The End of the Beginning

by Mark H Culbertson

  I kept spotting movement for the rest of the night. There appeared to be more than one of whatever it was. They were staying just out of direct sight and they were good, real good.

  I woke Mike just as the eastern horizon started to show some light. I really didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to alarm Russell or Charlie and I wanted a chance to fill her in.

  I knelt down next to her and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She was instantly awake. I motioned her back away from the fire and toward the darkness surrounding Nemesis. Just as we moved up next to the starboard landing gear something real large and fast darted away from the port gear. I whipped the M-16 to waist level, but Mike grabbed the barrel with her hand and pushed it toward the ground before I could fire a shot. She looked at me and said “Whatever it was, it’s been there most of the night. I spotted it just after dusk last night. If it meant us harm we would probably have known it by now.” Stunned, I asked “Why didn’t you say anything?” She grinned and said “What, and have a couple of trigger happy American cowboys shooting up the natives? I don’t think so.”

  Russell and Charlie were still out. It hadn’t made much noise taking off and I guess with the bulk of Nemesis between it and them it must have blocked what little sound it made. “What do you think it is?” I asked Mike. She shrugged and said “Whatever it was it was big, fast and smart enough to hide out of sight. I think right now it’s just curious, we’ll find out later if it’s dangerous. Let’s get some breakfast started and wake the others”.

  I woke Russell first and decided to wake Charlie after we got the breakfast hot. We opted for scrambled eggs, sausage and toast. We settled for grape flavored protein jelly, a soy patty and a piece of flat bread. I popped the tops on the soy patties and set them at the edge of the fire. I could have went back into Nemesis and used the convection to heat them in just a couple of seconds but it seemed like way too much trouble when I had a perfectly good campfire going within a couple of feet of me. Charlie perked up on his own as the coffee started to boil and the food was getting hot, he kept watching me and finally spoke up and said “quiet night?” I told him what I had seen and what Mike and I had encountered. Russell asked “I wonder what it is?” Mike looked at him and said “I don’t know, but I don’t think that it means to hurt us, yet. It’s just curious about what we are. Keep in mind that there may not have been any humans in the area for almost twenty years.”

  As we were finishing breakfast Mike said, “I want to see if we can get Nemesis leveled out.” I gave her a kind of quizzical look and before I could open my mouth and make a fool of myself she said “I want to get her up and ready for takeoff in case we need to get out of here in a hurry. That means we need to come up a way to get her off the ground again. After all, if we can get her topside again, we won’t have to land and I don’t want to leave all my eggs with a twenty-year-old prototype sitting at Boeing.” I shut my mouth and decided that I knew why they had made Mike the skipper of this mission. She was better at it than I was. Cover your bases, no halfway measures. If we couldn’t get Prometheus up she was at least going to do her best to get Nemesis back topside.

  We decided that we should check out the warehouses and business first. At least it appeared that we did. I really think that Mike did the deciding and just made it look like that we had made the decision and that she had just agreed, one more reason why she was skipper. Mike made us pack two days worth of food and water. We hadn’t tested the river water yet, but Nemesis had water distillation and could pull about eight gallons a day out of the air and the Missouri river was about three quarters of a mile in the opposite direction of Spirit of St. Louis.

  We decided that the thing to do, would be to climb the slight hill to the overpass to get a higher view of the surrounding area. I took point, followed by Mike and Russell with Charlie at tail. As I got to the top and could look around I couldn’t help but feel a slight bit of jubilation, until it hit me. I realized that these cars in the parking lots weren’t shoppers or workers, and that no one was going home to fix dinner for the husband after his commute. That these cars were abandoned or more likely had the remains of people who just wanted to be together at the last. You’ve all seen the end of the world movies where the streets are blocked with wrecked cars with bodies everywhere. It wasn’t like that. These cars were parked in the parking lot in the same way that you would see them at the mall on a Saturday night.

