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Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer

DOOM
Infernal Sky

Prologue

"Why are there monsters?"
An exhausted woman looked at her little boy, who
had asked the question that was burning in her own
mind. His voice didn't tremble. She reached over to
wipe his face. They were not wearing camo right now,
and the smudges of dirt were only dirt. It wasn't right
for a ten-year-old to be a seasoned veteran of war, she
thought, but all of the human survivors on Earth
understood what it meant to fight for their lives
against alien invaders.
A long time ago, when she was ten, her only
question was "Are there real monsters?" What a
wonderful world that had been, a sane world where
nightmares stayed where they belonged, lodged in the
gray matter between the ears. Only in dreams would
you encounter giant floating heads that spit ball
lightning; angry crimson minotaurs; shambling hu-
man zombies fresh from their own death; flying metal
skulls with razor teeth dripping blood; ghosts colder
than the grave; fifteen-foot-tall demons with heavy
artillery in place of hands; obscenely fat shapes, only
vaguely humanoid, that could crush the life from the
strongest man in a matter of seconds; and, finally,
there was the special horror of the mechanical spider
bodies with things inside them that were far worse
than any arachnid.
There was no way to answer David, no explanation
for why dream shapes crawled across the land that
once was a country called the United States on a
planet called Earth.
She thanked God that her son was still alive. After
her husband died, there were only three of them.
Three. The number made her cry. They weren't three
for long.
She'd never had time to grieve over the man she
loved. The monsters didn't give her any time at all.
Her daughter, Lisa, had been thirteen.
At least her husband had died bravely, ripped apart
by the steel legs of a spider-thing. For a brief moment
the woman had caught a glimpse of the evil face
peering out from the dome mounted on top of the
mechanical body. She couldn't stop herself crying
out! Her husband couldn't hear her. But the spider-