The Fall

by Michael McBride

The helicopter lurched, the nose tilting upward as the air around them became electric, causing all of their hairs to rise on end.

  “Whoa!” Samuels shouted, fighting with the control stick. The floor bucked up and down beneath them, the tail swinging in rapidly changing directions like rear tires on ice.

  The overhead rotor let out a loud whine to replace the thrum of the blades and the floor dropped from beneath them, the ground rising and reaching for them with wavering arms. What had looked like wheat from so far above came into focus as nothing Adam had ever seen before. Rather than the wispy grains fringed with feather-like tendrils, the field appeared to be a snarl of grayish-brown bramble like so much sage.

  The blades resumed with a whoosh, jerking them back upward, before ceasing altogether with a pitiful whine.

  “What’s going on?” Peckham shouted from the front passenger seat. As he watched, all of the instrumentation lights on the control console snapped off, the needles on all of the gauges dying flat to the left. In that moment, it sounded as though the very air keeping them aloft took a deep, whistling inhalation, sucking them toward the ground.

  “Hold on!” Samuels yelled, baring his teeth and gripping the stick as tightly as he could with both hands.

  Carter whimpered something from Adam’s right, beyond Norman, then brought his head down between his knees, clasping his hands over his helmet. He disappeared behind Norman, who gritted his teeth and pinched his eyes shut before assuming the same crash position.

  Samuels roared in defiance against gravity, urging the stick to keep them airborne, while Peckham braced his hands and legs against the console, watching the horizon rising quickly ahead.

  The nose tipped up just enough to show them the fiery underside of the storm as the runners beneath made first contact with the tops of the crops. It skipped like a stone across a pond before once again dropping down into the field. Tall plants pounded at the front windshield before being turned to straw and thrown in their wake, reaching in through the open doors to either side of the cabin.

  A scream was silenced by the loud growl of the runners striking the earth and the screeching of bramble trying to tear through the exterior paint.

  They stopped abruptly, launching the men in the rear against the seats in front of them while Peckham had his breath knocked out by his seatbelt.

  The cloud of dirt and dust thrown up from the impact closed around them.

  “Everyone okay?” Samuels barked, tearing off his seatbelt and leaning first to Peckham, who finally caught his breath with a loud wheeze, and then turning back to check on the men tangled together in the back.

  “What in the hell was that?” Peckham asked through his first natural exhalation, his voice an octave too high.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Samuels said, already gathering his pack from the floor in front of Peckham. “All of the instruments shut down at the same time, almost as though there had been an EMP.”

  “An electromagnetic pulse?” Carter spat, pulling himself from atop Norman and settling back into his seat long enough to find his own pack. He slung it over his shoulder and leapt down to the ground in one fluid motion. “What would you know about EMPs?”

  “You have a better idea? I’d love to hear it,” Samuels growled, shouldering his door open and launching himself to the dirt.

  “I’ll bet you just ran the damned thing out of gas.”

  “You think I’m that stupid, man?” Samuels rushed around the damaged front of the chopper, momentarily amazed the windshield was still mercifully intact, and shoved Carter right in the middle of the chest. The much smaller man left his feet and slammed backward into tangles of foreign shrubbery nearly as tall as he was.

  He screamed.

  Samuels was a furious step from grabbing the soldier again to rip him to his feet when he stopped, his breath hitching in his chest.

  Long lacerations opened along Carter’s cheeks, tearing through even the thick fabric of his jacket to summon fresh lines of blood into the material. At first they had been simple red lines, but had opened like many mouths, spilling out Carter’s warm fluid in freshets.

  “Jesus,” Norman gasped, hopping out onto the mangled ground. The dirt was mounded to either side of the twisted runners, the angled fronts staked into the ground. He was already on his knees and tearing into the medical kit when Carter screamed again.

