They reached the wall of debris and could see the pile tower over them. Warren’s guess of 75 feet in height was accurate. As the full moon rose over the edge of the mountain’s eastern ridge, they could make out details within the huge mound which was primarily made up of trees and branches. But there were also odd pieces sticking out of the pile that were crafted by humans, such as the wall of a barn and whole windows from houses. They walked as quickly as they could along the massive and seemingly unending wall of debris.
In half an hour, a mound of debris rose like a lesser lump before them, as though a pile had fallen off the larger heap and stood in their way.
“Well, it looks like we’ve reached our first roadblock,” Warren said, eyeing the three story mass of debris that lay in their path.
They carefully walked around the pile and, upon reaching its far side, Wattenbarger gasped excitedly, “Here’s your tunnel, dude! But holy crapola, look at that!”
Before them lay an opening through the debris pile some 150 feet in width. It was a clean sweep of earth that obviously led to the tree-line on the opposite side. But what captured their attention was a passenger aircraft, a Boeing 7E7 Dreamliner, sticking tail up in the center of the cleanly swept path before them. It towered over 150 feet above them, perfectly balanced on its nose. It even appeared to have little damage to its structure – both wings were intact as well as its tail structure. Were it not real and towering over them, it would have appeared to be a toy sticking out of some monster child’s sandbox.
“How do you suppose this got here?” Wattenbarger asked Warren.
Warren shook his head slowly looking at the bizarre scene in front of him. “I would suggest it was picked up from Tulsa International, or some airport from who knows where, and was deposited here by the tornado.”
Wattenbarger began to walk toward the aircraft.
“Dale, stop!” Warren cautioned.
“What?” Wattenbarger asked, turning to face him.
“It’s balanced, for heaven’s sake! It may not take much to tip it one way or another!”
“But we have to see what’s inside!” Wattenbarger replied. “It may be loaded with food!”
Warren arced his head back as far as he could, looking up toward the tail of the plane, then allowed his eyes to travel down its length to the slightly wrinkled forward fuselage sticking out of the soil. “No aircraft carries a supply of food!” he responded. “They just load what they need prior to each flight.”
Wattenbarger looked momentarily frustrated, then gazed longingly back at the aircraft. “Well, they don’t wait to load those little bottles of liquor. I know for a fact they keep ‘em onboard all the time.”
Warren sighed deeply. He, too, very much wanted to see what was inside. But he was also acutely aware of the inherent dangers of hundreds of thousands of pounds of mass balanced precariously on its aluminum skinned nose.
“The liquor’s all in the back, near the tail, way up at the top,” Warren reasoned. “Besides, the impact would’ve shattered all the bottles.”
“Bullcrap! I’m goin’ in!” Wattenbarger snapped, turning to walk away.
“Dale, stop for just a moment,” Warren pleaded. “You’re gonna kill us both because you need a drink. I won’t let you do that. Not to me or to any of us. Not…especially not to Mel!”
Wattenbarger stopped in his tracks. Slowly he turned to face Warren. “Okay, then, here’s the deal. After we establish the system at the observatory, after it’s all over, we go… no, I go… in to see. Deal?”
Warren nodded his head somberly. “Once its working, we both go in, together. Deal?”
“Deal!” Wattenbarger smiled as he struggled with the tension elicited by his addiction. “Now where?”
“Through the pass,” Warren answered, nodding beyond the stricken aircraft to the black canopy of trees on the other side. But both of them stood unmoving, nervously staring at the towering mass of steel rising above them.
“I say, to the right,” Warren finally said.
“I was gonna say left,” Wattenbarger confessed.
Warren signed deeply. “Okay then, we toss a coin,” he said, pulling a shiny disk out of his right pocket.
“Let me guess,” Wattenbarger said dryly. “You were gonna use that for coffee, just in case we ran into a Starbucks between here and there.”
“It’s my lucky ‘heads I win – tails you lose’ coin. Call it,” Warren said, tossing the coin in the air.
