A Shrouded World 6 Read online

  After a few minutes, we had outdistanced the zees and were continuing on. All was going decent, I mean, as decently as it can when you are rushing headlong into a shit situation with an enemy that is nearly immortal and had zombies batting cleanup, in case the angels didn’t quite get the job done.

  “Holy shit, is something overheating?” I was pulling on my shirt; sweat was forming on my forehead, well, everywhere, actually.

  Jack’s jaws were clenched tight, he pointed to a gauge; it read 115.

  “That doesn’t seem so bad,” I said wrongly, thinking it was referring to the operating temperature of the machine.

  “Ambient.”

  “English.” I knew what the word meant; I just didn’t want to believe it. Jack looked over at me. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  Jack was checking over his instrumentation. “The hotter it gets, the less dense the atmosphere, which makes it more difficult to stay flying. The helo will be fine for a while; I’m more concerned for us. It keeps rising like this…” he pointed again, the gauge now read 120, “and we could be looking at heatstroke. Can’t fly a machine if you’re passed out.”

  “What about auto-pilot?”

  “That’s your answer?”

  “Can’t land in this shit, we’d stroke out a lot sooner.”

  BT’s hand landed on the back of my chair, he had stripped down to his underwear. “Hot as balls back there,” he said.

  “Not much better up here,” I told him. “It’s another of those weird weather patterns.”

  “They don’t tend to be overly large, but we’re going to burn more fuel going through it.” Jack looked over to BT.

  “This is nice!” Kalandar shouted.

  At least one of us was enjoying it.

  “This has got to be a weapon of some sort.” Jack was thinking, and we’d talked about it before. The cold had worked wonders on stopping the whistlers; would intense heat do the same? I didn’t think it would do shit against the zombies.

  “Will this affect the night runners at all? The heat, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. It could, but I can’t say it’s been tested before. I’d think it would have the same effect on them as us. I see where you’re going with this, but do you want to know what I think?”

  “Do we?” BT asked.

  “I think the heat is meant to stop us.”

  “Not what I wanted to hear. I was hoping this was more of a human-made weapon to aid, rather than dissuade.”

  “Might not have to worry about it.” Jack pointed to the gauge; we were now at a relatively cool 108. Heaven, compared to the last reading. We’ve all heard the adage “sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the oncoming train’s headlight.” This was like that. An alarm sounded and I was pushed up against the side of the copter as Jack banked hard to the right. BT about ripped the chair free from its moorings as he held tight.

  “Surface to air missile,” Jack said, calmly enough. He pointed to the swirling contrail as the projectile made its way toward us at speed.

  Safe to say, I was terrified. If we blew up that was one thing, death would be instantaneous, but if it took out our ride and I was left to freefall a few hundred feet before hitting the ground at terminal velocity, that would be another thing entirely. There’s a reason why humans are innately born with a fear of heights. We don’t bounce well.

  “We’re good,” Jack announced as he got us back to level. The missile had, according to him, flown harmlessly past. Personally, I didn’t give a shit that it was a hundred feet away; it was a hundred feet too close. Makes sense, if you think about it.

  “Umm, maybe not.” BT had pointed; the missile was doing an about-face.

  Jack threw us into a nosedive. I was scrambling as fast as I could to put the restraining belt across me as I, at least, wanted the cushion of the nosecone before we impacted with the earth.

  “High burst,” were the only words he was willing to share just then.

  It was more than enough. The missile wasn’t made to strike us; it was designed to fly above its target and then blow up, much like a fireworks mortar. Only instead of oohs and aahs and pretty colors, shrapnel and miniature bombs would rain down. I was strapped in; BT had his entire weight pressed against the back of my chair. Even through the alarms, the sound of the rotors under strain, and Kalandar’s cries of delight, I could hear the bolts groaning in protest. There was a fair chance we’d blast through the front windshield long before we crashed.

