by A. R. Shaw
Point of No Return
Surrender the Sun, Book 3
A R Shaw
Apocalyptic Ventures
© 2017 A. R. Shaw
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1978021925
ISBN 13: 9781978021921
LCCN Imprint Name:
Apocalyptic Ventures, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator.”
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
AuthorARShaw.com
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Dedicated to the light at the end of the tunnel.
A journey I’ll never forget.
Contents
The Journey
1. Walt
2. Walt
3. Bishop
4. Jax
5. Bishop
6. Walt
7. Jax
8. Bishop
9. Walt
10. Jax
11. Bishop
12. Walt
13. Jax
14. Bishop
15. Yeager
16. Jax
17. Cassie
18. Walt
19. Jax
20. Bishop
21. Walt
22. Jax
23. Bishop
24. Walt
25. Jax
26. Bishop
27. Walt
28. Jax
29. Bishop
30. Walt
31. Jax
32. Bishop
33. Walt
34. Jax
35. Maeve
36. Walt
37. Jax
38. Bishop
39. Walt
40. Jax
41. Maeve
42. Jax
43. Walt
44. Bishop
45. Jax
46. Walt
47. Bishop
48. Walt and Bishop
49. Jax
50. Bishop
51. Maeve
52. Jax
53. Bishop
54. Maeve
55. Bishop
56. Cassie and Maeve
57. Bishop
58. Maeve
59. Bishop
60. Maeve
61. Bishop
62. Maeve
63. Bishop
64. Bishop
65. Jax
Also by A R Shaw
About the Author
1
Walt
The catalyst for the Osprey’s design—the need to land vertically in tight places—also proved to be its menace. With rotors that tilted to make way for landing, there was a point of no return that had killed marines in the past. As the Osprey hovered over its landing area, the rotors turned downward…at a point in this turn, a sudden drop could occur like a slip in a steering wheel. Engineers worked continuously to solve the problem, yet the bodies stacked up over time.
A fail-safe usually prevented sudden descents and the inevitable crashes in the modern-day design, but with conditions such as the severe wind shear during the Maunder Minimum and sustained wind gusts, something went wrong. The point of no return became just that as Walt frantically tried to hold the Osprey up. In the blink of an eye, the craft was descending. All he had time to do was to key the mic rapidly four times.
“Walt! Walt!”
Hands shoved under his armpits. Electric sparks flew as he opened his eyes. The black of night held only a golden flicker, its source a mystery. A searing pain shot through Walt’s left leg. He was trapped. Yelling in agony, Walt jerked his leg, attempting to tear himself away from what held him prisoner.
“Walt! Help me, here.” The gruff, panicked voice belonged to Garrett Yeager.
Somehow, Walt was lying on his back. He bent his right knee and pushed with the heel to gain more traction. He was trying to help. Again, a severe pain shot through his left hip. And blazing heat. Where was the warmth coming from? Could there be a fire? “Oh God!” he yelled out in agony.
“You’re trapped in the plane’s wreckage, okay?” Yeager seemed to be reasoning with him. Trying to get him coherent enough to help. A frightened child screamed in the distance…in fact, several children yelled, though he heard one terrified voice above the others, a higher-pitch screamed, a cry of utter terror.
“What? What happened?” Walt asked. Thick, choking smoke invaded his wretched lungs so that he had to cough over and over again, trying to get a decent breath of air.
“Gotta…get you out of here. It’s on fire…the whole thing.”
“What!” The screaming…or was it ringing? Twisting his pounding head around, he struggled to find the source of alarm. Yeager pushed and pulled the torn wreckage that covered Walt’s lower body, the hard metal scratching against itself like nails on a chalkboard. Then Walt watched as Yeager ran around to the other side of the wreckage. He shoved his hands under Walt’s shoulders again and pulled relentlessly on Walt’s body, finally yanking him free, and dragging him through the twisted metal wreckage. Walt wailed with pain so excruciating that it felt as though his leg had ripped away.
2
Walt
“Put your coats on,” he told his two boys, though he barely heard himself say the warning words over the ringing in his ears. They stood before him in the dim light, wearing only their flannel pajamas, yet he felt the skin on his face freezing.
His two sons stood there, staring at him blankly, as if they expected something from him…waiting and watching him there on the frozen ground. His older son, only seven, one button of his blue spaceman flannel pajamas undone so that he saw his son’s exposed belly button from his position on the ground. The edges of the pajama top flapped like flags fluttering in a stiff breeze.