  These weren’t crops of anything he could recognize. They had long thin stalks somewhere between the thickness of corn and wheat, but there were what looked to be coiled vines spiraling up toward the top, the outer edge serrated like the lip of an aluminum foil box. Long gray leaves reached out to either side, grabbing hold of their opposite number on the adjacent plant and tangling into a twist, their sharpened ends standing up like twin barbs on a fishhook. From the top of the plants grew large cones shaped like spades, the outer layers peeled back like an onion blossom, only the edges so sharp they glinted with the flashing lightning.

  “Hold still!” Norman commanded, easing his way closer to Carter. “Someone give me a hand!”

  Adam walked around the rear of the copter from the other side, ducking beneath the remaining half of the tail. A long trail of gouged earth led away from the wreckage like a meteor strike.

  Samuels reached for Carter, grabbing him right in the center of the chest, his fists tangled in the man’s jacket, and jerked him back out and to his feet. Carter’s legs quickly buckled beneath him and he landed in a crumple on the ground. Norman eased over the top of him, staring at all of the bleeding slashes as though he hadn’t the faintest idea of where to begin.

  He pulled a small bottle of betadine from his pack and began simply squirting it all over the man’s skin, turning the flesh a rust color not so different from the blood. Carter screamed as the antiseptic worked its magic, thrashing around on his back as Norman started pulling rolls of bandages out and tossing them to the ground beside him.

  Adam hurried to the other side of the man and tore off the tattered sleeve, tossing it over his shoulder. Carter’s arms were smeared with blood, but none of the wounds appeared to be more than superficial. He would wrap the man’s arms after he tended to the more serious of the wounds.

  “I need steri-strips and butterflies,” Adam commanded, raising his right hand without stealing his eyes from Carter’s face. The cuts across his face were much deeper as they hadn’t had the benefit of the layers of clothing to absorb the worst of the injuries. His hands were already covered with blood and dirt so the dressings would be far from sterile, but he would have to worry about that later. Right now, the betadine solution would be enough to at least stall any potential infection long enough for them to find somewhere sufficiently clean to attempt a more sterile dressing.

  Norman slapped the line of steri-strips into Adam’s hand, which he quickly peeled off one at a time, sticking the bottom edge of the length of tape to the lower lip of the wound, and then drawing it upward and taping it to the skin above the top. As soon as all of the facial wounds were sealed as tightly as he could manage with the thin strips of sterile tape, he applied the butterfly bandages, closing those formerly screaming mouths until only swelling droplets of blood blossomed from beneath the seams.

  Norman gave Carter a solid bolus push of what Adam assumed to be a morphine derivative and then loaded a larger gauge needle to begin numbing the surface of the soldier’s face with a local anesthetic.

  The tension in Carter’s face faded with his consciousness as Adam set about wrapping one of the bloody arms with several rolls of gauze, while Norman did the same on the opposite.

  “Good he was wearing his helmet and backpack,” Norman said, gently rolling the unconscious man up onto his side so that he could survey the posterior surface of his head and back. Neither of the legs seemed to have sustained more than rips in the fabric and a few small gashes easily rectified with gauze squares and tape.

  Samuels’s eyes had grown hollow and distant as he simply stared forward into the weeds, cockin
g his head side to side like a bird as he inspected them. Slowly, he reached forward and placed just the tip of his right index finger on one of the thorns. He immediately recoiled at the sight of the blood, his hand already cradled to his chest before he felt the sting.

  “They’re as sharp as razor blades!” he gasped, pinching his fingertip against his jacket to staunch the bleeding. “How the hell are we supposed to get out of here?”

  “We crawl,” Peckham called from what sounded like a dozen paces away.

  “Where are you, Peck?” Norman called, shoving the last of the unused bandages into his pack and snapping it shut.

  “The road’s to the northwest,” he called back. “I saw it as we were going down.”

  Samuels dropped to his hands and knees and lowered his head. There was a good eighteen to twenty-four-inch gap between the ground and the lowest row of those astoundingly sharp tangles of leaves and three to four feet between the stalks. He looked back to the grooved earth behind the chopper, the foliage lining the earthen wound like a trench. The prospect of crawling under those knife-like brambles was mortifying, but what else were they going to do?

