Maybe I needed someone else to say it again. This time it was the pilot, Tim.
“Sleepers moved,” Tim said. “They moved far enough away from the clinic for them to get away. We’re talking nine hours maybe? They got clear.”
Danny nodded at me. “See?”
But I didn’t and I didn’t feel any better. Even if they escaped that roof, where could they go?
I couldn’t believe I was worrying as badly as I was. Beck was resourceful, I knew, but I feared for Jessie and Mera in that world.
Part of me felt we were stronger as a group, safer. You know, the old saying, safety in numbers. But now we were separated. And we weren’t just apart for a short period of time. We would be apart for six months.
I prayed they’d thought of us and left clues. They had to. Mera loved Danny and Phoenix. Surely, they would know we would go looking for them once the ARC opened again.
Or maybe they planned to be there when the ARC doors opened.
I didn’t know.
I couldn’t think. I was sick over the whole thing. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend it was all a bad dream.
It wasn’t.
The nightmare was six months from being over.
* * *
I had to wonder if a dinner bell was going off around the ARC. I hadn’t noticed how many were there when we left but it seemed as if every Sleeper for miles, hundreds of miles maybe, had congregated in the area surrounding the ARC.
How were we going to deal with them without jeopardizing those inside?
Nowhere was safe. The fence surrounding the landing area wobbled from the weight of them.
Through the chopper noise, I couldn’t make out what Tim was saying on the radio, but he had a look of urgency. Readying to lower the chopper, Tim looked back at us.
“This is going to be rushed,” he said. “Sleepers already made it through a lot of the fenced-in area. Once we’re inside, they are initiating The Reckoning.”
I don’t know why but my heart dropped with a sickening feeling. I thought of Mera and Beck and Jessie and I hoped with everything I was that they were safe.
“I’m gonna set down. As soon as I open the cargo door, bolt for the lift. Got that?” Tim instructed.
I turned to Danny. “Let me have Phoenix.” Danny handed the baby to me. “You run, you got that?” I told Danny. “Don’t look back. Don’t stop, just run. I’m good with the baby.”
“I got it.”
The chopper began to lower. When we were fifty feet from setting down the fence gave in and, like a tidal wave, the Sleepers flowed through. They fought each other, climbed over one another. It was disturbing.
Twenty feet.
The Sleepers ran for us.
I spun in my seat looking for the doorway to the elevator that would take us below. It was a good fifty feet from the heliport. There was no way, in my mind, that Tim could lower that cargo back door and safely allow us to run out. No way.
Ten feet.
The Sleepers raged our way in masses.
“We need some help out here!” Tim yelled into the radio and then I felt the helicopter jerk.
Sleepers had reached us.
“Sorry,” Tim looked over his shoulder. “We have to get out of here.”
Seriously? Leave the ARC? Don’t go in at all? That was fine with me until I felt the jolt of the chopper when Sleepers leapt for us.
“This is Nomad84,” Tim called into the radio, struggling with the bird. “We are lifting out. We cannot land. Repeat, we cannot land. Attempt to lift. What is your directive?”
It was apparent that Tim was trying his hardest to gain control. But the weight of the Sleepers hanging on the hovering chopper made it impossible, and this was a huge chopper. The blasting chopper blades with wind forces equal to an F2 hurricane blew back dozens of Sleepers. It was actually sort of comical, like a wind bomb, but there were Sleepers that still held onto the bird.
“Take Phoenix, Danny.”
“What are you doing?”
Immediately following the transfer of the child into Danny’s arms, I pulled my weapon and crossed over him to the cabin door just as a Sleeper slammed his face against the window.
I grabbed for the door.
“Alex!” Danny yelled. “What are you doing?”
“Hold him tight!” I looked at Tim as I grabbed the handle. “Get ready.”
Tim nodded. I could hear him speaking into the radio, but I couldn’t distinguish his words. He was trying his hardest to work between communicating, pressing things on the digital control panel, flying, and dealing with what I was about to do.
I readied my revolver and whipped open the cabin door.
The one at the window flew sideways and another jumped to the floor of the chopper. I kicked him then shot another. There were two more hanging on and I was able to pick them off with ease. Another reached up, grabbing my foot, and I don’t recall if I unloaded on him or kicked. I may have done both. Everything happened so fast, it was a blur.
Once the chopper was free from the imbalance caused by the Sleeper attack, it lifted. As it tilted to fly out, I nearly fell to my death. I slid out of the small door and my feet caught air, but I managed to get a grasp and climb back in.
I swore my heart beat out of my chest and my breathing was erratic. In no way was I calm. I peered out to see every square inch of ground covered in swarming Sleepers. It was if they knew their death sentence was being delivered from that location and they were trying their damndest to stop it.
We were airborne.
“What now?” I asked Tim.
“We have to fly out into a safe zone. They already initiated The Reckoning. We have about twenty minutes. We should be able to make it into Nebraska, at least to the forest. That should be a safe distance. They’ll come for us in a few days.”
