Mop Up

A young soldier is assigned to clear a house of alien intruders,

Mop Up

By John D. Ziegler

“I don’t recall asking you if you wanted this job!”.  The Gunny, who was not known for a sense of humor on a good day, looked to be about three seconds away from having a total meltdown.  “Now, get your worthless a*s in there and don’t come out until you have cleaned all of those little b******s out!  Do you understand me?”  He turned on his heel without waiting for an answer and strode off before I could assure him that whatever my other faults and defects were, being deaf was not on the list.  He took the rest of the platoon and marched them off in the general direction of hot showers, cold beer, and all of the other benefits that one associates with liberty after a hard day.  A couple of them turned to wave and make faces at me, to which I responded with the one-finger wave.  “The fickle finger of fate, having done its dirty work, moves on.”, I said to myself as the platoon disappeared around the corner.  

 I grabbed my gear and made my way to the front door of the deserted house, and kicked in the door.  Why the hell not?  Nobody lives here anyway, and from the look of things, no one has lived here in years.  I heard a scuffling sound from somewhere in the house, and quickly dropped my pack and brought my pulse rifle up.  The last thing I needed today was to let the creatures get the drop on me.  I carefully searched the ground floor until I came upon a small room at the rear of the house that I could use as a base of operations.  I booby-trapped all of the potential entry points before dropping my gear and got ready to begin my search of the rest of the house.  Regimental Intelligence (their title, as opposed to their condition) had estimated that there were as many as fifty of the little orange b******s in here;  my experience told me that there could be half or twice that number. The important thing for me to remember was that all it took was one of these creatures to end my dreams of early discharge.  

 I heard the scuffling sound again.  It was a peculiar yet distinctive sound, sort of like fingernails on a chalkboard or something like that.  The little b******s were in here all night.  I made my way up the stairs to the second floor.  From the top of the stairs, I could see the length of the upstairs hallway plus most of the living room downstairs.  I eased myself back into the shadows and settled in to wait them out.  There was no chasing these things.  For one thing, they were too fast;  you could wear yourself to a frazzle just chasing after them.  For another thing, they were smart, damn smart.  You would get so busy chasing one that you didn't realize that there were three others behind you until it was too late.  I had learned the hard way to sit still and let them come to me instead of running myself ragged chasing them.  I caught movement downstairs out of the corner of my eye and in one fluid motion brought my rifle up and fired.  There was a shriek followed by the thumping sound of a body hitting the floor.  That was one less of the little b******s to contend with and left forty-nine to go.  I left it where it lay, hoping that it would draw more of them out.  I stayed at the top of those stairs for about two hours and bagged twenty-two of the little s***s.  They must have finally figured it out because they stopped coming around.  It was time to find a second position.  Since Intel had pegged the number in here as fifty, I knew that I had to get at least that many before the Gunny would get off my case.

 Earlier I had noticed a hatch in the ceiling at the other end of the upstairs hallway and decided to check it out.  I grabbed a chair out of one of the nearby rooms to stand on and popped the hatch open far enough to toss in a smoke grenade before slamming it closed again.  The aliens hated smoke and seemed to be afraid of it, so I was relieved when nothing came out. I pulled myself up through the hatch and found myself in a spacious attic.  It was a perfect place for a second firing position because all I had to do was shoot the little b******s as they ran under the hatch. I got eighteen more of the aliens before they started avoiding the hallway.  These kills brought my total to forty.  Only ten more to go and I can get the hell out of here and go on the liberty that I so richly deserved.  I started planning the evening.  Beer would be flowing like water, and I would have to beat the women off of me.  They would be good-looking women too, none of these superannuated dried up floozies that seemed to fill every bar outside the base.  Suddenly I realized that I was starting to space out, which was a damn good way to get killed on an operation like this.  The little orange alien b******s were waiting for you to slip up so that they could pounce on you. 

It appeared that I had already shot all of the easy ones and that I was going to have to work my a*s off for the last ten.  I reluctantly climbed down from my perch in the attic and started poking through the house again, hoping to flush the little b******s out.  These last few had had time to learn how to avoid me, so I didn't see any more, although I did hear several of them scurrying around from time to time.  I returned to my safe room and sat down to eat a cold meal and plan my next course of action.  I knew that I could easily spend the rest of the night chasing these little b******s around if I didn't come up with something devious and sneaky to draw them out.  I would have liked to get in a short nap, but I knew that it would be my luck that the damn Gunny would come back to check up on me and catch me sacked out.  The thoughts of what that starchy SOB would do to me if he caught me sleeping on duty were unpleasant, to say the least, and were a fantastic motivation for staying awake.  I went over in my mind what I knew about how these aliens operated to see if there was another way to draw them out.  They were pack hunters.  They were no match for humans by themselves, but they were a force to be reckoned with in a group.  Even in groups, however,  they hesitated before attacking healthy, well-armed adversaries, preferring to jump the weak or injured.  I knew that any plan would have to incorporate these factors.  Suddenly a plan started coming into focus, and even I was impressed by its simplicity.

