Chapter 10 - Out Of The Frying Pan

As soon as the words came out of Colonel Martin, Malachi rushed to one of the south windows by the elevator shaft. The windows here were bigger, and they had a clear view of the sky. Five soldiers fought next to three shields. Juan was still standing, breathing hoarse from exhaustion. In between the bugs crawling up the pile, Malachi could just make something out in the cloudless sky, flying toward them from the nearby military base. The triangular shape was unmistakable: it was a B-2 bomber.

Colonel Martin was right. There was just one.

“No,” Malachi whispered. He whirled. “Does this building have a basement?”

Chavez shook his head.

All around them, air raid sirens began to sound across the city. The regional evacuation order had gone out a few hours ago. There was no way the city had been given enough time to leave. How many people were going to die?

And they were going to be in the epicenter of the blast. “Fuck. Fuck!” He looked around. The brass was just standing there. They needed to give orders. They needed to evacuate. Maybe another building had a basement. Maybe—

No, he realized. There was only one way out.

“We need to go through the portal,” he said. “It’s our only chance. Maybe if we bring the magic core thing—we have to go.” That bomber would be on them in minutes. The portal was only about a half-block away, but with the ground swarming with mantises, they’d be fighting the whole time.

No one was moving. They didn’t have time to hesitate. Every second counted right now.

Colonel Martin had slumped on the ground, and the other officer was just staring at his superior in shock. Malachi looked around. Juan was by the window, shield full of holes and pitting. Two more soldiers were slumped to the ground. He realized, belatedly, that they were dead.

Malachi spun around, then raised his voice. “We have to evacuate to the portal. There’s a bomber coming. A nuclear fucking bomber! It’s our only chance!” He looked around. “Pull out from every room except that west facing one. The bodies are piled high enough, we’ll leave through the second story window. Chavez, can you bring the core?”

“I need a few minutes.” The scientist nodded and began fiddling with panels on the machine. He pulled out a key ring from his pocket and started fiddling with the release mechanisms.

Malachi ran down the hall. “Nuclear bomber en route, we’re getting the fuck out of here!” He stopped outside the room full of wounded. Shit. He swallowed hard. We’re probably all dead anyways. “If they can move, we’re evacing. If not… I’m sorry.”

“I’m staying with them then,” one of the medics said.

He wasn’t going to argue. He ran back through the hall, shouting to gather everyone up. “Alright, as soon as we hit the ground, we make as tight a phalanx formation as we can. Layered spears. Then we push as hard and fast as we can for the portal. I’m designating myself the center. William, you’re on my right. Ready?”

Dozens of soldiers were crammed together, apparently ready. None of the army brass had joined them, and Malachi wasn’t actually sure if anyone was going to follow his orders, but someone had to act. He noted Chavez had grabbed the core and was joining them.

“Go, go, go!” he shouted.

Malachi still had his rifle. He’d been too busy stabbing this whole time to use any ammo, so he started them off by unloading a magazine into the mantises outside the window, then charged forward with his spear. William looked like absolute shit, but he kept up. Malachi was almost surprised when he realized people really were following him.

Outside the window, the bug corpses had piled all the way up to the edge of the window. It formed a ramp of chitin that sloped into a street that was still covered in the mantises—and more were still coming out of the portal, though they’d finally slowed to a trickle.

Malachi grit his teeth and slammed through the window. As soon as his feet hit the slope of bug corpses, his feet partially sank into the mess, crunching as they did. Wading through it was like wading through the world’s grossest ball pit. As soon as he was out from the cover of the building, mantises began leaping from the nearby roofs and buildings toward him, joining the swell. Behind him, he heard shouting. With the defenders moving out, bugs would be swarming the building. Above, the skies had cleared; the roar of jets and crack of helicopter blades had grown silent. By now, the tanks that had tried to rescue them were also done. The last treads had stopped spinning; the last guns had stopped firing.

Now, the air was filled only with the clack of the mantis’s sharp feet, and the sound of steel. Malachi felt a scythe-claw smash down on his left pauldron. He brought the blade of his spear down through the offending limb, then raised his buckler just in time to deflect another. “Push! Push!” he called as people filed through the window. Before him, the mantises had climbed on top of each other to become a mass of flailing limbs. He smashed one in the weird torso-face with his buckler, then heaved forward, throwing his whole weight forward. His feet sank further into the corpses, but the push threw the swarm in front of him off balance, and the mantises cascaded down the slope like a landslide.

“We’ve got you,” William said as he and Juan lifted Malachi up by his arms so he could get back on top of the corpse pile.

“Push!” Malachi shouted again, and by now, enough of them had formed up they could make a phalanx. Juan’s shield had holes in it, but he could use it to push back against the swarm. The spears were arranged in layers so that they acted like a pincushion, and they could use the corpses of the recently impaled bugs to ward away the others. The magic acid began spattering them, and some splashed in Malachi’s face. He let out a hiss of pain but kept going.

