Joel Sanders watched the trees rushing up toward him as the helicopter descended. The landing point was just a small clearing in the woods. Stealth aircraft and orbiting satellites bathed the area in infrared light, transforming the pre-dawn darkness into Soldier's Noon: a day-bright, alien-green luminescence that could only be seen with night-vision goggles. The chopper ahead of them was already pulling up after having deposited its payload. Six black-clad figures were sprinting for the trees. They were just moving out of sight when Joel's chopper dipped down at a steep angle toward the clearing. The rapid deceleration hit them like a fist-

"READY!" the C.O. shouted. Joel clutched his weapon with one hand while holding quick-release buckle with the other. Through the cockpit windshield, Joel could see the treetops... and then the clearing... Suddenly the pilot yanked back on the stick, and the helicopter's nose pulled up-

"GO!" said the C.O.

Joel unbuckled himself as the helicopter's passenger door roared open. The wind battered him as he sprang from his seat. Joel was the first out. He hit the ground and ran for the trees without looking back. He knew that the others were right behind him. By the time the last man touched down the helicopter was veering up toward the black sky. It had never even touched the ground.

The six of them... three gunners, two flamethrowers, and a chemist... rendezvoused after a solid ten-minute run through the woods. Each man had their own GPS system build into their visors, and an IR searchlight mounted on their shoulder to turn darkness into daylight. Getting lost wasn't even a possibility.

"Hold!" the C.O.'s voice bellowed over the helmut-radio. Joel immediately dropped in to a crouching position. Everyone else assumed identical positions around him. "Make the time 0410. We got twenty minutes to get into position. Gear-check."

"We're hot," said Norris, one of the flamethrowers. Beside him, Sinclair nodded in agreement.

Joel checked his weapons, ammunition, and equipment for what felt like the hundredth time since deployment.

"Check," he said

"Rock and roll," Dillon added... slapping a magazine into his weapon for emphasis.

"Churchill?"

The chemist always took longer to check out due to the sheer number and intricacy of the equipment he carried. Instead of electronics or fuel, the chemist had two huge canisters strapped to his back, with a nest of hoses leading through an array of dials, compressors, regulators, coils, and God knew what else... finally ending in two high-pressure nozzles... one for each hand. If any of that gear malfunctioned, then the whole squad may as well have stayed in the helicopter.

"Good," Church's deep voice rumbled.

Lieutenant Michaels, the C.O., checked out his own equipment, and then pointed through the trees. There was nothing beyond them except... more trees. At least not that THEY could see.

"Fifteen minutes," said Michaels. "Move out!"

Again, they ran. But slower this time. They wove their way through the trees toward the target... which was represented as a glowing red dot on their GPS visor-maps.

Ten minutes later, they were there. The street was just a narrow row of mostly-identical houses, ending in a wooded cul-du-sac where the squad took their position.

"Sanders," said Michaels. "Scope it out."

Joel adjusted the magnification on his visor and inspected each house. He checked for motion... sound... and then scanned with IR and UV.

"Good to go," he whispered into his helmut-microphone.

"-and ready to burn," Norris added.

"Time is 0428 and 34 seconds."

Joel was glad that they were one of the last squads to deploy. Others had been in position for well over an hour. He didn't think he could stand that much waiting... but he supposed he would have if he had to. He'd do a lot of things if he had to.

"0429," Michaels announced. The C.O. initiated a verbal countdown on his battle-PC. The shrill, slightly-feminine voice counted out the final seconds directly into the squad's earpieces. Joel ran his magnification up to maximum and scanned for the other squads. He caught flashes of IR and slight movement at the far end of the street. They were in position. Everyone was ready to go.

"Nine... eight... seven... six..."

"Steady now," said Michaels.

"...four... three...two...DEPLOY!"

"KICK ASS!" Norris shouted into their ears. "ROCK AND ROLL! ROCK AND ROLL!"

"MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!" The C.O.'s orders were barely audible over Norris' juvenile battle-cries... but they didn't need to hear the orders. Right on cue, the six-man squad sprang from the bushes and raced toward the first house. "Sinclair and Dillon... take up position outside!"

Dillon mumbled something under his breath as he and Sinclair flanked either side of the back porch. Norris and Joel slammed into the cheap door with their shoulders. The door gave way, and they were inside.

"UPSTAIRS!" Michaels ordered.