I looked to the black bag containing survival supplies we had for Beck and Mera. Little did I know when I packed it that it would be for me, Danny, Phoenix, and Tim.
I felt safe as we flew on, leaving Colorado Springs, leaving behind the multitudes of Sleepers, closing in on Denver and where I had hoped to find Beck, Mera and Jessie.
It was starting out to be one hell of a day. Nothing had gone as planned and I worried what else could go wrong.
8. RANDY BRIGGS
“Hawk Center, Hawk Center, this is Nomad84. Falling Angel. I repeat, Falling Angel. Grid to follow.”
While I wasn’t certain what that meant, internally I knew.
I was never far from the President or his men. I was the man from the future. I was there when the pilot reported a failed mission, that the ‘forgotten’, as they referred to Beck, Mera, and Jessie, were not there.
The roof was empty.
I was also present when the pilot placed the very quick distress call and the President instructed that as soon as Alex, the baby, and Danny were inside, The Reckoning would commence.
I felt like a prisoner, a hostage, a bartering tool. Something inside of me told me all that would change the second the final radio transmission came in.
The landing area outside was overrun with Sleepers, making it impossible for the helicopter pilot to land. The pilot was given directives to fly north at least 150 miles and wait in a mountainous area.
About 50 miles into the trip, they lost an engine.
Falling Angel meant one thing: the helicopter containing Alex, Phoenix, and Danny was crashing.
At that moment, I began to question what this meant to me, all my work, all those years, reading and studying the Doctrines. Going back, searching for and finding the Phoenix child, making sure the baby got to the ARC unharmed and healthy enough to be a cure for the future.
All that was out the window now. The chopper went down.
Was it ever meant to be?
Were we as a people meant to become extinct? I lived in a time where, for the first time ever, the birth to death ratio wasn’t scaled in favor of living.
There was no fear of overpopu
lation, because children died. They died every day. As routinely as people taking out the trash, they buried their children. I was born with a gene that made me care, a gene that crushed me when my children died.
No one understood that.
Well, my cohorts in this endeavor did. They were like me.
I recalled a conversation during the planning stages. We were Time Keepers, entrusted with the protection of the Time Vehicle and we were about to break that trust for our own good, for the good of humanity. Should the past be changed? Could the past be changed?
It was argued that if a man invented time travel to go back and save his wife, then he would never be able to save his wife because that was the reason for the invention of time travel.
A paradox.
My argument was, once you went back, you were no longer in the past but the present and everything was fair game, even if it meant the lack of our existence in the future.
My thoughts weighed heavily on me as I waited in the silence after the crash in that control room.
I kept going back to ‘what was meant to be, was meant to be’.
Perhaps Phoenix, while depicted as some sort of savior of humanity in the Doctrines, was not intended to make it into the ARC to save humanity.
There were several emotions that swarmed around that control room: anger, sadness, regret.
The President listened to the military man state that they had a lock in on the location where the chopper went down and that the pilot probably did a roll on landing, which gave a probability of survival.
The President seemed relieved to hear that. However, there was no further communication with the chopper.
To get to them, they’d have to fly out again.
There was no way out of the ARC, not unless they initiated The Reckoning. After they had done so, and the area was semi-safe, in a few days they’d send a rescue squad for them.
Hopefully, they’d survive the few days.
I was confident in Alex Sans and that he’d see them through. He was the Survival Haven guy.
I wanted to hear more, needed to hear more, but oddly, I was escorted out of the control room and told simply that they would come for me when and if they needed me.
It wasn’t until I was off the elevator and had walked down a long dark corridor that I realized something was up.
The hallways weren’t like the ones I had seen already. They weren’t new, clean, brightly lit. These halls were dingy, dirty, and rusty. My escorts opened a manually locked door that was heavy and solid, like a prison door.
For some reason I wasn’t brought into general population. I was taken far from everyone. Hidden like a criminal or leper in no less than animal-like conditions.
There was a reason for it and I was certain I would find out.
9. MERA STEVENS
I hated the fact that Beck had disappeared, playing an apocalyptic hero of some sort when I really felt we needed him more.
Was that selfish of me?
I faced two things the next day not long after I woke.
One was The Reckoning. The sound of the explosions echoed across a dead land and it was hard to pinpoint where they had come from.
Before that, Beck swore he saw and heard a helicopter go down. Michael said he did too. I was sleeping. I had only been asleep for a couple of hours.
Beck, so convinced that he and Michael saw a chopper in distress, took off.
With no real direction, no radio contact, no way of knowing, he left. Before The Reckoning commenced.
It pissed me off.
Then again, that was Beck. That was who he was. He never really had any regard for himself. If someone else was in trouble, he went to help them.
He assured me before he left that I was safe.
It was a madhouse. The world had gone mad and Beck had gone off.
We convinced him to take the truck. I was with Michael, the Sleeper repellent, as we joked, safe on that ranch.
