Into the Fire

by Mark Tufo

  Funny how quickly those three minutes rushed by compared to the dragging out of each eternal second with the suit zipped. Time is most definitely a man-made construct, that we have the ability to manipulate it to such a degree is proof of that premise.

  “Wakey, wakey,” reverberated through my suit as BT had taken up the shift of monitoring me.

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “I gave her a break. She’s pretty wiped out. This whole thing has her stressed out. How you doing, man?”

  I delayed responding. “She’s not around?”

  “No.”

  “Not so good, man. I’m out of water, and I stopped sweating an hour ago. My skin is prickly, I’ve got a raging headache, and I think I either saw a hedgehog or a werewolf.”

  “I wish I could tell you that you could take that damn suit off, but we can’t see the drone with the sun down, and its patrol is random…or at least no discernible pattern we can figure out.”

  “The sun is down?”

  “Um, yeah, can you not see?” I could sense the alarm in BT’s voice.

  “Yeah, I’ve just had my eyes closed against the glare of sun for so long I didn’t dare open them.”

  “On a good note, we think that the drone relies heavily on infrared and not traditional sight to locate enemies. You can get up and walk instead of crawling.”

  “Think? Fine, whatever, I don’t think I’d make it if I had to crawl anyway.” I pushed up, getting to my knees slowly. I snapped my shade stick in half as I pulled on it in an attempt to stand. I landed roughly on my ass.

  “You okay?” BT must have heard me grunt.

  “You didn’t see that?”

  “No, your wife has the Night Vision goggles.”

  “I’m fine then, I was fighting off a pack of coyotes.”

  “Dude, you sound like shit.”

  My breathing was labored as I pushed out the words and had exerted nearly all my strength in a failed attempt to get vertical.

  “Yeah, well, fuck you,” I said as I sat and gathered up the rest of my intestinal fortitude, or is it internal? I grunted some more as I got back up. My head swam, I saw stars, and I’m pretty sure I was wobbling like a spinning top on its last legs. Ever have a lightheaded spell? You know the kind, it’s a hot summer day (again) and maybe you were doing some yard work for a few hours then you went into the house and sat on the couch for a bit of TV watching, then decided you really wanted two pitchers of iced tea during a commercial break, so you get up entirely too fast? That feeling like your head is fluctuating between being light as a feather or as heavy as a cinder block, and you can’t decide if you want to spin away or crash to the ground? Yeah, it was just like that, only like maybe I was riding a roller coaster that had its entire structure built on an air-filled bouncy house.

  I guess much like a gyroscope, I had centrifugal force or some equally mysterious force working for me, because somehow I managed to stay on two feet. I found walking helped, although those first couple of steps would have had a new toddler shaking his head in scorn and derision at me.

  “How is he?” I heard Tracy ask in the background.

  “Not too good.”

  BT must not have realized that he had the send button still depressed. I did my best to correct my staggering steps, as I knew she would be able to see me once she donned the goggles. I felt like I was doing pretty well.

  “Mike…honey, how are you feeling?”

  “Fantastic, never better.” I think it came out a little higher pitched and faster than I had hoped. I wanted to blame that on my accelerated heartbeat and rapid breathing. I had all the classic signs of massive dehydration. “Should be done soon.”

  “Sweetie…”

  “Sweetie? I’m fucked.”

  She ignored me. “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “Huh.” I turned as slowly as I could, hoping to not trigger another vertigo session. I could see the lights of the alien encampment. “Dammit.” My feet followed where my head had turned and I trudged on.

  I had a sort of shuffling rhythm going on when BT blurted out, “DRONE!” It was so loud I thought there was more than a fair chance the Progs would hear it.

  “Get down slowly, Mike,” Tracy whispered.

  “Can’t,” I told her. I knew enough about my limits to realize that if I went down I was not going to be able to get back up.

