by James King
“The dial’s faulty then. Surely that’s the problem. The needles stuck, wires are crossed, there’s a screw loose - ,”
“Possible,” Sullivan returned, “but unlikely. The electrical systems on these choppers are usually faultless, at least in my experience. Not much that can go wrong with them really. I’ve certainly flown countless times in this very bird and there’s never been a problem.”
“Well – what the hell is the problem then?” asked Clark, and he realised that he was nearly shouting now. He knew he shouldn’t – that he should keep calm – but he was quite unable to stop himself.
“The most likely explanation...” Sullivan began, slowly, reluctantly, clearly not wanting to say what came next, but having to say it anyway, “...fuel leak.”
Cold sweat burst afresh over Clark’s skin, while his mouth turned into a burned-out fireplace. His body shook with almost as much violence has the helicopter had a moment ago. Fuel leak? Christ, fuel leak...? And what when the tank was empty? What then for this helicopter and all who flew in it? Clark had a sudden vision of plunging toward the ground, being engulfed in flames, the glass of the windscreen around him cracking, melting, fusing with his blistering, screaming flesh –
Christ stop it!
For his part, Sullivan seemed as nonchalant as ever, his jaw working on gum, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses. The frown was still cut into his brow, but even that seemed somehow disinterested. Clark experienced a sudden and rather unexpected burst of hatred toward the man – no doubt fuelled by envy at the helicopter pilot’s calmness.
“Yeah..” said Sullivan at last, “probably a fuel leak.”
“So... what does that mean?” Clark asked, unable to keep either the ire or the terror out of his voice.
“Well...” said Sullivan, glancing around as though seeking an answer to Clark’s question somewhere beyond the cockpit, “...I guess it means that we’ve got ourselves a problem.”
“But what the hell do we do about it? Can we land?”
And as he asked this question, Clark thought, please let the answer to that be yes, please let us land on firm ground and let this nightmare be over.
Sullivan shrugged, “might have to. There’s plenty of fields about so I suppose landing would be a possibility if push comes to shove. Not something I’d want to do though. I particularly don’t want to have to radio back to those arseholes at Raddex to tell them I’ve had to ditch their precious helicopter because it ran out of bloody rocket juice. And anyway, a forced landing might do damage to the chopper, which is again not something that I’d want to have to admit to. Anyway, don’t worry about it, Dave mate. We’ve still got half a tank left, so that should be more than enough to... oh...”
“What?” asked Clark.
Sullivan remained silent, his head inclined, his shaded eyes seemingly gazing down at the helicopter’s dashboard.
“What?” asked Clark again, terror now as loud as an air raid siren in his voice.
“Well...” said Sullivan, “make that did have half a tank left.”
“Did have? What are you talking about? How much have we got left now?”
“According to this dial...” and, as Sullivan spoke, Clark noticed that his jaw had stopped working on its gum, which seemed an omen almost as worse as a thousand air raid sirens, “...according to the dial...”
And now Sullivan looked around, reached one hand up, and slowly, carefully, plucked the sunglasses off his face. And David Clark could see stark terror in the other man’s eyes.
“...Dave, mate, we’ve got no fuel at all.”
Then, as though Sullivan’s last utterance had been its cue, the helicopter shuddered again. Only this time it was a thousand times worse than before, a great wrenching convulsion of metal, glass, rotor blade, and wheezing, grinding, tormented engine: a gigantic helicopter-quake that seemed to shake the very air about it, and threw the two men around in their seats like a couple of rags in a washing machine. Clark screamed out, Sullivan too cried out as he clutched at the helicopter controls, wrestling, desperate, trying to keep it airborne even as the aircraft seemed to be intent upon tearing itself apart. He raked the radio off the dash and hollered something into it, but Clark couldn’t tell what he was saying. Between the roar of the dying helicopter, the sound of his own screaming, and crazy trapped-bird flapping of his own desperate thoughts, Clark was unable to make sense or reason of anything that was transpiring around him, and Sullivan might as well have been talking Chinese into that radio. For his part, Clark just clutched onto anything hard and firm that was in the vicinity, while screaming out the terror that had been building in him from the moment that they risen from the ground in this bumping, whining bucket of bolts.
