World of Ashes ii
By J.K. Robinson
Dedicated to my friend Dan Sellers.
If it weren’t for you, buddy, I never would have started writing.
We miss you.
Chapter 1
They were on the tarmac, in the grassy fields beyond, running through the city and bursting from every corner and building. The Boeing 727 flew low over the flaming war zone that had, just hours earlier, been the Capitol of the United States of America. The military forces in the area were not combat forces, administrative and strategic command were the most common this close to the Pentagon. Their weapons and tactics were too little too late to make an effective stand, or even save most of the people who ran to them for help. The most Historic President didn’t want men with guns on every street in DC, not even when the riots spread from Nogales. Too late to change his mind about it now.
Just the day before Daniel had been in London. His father had moved back to his native country after the divorce. This was the first time they’d spent any more than a holiday weekend with each other in almost five years. Daniel made the most of it, the world was on a knife’s edge and maybe soon travel to Europe would be restricted. Skype was a good stop-gap, but nothing beat riding a motorcycle through the English countryside with your old man. Daniel’s father had come out as gay perhaps six years ago now, and that was the most blatant cause of the separation. Daniel was old enough, though, that it didn’t mean he hated his father or didn’t understand what was going on. If anything, Daniel’s mother and her complete lack of cooperation had been the only cause for bitterness during the separation. His father hadn’t remarried, or even moved in with anyone, to the best of anyone’s knowledge there was no secret lover. He simply didn’t want to leave his wife with a disinterested husband at no fault of her own. Annette had never seen it that way, believing Clyde could be cured by faith healing alone. In the opinion of her son, though, she was trying to keep the marriage together to save face in front of the other officers in line for captain. It doesn’t look good when you can’t keep your shit together at home.
“When will you be going back to the States?” Clyde had asked, trying not to tease Daniel by referring to America as “the Colonies.” That ‘misinterpretation’ was reserved for riling up his ex-wife when she became belligerent over custody or child support. Annette might be a lot of things, bitch, harlot, but unpatriotic wasn’t on the list.
“Tomorrow at noon. My flight leaves at three.” Daniel sipped at his father’s famous vegetable soup. “Have you heard about the riots in San Diego and Nogales? My unit hasn’t been put on alert yet, or I’d have gotten a call. Then again, Wyoming is pretty far from California or Arizona.”
“Bloody Commies. Those filthy bums camping out and creating ghettos in the city parks. They’re not protesting, they’re squatting! Sometimes I think about moving back to America and not telling your mother. I can’t stand all the Stalinist bullshit Parliament puts up with from the fucking Pakis, they’re worse than the Mexicans sneaking into the States! At least those poor bastards want to earn a better life. All the Pakis want is for England to be part of their new caliphate.” Clyde tasted his own creation. He seemed to not approve, though this one relatively bland dish could have earned him awards or cured a cold instantly. “Gets worse every day, jackbooted thugs come door to door last month, asking if anyone had any firearms. Seems they think someone here is smuggling American weaponry to those little diaper-headed bastards. They assume anyone who’s got a gun is now on the Jihadist’s side! This is England, for fuck sake. When did we become the empire that couldn’t sort its own shit out?”
“1986, the Falkland Islands. After that England pretty much gave up her place as ruler of the high seas, Pop. But then again, you have a gun. In fact, you have lots of guns.” Daniel nodded to the underside of the kitchen table. A Sig Saur P226 was in a special holster that aimed at the front door. The gun, like any other, was completely illegal in the United Kingdom. Clyde didn’t give a damn for the afore mentioned jihadists and overreaching police alike.
“Well don’t tell anyone.” The elder Sawyer laughed. He wasn’t flamboyant and not given to public displays of laughter. He’d taken his ways to the U.S. Army in the early 1980’s after immigrating from England and that was where he and Annette had been introduced. She was an Air Force paper pusher, he a brash young officer in his new nation’s Army.
“You’re a strange man, Pop. Changing the subject, do you think the riots will spread? I think the Army can stop them, but we gotta deploy soon or every Occupy camp will rise up.”
