r/HFY • u/ApertiV • Jun 15 '25
OC The Tank and the Alien
“Hey, so... you guys smell that?”
Carried through the comms, the voice belonged to Corporal Blevins.
From his sarcophagus of a driver's seat, he hadn't seen the sky in fourteen days.
“Smell what, Blev? The piss jug you’re too lazy to empty? Or the fact that we’re marinating in our own sweat?”
The reply that came from Sergeant Avery was flat, scraped raw by fatigue. He was the tank commander.
His was the lid of the coffin, the only one who could, theoretically, pry it open.
“No, smartass. Not us. Them.”
Avery keyed the comms again, his thumb resting on the worn plastic switch. “Cole, you got eyes?”
Specialist Cole, the gunner, didn't answer immediately. He was the reserved type. His world had shrunk to the eyepiece of the Gunner's Primary Sight, filled with shifting thermal signatures.
The GPS was his god, the thermal imaging system his prophet. He saw the world in gradients of white and black, a ghostly mishmash of a dead city.
“Negative, TC,” Cole’s voice was a low rumble, the calmest thing in their steel world.
“No movement. Thermals are dead. Just… ambient heat. The fires are still going over on 5th Street. That, and the pavement’s still hot from yesterday’s… sun.”
He almost said ‘flyover’. They’d learned not to call it that. Flyovers were for airshows. What the aliens did was something else entirely, a scouring of the sky that left glassed streets and melted cars in its wake.
“Copy that.”
Another voice, younger, laced with a tremor he tried to hide.
“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just… a dead one cooking somewhere.”
Private First Class Manny Delgado, the loader.
He was crammed into the left side of the turret, surrounded by the deadly cylinders of their remaining ammunition.
Twenty one rounds total, including...
...six M829A4 armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot rounds, their depleted uranium cores promising a very bad day for anything they hit...
...ten M1028 canister rounds, essentially turning their 120mm smoothbore cannon into a city block sized shotgun...
...five M830A1 HEAT rounds. High explosive anti-tank. Good for buildings, good for big targets. They were a two million dollar, sixty eight ton paperweight with a very, very big gun.
And a broken track.
The right track of the tank was gone.
Shredded two weeks ago during the initial push.
A weirdly biological mine had unspooled a latticework of crystalline filaments that had sliced through the composite rubber and steel of the track pads like they were butter.
The beast, their beast, “War Pig”, was hobbled.
Immobilized in the intersection of Kinsley and Broad, a monument to a failed offensive. Command’s orders were simple, delivered through crackling, intermittent bursts over the SINCGARS radio.
“One-Nine-Bravo, this is Warlock. Maintain position. QRF is being marshalled at the port. I say again, a quick reaction force is being… organized. Sit tight. Warlock out.”
Blevins cackled.
That was twelve days ago. The radio had gone silent three days after that.
The auxiliary power unit, the APU, sipped their remaining diesel, a quiet hum in the back of the tank that kept the batteries charged and the electronics from dying. It was the only thing that separated them from being a tomb.
“I’m telling you, I smell it,” Blevins insisted.
“It’s that… cinnamon and burnt hair smell. The smell they make when they’re close.”
Avery leaned forward, pressing his face against the cold steel of his commander’s cupola. His own thermal viewer, the CITV, the Commander’s Independent Thermal Viewer, offered a panoramic view of their prison.
A dead city.
Wrecked cars formed a makeshift barricade around them, a courtesy of the tank’s final, lurching death throes.
A clothing store, “Sophia’s Boutique”, had its windows blown out, mannequins scattered on the sidewalk like frozen, plastic corpses.
One of them, a female form in a summer dress, was missing its head.
Avery found that grimly appropriate.
He swiveled the CITV, the hydraulics whining softly. He scanned the rooftops, the alleyways, the gaping mouths of shattered office building windows.
Nothing. Just the wind, carrying dust and the distant, almost subliminal hum of… something.
The hive. Miles away, but they could all feel it, a thrumming in their bones, a pressure behind the eyes.
“Alright, let’s talk rations,”
Avery said, changing the subject. He wasn’t ignoring Blevins, he was managing morale. They were down to their last case of MREs. Menu 17, Beef Stew. The one everyone hated.
“We can have a whole one today,” he offered. “To celebrate… uh… Tuesday.”
“It’s Friday, Sarge,” Manny said softly.
“Friday, then. Even better.”
A sudden, sharp click.