“Heads!” Wattenbarger shouted.
“I win,” Warren responded after a quick glance at the disc before he immediately pocked the coin.
Wattenbarger looked as if he wanted to challenge him, then laughed lightly, shook his head slowly and headed without speaking toward the rift in the piles of debris that featured the altogether bizarre sight of the completely vertical aircraft, tail sticking high up in the air. As he approached within arms reach of the craft, passing to its right, he stopped and looked at a cracked window just aft of the control deck.
“Warren, maybe the radios survived!” he exclaimed.
“I already thought of that,” Warren responded quietly. “The problems with that theory are many. For one, they probably couldn’t have survived. And even if they did, aircraft radios are typically line of sight, so they wouldn’t do us any good. And that doesn’t even mention tryin’ to get ‘em out of that wreckage safely.”
“Killjoy,” Wattenbarger replied flatly as he walked slowly by the giant monument embedded in the black soil of the mountain.
“Let’s move along quickly,” Warren said. “I’ve got no desire to be pinned under that pile of wreckage.
“This whole trek reminds me of the Khumbu Icefall in Nepal,” Wattenbarger mused.
“Since when have you been to Nepal?”
“I haven’t. But a friend of mine actually summited Everest,” Wattenbarger added. “He said that the most dangerous part of the climb was a narrow trail that led around a rotten glacier field called the Khumbu Icefall. He said you had to walk through it and you never knew when another wall of ice was gonna peel off and crush you without warning at all.”
“Great, thanks,” Warren retorted instantly. “We’ll call this the Khumbu pass.”
“Fits well!” Wattenbarger responded.
In just ten minutes they had crossed over the area. They walked carefully through the mountainous piles of tornadic deposited debris, safely under the precariously balanced passenger jet on Concharty Mountain and now they faced the bizarre world of the relatively untouched and densely forested mountaintop.
The canopy of Concharty's blasted forest lay before them, a skeleton’s shroud hanging off its nighttime summit like an outrageous, lascivious toupee. The harsh, gray light of the full moon filtered through the tangled, naked upper branches of the tree-tops and fell as a barely useful noise of shadowed light, blurred against a billion indistinct points on the sterile carpet below. Above them, the branches and branchlets of the mountain’s blackjack hickory stood tangled together, hardy and fixed against the daylight onslaught of the sun's deadly rays. But, though stubborn, they were quite dead nonetheless, projected upward as impotent, gnarled, skeletoneous fists of defiant rage lifted in ultimate futility against a bitterly angry sky.
The pair stopped at the entrance to Concharty’s wall of trees as though it might be impassible. It was as if some nameless force seized them at its outer limit and would permit them no passage. They both just stood, staring into its strange, black interior mottled beneath with the creepy light of the moon.
Finally, Warren sighed deeply, then checked his watch. “Marking our way clearly is most important,” he noted. “We have a little moonlight to help us out for a few hours tonight, but it won’t always be with us. And we have to get through this quickly. Once marked, we need to be able to move through at the pace of a brisk walk without gettin’ lost.”
“If we mark our trail clearly, then anyone else can follow it as well,” Wattenbarger noted with no e
motion.
“Yeah, true, but it’ll only lead here. Our cave is far enough away to leave ‘em guessin’ and there’s no place to hole up and pick up the trail, even if they wanted to keep lookin’ day after day. It seems safe enough to me.” Warren could see his friend’s eyes shift back to the dark forest.
“He only comes out at night, you know,” Wattenbarger whispered.
“Who does?” Warren whispered reflexively in return.
“The Creek Indians passed on a legend about these mountains,” Wattenbarger began in hushed tones. “There’s a monster lurking in the woods at night. He’s called, in the Creek language, Monatawana. Monatawana is half bison and half cougar – he’s the horrible revenge of Chief Nawnatawki.”
Warren stared back at Wattenbarger with shifting eyes, following the line of the forest with his vision, then looked back to his companion.