  “Please, Mike, stop walking then.” There was a hint of desperation and tears in her voice. I almost came back with the same response of “can’t” for the same reasons. I did, however, manage, although I was swaying like a tall tree in the midst of a hurricane. I wasn’t walking anymore, but I sure was moving.

  At first I thought I was hallucinating as a bright beam of white light shone on the ground not more than twenty feet behind me.

  “Fuck.” I think we all said it at the same time.

  It was clear enough it was looking for something, just so happened I was in the general vicinity. I was more than a little convinced I was the object of their attention. The light stayed steady in its spot for a moment before it began to slowly move, creeping up on my right hand side. The ground shone like it was noon wherever the intense light hit; there was no question I would stick out. I was in a camouflaged Ghillie suit, but it was apparent I did not belong here. An elephant, no matter how good the disguise, will never fit in with a pack of hyenas. There was nothing for square acres near me much bigger than a fist-sized rock, much less a man-sized shaggy bush. Plus, I was swaying, and there wasn’t so much as a slight stir of wind.

  The searchlight was two feet behind me and not more than three or four inches to my side. It was moving slowly enough that I was in more danger from the dehydration than I was being found. Maybe it would be worth it if they’d give me a keg of water before they killed me.

  My radio crackled. “Mike, move to your right,” Tracy whispered.

  The light, which had been seeking now stopped, almost becoming rigid as if it were contemplating a new stream of information. My mind, which had been struggling with the lack of fluids in my system, crystallized in thought.

  “It’s the fucking radio.” I fumbled with the controls until I found the power button. The light was now abreast of me, I was wobbling so much that occasionally my shoulder would break the plane of that light column. I was powerless to stop from doing it. The light became brighter somehow right before it winked out. I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but the danger had not yet passed. The drone was still there, waiting patiently like a spider for its prey to make a mistake. And lord knows I sure am error prone.

  I had been struggling so much to stay upright that I had kept my legs straight, which is a big no-no. My right knee had locked, and I was going to pitch over. Anything short of a handrail miraculously sprouting up and I was about to meet the ground and most likely my maker soon after.

  A couple of things happened simultaneously, or at least close enough to give it that descriptor (adjective—whatever). I was fighting for my life, I didn’t really give a shit about the appropriate usage of English. I fell, that was a foregone conclusion. As the luck I was generating at the moment would have it, it was exactly flush in the cylinder of light that had just a few seconds earlier gone out. I may have heard the shot of a bullet first, then the gonging sound of a bell being struck or possibly it was the reverberation I made as I impacted the earth.

  I knew I was done, but that still didn’t give me a moment to ponder. “They’re using bullets? Is there a global shortage on rays?” Then I heard a high-pitched whine. I waited for the slicing of that alien ray as it separated me into my individual atoms then obliterated them in a hot well of frenetic cellular activity. I waited, and then I waited some more. It finally dawned on me that the whining wasn’t its weapon powering up but its motor thrusting as it screamed off to parts unknown.

  The bullet hadn’t come from the drone—it had come from Tracy. My murky mind was reasoning the whole thing out. Tracy had seen me fall and she’d taken
an impossible shot. The gong was from the resulting hit as the bullet careened off the drone and ricocheted into the ground. How in the fuck she’d hit a car sized object hovering in the air at night from over a mile away defied logic and was one that belonged in the record books. I knew she could shoot better than me, even if I kept hiding our score sheets when we went to the range, so she wouldn’t have tangible proof. But this was orders of magnitude above difficult. Impossible was a word I kept bandying about. Otherworldly most likely.

  I rolled over so I was looking up at the stars. To say I felt like crap would be to give crap a bad name. I was indeed in trouble like BT had said, but I’d be damned if I was going to die like this. I didn’t have time to feel like shit; Tracy had just risked hers and BT’s lives in an attempt to save mine.

