Monsters

by Peter Cawdron

  A couple of the mechanically-minded soldiers carefully examined the props and landing gear of the flying wing. James could see they were itching to get inside one of these planes. Given their success with the steam engine and boilers, they probably fancied they could get these planes running again, but James knew it was technology hundreds of years more advanced than anything they’d played around with.

  “This one has no wings, no propellers, no blades,” Gainsborough announced, having walked ahead past several other larger airplanes. James wasn’t sure if he was asking a question about the dark capsule in front of him or simply making a statement. A plaque in front of the craft told James this was Apollo 12.

  “Men once flew to the moon in this capsule,” he said.

  “Really?” Gainsborough exclaimed, examining it with curiosity. “It’s round. Where is the front?”

  The general walked around the sloping sides of the craft, peering in the tiny windows, looking at the tarnished metal and examining the machined handles and pop-rivets. He ran his hand over the dust that had accumulated on the corrugated side panels. Bending down, he examined the edge of the worn heat shield.

  “There was no front,” James replied as Lisa hobbled up beside him. “Best I understand it, there was no up, no down, no sense of this way or that. Apollo floated in space like a cork on the ocean. When it was launched, it moved up, with the hatch at the top being the front. But when it returned to Earth, it moved down, with this blunt edge leading the way.”

  Gainsborough said something softly to McIntyre, who then waved his hands, signaling for soldiers.

  “This one,” McIntyre said, leaning down and examining the wheels on the trolley upon which the Apollo spacecraft sat.

  “You can’t take it,” James protested.

  “Why not?” Gainsborough demanded. “It’s ours now.”

  “But you don’t understand. This is part of our heritage. That’s why it’s here, to protect it.”

  “For what?” Gainsborough asked. “For future generations? We are those future generations.”

  “But it’s of no use to us.”

  “Man has been to the moon once. He shall go there again,” Gainsborough proclaimed.

  “But you can’t reuse this craft. Even in its day, it couldn’t be reused. To launch a spacecraft like this, you need a mighty rocket, you need the technical know-how to cross the unimaginable depths of space. Apollo sent three men at a time to the moon, but only two men in each craft ever walked on the moon’s surface, and yet it took over a hundred thousand men and women here on Earth to make Apollo a reality. Technicians, scientists, engineers, pilots, just about every industry was involved in one way or another.”

  Gainsborough seemed to deeply consider his words. It was in that moment that James realized why they were here—Gainsborough was looking to exploit technology from the past, to cannibalize anything that would be of use to him and his propaganda machine.

  “And this?” Gainsborough asked, pointing at the massive delta-wing craft in the center of the floor. “This flew in space?”

  “Yes,” James replied, checking against the guide. “This is the space shuttle. But it too rode on the back of rockets.”

  “Rockets like this one?” Gainsborough asked, standing before the Redstone rocket. James nodded.

  Gainsborough wandered back out of the annex into the main hangar, having only looked superficially at a fraction of the spacecraft on display. Seeing that the general had lost interest in Apollo, McIntyre and the soldiers left the capsule where it sat.

  “And this one?” Gainsborough asked, having walked past several other airplanes to a large bomber raised off the ground in the middle of the vast hangar. There were more modern jet planes and fighters around him, but the General seemed to have a particular interest in the shiny, chrome bomber, and James suspected Gainsborough knew more about the contents of the hangar than he was letting on.

  “This is the Enola Gay,” James said, reading the name from the guide. He’d heard this name before as a child, it was mentioned in one of the history books his father had read with him. Looking at the plaque in front of the craft he quickly remembered why. Enola Gay had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan in order to end World War II. James doubted Gainsborough’s interest was historical.

  Standing there, looking up at his own distorted reflection in the shiny metal fuselage of the bomber, James felt intimidated in a way no monster had ever scared him before.

  “What did it do?” Gainsborough asked, and James was sure the General knew damn well what the Enola Gay had done.

  “It dropped a single bomb with enough power to destroy an entire city.”

  McIntyre had already walked over beneath the open bomb bay doors. He stood next to a caddy holding a large bomb.

  “And this is it?” McIntyre asked. “This is the Little Boy?”

  “Yes,” James replied, noting McIntyre knew precisely what he was looking for.

  Lisa was standing beside her father. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Not now, Lisa.”

  “You can’t do this,” she protested. “You cannot use a weapon like this on your enemies.”

  “It won’t work,” James added. “It’s a dummy, a replica. Even if it was a real atomic bomb, it probably wouldn’t detonate after all these years. And how would you deploy such a bomb? Using a horse and cart?”

  “You mock us,” Gainsborough said. “But we will not stand still. We have recovered a foundry. We will forge new guns. We will make our own bullets.”

  “And we will have mastery of the air,” McIntyre said with confidence. To one side, James could see a couple of the mechanics standing on the wing of a Mustang fighter plane. They’d opened the cowling, exposing the engine and were looking at the various components, while another soldier had opened the cockpit and climbed inside.

  “We cannot aspire to jet aircraft,” McIntyre added. “But we need not have jets. Even the simplest of airplanes will give us an insurmountable tactical advantage over our enemies.”