Norris and Joel raced for the stairs as Michaels and Churchill went room-to-room on the first floor...kicking in one door after another, searching in every closet and cabinet.... literally tearing the place apart. Norris reached the top of the stairs first... just as the startled homeowner burst out of the master bedroom. He was a young man... early thirties... brown hair. About Joel's height.

"HEY-!" he began. He never finished.

Joel caught him with a seven-shot burst to the chest. Alternating hollowpoint and exploding-tipped rounds tore the man's torso to shredded chunks.

"AAAK!" the man gagged as he fell to the carpet amid a spray of greenish-white ooze. He thrashed around, flailing his limbs and splattering bits of himself all over the hallway. Norris emptied the magazine of his .45 semiautomatic pistol into the man's upper chest. The thrashing subsided... rose to a sudden crescendo... and then ended. The man's corpse lay still at their feet.

Suddenly, the bedroom door flew open and a woman charged into the hall. She saw the soldiers, and froze... just for an instant... eyes wide with terror. Then she screamed and ran.

Joel's weapon jerked in his grasp. The two-second volley cut the woman in half right at the midsection. Both halves hit the carpet with a sickening pair of thuds. The lower abdomen, pelvis, and legs lay reasonably still, but the upper body began pulling itself along the floor... trailing long strands of what SHOULD have been intestines, but instead they more resembled gnarled roots soaked in green slime.

"A-A-A-A-" the woman tried to scream. But all she could managed was a cross between a gurgle and a wheeze.

"Where's she going?" said Norris.

"Nowhere-" Joel took aim at what remained of the woman's back... but he didn't fire. They were on the second level, and any rifle-shots fired into the floor would pass through to the first level and injure Michaels or Church.

And the last thing they needed was for Churchill to spring a leak.

"Michaels! Church!" Joel said into his helmut-microphone. "We got two up here. One down, one... uhh... sort of down."

"Clear downstairs," the C.O. replied. "On our way up."

"Affirmative," said Joel. He waited until he heard footsteps on the stairs, then ended the half-woman's struggles with a two-second burst. "Continuing with search."

Joel hopped over the man's body quickly checked the master bedroom. It was empty. The next door was the bathroom, and beyond that was a second bedroom. This was the door the woman had been crawling toward. Her upper body was laying right in front of it... the fingers of one hand resting mere inches away from the wood.

Michaels and Churchill arrived just as Joel kicked in the bedroom door. Something shot across the room and dove into the bed, where it huddled under the sheet.

Joel put fifteen rounds into the bed. The quivering sheet went from white to greenish black as the thing beneath it became a chunky green paste. Joel checked the closet-

"CLEAR!" Joel announced.

"Norris-" the C.O. began.

"SIR!"

Norris ran to bedroom, and Joel stepped aside as Norris did his job. Norris's weapon roared and spat out a thin stream of greasy flame that incinerated the bed and whatever was left in it. Then he turned and sprayed fire on both halves of the woman's corpse... and then the man had met them in he hallway.

"Roasted and toasted!" Norris announced. The flamethrower's fuel was a special mixture that burned extremely hot... but only for a few seconds. The flames were already dying, revealing piles of ash and chunks of burnt pulp where the bodies had been. There were no bones.

There never were.

REAL bones could survive the fire... but not these things. They burnt all the way to the core, like a rolled-up newspaper in a fireplace.

The carpet and bed were still smoldering, but Norris extinguished those flames with a quick blast from his mini-extinguisher. The last thing they needed was an inferno.

"Dig 'em out," Michaels ordered.

Joel and Norris sifted through the ash with their boots... kicking stomping on the larger chunks until they found something solid.

"Got it!"

Joel reached into the pile of hot cinders that was the woman's torso and pulled a fist-size lump. He blew the ashes off of it and held up his prize.

A seedknot.

It looked like a handful of small white rocks dipped in green tar, but it was a lot tougher. Tough enough to weather the broiling entry into Earth's atmosphere. Tough enough to survive all but a direct hit from a tactical nuke.

And to think... the whole invasion had started with just one of these things.

That's what made these raids necessary. That's why they brought Churchill.

Joel tossed the seed to Churchill and went into the bedroom while Norris retrieved a similar lump from the man's ashes. When all three of them were collected, Churchill dumped them on the floor, aimed his nozzle, and squirted a stream of concentrated herbicidic acid onto them. The lumps began to sizzle and dissolve instantly. The squad watched until the outer casings had cracked open, then Church squirted another stream of acid into the half-melted seeds. It was only then that they could be sure... absolutely certain... that the three 'people' they had 'killed' wouldn't be up walking around in three weeks.

