"100,000 feet," Chub says.

Duggers flips you a holovid of his scary, trash girlfriend. "Touch the
green button," he says. 

There is a shudder in the cabin, and warning lights flare greasy-green in your
night vision goggles. "Hang on, campers," yells Chub. "Descent jets one and 
two just jammed up. We're in for a bumpy landing."

You swing yourself from the hatchway up into your emergency station. You're
already starting to sweat inside your suit, but there probably isn't time to
adjust the coolant controls.

Duggers grunts. "So much for surprise. They live in the ground. Every 
stinking bug in the sector's gonna feel the vibrations."

"Thanks for the update, Mr. Obvious," Chub says, his elbows swinging out at
awkward angles, flapping like stunted chicken wings, as he fights the two
joysticks, trying to keep this iron turd level as it streaks through the
sky. "On my mark, Mitchum," he says.

CENTIPEDE
A short story of senseless violence
by J. Robinson Wheeler

Buzz-Busta AVLC-905 Cabin, emergency station
There's dick-all to see here, even with the goggles on. Armory cabinets,
supply shelves, two brushed-steel benches, safety straps. The emergency 
station is a swivel chair three steps up a ladder, facing a panel with
rugged switches and levers.

Duggers is below, one boot up on the bench, holding a safety strap with
one hand. Thinks he's on the damn bullet train. He's survived forty 
missions, thinks he's invulnerable now.

Chub is tucked around the corner at the helm. You can't see him, but you
can hear his voice in your helmet. "On my mark. On my mark..."

Your forehead just started to itch.

>

Chub's voice starts counting down. You can hear the strain in his voice,
pitch rising and falling in synchronization with the cabin's spastic
lurching and yawing.

>

Chub says, "Four... three... Shit...! Shit! Mark!"

>

Chub screams, "What are you waiting for? Mitchum!"

>

Chub says, "Duggers!"

Duggers is already up the ladder and grabbing for the parachute release
levers. He yanks them hard, there is a noise like a screech owl colliding
with a sheet of inch-thick plexiglass, and then the cabin seems to stop
in midair, jolting everything that's not nailed down, which includes you
and Duggers. The two of you smash to the cabin floor. You land on your
side, the hard ammo clips strapped to your side bruising your ribs, damn 
near cutting through your suit.

Just as you start to sit up, Duggers attacks your throat with his elbow,
crushing your windpipe. You flop backwards like an upended beetle, choking
and gagging, pain throbbing outward from your neck, your lungs burning.

The fall seems to have damaged your helmet, because you can't hear 
Duggers' voice any more. He's holding you by your gear straps, his 
faceplate right in front of yours, screaming obscenities. Probably
just as well that you can't hear it.

>

Chub comes racing into view. You watch, hearing only your own staggered
breaths as your windpipe relaxes, as an argument ensues. Hands haul you
to your feet near the hatch. Chub blows it open. Waited too long to 
release the craft's parachutes, going to have to jump for it. Probably
cost us the mission and our lives, you reflect.

Duggers leaps out of the hatch. Chub shoves at you from behind. You 
still can't hear any voices.

>

You're in mid-air, falling fast. You can't see the ground, and there's
nothing to see in the sky.

>

You pull the rip-cord, and your chute opens. Your neck snaps forward,
your throat closes hard and painfully. As you raise your head, your 
throat doesn't open again. It feels swollen shut, and you can't 
breathe.

Far below, there's a round, white-green flare -- the landing craft, 
crashing down.

>

You see a cloud-layer below. Maybe it's mist on the ground? You brace
for impact.

>

You fall through the clouds. Not the ground, not yet. You take a small
breath, and another. You spot Duggers' chute below you, slipping sideways,
furling and raveling, sinking into wet blackness. That's the ground, the
marsh right below you.

>

Your boots hit a layer of wet slime, and you sink into it up to your
buckling knees. You lose your balance, but can't move your feet to 
stabilize yourself. Slime splashes up into your faceplate. Your hands
sink into something gelatinous. Everything is cold. You must be 
underwater.

>

You put your hands down, hoping to raise your weight, but there's 
no support. Your arms sink like toothpicks into a sponge cake.

>

You curl your legs up under your chest, slowly drawing them out of
the muck, and you replant them in fresh muck. Gradually you wobble
yourself into an upright fetal position and try to stand. You must
weigh 350 pounds with all of your gear. Carefully, slowly, you stand.
You get a little help from your chute, yanked by a sudden wind. For
a moment you're not sure whether you're actually standing or not,
and you realize it's because your faceplate is covered with marsh
slime.