  “First things first.” I unzipped the suit and pulled it off. Bliss was a word I’d use to describe how I felt. Somehow, the luck that I thought had boogied on down the road on me had apparently had a change of heart and turned around to maybe not pick me up, but at least let me know it was still around. A full bottle of water rolled onto the ground, it must have fell out of a pocket and been sloshing around in the bottom of the suit. Grabbing it, I crushed the plastic in an effort to get the liquid out faster. If I had more time I would have split the bottle in two and licked the sides dry. I stood with a modicum of effort, my head swam, but not with that debilitating feeling I’d had earlier. This time I made sure to orientate myself correctly and, after grabbing the gear I needed, I moved as fast as I could manage; which, given the circumstances, wasn’t too bad.

  If the drone came back, I was as good as toast as I rapidly left my heat-shielding protective suit behind. Funny fucking thing about the desert…it gets cold at night. My teeth were chattering as I moved in a steady gait.

  “This is irony, right?” I was talking to myself. I didn’t dare turn my radio back on. I was already a heated up target, and if I gave a drone any more reason to check in on me, I was as good as dead.

  Continuing with my original thought, I figured that to die of sweat-induced dehydration only moments before I succumbed to frostbite had to be irony on a higher echelon than most would ever experience in their lifetimes. I heard nothing behind me as I advanced, neither gunfire nor explosions. I took that as a good sign. Tracy and BT must have had some counter-measures in place should a drone or patrol head in their general direction. I’d ask them about it if I ever got the time. I was giving my odds of making this part of the mission successful about one-in-three. Odds of me making it out if the mission were successful were around one-in-ten. I have no idea what those two odds together made my probability of seeing my son again; I would imagine it was not good. It was better not to dwell on it.

  I was making what I hoped was decent time. My stumbling and shuffling was kept to a minimum as I made a mostly straight approach. Now, if I could just get in range and shoot my fancy laser pointer, I’d be all set. Off to my far right, a bright beam of light caught my attention. It was a drone. I was going to say, “I’m over here, fucker!” but on no level did that seem like a good idea. It was somewhat comforting to know just how far away it was. If I could have reached, I would have given myself a congratulatory pat on the back, then I thought about shifting that hand down and trying to prevent anything from being shoved up my ass as another drone light clicked on, this one about a quarter mile off to my left.

  “Definitely closer, still far enough away,” I said my hopeful words aloud. Straight ahead, but on the other side of the alien camp, another light came into existence. “Oh, come on,” I sighed. Were they actively searching or was this the equivalent of the aliens’ street lights coming on? I took note that they were moving; this was my cue to do the same. The drones were circling in a counterclockwise rotation and were covering much more ground than my less-than-blistering pace.

  Not so very long ago, I was trying to cop a feel of a breast—over the sweater no less—of a now-forgotten girlfriend. Now I was running for my life from aliens. I believed that the incredible tale from its origins to now was coming to a close. These final chapters would define this war and me.

  “Dammit.” I double-timed it, which put me at somewhere close to a power walk. I was close enough or antsy enough that I took the targeting system off my back and into my hands. I may have just saved precious seconds I would not be able to recoup. The thing was bulky, thankfully not heavy, though. It was roughly the size and shape of a four-by-four inch post, not much more than three feet long, with a trigger pretty much right in the middle of the apparatus. Couldn’t have weighed any more than ten pounds, if that. And most of that was the protective shell it wore in the hopes of keeping some soldier from breaking it. I took one more quick glance over to the drone that had made up a significant amount of space between us, and then looked straight ahead.

  “Now or never.” I flipped the power switch on.

  I had a momentary pang of regret where maybe this wasn’t the time I should be checking to see if the battery was in working order. I was running, whatever I had left in the proverbial tank was being used now. I would have none for an exit strategy, this was the exodus. The laser reached out like a finger of fire only to fall short. Not by much, but enough. I might as well have been running with the Olympic torch as I crossed that patch of desert. The laser beam was bouncing wildly about as I kept moving. The drone seemed to have stopped its normal patrolling route and had become fixated on me. I turned my radio on.