They made it to the bottom of the slope. The light of the gate washed over them. It was so close, yet it was impossibly far. The mantises were swarming from the nearby school’s playground, climbing down the walls, leaping from every direction. There were no more tactics to be thought about; there was no grand strategy that could help. This was just a contest of strength.

The sweat poured down Malachi as they moved forward. Each step was a struggle. He gripped his spear as tight as he could, body at an angle like a linebacker to give it enough force. Magic acid came down on them like rain. He was screaming, he realized. Someone started firing guns behind them. There was shouting, but it all became a blur. His entire existence became about taking one more step forward. One more step. Then another. Then another.

The phalanx heaved forward. William dropped back, and some other man came forward. It stank of body odor and gunpowder. Malachi stayed at the front, pushing his spear forward like a plow. The mantises kept coming, and it was like they were fighting the tide just to walk forward.

Before them, the gate loomed. Almost there.

There was more screaming. People were dying, he knew, but there was nothing else to be done. They had to push forward. The problem was, they were becoming mired. The press of bodies against them was just too much, and Malachi’s muscles were failing him.

He glanced up. High above, through a gap in the mantis corpses, he could see it. The black triangle of the B-2 was coming into place above them.

Minds were strange things. They remembered the most ridiculous trivia. At some point, his high school history teacher had mentioned that the nuclear bomb that hit Hiroshima had fallen for 43 seconds. Why the hell he’d remembered that, he couldn’t say, but that was what flashed through his mind in that moment.

We’re not going to make it, he realized.

With a roar, he redoubled his efforts, pushing forward, when suddenly—the swarm parted. The mantises all started scrambling towards the playground.

“Go! Go! RUN!” he heard a voice say. Dr. Chavez.

Malachi ran.

The air filled with the clatter of steel armor and wheezing of people. Another mantis came out of the portal, but Malachi shoulder-checked it and kept running.

The gate looked so much bigger when he was at its base looking up it. It suddenly filled his vision. It yawned before him like a sheet of luminous water, the strange energies dancing around its outside. He couldn’t hesitate. He charged through.

There was a brief sensation, like he was floating, like he couldn’t breath, like time had stopped, like all his senses had gone dark, like all his senses were being overwhelmed at once—

Then he was stumbling forward, his feet crunching against rocks. He was through. The world here was dark. Flashes of something lit up the sky briefly, but Malachi’s focus was on the four mantises in front of him. He lunged forward with his spear, hitting the first one, then withdrew, whirling and slashing with the tip to cut off the leg of another. The third one had charged forward, but he brought his spear up like a bar to block the blade-arm as it came smashing down. His muscles trembled with exhaustion.

Relief flooded through Malachi as more infantry came through. One of them impaled the bug he’d just blocked. Another stabbed the fourth bug. Malachi tried to catch his breath. For the moment, the area by the portal was clear of enemies. Juan was suddenly by his side again, then Cameron. He saw Jason and a few others from HQ-22, plus at least a dozen people from other portal teams.

Then the light of the portal behind them flickered and vanished.

The world around them was suddenly that much darker. Malachi looked back, eyes lingering where the portal had been. The way home was gone. He looked down at the people gathered.

Jesus, he thought. Of the group that had charged out, only a quarter of them had made it through.

Violet lightning crackled in the sky above them, departing with a gentle rumble, and Malachi looked around. The flashes of lightning came every few seconds, and they lit up a world that was nothing like anything else he’d seen on the Portal Wiki. The other portals led to biomes that were strange, but at least comparable to something on Earth. This was nothing like that.

The landscape was primarily made up of dark rock, so glassy it could have been obsidian, except instead of sharp edges, it came away in hexagonal chunks. The piles of debris reminded him of Legos. Jagged hills went off in every direction, cut by winding flat areas. Nearby, there was a formation large enough to be called a mountain. Lightning flashed again, and at the top of the mountain—

His mind fuzzed over. That can’t be right, he thought. At the peak of the mountain, there was a colossal pillar. It just kept going up and up, until it hit… a ceiling. A ceiling that must have been miles away. As lightning illuminated the landscape again, he realized there were other distant mountains, each with their own pillar on them.

The landscape wasn’t entirely barren. Alien looking things grew here and there. Most looked more like coral reefs than any plant he’d seen, while others resembled strange fungi he’d only seen in listicles about weird shit.

“What the fuck,” he heard someone say, and never had his thoughts been so perfectly summarized.

“This don’t look like no landscape I’ve ever seen,” William said.

William made it, Malachi thought with relief. He looked around. HQ-22 was well represented in the survivors. Nicole had come through, though she’d ditched her machine gun. Trey had picked up a spear from somewhere and was doubled over, breathing hard. Corporal Booth was standing by where the portal had been, staring blankly at an arm he was holding.

Malachi felt bile rising up. Booth had been trying to drag someone through at the last minute. They hadn’t made it.

About thirty of them had made it through—all that was left of what had once been the ten portal response teams that had been holed up in that building.

Dr. Chavez had made it, too. He was holding an assault rifle, standing next to Booth. He’d also been one of the last ones through.

