Zach replied with military precision, “Sir, we haven’t seen anything larger than a rat or squirrel within a thousand yards of this location to the east and over twenty five hundred yards in any other direction. There is a human enclave to the east, but they are savages with no organization. The building is easily defendable, but no water to speak of. It is possible that there are rations still inside the building, but per your orders, the building has not been breached.”
“Alright, good job, Roger what about your end?”
Roger was a fireplug of a man. Short, stout and with a mustache that threatened to take over the rest of his face.
He replied, “Sir all of the minor debris has been cleared from the main runway. However, we do have a couple of items that we need some manpower and possibly the Hummers for.”
Thomas nodded and started barking orders. Most of the group headed toward the runways with Roger. I told him that I would want to walk the runway prior to takeoff and he said “of course sir, you will be able to walk the cleared runway by the time that you are ready to take off.” That was going to be quite a feat, considering that at least one the “couple of items” that they needed help with was a Boeing 747 Jumbo lying on its side in the middle runway that I needed to take off on. With that he walked to the front door of Boeing Building 1 and nodded to the man standing there who promptly used his gun butt to break the glass.
Although I was halfway expecting it, no alarms went off, no security guards came running, the man who broke the door glass calmly reached in and pushed the door bar to open the door and let Thomas, and the rest of us in.
It was anti-climatic. There wasn’t much dust, because they kept this building as air tight as was possible. We did find eight uniforms with bones in them along with the M-16’s that they had for protection. It seems that the US Marines didn’t believe in abandoning their posts.
Thomas nodded to several of the men, who turned and moved back outside. I was dumbstruck. It was one thing to be in this building when you had the energy and excitement of the thousands of people that worked here surrounding you. It was quite another to have walked into it possibly twenty years or so after the last person who had been here alive.
The men who had moved outside had returned with blankets and began transferring the bones and uniforms to the blankets. When I asked Thomas what they were doing he said “we are going to bury them. They gave too much to not have at least that much respect given to them.” I nodded, I’m not sure that I could have done anything else.
We slowly moved through the reception area and into the front hallway of the building. I definitely had one of those feelings of someone watching me. I couldn’t quite shake it. It was almost like there was someone behind me that kept turning when I did so that they were constantly behind me. It wasn’t like the night we were on watch and the dogs were watching us, it was entirely different than that. Mike and I both knew for sure that we were being watched that night, today it was the feeling that we weren’t quite alone. I looked at Mike and said “you feel it?” She nodded and said “We call it ‘fantome de mort’, you would know it as ghosts of the dead.”
I think that described it best of all. The people were missing but their presence wasn’t. You could tell that they had been there and it almost felt like that they were going to come back any second.
Thomas nodded and said “you get used to it after a while. In the early days, every time that we entered one of the larger buildings, we felt it. It was almost like the doors were going to open and the hallways were going to flooded with people or that the security cameras still worked and some old guy in a uniform was going to come down and ask you what he could do for you. I still feel it, but it doesn’t bother me the way it did in the beginning. I consider it our penance for being stupid.”
I moved on down the central hallway without asking anyone where we were going. The last time I was here I was taken to a conference room for a meeting with another pilot and a couple of technicians who told us about the capabilities of Prometheus and then we were lead out to a maze of hallways and finally to an elevator and another maze of hallways that finally took us to the hanger in sublevel one. I tried to stay to the main hallways as much as possible. I knew that the hanger was on the back side of the building. It appeared to be built on almost as an afterthought. I also knew that there was no way we were going to get in from the outside without some high explosive.
I couldn’t rely on the elevators and wasn’t even sure how to get to the hanger or the lower level. I figured that the best way to get to the next level down was to figure out how Prometheus was going to come up. No one asked me any questions, they just followed me. We walked at least a quarter of a mile before I got to an area that I remembered seeing for sure. There were loading docks to my right with many racks full of who knows what on my left. I knew that this would lead to the hanger bay. As we approached the door to the main hanger I remember thinking to myself that I was going to look like an idiot when I walked out into an empty hanger and couldn’t figure out how to get down to where my ride was.
What I hadn’t thought about was the possibility of the hanger door being locked, and it was. This wasn’t just any door. This was a blast door. Over four inches thick, steel construction filled with concrete, capable of withstanding over one hundred fifty pounds per square inch of pressure. I remember learning that fact while I was training. They were there to keep anyone inside the offices from being hurt in case of an accident as well as to keep whatever was inside the hanger safe. It was housed in a wall of solid concrete ten inches thick, with the external blast doors built more solidly than this one.
There was no way through it with our equipment. The only way was around or under. I turned to Thomas who only smiled and nodded. “I was expecting this. They wanted to keep anything in here from being easily acquired by anyone who didn’t have a reason to be here.”
With that he let out two short sharp whistles and turned back down the hallway. Just a few seconds after that Robert and another man who I thought looked familiar came around the corner of one of the racks. It turned out that the other man was Ian. I noticed that they had traded in the slingshots for AR15’s. Where they got them I never found out, but they appeared as at ease with them as I did my M16, maybe more so.
