been cut down. The civilians around the landing pad were being slaughtered.

  Jack felt something slash through his back and he fell to his knees. One of the final rattles of gunfire washed behind him and killed whichever one had sliced through his back. He raised his head and saw the evacuation ship turning away and, as one of the final things he did, he agreed with the decision. He dropped his rifle and put a hand to his helmet.

  “Squadron 816, transmitting coordinates. Fire on my position,” he said and then pulled the helmet from his head.

  The dross were surrounding him, ready to pounce after finishing the marines that were still fighting around him. Jack looked up at the ship that turned its turrets toward him. It was his final act of defiance, stealing away the alien’s pleasure of finally killing him. The flash of the cannon blazed his eyes—a brief moment of burning pain. He was obliterated before he could hear the impact.

  * * *

  Burke woke up to a shooting pain from his augmented leg. Even a year after receiving the prosthetic, it still caused him pain on a daily basis. The point at his thigh, where the metal and the flesh connected, was always tender and inflamed after the leg pain. It felt like the limb was being roasted in an unseen fire, assaulted by a flash of heat that was strong enough to wake him. He didn’t waste any time as he sat up on the edge of his bed. He knew that it would be hours before he could fall back to sleep again.