  Tracy’s voice came over. “...answer me! Or I’m calling in the artillery!”

  I wonder how many times she had been trying to hail me. “Not yet,” I breathed out. “Soon, just a little further.”

  “Mike, it’s almost to you.” The words came through the speaker with a frantic tone attached to them.

  “Better hurry up.”

  That was BT. I knew he was trying to be helpful, but really? Did he think I was going to stop for a bit of tea?

  I grunted into the mic and kept moving.

  “Quarter mile,” Tracy said. I hoped she meant the distance of the drone to me and not the distance the laser fell short to its target. I pushed on. Whatever my body would give, I took it. I had as close to a sprint going as I was ever going to get. My left leg dropped down into a depression. I knew I was going to topple over, there was going to be little I could do to prevent it. I couldn’t even brace myself. In my left hand I held the laser, the walkie was in my right. I lost either of those, and it was my life. I careened off the desert floor chin first. Pebbles, sand, and blood made a tasty cocktail mixture in my mouth. When the dust settled, I realized my laser was bouncing perfectly off a target.

  “Fire, fire, fire!” I shouted.

  And then the world blew up.

  Chapter 13

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – DRABABAN

  “I have to pull over,” Yodell told the group.

  “Again?” Drababan asked him. “You are worse than the boy.”

  “Well, I’m sure his prostate isn’t the size of a softball, now is it?” Yodell brought his truck to a stop. There was no need to pull over, as there was no traffic on the highway. In addition, there was no shoulder to pull off into either way. The snow had intensified as the night wore on. They had gotten stuck twice; both times, the only thing that had kept them from hiking out was Drababan’s brute strength.

  “I believe we have escaped their net.” Drababan was staring up at the sky.

  “Never thought I’d see the day when I-95 was completely empty this close to Boston.” Yodell had come over. “Blizzard or not. How much further? We’re going to need gas soon.” Yodell was checking the gas cans he had in the back of the truck.

  “We’re about thirty miles from Indian Hill,” Tony said, popping his back.

  “Are you boys sure it’s still there? Seems to me these aliens would have taken it out first.”

  “That is indeed a concern, Yodell,” Drababan intoned. “Secrecy was and is its primary defense. Not many of your kind know o
f its existence. We must hope that none were taken captive and have yielded their secrets.”

  “That’s a very dry way of saying that people were captured and tortured.”

  Drababan looked at Yodell. “My words will in no way have influenced that outcome, and I thought it a wiser course of action to tone down the language I used so as not to offend what I consider to be a human’s tender spirit.”

  Yodell looked confused. “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be angry or if I should apologize.”

  “Don’t worry, he does that to me as well,” Tony said. “Let’s just get back on the road before we have to build an igloo.”

  Yodell could not manage much more than ten miles an hour as they crawled down the roadway. Drababan did his best to keep Travis entertained during that time, but the youngster was at about his limit to how long he would sit still.

  “We are in Walpole,” Drababan said.

  “How do you know that?” Yodell asked.

  “The sign.”

  Tony looked around. “What sign?”

  “The sign that used to be back there informing us as we crossed over an imaginary boundary.”

  “Used to be? Did the aliens get rid of it?” Yodell asked.

  “It could have just as easily been humans out foraging and someone needed piping,” Drababan said.

  “Then how do you know this is Walpole?” Yodell asked.

  “I recognize that tree.”

  Yodell laughed. The roadway was lined with trees, telling one from another would be harder than distinguishing one person from another while you were a mile up in the air. He stopped when he realized that Drababan was not laughing with him.

  “You’re not kidding?”

  “He doesn’t kid much. He says this is Walpole, then that’s where we are.”

  “Who recognizes trees?” Yodell asked as an aside.

  Tony shrugged. “Another tree I suppose. He’s big enough and green enough.”

  “I think that is pretty funny, Michael’s sire. Perhaps you would find it funnier if I put you aloft of one, much like a Christmas star?”