“Have I ever told you about the American Soldier’s rebellion during the Great Depression?”
“No.”
Clyde was tickled pink that he had yet another amazing story to tell his boy. “During the Great Depression the former Doughboys demanded their benefits sooner, a price your government couldn’t pay after the stock market crash. So they deployed a young Lt. Dwight D. Eisenhower to use armed troops to quell the demonstrations and route the squatting men out of the capitol. Nothing like that could happen today of course, it would cause a media frenzy that would expose that Paki sonofabitch and his cronies for the un-American scum they truly are. I cannot believe your people elected him twice in a row! No royalty in America my arse.”
“He’s running for a third term. Trying to overturn the term limit by flushing in new voters via Syrian refugees. And I’m pretty sure he’s from Hawaii.” Daniel smirked. He was messing with his father again. Neither of them believed that fairy tale.
“Christ… You’re a little shit, you know that?”
They spent the rest of that day watching movies on Clyde’s new wall projector and talking about life in the States. Daniel had a girlfriend from the town next to his mother’s base, but they were on the rocks. He’d caught Liz cheating once because the guy she blew found out he knew Daniel and did the “bro-thing” by telling him. He’d forgiven her against his better judgment, but a lot of that was because he was too lazy to find anyone better. Now she was back to old habits of sneaking around, this vacation to England was as much about seeing his father as it was escaping his mother and her panty-waste new husband, as it was about the inevitability that he’d have to confront his soon to be ex.
Daniel wasn’t old enough to drink yet, but somehow the men at the local pub his father frequented took Clyde’s word for it and served them both without question. The barkeep asked to give a cheer for their favorite patron’s son on his way back to war-torn America, to which Clyde readily agreed. It meant free beer, so… Everyone has a favorite memory, and as the other barflies gave three loud hoozahs to his son, Clyde and Daniel both found theirs. They rode the antique Harley Davidson Clyde had brought with him from America across miles of open English countryside in the deep, early morning fog. Daniel could find his way to the airport from the train station. “Love you, Pop.” Daniel said, hugging his father and soaking in the smell of his aftershave and mink oiled, aging leather jacket.
“I love you too, son.” Clyde squeezed a little too hard, his signature sign for ending a hug, and rode off into the hedgerows like a classic war movie. If Daniel had known this would be the last time he would see his father, he might have said something more profound. Then again, what could he say that would be more all-encompassing than I love you? Besides, this was the way of men in their branch of the Sawyer clan.
At the airport, security was tighter than usual. All the guards were on edge and more suspicious of Americans than they’d ever been before. Like many nations after September 11th 2001, England’s airport security was a nightmare of personal violations and lack of empathy. Today it was a little too reminiscent of mass deportations past. Anyone traveling to America was sent throu
gh security twice, then got questioned about why they were going at least three more times, and once more by a secret security agent who struck up a casual conversation and read your body language rather than listening. Daniel’s interviews were always quick, he showed his Military ID and was left alone soon thereafter. He could see some of the men behind the secure areas, they were wearing British uniforms of course, but some he glimpsed wore the flat OD green of the Israeli Defense Force. The Israelis had a unique way of conducting airport security, and now they were exporting their expertise, probably for an exorbitant price. How bad had things gotten in the U.S. that Israel would stand apart from us? Daniel was in the Wyoming Army National Guard, and his phone was still on, but despite his apprehension he hadn’t received any emergency orders. Must not be that bad then, right?
Their plane was delayed for almost an hour on the tarmac, but that wasn’t unexpected. The jetliner was already in the air when the captain announced that the flight would not be allowed to return to England, and that in case of an emergency they would be rerouted to Iceland or Newfoundland. The other passengers became upset, but Daniel just put his headphones on and tuned out the complaining. He didn’t want to be reminded about going back to Warren Air Force Base if there was a lockdown, or having to explain to his mother The Colonel why he was under investigation for choking someone’s annoying child on an international flight. His decision to join the Army National Guard as born entirely out of loathing for the strict nature of an Air Force Base. The Army, for those who know, can often be boiled down to a giant frat party for underage drinkers with a gun fetish. Daniel fit right in, of course. The real benefit was, if he was in an entirely different chain of command from the Air Force he couldn’t be touched by the drama and command level-housewife bullshit, even if he did live on the base with his mother. Daniel was 20 now, and like millions of kids coming of age in Post-Socialist America he wasn’t doing very well in the job market. The best he could hope for were seasonal jobs, or bagging groceries at the Warren AFB Commissary. A second economic recession right after the first one could do that to a generation, especially when China threatened to called in their debt.
