by Dean M. Cole
After an awkward silence, Sheriff Biggs turned his confused look on Captain Giard. With an Appalachian accent thicker than Victor's, he said, "I sure hope you boys can clarify what the hell's been goin' on. The news on the radio is crazy. Stories of giant alien ships appearing over cities worldwide, and suddenly, they lose all contact with those cities."
Captain Giard shook his head and pointed southeast. "I wish I could tell you it was just the one, but the radio reports are right," he said. "There is some good news, though. Our fighters destroyed the ship that attacked DC, and they've gone after the rest of them."
The deputy seemed to breathe for the first time. "Oh, thank god."
Jake nodded. "It's a start, but we need more information. Our fighters need to know how far the weapon reaches and what happens there."
The sheriff's face darkened. "I can show you what you're looking for. Ain't no use trying to describe it, though. Follow me," he said. Turning and breaking into a run, he shouted over his shoulder. "It's in Old Downtown."
After exchanging glances, all three pilots followed at a jog. A quick block and a half later, they rounded a corner onto a long street and found themselves in the crosshairs of a squad of the sheriff's deputies.
Almost falling, Victor slid clumsily to a stop. "Oh fuck," he whispered.
Slowing to a brisk walk, and still loosely holding the shotgun in his left hand, Sheriff Biggs raised his right and shouted, "All clear."
Up the street, the obviously edgy officers lowered their weapons. Fifty yards northwest of Victor and, therefore, fifty yards farther from the weapon's epicenter, the sheriff's men stood in front of a large group of nervous-looking civilians.
An apparent historical district, Old Downtown looked like a tourist haven. Blocking automobiles while permitting pedestrian traffic, large evenly spaced ornate stanchions guarded each end of the main thoroughfare. Nineteenth-century gas lamps decorated both sides of the cobblestone roadway, and antique awnings adorned the red brick shop fronts.
This morning, many of the tourists had apparently started their shopping early. Deposited by vaporized shoppers on a busy morning, emptied articles of clothing littered the scene. Looking around, Victor realized they were everywhere. He pointed at the scattered piles. "Holy shit!"
Mounds of clothes lined both sidewalks, some propping open shop doors, others had dropped as their occupants vanished while crossing the street. Having spilled from dropped bags, their early morning purchases lay strewn amongst the scattered articles.
Scanning the street while proceeding northwest toward the group, Vic did a double-take and stopped mid-step.
Seeing him, the sheriff nodded. "Yep, that's what yer looking for."
"Is that?" Vic started, then froze. "No … no, oh my god." Breaking from his paralyzed epiphany, he ran to the corner of a nearby storefront, retching the whole way.
Pussy! his mother's disembodied voice chided.
"I didn't expect this," Richard said between his own nauseated chokes.
Victor stared at the gory panorama. Unable to accept the reality streaming into his eyes, he shook his head. "I never even imagined this."
Approaching the edge of the weapon's effect, Jake studied a collection of lumpy piles.
Standing unsteadily, Victor ignored his mother's unending rant and walked to Captain Giard's side, almost tripping on the way. Apparently, the energy wave struck a large group of shoppers standing in the middle of the road. In a day full of horrors, this was the worst. It was also the first blood he'd seen. Although, Victor feared it wouldn't be the last.
Of varying thickness, blood-soaked piles of clothes formed a clearly delineated boundary. Immediately outside that line, partial bodies still occupied sleeves, pant legs, and skirts. Based on the missing parts, you could discern the walking direction of each victim. Seeping from cleaved body parts, vermillion rivulets flowed down the street. Adding to the calamitous milieu, the jagged red stripes that covered the scene looked like the work of a demented artist loosed on a blood bank.
A pale Captain Giard shook his head. Gesturing to the bloody streaks, he said, "I recognize this pattern. I saw the same thing after a terrorist attack in an open-air market outside Bagram Airfield. The arterial spray released by the suicide bomber's shrapnel painted the same design."
"Oh my god," Richard gasped as he dropped to his knees next to a woman's emaciated remains.