And then, they were falling.
No – not falling: plummeting. Plunging, swooping, hurtling toward the earth like Icarus with his melting wings, and at the same speed, it seemed, as a meteor from outer space. The sky, the clouds, and the ground became a crazy, whirling carousel beyond the helicopter’s windscreen – with the ground becoming more apparent with each passing second. Clark experienced that sudden elevator-drop sensation of weightlessness, seeming to float for a moment with the cockpit of the helicopter, as though, instead of falling, they had been propelled into outer space, and were now beyond gravity’s pull.
Not true though.
Because, after an incalculable period of plunging, whirling, writhing, and screaming, they hit the ground.
Clark had always thought that all that stuff about time slowing down at pivotal moments in your life was just a crock of movie bullshit. But as his last seconds closed in upon him, he found that it was kind of like watching a slow-motion film. He saw the ground, whirling beneath them through the windscreen of the chopper, close enough now to see individual blades of grass, a daisy, a cowpat all big and round and ready for them to splat into. He saw Sullivan, his eyes wide and fearful, his mouth a giant cave of bellowing terror, the radio all forgotten now. There came a wildly surreal and grisly moment as a long streamer of vomit flew out of Sullivan’s mouth, reddy-pink and glistening, hanging in the air for a moment like some weird and geometrically impossible sculpture, before it settled to paint the glass and upholstery of the helicopter’s interior.
And then, in the very final moment, Clark saw the box - the box that contained the phials, the box that had been the cause of all this trouble in the first place, the damn stupid box – fly forward, like a crash test dummy liberated from its strap on the back seat by the relentless forces of physics, and now flying forward to meet the ground with the greatest of ease. Clark saw it crash into the windscreen as the windscreen met the ground, saw the box split and the lid fly open, and then he saw the bright glistening shards of broken glass as whatever was in the box broke open too.
And then he saw it. It. Whatever it was. A black liquid, pouring out of the broken box, seething, fizzing, seeming to gather itself into an actual shape, like some huge black spider scuttling eagerly into the ground to become as one with the darkened, tainted earth.
Then, the last slowed-down moments of David Clark’s and Joe Sullivan’s lives were over. The helicopter hit the ground, the ground pushed back with force in an equal and opposite direction, and several tons of howling helicopter machinery compressed itself around the frail corporeal forms of Clark and Sullivan. A spark set alight what little fuel remained in the tank, there came a strident detonation, and flame and smoke and anger rose in a roiling mushroom cloud into the clear July sky like a foretelling of doom to come. The ground shook, birds took wing from trees, a flock of sheep in a nearby field took fright and fled toward the furthest hedge, while in the nearby town of Alchester, people glanced up from whatever they had been doing, shaded their gaze against the strong summer sky, and wondered... Some even saw the rising mushroom cloud, and dry terror burned through their souls as their brains immediately accessed a thousand end-of-the-world scenarios. Then the sound of the explosion rolled away, a kind of counterfeit peace ret
urned and, hesitantly, the birds began to sing again.
Neither Clark nor Sullivan knew any of these post-explosion events however. Both men were killed. Temporarily.
Three
Matt Dixon guided his Mitsubishi Colt at a steady fifty miles an hour down the country lane. He was driving too fast – breaking the speed limit by a good twenty miles an hour – but he was also late for work, and his foot was getting heavier on the accelerator than it really should. He’d made it out of Alchester’s one way system at about a quarter to nine that morning. There’d been road works on one of the main roads out of the town – a road that he’d been foolish enough to take – and needless to say, the light had been on red, seemingly for better part of eternity. Then he’d been stuck behind a tractor, which he’d overtaken, only then to get stuck behind a kid on a chicken-chaser motorbike travelling at one mile an hour. He’d overtaken that, and had encountered no more obstructions since. Problem was he was due at work at nine o’clock, the time now was about one minute to, and he was still a good seven miles from his destination.