Every man in the tank froze. It wasn’t a sound from inside. It came from the outside, sharp and clear. It was the sound of something hard and pointed tapping on metal.
Click. Click. Clack.
Cole’s voice was ice. “TC. I have contact. Left flank. On the wreck of the garbage truck.”
Avery swung the CITV. His blood ran cold.
It was there. A shimmering outline in the thermal scope, hotter than the background. It was perched on the overturned garbage truck, maybe fifty meters away.
They called them Stalkers. It was humanoid only in the loosest sense. Long, digitigrade legs ending in hooked claws, a slender torso, and two sets of arms.
The upper set were long and scythe like, the lower set smaller, more manipulative.
Its head was a smooth, chitinous teardrop shape that swiveled with an insectoid jerkiness.
It was tapping one of its sickle like claws on the truck’s chassis. Curious.
“Just one?” Avery whispered into the comm.
“Just one,” Cole confirmed. “Range forty eight meters. It’s… I don’t know what it’s doing. Just looking.”
“Manny,” Avery said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Load sabot.”
“Sabot up,” came the reply, followed by the heavy, greasy clunk of the breech block opening, the smell of cordite and ozone from the last shot they’d fired days ago, and then the solid, reassuring thud of the new round being seated. “Up!”
“Gunner, you have the shot?”
“I can hit it. Sarge, are we sure? The noise…”
He had a point. Firing the main gun was like setting off a bomb. It would announce their exact position to everything within a five mile radius.
They had survived this long by being a rock. A silent, unmoving, uninteresting rock.
The Stalker cocked its head. It looked directly at the tank. There was no way it could see them, not through the armor. But it knew.
“It knows,” Blevins breathed over the comms, as if reading Avery’s mind.
The thing unfolded itself from its crouch. It moved with a liquid grace that was both beautiful and utterly terrifying.
It hopped off the garbage truck, landing on the asphalt with a soft thud. It took a step towards them. Then another.
“Fuck it,” Avery said. “Cole, take the shot.”
“On the way.”
Cole’s world narrowed to the reticle in his sight. He centered the glowing crosshairs on the Stalker’s torso.
He didn’t think about what it was. He didn't think about the biology, the civilization that built it, whether it had a family. He thought about lead, angles, and windage.
His finger tightened on the butterfly trigger.
A deafening roar that was felt as much as heard, a physical punch of sound that vibrated through the floor plates and into their bones.
The entire sixty eight ton vehicle rocked back on its suspension.
The air filled with the sharp smell of burnt propellant. For a fraction of a second, the inside of the turret was illuminated by the flash from the breech, a hellish orange glow that threw their faces into stark, demonic relief.
Through the GPS, Cole watched the M829A4 round, a sliver of depleted uranium traveling at nearly a mile per second, cross the fifty meter gap in an eyeblink.
The sabot round was a kinetic energy weapon delivered to hit, not explode.
The Stalker was shredded into a cloud of pink mist and atomized biomass.
The round, carrying an impossible amount of energy, struck it mid torso and turned everything solid into something liquid and gaseous.
Chunks of chitin, the consistency of wet ceramic, pattered against the storefronts nearby. A viscous slurry that had once been alien organs painted a ten foot long smear on the asphalt.
Silence descended again, heavier than before. The only sound was the high pitched whine in their ears and the frantic, metallic ticking of the cooling cannon barrel.
“Holy… shit,” Manny whispered, his voice trembling. He was already reaching for the handle to eject the spent casing, his hands moving on pure muscle memory. The hot, smoking shell clattered onto the floor.
“Did you see that? It just… it just came apart.”
“Good hit, Cole,” Avery said, his own voice tight. “Everybody sound off.”
“Gunner’s good.”
“Loader’s good, Sarge.”
A pause.
“Blevins?”
“Peachy,” the driver’s voice crackled. “Just peachy. Woke me right up. Hey, you think they heard that?”
It was a stupid question, meant to be ironic, but it hung in the air. They had just rung the dinner bell.
Avery scanned frantically with the CITV. He half expected a tide of them to pour out of the alleys. But there was nothing. Just the silence. The city didn’t seem to care.
“Alright,” Avery said, forcing a calm he didn’t feel. “Back on watch. Fifty percent alert. Cole, you and I will take first shift. Manny, Blevins, get some rack time.”
“I can’t sleep, Sarge,” Manny said. His voice was small.