“Sir, our team has found stairwells on the other side of the building. There are openings into the hanger and the rest of the lower levels of the building.”
I know that I was expected to take charge at this point, but it was Thomas who said “Lead the way Robert and we will be close behind you.” With that the whole party turned and followed the boy who didn’t look more than ten.
After backtracking almost a hundred yards with various twists and turns we can to a normal door with a security scanner. With a simple twist of the knob Robert walked through the door and into what looked to be a locker room that opened onto a cafeteria. We walked through the cafeteria in a hushed silence, we could all feel it. Even Thomas, when he did elect to speak, did so in a whisper, “I think that this is probably where the high security workers came to relax and eat. Here they didn’t have to worry about what they said because everyone here was under the same security guidelines.”
I’m pretty sure that he was right. I had never been through this part of the building before, but I don’t think that they would have had a security door for a normal locker room.
The far wall had a single door. It was nothing ostentatious, just plain metal, with a small window. It opened onto a landing with a door and a stairwell. Robert and Ian immediately took defensive positions, Robert at the top of the stairwell and Ian at the first lower landing. I was surprised, it was a basic top down infantry tactic, both had guns pointing down the stairwell ready for anything that were to come their direction.
Mike nudged me and pointed to the door. It was a standard blast door, much like the one that we had encountered earlier, except that this time there was a security scanner and not a high end mechanical dea
d bolt. Mike pointed low and then took position on the door knob side of the door ready for a frontal assault, I held my M16 in one hand while opening the door with the other. Mike went in low and to my left as I went in high and to the right.
There was no need for the frontal assault. This building was dead. Nothing moved in the empty hanger. That’s right, empty. Evidently, Prometheus wasn’t on this level. I was pretty sure that they hadn’t had a chance to move her and so did all of the intelligence guys topside. I could see that the lift had malfunctioned and was lying at an angle instead of the nice flat surface that I was expecting. Other than that, and a couple of forklifts and scissors lifts in the bay, it was empty.
We didn’t get lazy, but deployed in standard infantry fashion. We played leap frog from spot to spot until we could make sure that the entire hanger was in sight. I tried not to look down the ramp that the lift had formed when the end of it had collapsed. I knew that it wasn’t secured yet, but I was drawn to the top of it. I knew she was down there, she had to be. And I was going to take her up.
Chapter 15
I didn’t realize that Mike was standing beside of me until she said “This is the Steve that I know, not the one gets mushy when he think about doing what has to do. You focused now. We get her out and get you back topside.”
I felt guilty when I realized that she had said “get you back topside”. She was talking about me, not the shuttle. I was so damned intent on finding Prometheus that I had almost forgot about the situation that I was going to leave her in. I knew that she meant what she said. She was happy to see me focused again, even if it meant that she played second fiddle to a glorified jet.
In the time that I had been looking off into the darkness, Thomas had been busy trying to get everything lit up. He had succeeded in getting one of the smaller hanger doors open and was in the process of getting the vehicles inside. The sun was beginning to go down outside and Thomas wanted to pull everyone in close before the sun went down. That meant that he wanted everyone inside the building.
I was impressed. I counted nine vehicles and eleven horses, not counting the two trucks and two hummers that we had arrived in. There were forty two different people inside the hanger, and I knew that there were probably at least a dozen outside for lookouts.
No one built any fires, but there were several alcohol powered cook-stoves and it seemed that everyone was cooking something different. Evidently, Mike and the rest of the crew were used to this. They hadn’t spent almost three weeks oblivious to the world lying in a hospital bed, being catered to by a fawning set of admirers. Mike grabbed two pans from the back of one of the Humvee’s, handed one to me and said “let’s eat”.
I went from roasted tubers that looked a little strange, I was later informed that they were sedge tubers, a relative of the potato, to a salad that had something that tasted like cucumbers, that I later found out to be cattail, to mushrooms, onions and corn sautéed in what seemed to be a natural corn oil, along with rabbit and rat roasted on a spit, and even a hard flat bread that reminded me of a thick tortilla shell.
Everyone was good natured and happy to be here. We approached the tailgate of an old pickup truck to sit on. As we sat down to eat, I noticed that we were the center of attention. Everyone was collecting their food and gathering about us like we were the main attraction. I glanced up at Thomas with a questioning look in my eye. He just grinned, “They’re waiting for the stories my friend, they want to know what it’s like up there and what kind of miracles can keep a man alive after having more bullets put into him than an average gun will hold, but mostly they just want to hear you talk.”
I sat there eating in silence and didn’t know how to start, except to tell them what I already knew. I finished up the last of the tortilla and I began to tell them that we were stupid, that we let our differences stand in the way of common sense, and that the bullies of the world wanted everyone to answer to them, just like the New American’s were doing now. I told them that tolerance made them better than hate and that knowledge made them stronger than ignorance. I told them that fear and greed were terrible things and would make people do terrible things. I told them to respect life and what it gives, but to be prepared to give it up to protect what they believe in.
