Feeding Time

  by Ian Reeve

The war was lost.  All that was left was revenge.

They first appeared six months ago. Huge creatures, a mile long, sailing across space on wings dozens of miles across. They ignored every attempt to communicate with them, landed on every continent and began eating. They ate everything, leaving a barren, lifeless landscape behind them like the surface of the moon. Some swam in the oceans and emptied them of life as well. Every army hurled itself at them. Bombs were dropped, the land ahead of them was mined. Eventually they even tried nuking them. Nothing worked. They were impervious to everything. Soon, all organised resistance ended, and all we could do was run way from them. We hid in bunkers, in any hole in the ground we could find, knowing we were only delaying the end. Knowing that the world we would emerge into would no longer be able to sustain us.

I was a gardener, working at Eastwood naval base, the place where the nuclear warheads carried by the Trident missiles of Britain's nuclear deterrent were serviced. I cut the grass, pruned the hedges, that sort of thing, but I had to have a pass to get in, and that was enough to earn me a place in the bunker when the alarms went off. We huddled there, hundreds of feet below ground, as the ground shook above us, trembling as the noise and vibrations deafened us, and when it passed, the Captain climbed the stairs to see that was left. His expression when he returned told us everything we needed to know.

He gathered everyone together in the mess room, the only room big enough to hold us all. By then, there were precious few military men left. We were mainly support staff. Cooks, cleaners, people like that. The Captain told us that he had an idea, a way of killing one of them. Their hides were too strong even for nukes, but if we could get a weapon inside it... He asked for volunteers to offer themselves up to be eaten, with a nuke strapped to their back. We knew it was the end for the human race, but he was damned if we were going to go down without taking at least one of the creatures with us.

We all volunteered. It was that or a slow death from starvation, possibly preceded by cannibalism. There weren’t enough nukes for all of us, so the rest of us had to make do with twenty kilos of TNT strapped around our waists.  Most of the creatures were leaving by then, spreading their wings and heading back out into space, but there were still a few gobbling up the last bits of greenery in the mountains, areas that they’d ignored until then as they devoured the farmlands and forests. A fleet of helicopters took us to a place one of the creatures was approaching, and we jumped out, spreading out across the rocky ground. We could see it coming like a mobile mountain, so huge that every movement caused magnitude five earthquakes.

We scrambled towards it across the uneven ground. Margaret was the first to get close. She was one of the accountants, and was one of the lucky few to be carrying a nuke. One of the creature's secondary heads spotted her, and a tentacle lashed out, wrapping around her waist. She screamed, and her hand flew to the trigger, I thought for a moment she was going to detonate too soon and kill all of us, but she was carried into an orifice that we hadn’t realised was a mouth until then. She disappeared inside, and a moment later a stretch of the creature’s hide hundreds of metres long bulged out as the nuke detonated.

Fire and smoke jetted out through the orifice, and we cowered behind rocks as the blast swept over us. When we cautiously looked out, the creature was motionless, and we thought for a moment that Maggie had killed it, but then some of its extremities began to twitch and move, and we realised it had only been momentarily stunned. We all ran forward, all eager to be the one to finish it off.

I reached the orifice Maggie had been carried in through. No tentacle took me, the creature wasn’t quite recovered, and I had to climb in, the creature’s hide being rough enough to offer plenty of hand and foot holds. It was hot inside, probably radioactive, and I was glad for the rubber swimsuit that had been intended to protect me from digestive juices. The smoke was rapidly clearing, and I saw some of the damage that had been done to its relatively delicate internal tissues. There was an opening that I was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to be there, a hole torn open by the blast, and I scrambled through it, thinking that my bomb would do more damage if I took it further inside. Behind me, I saw some of the others following me with the same idea.

The creature shook as another bomb detonated somewhere and I was thrown against some kind of horny growth that ripped my suit open. I found myself breathing the creature’s internal gases. I realised I could breathe them, and then thought of course I can. The creature must have the same basic biochemistry as us, or it wouldn’t have been able to eat us. And then I thought, if it can eat us...

I yelled into the radio, shouting at everyone not to detonate their bombs. I directed them to the orifice, told them to climb inside, my heart hammering with excitement. Soon there were fifty of us assembling in the gas chamber I’d found, while the wound opened by Maggie’s nuke healed behind us. Around us, passages led away to other chambers, a network as large as a city and all filled with breathable air. A new home for the human race, if we could eat the creature’s flesh.

We’ve been here for a week now. The creature left the Earth, heading back into space to join its fellows. On its way to another world to feed again. That’ll be thousands of years from now, though. Plenty of time for our numbers to grow, and there’s room here for thousands of us. Maybe one day we’ll find a way to steer it, make it go where we want. If we can make it move alongside its fellows, maybe we can colonise them as well. Turn them into a fleet of starships. All I know is, we’ve got a chance. A chance to survive, and that’s really all any of us has the right to ask.