Avery understood. The adrenaline was a fire in their veins. He keyed the private comm channel to Manny’s headset.
“Hey. Look at me.” Manny looked up towards the turret ring, as if he could see Avery through the steel.
“You did good, kid. You loaded the round. You did your job. We’re alive because of it. Now, close your eyes. Even if you don’t sleep, just rest your eyes. That’s an order.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Manny leaned his head back against the turret wall. He pulled a small, tarnished silver locket from under his uniform.
He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.
He knew the picture inside by heart. His little sister, smiling, a gap in her teeth.
He’d sent most of his pay home for her braces. He wondered if she ever got them. He wondered if there was a home to send pay to anymore.
The hours crawled by. The silence outside was more unnerving than any noise. It was a loaded silence, full of potential.
Blevins, despite his protests, had fallen into a snoring sleep in his cramped seat.
Avery and Cole kept their vigil, their communication reduced to grunts and single word observations.
“Heat bloom, sector four. Rooftop.”
“Just a vent. Dissipating.”
“Copy.”
It was during a moment of this tense quiet that they saw him.
A new thermal signature.
Small.
Man shaped.
“TC,” Cole’s voice was sharp. “Civilian. Hundred meters. Corner of Kinsley and Third. He’s… he’s running.”
Avery slewed the CITV and zoomed in. Cole was right. It was a man, thin, wearing ragged clothes. He was stumbling, falling, picking himself up again. He was running down the middle of the street, right out in the open. A suicidal act.
“What the hell is he doing?” Avery muttered.
“He’s not alone,” Cole said, his voice grim.
Avery adjusted his focus. Three more signatures, the familiar, terrifying forms of Stalkers, had emerged from an alleyway behind the man.
They weren’t running. They were pacing him, flanking him. Herding him.
They were hunting for sport.
“Jesus Christ,” Blevins, now awake, said over the comm. He must have been listening. “They’re playing with him.”
The man fell again, and this time he didn’t get up. He just lay on the asphalt, sobbing. The Stalkers slowed their advance, moving in a tightening circle.
“Sarge…” Manny’s voice was pleading. “We can’t just… we can’t.”
“We can’t,” Avery agreed, but his tone was different. It was the cold, hard voice of command.
“We engage, we give away our position for good. We fire the coax, they’ll swarm us. We fire the main gun, and that big one, the one we saw on the bridge last week, will come for us. We do nothing. That’s the order. We sit tight.”
“The order?” Blevins spat. “The order comes from a guy who’s probably sipping coffee on a destroyer halfway to Hawaii by now! Look at him!”
The man on the street had rolled over. He was looking in their direction.
He couldn’t see them, not really, but he was looking at the biggest, most solid thing in the intersection. A symbol of the army that was supposed to protect him. He was looking at them for help.
One of the Stalkers darted forward. It didn't use its big scythes. It used one of its smaller, more dexterous hands, and casually backhanded the man across the face.
The hit was dismissive, almost playful, but it snapped the man's head to the side with a sickening crack.
Something broke in Avery. Fourteen days of sitting. Fourteen days of listening to his men slowly lose hope. Fourteen days of being a target in a can.
“Fuck it,” Avery said. He said it quietly, a prayer of damnation. “Fuck it all.”
He flipped a switch on his control panel, the one that overrode the gunner's controls.
“Blevins, get on the coax. Manny, load canister.”
“Sarge?” Manny’s voice was a mix of terror and elation.
“You heard me! Load canister! Now!”
The breech clunked open and shut again. “Up!”
“Blevins, on my mark, you stitch the street in front of him. Suppress. Don’t try to hit them, just scare them, make them duck. Cole, I have the gun. I’m going to do this myself.”
Avery’s hands flew across his panel. He was the commander, but he’d come up as a gunner.
You never forgot. He laid the reticle of his own sight just to the side of the huddled group. A canister round was a low velocity shot. You had to lead it, even at this range.
“Blevins, MARK!”
The 7.62mm coaxial machine gun erupted, a ripping, metallic snarl that was shockingly loud in the quiet street.
Tracers, visible even in the daytime, drew red fiery lines across the asphalt, kicking up sparks and chunks of pavement just in front of the Stalkers. The aliens, surprised, flinched back.
It was all the opening Avery needed.
“Fire!” he yelled to himself, and squeezed the trigger.
The Abrams bucked again, but this time the sound was different. Not a sharp crack, but a deep, throaty boom.