Their original destination for Flight 1851 had been New York City, then on to Chicago and eventually Wyoming, but the plane was rerouted to Reagan International on the banks of the Potomac River before they’d even crossed over the Atlantic. Ten minutes from touchdown the captain announced they were going to have to orbit and wait for a clear runway, the nervous tone of his voice making the passengers and crew uneasy. The plane was below the clouds already, orbiting with a dozen other airliners that were so close Daniel could read their tail numbers. Something was very, very wrong down there. The passengers climbed over one another to look out the windows as rumors of terrorists or race riots swept through the plane. DC was on fire, of that there was no doubt. The small military bases that dotted the landscape as relics of the Revolutionary War looked like miniature warzones, the soldiers of the Old Guard arming themselves to protect their posts against insurmountable odds might as well have been ants trying to fight off a tsunami. Daniel recognized General’s Row, a group of historic houses where high ranking officers lived. His mother used to date an Army Brigadier General who lived there, and he remembered the small post of Ft. Myer and its entertaining menagerie of Military Policemen. Never paying enough attention to catch him speeding on the road that followed the wood line below the munitions bunkers, always trying to beat each other’s scores for number of laps in the Henderson Hall parking lot. Now he was afraid for their lives, not just his own, he had to look away when a patrol car was swarmed by people. He may have known that guy.
Daniel had a window seat and the Asian girl leaning over him not only smelled good, but looked even better with a view straight down her shirt. She craned over him for a look at the mayhem below. When he finally took his eyes off her breasts and looked down at the raging war again he almost gasped in shock. They were banking over Arlington National Cemetery in a long left turn as a wave of bloodied looking rioters washed over the tiny post, through the burial grounds and onto General’s Row, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and back out to the other side of the post where there was more apocalyptic looking city to run through. The convoy evacuating the family members in the parking lot of the Ft. Myer PX was overrun, those not already in vehicles probably didn’t make it. The sheer number of these rioters blocked the vehicles from moving, but before the drama could completely unfold the jetliner banked away to avoid tracers from machine on the ground. It wasn’t worth worrying about who was shooting at them, they just needed to get away.
The pilots saw the fighting too, and even though they were running on fumes chose to reroute to anywhere that could fit the large plane. As radio communications were overwhelmed and air traffic control no longer had a handle on the situation, the only place they could set down turned out to be a highway. The pilots made the announcement to buckle up and assume the oh shit position, although they were professional enough not to put it that way. Daniel buckled the Asian girl in when she confused two latches with no clip in her panic. He barely had time for himself when the whine and hum of the engines cut out and the plane was left to drift in silence after a brief sputter. Before anyone could scream the wheels slammed down onto the narrow pavement hard enough to dislodge some of the passenger’s stowed luggage. The plane’s landing gear couldn’t slow them in time and the nosecone took out a Greyhound bus that was run up against the center divider. The tires were sheared off with a deafening clap and everything fell to the right when the halved bus’s front end caught the starboard wheels and ripped the entire assembly off the wing. While the plane slid on the front and port wheel braces, Daniel had time to look at the cars and trees the wings were slicing to confetti, though not the time to wonder if anyone had been in the way, he was still stuck with the thought of decapitated children. With luck, or perhaps some truly gifted piloting, the jet came to rest in a field on the other side of a thin row of trees without bottoming out. Blessedly the plane didn’t catch fire. This was probably because the tanks were bone dry, the engines shut off before they even hit the highway.