Similar scenes were taking place all over the small town. Heavily armed men equipped with flamethrowers and chemicals descended on the sleeping inhabitants of Shady Valley like an invasion force. The soldiers went from house to house... door to door... room to room... slaughtering and burning every living person they could find. The remains were sifted for seeds, and the seeds were destroyed with the only thing that was affective against them: a noxious mixture of chemicals and acid.

With two six-man squads for every street in the city, the civilians didn't stand a chance. But they stood more of a chance than the original humans did when they were invaded the FIRST time. The first seed had fallen from space five years ago. It assimilated and replaced the first human it encountered, and there began a domino effect that lead to the complete subjugation of the human species in every part of the planet where the plants could survive. All tropical and temperate climates... anything south of Canada and north of Antarctica.... were completely infested.

And they didn't even know.

That was the true insidiousness of the invasion. It was a silent one. A peaceful one. An invasion without force... without weapons... without resistance. The conquered didn't even know that they'd been taken. They fought no battles, and saw no enemy troops. They simply woke up one morning, went to work, and continued their lives completely unaware that they were no longer human.... that they were really just some kind of mobile fruit-creature who's sole purpose was to protect the seeds lodged within their pulpy, sap-filled core.

By the time anyone noticed... it was too late. So late, in fact, that the very people who DID notice were already victims themselves. Tests were devised and administered, and the true humans discovered that they were a rapidly-shrinking minority. Then came the exodus. They headed for cooler climates for protection, leaving jobs, families, and friends behind while the invaders carried on business as usual.... continuing to run the world much like it had been run before. Even better, in some ways.

But the humans weren't idle in their half-frozen homes. They were planning. Testing. Building and developing. And eventually, striking back. THEIR invasion was nothing like the one that had taken the earth from them in the first place. This time, there WERE soldiers... there were weapons and battles and troops. Cities on the fringes of the plant's territory fell to carefully orchestrated guerilla raids. Entire populations were wiped out. Sometimes human civilians moved in to take back their homes... but mostly the strikes were tactical. Nuclear plants and manufacturing facilities... farmland... all of which became the property of the human 'invaders.'

The war was going well. Humans quickly discovered that plants didn't have the stomach for combat. They would fight... and they were damned hard to kill at times... but they didn't make war like a real man. The rage wasn't in them. The ferocity... the anger... the surge of terror-fueled adrenalin.... those where the domain of the animal kingdom, and there was nothing animal in these things. And as a result, the war was going so well the swelling human population needed to expand out of their frigid strongholds. Border towns and small cities fell in early-morning raids as the humans pushed further and further into the more temperate climates. Unsuspecting civilians... or rather, plants that THOUGHT they were unsuspecting civilians... fell to the roaring behemoth that was the human war machine.

The Shady Valley invasion lasted well into the night. Entire neighborhoods were depopulated with frightening efficiency. Joel's squad cleared their street, then moved on to secondary and tertiary locations to clear them as well. The first was the easiest. As the day wore on, the element of surprise was lost. Resistance became stronger and more organized... but with the major communications hubs and military installations already under human control, the 'civilians' didn't have much of a chance no matter how many handguns and hunting rifles they had stashed away.

It was about two hours past sunset when Lieutenant Michaels lead Joel's squad to the farmhouse. The siege had already been going on for several hours. Three six-man squads already surrounded the large house, with Joel's squad completing a 24-man assault team. Ten families from neighboring families had taken refuge in the large farmhouse... men, women, and children... most of them armed with weapons ranging from pitchforks to semiautomatic assault rifles. Reconnaissance indicated at least 30 people inside.

"Just 30?" said Norris as they got in position behind the barn. "Awww, man... I thought we were here for a FIGHT!? Why don't they just blow the house, sir?"

"You blow that house and we'll be picking seeds out of the ground for months... and STILL won't get 'em all. One-on-one is the only way to be sure... you should've learned that in basic training."

"Yeah, but this is a waste of time!"

"Yes, we're wasting time standing here talking," said Michaels. "Delta Squad-6 is going cover us while we move in. Everyone is going to hit the first floor windows with grenades. Then we go in and take 'em out as usual. Room to room-"

"Roast 'em and toast 'em!" said Norris.