  The fun started almost immediately. The missile blew up, sending black spheres the size of baseballs spraying outwards in a 360-degree arc. Jack was trying to outrun them but they had propellant and gravity on their side. There was a cluster burst; the alarms inside the cabin somehow grew louder, though the sound could not obscure the barrage of metal chunks peppering the hull and blasting through the relatively thin fuselage.

  “I am angry now!” Kalandar roared. Going to go out on a limb and say he took a couple of shards of hot metal. To the side of me and two inches from head height was a fist-sized hole. I followed the trajectory it had taken. It had been close to me, but Jack must have got a really clean shave. The bomblet had traveled past his Adam’s apple and back out the cockpit.

  “BT?” I shouted.

  “Good! Good!” he yelled back.

  “We’re going down!” Jack yelled.

  I wanted to tell him I realized that as I could see ants start to scurry out of the impact zone. He was pulling back on the controls; they were responding about as well as my wife after we’d just had a fight. Not spelling that one out. Kalandar knew what was going on—he was ripping through the ropes quickly in the hopes he’d roll away from the devastation. I wished him well. Not really; I mean, I hoped he made it, but at that very moment, I was just trying not to die, and there wasn’t a fucking thing I could do about it. Yet one more reason not to fly.

  “Going into auto-rotate!” Jack yelled above the bleating.

  That meant as much to me as if he’d explained that he was about to make a reduction sauce.

  It was BT that picked up the slack. “Engines are damaged.” Then I put that all together: the rotors were still spinning but without the assistance of power. I had no idea how long we could sustain flight that way. We were leveling off, which was good, but we were flying parallel to a column of military trucks. Jack, realizing this, was trying to move us further away to the east—east, relative to me. Could have been north.

  “Kalandar, we’ll be coming down soon. Evac when you think it’s best for you,” Jack said. “BT, get strapped in!”

  “On it.” He pushed off from my seat.

  “And get your clothes on,” I added.

  “Fuck you,” he mumbled. That was the first normal thing that had happened in the last twenty minutes, and I was happy for it.

  The column was no longer in sight, but I’d bet they had a few trucks heading our way to finish the job they’d started. We were close enough to the ground that rope from Kalandar’s harness was dragging in the dirt. He’d maneuvered himself so he was holding on to the line, much like the night runners had been. There wasn’t much more than ten feet between him and the earth at this point.

  “How fast are we going?”

  “Sixty or seventy knots!” Jack yelled back through the cacophony. He must have heard me sigh or he caught my expression through his peripheral vision. “Seventy, eighty miles per hour.”

  “You going to slow this thing up?”

  “See any brakes?” Though he was pulling harder back on the yolk, and soon enough we would be flying backwards, I was pressed into the back of my seat. He was using drag to get us to a speed we could survive from. He grunted loudly just as the alarm, thankfully, silenced; it was then I realized that it had stopped because all electrical functions had ceased. I didn’t say shit as I grabbed hold of the seatbelt strapped across my chest. My eyes were closed. I gave some half-assed rendition of the L
ord’s Prayer, most of it revolved around not wanting to be embedded into the ground or spread thinly across a mile of dirt; I don’t think that was in the actual written version.

  We’d slowed considerably, and Jack had eased up on our strange flying position. I looked down. Kalandar must have decided to give it a go; he’d started running in place, his legs a blur. The added movement wasn’t doing our ride any favors.

  “Fucking let go,” Jack grimaced, holding tight to the controls.

  No way Kalandar heard him, as comm was down, but it was as if he had, or more likely, he’d decided he was moving fast enough to match speed. He dropped down, did one front roll, and was up and running. When he came to a stop, his arms were up in the air like Rocky climbing the steps in Philadelphia. I sincerely hoped I’d be able to raise up any part of me once we touched down.

  “Here we go!” Jack yelled even though it was quiet, I mean, except for the whistling wind and the pounding drumbeat percussions of my heart. Yeah, other than that.