  I don’t know how long we stood there. It may have been seconds. It could have been hours. That time will stick in my mind until I die. Finally, Mike said “Lord forgive us for what we have done and what we will do” and stepped forward onto the roadway and off down the hill. I reached up to rub my eyes and realized my face was wet. I caught up to Mike and noticed that it wasn’t just me. I didn’t say anything and she didn’t look over at me. That’s Mike. She wasn’t going to show that she was hurting. Or maybe she knew that we all were.

  As we came to the intersection at the bottom of the hill I noticed a sign that said Chesterfield Airport Rd. I wondered how long it would be before that sign would mean anything again or if it ever would. Just as I was turning my head to look at Mike to see which way we wanted to approach from, I saw something really big and really fast moving out of the corner of my right eye. It looked like another one of those dogs. This thing came out of the cover on the side of the road fast, real fast. The size is what surprised me. This thing was looking me in the eye and was headed right for Mike. I yelled “Down!” and let loose a short burst with the 16 over the top of Mike’s head as she was hitting the ground. I hit it. The sound that this thing let out was uncanny. It almost sounded like a scream. It hit the ground at a roll, changed direction and had crossed the road before anyone else could get off another shot. Mike stood up and flipped down her goggles. She said “It’s still moving. Three hundred degrees about sixty meters out.” It seems that the depleted uranium slugs for the 16’s worked with the radiation goggles that we had. “Should we follow it?” asked Russell. “I don’t think that any of us could keep up with it. Even wounded it’s moving at about 30 klicks per hour. Think you can run that fast, Russ?” asked Charlie.

  “They’re just testing us”, said Mike, but I noticed that her eyes kept moving even if her weapon didn’t. She was spooked. That thing had caught all of us off guard. If I hadn’t of been turning to look in that direction Mike would have been in rough shape.

  Russell walked over to the edge of the road, pulled a small plastic container out of his pocket and used it to scrape some blood off the ground. He turned and looked back at us and said “We’ve got DNA readings from everything on Earth from before. I’d like to see what that thing used to be.”

  We moved on down the road to the right, the direction that the Dog, with a capital D, had come from. There were several buildings that I identified as banks and restaurants and Mike wanted to bypass those. It was almost as if she were looking for something in particular and just didn’t want to say it out loud. About a mile down the road we came to what looked to be a retirement home. Mike said “Let’s check it out.” Charlie and I looked at each other and didn’t even have time to question her, when she said “We’re going to need compressed oxygen, where better to find it than a hospital, nursing home or a machine shop?” I felt pretty dumb, it’s that kind of thinking that keeps you alive and I wasn’t doing that good of a job of it.

  As we moved toward the building, Mike said, “Ray, you and Charlie on point, I’ve got the tail, Russ keep your head up and your eyes open.” We crossed that parking lot like it were full of rattlesnakes. Charlie and I were leapfrogging from car to car, trying to present a low profile to anything that may be in the building. Not that I expected anything, but I’ve seen men die walking into things they didn’t expect. Mike and Russ hung back about 100 feet, Russ watching us, Mike with quick looks all around. I hit the building first on the left side of the door, Charlie came in to the right. So far, so good, no movement, no gunshots or rocks from the second floor,
nothing out of the ordinary. The doors were glass and still intact. There two sets of doors, with the expected handicapped buttons on each side. The right door was meant to swing in and the left out. I motioned to Charlie that I was going in low and to the right, kind of a diving across the doorway into the building and was going to push the door open as I hit it.

  I launched myself and did a perfect shoulder roll into the door, and stopped, hard. The damn thing was locked! Russ started laughing from his spot behind us, Charlie just grinned the whole while he was keeping his eyes open and looking inside those doors. I moved back out of the doorway to keep from being a target to anything that may be inside, the fact that I turned and moved away is probably what saved my life.