"Here comes the signal..."

A countdown began to squawk over the earpieces of every soldier in the four combined squads.

"ten... nine... eight..."

"Churchill... stay here until we call for clean-up."

"Aye, sir."

"...three... two... one... MARK!"

Gunfire erupted from a half-dozen points around the perimeter. As one squad peppered the monstrous farmhouse with bullets, Joel, Michaels, Dillon, Sinclair, and Norris sprinted for the side of the building.

"DILLON! JOEL!" the C.O. called.

Moving as one, Dillon and Joel both tossed hand-grenades at the window. The glass was already broken; the grenades passed into the darkness unimpeded. There was a deafening silence... then the beginnings of a shout from within the house:

"GRENA-"

The massive double-explosion blasted out a chunk of the wall and threw up a cloud of dust and debris. The soldiers charged right through the cloud, scanning the interior with infra-red and UV sensors while normal visibility returned. They were just crossing the threshold into the house when another set of explosions rocked the structure. Delta-4 and 3 squads were blasting their way in through the west side just as Joel's squad had done on the eastern flank. The gunfire from outside died down, but was immediately replaced by shots from inside the house. Delta-4 was under attack, but it wasn't Joel's place to worry about that now.

The grenade-blast had caught three civilians by surprise. Two were on the floor, trying to get up despite wounds that would have killed a real human instantly. Pieces of the third were scattered all over what was once a formal dining room. There were two exits... one doorway leading to the living room, and a hallway with no easily discernable destination. Joel's sensors picked up movement from both exits.

Joel didn't even have time to shout a warning before they were under attack. Two men.. one armed with a rifle, the other with a shotgun... began firing from the living room. They leaned out into the open, fired a few rounds, then leapt back behind the separating the rooms.

They were very poor shots... and they were obviously under the mistaken impression that the wall would protect them.

Lieutenant Michaels emptied a magazine into the wall. Plaster, sheet-rock, and bits of wood flew everywhere. Frantic screaming erupted from the living room as one of the man tried to run for more adequate cover. A burst from Dillon's rifle turned the fleeing civilian's back into something resembling a sponge soaked in green paint.

The civilian kept running...

...right into the wall.

WHHUMP!

He left a green smear as he bounced off the wall and fell. He tried to get up, but Dillon finished him off with another few rounds to the upper chest. Sinclair immediately set the still-twitching corpse on fire with a blast from his flamethrower.

"Sinclair, with me," said Michaels. "Norris, Joel, and Dillon... clear this room and take that hallway."

"Yes SIR!"

Norris was still burning the corpses when three men ran into the room from the hallway. All had large-calibre handguns... They were screaming and firing wildly as they ran.

FWOOOM!!!

A long, thin finger of flame leapt from the tip of Norris' flamethrower like a bolt of divine wrath. In the blink of an eye, one of the men was covered in fire. Screaming for mercy, he streaked across the room, flailing his arms and throwing droplets of flaming fuel onto the walls and floor. The other two civilians quickly backed out of the room.

"DAMMIT NORRIS!" Norris shouted. "Don't torch 'em until AFTER their down! DILLON!"

"ON IT!"

Dillon peppered the inhuman torch with bullets until it finally dropped. Joel emptied his magazine into the hallway. Someone screamed. A second later, shots burst from the hallway. Lots of shots.

"DOWN!"

Joel and Dillon dropped to a crouching position behind the dining room table while Norris pressed himself against the wall out of the line of fire.

"We got more than one or two people down there!" said Dillon.

"Not for long!"

Joel lobbed a grenade over the table and into the hallway.

The explosion seemed to shake the entire house. The dust hadn't even begun to clear when Norris and Dillon both jumped to their feet and fired into the cloud of smoke and debris. IR, UV, and motion sensors picked up the civilians stumbling around in the dark. The soldiers dropped them one at a time, concentrating their fire on the individual targets as they came into view.

Joel kept a mental count so that he would know how many seeds needed to be retrieved at clean-up. The count was up to five when:

"YAAAAAAAHHHH!!"

A crazed civilian wielding a baseball bat charged out of the living room. Dillon and Joel both fired at once. Their explosive crossfire sliced the man in half. Norris threw flame across the room, and the civilian's torso was already on fire by the time it hit the floor.

The severed upper body started pulling itself across the carpet, leaving a trail of fire behind it as it tried to crawl back the way it had come.

"HA! I LOVE it when they do that!" Norris laughed.