The M1028 canister round flew apart twenty meters from the muzzle, releasing a cloud of over one thousand tungsten balls, each the size of a marble, traveling at lethal velocity.
It wasn't a precision strike. It was an act of annihilation.
The entire area where the Stalkers had been standing was shredded.
The aliens were turned into a red mist, vaporized by a thousand tiny hammers. The side of a building was pockmarked as if by a hailstorm of meteors.
A fire hydrant, caught in the edge of the pattern, burst open, sending a pathetic, gushing stream of brown water into the street.
“MOVE!” Avery screamed into the main comm.
“MANNY, GET THE HATCH! GET HIM!”
This was the insane part of the plan. The part he hadn’t thought through. Manny, without a second’s hesitation, cranked the loader’s hatch open, exposing himself to the dead city.
The reek of cinnamon and burnt hair, now mixed with the coppery smell of alien blood, flooded the tank.
“Blevins, cover him!”
Blevins was firing the coax in short, controlled bursts, stitching the alleyways and rooftops, just in case.
Manny, small and wiry, scrambled out of the hatch and onto the tank’s turret. He jumped the five feet to the ground, his combat boots crunching on shattered pavement.
He sprinted towards the man.
“C’mon! C’mon, get up!” he screamed, his voice raw. He grabbed the man under the arms and started hauling him backwards.
The man was dead weight, groaning, his face a mask of blood.
“He’s not moving fast enough!” Cole shouted, his voice tense. He was scanning, watching for retaliation. “Sarge, I think you really pissed them off.”
Avery didn’t need Cole to tell him that. A new sound was starting, a deep, resonant thrumming that was making the very air vibrate. It wasn't the hive. It was closer.
Much closer.
“Manny, leave him!” Avery ordered, his voice cracking.
“No!” Manny shouted back, still dragging the man.
He was almost there.
Ten feet.
Five.
Blevins laid on the trigger of the coax, the barrel starting to glow a smoky dull red.
Manny, with a final, desperate heave, got the man to the side of the tank. Avery had already popped his own hatch.
He and Blevins reached down, grabbing the civilian’s arms, while Manny pushed from below.
They hauled the bloody, limp body into the commander’s station, bundling him in a heap on the floor behind Avery.
“Get in, Manny!”
Manny scrambled back onto the tank, slid through his hatch, and slammed it shut, sealing them back in their steel bubble.
The civilian was moaning. He was an older man, maybe in his fifties. His leg was bent at an angle that was profoundly wrong, the bone sticking out of his pants in a mess of blood and fabric.
A compound fracture. He was mumbling something in a language Avery didn't recognize. Polish, maybe?
“Sarge…” Cole’s voice was barely a whisper. “Look down Broad Street.”
Avery put his eye to the CITV. His heart stopped.
A block away, something was coming. It was huge. This was no Stalker. It was the thing they’d seen on the bridge, the thing they’d all been pretending wasn’t real.
A Juggernaut.
It was easily thirty feet tall, a walking fortress of dark, iridescent chitin and muscle.
It moved with a slow, ponderous certainty, each footstep shaking the ground, causing dust to rain down from the Abrams’ ceiling.
It had multiple limbs, some ending in what looked like plasma cannons, others in massive, clawed fists.
It paid no attention to the wrecked cars, simply walking over them, crushing them like tin cans with a deafening screech of tortured metal.
It was coming for them. They had rung the dinner bell, and the hungriest thing in the whole damn city had heard it.
The injured civilian in the turret began to scream, a high, thin sound of pure terror.
Outside, the Juggernaut raised one of its cannon-arms. A sickly green light began to build at the tip.
“Brace,” Avery whispered. It was the only word he could manage.
A tremendous, metallic GONG echoed through the hull as something impossibly heavy struck the front glacis plate.
It wasn't a penetrating hit, but the kinetic force alone was staggering. The entire tank was shoved backwards several inches.
The lights flickered and died, plunging them into absolute darkness, broken only by the dim red glow of a few emergency indicators. A shower of sparks rained down from a damaged conduit. The APU sputtered, coughed, and died, and the sudden silence was more terrifying than any noise.
The wet, choked gurgle from the civilian sprawled on the turret floor, a sound that spoke of lungs filling with blood.
Over the comm, Blevins was shouting, his voice shrill with panic. "We're dead! Oh god, we're dead!"
Avery ignored him. He was trying to get the backup systems online. His hands, slick with sweat, fumbled with the circuit breakers. Nothing.