 There were two parts to my plan.  The first part involved my intimate knowledge of how my phase rifle operated.  The current model that we used in the field had a charge economy switch, which was known by the troops as a ‘stutter' function.  What it did was to slow down the rifle's otherwise awesome rate of fire to conserve the rifle's charge.  Since we possessed many advanced charging devices now, keeping a rifle fully charged in the field was never a problem anymore, but the switches were still on the rifles.  Almost nobody ever used them.  I was going to use the ‘stutter' function to fool the little b******s into thinking that I was about out of charge, which they would interpret as a weakness and attack me.  Pure genius!  Once they attacked, all I had to do was flip the switch to normal operation and blast the hell out of them.  The second (and harder) part of my plan was to feign an injury.  One of the reasons that the little orange b******s were on Earth was to harvest our DNA.  Because of this, we were under strict orders to pick up and carry all bandages and anything else that had our blood or other bodily fluids on it until we reached a place where we could safely dispose of them.  Like everyone else, I had a pack that was about half full of bloody bandages.  What I intended to do was cover one of my legs with the bandages so that it would appear that I was wounded.  I was banking that the little freaks would either assume I was wounded and come out to attack or that they would see the bandages and recognize it as an easy source of DNA and come in close so that I could blast them.  I had tried these tricks before separately.  This mission would be the first time that I would do them at the same time.  I tore my pant leg in several places to add a dose of reality to my subterfuge and wrapped the bloody used bandages around the open spots.  Once finished with that I set the rifle to ‘stutter' and started limping around.  I had to concentrate on keeping the anticipatory smile off of my face, fearing that the aliens would see it and thus spoil my ‘surprise' for them.

I limped around for several moments with no response except for a tingling sensation caused by my wrapping the bandages a little too tightly around my leg.  I knew the little b******s were still there because I could hear them scurrying around.  No doubt they were conferring with one another, trying to assess whether or not it was yet another human trick to catch them off guard, as well as coming up with their own attack plan.  When I reached the living room, I sat on a box that someone had thoughtfully placed in the center of the room.  I straightened my ‘wounded’ leg and made little moaning sounds while I gently massaged it.  I thought about loosening the bandages but resisted the urge in case the little b******s saw me and were able to deduce that I was shamming.  I must have sat there for an hour before the first one peeked in the door at me.  I pretended not to see him and continued moaning;  I didn’t want to waste a shot on one of them, I wanted a group.  The ugly creature disappeared, and I sat there for what seemed like another hour.  Then I saw two of them, one at each entrance.  I arranged myself so that I could retreat into a corner if necessary and waited.  After about thirty minutes my patience began to pay off because a gaggle of six showed up at the front entrance to the living room.  They milled around in the doorway for a moment as if unsure what to do next and suddenly started advancing on me.  I waited until they were all in the room and let fly.  In less time than it takes to blink all six were down.  Four more to go!  I pulled the bodies into a closet so their presence wouldn’t spook the rest of the little b******s, then settled back down to wait.  After about an hour, a group of eight of the orange beasts approached me from the opposite direction that the first group had used.  I restrained myself from firing too early again and was able to drop the whole group with one good burst.

 I could hardly believe my luck.  Not only had I bagged the fifty that Intelligence had said were there, but I had also gotten four extras.  If the Gunny wasn't impressed by this then the hell with him!  Now, all that remained for me to do here was to gather up the bodies and take some pictures to prove that I had in fact completed the task.  As soon as that was done, I would be able to get the hell out of this dump and wrap my lips around a cold beer.  I went from room to room, collecting bodies and dragging them into the living room.  Finally, I had all fifty-four neatly laid out on the floor.  It took several minutes to get the bodies arranged so that they all were in the picture, but I finally was able to snap the picture.  As soon as I snapped the shot, however, it occurred to me that the picture would be so much more convincing if I were in it as well.  It took several more minutes of experimentation, but I finally figured out how to get that done.  I propped my rifle upright, muzzle down on the floor in a corner and balanced my camera on the butt of the stock.  I set the camera’s timer, pushed the shutter release, and rushed to get into the picture with my trophies.  I took a total of four pictures this way, just to make sure.

 I heard them coming as soon as the flash popped for the last time.  The flash blinded me for a second or two after each shot so that I couldn't see them, but I knew that they were there and that there was a lot of them.  They were crowding into the doors and windows, blocking any chance of escape.  I lurched toward my rifle, but several of them got in the way.  I was unarmed, trapped, and alone.  As they closed in on me, my last coherent thought was one of regret for all of the cold beer and women I would never see and anger that none of the ‘experts' had a clue as to just how smart these critters are.  Then, blackness… 

The platoon showed up at daylight.  His buddies had become concerned when I didn’t come in after such a simple task and persuaded the Gunny to come out to look for the hapless trooper.  The Gunny stood in the living room while the rest of the platoon went through the house.  One of the troopers brought the missing trooper’s pack and other supplies out of the safe room and dropped them at the Gunny’s feet.  “Any sign of him?”, he asked although he already knew the answer.

 "Nope.", The trooper replied before heading back outside.  The Gunny bent over and scooped up the pack and headed for the door.

“Another t**d bites the dust.”, he growled to himself as he went through the door and out onto the street.