Joel immediately turned back to the hallway-

"DILLON!!"

The civilians had taken advantage of the brief distraction. Four of them had regrouped and were retreating toward a door at the end of the hall. Two more were covering their escape... they stood halfway down the hall, with pistols aimed at the closest, most visible target: Dillon.

They fired at the same time as Joel... the bullets zoomed past each other in the air as they streaked toward their targets.

"ARRRRGH!" Dillon went down, clutching his chest. He was wearing Kevlar, but the bullets still hurt like hell when they hit. Joel knew that from experience.

Joel sprayed the hallway with gunfire. Both civilians went down, but only one stayed there.

The other was on his knees when Joel fired his last shot.

"NORRIS!"

Norris doused both civilians with a brief blast of fire while Joel reloaded. Joel checked the markings on the magazine as he slapped it into the rifle. He'd used his last explosive rounds... he was down to regular hollowpoints now.

This was about to get interesting.

"Dillon-"

"I'm up!"

Dillon wasn't up. He was bleeding. One of the rounds had caught him in the shoulder... just below the neck and above the Kevlar padding of his jacket.

"This room is our escape route," said Joel. "Keep it clear!"

"I got it," Dillon coughed.

"Norris, follow me!"

Joel jogged down the hallway, stopping to kick in each bedroom door as he came to it-

WHAM!

Empty.

WHAM!

Empty

WHAM!

"GET HIMM!" Two male civilians fired from the closet while a female tried to hide under the bed. Joel jerked back into the hallway and tossed his last grenade into the room...

BOOOOM!!!

The grenade blew a hole through the wall... turning whatever was in the closet into chunky green sludge. Part of the roof collapsed on top of the bed, pinning the woman underneath it.

"LEAVE US ALONE!" She cried. "WE'RE AMERICAN CITIZENS! WE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING TO Y-"

Hollowpoint rounds obliterated the young woman's face before she could finish, but Joel couldn't get a good torso-shot. The woman continued to flail and convulse under the broken bed. Major catastrophic tissue damage was the only way to shut them down, and erasing their craniums with hollowpoints apparently didn't qualify as 'major.'

"Torch her," said Joel.

"Consider her TOASTED!"

Norris crouched down and aimed the nozzle of his flamethrower under the bed. He squeeze the trigger.

The woman probably would have screamed if she'd still had a mouth.

The brief blast of fire ignited the bed and the floor, and the fire was beginning to grow. They couldn't let it spread... if the house burnt, then the chemists would never be able to retrieve all the seeds.

"TAKE CARE OF THAT!"

Norris moved in to extinguish the blaze... and Joel heard weapon-fire from the dining room.

"Dillon!"

"GO!" said Norris. "I got this!"

Joel went back to the living room, where Dillon was under attack. One civilian was in pieces on the floor, but when Dillon stopped to reload, two more sprang from the living room and descended on him. One had a .357 revolver and was pumping rounds into Dillon's Kevlar vest. The other had a axe... he was just waiting for his turn.

Joel sprayed the room, catching both men with a few rounds each. That got their attention. Then he concentrated fire on the gunman. Hollowpoints ripped deadly furrows into the man's flesh... he jerked and danced as the multiple impacts forced him away from Dillon.

Dillon had reloaded and was rapidly emptying his magazine into the axe-wielder... who refused to go down.

"ALL I GOT IS HOLLOWPOINTS!" Dillon coughed into his helmut-mic.

"ME TOO!"

Both rifles emptied at the same time.

The gunman dropped to his knees... mumbled something about 'freedom or death'... then collapsed. The civilian with the axe still had enough juice in him for one last charge. Dillon had just re-loaded his weapon when the axe came down-

"DILLON!!"

KA-CHUNK!

Kevlar was an effective armor against small-arms fire... but it didn't do squat for axes.

KA-CHUNKT!

He managed a second swing before Joel re-loaded and put half of the new magazine into the civilian's chest. The man folded and dropped, landing in a pool of his own green sap.

How could these things even THINK they were still human!?!

Dillon was gone. The axe was buried deep in the center of his chest... his ribs and one lung were visible through the gushing blood.

THAT was human.

"NORRIS! DILLON'S DOWN!"

"WE GOT SOMETHING GOING ON BACK HERE!" Norris responded.

Joel returned to the hallway, where Norris was about to bash down the door that the four civilians had fled through earlier.