  I figured we were going in the neighborhood of thirty to forty miles per hour, not car-wrapping-around-tree speeds, but definitely enough to do us in. It was sort of like being shot with a .22 caliber round as opposed to a .45. I didn’t fucking want to be shot with either of them.

  The wheels of the chopper touched down so hard, my chin slammed into my chest with enough force that both points of contact were going to bruise. It hurt like hell, but I was ecstatic I’d not been talking; would have been looking at a portion of my tongue in my lap. The ground repelled us, sent us back into the air a good twenty feet. We were now canted to the side like one set of tires had more air and thus more bounce to them than the other. Jack was doing his best to get us straight, but there wasn’t much he could do. I was once again looking at the ground approaching, although instead of in front, it was to my side.

  I either said or thought the word “fuck” as the bottom of my door crumpled in. The glass shattered and showered the entirety of the cockpit. The noise was deafening as the heavy machine bounced, slammed, slid, dented or just had parts stripped away. The rotors sheared off and sent sword-sized shards hurtling into space. I was holding on to my restraints with both hands. Time meant nothing. I don’t think the human mind has the capacity to process information in these types of situations. Like it temporarily shuts down in response to overwhelming dangers you have no ability to fend off. My eyes were shut tight. If I’d hazarded a look, I would have seen the desert ground zipping past my face at skin-abrading speeds. My body was being tossed about within the confines of my constraints. I was doing my utmost to stay frozen in place, in direct contrast to what all experts tell you to do.

  I don’t know what kind of Shaolin monk you must be in order to let your body go limp in a crash. My guess is it’s hardwired in us to brace for impact. Although I’ve got to think Uckmar the Caveman never had to worry about high-speed collisions. Not like the wooly mammoth he’d hitched a ride from could go more than ten miles an hour; plenty of time to bail before you hit anything. The sound of screeching, tortured metal finally subsided. Abundant dust swirling and the creaking of a helicopter in its final death throes was all that was going on now. We were more upside down than right side up. I heard Jack cough and then the metallic release of his harness.

  “Mike?” he choked out.

  “Yeah, good,” I told him as I undid my belt and flopped unceremoniously out the exposed side and to the ground.

  “BT?” Jack asked.

  “Good, but I think my buckle is twisted—I can’t get out.”

  A few moments later, there was a grunt and a thud as Jack must have cut him loose. I had time to rise shakily and look back at the gouge we’d put into the earth. There were panels and wheels, nuts and bolts, strewn along the entirety of it. Kalandar was lumbering our way; he waved at me. I waved back. What else could I do?

  “Two fucking flights, two fucking crashes,” Jack said as he helped BT out. “Not going for three.”

  “You all right?” I asked an obviously dazed BT.

  “Should be asking you that. You have blood all down the side of your face,” he replied.

  I put a hand up, expecting to wince from touching open wounds; instead, I felt the slick grittiness of fluid mixed with dirt.

  “Looks like hydraulic fluid.” Jack had turned me to get a better look.

  “Ah, you live! I did not think your delicate frames would survive the crash.”

  “Good to see you, too,” I told Kalandar.

  We could see the dust trails being left by the vehicles coming toward us. There was nowhere to run.

  “We will defeat them.” Kalandar looked to be summoning power.

  “Hold on a second,” I said.

  “Mike, these are the people that just downed our ride with us in it,” Jack replied.

  “I know, it’s just, people seem to be in the minority right now. Killing them seems counterproductive. Get behind what’s left of the helicopter.”

  “Wait, what?” BT asked. “Jack’s right, man, they tried to kill us.”

  “Yeah, and they still might. We don’t have a shit-ton of ammo left and we’ve got absolutely nowhere to go. Nothing to prevent them from shooting a rocket into a crashed aircraft.” That got their attention. “You too, Kalandar. They see you, they’re going to start shooting no matter what I say.”

