The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1)

by John Triptych

  Paul had a hard time getting up the stairs as his legs were still weak from lack of exercise. Greg Gover was helping him along while Getz led the way as he drew his Glock pistol from beneath his suit jacket. As Gover helped Paul up the third flight of stairs, he heard a shrill grunting sound coming from downstairs, near the base of the fifth floor stairwell.

  It was one of the Fomorians. The misshapen creature had a large, bulbous head, dark grey skin and long sinewy arms that seemed to function as legs while it stood on them in order to move its limbless, bloated torso. Gover screamed when he turned around and saw it as Getz ran back down, trying desperately to bring the pistol to bear.

  At the last minute, Gover dove in between Paul and the creature, just as Getz pivoted sideways a few steps above them to see if he could get a clear shot. The Fomorian opened its gaping mouth and out came a whip-like, barbed tongue that shot out like a spring and wrapped itself around Gover’s neck, dragging the screaming man right down next to it as the barbs on the tongue began to squeeze its victim’s windpipe shut.

  Getz fired a half dozen shots at the creature, who barely felt the small holes being poked into its dense, clay-like flesh as its tongue began to drain the still struggling Gover of his blood. Paul screamed as Getz held him back and started to push him up the stairs.

  “We gotta do something to help him!” Paul cried as he was now getting dragged upwards.

  Getz kept pulling him up. “We have to move, he’s gone!”

  Paul looked at him as they got up past another flight of stairs. They both could still hear the mulching sounds below. “You’re a cold, heartless bastard.”

  Getz kept his eyes above them as he continued to drag him up by the arm. “The mission was to get you out of here by any means possible. He knew the risks when he volunteered.”

  When they finally got to the top of the stairs, Getz pushed open the fire door and both men started climbing onto the roof of the hospital. Paul’s jaw dropped as he saw the chaotic swirl of battle all around them. Down below were hordes of Fomorians feasting on the dead and dying soldiers as well as on hapless civilians that were caught in the crossfire. He could see a wave of monsters massing near Buckingham Palace a few miles away, just as the few remaining tanks and soldiers were desperately trying to hold them off. Swirls of mist were all around them as a few news helicopters were being chased by horrible flying things on leathery wings.

  An AS350 blue-painted Eurocopter flew in from east of Westminster, dodged a few boulders thrown its way, then it headed straight for them. Paul turned to his left as he heard a guttural shriek just as two Fomorians came out of the stairwell that they had just passed through, the two froglike creatures were less than thirty feet away as they began to hobble towards the two men.

  Getz pushed him out of the way as he began firing at the creatures. “Edge of the roof. Go! Go! Go!”

  Paul’s legs were beginning to buckle from the strain, but he forced himself to move slowly towards the southern end of the roof just as the two Fomorians were almost upon them. The helicopter soon made a quick turn and hovered alongside Paul, its landing skids barely touching the edge of the roof. The side door opened and a uniformed man inside grabbed him by the hand. As one of the Fomorians tried to seize Paul’s leg with its webbed claws, Getz threw himself at the creature and tackled it as they both fell down the ledge and onto the lower part of the roof.

  Paul clambered up and into the small interior of the chopper. In less than a second it rapidly veered away before he could even get the door closed. The uniformed crewman was sitting beside him as he struggled to help Paul put on his seatbelt.

  “Hold on!” the pilot shouted as he banked and dove before climbing up again as a winged, man-sized creature with legs that ended with bird-like talons attempted to get close to the helicopter.

  Paul grimaced as he hung on to the safety straps for dear life as the sky whirled and twisted all around him.

  11. The Birds

  US Airspace

  Captain Barry “Clyde” Barrow frowned underneath his oxygen mask as he banked his F-22 Raptor in a slow circle over Nellis Air Force Base. His wingman, Lieutenant Martin “McFly” Foles quickly followed his move as his own F-22 followed just behind and to the right of his wing leader. Both Raptors had been flying combat air patrol for over an hour now and they could see the misty outlines of Las Vegas just below them. Although they were built for stealth, each fighter jet carried a pair of external fuel pods in order to give them extra range, their commanders on the ground deeming their radar-evading stealth systems weren’t necessary for this mission.