"NORRIS, DON'T-"

WHAM!

Norris threw himself against the door. His momentum snapped the lock and sent him stumbling into the garage. Gunfire erupted immediately.

"WHOA! DAMN!" Norris sprang back into the hallway before a random bullet could catch his fuel-tank. "WE NEED A GRENADE!"

"I'm all out! Go get Dillon's!"

Joel fired a few shots into the garage, but that was just to keep the civilians busy. Even if he managed to HIT anything, without explosive-tipped rounds me may as well be throwing popcorn at them. It'd take a magazine and a half to take any of them down. That... or a grenade.

"GOTCHA!"

Norris tossed Dillon's weapons-belt to Joel. Joel grabbed a grenade, pulled the pin and tossed the deadly egg through the doorway. He heard the grenade hit the concrete floor-

Concrete?

A garage... A GARAGE!

"RUNNN!!" Joel ordered. He and Norris sprinted back toward the dining room. The grenade went off behind them... igniting the gas cans and propane tanks that the civilians had foolishly taken refuge among.

The explosion blew the roof and one of the walls completely off the garage. A ball of flame chased Joel down the hall and threw him across the room. Norris turned the corner just in time to avoid the fire... but he caught a huge chunk of the wall when it fell on him.

"NORRIS!" Joel shouted.

"I'm good!" Norris was frantically trying to dig himself out and check his equipment for damage at the same time. Joel's uniform was singed... blackened in places... but he was mostly unharmed.

But there was a raging inferno where the garage used to be.

"I don't think this thing is up to that," said Norris, holding up his nearly-empty fire extinguisher.

"CHURCHILL, WE GOT A BLAZE IN HERE! WE NEED CHEMICAL EXTINGUISHERS RIGHT NOW! WE CAN'T LET THIS HOUSE GO UP UNTIL ITS CLEAN!"

"Already on the way," Churchill replied calmly. "I got flaming bits of civilians rolling around on the lawn out here... should I take care of them first?"

"NEGATIVE! GET YOUR BUTT IN HERE AND TAKE CARE OF THIS FIRE!"

"Yeah, yeah..."

Joel couldn't see Churchill or the other chemists, but he could tell when they went to work. A thick white fog... concentrated extinguishing agent... drifted in from several directions. When the fog and the fire encountered each other, the fire died.

"We'll never know how many people were in that garage," said Joel.

"Four-"

"We SAW four... there could've been more. And those seeds could've been thrown halfway to the STREET by that blast!"

"We'll get 'em all, Sanders."

"Just ONE! All it takes is ONE! DAMMIT!!"

"SANDERS! DILLON! NORRIS!" The C.O.'s voice screamed through their earpieces. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!"

"We had an uncontrolled blast in the garage, sir," Joel replied. "Fire's contained now."

"Did we get a count?"

"Negative, sir. Four for sure... but there may have been more."

"Who set that damned blast!"

Norris grabbed Joel's arm and gestured emphatically toward Dillon.... who was still quite dead. Dead men couldn't deny culpability or reject blame... even if they'd done nothing wrong. They made excellent scapegoats.

Joel shook his head.

"It was me, sir."

The C.O.'s angry silence came through the earpiece loud and clear.

"I'm sorry, sir," Joel added.

"You damn sure are," said Michaels. "The house is secure. If you're finished blowing things up, please meet us in the kitchen."

"Yes, sir."

Joel limped into the kitchen, where Michaels and Sinclair were waiting... along with Delta-4 squad. Delta-3 was still upstairs doing room-to-room searches.

"We got anything to eat in here?" said Norris.

"Lots of shredded cabbage," said one of the Delta-4 soldiers. "Shredded, toasted... however you want 'em."

Everyone laughed, except for Joel.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said to Michaels. "They were in the garage. I tossed in a grenade without thinking. It must have ignited some gas tanks or something-"

"I'm not interested in your story, soldier. I'm only interested in being absolutely sure we got every last one of those salad-heads. Only now, because of YOUR screw-up, we'll never be absolutely sure."

"No sir, we won't."

"Consider yourself demoted. And you don't so much as TOUCH another grenade until you've been re-educated on their proper deployment. Is that clear.... Private?"

"Yes, sir."

"Clean-up crews are moving in," said Patrick... the C.O. of Delta-4. "They need your counts."

"I killed four in a bedroom," one soldier announced.

"Three in the front hallway," said another. "Two in the hall closet."

