The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

  There was nothing for Anna to do but hold onto Logan. If a piece of debris came at them, there was nothing they could do to protect themselves from something that had fallen from space, and certainly nothing could stop something the size of a station arm. She couldn’t even hear him saying her name at first, but eventually through the ringing in her ears, she opened her eyes to look up at him.

  By some miracle, they were uninjured, and most of whatever had fallen was kilometers away, but the pieces were so large that they were certainly visible from a distance.

  “What the fuck?!?” Anna hissed. If there had been some kind of station malfunction, they should have been warned, for fuck’s sake. “What was that?!? A whole fucking arm?” God, had there been people on that arm?

  “That’s what it looks like.” He was still looking back and forth between her and the sky, but it didn’t look like there were any other large pieces still coming down, just flashes of light in the upper atmosphere as bits of dust and debris were vaporized on their way down.

  He pulled away from her just enough to help her to her feet and stood there looking out at the devastation in the distance for a while, completely dumbfounded. “We need to get moving. If that came down where it looks like it did, that’s over the Reeves farm. Are you okay?” He was still looking her over frantically and still looking back out at all the fires as well as his own equipment. Some of the harvesters had actually been shoved off track by the impact, but it looked like they were working on self-correcting down below. They weren’t his primary concern. Anna was.

  “I’m alright. You were my body armor.” She patted him on the arm as he started to get up, but when they were both up on wobbly legs, she could see the damage. “The fires. They could rip through everything! We need to check on the Reeves and get people out here to get the fires under control!” Shock had stopped her from panicking immediately but she had never been the type to let panic linger for long.

  He didn’t trust the lift after the tower had been shaken that way, so he immediately ran to the stairs and raced down them quickly once he was steady, barely touching each landing on the way down, Anna right behind him. It was a short jog back to the house and the massive auxiliary garage off to one side, but luckily Logan’s truck was parked close to the front with the keys still inside. There were emergency supplies already stowed in the bed of it for general use around the district.

  As soon as he got the truck going and Anna was in the seat next to him, he pulled her across the seat to sit in the middle beside him, unwilling to let her get even a few feet away from him. He didn’t comment on the move, didn’t make a big deal out of it, just got the truck moving as quickly as possible before he grabbed his phone. He tried calling Larissa or Liam, but lines were jammed. “Probably fried cell service in the whole area when it came down. Damn it.”

  “I can’t get through either.” Her phone was giving her all sorts of warnings, but otherwise she couldn’t get it to make a single phone call. “Ben and Liam will take care of everyone else.” Hopefully they were alright enough to do that, but it didn’t look like any debris had gotten as far as the homesteads. “Do you think there were people on that? There had to be, right?” Her stomach twisted as she thought about all the people that could be dead. “Could anyone even survive that?”

  Logan shook his head with obvious grief in his eyes. “Not a chance. Not moving that fast with that much debris through the whole mess. That was an entire arm of a station. There had to be thousands of people on it when it came down. Unless they evacuated it beforehand and did the demolition on purpose, in which case, they need to work on their fucking landings. Bring it down in the Pacific or something, it’s an easier target.” He didn’t sound like he thought it was intentional, though, and he only drove angrier once he was out on an open stretch of road.

  “We would have gotten warning about a demolition. And most of those they jettison off pieces at a time and then dispose of the pieces. A whole arm? That’s unlikely. It must have been some sort of accident.” She looked up toward the sky again, then linked her arm through Logan’s, and he could feel her trembling. “I hope everyone is okay. Our families. The Reeves.”

  He moved to hold her hand as he drove, his eyes scanning the sky and the sides of the road to make sure things were clear. There were two places where debris had shattered part of the road and he had to take the truck around it, but most of the damage seemed to be off the main stretch between his estate and the Reeves. The Reeves farm was a smaller farm when it came to crops, but they had massive amounts of pastureland set aside for cattle, some of which Logan saw stampeding in panic as they got closer. There was an entire herd of horses that had apparently broken free of their paddocks and rushed onto the road just ahead of Logan’s truck in time for him to stop and let them pass. Cows weren’t far behind, rushing away in every direction to get away from the devastation.

  The Reeves’ home was nowhere near the monstrosity Logan’s was, but it was still a large estate house, or it had been, minutes before. Half the house had been immediately destroyed on impact with a massive shard of metal and twisted glass, and some of the other half was still on fire. The main crater of impact from the bulk of the arm itself was visible just a few hundred meters away from the house. The landscape was dotted with fire and choked with dust. Smoke was beginning to cover everything, and Logan cursed as he saw an entire bevy of cars and trucks parked in front of the house.

  “Of all days to have a fucking party…” He pulled up near the side of the house that wasn’t burning, and left the engine running as he jumped out and grabbed a crowbar and fire extinguisher from the bed of the truck. “Check the back of the house! There has to be somebody!” The fires were incredibly loud around them, and his ears were still ringing from the impact as it was.

  Anna jumped into motion, but she had no idea what she would be able to do with fire and large debris that someone would need a crane to remove. She ran around to the back of the house as quickly as she could, but she couldn’t hear much over the crackle of the fire.