Malachi went up to him, about to ask him a question, when Chavez spoke first. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

His mouth opened and closed. “I was about to ask you that,” he said.

“Well. Shit,” Chavez said.

“Malachi, did you have a plan for what we do next?” Cameron said. He’d managed to lug a backpack with him. It probably had little bricks of C4 in it and some detonators.

Off to the side, Malachi heard Chavez say quietly, “Ah. Malachi. MalFeSense. I get it.”

“We figure out how the weird Magic Core thing works and open the portal back,” he said, turning to Chavez. Then he noticed the distinct lack of a glowing octahedron. “Uh, where’s the magic thing?”

“I threw it,” Chavez said. “I had to. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have made it.”

Rage flashed through Malachi. Not at Chavez. He was right. There had been too many mantises. Throwing the core must have been what had lured the attackers away long enough for them to move. Without the distraction, they would have never gotten through. No, he was mad at the impossible position they’d been put in. Command should have given them warning. The secret operation should have never been secret. The Magical Core should have been studied more. Whoever was opening portals should have never opened them in the first place. Malia should still be living in her cozy little apartment, finding joy in the world.

“Fuck!” was how he verbalized all those thoughts. He started pacing.

“There’s some good news. Without the portal or the core, I think those creatures will stop seeking us.”

“You mean they don’t want to eat us?” Nicole asked, her eyes scanning the horizon.

“No. They’re magical constructs of some sort. The first ones we shot that were by the portal dissolved into sparks a few hours later.”

“Like an iron quill’s… quill.” The reason Malachi’s broom-spear had lost its spear part. Only, those magical iron quills faded after several minutes. Magical summonings usually didn’t last long, especially once they’d lost connection to the caster or been killed. “Wait, does that mean someone is summoning these things? That they’re entirely made of magic?”

“Someone. Or something,” Chavez said, looking at the bizarre barren landscape around them. “We’ve been doing calculations, trying to quantify ‘mana’ as a concept. The lizard-people seem to call it ‘kzztht’ and the goblins call it ‘boogit’, so we’ve gone with mana. It’s a culturally well-entrenched concept. A digression, apologies. The point is, there’s a limit to magic. These summons… you started calling them mantises? The mana quantities they must be using fly in the face of everything we know about limits.”

“What the hell happened?” Malachi asked. “How did this even happen?”

“I wish I knew,” Chavez said. “We thought we could un-summon a portal. The lizards have described something we’ve translated as ‘counter-magic,’ and we thought we’d found a way to do that. But instead, the color shifted. The portal origin changed. And then… well, you know the rest.”

Corporal Booth had finally dropped the arm he’d been holding, and was now sitting with his head in his hands, soundlessly crying. A few soldiers were doing something similar. Others were gaping at the place. One was just lying spread eagle on the ground, too tired to move. Malachi empathized. A little longer, and he’d need to do something similar.

The precarity of their situation couldn’t have been starker. A few canteens of water were being passed around, but what they had was woefully insufficient. Only a few people had grabbed packs as they scrambled to leave. Most of the supplies were kept in the APCs, and those had all gotten swarmed over during their first retreat.

“We need to find a source of water,” Malachi said.

Chavez looked up. Lighting briefly illuminated the distant ceiling again. “I don’t know that you’re going to find a hydrological cycle in a place like this.”

“Then we have to find a Magical Core. Those mantises—they’re attracted to them, right? That means they must exist here. Then we’ll…” He thought of the incredibly complicated device Chavez had been wheeling around. Part of him knew he was absolutely full of shit, that they were fucked, but he didn’t want to admit it. “How did you locate one in the first place?”

“A team exploring the Jurassic portal encountered a caravan moving through the jungle and ambushed it. That Core was one of the things they looted. That’s the only one the US government had. Intelligence reports indicate there’s probably four or five more of them that have made their way back to Earth, but every government that has one is jealously guarding them. The CIA thinks that France got ahold of one during their big battle. We don’t know where the rift invaders are getting them.” He took a deep breath. “We can only hope they got them from a place like this. Perhaps there’s a way… it’s the only hope we have.”

“Or maybe there’s a way out. It’s a big room, right? Rooms have doors.” He was deluding himself again. This was a room the same way the rings in Halo were like the International Space Station.

“We have to rest,” Cameron said, coming over. “Everyone’s been fighting for… hours? However long it’s been.”

Lightning flashed again. Briefly, it silhouetted something big that had summited the top of a nearby hill. Another flash, it and they saw dozens more of the mantises scurrying over it. The swarm was heading towards them.

“I don’t think we’re going to get the chance,” said Nicole.

“Estamos tan jodidos,” Dr. Chavez muttered.

“Everyone up. Everyone up! If you can hold a spear, get one ready!” Malachi shouted.

Not everyone stood. Booth was still sitting on the ground, shaking. Jason was sitting there in shock. Several others lay on the ground.

Behind the swarming mantises, one of the tyrannosaurs-sized creatures stalked toward them.

“Form up around the incapacitated. Get ready!” Malachi said, and he readied his spear as the swarm came again.