"Two in the pantry, one in the storage closet."

"Ten in the living room," said Joel. "Seven in the hall. Three in a rear bedroom. Four confirmed in the garage, but there may have been more."

Joel noticed that everyone was staring at him.

"He sure likes to kill cucumbers, don't he," Patrick said with a smile.

"Yeah, maybe a little TOO much," Michaels added. Everyone else gave their counts... none of which even came close to Joel's... and then Patrick relayed the information to the chemists so they'd know how many seeds needed to be destroyed.

"What now?" said Norris.

"Now we re-search the house," said Michaels. "Everybody take a different area than the one you cleared. Search everything. Twice. Then assist the chemists."

"Awww, maaan...." Norris groaned.

"What was that, soldier!"

"Yes, sir!"

"How many kids?" Joel asked.

"Eh?"

"How many children were there? I didn't see any."

Joel glanced at his fellow soldiers and saw universal expressions of denial and apathy.

"Wait a minute..." said Michaels. "There were supposed to be ten families in here... and none of you saw so much as a SINGLE child?"

"No, sir."

"If this count is halfway right," said Patrick, "Then we took care of all the motion signatures that we picked up from outside. Plus a few more."

"IF the count is right," said Michaels, glaring at Joel. "IF."

"Sensors can only scan through one wall," said Joel. "If they were in an interior room, we wouldn't have gotten anything on them at all."

"Maybe they got out."

"Delta-6 would've picked 'em off in the yard if they'd made a run for it."

"Maybe they were upstairs," said Norris. He leaned against the refrigerator and yawned.

The refrigerator slid away from him, nearly dumping Norris onto the floor.

"HEY!"

Suddenly, the sounds of rifles being loaded and cocked echoed around the large kitchen.

"Huh?"

Joel pointed to the wall where the refrigerator had been. The appliance had only slid a foot or two, but it was enough to reveal the door hidden behind it.

"...or maybe they're in the bomb shelter?" said Norris.

Michaels and Sinclair finished moving the refrigerator out of the way, then two of Patrick's men took position on either side of the door. One man reached for the latch while everyone else stood with weapons ready.

"What're the chances that this thing is booby-trapped?" said Joel.

Everyone took two large steps back.

"Joel, open the door," said Michaels.

"What-"

"Open the door."

"But-"

"Open the door."

Joel crept forward, grabbed the latch... waited....

...then thrust the door open and leapt out of the way-

BOOOOM!!

The explosion wasn't a trap... it was the roar of a double-barrel shotgun. Beyond the door was a set of simple wooden steps leading down into a dark room. Standing at the top of the steps were two women... one holding a hunting rifle and another with a shotgun.

They weren't standing their for very long.

Combined firepower from two squads erased the women from the stairs and sent their shredded bodies oozing back down into the darkness. Screams of terrified women and children erupted from the basement... along with the sound of someone running up the stairs.

"YOU LEAVE US BE!" the woman screamed. "GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM AND LEAVE US ALONE!!!" She was pregnant... or at least SHE thought so. Eight or nine months from the look of her. She was also carrying a pistol, which she immediately began firing into the crowd of soldiers.

She never knew if she hit anything or not. The hail of bullets completely shredded her head, neck, and upper torso. She fell with a wet flapping sound, landing halfway into the kitchen. Joel grabbed her and pocketed her weapon, then dragged the body into the room. He rolled her over onto her back.

She was still alive... trying to speak with no lungs, lips, throat, or tongue remaining. She wasn't having much success, but her eyes told more than enough. It was a look that Joel had seen too many times: shock... terror... and bewilderment at how she could still be alive. She knew she should be dead... but she wasn't. And perhaps... just maybe... the reason was beginning to dawn on her.

Up until that point, she thought she was just a normal human being. She was wrong.

The look on her non-face was almost funny... and it remained so until Joel emptied his rifle into her swollen abdomen. The protruding gut split and opened up like a giant green flower, revealing the cluster of seeds growing from the walls of her over-sized uterus. The seedknots were almost mature... almost ready to blossom and grow into something that would THINK it was human. Fortunately, their outer shells hadn't hardened yet.

"Torch 'em," said Joel as he stepped away. Norris and Sinclair pumped fire into the woman's exposed womb while Joel loaded the final magazine into his weapon. He and the others descended into the basement.