  “Can anyone hear me? Hello?!?” She ran wherever the roaring flames weren’t, and didn’t even hear screams. She couldn’t get very close to the house, but she could see part of the arm, and tiny compartments pockmarked along it. It looked like residential units, some kind of orbital apartment complex. There was smoke coming off the arm, glass everywhere, but she had to look.

  The arm itself was every bit as sterile and lifeless as she might have expected from a space station, and as a result, the fires burning along it were contained to broken air ducts and sparse furniture that had caught fire on entry. Instead of fires, though, there were masses of death everywhere she looked, telling the story of the arm’s final, terrifying moments.

  There were huddled groups of what had once been living people crushed up against the bulkheads of the broken corridors, turned to little more than gelatinous masses of burst skin and shattered bone on impact. Some others had apparently had the foresight to web themselves into restraints within their chambers or small craft, but the safety webbing hadn’t been anywhere near enough to help, let alone save them.

  A few of the bodies she found were intact, but either the people’s necks had been snapped or some other piece of shrapnel had broken free and killed them on contact. One woman Anna couldn’t look at for long had secured herself perfectly, but the metal against her back was still glowing bright orange from the heat of atmospheric entry. What remained of the woman was still on fire.

  The closest thing to a survivor she found was a man webbed into what looked like a tiny escape pod with two other unoccupied boards, surrounded by mostly-intact glass and steel. The board had failed in the landing, and had cracked behind him, crushing the man’s spine in the process to leave him broken beneath a single massive fracture in the glass. On the man’s chest, falling halfway out of the jumpsuit he was wearing, was a handheld tablet with one corner cracked by debris. The screen was still on and flickering with an image
of the man’s face, living and screaming, over and over again. He seemed to have been recording just as things were coming to an end.

  Anna had to look away several times, and she had thrown up more than once at the sights in front of her as she wandered through looking for survivors. She stared at the old man who had probably suffered the least horrific death, though the entire sight was one horror after another. Tears ran down her cheeks at the sight of the poor man playing over and over on the tablet, and she couldn’t help but say something. Maybe…”Sir? Sir?” He didn’t stir, but she moved closer anyway.

  In her shock and distress over the entire scene, she slipped and fell forward toward the dead man. At first she screamed, both in fear and pain, since something had sliced her arm open in the fall, but the pain wasn’t as bad as coming face to face with the man who had died. She retched several times before she scrambled to get away and get free, and the tablet caught her eye again. Maybe it would give them answers about what had happened. There had to be some kind of answer, didn’t there? She grabbed at the tablet several times before she managed to get it, but it was made even more difficult by all the slippery blood pouring out of her arm.

  Anna held it to her chest just as she stumbled out of the pod, twisting her ankle in the process and eventually ending up on her knees on the ground where the tablet skittered out of her hands again. She closed her eyes as she tried to get her bearings. She had never seen so much death, and death was a daily occurrence for life on Earth.

  A few minutes passed with her getting her head back on straight, but she was shaken out of her thoughts by an explosion nearby on the main part of the arm, throwing more debris into the air. Someone was calling her name at what seemed like an incredible distance through the flames, but it seemed like a very long time before the person actually reached her.

  Logan looked like a different person from the last time she’d seen him just a few minutes before, his shirtless torso covered in what could have been soot or burns, it was difficult to tell which through the smoke and haze of the fires. “Come on, we’ve got to get to Doc Weber’s! I got Kevin and a few of the others out, they’re in the truck.”

  Anna agreed, though she was dazed as she attempted to get up, and she became even more dizzy once she was standing. She barely had a chance to look down at her injury to see that her arm was flayed open the entire length of her forearm and still bleeding before her vision started to get blurry. “I don’t know what I cut my arm on…”

  Logan was already ripping at a scrap of fabric he had brought with him from the front side of the house to wrap her arm tightly. If he didn’t, she was likely to lose too much blood and pass out, or worse.

  “Looks like the glass.” He said as he picked a few shards off her arm before he finished wrapping it up. He looked down at what she’d found and saw the tablet give a final sputter of the man’s face on the screen just before it switched off completely. He grabbed the tablet and put it into her hands before he scooped her up in his arms and started jogging back toward the front of the house. She could feel that he was favoring one leg, but he didn’t falter as he ran.

  There was one other able-bodied man out in front of the house, a young man no more than Cory’s age, sitting in the bed of Logan’s truck trying to hold pressure on two of his family members at once, one of them an older sister, the other a cousin, if Anna remembered correctly. Their mother was bandaged up about as well as Anna herself was, lying unconscious but otherwise apparently whole. Logan took Anna to the front seat and shoved the tablet beneath it before racing around to his side to get the truck in gear.

  Anna’s vision remained blurry on the way to Doc Weber’s, since the doctor’s home wasn’t exactly close, and her arm continued to bleed. The ringing in her ears was still a constant annoyance, since it made hearing Logan more difficult on top of feeling weak and dizzy. “There were so many people. Half of them…just…goo. It was worse than any horror movie I’ve ever seen.”