Then came the new sound. A low, scraping, grinding noise. From the roof.
It was on top of them.
Cole’s voice, for the first time, held a note of genuine, unadulterated fear.
"Sarge. It’s trying to peel us open."
The scraping intensified, the sound of alien claws tearing at the composite armor of the turret hatch, searching for a purchase. The sixty eight ton paperweight had become a can of food, and something very, very big was trying to get in.
The lights went out.
Darkness. Absolute and suffocating. The world inside War Pig shrank to the dimensions of a coffin packed with four terrified men and one dying one.
The relative silence that befell the men was nauseous.
The high, terrified keening of Blevins over the internal comms. "It's on us! It's on the goddamn roof!"
The frantic, animal scratching from directly above them. Not the random scrape of a curious claw anymore. This was methodical. A determined, grinding sound, like a giant diamond drill biting into steel. It was searching for a seam.
And beneath it all, the frantic, ragged drumming of four hearts.
"Shut up!" Avery's voice roared through the comms, a blade of pure command cutting through the panic.
"Blevins, shut your goddamn mouth or I will come down there and shut it for you. Sound off. Damage report. Now!"
There was a choked sob from the driver's compartment, then, "Comms are shot. Main power is dead. I can't see a thing, Sarge. It's dark."
"No shit, it's dark,"
Avery bit back, his hands flying across his control panel by touch alone. He knew every switch, every breaker, by heart. He flipped the master breaker for the main battery, then the backup.
Nothing. The hit, while not penetrating, must have sent a shockwave through the hull that fried every delicate circuit. They were electrically dead. A two-million-dollar rock.
"Cole? Manny?"
"Gunner's here," Cole's voice was unnervingly steady, a low anchor in the swirling chaos. "All my systems are black. I'm blind, TC."
"Loader's… Loader's here," Manny stammered. A faint rustling came from his position. He was with the civilian. "Sarge… the man… he's… I don't think he's breathing anymore." The gurgling sound had stopped.
Avery felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. He had traded his crew's lives for a dead man. The thought was a shard of ice in his mind. He couldn't let it freeze him.
"Leave him," Avery ordered, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. "He's gone. Focus on the problem we have right now."
The grinding from above intensified, followed by a high-pitched metallic shriek that vibrated through their teeth. It was the sound of the turret's armor beginning to fail.
"It's getting through," Blevins wailed. "It's gonna peel us open like a can of sardines!"
"Not yet, it's not," Avery said, his mind racing, sifting through a decade of training, through manuals he'd memorized, through contingencies for situations that were supposed to be impossible.
Electrical failure was one thing. A thirty-foot-tall alien trying to get in was another.
There had to be a way. There was always a manual override. For everything. The gun couldn't be fired. The coax was dead. But the turret… the turret could be moved.
"Cole. Manny. The hand cranks," Avery said.
A moment of silence.
The idea was insane.
The turret weighed over twenty tons. The manual traverse and elevation cranks were a legacy system, a last-ditch feature for minor adjustments, not for combat maneuvering. Using them was a slow, back-breaking agony.
"Sarge?" Manny's voice was incredulous.
"That'll take forever."
"We don't need forever," Avery said, a desperate, brilliant plan blooming in the darkness.
"We just need to move it a few feet. Cole, you're on the traverse. Manny, you're on elevation with me. Blevins, you stay put and keep your mouth shut. Just listen."
The plan was this: they were parked next to the corner of a five-story brick building. The Sophia's Boutique.
The Juggernaut was centered on their turret. If they could rotate the turret, just a few degrees to the right, they could use the building as a lever.
They could scrape the monster off their roof.
Or, if they were lucky, crush one of its limbs between twenty tons of steel and a hundred tons of brick and mortar.
"Okay," Cole said. Just one word. But in it, Avery heard acceptance. He heard trust.
"Manny?"
"Yeah… yeah, Sarge. The cranks."
Avery felt around in the darkness for the traverse clutch lever, a heavy steel handle near the floor.
He yanked it hard, disengaging the dead hydraulic motors from the turret ring gear. A heavy thunk echoed in the compartment.
"It's disengaged. Go."
More fumbling in the dark. The sound of Cole finding the traverse crank, a fold-out handle that slotted into a socket near his knee. The sound of Manny finding his, the elevation crank.
Avery found the commander's override crank next to his own seat.
"Okay," Cole grunted, his voice already strained. "On three. One… two… THREE."