The Monday morning commute. Didn’t you just love it?
Matt drew a deep breath, and did his best to get himself under control. He eased off the gas, and the hedges to either side of the road started to look more like hedges rather than green blurs. He touched the window button and slid it down a couple of inches. Christ, it was hot. July the first, and summer was lying heavily upon central England - made even hotter at the moment, by the fact that the aircon had broken. He thought about his mother admonishing him that morning to take a bottle of cold water and make sure that he took regular sips out of it – as though he was a seven year old heading off to school rather than a twenty seven year old man heading off to work. Matt smiled. Some things never changed.
And Matt was just thinking these thoughts, and enjoying the feel of the cooler air blow in through the open window, when he saw the helicopter.
He had just crested a rise, the hedges had fallen away to either side, and the fields were spread before him like a green and gold tapestry, glowing in the strong morning sun. He was just admiring the scene, and telling himself how lucky he was to live in such a fine part of the world, when he saw the air craft swoop into view. It appeared from the left, out of the sky, and appeared to be descending in a diagonal from sky toward ground.
And it was spinning, whirling, out of control, its tail propeller winking in the strong July sunlight.
“Holy shit,” said Matt, his voice falling low and afraid within the upholstery of the car.
He peered through the windscreen, his foot jabbing at the brake pedal, and a sharp burst of dread detonating in his stomach. Holy shit indeed – that was one hell of a manoeuvre that the pilot was pulling, Matt didn’t even realise that you could do that with a helicopter and not... well... crash...?
And the chopper wasn’t going to crash.
Was it?
Matt slowed the car down, almost to a halt in the road. There came a sharp blast of a horn, and another car swerved around him, overtaking in a fury of shrieking tyres and flashing headlights. Matt took no notice. Matt had eyes only for the descending helicopter that clearly Mr Angry in the other car either hadn’t seen or didn’t care about. The copter had descended even further now, and was still spinning, nose to tail and tail to nose. No, this was no manoeuvre that any pilot could pull out of. Matt was no aviation expert, but you didn’t need to be Chuck Yeager to see that that chopper was one fucked little bird.
It descended further, the diagonal almost complete, the ground seeming to reach upward toward the tumbling helpless aircraft with an almost murderous intent.
And then, the helicopter crashed and burned.
“NO!” Matt shouted, his voice a kind of wild and desperate plea to a god or higher power that he didn’t even believe in, “oh Christ, God, fuck NO!”
The mushroom cloud of fire rose upward into the sky, a grisly confirmation that yes, the helicopter had crashed, yes the disaster had transpired just as you thought it had, and yes, whoever was in that old chopper is about as dead as barbecue beef. Matt’s car swerved beneath his hands, and he realised that, in his intensity at gazing at the helicopter, he’d allowed the car to glide out of control. It was almost as though he had descended into a kind of slowed down nightmare wherein the laws of time and physics had been temporarily suspended, as his entire mind strove to compute the horror that he’d just witnessed. But now the fugue was at an end, time and motion slammed back into him with all their perilous reality, and Matt found himself dragging his wheel sharply to the right to avoid plunging into a yawning ditch, and crashing just as surely as the helicopter had.
Desperately, Matt wrestled with the wheel, slowed the car right down, and parked it at the side of the road. He sat there for a moment, trembling, sweating, nausea building within his stomach itself like a rising mushroom cloud of disgust. He fought against these sensations, taking deep and ragged breaths, his chest rising and falling beneath his sweat-stained work shirt, hyperventilating. Then he controlled his breathing, raised his hands to his face, and rubbed them across his sweating, pallid, shock-struck flesh.
Shit. Ah, shit! He hadn’t just seen that happen. He couldn’t have just seen that happen. That shit only happened in movies, didn’t it? That shit only went on after the director had shout “action!” through a megaphone and the cameras started rolling. And then, when it was over, the actors got up and went back to their dressing room and had the fake blood all washed off them. That shit didn’t happen in reality, before your very eyes while you driving to work through sunny fields.