  “I’ve got Carter,” he said firmly, unfastening his belt and tugging it loose from his pants. Crawling over to the unconscious man, he looped it around Carter’s chest beneath his arms and tugged it tight. “I need your belts.”

  Norman already had his off by the time Samuels asked, passing it to the larger man, who this time wrapped it around Carter’s chest on top of the other belt, but outside of the arms, pinning them to his sides.

  “Now yours,” Samuel’s said, taking Adam’s belt from him without looking. He slid the end of the belt beneath the others and pulled it through, sliding the end through the buckle and pulling it tight.

  Before either Norman or Adam was sure of Samuels’s plan, he was out of his backpack and lying on his back with the end of the belt knotted in both fists.

  “Grab my pack,” he said, then dug his heels into the soft ground and pushed himself in reverse. No sooner had Carter’s legs disappeared beneath the crops than Peckham called out.

  “There’s a thin stream down here!” Loud splashes signaled he was thrashing forward through knee-deep water. “And I think I can see the road!”

  “Wait up!” Norman called, throwing himself to his belly and shimmying forward, using his elbows and the insides of his feet for propulsion.

  Adam looped his foot through one of the straps on Samuels’s pack, twisted it again to make it tighter and then began crawling through the darkness following the sounds of Norman’s harried scrabbling.

  * * *

  Adam splashed down into the stream before he even knew it was coming, sputtering water that must have serviced cattle somewhere upstream. He managed to catch himself with his hands in the soft silt, keeping his head and backpack barely above the water. Pulling the other backpack from his right foot, he cradled it against his chest and dropped to his knees in the cold water.

  The bramble to either side of the stream grew together above him like a natural ceiling, just high enough that he could walk reasonably comfortably if he ducked. Stagnant water barely moved at a trickle around his legs, leading him toward a corrugated pipe that passed beneath a steep embankment that stood ahead of him like a wall.

  “You coming, Newman?” one of the men called from out of sight somewhere above him.

  A wet trail of mud and sludge led upward from atop the round pipe and out of sight.

  “Yeah,” Adam coughed, his lower back protesting the weight he carried at a stoop, but he sloshed forward until he reached the duct, balancing his right boot on the slick top and propelling himself upward. Hands grabbed his backpack and tugged him, nearly lifting him from his feet and out of the vegetative enclosure onto an elevated, single-lane dirt road.

  With Carter slung over his back, Samuels was already fifty yards down the washboard road toward a distant house.

  “Are you okay?” Norman asked, already striking off in the direction Samuels was headed.

  “With the exception of a bunch of cuts on my palms, I’m none the worse for wear,” Adam said, wiping his hands on his pants.

  “Good,” Peckham said, wincing as he applied pressure to a solitary laceration on his cheek.

  They walked along the road in silence marred only by the scuffing of their boots on the loose gravel. Adam watched the house growing larger as they approached. A chain link fence surrounded the front yard, enclosing even the detached garage to the right. Faded paint, as light blue as the sky had once been, peeled from the weathered siding, the front screen door hanging askew. The closer he got, the more it began to look familiar. Weeds grew from the wide cracks in the disintegrating driveway, the front porch framed by walls of browning junipers. A stripe was worn into the lawn from the front gate up to the crumbling steps and the windows were shielded from within and painted over, but it wasn’t until he was nearly to the gate, watching Samuels crossing the yard with Carter, that he saw the basement window wells had been filled with concrete.

  It was exactly as it had been in his dream before the plane went down.

  Samuels banged his meaty fist into the door several times.

  “Wait,” Adam called, dropping the other man’s backpack, shouldering aside Norman and Peckham and sprinting through the gate.

  The force of the big man’s knocking loosed the front door, which shuddered slowly open to reveal a darkened room beyond.

  “What’s the deal, doc?” Samuels asked, turning to face him. “I’m guessing that whoever lives here is dead already. Just like everyone else.”

