Night Terrors 6 - Toxicity
They call it the demilitarized waste zone; a micro-continent of that drifting toxic garbage island without anchor that steadily grew and eventually crashed into San Angeles only a few years after becoming the state capital of a larger annex California, which includes parts of the Nevada mountains and Mexico. For some years, birds have been landing on the floating dump and over that time, they have rapidly evolved into deadly and vicious envenoming consumers of the utmost waste set adrift by the polluting nations for centuries. Eventually as former pests and pets of society fed by human waste became larger and adept at different traits, a food chain developed throughout the drifting waste. This often includes walrus and seals who they themselves became mutated predators, the shark are no longer the king of the water as a drifting new geography makes its way to collision with the south shore. The island city of mutation and degeneration consumes most of the life it encounters, if not life assimilated, by mutations caused by the wastes. The Kingdom of the United States has tried its damnedest to avoid contact, putting out miles and leagues of rubble and boulder but too little too late. The artillery used blasts holes and dents, but the drifting mass will only float and resurface, inevitably, all postponing efforts are useless for it is just too large. Hell, it was the size of Texas 500 years ago, it is definitely a population of monsters, attacking whether they had planned it or not, very dangerous, very.
Giant black birds some other color at their cores or at their bones, covered in oil so that none could tell with teeth and tails that could claw and if need be pull their toxic feathers and throw and launch as disabling darts nesting upon a drifting black heap. Beasts that look like whale dogs, teeth and shadow pack that strike a shocking resemblance to the long extinct bear on the old flag that give no less than napalm and dragons fire. Snakes with poisonous skin, crawling claws and shells and lizard men that can climb with agility, that carry their own armor, some with spears others with spikes. However, the worst among them to by standard belief are the crawlers, the small and burrowing things that are the loathsome writhing interwoven plague that drift into the sands at the shore. Pools of them will gather into a cesspool, when the winds cover them with dust they consume anything that steps into them to the bone. This is no overgrowth because there is method to such madness, a hierarchy of complexity and evil led by nearly human lizards and raptors that order the attack from the center of the mass. The ships never conquer and the planes are shot or crash with suicide machines sent into the air from such a hellish domain. The battle has landed, while other continents made their own defenses and battle their mutant scouts, we are all that remains to defend our lives from diseased ages washed upon our lands.
Soldiers drive through the desert of the salt to the impact site passed the derricks that pump more oil to make ruin and plight. The best ride in the front of the caravan, not leaders but of the secondary ranks, part of the fore running decoys, too skilled to be part of the artillery squadron, too loved to leave at home. The intelligence obtained from satellite surveillance has discovered that with the few successful air raids that the targets only burrow to resurface again later, but more interestingly always a nest above the rubbish as the leadership of the island. Of kings and queens perhaps of each the birds and the lizards, the soldiers sent are to arrive and kill them, hopefully that will get closer to victory, or at least gotten away from battle. For soldiers of such caliber that would be unlikely, to be members of this coalition they had at that time already killed two of everything on the planet and many more so this siege is more of eager fears and less of anxiety.
Upon contact with the landmass the mutants began collecting, anything with biological mass especially the wounded human population. Packs of things with dripping teeth pulling in large folks, large sentinel sentry beasts tearing through everything, complete anarchy and total chaos as these things dissembled everything. For many years the southwest had ordered a rational distribution of resources, they had also pushed themselves into the deserts and when these things hit, there was nowhere for them to go, not all at once. Without calm or contempt, the demonic horde continues to pull anything it can find to the rubbish peninsula, if forces can make it through the infested city, passed the hiding creatures and the survivors that want their weapons, their food, or to eat them just to survive, they still have no cover between hell’s minions and themselves. This is of the least of concern, the artillery would blow holes where the transport needed through, and then all they have to do is find what lies in the walls, to be of least concern. They had done that several times in a dozen cities, and were more worried about the island and the notion that they might come from behind through the sewer lines.
There are 30 belts of caravans descending on the city no longer of the angels and they are ready to run through the light as if it were a battlefield of some early era. Inevitably they are in the buildings, as if a final boss in virtual combat designed to be a penetration of the gates of hell. Artillery air raids, monsters that hurl smaller monsters miles away, creeping insects in the sand, scorpions the size of small dogs, and both airborne and marching enemy that would pierce the resolve, something evil has created a vampire toxin, half-dead, diseased, decaying and mutilated corpses of the citizens crawl the ground. At best to describe, everything small enough burnt back by thermal weapons that scorch, douse the walls with fire, and force them into the buildings, they were testing our greatest fears and had only just begun, we had miles of the city ring before reaching ground zero. They crawl with chutes and ladders or jump straight from the open walls, they leap over each other, climb, and tear through soldiers, and they crawl out of corpses and into their victims. Life like fire as can describe it spews vile disgust and putrid bile, the demolition creatures begin to take notice and stop eating rock and rubble, and begin eating the howling screams. They throw huge objects, hurl others, tearing, breaking and crushing across the battle on any number of legs, some long, some short with jagged mouths, the worst blind and undeterred. From the sewers water rodents, if you can imagine, with flesh on the inside and bones as scales walking on too many legs and saw blade tails. The equivalence to scaling the walls of a castle with only a kind word and a smile, eventually the human defense decides to demolish the boundary buildings and cross over them, a firefight with hell in the corner.