Apparently facing southeast, it looked like she had been walking toward ground-zero. The weapon took the front half of her head, neck, and torso. Her right leg and left arm were missing as well. Soaked in blood, the woman's clothes were too flat in those areas. Except for the intact garments, it looked like a giant butcher's cleaver had bisected her mid-stride.
"As far as we've looked, the boundary line continues southwest and northeast. We sent several survivors to the emergency room with partial amputations," Deputy Biggs said, looking haggard again.
A new wave of nausea rolled over Victor. Bending over, he threw up the snack he'd scrounged as they left the Pentagon.
There's my boy, his bitter mother said sardonically.
Before Victor could say anything, more ham and cheese splattered the cobblestones.
Jesus wept!
Captain Giard gave Victor an appraising stare then shook his head in disgust. Vic couldn't tell if it was directed at him or the scene.
The captain turned back to Sheriff Biggs. "How far from here to DC, as the crow flies?"
One of the by-standers raised a hand. "I'm a private pilot. Before Nine-Eleven, I used to fly there from Cumberland Airport. Now, it's too much of a pain in the ass, what with all the airspace restrictions." Seeing Captain Giard's impatient expression, the man shook his head. "Sorry." He pointed south. "Cumberland is just across the river in West Virginia. From there to Ronald Reagan Airport is ninety-three nautical miles or about a hundred and six statute." He scratched his head and added, "I'd say it's about the same distance from right here."
"Thanks for the info," Jake said nodding to the stranger. He pulled Captain Allison to his feet.
Having seen more than enough, Victor turned away from the carnage. Feeling pale-faced and wiping a sleeve across his mouth, he stood next to the captains in the center of the street.
Captain Giard turned to Sheriff Biggs. "We need some weapons. The ship we're flying is unarmed, and I feel totally naked in combat without my sidearm. I doubt we'll be in a position to need them, but I'd rather have them and not need them than vice-versa."
Without hesitation, Biggs offered the captain his shotgun and nine-millimeter. He gestured to two of the other deputies who responded in kind after a slight hesitation, handing both Victor and Richard a pistol and shotgun as well.
"Thanks, gentleman," Jake said, nodding to each.
With a final look at the carnage strewn across the otherwise peaceful city street, Jake turned and trotted back toward the Turtle.
Victor looked nervously at the pistol, then tucked it into a flightsuit pocket. His sweaty palms had already stained both weapons. He shifted the shotgun to his trembling left hand. As he turned to follow Captain Giard, Victor heard a female's high-pitched cackle behind him. It took all his will not to look back.
Pussy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
"Oh shit," Sandy whispered. Ahead of her fighter, a massive cloud she had mistaken for a huge thunderstorm, resolved into a roiling smoke cloud. The churning black column extended tens of thousands of feet above the airport. At its bottom, the furnaces of hell appeared to be consuming the entire Monterey Regional Airport.
The sight brought a new fear. Approaching from the north and short of fuel again, Sandy saw no place to land. It appeared that flames completely engulfed both the general aviation ramp to the north of the main runway complex and the commercial terminal on the south side.
She decided to do a low pass recon along the airport's west side. As in San Francisco, the onshore breeze fed comparatively clear oceanic air into the western portion
of the airfield. However, smoke from the multitudinous smaller fires dotting the city drifted across the field. So, clear was a relative term.
The airport's inferno was passing on Sandy's left. As she crossed the departure end of the east-west oriented Runway Two-Eight Left, a gap in the smoke clouds came into view. Forming an atmospheric canyon, the onshore breeze was driving a river of clear air between the boiling black clouds.
That was when the source of the spreading fires came into view. It appeared that tank farms on either side of the east-west runway had ruptured and breached their retaining walls. The unrestrained spreading fuel had flooded the area. Everything was burning from the inside out.
While the chasm of clear air was in no way an optimal landing area, Sandy was out of fuel and options. As she'd expected, the flight from San Francisco had taken every bit of fuel she'd been able to scavenge from the chaos of SFO. She had to land here now or risk an ejection somewhere else later, and not much later at that. Ejections were a dangerous option. A not insignificant percentage ended in serious injury or even death. Considering the current situation, even something as simple as a broken leg could be fatal. Emergency medical attention wouldn't be available.
