“Captain, you may want to check this.”

Eric nodded, unbuckling, and made his way forward to where the pilots were nodding. He looked out over the copilot’s shoulder and whistled.

The city of Dallas was a mess, there was no questioning that. He could count a dozen ruined skyscrapers at a glance, and his armor warning systems were going nuts with all the high thermal points in motion across what remained.

“Damn. Do we have any contacts on the ground?”

“Yes sir. Rangers and Guardsmen have a forward base near Reunion Park,” the pilot told him. “They’re using it as a relay point for evacuees and a delivery zone for munitions drops.”

“Alright, good,” Eric said. “Get them on the line. I want to talk to whoever is in charge.”

“It’s a mess down there, sir,” the pilot said. “I think that a Texas Ranger is currently the man in charge.”

“Really? Alright, get a hold of him then.” Eric shrugged. “I don’t care who, I just need to talk with the person in charge.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Where do you want us?”

“I’ll let you know once we’ve had a chance to talk with the person in charge,” Eric said. “The question is going to be what can we do, not where can we do it.”

Ranger Swenson had seen a lot of shit in his day, but whatever the hell had happened to his city over the past four weeks topped everything he’d even seen in movies. The damn things came out of the sky. Alright, they were aliens. Sure, he’d watched the news, he knew that aliens existed, but they didn’t drop in on the Dallas/Fort Worth area and start eating the goddamn place!

Never, never had he even imagined anything like the nightmare they’d been dealing with for the past month. He was a goddamn ranger. He dealt with scum and villains of all stripes, from the lowest street filth to the most dangerous psychos in a state where insanity was considered part of the way of life.

“Ranger?”

“What is it,” Swenson looked around, seeing a Guardsman running up with a field comm.

“We’ve got a captain on the comm. Wants to talk to the person in charge.”

“Unless he has a division or two of troops he can lend me, tell him to take a number and wait in line,” Swenson growled. Three, four, sometimes five and more times a day some jackass with a chest full of medals, usually for piloting ROVs, was on the line trying to tell him how to handle the shit coming his way while he was standing right in the middle of the stream with nothing but a goddamn net.

“Sir, Ranger, he’s using presidential codes.”

“Oh fan-frigging-tastick,” Swenson sighed, reaching out for the comm. “Fine. Put the boy on.”