by Josh Craven
“This way,” he shouted over the choppy chatter of airplane engines and giant four-wheelers.
Jogging up to the hangar, Ben was relieved to find the plane unguarded, but then again, he thought, who would be stealing an aircraft from an Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert. The thought made him smile.
“Ben!”
He had buckled Hannah into her seat, completed an abbreviated systems check, and had sparked-up the twin engines when DeShaun barked his name from the copilot’s chair. DeShaun pointed toward the main entrance to the medical facility. Maldek and her coterie were pouring out like blue ants. Ben gave his friend a thumbs-up.
“We have plenty of head start on her; we’re home-free,” he said.
He taxied the small plane out of the hangar and onto the tarmac, guiding it toward an empty stretch of runway. He looked back to see if Maldek was chasing after them, and she wasn’t. The smile evaporated from his face.
“DeShaun, we got a big problem.”
“Oh shit.”
She was running in the other direction, toward two F-22 Raptors, waving her hands like she was on fire and pointing toward Ben’s plane.
Ben glanced over his right shoulder to check on Hannah, secure in her pillowy cabin chair, eyes closed, rubbing her ears, moving her mouth in silent conversation. “Hold tight, Hannah!” he hollered over the roaring engines.
He guided the small plane down the runway, white-knuckling the throttle higher and higher. The acceleration pushed him deeper into his chair until the plane broke free of the earth like a flung dart. The small plane clawed its way high into the western sky, then banked hard to the left, looping around to the south.
Ben looked out his side window, down on the airstrip below. He saw the pair of Raptors rolling toward the runway, and he knew they were screwed. Catching the little twin-turboprop would be about as difficult for the Raptors as two cheetahs taking down a baby gazelle. They don’t even need to catch us, just lock on and launch a Sidewinder.
He had hardly completed the thought when a jagged gash bisected the runway, cutting across the path of the Raptors. The two pilots likely never knew what happened. One second they were streaking down the runway, and in the next, the fighters hit the fault and popped into orange balls of fire like two giant firecrackers. Within seconds, the ragged opening encircled the installation, and the earth below Ben’s plane collapsed in a titanic crater.
A dozen red tentacles, each the length of a city block, sprouted from different areas of the mile-wide sinkhole and whipped side-to-side like alligator tails, obliterating the remains of the broken buildings.
“What in the world…” DeShaun said, looking past Ben at the surreal scene playing out below.
“It’s Bob! Thank you, Bob!” shrieked Hannah while rubbing her ears.
Ben leveled the plane and looked over at his shell-shocked copilot. “You got anywhere you need to be tonight?”
“I think my schedule just got cleared. You?”
“Yeah, actually, I’ve got a guy waiting for me at an airstrip outside of Mexico City with a clean airplane and some cold cerveza. First stop on my way to Brazil, where I’m going to need a new partner. How’s that sound?”
“I’ve always wanted to see Brazil,” DeShaun said through a wide smile.
“How about you, Hannah, you wanna go to Brazil, see the ocean?” Ben asked, looking back at his sister.
“I wanna see the ocean,” she said softly, staring out the window at a sky she hadn’t seen in years.