  Barrow wasn’t happy at all, but he kept his thoughts to himself. It didn’t help that Hoover Dam had been breached by unknown causes just two days ago and its destruction reverberated across the entire country. Lake Havasu City and a number of other towns along the river were swept away when ten trillion gallons of water burst through. But the disaster hadn’t ended there since the massive floods caused by Hoover ruptured the dams in nearby lakes as well, creating a catastrophic chain reaction across several states as highways and bridges were suddenly ripped apart and whole cities were cut off. Las Vegas was now without drinking water and electrical power and this looked to be just the start. It now looked like the whole state of Nevada might have just been rendered uninhabitable. Barrow was partially relieved that his wife and two daughters were within Nellis when the disaster happened, but it was already decreed that all military dependents would have to be evacuated for safer areas, even though no one could tell where these so-called safe zones would be. Already, there were riots just outside the base as civilians had to be held back by Air Force MPs at the base perimeter, despite the fact that they were just begging for food, water and help from an increasingly powerless government.

  But what bothered Barrow the most was a feeling of complete helplessness. Here he was, sitting in the cockpit of the most advanced jet fighter in the world, which had state-of-the-art weapons and dual thrust-vectoring capable engines that could enable the Raptor to super cruise at near Mach 2. Advanced avionics gear with full-spherical infrared coverage acted as a passive radar. It could deploy built-in countermeasures against enemy attacks. The Raptor also had stealth characteristics such as a reduced radar cross-section coupled with a low-heat signature and radar absorbent materials embedded in its fuselage. Still, this very expensive weapon was all but useless against the unknown enemy that was even now busy destroying his beloved country. The most powerful military on earth was so far unable to identify or know who or what it was that was doing all of this. Quite a few others in his squadron had been saying it was aliens from outer space, but it just didn’t make any sense to him while the other theories like the religious types who claimed it was Judgment Day scared him half to death. Barrow was a very religious man, he took his family to church on the Sundays when he wasn’t deployed and his kids were enrolled in Sunday school; this whole notion about the world coming to an end the moment Jesus finally reveals himself made him nervous … just a few days ago he was starting to feel guilt over his career as a fighter jock, would The Lord ever forgive him for the violation of God’s commandment about not killing anyone?

  A beep on his radar display brought him back to reality. “Rapier one-one to Bigwig, I got a contact one fifty miles northeast of my position,” he said over the radio.

  “Rapier one-one, be advised: Angel is in the area,” the Air Force ground controller said. Angel was the codename for Air Force One, the plane in which the president was flying on.

  “Roger,” Barrow said. “Continuing CAP.” He had just remembered that the president would be flying to California today since the weather forecasts were still clear in the Southwest, unlike the East Coast and the Southern states, which were inundated with rainstorms. The FAA had grounded all commercial flights almost a week ago so other than the combat air patrols, Air Force One had the skies all to itself.

  One other thing about the mission did bother him though. Even though the
authorities never released the cockpit flight recordings from the dozen or so downed airliners to the public, they were in fact able to recover almost all of them from the wreckages. Based on the latest intel that was filtered on down to the military aviators, most of the cockpit recordings seemed routine, almost as if the doomed airliners were blindsided and never knew what hit them. The last one that Barrow heard during the latest briefing did make him a little apprehensive, since the now deceased airline captain had screamed about some sort of flying monster coming at him just before the recording stopped. Several of his squadron mates theorized that the airline captain must have mistakenly identified an unknown enemy aircraft as an airborne creature of some sort, before getting hit by some mysterious weapon that caused his airliner to crash, they surmised. To that end, all available fighter aircraft had been assigned to extended combat air patrols. They were now under full authority to shoot down any unidentified aircraft that was foolish enough to enter US airspace. Barrow’s squadron had at least two fighters up in the air at any given time, ready to intercept anything in their range. The rest of the squadron was on standby and fully prepared to scramble at a moment’s notice once contact was made. The entire US Air Force was now hunting for whatever it was out here in the skies that took down those planes.

