Intergalactic Pest Control

Chapter 6

Chapter Six

Sector 12 Transgalactic Station

The elevator dinged. Sublevel four: engineering department, and a swarm of flesh-eating nightmare beasts. The door slid open, and the Notches held their new weapons at the ready. They breathed a collective sigh of relief when they were met with nothing.

Exiting the elevator in a tight formation, Reggie on point, the others watching the flanks, they felt ready to take on the bugs. They were rested, newly armed, and had a better sense of their enemy and a fresh mindset. They were unprepared before, unsure of what they were walking into. But they knew now. They knew the horror that was waiting in the dark, ready to snap their bones like twigs and chew off their flesh.

“You guys remember the qualifier game we won to make it into the VRE championships?” Reggie asked in a hush. “The Return to Order team deathmatch?”

“Yeah,” Cody said with a chuckle. “One of our highlights.”

“Best of five series,” Joel said. “We were down two to nothing. Needed to win three in a row.”

“Against a team favored to rank highly in the championships,” Reggie added as they progressed further down the hall. “Everyone counted us out. But that’s when we changed up our tactics. We moved as a unit. Never left each other’s side. They spread out, played zones, came at us one by one, and we wiped them out.”

Reggie held up his fist, signaling them to stop at the intersection in the corridor. Before peering around the corner, he said, “That’s what we do now. We stick together. We move as a unit.”

The others nodded in agreement.

Reggie peeked around the corner and signaled the all-clear. They moved as one, never allowing more than a few feet of daylight between them. Reggie was always on point, and Joel and Cody always watched the flanks. Even when a group of ShimVens rushed them as they approached the main engineering section, they didn’t break formation.

“Twelve o’clock!” Reggie yelled.

Joel and Cody pivoted and angled their flamethrowers forward, a safe distance from each other. All three of them lay on the triggers at the same time, sending a wall of fire hurtling at the bugs.

The creatures shrieked as the inferno swallowed them. When the Notches let up, the bugs were nothing but twisted, crispy corpses.

Joel held his flamethrower up and smiled at it. “Hell yeah.”

The others seemed equally pleased. They pressed forward, toward the heart of the engineering section. Cody hypothesized that’s where the bulk of the swarm would be; that’s where the largest concentration of wires and circuits and all the stuff the bugs loved to munch on were located.

Another small group of ShimVens rushed them a minute later, four bugs in total. Two charged from the front, and Reggie smoked them without a problem; one tried to flank them, but Joel caught it in time. It was the one that dropped from the ceiling that almost did them in.

Cody noticed the shadow fall over him a split-second too late. He raised his flamethrower and let loose a burst of fire, but the bug was too low. The fire missed, and the bug smashed into him. Cody hit the floor with such force that the air was knocked out of his lungs. His head swam as he tried to get up and fight off the bug at the same time. It slashed at him with its needle-like legs. Cody used his gun to block it.

Without thinking, Reggie took aim. Joel tried to tell him to stop, but his voice was swallowed by the whoosh of fire.

Reggie’s flamethrower ignited, washing the bug in a stream of flame, nearly hitting Cody. The bug shrieked, flailed and fell dead. Still on fire, the ShimVen toppled over onto Cody. Joel rushed forward and thrust Cody’s flamethrower out of his hand and away from the burning bug. Reggie kicked the ShimVen off Cody and dropped on top of his friend to extinguish him.

Reggie rolled off Cody once the flames died.

“s**t, man,” Cody snapped. “You almost killed me.”

“Sorry,” Reggie said, his voice low. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Damn right, you weren’t,” Joel said. “If you’d hit his flamethrower, the fuel tank could’ve blown, and we’d all be toast.”

Cody stood up and took stock of the singed parts of his suit. The damage was superficial—nothing that compromised his ability to press on, other than the hit to his confidence.

Reggie paced a few yards up and down the corridor. He was shaken. His fingers twitched, and his heart pounded from the adrenaline.

I almost burned my friend alive.

Going forward, he’d have to be more careful, or he was going to blow them all up.

“Okay,” Reggie said after a lengthy silence. “I think we should split up.”

Joel’s face twisted with confusion. “Didn’t you give us a speech about teamwork a little while ago? And now you want to split up?”

A little while ago, I hadn’t almost torched my friend, Reggie thought. Aloud, he said, “I didn’t know the power of the flamethrowers then. These things are incredible, but we can’t use them in tight quarters.”

Then something sparked in his mind. An idea that was both great and stupid.

“The initial plan would have worked if the chem wasn’t a bust. We should try it again. Set up kill zones, lure them in and then torch them to hell. We can organize three separate but simultaneous traps. That will split the swarm, and let us each burn our share…then we’ll be done with the whole thing. Piece of cake.”

Cody’s face turned pale, like he was ready to puke. “You want all of us to be live human bait now? Alone?”

Doubt poked at Reggie’s brain. He pushed it away. “I know it sounds dangerous, but this will definitely work. It would have worked if the chems were legit. These bugs aren’t that bad—there’s just a ton of them. But now that we have a real means of killing them, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Joel said.

“We got this.”

Reggie was trying to sound as optimistic as he could. He needed to believe it. He needed to know that this was going to work out, that they would kill these ShimVens, get a reputation, rake in more lucrative jobs and get rich. Then they would never have to split up and find office jobs and only talk to each other over direct message and, eventually, even stop doing that because of mortgages and families and deadlines.

We’re going to kill the bugs. Everything is going to be fine.

Joel and Cody both nodded half-heartedly. They split up the gear, making sure each of them had the supplies to make an effective bug trap. After studying the schematics, Joel assigned them specific kill zones.

“It’s important that we all know where the others are going to be,” Joel said, running his hand through his wavy brown hair. “We’re separating temporarily, but we’ll still need to have each other’s backs.”

The other two agreed with adamant nods.

Once ready, they all returned to the elevator, choosing those over the stairs. It was a quiet ride down to sublevel five. When the doors slid open, Cody’s heart jumped into his throat.

“My stop,” he said, trying to psych himself up. He moved his head from side to side, the way fighters do before jumping in the ring. All it did was put a kink in the left side of his neck. He stepped out, rubbing his now spasming neck, and turned to face his friends. “Listen, guys, this has been a real trip. I just want you to know, in case I get eaten—”

Joel pressed the ‘close door’ button. It slid shut, cutting Cody off, but they could still hear his muffled voice shouting from the other side.

“I blame you!” Cody finished.

The elevator lurched as it descended another floor. “Sublevel six,” Joel said. “I’ve always loved sublevel six.” He needlessly checked his flamethrower again, trying to distract himself from the fact that his hands were shaking, and a cold sweat had begun to run down his face.

The door opened to another level of cold metal and the stink of solvent and s**t in the air.

Joel stepped out. He didn’t turn to face Reggie, but said over his shoulder, “Don’t get dead.”

“You either,” Reggie retorted as the door closed.

Alone, Reggie ran his fingers along the pincer tucked in his belt. He loved the trophy system. That’s what this job was. A trophy grab. An achievement. Something he could display that would bring them glory. And glory begets more glory. This job was a stepping stone. It was important.

The elevator stopped. A lonely ding sounded his arrival on sublevel seven.

“Don’t get dead,” he told himself.

He stepped out and readied his flamethrower.