>

Your chute, still caught by the wind, starts to pull you over
backwards. You're going to fall into the marsh again if you 
don't release it.

>

You lift your arm to wipe off your faceplate, and a screaming pain
shoots from your shoulder down to the end of your pinky. You grit
your teeth and ignore it. You figure you can probably still hold
and fire your weapon, so there's no use crying about it. You smear
the slime away with your other hand, and see the marshland.

Duggers and Chub are standing in front of you, pointing and 
screaming at you, wondering why you don't answer them. 

>

You point at the comm antenna on your helmet and tap your finger
to it. You shake your head.

Duggers flings his arms wide and throws his head back, the 
universal pantomime for, "Well, that's just fucking GREAT."
Chub approaches you, removing his thick gloves, reaching for
his toolbelt. You hear his hands bumping against your helmet.

>

There is a burst of deafening static in your helmet. You flinch
and turn to face Chub, who glowers at you and shoves your head
away so he can keep working. You feel the bones in your neck
grind together, a pain so bad you want to black out. Your 
training asserts itself. You clench your fists, bite your 
tongue, and hang onto consciousness.

There's another burst of static, and Chub's voice poking through
it.

"...hear that? ... if you ... --kay? ...Mitchum!"

>

You hear Chub say, "How about that?"

"Got it," you say.

A vibration ripples the water. Duggers's voice: "Heads up! Heads up!
Can he hear through that goddamn thing yet? Come on!"

Chub whips out his pulse rifle. You whip out yours, ignoring the
spasms in your bad arm. 

Just... hold it ... steady.

>

Marshlands
The landscape is pitch black, even in your goggles. No heat from the
freezing swampwater. Out of the blackness, looming shapes in obscene
colors. You aren't supposed to see colors through these goggles, and
you wonder if you're doing worse than you thought.

The shapes are mushrooms, hundreds of them, rising on their moist
stalks, ballooning heads eighteen feet around, eight feet high. You
can't get much of a sight beyond them. There's too many mushrooms.
Maybe you should waste some ammo clearing a sightline. Then again,
maybe you don't have any ammo to waste, now.

The vibration comes again. Somewhere, far ahead, twisting its way
closer, the bug is coming.

>

Chub says, "I've called for reinforcements, but they won't come in 
until we hold this position for a while. No use aiding a lost cause."

You say, "It is a lost cause, isn't it? The bugs are just going to
keep coming."

You hear the roar of many feet, so many feet it makes your stomach
turn. Up ahead, through that maze of mushrooms, you see a slickened
shape pass by, west to east.

>

Duggers fires. Chub fires. Mushrooms explode into spores. Fast-growing
spores, you remember. In ten minutes, there will be more of them, full-sized.
How are you supposed to win a war like this?

>

Up ahead, the behemoth twists like a snake, heading west, then east, 
then directly at you. Duggers fires at the head of it, and the head
explodes, but the beast keeps coming. It turns east again.

>

You fire, and the bug is cut in two. The damn segments don't stop 
moving, though. Now there's two bugs, each twisting this way and that.
One segment reaches a small tunnel, formed by columns of mushrooms
to each side, and it twists between them, heading straight for you.

"Fire! Fire!" Chub screams.

>

Your rifles flare in the damp night, shooting plasma pulses a million 
degrees hot and moving at 400 miles an hour. The charging beast loses
its head, and then another head, and then another head, and then another.
Suddenly, there are no more heads, it is gone.

The second segment twists into view, just beyond the closest range of
mushrooms, about to invade your empty black marshland base.

Another noise, unlike the steady thrum of these insect feet, begins
to grow, with a doppler effect, from dead ahead.

>

It's a tick, two tons of chitinous carapace, bristly fangs, and bug
meat, hurtling straight at you, over the tops of the mushrooms. Its 
lazy feet scrape the mushroom heads, poisoning them as it passes,
making them change to ugly colors. If another bug touches one of
those...

Duggers is right in the tick's path. He stands his ground, shouting
at the sonofabitch. Duggers fires at it, misses. Fires again, misses.
It's coming in too fast.

Chub splits the centipede again in two. They're coming at you from
both sides now.

>

The tick mows Duggers down, its sticky feet latching onto his body.
You see his face purple and blacken as he's carted away to some 
nest to be digested. There is a scream, and then silence.

Dead silence. The bugs are gone. There's two of you left, now,
and they'll come again.

>

Up ahead, you hear the thrum. Wave number two. Or is it just a 
continuation of the first wave?

You were right. More mushrooms have grown up already. It's harder
to see. Up ahead, you see the segmented beast twisting this way
and that. Up ahead, you hear another tick approaching like a 
dive bomber, coming right at you and Chub.