  The radio squawked again. “Rapier CAP, be advised we are getting a mayday call from Angel, I repeat, we are getting a mayday call from Angel. They have visual contact with unidentified aircraft.”

  Barrow’s heart leapt as his left arm caressed the throttle. “Bigwig this is Rapier one-one, copy that. I am now heading for intercept course, going balls to the wall at full burners.”

  With that, both Raptors turned northeast, dropped their external tanks and activated their afterburners. With their dual Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines accelerating to a maximum speed of over one thousand five hundred miles an hour within seconds, both fighters would take less than two minutes to reach the president’s plane.

  As he looked at his HUD, Barrow began to arm the six AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles located in the Raptor’s internal weapons bays. The weapon indicator soon shifted to the color green. “Do you see any other contact on your radar, Marty?” he said to his wingman.

  “That’s a negative, Clyde. All I see is Angel on my scope,” Foles said.

  Barrow keyed his radio back to base. “Rapier one-one to Bigwig, I’m not getting any other contacts on my radar.”

  The Air Force ground controller was on again. “Rapier one-one, this is Bigwig, we are not getting any contacts either from ground based radar, I’m patching you over to Angel Actual so you can talk directly to them.”

  “Copy that, Bigwig,” Barrow said as he rapidly switched frequencies on his radio.

  Another voice soon came on to his radio link. “This is Angel Actual, we have an unidentified craft or something just below us, we are climbing at full throttle to try and evade.”

  “Angel Actual, this is Rapier CAP, we are less than a minute away from you, can you turn and make your heading at … two-seven zero, over,” Barrow said as he kept looking at his radar, but he still couldn’t see any other aircraft in range as the two fighters began to encounter thick clouds over the area.

  “Affirmative, CAP, we are now turning to two-seven zero, over. Am I glad to hear from you guys.”

  As the two Raptors flew just above the thick grey clouds, they finally got a visual on Air Force One. The president’s plane was a blue and white VC-25, the military version of the venerable Boeing-747. They could see that it was making a rapid ascent at full throttle to try to rise above the clouds. Within seconds, the two supersonic Raptors closed the distance and they soon slowed down and maneuvered themselves until they were flying parallel and to the side of Air Force One.

  “Angel Actual, where did you see the unidentified aircraft, over?” Barrow said.

  “CAP, we were about forty-five thousand feet and cruising when one of our passengers noticed something flying just below us. We quickly made a distress call and climbed above the cloud cover.”

  “Did any of your crew make a visual identification?”

  “Negative, CAP, none of my crew made full ID other than seeing a glimpse of it, but cloud cover obscured full identification.”

  “Clyde, bogey at five o’clock … just below us!” Foles said.

  Barrow glanced down to the right side of the glass canopy and noticed what looked like a black wing hidden by some clouds below. He quickly put the engines to near full throttle and banked right, his wingman following right behind him. “This is CAP, I have tallyho on a bogey at thirty thousand, turning to engage.”

  The two Raptors began to use radar sweeps over the clouds, but they still couldn’t get a contact as Air Force One veered away and tried to get some distance from them. Barrow cursed. Whatever kind of a plane that was, it must be able to vanish into thin air. The radio was silent other than the heavy breathing of the two fighter pilots.

  And then they saw it, or at least a slight glimpse of the creature. It flew up slightly where it poked its head above the clouds before diving back into the mists. It looked like a gigantic black bird, its condor-like wings were close to fifty feet across, its entire body the size of a small building, with a massive, hooked black beak equal in size to the Raptor’s nose cone. And it had glowing red eyes.

  Barrow pulled at the control stick with his right hand that sent the fighter down towards the massive cloud cover ahead of them as his wingman followed. “Tallyho! I have contact … it looks like a giant bird. It’s almost as big as an aircraft carrier!”

  “Jesus, Clyde! Did you see the size of that thing?” Foles said over the radio.

  Barrow cursed as his sensors continued to see nothing. “McFly, can you get a tone?”

  “Negative, no tone.”