  “And we will acquire nuclear weapons,” Gainsborough said. “Perhaps not here, not now. But there are stockpiles. There are naval bases, airfields, army depots. We will find them. We will not need rockets to deliver them, just planes, like the Enola Gay.”

  James couldn't help himself. He blurted out, “No man should have that power.”

  “But some man will,” Gainsborough replied. “And that demands we hold that power too. You cannot put the genie back into the bottle. Since nuclear weapons exist, we must have them, and we must be the first to have them.”

  “But, don’t you get it? They don’t exist, not in practice. Even if you could get your hands on one, you wouldn’t know how to maintain it or have the specialist skills to service it. And if you find a damaged nuke, the radiation from an exposed core would kill anyone that handled it. Perhaps not straight away, but within anywhere from six months to a few years.”

  Gainsborough was silent. James continued.

  “Even in their day, nuclear weapons were Pandora’s Box, containing an evil so insidious they could never be used. They were so powerful, so devastating that they could not be fired, not without war escalating into total annihilation.”

  “And yet they ended a war,” Gainsborough replied. “They brought peace.”

  “You’re mad,” James cried. “Why would you want that kind of power? You don’t want to restore the Old World, you want to rule the New.”

  “Get them out of here,” Gainsborough said.

  McIntyre signaled to a couple of soldiers who led James and Lisa out of the hangar. Behind them, James could hear McIntyre issuing instructions to take the Mustang, Messerschmitt and Zero—all airplanes from the World War II era. They might be over ambitious, but they knew what was feasible and what wasn’t.

  “Do you see?” Lisa asked, as they sat in the sun, well away from the soldiers working with ropes to pull the aircraft out of the hangar. “We’re all so concerned about our
world being overrun with monsters, all this talk about restoring man to his rightful place, but these are the real monsters. My father scares me more than any grizzly bear or mountain lion.”

  “Come with me,” James said rather impetuously. “We can escape this madness. We can live free.”

  “There’s nowhere my father wouldn’t follow.”

  “Not necessarily. If he thought you were dead, if he thought you’d been killed by some monster while trying to escape, he’d have no reason to give chase.”

  “But I can’t,” Lisa replied. “I need to—”

  “You need to what?” James asked. Although he’d cut her off, her voice had been trailing to a stop, and he knew this was a sentence she didn’t want to complete. “You need to change things? Now, who sounds like the general?”

  James looked deep into her eyes.

  “We can do this. We can escape, but we need to do it now, while they’re distracted, while there’s enough daylight to put some serious distance between us and them.

  “You know he’ll never change. You know that, for all your efforts to improve the quality of life in Richmond, your good graces will be abused. And it’s not just him, it’s the whole system. After Gainsborough will come McIntyre, and after McIntyre, some other lackey they’ve groomed. And all your goodwill, all your years of toil to help those trapped in that system will simply support a regime you despise.”

  Lisa had tears in her eyes. James knew her well enough to know that silence was an answer in its own right.

  He left her there and headed over to the horses.

  There was so much excitement about the aircraft being wheeled from the hangar that no one noticed as he took a water bladder, a satchel filled with dried foods, a couple of blankets and ground sheets, his bow and arrows and a sword.

  Looking back at Lisa, he could see she’d moved to the edge of the old administration building, ready to slip around the corner and out of sight. He grabbed some of her clothes from one of the tents set up by the hangar and casually walked towards her. As he helped her stand, they both looked down at her leg. Even with a walking stick, she’d struggle to make more than a few miles in a day.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes,” James replied as they began working their way around the building, heading toward the forest.

  “But my leg.”

  “We’ll use the waterways. Your limp won't matter in a canoe. We’ll double back down the river toward the sea and cut inland near Richmond. That’ll confuse them. They’ll expect me to make straight for Amersham across the mountains, but there’s an abandoned town to the south where we can take refuge. My father would take me there a couple of times a year to read in the library. We’ll be safe there.”

  “If he catches us, he’ll kill you.”

  “Well then, we can’t let him catch us.”

  Two hours passed and James was horrified by how little progress they’d made. They’d barely cleared the forest next to the hangar and crossed the adjacent highway.

  Moving through the desolate surrounding suburbs gave them a bit more cover and more places to hide, but as soon as the alarm was raised, there would be soldiers crawling all over the place looking for them. What had seemed like a good idea now looked like a deathtrap.

  James found a wheelbarrow. The wheel was flat, but he was able to use a bike pump to inflate it to almost full pressure. He helped Lisa lie on a blanket, using it as a cushion for her back.

  James had Lisa sit facing him, so her center of gravity was mostly over the single wheel of the barrow, making it easier for him to push. He was able to run at a light-jog pushing the wheelbarrow.

  At the top of the rise, he paused, looking back at the hangar in the distance.

  “He’s too concerned about his precious planes,” Lisa said.

  Three planes sat outside the hangar, with another having been hauled up onto the back of a wagon using a makeshift block and tackle attached to the roof of the hangar. The prototype helicopter had been dragged out as well, and there was no doubt Gainsborough intended to see it fly again.