That boy of his was always in too much of a rush for the little details. He sighed heavily, but jeez, now that he looked again, they were both barefoot out there in the jagged snow, too. Their tender bare toes were turning a deep blue. Where the heck was Alyssa? She’d have his hide for this—another failure of his parental skills.
“Walt…”
“What in the hell…get your snow boots on, now!” he yelled at his sons as his fist came down to land on something cold and wet, not hard and substantial like he expected. The raw tone of voice usually made them scramble, yet neither of them budged or showed the least bit of parental fear now. Their eyes were transfixed on him, as if they were awaiting their daily morning waffles with eager anticipation.
Something’s wrong, he thought. He opened his fist into the searing cold, felt around, and clenched his hand again. Looking again, the boys faded. Then they weren’t there at all…not disregarding his orders and staring at him as though he were some lazy bum lying on the frozen ground.
He brought his icy hand to his face and managed to smear a handful of cold snow over his eyes. He blinked them.
“Wal
t!”
Suddenly, Yeager was standing over him again, which meant that his boys were never there at all. They were safe at their current underground home in the silo, or so he hoped. He was merely hallucinating.
Yeager pushed on his shoulders, rattling even his jaw.
“What!” he finally yelled, annoyed. “What do you want, Yeager!”
“Wake up! I’ve got to move you again. Hold on.”
What does he mean? Why again? Walt thought, but when Yeager rammed his hands under his armpits, he remembered the ripping flesh that he’d hoped was merely a nightmare. Something was burning nearby. He could smell a sickly-sweet aroma. A child screamed out again. “Wait,” he yelled, Walt shoved his arms out to the sides to stop the momentum. “Who’s hurt?”
Yeager ignored him and yanked on Walt’s torso, sending shooting pains up Walt’s left leg again. “Stop! Holy shit! Stop!”
But Yeager didn’t stop; he yanked again and again, sliding him across the jagged, icy earth.
In an attempt to end the pain himself, Walt began kicking the heel of his left boot at the snowy ground. The pain was like nothing he’d ever experienced, but he was willing to make it hurt worse just to get the relentless agony to stop sooner. His eyes flew open, and suddenly Walt was alert to the chaos around him. The first thing he noticed was that the farther they went from the searing heat and light of the plane fire, the opposite existed in the dark—a biting, gnawing cold.
Yeager managed to drag Walt through the billowing smoke, and as he did, Walt coughed for air and then his eyes landed on a diminutive forearm lying in the snow. A child’s. Facedown, one of the children lay there, utterly still, like a tree stump…something rooted to its position, forever unmoving, perfectly still. “Wait! Stop!”
“She’s dead, Walt. I already checked.”
Then it hit him…the mic clicks…his thumb rapidly tapping. He remembered the quick cadence by his own hand. The Osprey had crashed. They were flying to Deer Trail, Colorado, where an old, renovated missile silo hid underground. He remembered now…he was flying the children of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, there so that they might survive the trip through the harsh conditions of the Maunder Minimum.
Brown blood covered the lower half of the child’s small frame. They’d been there for a while. His eyes pulled away even before his mind made the conscious effort to do so.
Crashed…we crashed.
Yeager stopped and abruptly let go of Walt’s body as if it were a sack of concrete, rushing to a group of yelling and terrified children, awash in utter pain and panic. This was where the terror lay.
Each time Walt tried to look at the grisly scene, the images were out of alignment. Yeager ran from one child to the next, and then he disappeared into the foggy smoke again. When he bent down, his tall frame was enveloped by the gray-and-black mist. Walt turned his sore head. A crying little girl sat next to him. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath as she gasped between sobs and shivers. He wanted to help her, but each time he tried to sit up, her image bounced around. Blood trickled from her swollen lip, and black soot covered her forehead where a gash in the skin released a bright-red river. When they’d left, all the children bundled in puffy snow gear, and there she was, with only a blue sweater on. She looked to be about three or four. Her bare little legs were nearly blue. He moved his shaking arm around her, trying to give her a bit of his own warmth.
Then Yeager came back again, out of the gray haze. Two images of him kept melding into one and then dividing again. He walked steadily toward Walt, a girl draped across his arms. Perhaps fourteen. From her long dark hair, smoke rose. Her pink snowsuit was mostly burned away; the flesh on her hip was exposed and reddened with a burn; a flap of skin hung down loosely. He couldn’t help but feel that the greater mercy would be to leave the girl to her death. It wouldn’t take long if she just breathed in the heavy smoke as she lay unconscious.