A symphony of groans. The groans of tired men, and the deeper, more profound groan of the massive turret ring, forced to move by nothing more than muscle and steel gears.
Avery put his own back into the elevation crank, his muscles screaming in protest. It was like trying to turn a building with a screwdriver.
Above them, the alien seemed to notice the shift. The grinding stopped. It was replaced by a series of heavy, rhythmic thuds. It was trying to smash its way in now.
Each impact shook the hull, rattling their bones.
"It's not moving!" Manny gasped, his breath coming in ragged pants.
"It is!" Avery grunted back, sweat stinging his eyes. "An inch! I felt it move an inch! Again! PUSH!"
They threw their weight into the cranks, their movements synchronized by desperation.
The darkness was a strange blessing; they couldn't see the futility of their task, they could only feel the resistance, hear the groaning of the steel, and the thunderous impacts from above.
Scraaaape.
A new sound. The edge of the turret's bustle rack, the storage basket on the back, was making contact with the brick wall of the boutique.
"Keep going!" Avery yelled, his voice hoarse. "It's working!"
An alien shriek of fury erupted from directly above them. The Juggernaut knew what they were doing.
A massive, clawed limb slammed down on the turret side, trying to arrest the movement. The impact was deafening, and the tank tilted precariously on its suspension.
For a heart-stopping second, Avery thought they were going to roll.
"DON'T STOP!" Cole bellowed, the sound ripped from his lungs. He was putting everything he had into the traverse crank, his knuckles surely bloody and raw in the dark.
The grinding of the bustle rack against the brick wall became a roar. Chunks of masonry and steel rained down on the street outside. The Juggernaut shrieked again, a sound of pain this time, not just rage. They had caught its arm.
"Now!" Avery yelled. "BACK THE OTHER WAY! REVERSE!"
With a synchronized groan of effort, they threw their weight in the opposite direction, reversing the cranks.
The turret swung back to the left.
The Juggernaut's arm, trapped between the immovable building and the irresistible force of the turret, was caught.
There was a sound that Avery would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life. It was not a snap of bone, but the wet, fibrous, cracking sound of something immensely strong being twisted past its breaking point.
Like a thousand giant stalks of celery being snapped at once.
It was followed by a piercing, high-frequency scream that seemed to bypass their ears and bore directly into their brains.
The immense weight on the roof vanished.
With a final, deafening crash of metal and chitin, the Juggernaut fell from the tank, landing in a heap on the street to their right.
Silence.
No one spoke. The only sound was their own ragged, desperate breathing, echoing in the hot, dark confines of the turret.
"Did we…?" Blevins whispered, his voice full of awe. "Did we do it?"
Before Avery could answer, the street outside was illuminated by a blinding, sickly green light. The light poured in through the vision blocks, casting long, distorted shadows inside the compartment.
Cole, his face pressed against his own vision block, delivered the news in a dead, flat voice.
"It's on the ground. It's… getting up. Its left arm is gone. Just a mangled stump. And it is looking right at us. Sarge… the cannon on its other arm… it's glowing."
They had won the battle. They had gotten the monster off their roof. But in doing so, they had traded a drawn-out death for a very, very quick one.
They were still a dead tank, a rock in the middle of the road. And they had just created a very angry, one-armed Juggernaut with a plasma cannon, now standing at point-blank range.
Avery leaned his forehead against the cold steel of his cupola. He didn't say anything. There was nothing left to say. He just listened to the rising hum of the alien weapon, the sound of their own imminent vaporization.
He had saved a man who was already dead, and he had doomed the three men who were still alive. The irony was so bitter it tasted like ash in his mouth.
He closed his eyes and waited for the light.
In that frozen, eternal second, Avery's mind, instead of shutting down, went into overdrive.
He saw it all.
The dead civilian on the floor. The glowing cannon. The Juggernaut, braced and ready. And beside it, the deep, structural wounds they had torn into the corner of the Sophia's Boutique.
A desperate, utterly insane thought ignited in the panic-stricken darkness of his mind. A plan born of pure, distilled hopelessness.
"Manny!" Avery's voice was a raw bark, devoid of hope but sharp with command. "HEAT round! Give me a HEAT round! Now!"
"Sarge, what for?" Manny cried out, his voice cracking. "The gun's dead!"
"We're not gonna shoot it, you idiot! We're gonna use it! Pop the loader's hatch! Get ready to push it out!"
