Skeleton Wars (6 page)

Dr. John FitzWorth was a respected Canadian
Computer scientist of French origin at the prestigious University
of British Columbia. Early that morning, he was traveling by car to
the countryside with his family. As they were rounding a bend in
one of the forested areas, they were shocked to see a dozen of
human skeletons standing in the middle of the road waving for them
to stop. The driver stopped the car and tried to make a reverse but
was stopped by another group of skeletons that was coming from
behind.

This time, there was no wind and the
skeletons were operating in the open. The driver who doubled as the
family’s bodyguard tried to attack the skeletons but was
overpowered. They stabbed him several times with their double edged
swords and left him fatally wounded. The skeletons then pulled out
the whole family from the car and took them to the forest. At a
distance away from the road, the skeletons stopped. They forced the
woman and their daughter to kneel on the ground while the man was
separated from them.

The skeletons wrapped the scientist’s head
with a helmet. They undressed him and forced him to lie on the
ground in a supine position. When they started cutting him, his
wife fainted! His daughter started screaming out loudly and tried
to cover her eyes but she could still hear the death rattles from
her whining father. The ghosts put the scientist’s skeleton and its
helmeted head in a body bag and disappeared with it in the forest
without trace.

Early in the morning of the following day,
the US federal government ordered for a protective arrest of all
high profile scientists in the country. Local radio and television
stations were running ads that were advising all scientists to take
themselves to nearby police or military installations. Plans had
been made to disperse all the scientists to different secure
underground facilities of the US Army.

Special military teams were dispatched to
different universities to help in the transfer of the scientists to
different US military bunkers. At San José State University in
California, the soldiers arrived at around 8:00 am. They were from
the 91
^st
Training Division at Fort Hunter Liggett, a US
Army fort in Southern Monterey County. They came by a convoy of
armored vehicles whose make had not yet been revealed to the
general public. The armored cars were being escorted by more than
ten military tanks. Patrolling the air above the campus were HH-60G
Pave Hawk helicopters from the 129
^th
Reserve Wing at
Moffett Airfield, North East of San Jose.

Activities at the university were put to a
standstill as the students and staff came out of their lecture
rooms and offices to gaze at the army that had invaded their
university. They were wandering why an entire arsenal had to be
emptied and a full battalion had to be brought just to protect a
handful of the scientists that were at the university at the
moment.

The most disturbing thing about the soldiers
was however their type of uniform which made them to look like free
moving robots. Basing on the first raid on the CIA offices, this
personal armor had been designed for foot soldiers by the United
States Army Soldiers Center in anticipation of a second attack from
these obscure aliens.

It was intended to absorb or deflect
slashing, bludgeoning and penetrating attacks from swords and
flying debris, which the skeletons had used as their main weapons
in the first raid. It was consisting of three layers. The innermost
layer had been made from Kevlar, a synthetic fiber of high tensile
strength. Given its excellent fragment stopping power, it could
provide full protection against slash attacks from swords and other
close quarter weapons.

The middle layer had been fitted with
metallic plates to provide protection from rifle rounds. The
outermost layer was a thickened strap of rubber. This could
perfectly deflect off bludgeoning weapons and flying fragments. A
special insert had been put at the back to protect the spine. Each
soldier was putting on a helmet that had been designed in almost
the same way as the uniform. It was a full suit that was covering
even the limbs. It was however ridged at the joints especially the
knees and ankles, to allow for flexibility when moving.

The soldiers separated themselves into
different companies and each company was assigned two or three
scientists to escort to different military sites. From that
university, there were two scientists from the department of
Microbial Evolution who happened to be married at the same time.
These two were Prof. McDonald Ressy, a specialist in Microbial
Evolution and Molecular Phylogeny and his wife Dr. Christine Ressy,
a specialist in Bacteriology and Molecular Biology. They were being
escorted to a secret underground facility in Santa Cruz Mountains
in a convoy of ten armored vehicles which was being accompanied by
two Pave Hawk helicopters which were also full of soldiers.