Yeager laid her next to Walt in the snow. Walt assumed there were no more to save because Yeager was in no hurry to return to the wreckage. He looked around, though the craning of his neck cost him. Fewer than half remain, he thought.
The semicircle of terrified children around him comprised fewer than half of the number they’d started with. He took comfort in the fact that he no longer saw the dead bodies; the smoke too thick now. The girl at his side was dead too. They were all dead now, or merely dying slower than the rest had. There was no saving them from this. That was Walt’s last thought as his vision faded in from the sides to deep, cold blackness.
3
Bishop
Bishop found himself pacing once again through the main office and hallway that led to the bunker door. This was becoming a habit, the pacing. It was new…and it was a problem he’d recently recognized. Oddly restless, Bishop needed to deal with the caged-up feeling. He’d already moved Maeve and the two kids: Ben and Louna to the apartment next to the office on the main floor, using the excuse that he wanted to be nearby. But really, he wanted to be nearest the exit door. Never before, even in deep winter conditions in the cabin near Beauty Bay, had he felt like a caged animal.
Conditions outside, with the constant howling wind, made the safe haven inside feel like nothing more than a cylindrical tomb. He expected some of the other new arrivals from Deer Trail to have issues living underground, but as he was watching them for signs that they were going stir-crazy, he’d failed to spot his own early on.
Maeve and the children seemed to take to living underground in stride. He found that he was the one most adversely affected. A gnawing sensation grated on his nerves the instant he awoke, and nothing staved off that caged feeling until he was able to make his way to the porthole in the bunker door to look outside. Even if the view was the black abyss, as it was now, even that nothingness was something to him. A lifeline. He’d never known himself to be seriously claustrophobic, but perhaps all of his experiences in war had made him this way. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being trapped in the only life-sustaining place below the earth’s frozen surface.
So, he paced back and forth. There was no way he’d go out there right now. It was more than forty degrees below zero in Deer Trail, Colorado, and visibility was zero. They didn’t even have the equipment to check the wind-chill factor. Heck, the ice-laden wind itself would peel the skin off your exposed face before freezing what tender tissue lay beneath.
No, instead he paced until his guard watch was over and someone came to replace him. There were other crises to deal with besides his craziness.
He lamented that perhaps the bravery he’d shown in the past was costing him now. Maybe there was a limited amount of that stuff within a human being, and once the well was depleted of heroism, the human mind made up for the loss by choosing weaknesses. He’d heard of war buddies who had scaled the highest mountains to gain a clear shot at the enemy but now developed a quickened heartbeat and panic attacks climbing a ladder to clean the gutters on their roofs. He’d thought those stories were crazy, but it was happening to him. He couldn’t afford this, not now.
“Bishop, you all right?” Cassie asked.
He stopped suddenly, realizing that he hadn’t heard the soft cadence of her steps coming down the long hallway. His situational awareness was off. He needed to clear his worried mind. This wasn’t good. “Yeah.”
“You look a little…lost. Everything okay? Did we locate them?”
“Walt’s group? No. Nothing yet.”
“We’ve got to go find them. Two days have passed. We’re just sitting here.”
“You don’t think I know that? Do you have any idea where they might be? I mean, there’s quite a distance between here and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.” He stopped suddenly, realizing that he was almost mocking her.
She stared blankly at the concrete floor in front of him.
He realized then that she seemed on the verge of tears. He’d known that she and Yeager had developed some kind of close bond. Of course, she must be worried about him, just as Alyssa was ready to mou
nt her own search and rescue mission for her husband, Walt.
She looked up at him then. “Can I please have permission to check Yeager’s quarters? There must be some kind of tracking device. You know how he is…maybe he took a radio with a beacon or something.”
“I doubt he did, but hey, if searching makes you feel better, knock yourself out. Search all you want.”
She turned around and headed down the hall past the nursery, which was another problem. The baby that had arrived on the last flight had yet to stop crying. He was in terrible pain and rarely slept for more than an hour at a time. The one thing they didn’t have and could not get was any sort of painkiller, such as morphine. But Alyssa and Carmen had worked on that in the greenhouse before they’d even arrived. He wasn’t sure how far along the homemade laudanum was in development, but he hoped for the infant’s sake they had the painkiller ready soon. The child’s wailing was weakening in intensity, and they all thought that was a very bad sign.