Slowly, reluctantly, Matt glanced to his right and looked through the side window of the car. And there, peeking over the top of a nearby hedge, like a malicious jester who couldn’t help but play the same cruel joke twice, was the mushroom cloud, reaching black and evil into the summer sky.
“Oh shit...” Matt whispered, his voice falling like a prayer to ward off devils. But they would not be banished, they hung there in the sky, coiling and smoky and murderous.
Suddenly, as though galvanised by a unexpected energy, Matt raked the door of the car open, fumbled his seat belt, and then fell out of the car. He staggered for a moment, leaned against the hot metal of the car’s side, and then stood up. He glanced up and down the lane, but there was no one else to be seen at the moment. The road he was on was a minor lane, and there didn’t tend to be many vehicles using it, even at a quarter passed nine on a Monday morning. No, it was just him, Matt Dixon, the clear blue sky, the fields of wheat and barley, and one crashed helicopter. And somehow, some way, Matt Dixon supposed that he ought to damn well do something about it.
He touched his pocket and felt the reassuring bulge of his mobile phone. Ring the emergency services. Yes, Christ, yes that’s what he needed to do without a damn shadow of doubt- the ambulance, the fire brigade and the cops. They’d be able to sort this mess out for sure. He almost raked his phone out right then and punched 999 – but he paused. Was there still some part of him that believed that none of this had ever happened? Was there still some part of him that thought that this was a dream, an hallucination, a scene out of a film, a minor incident that everyone would pick themselves up from and get on with their lives? The mushroom cloud hung in the sky, a dreadful affirmation that none of this was a joke, that it was all actually happening. But still, Matt paused. Still, he couldn’t quite make the call that would make this all real.
Slowly, as though in dream-world, Matt jogged across the roadway, and arrived at a gate that led into a nearby field. He paused at the gate, allowing his hands to rest upon the warm metal, and he peered across the field’s expanse. It was a corn field – barley, Matt thought, you could tell by the long, wispy ears – and the golden expanse swayed and glistened beneath the strong morning sun. Almost close to harvesting now, that corn. But, the field now bore a harvest of a different kind, and a very dark harvest at that. There, almost smack in the centre of the field, lay the helicopter, a h
uge pyre that sent flames shouting toward the sky. The structure of the helicopter was visible in the very heart of the inferno: its cab demolished, its tail splayed, its rota blades jutting crookedly through the flames.
Still in a daze, as though drugged by the horror of it, Matt climbed over the fence. He fell, staggered for a moment, and then regained his footing. Slowly, he made his way toward the helicopter. The barley clung to his legs, whispering across his trouser, barley pile sticking into his socks. He felt none of these things. Instead, he waded onward, his senses filled to capacity with the bright fury of the flame, the ogre’s bellow of the conflagration.
At last he halted some twenty feet away from the helicopter. The heat thundered against him with the power of a storm wave, he could almost feel his eyebrows sizzling, turning black, like the skin on a badly cooked pork roast. He backed off a few paces, putting his hand up to shield himself from the worse of the heat, but he was unable to remove his vision from the hypnotising flame.
Phone, he told himself, you’ve got to phone someone now. You have no choice. Nobody could have survived this, but the authorities must be informed – if for no other reason than this fire could spread.
That was certainly true – even now he could see tongues of flame reaching outward, lapping at and then consuming the barley. The corn itself was still damp from the night time dew, which was for now stopping the fire from spreading too hastily. Matt had an idea though that, with the strength of the sun to aid and abet it, fire would soon triumph against water.
Hastily, he dug his phone out and dialled 999. When the voice had the end of the line asked him what service he wanted, Matt said “fire”. Then another voice came on.
“Where is your location please sir?” the voice asked.
For a moment Matt was completely thrown by the question. Where was his location? In a cornfield in front of a burning helicopter was, for a moment, the only damn answer that he could think of. Then at last his mind grappled out its bearings, and he was able to provide a location.