There was no more hostile fire... no more resistance... just a room full of frightened children crowded behind one frail old woman. She was obviously someone's grandmother... or at least, she THOUGHT she was someone's grandmother.

"God help us!" the old lady shouted over the screams of the children. It wasn't an exclamation of fear... it was an actual prayer. She was on her knees, praying vehemently for deliverance. Behind her were ten children ranging from 2 to 12 years old. They were too frightened to pray, so she was praying for them.

"Our Father, who art in heaven...."

"Should we let them finish?" said one of the soldiers.

"Hell no."

Joel was the first to fire. And when his weapon was empty, he just backed away and let the other soldiers finish up. Soon, the basement wall had a fresh coating of thick green paint, from which chunks of pulp and 'flesh' dripped and oozed toward the floor. The larger children tried to protect the smaller ones, but with assault rifles it really didn't matter who was standing in front of whom. One bullet would go through three of them and still bury itself into the wall behind them. Joel just watched them as they dropped into convulsing heaps on the slime-soaked floor.

Then Norris and Sinclair came down and burnt the still-twitching bodies to a thick, coarse ash, from which the seeds could easily be sifted.

"'Nother job done," said Norris as they headed up the stairs. The chemists were already in the kitchen, waiting for them to clear out. "What's next on the agenda?"

"What's this?" Joel knelt down and picked something up off the floor. It was a phone.

"The pregnant one had it in her pocket. Slipped out when you rolled her over. Souvenir?"

Joel shrugged and, on a whim, hit the power button. The phone came on.

"Hey..." he said. "She's got signal!"

"Can't be-"

"Look!" Joel held up the phone so Norris could see the display.

"Uh-oh..."

"The Beta-team must have missed some of the cell-towers," said Michaels as he walked past. "Seems like Joel isn't the only one screwing up. Doesn't make any difference to us, though. The town is ours."

"I guess you're right," said Joel. He turned the phone off and was about to toss it when he spotted something on the wall.

"What's the date?" he asked.

"Why?"

Joel pointed to the calendar. It was flipped to the current month, and one check of Joel's watch confirmed the date.

"Damn... I can't believe I almost missed it. She must be pissed by now..."

"Who?"

"Look at the date, idiot..."

Joel dialed a number on the phone and put it to his ear. The phone rang twice, then it picked up.

"Hello?" said an elderly woman's voice.

"Mom?"

"Joel! Ohhh, its so good to hear your voice!"

"Happy Mothers Day, mom."

"Oh, THANK you!"

"I'm sorry I couldn't send you anything. But things have been... well... strange."

"Just hearing my son's voice is the best gift I could ask for! I almost thought you'd FORGOTTEN about your poor old mother! Do you know what TIME it is!?"

"I know. I'm sorry. So, uhhh... how's things in Texas?"

"Hot. Just like it always is. When are you going to come and visit me?"

"Ummm... well... that... uhhhh... might be a while, mom."

"Joel... you sound like something's wrong."

"No, mom... everything's fine."

"You can't fool your mother, son. What's wrong?"

"Well, I guess its just been a really long day. We got a real early start this morning. And then I... I messed up something important. Something really important."

"Oh, no!"

"Yeah. I can't really get into it on the phone, though. I just... well..."

"You're only human, son. We're all only human, and humans make mistakes. As long as you own up to 'em and don't go around covering 'em up.... you can't LEARN from a mistake if you hide from it-"

"I know. I didn't."

"Then I don't care what you did... I'm still proud of you. I'll always be proud of my son."

"Thank you, mom. I... I'd better go."

"Okay, Joel... you call your mother more often, ya hear!"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you come and visit me!"

"I... don't think that's a really good idea."

"Why not!?"

"Its... complicated."

"Well THINK about me, at least."

"All the time, mom. All the time. Good-bye, mom."

"Bye son. I love you."

"Love you, too."

Joel hung up.

"Joel?" said Norris.

"What?"

"What the HELL was that!?"

"What do you mean... it's mother's day and I was calling my mom."

"You can't be for real," said Norris. "That's not your mom... that's just some CABBAGE that thinks its your mom!"

"Yeah," Joel replied. "But SHE doesn't know that. She thinks she's real."

"They ALL think they're real!"

"But they don't all think they're my mother. Even in this screwed-up invasion... I've only got one mom."

Norris just stared at Joel... then he glanced at the calendar... then he sighed and looked around to make sure no one was watching.

"Gimme the phone," he said. "I gotta make a call..."

[END]