What I tried to tell them was that we didn’t know everything, that although we did know more about planes, medicine and weapons than they did, we didn’t even begin to know as much about living as even the youngest among them. That we had forgotten what it was like to live and be free. That it was up to them to remind us. Then I stopped. There was silence around the fire, I could see several of the older men nodding. They knew what I was talking about. They had lived it, had been there and didn’t want to go back again.
Thomas nodded to me, “Well said, my boy” he then produced a pack of cigarettes. “I believe you left me with these before we got interrupted by gunfire.” With that he handed me the pack. I pulled one and handed it back. One of the boys had brought up a flaming stick from the fire to light it with. I grinned “These things will kill ya, ya know.”
Thomas laughed. “but only if I live that long!” One of the boys had brought me a bottle full of clear liquid, it didn’t take much of a whiff of it to realize that it was sour mash. I emptied my coffee cup and poured a liberal portion into the cup, and thanked the boy for the drink.
Thomas began speaking as I was pouring. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. Mr. Ray will need the runaway cleared before he can take off. So let us relax so that tomorrow we can work.”
That was pretty well the signal to leave us alone. Everyone broke up into their individual groups and left us to ourselves. Charlie was talking to Mike about orbital velocities that I was vaguely listening to, when out of the blue, Russell looked me straight in the eye and said “I’m staying Steve.”
I thought that I had lost my mind, or was at the least, hearing things. I managed a “What in the hell are you talking about? Are you crazy”, before he interrupted me. “What am I going to do up there? Sit around and go nuts? Wait for the next opportunity to do some stupid, heroic thing? I can do good things down here. People like me are a dime a dozen topside, down here I’m valuable. I can make a contribution that will help these people and I want to stay here.”
“Are you stupid? There’s no medical care to speak of, a simple cut could get you killed.” I didn’t stop there, “You’ve got an entire community that’s out to kill you, not to mention killer dogs that are smarter than some of the guys that I went to boot camp with.”
Russell was never much for controversy, he always went with the flow and did whatever anyone needed him to do, so it was totally out of character for him to come up with this kind of crap.
Charlie and Mike had stopped talking and were looking intently my direction. It didn’t take much to realize that they were looking at me, not at Russell. It dawned on me that they had already had this conversation with Russell.
He never hesitated “I don’t have any future topside. You know it and I know it. The only thing that I can do is either rot on Moonbase or in one of those tin cans. The tuna doesn’t want us there and I don’t want to be there. To top it off, we owe these people something. We owe them a chance to a fresh start. We owe them a chance at a future without all the mistakes that we made. Even if I my life here is shorter than it would be topside, at least I would have lived instead of sitting by and letting life go by as I watched.”
I was a little in awe, that was the longest speech that I had ever heard come from Russell. “You’ve been practicing that haven’t you.”
He nodded and confirmed my suspicions, “that’s the third time that I’ve had to go through it. Mike and Charlie have both agreed that if it’s what I want to do, they wouldn’t oppose me, but they wanted me to convince you before they would agree to it.”
“Why me? Why is it that I have to be convinced? Mike’s the skipper. She’s the one who should be telling you whether or not you could stay or not, not me.”
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Mike finally spoke, “You are the ranking American here. I can’t tell a man that he can’t stay and defend his country. Only you can do that. You have better eyes than the rest of us. You see things that the rest of us do not and you are better equipped to make that decision than Charlie or me.”
I said a few things that shouldn’t be repeated in polite company but followed up with “I can’t make that decision. That’s yours and Mike’s. I’m not going to be responsible for you dying of tetanus or Cholera, or some other stupid disease that we have a vaccine for topside. That’s on the two of you. If you want to stay down here and get yourself killed, that’s fine with me, but don’t go around saying that I said it’s okay.”
He didn’t let up “Would you stay if you could? Go on Steve, tell me that you wouldn’t forget it all to stay here and help these people out. We’ve spent the last twenty years sitting up there with our thumbs up our ass, wiping their asses and doing the things that they don’t want to or are afraid to do. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that you wouldn’t stay, not without me being able to tell that you’re fucking lying.”
He was right. I couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him that. I couldn’t even tell myself that and if you can’t lie to yourself, then who can you lie to.
I looked into my cup, and in that clear liquid could see eyes full of guilt looking back at me. It was a look that I couldn’t stomach and I knew that if I didn’t handle this right, it was a look that I would see in the mirror everyday for the rest of my life. I took a long slow drink and then tilted my head back and let out a deep sigh, then I looked at Russell and nodded. “You’re right, I do want to help them out and if the situations were reversed I would probably do the same as you. But, I can’t. I’ve got this thing that I’ve got to do because a couple of thousand people are depending on me and I can’t sacrifice the one group for the other. So you do what you need to do. I understand, we’ll figure out a story that will work for the tuna.”
The End of the Beginning Page 13