When the convoy reached at the north end of
Scotts Valley where State Route 17 begins winding an ascent of the
Santa Cruz Mountains, the soldiers started hearing sounds of a fast
moving wind which was accompanied by strong shaking of the ground.
The soldiers were forced to stop the vehicles and turned their eyes
behind. They were shocked to see a large translucent wind which had
covered the whole road. The wind was sweeping a damage trail along
its path on the highway. It was blowing away all the cars that it
was coming across and it was piling them onto each other. Wreckages
from these cars were being released into the surroundings, causing
extensive structural damage and casualties wherever they fell.

Surprisingly, the wind moved passed the
convoy without causing damage to any of the vehicles. When it
reached sixty yards away from the convoy, it became stationary but
kept on rotating. It was spinning at a faster speed than a dust
devil. Lt. Col. Tim the commander of the company ordered the
soldiers to jump out of the vehicles. They took up different
positions behind the vehicles with their guns aimed at the rotating
wind.

Lt. Col. Tim pulled out a megaphone and
started giving instructions to the wind. “If there’s anyone there
freeze……. freeze.” He paused for five seconds before shouting
again, “freeze….. I said fre--eee--eze!” As if to obey him, the
whirlwind lost its strength at once and exposed the skeletons. They
were twenty five human skeletons in total and were all armed with
glittering double edged swords. One of the skeletons was carrying a
body bag in their other arm and another was carrying a toolbox
which was containing the dissection apparatus.

When the skeletons started walking towards
them, Tim was prompted to pick up the megaphone again. First, to
his soldiers he said, “Don’t shoot!! Night visions on…..!!” and
again to the skeletons ‘’Freeze…..Freeze….” But the skeletons just
continued walking and when they reached twenty yards away from the
vehicles, the whirlwind reformed and covered all of them. The wind
kept on expanding until when it reached the cars. When it started
enveloping them, Tim shouted his last instructions to the soldiers,
“Show time…”

The soldiers started shooting heavily into
the wind, but it was hard for the bullets to hit any of the
skeletons. This was because the skeletons were just running around
the area, in the same direction as the wind. After shooting without
hitting any target for over five minutes, the soldiers decided to
resort to an arm-to-arm combat. A heavy exchange of blows and kicks
from both sides broke out immediately. Although both sides were
equally good at close quarter fighting, the US soldiers were
invulnerable to all forms of attacks from the skeletons thanks to
their personal armor.

The skeletons tried hard to slash them with
their swords, but the soldiers would perfectly use their swords as
shields against them. Even the slashes that could reach their
bodies would be deflected away by the thick rubber strap of their
uniforms. When they failed to cut them, the skeletons plotted to
first disarm the soldiers. However, as the skeletons concentrated
their efforts on taking away the guns, it gave more chances to the
soldiers to do more offensive to them. By the tenth minute, the
soldiers had not registered any injury on their side despite the
efforts the skeletons had put in to cut them.

The skeletons decided to first run away from
the battle scene because the human soldiers had started
overpowering them. When they reached one hundred meters away, the
wind became stationary again. Its spinning speed and strength more
than doubled. A minute later, the skeletons and the whirlwind
returned with renewed vigor. The soldiers were made to lose their
balance by the strength of the wind, forcing them to start
struggling to hold onto the armored cars for anchorage. One by one,
the ghosts would come across them and would cut them several times
all over their bodies. The soldiers’ ability to fight back had been
reduced because they had to maintain one arm holding onto the
vehicles in order to avoid being blown away.

But the greatest challenge which the soldiers
were facing was the way the wind kept on changing its pattern of
rotation. It would rotate in a clockwise direction for a while and
would then change abruptly to a counterclockwise pattern before
going back to the clockwise direction. It kept on doing this over
and over again and whenever it would change pattern, some unlucky
human soldiers would be lifted aloft. As they floated within the
wind, the skeletons would find it easy to stab them repeatedly and
after some time the rubber coating of the outermost layer of their
uniforms loosened. The metallic plates of the second layer also
started protruding through the cut areas and later dropped off.