  “Switching to boresight mode,” Barrow said tersely as he toggled his four AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles into free guidance mode, this meant that his missiles could lock onto the first thing it sees after being fired, rather than having to wait for the target lock via radar before it could be released.

  Both Raptors descended rapidly, hoping to catch the creature below the haze, but as they flew out just below the clouds, there was nothing but an empty sky down below.

  Foles continued to turn his head in order to scan what was at their flanks and behind them. “Where the hell is that thing?”

  As both fighters continued flying just below the mists, the once tranquil white cloud cover somehow began to transform itself into a storm front within seconds, as the clouds began to coalesce into a swirling grey haze of high force winds. Electric sparks could be seen as lightning bolts began to flash all around them.

  Barrow’s grip tightened on his control stick as it began to wobble due to the violent winds now buffeting his aircraft. “What in the hell is going on?”

  “Clyde, I think I see something up in the clouds just above us, one o’clock,” Foles said as crackling thunder began to deafen their ears. The whole thing was just unbelievable.

  Barrow pulled up on his control stick. “Climbing.”

  As both Raptors gained altitude, they ended up in a swirling, haze-filled fury of rain, thunder, and lightning that was all around them. Barrow’s electronic HUD began to go haywire as frequent lightning bolts had touched his aircraft. Although modern day fighters had built in insulators against lightning strikes, frequent exposure would corrode these defenses over time. Barrow felt like his Raptor was hit by over a dozen electrical bolts within just a few seconds as his radar indicator suddenly went blank. Just as he took his left hand off the throttle and started to toggle with the controls of his HUD, the giant bird dove down until it was less than half a mile in front of them.

  On impulse, Barrow toggled the weapons switch to activate his aircraft’s 20mm Vulcan cannon embedded in its right wing root. Just as he sighted the creature on his helmet, it turned to face them while still maintaining its velocity as a massive electrical bolt surged at them from its open beak. B
arrow instinctively made a hard turn to his left as the energy surge only glanced off his aircraft’s fuselage. In the split second, he veered away from it, but his wingman wasn’t so lucky as Foles’s Raptor took on the full force of the mystical lightning bolt. Foles screamed for a split second. The intense energy from the monster engulfed the cockpit and ignited the fuel tanks while detonating the missiles in the second Raptor. The resulting explosion instantly tore the plane apart in midair.

  Barrow struggled to keep his plane steady as it entered into an uncontrollable spin. The energy surge had shorted out his fly-by-wire controls and HUD. His Raptor began to tumble out of the sky as the intense G-forces made it hard to breathe and he moved in slow motion. It was as if there were multiple anvils on his chest, shoulders, arms, and legs while the pounding headache got worse and started to blur his outer vision. All he could see now was his gloved left hand that slowly reached down and activated his APGS, the auxiliary power generation system, the one thing that could save him since it had a self-contained battery. The seconds seemed like an eternity as his fingers slowly touched the switch and flipped it on twice. By the second click, he instantly heard the turbines restart themselves as his left hand quickly grabbed the throttle stick; his right flipped the switches back on to get some power before the aircraft hit the ground. All the while, the onboard computer kept giving him the stall warning.

  He was less than five thousand feet off the ground as the Raptor’s engines got to full throttle and he pulled the control stick up to climb again. Barrow’s radar indicator and most of his electronics were malfunctioning due to being burned out by the lightning surge, but he still had his guns. Even though his wingman was probably dead, he still had a duty to protect the president with his life if necessary.

  Just as the Raptor finally tore above the storm clouds, he quickly saw that the cause was lost as the monster bird had closed in on the president’s plane. Barrow screamed in rage. The creature had somehow accelerated close to Mach 1 as it got right behind Air Force One, even though the president’s plane was making a hard right turn and diving to avoid it. Barrow felt like he was living a nightmare as the creature’s huge claws started tearing at the veering plane’s left wing and finally ripped half the section right off just as its massive beak snapped the tail rudder in two. Air Force One plunged sideways and into the swirling mists below as the monster bird seemed to have noticed the closing Raptor and turned to face it.