For a moment longer nobody said a word, the silence ringing in their ears while the plane made all kinds of structural and mechanical groans and tics. Suddenly someone coughed and there was pandemonium on the plane, people shouting and screaming and climbing over one another like a stampede of stupid. The crew did their best to calm passengers and deployed the emergency slides lest they be trampled too. Daniel stayed in his seat, not wanting to be caught up in the clusterfuck when he saw the plane was in no immediate danger of exploding. The girl who’d been leaning over him unbuckled and slid closer, she was staying put too. They waited together until the path was clearer and those losing their minds were out of sight. The crew gathered the cooperative passengers in the trees they’d crashed through and waited for rescue for what seemed like hours, distributing what food and water was left on the aircraft after the pilots said it was safe. Despite the repeated radio calls and passenger trying to get through on their cell phones, no one ever came. Police cars and fire trucks passed them in a hurry for the first hour, but after that hour the emergency vehicles they saw became fewer and were traveling faster. One ambulance covered in blood flew by with no lights on, Daniel was by the side of the road and made eye contact with the driver. It was a terrified child that was nowhere near the age to drive. He didn’t stop for them at any rate, and who could blame him? Race, creed or religion didn’t matter now. The human race was just another rat fleeing the sinking Spaceship Earth. The only question was why? How had a bunch of unarmed hippies sent the capital of the United States into complete and utter chaos? The British made less of a mess two centuries ago, and they burned the damned White House.
From the time the plane evacuated everyone could see the smoke plumes of the cities around them. They saw one jetliner after another try to land with varying degrees of success in every available, or semi-available stretch of la
nd. Fireballs mushroomed from one crash or another, at least one plane was shot down by surface to air batteries stationed in the DC area. The sound of the rocket engine was audible before it hit the jet, Daniel counted the seconds between the impact and when they heard it. Four seconds, the old wives tale was that meant four miles, but that was probably bullshit. The fear of the riots was soon replaced with the fear of invasion, otherwise why would the military shoot down a passenger jet?
“I’m Lea, by the way.” The girl said while they were standing around, watching the pilots pretend to speak to someone on a walky-talky. They wouldn’t let anyone near the plane for long, claiming it was in case of fire, but it was probably to keep people from knowing there was nobody on the other end of the radio. Not anymore.
“Daniel Sawyer, PFC type.”
“You’re in the Army? My uncle was too.” Lea smiled, feeling safer around him already.
“Well, don’t ask me if I know him. I can’t tell you how many people ask me if I know their relatives. It’s a big Army.” Daniel tried to be funny.
“Never underestimate the stupidity of others.” Lea smiled. “So what are we gonna do?”
“Sit tight for now. But if the fires get closer, I’m bugging out.”
“Can I come with you? I don’t know anyone else, and you’re the only one who’s spoken to me…” Lea tried to hold back how nervous she really was.
Daniel looked Lea over. “Yeah, sure. Is this your first time being away from home?”
“No. Do I look like a child?”
“Kinda. Take it as a complement, you look younger than you are. When you’re forty that’ll really mean something.” At least Lea thought that was funny. “I’ll stick with you, though. Maybe we can find a refugee area.”
Some of the passengers slipped by the crew as it started to get dark and broke open the cargo hold to get their stuff. Daniel didn’t have any weapons but a pocket knife, still it was good to have it back. One man was a private security officer for a celebrity who’d taken an earlier flight home. He had two Beretta M9s with enough ammunition to start a small war. Naturally he didn’t share, but he welcomed Daniel to tag along until he found a weapon for himself. Lea came too, they still had daylight but no one was letting strangers into their homes as far as the eye could see. Daniel saw some blankets hung out to dry in a lawn, he and the man with the guns scoped the place out. Whoever owned the property wasn’t there, but their house was locked down tight with a blinking security system visible through the windows. Lea fell asleep on Daniel’s arms after they’d barricaded the door to the expensive miniature barn out back. Mark, their armed guard, finally relinquished a gun to Daniel when he showed the man his Army ID. Eventually Mark needed to sleep too, and Daniel would have to stand watch, so he might as well trust someone.
World of Ashes II Page 1