  “There are still two hours till sunset,” James said. “If our luck holds, we can make the river. I’m guessing there’s so much commotion back there, they’re not going to miss us until nightfall, and by then it will be too late to send out a search party.”

  They continued on until dusk settled across the land and they were within sight of the river.

  An abandoned water tower sat on the edge of a small township so they climbed up, wanting to settle for the night out of any monster's reach. A maintenance platform running around the girth of a rusted steel tank that once held over a million gallons of water, giving them a high vantage point. From the platform, they were safe from predators and could see for miles.

  In the distance, they could see the hanger.

  Pockets of burning torch light lit up small sections of the forest surrounding the hangar as search parties went out looking for them. James was glad to see the soldiers were evenly spread, meaning they hadn’t picked up on their general direction from any careless footprints. Although that could simply be because they hadn’t started looking until last light, by morning the scouts would be scouring the area for any sign of their departure.

  Hopefully, the search parties would trample over their tracks in the night. Lisa’s walking stick would leave a distinct mark in soft dirt, and James doubted their direction would remain a mystery for long.

  James rigged up a ground sheet to keep the wind at bay, but he was careful to make their impromptu camp on the far side of the tower so as to not attract any attention from binoculars.

  Huddled together under the blanket, Lisa said, “Just like old times, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. This is right up there with being chased by a bear and fighting off a pack of wolves.”

  “Tell me about your Mom and Dad.”

  “Well,” James began. “I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to me.”

  “I’m—”

  “No, don’t be,” James replied, cutting her off gently. “She was an amazing woman, from what my father tells me. She taught him to read, and made him promise to teach me to read. He tells me I have her eyes, and I believe him, as sometimes he stares at me like he’s lost somewhere in the past.”

  Lisa moved to get more comfortable.

  “My mother was a whore,” she began. Her words were coarse, surprising James. “My father kept it from me for the longest time, but these things have a way of getting around. Someone somewhere knew and had loose lips, and so before you know it, a twelve-year old girl is being told her mother is a harlot. I refused to believe it, of course, even though deep down I knew it was true. She abandoned me, I guess. Dad doesn’t talk about her or what happened to her. For all I know, she’s still out there somewhere.”

  James was quiet.

  “And so I’ve always put up walls, keeping people out. Life is easier that way. You don’t get hurt if you don’t let anyone get close enough to hurt you. I found it’s easier to be a bitch than a lady.

  “I think that’s why I hate my Dad. It’s the whole rebellion thing, pushing back. It makes it easier if he’s the basket case and not me.”

  She rested her hand on his knee as she spoke.

  “Running away with you ... He’ll be sure it’s to spite him, but it’s not. Sooner or later, you’ve got to choose to live your own life, to stop reacting to others and start living for yourself. I found solace in picking holes in all his plans, in showing them up as shallow, but that’s not living my life, that’s living his. Running away with you, well, hobbling away with you, that’s daring, that’s adventurous. It’s my choice for my life.”

  She turned slightly so she could look him in the eye as she spoke.

  “You’re so confident. I dare say there’s no monster you wouldn’t do battle with. And you treat me like the lady I’m not. You’ve got big shoulders, James.”

  Lisa leaned forward and kissed him gently on th
e lips. There wasn’t much in it, he thought, just enough to let him know where he stood. And for James, that was enough.

  “So what about you? What’s your story?”

  “It’s funny you see me as being so confident,” he said. “Truth is, I’m winging things most of the time. When that jaguar attacked my troop a couple of days ago, I thought it was going to kill me. I was so scared I couldn’t run. I had to fight. I knew if we ran we were dead, but I didn’t fight out of courage. I fought out of necessity. And that’s always been the way for me. I’ve never chosen a battle, they always seem to choose me. As for shooting at that bear. Well, up until then, that was the stupidest thing I’d ever done.”

  “And,” Lisa added, “I guess you’re counting today as another hall-of-fame entrant under the topic of stupidity?”

  “Absolutely. It doesn’t get any dumber than this.”

  Lisa laughed. In the quiet that followed, Lisa said, “Tell me about your Dad.”

  “His name is Bruce. He’s a good man.”

  That was all James could bring himself to say. In the moment, he was surprised by the upwelling emotions he felt within. He hadn’t expected this kind of reaction to her question, but the need to be honest with her stirred something deep within.

  “Are you all right?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah ... it’s just ... Well, we all have our reasons for running. For me ... I felt I had something to prove. I had to show my father I wasn’t a boy anymore. I was a man. Oh, he never expected that of me, and he’d tell me not to be silly, that I had nothing to prove, but by the time he was my age, he’d already fought in the war and had taken over the family farm. It seems like there was nothing he couldn’t do.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “What do you mean?” James asked.

  “I’m saying you and your father sound very much alike.”

  James nodded.

  “When I was eight or nine, my Dad was attacked by an eagle. Damn thing picked him up out of the fields like a rabbit. The eagle flew high in the sky and would have dropped him to his death, only he wasn’t ready to die. I remember seeing him hanging on to one leg as the eagle soared through the sky. Stubborn old bastard, he refused to fall. He was swinging something, an axe or a spade or something, I forget exactly what, but he forced that old bird down.”