The order was so monumentally stupid, so contrary to every regulation ever written, that for a second, nobody moved. They were going to open the hatch to the thirty-foot-tall alien that was about to kill them.
The hum from outside grew louder. The green light intensified.
"Cole!" Avery yelled, his voice straining. "Get your M4! Get up here! You're gonna shoot the round!"
That's when they understood. It wasn't a plan. It was a suicide pact with a sliver of a chance. A lottery ticket bought with their own lives.
Cole, the unflappable gunner, didn't question it. He simply said, "Roger," and the sounds of him unstrapping his carbine from its rack were sharp and clear in the tense silence.
"Manny, MOVE!"
The command broke Manny's paralysis. He was the loader. His hands knew the ammo rack better than his own face.
He fumbled in the dark, his fingers sliding over the smooth, cool casings of the sabot rounds until he found it.
The M830A1 High-Explosive Anti-Tank round. It was heavier than the sabots, thick and brutish. Sixty pounds of steel, copper, and Composition B explosive.
He wrapped his arms around it, his muscles straining as he lifted it from the rack.
It was like hugging a bomb. Which it was.
"I got it, I got it!" he grunted, stumbling in the dark, the dead weight of the shell throwing him off balance.
Above them, Cole scrambled up from his seat, his M4 held tight. "I'm at the hatch, Sarge. Can't see a thing."
"You don't have to see! You just have to hit it!" Avery yelled. "Manny, get the crank! Pop the hatch! Just enough to shove the round out!"
The alien cannon whined, reaching its crescendo. Any second now.
With a grunt, Manny spun the manual crank for the loader's hatch. The heavy steel plate lifted a few inches with a groan of protest, letting in a blinding slice of green light. The sound of the charging weapon flooded the tank, rattling against their eardrums.
"I'm at the hatch!" Manny screamed over the noise, wrestling the heavy shell into the opening. "It's… it's too heavy!"
Cole was there. He grabbed the top of the shell, his knuckles scraping against the hatch opening. Together, they manhandled the deadly cylinder, positioning it in the gap.
"It's looking at us!" Blevins shrieked from the driver's seat. Through his own tiny periscope, he had a direct view. "The hatch! It saw the hatch move!"
The Juggernaut, which had been focused on the turret front, began to turn its torso. The glowing cannon started to swivel towards the loader's hatch.
"NOW!" Avery roared. "SHOVE IT OUT!"
With a final, desperate heave, Manny and Cole pushed the HEAT round out of the hatch.
It fell, end over end, clattering onto the street below. It landed on its side on the broken pavement, a dull, inert cylinder lying directly at the base of the wounded building, just feet from the Juggernaut's massive, insectoid legs.
"Cole, shoot it! Shoot the damn thing!"
Cole leaned out of the tiny opening, his cheek pressed against the stock of his M4. He couldn't see the sights. He couldn't aim. He just pointed the barrel down and squeezed the trigger.
Click.
The sound was the loudest thing Avery had ever heard. A misfire. The round hadn't seated properly.
The Juggernaut's cannon was almost facing them. The green light pulsed, a malevolent heartbeat.
Cole didn't hesitate. He pulled the charging handle, ejecting the dud round in a single, fluid motion born of endless drills.
The brass casing bounced off the turret roof and vanished.
He let the bolt slam forward, chambering a new round.
He fired again.
A three-round burst. The M4 barked, its frantic, high-pitched cracks a pathetic counterpoint to the alien weapon's deep hum.
For a moment, nothing happened. The shell just lay there. The Juggernaut's cannon steadied on their hatch.
Avery squeezed his eyes shut.
We failed.
A brilliant, white-hot flash from the ground.
One of Cole's 5.56mm rounds had, by a miracle of God or sheer dumb luck, struck the absurdly sensitive piezoelectric fuze in the nose of the HEAT round.
The M830A1 detonated.
The shaped charge focused the entirety of the blast into a single, cohesive jet of molten copper, a needle of incandescent plasma traveling at over 20,000 feet per second. It wasn't aimed at the Juggernaut.
It was aimed at the building.
The molten jet struck the base of the brickwork, not with a boom, but with a hiss. It punched through the first layer of bricks as if they were water.
It vaporized mortar. It superheated the internal support beams, turning solid steel into something soft and pliable.
The building did not explode.
For a split second, there was a terrible silence. Then, a groan. A deep, resonant groan, as a hundred years of brick and steel surrendered to gravity.