  Chapter 3

  I felt something hit my backpack, at the same time that I heard the glass shattering. I did a dive to the right just as Charlie let loose a burst from the M-16. It took a minute for my heart to slow down and I felt something wet on my back. I wasn’t hurting anywhere, but I knew that was misleading, I took a bullet in Iraq and it was thirty minutes after the gunfire stopped before I realized that I had been hit. Charlie still had his gun up and was trying to take a look at me at the same time. “I’m still here, just tell me what the fuck hit me!” I yelled. Mike’s voice from behind me said, “looks like an arrow, I need you to unbuckle your backpack, but do it slowly, I don’t want to make the wound any bigger than I have to. Charlie keep an eye on that door and where it came from, anything moves and you fire one burst above, next shot for keeps.”

  I was having trouble with the straps and was really afraid that something serious was wrong. I still couldn’t feel pain other than my shoulder where I had hit the pavement and the moisture had ran down my back all the way to my pants. Russ came up in front of me with a grim look on his face and said “Let me do that,” and unbuckled the backpack. I could feel Mike taking a hold of it to take the weight off of the arrow that may be stuck in my back. Mike, in a serious voice, said “American cowboys scared of water, huh?” and then held the backpack out in front of me. The arrow, or what looked like a crossbow bolt to be exact, had hit one of the water cans inside my backpack. That pretty well explained the moisture running down my back, but sure didn’t explain where the damn thing had come from.

  Mike looked at Russ and said “keep an eye out the way we came, anything moving Charlie?” Charlie never looked over, but said “Some movement just after the arrow came flying out of nowhere, but nothing since. It came from down the main hallway, about a third of the way down.”

  I sat holding my backpack, taking a look at the crossbow bolt. It was made of metal with synthetic feathers. I fished the water can out of the backpack and pulled the bolt the rest of the way through the backpack. I was lucky. If it hadn’t been for that can and that glass door, I would have been as good as dead. That thing would have went through the pack, through my shoulder blade and if it hadn’t of hit my heart it would have a least pierced a lung and that would have been it. The head consisted of what looked like high carbon steel blades that were razor sharp. It looked like it had came from a sporting goods store. I said as much and Mike said “probably did. I’m sure that there weren’t too many people around in the beginning looting stores for crossbows. This one was probably picked up by someone with some brains, after all it’s kind of hard to reload that 7mm round if you don’t know how to make gunpowder.”

  Mike had picked up my pack and pulled out a piece of the flat bread with some of the flavored protein jelly. She smeared some on the flat bread, looked up at Charlie and said “I’m going up to that door, you keep a sharp eye. If you see anything hold fire, but let me know.” She slid up to the door on her stomach, ignoring all the broken glass, placed the flat bread just inside, then scooted back out of the way and said “let’s move on.”

  We all pulled back toward the parking lot, Mike on point, Charlie on tail with Russ and me as wingmen, and moved on around to the west side of the building. A lot of the glass on the building was intact and what wasn’t intact had iron grates pulled up against it. Some of them looked like storm water grates that were held up with wire, a couple had chains. Just another point of observation that should have told us somebody or something was living there. We weren’t ready for this. Mike stopped us with a hand and started moving back to the north to the street. There was an old Ford Econoline van sitting at the end of the parking lot with faded out letters on the side. She motioned us behind the van and then hunkered down so as to be out of sight of the windows.

  As we settled in, she said, “there was more movement on the second floor as we came around the corner. There’s no way that we’re going to walk around that building in plain sight of whoever’s living in there. We’d be sitting geese.” Russ said “sitting ducks”, Mike gave him a glare and said “be dead ducks if don’t pull head out of ass,

  crossbow bolt went through 20 mm plate glass and aluminum water bottle in Ray’s pack. If not for bottle, Ray be dead.” Mike was pissed. I don’t know if it was because we had been outmaneuvered or if it was because she had almost lost a crewmember. Either way, she needed time to regroup.

  We sat there for about ten minutes when Mike said “fuck it, we’ve got to do this sometime, Ray walk point with me” and started walking back towards the door of the building. Charlie and Russ started to get up, but Mike said “No, stay out of sight but keep an eye on us and anything else that moves.”

