He watched as the awful machine lumbered forward, seemingly undeterred by the crude ježeks that littered the streets. Almost carelessly, it collided with one of the houses, sending half of it crumbling to the ground. A woman screamed inside, stumbling out of the front door and running down the street, past them. The lad next to him flinched and clapped his hands over his ears as one of the beasts dragged a ježek out from under its belly, the screech of metal on metal enough to make him shudder.
“Sarge, what do we do?” the lad shouted, the gunfire echoing down the streets almost drowning him out. Lundt looked down at him, noticing for the first time that the private had been caught across the face with a piece of shrapnel. He fished a handkerchief from the pocket of his uniform. “You’re bleeding, Callaghan.”
Wiping carelessly at his face, the private continued. “They’re bulletproof! And you know we don’t have enough ballistics for this, and we haven’t been trained with the laser cannons, and –“
Lundt raised a hand, and his voice, addressing the rest of the men huddled behind the wall. “I know they look big and scary, lads, but they didn’t shoot that woman, did they?”
While he spoke, the machines continued to advance, a long line of them spread out across the city, pushing forwards slowly. They glistened horribly, silvery-black carapaces shining in the sunlight. Another group of civilians sprinted past. “They’re a demolition crew, that’s all! Does anyone, besides me, know how the cannons work?”
A few tentative hands were raised and he nodded. “Right then. We’ll fall back to central, get the cannons on these bastards. That should punch through the armour.”
He watched as they scrambled for their weapons with a sense of grim futility. He didn’t have enough men to organise a city evacuation, and even if he did, where would they go? Into the forest? They weren’t good enough for this. Too little training, too little time. A sense of duty was all well and good, but unless it was backed up by experience it wasn’t worth much. And these machines…he had never seen anything like them before. Callaghan stopped in front of him and he snapped out of his trance, stumbling into the back of him. “Move it, we’re almost there!”
The private pointed upwards, wordlessly, at the hundreds of missiles falling from the sky like shooting stars. They’re almost beautiful, he had time to think, before they started slamming into the ground. The impact shocks were enough to knock them over, throwing up great plumes of debris and punching through houses, but the expected explosions never came.
When the impacts stopped, Lundt peered cautiously around the corner of the alley, spotting one of the strange missiles not too far away. It looked like a dull silver sphere, maybe half a metre in diameter, embedded in the road. As he watched, it seemed to shake, small cracks appearing in the surface.
“I reckon we should be moving away right about now,” he called, trying to usher the men back along the alley, but they had stopped to watch in terrified fascination, transfixed by the sudden appearance of this new horror.
He glanced back at it, freezing in place as it began to open, like a flower – metallic petals unfolding themselves in sequence. They gleamed, razor sharp, eight in total. A cluster of blinding lights blinked into life, the top half of the strange machine swivelling, scanning the area, until suddenly the lights swept across their faces, throwing them into sharp relief. With a loud click, the lights turned dull red.
“Move, NOW!” Lundt roared, shoving Callaghan in the back. He could hear a dull, whining noise, rising in pitch, and as they started to run, he took a last glance back and watched as the thing rose jerkily, the appendages he had taken to be petals snapping and elongating into curved legs.
“What the fuck are those?” one of the men screamed as they ran. Lundt didn’t have an answer for him, but as they rounded the corner the answer became self evident. The town square swarmed with the things, and the air rang with the sound of screaming.
They used their front legs as blades, it seemed, dissecting anything that moved. He watched in helpless horror as three of them descended on a young man, tearing him to shreds in a matter of seconds. He could see two distinct kinds – some were vaguely circular, with eight legs, and the others had a long, curved tail-like appendage, arching over their backs.
Before he could speak, Smith screamed, raising his gun and firing wildly at the nearest of the machines. Lundt didn’t even have time to grab him before the first had fixed on him, a sheet of fire spraying from its segmented tail. Smith’s face melted right off his skull.
They tried to run, but the city was infested with the vile things, and they were surrounded in less than a minute. As the arachnids eviscerated Lundt, he managed to focus on one of the enormous machines as it came into view, rolling a compacted sphere made of…rubble, and bodies. Demolition and cleanup. He let out a strangled laugh, blood spilling from his lips as he died.