The soldiers were then relying on the
innermost layer of Kevlar for defense against the stabbing effects
of the swords. Though they were not being cut, they were constantly
feeling pain from the bludgeoning attacks. Due to this pain, the
company started losing the courage to continue with the fight. They
had not only become tired, but had also started registering some
casualties. The skeletons were however even more determined to see
them die.

The last blow to the human soldiers came when
the wind started moving up and down in a series. As it rose, it
would lift the soldiers up to a distance of over ninety feet off
the ground. It would then push them down to the ground as it
returned. It was through this regular rising and falling of the
wind that the greatest number of the soldiers were killed. Whenever
the soldiers would be carried up in the air, three or four
skeletons would hold their swords vertically on the ground below
them. As the wind raced back to the ground with them, they would
fall on the tips of these swords. The swords would then manage to
penetrate through the Kevlar lining of the soldiers’ suits and
hence pierce through their flesh.

Lt. Col. Tim also died in the same way. After
being lifted up by the rising wind, four skeletons staged their
swords below him. When the wind pushed him back to the ground, he
fell on these swords. One pierced through his thoracic region and
reached his heart which caused him to die instantly.

All along, the soldiers in the helicopters
had just been watching the ground fight from above. Though they
were also armed with M16 rifles, they had not tried to take action
for fear of injuring their colleagues who were battling with the
skeletons on the ground. But when the wind started blowing away the
sliced body parts of their colleagues, the pilots decided to call
for help from their seniors. “Bodies of our colleagues are being
thrown out of the wind, sir!” one pilot reported. “We need an elite
squad sir! Team Bravo has been eliminated….,” reported another
pilot.

Their seniors responded by sending a more
elite squad of US Navy SEALS. The SEALS were putting on a similar
personal armor, but their heads were covered with Modular
Integrated Communications Helmets instead. The communication
gadgets that had been installed on these helmets enabled them to
communicate with each other and to receive orders from their team
leader, Col. Davison. The helmets had also been fitted with
AN/PVS-14 Monocular night vision devices, to provide a better
vision through the translucent wind.

At the time of their arrival, the skeletons
had killed almost all the soldiers of the first squad and had
started opening the armored vehicles to obtain the two scientists
who were by then lying unconscious in their car seats. The SEALS
started by shooting into the wind to disperse them away from the
cars before they dashed into the howling wind.

They were using XM25 Individual Airburst
Weapons as their rifles! These computerized firearms were capable
of shooting a next generation of 25mm grenades that could be set to
explode in mid-air at or near the target from a distance of up to
five hundred meters away.

The detonating distance of the grenades could
also be manually adjusted by the user, ten feet longer or shorter
before hitting the target. These firearms were a perfect choice for
the skeletons which were running in unarmored targets because the
grenades could detonate at a proper distance to produce an airburst
effect. The resulting fragments could then distribute evenly over a
wide area, but without penetrating the armored entrenchments of the
military vehicles in which the two scientists had been abandoned.
The soldiers continued shooting without stopping and five minutes
later, they had managed to injure five skeletons. The five
skeletons had been shattered into pieces and their bones had been
lifted up and were also floating in the whirlwind.

The SEALS had also come with remote
controlled Black Knight military tanks which they sent into the
wind first. As soon as they entered the wind, they started shooting
at the skeletons with their 30mm cannon guns. With their advanced
autonomous navigation system, these tanks had the capability to
design and follow their own routes without dependence on outside
sources. This enabled them to trace and target the skeletons with a
higher degree of accuracy on their own. The tanks were also moving
in groups of five, being separated by very small gaps which made it
difficult for the wind to blow down any of them.