Sandy quickly realized her refueling plan was also going up in smoke. In a hellish cascading calamity, the conflagration had spread to every aircraft, fuel truck, and fuel system on the flight line.
The fighter's computer had already warned her several times about its low fuel status. Sandy needed to land, now.
Unfortunately, the scene here was worse than what she'd experienced at San Francisco airport. While it was daylight here, spreading smoke and fire cast dark shadows and faltering light. The onshore breeze wasn't enough to deflect the main fire's superheated smoke column from its heavenly aspirations. It shot vertically for thousands of feet to form the clouds Sandy had initially mistaken for a cumulonimbus thunderstorm. However, coupled with the smoke drifting in from the city, there were more than enough satellite fires of lesser intensity to spread smoke across the runways and city east of the terminal area.
Sandy's heart raced as she considered her options. She looked again at the relatively clear air streaming between the two blazing halves of the airport. Land in that sucker-hole or punch out. "Shit!"
"Omaha Four-Four, this is Dragonfly Five. It's bad here. The whole damned airport is on fire."
Apparently waiting for her call, Four-Four responded immediately. "Roger Five. What are your intentions?"
"I'm out of options. I have to land here … or eject. I think there's enough room on one of the runways." Sandy banked her fighter to circle around the airport's south side. To take advantage of the slower touch-down speed the onshore winds would afford, she needed to land to the west. "I'm circling to land on Runway Two-Eight Left. I'll give you a call when I'm safely on the ground."
"Roger, Five. I'll be standing by. Omaha Four-Four, out."
Finishing her long looping turn, Sandy flew through the smoke drifting east from the southern fire. Emerging back into her chasm of clearer air and facing west, Sandy aligned her fighter with the runway. Day seemed to shift to night as her fighter passed into the space between the two conflagrations. It was almost claustrophobic as the walls seemed to be closing in on her.
On Sandy's right, a new massive explosion burst from the center of the black cloud. In the moisture laden coastal air, a rapidly expanding vapor-shield of a supersonic compression wave shot out from the smoky chasm wall. Sandy's aircraft and body shook with its passing. For a moment, her fighter rocked sideways. A quick correction leveled it just as she planted the F-22 on the runway.
The jet decelerated hard as Sandy activated maximum braking. From the direction of the new explosion, the roiling black cloud to her right bulged as if reaching out for her fighter. As the cloud shifted from charcoal black to brilliant gold, a forty-foot flaming object materialized. Rolling like a burning tire, one of Monterey Regional's massive fuel tanks, apparently blown from its foundation and set rolling on its side by the latest explosion, bounced out of the fire and into her path. It was too big and moving too fast to avoid, there was no time to react. Her fighter was on a collision course.
Sandy grabbed the ejection handles and yanked. In adrenaline-filled time dilation, she heard and felt each of the sequenced explosive charges fire in slow motion. As her fighter rushed to its doom, Sandy heard the canopy jettison. The leg arrestor's squib fired, reeling her boots from under the instrument panel.
Like a flat-sided bowl rolling on its edge, the approaching tank loomed, its top forming the bottom of the bowl. Too fast, it grew to blot out the sky ahead. Sandy recoiled, throwing her arms over her face as a protective shield as her fighter was drawn into the waiting monster's open maw.
Finally, the ejection seat's rocket motor hammered her spine. Sandy narrowly escaped being bisected by the tank's rigid lip. Shooting vertically out of the cockpit, she saw the squat cylinder's jagged metal edge flash past, just missing her legs. Had the ejection motor kicked in a thousandth of a second later, she would have caught the tank's upper edge in the middle of her body.
Below her, the F-22 and wayward fuel storage tank met in a tremendous explosion. The scant fuel remaining in the fighter's wings flash-burned. The tank rocketed forward, shooting ahead of Sandy and her still rising ejection seat. Fortunately, the tank's walls contained the explosion, shielding her from the shrapnel-like projectiles screaming from the impact.
Another rocket motor whooshed overhead as her ballistic parachute deployed. The combination of self-righting rocket boosted ejection seat coupled with a parachute that rapidly deployed under its own smaller rocket motor gave the F-22 a zero-altitude ejection rating.