“Who was Chief Nawnatawki?” he whispered hoarsly.
“He was the great Chief of the Creek Nation when the white man came here, took his land and killed his people. As he took his last breath, he swore a curse on the land at the moment of his death. That very night, Monatawana came callin’ on the white men and their families.”
“What happened to ‘em?” Warren asked, eyes flashing about nervously.
“It’s not possible to describe what they found the next morning,” Wattenbarger replied, shaking his head slowly and placing his fingers aside his cheeks. “There were not enough body parts to even identify them as human. They gathered up the remains of forty settlers – men, women and children - and buried ‘em in a single coffee can. They dropped ‘em down a well from which strange lights are still seen hovering on many moonless nights.”
“Good Lord,” Warren shivered. “Well thank God we have a full moon tonight.”
Wattenbarger laughed lightly, then whispered. “Well, ‘cept that Monatawana only comes out on the few nights around a full moon.”
Warren ’s eyes nervously raced about the moonlit summit.
“One other thing,” Wattenbarger said. “Monatawana only hunts white men. And, as a Creek, I’m not on his list.”
“Wait a minute,” Warren replied as his eyes unfocused as though he were deep in thought. “You always told me you had Cherokee blood.”
A long, serious pause followed. Then Wattenbarger replied with a sheepish grin, “Oops!”
“This whole story was nothin’ but bull,” Warren snapped. “Am I right?”
Wattenbarger grinned, then responded in a normal voice, “Well, every time we came up here as boys, we told ghost stories and scared the living crap out of each other. And last time you told the story, I sat up all night long with my b-b pistol aimed at the door of our cave. So, my friend, payback is hell, and you’ve just been had!”
Warren looked provoked, then thought hard before he responded. “On this mission, minutes and seconds count for life and death. And you just wasted how many of those minutes on a boy’s ghost story? Billions of people have died horrible deaths and we’re next in the reaper man’s line, remember? And now, now, we have to share our vigilance on an impossible mission in a dark, tangled and unfriendly forest looking over our shoulders for the ghost of a fake Indian with the dubious name of Monatawana?”
“What d’ya mean we, white-man?” Wattenbarger instantly replied in his best fake Indian accent, then exploded in rolling, impulsive laughter.
Warren allowed him to get it out of his system before stating, “Now that you’ve had and fully savored your sweet revenge that you’ve plotted for over a quarter century, may we please proceed?” Then he strode out before Wattenbarger and took a step under the wooded canopy.
“Monatawana moontaba cunzina savogni boltha lawna,” Wattenbarger responded.
Warren stopped. “Do I actually have to ask what that meant?” he sighed in true exasperation.
“Roughly translated, it’s Cherokee for, “Monatawana wants to know if he can sell you a van.”
Warren returned an icy stare. “Follow me, please,” he said, stepping into Concharty’s dark wooded interior.
The tension of the darkness was immediate and overpowering. They stepped slowly, their eyes carefully following the narrow path of the flashlights, then shifting into the dark interior that lay before them. Step by step, they carefully broke sticks on either side of their path, lifting broken branches from the way as they walked to clearly mark their trail.
They had walked no more than forty steps when deep in the interior of the forest, a loud, thundering crack and boom echoed through the woods and vibrated the ground beneath them. Both men fell onto their faces in the leaves. Warren could feel the hairs stand up on the back of his neck and head.
“What the hell was that?” Wattenbarger whispered from the darkness, his voice labored and panicked.
“I don’t know,” Warren responded in his own gasping reply.
They both listened intently. There was nothing but the deepest silence.
“What the holy hell was that?” Wattenbarger gasped again. “It was freakin’ loud! Was it a gunshot? What was that noise?”
“In all of your careful research, did Monatawana own a cannon?” Warren whispered.
“That’s not funny, not funny,” Wattenbarger responded with a shudder. “What the hell was that noise? It was big and it was loud and it came from just ahead of us right on the path we have to follow.”