A revolution of evil when the snakes come rushing to the offensives and under heavy fire turn and flee only to collect anything that would become a useful projectile, picking it up like a skimming tread and turn to the military once more and with switchblade scales launch its bounty of sharp objects. Without cover, they would pave the roads with their blood. Everywhere another menace to quash underfoot only yet detraction from the danger of the black mantis wielding light posts and street signs among the many mad and menaced zombies turned by the infective mutagen throwing manhole covers and car doors and whatever not scavenged or remained once the battle began. Remarkable is one of them being stepped on the head by a creature’s spiny leg that pierces it from head to toe. When they make it to halfway to the coast and doing well, particularly because ammunition is inanimate and lifeless, unfortunately the smell of gunpowder and polished steel is favorable to good traditional spiders and ants the size of men, who were more destructive to the rotting wood and drying lawns and soaking pools of suburbia. The giant insects and mutated birds scare because they will catch and not let go, they will hold and tear, and same with cats, but a dog is much different. A dog hunts by taking you off your feet first, then it decides to kill or release. Now every soldier is a head hunter, if they weren't they wouldn't be on this trip, but one man is amiss, to shoot man's best friend as he's playing fetch with a mouthful of someone’s skin is more than disturbing.
Before they had come ashore, their continent was a dissolving island of plastic slowly becoming the oil from which it originated, but now it has pieces of a larger puzzle and like a beehive or an anthill, it slowly becomes a constructed fortress building on the shore with a slimy beach of its own. Their own forces destroy and reconstruct as a fortress of doom, before the military ever arrived to condemn the hive in a close quarter strike. As long as they could avoid projectiles the samurai were fine with their gun blades, they often-saved ammo far better than the strike teams could, and pinning back the embodied disease firing squads could keep the bullets flying. Close to the citadel of the creatures’ stands a large army of zombies, a small portion of the population who had been infected and decided to serve a new hell on earth, they stand in layers shoulder to shoulder one row behind another as far as the eye can see. When shot the bullets pass through their skin without their noticing, hits to the edge only blow apart the loose fodder and they continue to drone with smiles of certainty that they are welcoming a new era of the damned. Moral decay is only half of the equation. The other half is purely factual for they stand no match without weapon because their flesh suffers putrefaction. It peels the dying flesh of their corrupt nervous system driven by plague and not humanity, for they are already dead and do not know it yet, even with weapon they easily lose grip of any club and are easily thrust aside.
The discovery of birds with claws is particularly disliked, some prehistoric monstrous bats with feathers dripping acid in file followed by a layer of dark urchin led by tentacle creatures take many of their best, and still yet the scaled soldiers of the island itself. From the windows, the reptilian soldiers hurl spears and toss eggs that release contents that burns, poisons, pours and crawls often at the same time. The head of a dog or a snake with a shell over its own prized poison in yearned combat with the army's swordsmen and had battle so, many lost to haste or arrogance with the creatures who were stronger before swifter. Bullets bruise and bombs scratch an army of trauma and vindication, the lizards shot but many times over, wasting ammunition with every shot until discovered that they are susceptible to just one shot in the eyes. With caution and wariness, the army of man moves to destroy the architect of such creation that defiles humanity only to unearth the great winged serpents and armored raptors from perches overhead. A slithering teeth machine in a coat of rusting blades moves to strike, but a warring wings of the predator avian swoop in front of it, a decision to eat new humans before the serpent's opportunity.
Of as many that have fought on their desecrated stronghold were these snakes, predator birds and sea dogs waiting around the tower. It is when this spanning flier crashes to the ground before him that a swift, agile and lucky soldier twice receives the opportunity to jump out of his own skin. The first is when demon wing lands, with a stunning halt it hits the ground knocking the dark sunglasses from his face to reveal eyes made of black glass. The other is its landing seems to start the ground shaking, a wavering madness as the earth begins to rise and lower again afterward, a feeling of rumbling from within hell itself and a sense that the earth were to soon tear open ravaged apart and swallow him whole. Some froze with inhibition caused by shaking confusion, some were not as he and they survive, they fight. The venom inside, the infection, are all soon abandoned as the tower at the center of the city of monsters begins to rocket into the air, straight away it flies into the atmosphere. The creatures that did not flee from the racing fire flee to the ship to cling to the vines of putrid filth and windows of the tail; halfway to oblivion those windows fill with fire burning everything in contact igniting a good deal of the atmosphere in the process. It snows ash and corpulent decay as those whom survive and not fighting flees to the lines. They later find that beneath the island of oil and trash is a large engine with technology to study for centuries to come that had propelled the large mass to the shore. The entire region is now temporarily a restricted recovery zone.