CUSTOM-Part Eight: OVERRAN

Jamie scrambled up over the top defense wall, with help from extended hands. Once over, she caught her breath, and dared to look below to the trenches.


She gasped.

Fire and smoke engulfed over the lines, only a few reports of gunfire echoed out, and more Nix that she had ever seen before swept over the battlefield below her. From her experience, the aliens were combing the trenches for survivors.

She wished for the survivors to have a quick death. She prayed that her friends were already dead, and not being dined on by those things. In the moment of safety, her mind refocused from pure survival to contemplation of the events that had just transpired. There on the ridge above the battlefield graveyard, Jamie kneed into the ground and breakdown.

“Ani’t no one alive down there, soldier.” The officer tried comfort Jamie as she wept.

“I…left them.” She said quietly.

“Soldier, get up, take your weapon, and move out.” The officer left her there, and only the sounds of Wireless Ridge base was a chaotic sea of running people, and yelling. That was the push that she needed. Jamie picked through ammo boxes, cramming fresh magazines into her chest rig, other soldier darted in and did the same.

“Where the hell are we going?” She asked the nearest soldier.

“Vickers.” He pointed to the abandoned colonial town-site behind them.

“Shit.” She fired out as they hustled to the RV point.

“Trooper!” barked voice from the ground. Jamie turned down to see combat engineers setting up a line of claymores and screamer mines. It was the last of desperation measure.

“Plant these over there and help me seal up this gap up.” She handed Jamie the small cone shaped screamers. While the entire Wireless Ridge camp ran into Vickers, Jamie planted the last attempt at holding this point to hold off the Nix advance.

“Yeah, like that.” They shoved them into the loose dirt, and then nodded to the engineers and booked it to the next line of defense, Vickers itself. The city was the finally point before those things got to the domes, into the very heart of the command staff for the war on this moon.

Jamie was winded from the run into the city streets; she collapsed behind a concrete defense wall.

“MOVE! GET OUT OF THE WAY FOR THE PANZERS! Ordered an officer from one of the heavy MG nests that dotted the defense walls.

The Customs parted like the Red Sea when the tank shook the street, and drive directly to the new frontline in the urban environment.

The Wittman wheeled armored vehicles moved slowly up to the defense walls while its flechette machine gun chattered into the swarms. The great wheeled armored beast stopped and lowered itself. The 90mm anti-personal tank round burst in a fireball, showering the Nix brood with over five thousand flechette. Recoil rocked the tank back and forth.

Jamie watched waves of Nix were cut down like grass. The tanks cycled another round and fired, echoing off of the tall building around them.

It was the best thing she had ever seen.

Over and over, the Wittman tanks pounded the phalanx of black crabs, driving back the horde. It seemed, to Jamie, that the worm had turned for them.

“I’m fucking in love with the tanks now!” Jamie said to the troops next to her.

“Yeah, I’m going to kiss every last of them!”

Another Custom chimed in: “What if they’re a girl, Beckman?”

“Even better.” She winked at him

“I knew I loved you.”

“Troopers!” An officer angry pointed to them. “Get your asses ready! Those tanks don’t have many of these chop-chop shells left!”

“Aw, shit! Just when I was starting to enjoy watching die them, instead of us!” Jamie smiled to him. She was thankful to have a few minutes of the tank’s hailstorm driving them back. With the depletion of the anti-personal shells, legions of aliens jetted out from the nearly by buildings. They engulfed the tanks in a rushing black tide. Jamie realized the outcome, and ran for the next line, as they poured over the walls.

She blocked out the screams, and pushed her legs even faster. Just as it seemed that the grim reaper's blade was on her, the Nix were driven back by some divine moment of salvation.

As she cleared the wall of another defensive position, she thanked the engineers that had bought them a moment with their lives and screamer mines.