  “I saw.” Logan managed to say, putting the pedal down to the floor every time he had an open stretch of road, while trying to take even the gentlest curves slower so as not to aggravate the injured he was transporting. His truck was no ambulance, but it had to make do. “I don’t know how something like this happens. A failure on that kind of scale makes no sense. Those stations have been flying for hundreds of years, replaced bit by bit to make them new all over again. I’ve never heard of anything like this in all that time. Not even close.”

  “Then it had to be an attack.” Which was also unheard of, but to Anna it was more likely than the kind of technological failure it would take for such a catastrophe to happen. Humans were capable of such senselessness and violence. Technology was more careful and precise. “I don’t know what that means, or why anyone would attack that station…” She said as she held her uninjured hand to one of her ringing ears. “I wish I’d never seen it. That’s going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”

  Logan got to a long stretch of straight road and put out his hand to take hers, careful to avoid any of the damage that had been done to her arm. “I wish we hadn’t either. All I care about right now is getting you to Doc Weber and getting you fixed up.”

  Anna looked down at his hand holding hers and her eyes filled with tears again. Anna wasn’t often a crier. This day was different. She could have died. Logan could have died. They could have died in the tower, he could have died running into the burning house. Some other part of the arm could have exploded and killed them both.

  Then what?

  Then they would have been an almost, a sad, pathetic almost, and nothing else to show for their lives but loneliness and pain. That was what.

  “Promise you’ll stay with me? You could have died. I don’t know what I would do without you, Logan.” She found herself saying through the ringing in her ears. She didn’t want to leave his side.

  “You’re not getting out of my sight.” He promised with another squeeze of her hand, though he couldn’t take his eyes off the road as he drove. They were eating up countryside in a hurry, but it was still a long way to the Webers, and there were lives to be saved in the back of the truck.

  6

  When she woke up, it was in a place she’d seen more times in her youth than she wanted to remember. Doc Weber’s house and the clinic she operated were in the middle of the only thing in their district that could be called a town, though it was home to just under three hundred people. It mostly consisted of the shipping depot and market where products were imported and exported out to more major traffic routes. The clinic took up a small, oft-rebuilt wing of what had once been a full hospital, back when the town had been a full city.

  Anna opened her eyes to a broad, open room that echoed with other people’s footsteps. She was lying in a bed with the railing raised on both sides to keep her from rolling off, next to the windows where she could look out at the sun beginning to set. From the way she’d been laid out on the bed, she could see the Reeves family across from her, or what was left of it. Mrs. Reeves was still unconscious, as was her daughter in the bed beside her, with her little brother sitting and looking back and forth nervously at them both. The cousin was nowhere to be seen.

  Next to her bed, away from the windows, Logan was sitting in a chair with a blanket draped around his shoulders, working away at a message on his phone. It was obvious from the look of him and the scent of smoke still hanging in the air that he hadn’t washed or been tended to since the rescue, if he even needed such attention. Her own ankle was set in a tight brace that was keeping pressure on it to take the swelling down, and her arm had been wrapped in a clear bandage after cleaning. Beneath it, she could see the spray Dr. Weber had used to bind her arm back together and begin to regrow the skin. It was only a patch until her own body took hold, but she knew from previous scrapes and cuts that she would be back to a normal arm within a day or two.

  “Hey.” Her voice crackled as she spoke to Logan next to her, and she tried to sit up
slowly, but she was feeling lightheaded and her mouth felt dry. The taste in her mouth was rancid, probably from all the times she’d thrown up. “Logan.”

  He looked up immediately when she said his name, and she could see not only soot but a few burns on his face that had been only hastily treated. Still, he moved quickly, and got to the side of the bed to take her good hand. “Nice of you to wake up. Doc said she thought it would be later on tonight before you decided to join us. How’s the arm?”

  “It feels pretty numb.” She said as she glanced down at it again but she scooted aside so that he could sit more on the bed with her instead of on the edge. “I feel numb. About everything. How are they?” Anna nodded toward the Reeves family, but she didn’t think he would have good news.

  “Those three are gonna be alright. She’s gonna keep them here for smoke inhalation and some more treatments for their burns. Kendra caught the worst of it, and Kevin’s still freaking out about her, no matter how much the doc says she’ll be fine. Their mom took some hits to the head, but Doc said the scans come through clear, just a matter of waiting for her to wake up. Their cousin is in surgery. Cathy. Been there for most of the afternoon.”

  He nodded across the room at the boy sitting with his sister, and actually smiled as he shook his head. “Crazy idiot saw a fireball coming straight for his house and his first instinct was to start taping every damn thing. He got most of everything on video, including you and me showing up to the house. He was taping from the cellar where he ran when things started blowing up, but then kept recording from his house once he got out.”

  “He better hide it. Authorities will come through soon enough, I’m sure, and they’ll want to confiscate anything that might have information. That’s how they deal with problems.” Anna curled into Logan’s side as soon as he was on the bed with her, and she closed her eyes, pretending the tears that came were from the pain and not from the reminder that she could have lost Logan. “Are we staying here?”