We had arrived just before the sun came up. The moon was still eerily bright in the sky, yet the horizon was starting to lighten.
We lucked out. Michael brought out a map and the main road took us to a secondary, then to a dirt road, which wound around into the mountains, ending at a farm.
I truly felt this would be home.
We found several Sleepers when we arrived. They roamed the property dining on the horses. The untouched horses ran amok, I suspect trying to stay alive. Six of them had been eaten already, and when we pulled up the Sleepers were devouring the horses’ innards like a buffet.
Beck put them down. The Sleepers, that is.
To be honest I didn’t know how I felt about that. Jessie was in a sense a Sleeper. If she knew me, if she experienced feelings, then how did we know other Sleepers weren’t just trapped within their own out-of-control minds?
According to Beck, they were dangerous. Chomping on a heart of an animal, looking like something from a George Romero movie, they needed to be put down.
He calmly killed them all without flinching.
He took the night watch to make sure no more came. We were so far removed from the city or even a town that I doubted any would.
Until it was light, we camped outside. Michael lit a small fire for warmth and pitched a tent. The ranch-style home wasn’t too far away and we’d see what it had to offer in the morning.
I had barely spoken to Beck at all since our escape from the city. He cleaned and dressed my wounds and checked me for signs of infection. I was doing well.
Jessie was exhausted and passed out in the bed of the truck before we even had a bite to eat.
Everything seemed surreal. I was still reeling with how to handle Michael, or rather, how to feel about him. In my mind and in my heart I had watched him die. Even the Doctrines stated he had died. Why was he alive? Why didn’t the Sleepers get him? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the church at all that was protected but Michael himself?
Beck shrugged when I presented that thought to him. I was certain he had his own idea of why Michel was spared.
Michael was special though. He cooked Spam over his little campfire. I thought of Alex immediately. I recalled that, at one time, Alex called it Michael’s most endearing quality; not that the man ran a church, was a good Christian, helped so many people, but because he liked Spam.
Then again, that was Alex.
Deep in my heart, I knew he was responsible for the delay in The Reckoning.
The night before, just after we arrived, Beck was quiet, more so than usual, a man of few words.
I offered him a plate of food. He took a single bite then said he was fine.
It was quiet. Michael was dozing off inside the cab of the truck as well. I didn’t know why he pitched a tent.
“Thank you,” I told Beck.
“For what?”
“For everything. For being there, for staying behind, for getting us out of there.”
He turned and looked at me giving me a peaceful smile. “You’re welcome.”
“Are you… have you given any thought to what is next?”
“No, but I do know we have to find a way to leave a clue where we are, or stay in one place. We need Alex to find us. He has your son.”
“I know. What about... in a week or so, you head to the ARC?”
Beck cleared his throat trying to stop a laugh. “And where is it?”
“NORAD. We know this.”
“We think we know this. We can try.” He laid his hand on mine. “For now, let’s take a breather and be grateful we’re alive to watch the sun come up.”
A groggy and half awake Pastor Mike murmured, “Amen to that.”
Beck winked. “A blessing from the padre.”
It seemed right that night. The moon was bright enough for me to get a good look around. The horses settled some; the ranch home looked empty and dark. It seemed like the type of place that would be perfect to wait things out.
In the morning things were different. Despite the fact the ranch
was untouched when The Reckoning took place, and despite his promise to return, Beck was gone and had been for several hours.
The feeling of ease from the night before was gone.
10. ALEX SANS
I was dead, a soul trapped in a lifeless body. There was no heaven, no hell, no otherworldly existence, simply the cessation of my body’s life force.
I was unable to move; the air around me was thick and I could see nothing.
Was it really death? I started to fear that the Sleeper virus had somehow mutated and I was an animated corpse, that despite being in control of my mental faculties, my decaying body would eventually stand and ravish the living.
I was feeling hungry.
Damn it. How did it happen?
The pilot announced we’d lost an engine and we’d have to crash land. He promised he would do his best to land in a safe area, but silly me, I believed somehow, on a large hillside filled with trees, there’d be a safe place.
Unfortunately, not for a chopper the size of a Chinook.
Tim aimed for the small road below.
We had ample warning to strap in, but my concern was with Phoenix. I put him inside of Danny’s coat, strapped my belt around the baby, told Danny to hold him with his life, then secured them both in the crew chief’s seat.
It wasn’t a general knowledge of aircraft that I knew to do that. Tim had shouted that the crew chief’s seat was crashworthy and faced the rear of the craft. Upon impact, there was less chance of Phoenix ejecting away from Danny’s grasp.
I strapped myself in the second pilot’s seat and watched our descent.
It looked good at first, then we tilted as we neared the ground. We smashed belly-down with a fierce force, then flipped to the side and rolled for what seemed forever. I felt every bump in the road. My body was flung so far forward I could almost taste the windshield.
Then we careened into something. A hillside? A vehicle? I don’t know. I only felt the crushing impact on my body.
That must have been when I died, because everything went black, dark and thick.
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