Up ahead, you hear something else, something new. Feet clicking,
splashing, an almost musical chirp as the legs saw back and forth.
What the hell? Some sort of cricket? No.

>

It's a scorpion, sidling sideways. Fortunately, it's not coming
at you. You take it out with one quick shot. You're getting better
at this.

You'd better get even better, fast. Here comes that tick, with its
screaming song, with its poisonous legs, turning the mushrooms
purple and blue.

Here comes the beast itself. Chub cuts it into three parts, damn
his eyes.

>

You and Chub concentrate your fire on the tick, and vaporize it
with only about twenty yards to spare, a split-second. Plasma
spray and unvaporized bug bits sizzle over you, a wet coat of
death.

And then you hear another, bearing down on you, following its 
kamikaze partner, poisoning even more mushr--

Oh no.

>

Chub takes a lucky shot and destroys the second tick before it
even gets close, but it's too late. One of the centipede segments
hit the poisoned mushrooms, the oil gets into its skin, scrambling
its stupid bug neurons. Crazed, it charges forward, straight at 
you. Another segment hits another poisoned shroom, and it, too,
charges screaming at you.

The two segments swoop down on either side of you and Chub, 
circle, and play back and forth, zigzagging. The poison's worn
off, thankfully.

>

You see more segments, arriving out of the darkness to your left
and right. Where are they coming from? Just two segments, a head
and a tail, in front and behind you, joining the dance. There's
five of these damn things now, and more every minute.

>

You shoot and shoot, vaporizing as many as you can. You start
to think you're winning, that you're going to get out of this,
when out of the corner of your eye, you see Chub backing up,
not looking where he's going.

You yell for him to move, to watch out. You're still busy 
firing as you try to move closer to him, to yank him out of
the way, to give him cover, but it's too late. A new segment
dances into the marsh, runs Chub down, stomps him into the
muck. You hear a scream in your helmet that becomes a helpless
gurgle. The beast drips acid out of its flanks, out of its
disgusting glands, and something sizzles underwater.

A final shot from your rifle sails into the gloom. Far away,
a mushroom explodes.

Again, silence. And you're the only one left.

>

You can't see for all of the mushrooms blocking your way. You can
hear movement, far ahead, but you can't see anything but the 
mushrooms. They're different colors now. Are you hallucinating?
And where's the backup Chub called for? How long are they going
to take?

You vent your frustrations on the mushrooms, shooting again and
again. They explode, releasing spores that will grow more of them
soon. You don't care. You need the space to move if you're going
to win this battle, if you're going to survive.

You know, though, that it's just a matter of time. You wonder
what the point of this is, and you laugh. It's a sick joke to 
someone up there in HQ. It's just some stupid game.

>

You hear the thunder, the singsong chirping, the freight train
whistle doing its doppler effect, doubled, tripled. All the bugs
are back. More than ever.

A tick whizzes by you to your left, just missing you. You hear
it hiss its hatred.

Another flies by to the right, dripping poison. The mushroom
right in front of you warps, rots, seems to right itself. You 
destroy it. There's another deadly one behind it. You shoot
that one, too, and another.

A lucky shot obliterates a scorpion, but another tick comes, 
and the beast is moving fast. Two beasts.

>

The poison has done its work, and once again you are surrounded.
Once again, new segments arrive from nowhere, spinning in circles
around you.

And still one last tick comes, and this one has your name on it.

>

You fire at the tick, and miss.

>

You fire at the tick, and miss. It's going to get you.

>

You brace yourself for your last stand. You take aim at that tick,
right in its glassy, metallic blue-green eyes. You fire, and miss.
One last chance, it's almost here.

>

You get it from behind. Oh, shit, you think. The fucking irony.
The tick sails past, unharmed, as one of the segments of the 
beast crushes you, biting off your legs.

There's no time to feel pain, or maybe there isn't any pain.
Some sort of anesthetic in the saliva, you remember. You scream
anyway, just like Chub. You're not going down quietly. You try
to turn your rifle around, fire at the damn thing point-blank,
but suddenly your arms don't work.

You're flipped over on your back, and something viscous and
yellow oozes onto your faceplate, dissolving it. Suddenly your
eyes don't work, and you can't scream. You see a dull red that
turns brown and black in splotches, like the way the colors on
a bubble turn before the bubble pops, and it's dead.

"Game over, man," you think. "Game over."

>

The last thought that comes to you makes you laugh. It's
that old joke. "What's the last thing to go through a bug's
mind as it hits your windshield? Its a--"

*** YOU HAVE DIED ***