  Mike went after it differently this time. She just walked up to the building like she owned the place. M-16 pointed towards the ground, but still ready to come into play if need be. As we got close to the door, Mike said “Ray, on toes, this not right.” I saw what she meant. There was a metal grate over the door that had just been shattered. There were chains looped through it that went inside to both sides of the door. It had only been about fifteen minutes ago that Mike had slid the flatbread with the jelly inside the door. They or he, or it hadn’t made a sound, but had put a thirty kilo grate through the door and chained it down, all without us hearing it or seeing any movement. Mike backed away and we moved back towards the van much more cautiously than we had moved toward the building.

  Mike told Russ and Charlie what we had seen. She also said that the flat bread and jelly were gone. We all sat there for a minute and then Mike said “this now a combat mission. We have to reassess, and concentrate on the primary goal. We’re going on to Spirit of St.Louis, we’re going to see what we can get in the way of parts and then we’re heading back to Nemesis. Ray, you and Charlie take point,” and with that she got up and looked through the windows of the van toward the building. “Still no movement, not that we would be able to see it anyway. These guys are good.”

  We moved back out to the street and continued to head west to the next street that would take us south without too much exposure from nearby buildings. I felt kind of naked out there, walking right down the middle of the street. We turned left on Spirit of St. Louis Boulevard and tried to keep our eyes moving looking for anything.

  We were about a kilometer down the boulevard when Mike said “don’t anybody change what you’re doing, keep your eyes looking around and don’t tense up, we’ve got something following us, Steve, caen en la mitad de la mediana después de la próxima intersección.” The Spanish threw me off for a second, we used to use it topside when we didn’t want the tuna to know that we were talking about them. Mike had asked me to drop off into the median after the next intersection. I started edging toward the left at a very slight angle and heard Mike say “alright, lets double time and see how bad they want to keep up.” I dropped off into the median on the left with a nice slow roll into the four foot tall grass as the other three moved on down the street. The wind was in my face so I wasn’t concerned with being smelled, but I was concerned with being seen. Whatever was following us was savvy, even if it wasn’t intelligent.

  I lay there prone, the M-16 out in front of me, with my eyes glued on the median on the other side. What happened next was pretty
hectic. A kid, no more than eight or nine at the most darted across the pavement directly at me. I had two choices. Either shoot the kid or grab him. I dropped the weapon and came up at him just as he got to me. He must have sensed the movement at the last second because he tried to lunge to my right, but I was too quick for him and caught him around the middle. I got lucky then, my hand latched onto the handle of combat knife strapped to his waist. That’s probably what kept me from meeting the other end of that knife with my ribs or throat. He was fast and strong for his size and tried to grab the knife, but even at over forty, you don’t get to be a shuttle pilot by being weak and after all, he didn’t weigh more than 50 or 60 pounds at most. I swung him straight out and then brought him down on his back with me sitting behind him so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the kicks and swings.

  He was strong and fast. He tried biting, scratching and even groping for my eyes with his hands. I was hoping that Mike and the guys would be doubling back to check things out, but this all happened pretty well in silence. I didn’t want to yell out and alarm anyone, so I put some slight but insistent pressure on the boy’s throat and all the fight went out of him then. I pulled that combat knife out of the sheath and stuck it in the ground behind me. Using my legs to hold him down I undid my belt, one handed, and used it to pull his arms up behind is back. Keeping the belt tight, I shouldered the M-16 and pulled up the combat knife in one hand and the belt in the other and we started down the street the direction that Mike and crew had went. The boy never made a sound.

  As we approached the next intersection I noticed a slight paved area with an old McDonnell F101B Voodoo sitting there on display. Mike, Charlie and Russ where sitting there in the shade of that Voodoo waiting. As soon as Mike saw me, she laid her weapon down, dropped her backpack and walked out to meet me. She never said a word, just reached out and took the belt out of my hand, slipped it off the boy’s arms, took a firm grip on his wrist and led him back to the shade of the plane.