Chapter 5

Five

"What the bloody hell happened?" Joel demanded the moment they stopped somewhere he deemed to be safe. It was late afternoon by that point, and the small, wooded area they had paused in was already darkening.

"Saw them from the back window," Dimitri said. He was sat on a log, leg propped up, looking down at his wound. It was quite substantial and had already darkened his cargo pants with blood. Simon had tried to stop him a while back to investigate, but he'd refused, insisting they'd deal with it once they were well away from the munching monsters. "Hole there in the building wall and a mass of glistening purple behind it."

"Let me see that leg now, mate," Simon said.

Dimitri waved the words away. "It's nothing."

"Let him see," Joel commanded.

Dimitri complied, and Simon had a good look at the thing. "Not a bite," he said after a moment.

Did Dimitri blush? "I caught it on the edge of the newspaper stand," he said. "Scraped the skin right off! I swear one of those monsters laughed as I did!"

They all chuckled a little at that, perhaps as Dimitri had intended them to. It relieved the tension slightly, but they were all on edge. Theo didn't think it helped that they had paused in the woods where the bare trees looked a bit creepy in the late afternoon light. Plus, it was winter, it would be dark properly soon, and Theo didn't fancy camping out here. Surely, they were better off in the middle of a field where they could see anything and anyone coming, he thought, and soon suggested as much.

"And they'll see us!" Joel said just as Simon confirmed that Dimitri was fine.

"Yeah, but on balance…" Theo said.

Joel ignored him, saying instead, "This doesn't make any sense."

"How do you mean, boss?" Gill asked.

"They're never in small groups like this," Joel said. "You saw the drone feed from the beach, there are hundreds down there, and these ones should be down there too. They stay together, that's how they work."

"This could be a new infestation?" Dimitri suggested.

"Unlikely," Joel said. "Not unless you spotted a queen anywhere?"

Dimitri shook his head.

"Maybe they just got separated from the whole then?" Gill proposed.

"They wouldn't have been in that shop then," Julia said. "They'd have been trying to get back to them. Joel's right, they stick together."

She had a small amount of purple goo on her forehead. Theo suspected it was munching monster flesh, and he gestured for her to clean it off. She pulled a face as she rubbed at it.

"Perhaps they were waiting for us," Dimitri suggested as Simon applied a bandage to his leg and gave him a pat to confirm he was fine.

"No," Theo said after a moment just as Julia flicked the goo off. A piece of it landed on his thigh. He brushed it off with a sigh. "I don't think they were."

There must have been something in his tone because Joel turned and shot him a look. "What do you mean?"

"There was someone…something else there," Theo said.

"Where?"

"In the shop." Theo shrugged and looked around the woods. "Or nearby. I don't know. I didn't see it. It was…a flash maybe, in my peripheral vision, but there was definitely something there."

"The queen?"

"Not unless the muncher queens are like seven foot?"

"They're not," Dimitri said just as Joel demanded, "You didn't want to mention this before, mate?"

"And when was I supposed to do that?" Theo asked. "When we were running for our lives from munching monsters who shouldn't have been there? Should I have mentioned it then?"

Joel scowled. "Could it have been one of us? A human, I mean? Someone who avoided the evacuation order?"

"No," Theo said. "I think…I think there was a shimmer."

"A shimmer…" Did Joel actually growl? "That means something from the other dimension which means we've no choice but to go and find out what!"

"What's the plan?" Gill asked.

"Plan?" He looked at her as if she'd asked something ridiculous. "Simple. We go back to the shop, we kill those fuckers, and whatever the hell it was that Theo saw."

"But…"

"That is why we're here."

"Yeah…I guess…" Gill said.

"We were taken by surprise is all, such a close space, and they weren't meant to be there," Joel continued.

"They were also very aggressive," Dimitri said, interrupting Joel's speech which was either supposed to motivate or reassure them given that their first engagement had gone, well…badly Theo supposed. "More so than I expected."

"No, they're always like that," Joel said with a shrug. "Sometimes worse to be honest."

"So this is their usual approach?" Theo asked. He had wanted to say M.O. but he didn't yet feel that he had the army gravitas to pull it off. "Attack, attack, and attack again?"

"Yeah," Joel said. "It is." He paused for a moment. "And maybe it's a good thing that you've had a small taste of it in advance. You know what you're up against now!" He pulled a phone from one of the many pockets on his cargo pants. "I need to update the other team leaders. I mean, if there's a group like this here, who's to say there isn't one somewhere else? I tell you what, it's a bloody good job they've insisted on dropping us so far out! No risk of them escaping through the barrier!"

He wandered over to a large oak tree and opened his phone. It was a flip phone, nineties style, mainly because proper smart phones didn't work inside the infestation zones as the vibrations of the containment field affected them.

"There was definitely something else there, Julia," Theo said as she joined him to look out onto the surrounding fields. She had divested herself of her army jumper before they'd even entered the shop and was stood now in a t-shirt and tight-fitting Barbour gilet that was blatantly not army issue. Her arms were covered in goose bumps. She must have been freezing. Theo had maintained a steady pace on the run to the woods and remained in his jumper, though admittedly he was sweating a bit. He wondered if there was purple goo on him anywhere and decided he would rather not know. He only had one change of clothes in his backpack, and he was saving them for when things got really disgusting.

"What do you think it was?" she asked.

"I don't know. I barely saw it?—"

"Then—"

"But I did see something." He paused. "And it had a shimmer. What else can it be but another monster? Maybe that's why there are munchers here? Maybe they came through with another monster from their dimension? I mean, think about it, Julia, they must interact with other monsters there in some way?"

"They don't come through without a queen though," Julia said.

"Not that we know of."

Theo looked over at Joel who was speaking rapidly into the phone, gesturing as he did so but smiling at the same time. He had been shaping up to be a good team lead and had this been a regular mission Theo would be absolutely confident in his abilities, but suddenly this wasn't looking like a normal assignment at all, and smile or not Joel was obviously concerned.

"You'd think they'd know more about this stuff," he said after a moment.

"How do you know they don't?"

"Why haven't they told us?"

"Because we're grunts," Julia said, rubbing her goose-bumped arms with her free hand. "Our job is just to kill the munchers. The whys and the wherefores are someone else's jobs, someone with multiple degrees."

"I have multiple degrees," Theo said, and she laughed.

"Of course you do!"

Joel finished up his call and joined them. He was looking quite cheerful now. "No other groups spotted," he said. "I think we can be confident this is some sort of one off."

"Can we really be confident on that?" Theo asked. "Given we've been here for less than a day?"

"That's the sort of negative thinking that helps no one," Joel said.

"Just being a bit of a realist," Theo replied.

"Being a worrier," he replied.

"Yeah, but," Theo looked around the group, hoping to get them on side, "there's quite a lot of space we haven't covered yet. Just because the other groups haven't seen any lone muncher pods doesn't mean they don't exist. Perhaps a bit of caution is warranted?"

"There's no place for caution in an environment like this," Joel said and before Theo could say that he absolutely thought this environment really was the place for caution Joel gestured to their guns. "Now, all of you, make sure your torches are on straight and your ammo is fully loaded. We're going in and going in hard before we lose the last of the daylight."

"You think we'll make it to the shop before it gets dark?" Julia asked.

"We will with Theo pacing us," he said, and he gestured in front of him. "And there's no time like the present. Let's go, marathon man."