  “You sure about this, Mike?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah, a hundred percent,” I told him as I walked toward the wall of dust. “Or, more like eighty.” When I was out of earshot, I updated the figure to fifty when I saw the trucks racing toward me through the haze. I could just about feel the muzzles of many weapons trained on me. The lead truck stopped not more than twenty feet away.

  “Where is he?” a voice asked as a dozen men and women raced from the back of the truck and fanned out. The imaginary muzzles became all too real. A tall man with salt and pepper colored hair stepped out of the passenger seat. He placed a cap upon his distinguished head. I could see a glint of sunshine off his insignia. Figured him to be an officer, though I had no idea his rank, as from here, it looked like a silver hippo.

  “Sir?”

  “What unit do you belong to? I don’t recognize your battle dress uniform.”

  I was wearing the US military’s newest version, the digitalized camouflage pattern, while the personnel holding rifles on me had the old hand-me-down ones with the regular camouflage.

  I went with honesty; didn’t think I had a lie in me that would sound convincing. “I’m with the United States Marine Corps, sir,” I told him, trying to sound as respectable as possible.

  He looked baffled. And why wouldn’t he be. The only thing he probably took away from that whole sentence was the “sir” part. We might as well have been talking different languages.

  “Other side of the helo,” one of the men called out as more trucks pulled up. They’d fanned out almost to the point we were surrounded. I’d mistakenly thought things were tense beforehand.

  “Hold on, hold on!” I had my hands out. We were not very far from open hostility and me and my merry band were on the short end. I got a bit of inspiration, divine or otherwise, I wasn’t choosey. I knew who they were looking for. “He’s not the one!”

  The officer with the hippo insignia’s attention came back to me. I had to hope he was willing to listen.

  “I know this looks bad, trust me; what are the odds there are two demons running around, but this isn’t the one that caused whatever damage was done to you and your troops.”

  We’d not been shot yet, so it was a victory to this point.

  “This one here, his name is Kalandar.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn if his name is Alexander Cavendish,” the officer said. I figured that was a name synonymous with the pope.

  “Okay, the name doesn’t matter. I get it. He’s trying to help. We’re fighting the same thing you are.”

  “Your kind are fighting Black Ops?” he asked, dubiously.

 
“Well, not so much them, but all the other craziness…the zombies, the night runners…”

  “The what?”

  “The, umm, creatures that come out at night, they…”

  “The wailers, you mean?”

  “As good a name as any. We call them night runners.”

  “Have the rest of your men come out from there,” he pointed.

  “Jack,” I called back. He came out, followed by BT. Any smirks they wanted to give the big man and his attire were wiped clean as Kalandar stood and followed.

  When Jack appeared, there was a sound of weapons coming up and the men around were moments from squeezing triggers.

  “It’s Black Watch, sir,” one of the men nervously called.

  The leader looked from me to Jack and then back. “I thought you said you were fighting the same monsters, yet here you are harboring one of them. Explain yourself.”

  “He’s not one of them,” I stated, unsure of what else to say.

  The officer turned his gaze toward Jack. “You look like one of them.”

  “I seem to be getting a lot of that lately,” Jack responded, wincing as he shrugged.

  “Look,” I said, getting the man’s attention, “although he’s not a marine and more used to air conditioning and ice cream, I can assure you he’s not whoever you think he might be.”

  The leader looked from me to Jack and met my eyes. He then turned to the men surrounding us and gave a nod. The lowering of weapons was a relief.

  “You know something about what is going on here?” he then asked.

  “I’m not sure how much of this you’re going to believe.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  I told him most of what I remembered—most of what I could that wouldn’t get us killed outright. What I was fuzzy on, Jack would fill in those parts. We wisely left out the part about how the other demon came to be. I expected the man’s face to grow incredulous and then turn to fury as we described something out of a science fiction comic book. Instead, he motioned for his personnel to further stand down. I gave Jack a sidelong glance. I wasn’t going to say we were completely free and clear just yet, but this beat being shot outright.