Under her parachute canopy, Sandy drifted earthward. The onshore breeze carried her farther downwind, away from the burning lump of tank and fighter. Breathing heavily, she snapped her head left and right, studying the walls of fire and smoke bracketing the runway. Thank god I'm not being blown into that.
She was drifting away from the burning wreckage. However, debris littered the runway ahead of Sandy. Chunks of aircraft and tank littered the area where the parachute was taking her. Exacerbating the situation, she was facing the wrong direction. She was going to land downwind. The parachute was adding its forward airspeed to that of the tailwind.
Sandy looked left and right again. Unless she wanted to risk flying into a wall of fire, turning was not an option. The debris cluttered runway rushed up to meet her. An exceptionally large twisted chunk of unidentifiable metal lay directly in her path.
Sandy yanked the parachute's right riser. The chute responded to that side's additional lift and drag by swinging her away from a direct impact. However, the pendulous action reached its apex just before she struck the ground. At the last second, her body dropped sideways, slamming her left hip and shoulder into the runway's surface.
The impact knocked the breath from Sandy's lungs. She felt something give in her left knee. Then a burning sensation shot up her left arm. A few feet later, fighting to breathe she finally slid to a stop.
From her curled-up position on the runway's skid-mark blackened landing area, Captain Fitzpatrick threw back her head, mouth agape, struggling to draw air into her burning lungs. After a seeming eternity, she managed to pull in a ragged breath. The acrid air sent her into a coughing spasm.
Battling her way upright, Sandy almost fell as the pain in her left knee blossomed into pure agony. Bent at the waist, struggling to balance on her right foot, she fought to maintain the hard won vertical position. Rummaging through the debris littering the runway, Sandy collected a bent piece of aluminum strut that worked as a makeshift crutch. Turning back, she spotted a pool of blood. A trail led from it.
Looking from the puddle to the line of red drops, Sandy followed them to where they connected to a smaller puddle under her left arm.
"Oh shit!"
Grimacing, she pulled up the flightsuit's sleeve. Blood streamed from a ten-inch slice running the
length of her left forearm. Below it, dark red blood soaked her flight glove. Crimson rivulets crisscrossed the painted surface of the aluminum strut gripped in her trembling hand.
Sandy frantically scanned the runway for the ejection seat. She needed its first-aid kit. Finally, her eyes landed on the tangled burning mass of fighter and tank, realizing her seat must've dropped into it.
"Crap!"
Sandy hobbled to the fluttering tangled parachute. A chunk of twisted metal held it on the runway. Finally catching a break, she almost felt lucky. Digging out her survival knife, she hacked out a long ribbon of silk. After a few minutes of tugging with her teeth and right hand, Sandy fashioned an effective pressure bandage out of the parachute's canopy.
Now for the knee.
Like unending thunder, the jet-fuel fed fire shredded the atmosphere. Whipped into a frenzy by the conflagration's insatiable demand for oxygen, the channel of air rushing down the runway flapped and tugged at the ensnared chute. Sandy used another strip to tie-back her blowing blonde hair.
She found two short pieces of aluminum strut. Placing them on either side of her busted left knee, Sandy fashioned a splint by wrapping a long strip of silk around the whole thing.
Scrambling back to her feet, she made a quick assessment. While significant blood had soaked her forearm's pressure bandage, it appeared the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Tentatively, Sandy transferred some weight to the bad leg. Fresh pain erupted, but it was manageable. She inventoried her equipment. In addition to the survival knife, her Baretta 9mm pistol still hung in its shoulder harness. Patting her leg, searching for the iPhone, she came up empty. Standing, Sandy looked at the burning wreckage of her F-22. "Shit." Left on the chart holder, it had gone up with the fighter. Pulling the emergency radio out of her survival vest, she studied its boxy form. "At least you're all right."
Sandy started coughing again as more smoke drifted over the runway. I have to get out of here.
The wind had blown her closer to the east end of the field. While she was still between the two raging infernos, she was at their eastern edge. The airport's boundary fence laid beyond the end of the runway. Sandy saw something embedded in it. Leaning heavily on the makeshift crutch, she limped eastward.