“Well, just run the numbers in your head, my friend,” Warren responded with maddeningly analytical thought. “Nothin’ living can survive out in these woods. So that leaves three choices. One: someone like us comes out at night from their deep shelter and fires really big guns. Or, two: it could be the supernatural apparition of your Indian monster lookin’ for white men and half-breeds in the dark.”
“I already told you, I made the story up! You said three choices. What’s your third?”
“I would theorize that a dead tree, drying out under stress, would sound just like that if it sheared under tension.”
“How about reason number four?” Wattenbarger asked. “Because the first three were really lame.”
“What’s that smell?” Warren said suddenly.
Wattenbarger audibly sniffed. “Electrical. It smells electrical.”
“Did you see any lightning?” Warren asked.
“There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
“I smell ozone. It’s strong and getting stronger,” Warren replied.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Wattenbarger said, his eyes flashing rapidly about.
“Wait,” Warren replied, reaching out in the darkness and placing his hand on Wattenbarger’s shoulder.
A long moment passed, then the darkness itself was cut in half by a blinding ball of fire exploding from the woods.
“Run!” Warren screamed, but Wattenbarger needed no encouragement. They both sprinted back to the clearing from which they had entered the forest.
“Stop!” Warren shouted as they entered the clearing. The vertical shadow of the jet loomed before them, now illuminated in the flickering yellow light of the inferno at their rear.
They turned around to see another ball of flame leap hundreds of feet into the air from the forest, followed by the thundering clap of another explosion.
“Lew, let’s get out of here,” Wattenbarger snapped, his face lined with tension. “We’ve got to get back to the cave, now!”
“Number four,” Warren began, looking at the fire now beginning to engulf the dead tinder of the woods.
“What?” Wattenbarger asked incredulously, poised to run for the cave.
“Number four,” Warren calmly replied, now composed. “You wanted four reasons for the noise. I’m about to give you reason number four.”
Wattenbarger just nodded in expectation.
“It’s dark out here,” Warren began, “and it’s scary. Then you had to add our friend Monatawana to the mix just to make it even more exciting. But remember what your daddy taught you when you were a kid.”
“There ain’t no such things as monsters in the dark.”
“But there is…” Wattenbarger replied earnestly.
“Save it for later,” Warren snapped. “What we have here before us is a fire, nothing more. We’ve both seen fires out here before.”
“But who caused the fire?”
“Not who. All the whos are dead, remember? The question isn’t who at all, but what. You see, when you subtract the who, then the what becomes nothing more than an intellectual exercise. Reason number four: what we’re witnessing is another piece of equipment blowing up, just like that unlikely piece of equipment over there,” Warren said, pointing to the upended jet. “Now here’s the deal. We need to get a grip or we won’t be able to navigate these dark woods at night because our fears will consume us before we get the job done. Now there ain’t no Monatawana and there ain’t no boogie man out there. We’re definitely gonna find the dead and the weird in spades, but nothin’ looking to eat us for dinner and stuff us in a coffee can and drop us down a well. Got it?”
Wattenbarger began to laugh quietly and shook his head slowly. “Guess who just got scared by his own ghost story.”
“See, my friend, that’s why the Good Book says that revenge belongs only to God Himself.”
“Well, there really are monsters, you know,” Wattenbarger stated.
“Save it!” Warren replied with a sigh. “We’re goin’ back home.”
“What? I thought you said there weren’t any monsters out there.”
“We have to let the fire work for us. With any luck, it’ll burn out a fair amount of forest so that we won’t have to pick through it a foot at a time. By tomorrow night, it may be cool enough to walk around its edge. I’d guess that a path though the ashes will be easier to follow than a path through the trees. The fire will probably save us days.”
They sighed and looked back at the inferno building before them. The night sky was alight with the dancing flames engulfing the dead and dry forest. They could feel the wall of heat as the flames leapt more than a hundred feet into the starlit sky.
“Sad,” Wattenbarger said softly.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 50