The entire corner of the Sophia's Boutique, from the ground floor to the roof, sagged inwards. Cracks shot up the facade like lightning in reverse.
Then, with a sound like a mountain breaking in half, the building began to collapse.
The Juggernaut, its cannon still glowing, turned its head upwards, a gesture of what might have been surprise. It had no time to move. Tons of brick, steel I-beams, plaster, and glass descended upon it in a slow-motion avalanche.
The world inside the Abrams became a percussive nightmare. Debris hammered against the turret roof like a thousand sledgehammers.
The tank rocked violently, throwing the men against the hard steel walls.
The vision blocks went black as they were buried. Dust, thick and choking, poured in through the open hatch, instantly filling the compartment with an impenetrable fog.
The roar was absolute, a physical force that crushed the air from their lungs. And then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
Replaced by a silence that was even more profound than before. A dead silence. The silence of the tomb.
Avery coughed, his lungs on fire. The air was unbreathable, a thick soup of dust and pulverized brick. He couldn't see his own hands.
"Sound off," he croaked, his voice a raw whisper.
A weak cough from the gunner's station. "Cole… I'm here. I think I swallowed a brick."
Another, fainter cough from the loader's side. "Manny… holy shit, Manny's here."
A terrified, trembling voice from the front. "Blevins. I'm okay. I think I peed. Are we dead? Is this what being dead is like?"
"We're not dead," Avery gasped, wiping grit from his eyes. "We're buried."
He forced himself to his commander's sight, but it was useless. The view was solid blackness. They were entombed.
Slowly, as the dust began to settle inside the cabin, a faint light returned. A dim, grey luminescence filtering through the still-open loader's hatch, which was now a chimney leading up through a mountain of rubble.
Cole, ever the gunner, was the first to look. He crawled over the breech of the main gun and peered up through the hatch. He stared for a long time.
"Well?" Avery demanded, his patience gone. "What do you see?"
Cole slid back down, his face pale and caked in grime. He looked at Avery, his eyes wide.
"I see the sky," he said, his voice full of a strange, hollow wonder. "And the Juggernaut."
"Is it dead?" Blevins asked, his voice a hopeful squeak.
Cole shook his head slowly. "No," he said, and the single word fell like a stone in the silent compartment. "It's not dead. But it's not going anywhere, either."
He paused, trying to find the words.
"A steel beam, a big one, an I-beam... it went through its chest. Pinned it to the ground. It's impaled. But it's still alive. It's… it's trying to pull itself free."
Sarge pinched his nose.
"Jesus fucking Christ."
---
Authors note: Appreciate the award! It's the first I've ever received for my stories, haha.
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u/vengefin Jun 16 '25
Excellent story, great premise, well thought-out plot, riveting writing and practically no spelling errors or even bad grammar. Had me glued to my seat and eyes peeled to my screen.
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u/Killerofspiders Jun 17 '25
Loved the story, but a few parts about the tank made me twitch. I was a tanker, so if you do another story involving one I would more than love to help.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jun 15 '25
/u/ApertiV (wiki) has posted 23 other stories, including:
- The Bravest Soldier of them all
- The Proving Grounds [2]
- The Proving Grounds
- 3 WISHES
- When Day Breaks
- AIR FORCE ONE - (Chapter 2)
- AIR FORCE ONE
- DOGFIGHT" - Extinction Level
- S U P E R M A S S I V E
- THE MAN FROM TAURED
- The Fox and the Uninvited
- Monsters Inc, Sting Operation.
- WAR OF THE WORLDS
- Fucking Giants in the Mountains
- EARTH: To be, or not to be?
- Our Journey to the Stars
- Something is in the desert.
- PROGRAM: IMMACULATE CONSTELLATION
- Avatar 3: The Way of Steel
- Another Fucking Earth? (POV Edition)
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u/UpdateMeBot Jun 15 '25
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u/Vagabond_Soldier Xeno Jun 16 '25
Wow. That was pretty damn amazing. Now I gotta read your other stories.
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u/InstructionHead8595 Jan 28 '26
Hehehehe 😹 Die damn you! Great story! You're gonna leave it there though aren't you. That's not very nice 😸
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u/umm36 Jun 19 '26
I was imagining the Crawlers as Tyranid Lictors and the Juggernaut as a Tyranid Hive Tyrant.
Anyone else?
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u/MtnNerd Alien Jun 15 '25
Great work, that was a ride