  Yellow eyes snapped open in the darkness. There was a tearing sound and Samuels was on his back on the porch with Carter’s legs vanishing into the darkness. Sounds like threshing erupted from the doorway as Carter’s bloody helmet bounced back down to the porch beside Samuels, who was already rising to his feet and un-holstering his service pistol.

  He fired into the darkness with a flash of muzzle flare and strode directly through the open doorway to be swallowed by the shadows.

  “Don’t go in there!” Adam shouted, knowing full well he was too late.

  He pried the assault rifle from where it was clipped to the pack he’d inherited from Merton and brought it out in front of him.

  More flashes in the darkness coupled with a bellow of challenge.

  Eyes flashed through the darkness like bats at dusk. Before Samuels could even finish his war cry, he was abruptly silenced, followed by a thud and the subsequent scramble.

  “Jesus,” Adam whispered, easing toward the doorway with his heart beating a million miles a second. “Jesus Christ.”

  He clicked off the safety and inched past Carter’s helmet. The buzz of contented flies welcomed him from within, their engorged bodies flying almost lazily past.

  He couldn’t see a thing. There were no flashes of gunfire, no eyes watching him. The room was completely black, save for the wan strip of gray that crossed the entryway from the open door and reached into the room beyond.

  An enormous black fly emerged from nowhere, tapping his cheek as it flew back out into the sun.

  There were a series of clicks from behind him as bullets were chambered and safeties disengaged.

  “We go in on three.” Peckham’s voice even quivered in a whisper. “Norman, flank left. Doc, you flank right. On my count. One.”

  All Adam could hear was his own panicked breathing. He had to take the gun in both hands to make it even remotely steady.

  “Two.”

  Eyes like flashlights poured into the room from the left, leaping over the banister and scurrying up the stairs. A dozen more snapped open on the ceiling where they hung in suspension with fingers and toes embedded in the plaster.

  Adam screamed and tugged on the trigger, spraying a barrage of bullets into the room, strobing like a disco in the flaring of gunpowder.

  IV

  Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

  THE CREATURES NOW PRESSED THEMS
ELVES INTO THE SHADOWS BETWEEN the horizontal joists above, owl eyes staring down at Phoenix as he rested on his back, merely breathing. Reaching out to the others had taken all of his energy, leaving him feeling a shade this side of death. His skin was cool, clammy, each breath like trying to catch a rattlesnake by the tail. Mind swimming in and out of consciousness, it was all he could do to focus on the eyes leering down at him, gauging their size to ensure that they weren’t advancing on him. Though after what had happened to the pile of ashes on the concrete next to him, Phoenix couldn’t imagine that they would take that chance again. They may have looked like reptilian monsters, but there was an unquestionable sentience behind those eyes, as though even now they were formulating how exactly they would be able to get him. And perhaps the most disturbing thing of all was that they didn’t blink, but rather a clear crescent of skin would rise from beneath the lower lid to wet the surface and then zip back almost invisibly.

  Those eyes stayed glued upon him right up until the moment that he heard a muffled knock from the front door above, followed by the most insignificant sound of the hinges allowing the door to swing in.

  Their eyes darted to the doorway, followed quickly by their bodies, and then they were gone, scurrying upside down past the doorway and into the thick shadows of the hallway. There had been even more of them up there than he had originally thought. Some of them must have had the presence of mind to keep their lantern eyes closed. He hadn’t known they were there at all.

  “Don’t come in,” he tried to shout, but all that came out was a hoarse whisper.

  There was a loud thud from above that shook the ceiling.

  “No,” Phoenix rasped, rolling over onto all fours. He expected claws to immediately slash through the skin on his back, though at that point he didn’t care. They needed to be warned. He needed them to get him out of there; they were no good to him dead and certainly the guilt would have been more than he could bear after having called them to their deaths. The girl was in trouble. The men upstairs were as well. If they were unable to survive then there would be no reason left for him to either. Nothing else mattered now.