Run!
By J.J. Smiley
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About this ebook
A provocative and entertaining collection of short stories from a time and place only you can decide. Two brothers fight it out with un-natural intelligent hordes. Three aliens try for first contact. A signal from space leaves us curious. A ho-hum invention unwittingly crosses the line, and an air traveler tastes death. Can you imagine being eaten by an alien.
I hope that these short stories will cause you to reassess our place in space and time.
J.J. Smiley
Disappointed with titles that I read or watched in the theatre, it was time to write my own adventures. Just writing for personal pleasure at first and then publishing, has now become a joyful pastime. My wife who is always watching my back convinced me to go to press.
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Run! - J.J. Smiley
Escape
AFTER CONCEALING THE nuclear weapon under some rocks, Rob pulled the pins from the plasma grenades and tossed them back over his head. Forty feet away, the formidable multi-sectional soldier bugs that had crawled into the next blast hole blew into a thousand little pieces. With a short reprieve, he and Matt jumped down into the ravine, hoping to put a little distance between them and their pursuers. We need to get as far away as possible; this nuke should take this whole mountaintop off the map.
Fat chance! Running down the ravine, he could see three more bugs taking cover. Their antennae were sticking slightly above the pile of boulders. These bugs must have spotted them after the grenades blew. They both dove behind the rocks on either side of the ravine trail. Matt had one rifle mortar left. He loaded it on the end of his rifle. Rob pulled the coordinates from his nocks and shouted them to Matt. Matt clicked on the setting. If this didn’t work, they would be bottled, and the ravine's sides would be too steep to climb. Matt put the rifle butt on the ground and angled the barrel to the proper setting. He looked at the readout one last time. He said a little prayer as he pulled the trigger.
Kawoosh went the mortar. The explosive shell arched out of the ravine. Three long seconds later, it came down, and violent was an understatement for the explosion's sound. The three bug bodies, or at least many of their body parts, went flying. However, the explosion was much bigger than it should have been. When they reached the smoldering hole where the mortar had landed, they could see more body parts than could be explained by just three bugs. Gray metal pieces and the sickening smell of the bugs and explosives filled the air, and evidence of an ammo cache was strewn about, their luck was holding, and they quickly returned to running.
It would be three more miles to the extraction point, and they were still being pursued. They turned up the valves on their oxygen supplement bottles to compensate for the low oxygen content of the atmosphere. About halfway, Matt stopped long enough to set a grenade-sized mini-nuke charge and trip wires along the path. They had run another mile when the blast went off, but the wave of light had washed over them before they heard the nuke explode. Their suits, which were already protecting them from the background radiation, would protect them further from the mini-nuke, at least long enough to get off the planet. They could only hope that the blast took out the rest of their pursuers. They continued to run full tilt just the same.
Rob hollered that it couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards until the surface opened into a small canyon. The dropship should be waiting. He’d call for them, but the bugs were superb at targeting radio transmissions. This whole affair had to stay radio silent. They came out of the ravine and into the canyon.
Matt did not see the dropship and went straight for cover, signaling Rob to do the same. Crouched behind more rocks, he scanned the gray-green sky. Looking back down, he saw a small red light blinking about a hundred yards