Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  The road turned out to be just as endless as the desert. Though she got much farther than when she was driving through the rocky desert scrub, she had to stop after an hour and carefully pour the last drops of gas into her tank. She also finished another water bottle, leaving only two more in the now-hot cooler that had once held a dozen frozen ones. For the first time, Kathy started to feel nervous about her prospects.

  She drove on to the east, hoping for some signs of life as afternoon began to stretch toward evening. Another pair of jets passed over. Then, a half hour later, a group of helicopters surprised her. They’d come in low from behind her, no more than 100 feet over the road. When they shot over her with a roar of turbine engines and the deafening thrum of blades, she almost crashed into the ditch.

  “Shit!” she cried as she jerked the ATV off the road, then nearly flipped as she over-corrected and fishtailed in the gravel. The helicopters were U.S. Army gunships, bristling with machine guns and rockets. They were two-seaters, front and back, and looked vaguely insectoid to her. As the last pair flew by, Kathy had a perfect view of the helmeted man in the back seat of the final chopper. He turned his head and looked at her as he flew past.

  She grabbed the microphone from its clip next to the GoPro. “At least 20 helicopters, U.S. Army. I think they’re…Indian name…Apaches, or something like that. Maybe it’s Chinook. Anyway, they’re heading east, same as I am. There’s little doubt something big is going on that way.” She thought for a minute, then stowed the mic and started up again.

  Almost an hour later as the gas gauge slipped below 50 percent, and she emptied her next-to-last bottle of water, she realized there was no traffic on the road. Even in the middle of nowhere, wouldn’t she have seen a car or two in an hour?

  She crested a low hill and found a slight downhill grade that made a twisting turn around a clump of huge boulders. “Maybe there’s a stream down there, or something,” she thought. Part of the way down, she put the bike into neutral and coasted to save gas. She put it back in gear as she reached the bottom, gently banking on the turn around the boulders. And there was a gas station.

  “Hot damn!” she cheered, and got a mouthful of dust for her effort. She coughed and laughed, grabbing the last bottle of water to rinse out her mouth, then she downed the rest. Less than a minute later, she regretted that waste.

  It was obvious something was wrong at the station once she got closer. The doors stood open, and no one was in sight. At least a dozen cars surrounded the two pumps, and a line backed up almost to the road. “Petro Grande!” proclaimed the sign. The price of gas was $50 per liter. Damn! Then she remembered that was pesos and shook her head.

  “Anyone here?” she called as she pulled to a stop in front of the main door. An ancient metal milk can, painted to look like a cow, propped it open. “Hola?” she asked, utilizing her entire Spanish vocabulary. Slowly walking into the store, she found it part lunch counter, part convenience store. Someone had stripped the shelves, and smoke curled from the grill behind the lunch counter where forgotten food burned to a crisp. A radio played an almost cliché mariachi song. The station was abandoned, though it hadn’t been for long.

  She walked to the cooler. The liquor section was empty, and the sodas were mostly gone; however, the water section was at least half full. She went to her ATV, took the keys, and returned with her cooler and backpack. She filled the cooler with half-liter water bottles, the coldest she could find, and topped it off with ice from a five-pound bag. Popping an ice cube into her mouth, she crunched it and let it slowly melt, savoring the cold water dripping down her throat. After dropping the cooler onto her trailer, she went back in to look for anything else that might be of any use.

  She filled her backpack with chips, dip, and a half dozen cans of chili. As she walked past the counter, she stopped long enough to fish out a pair of $20 bills, moving a souvenir ceramic scorpion to hold them down, then headed out the door. Thunder pealed across the landscape from the east again, only now it didn’t sound like thunder. “Crump, crump, crump,” it echoed.

  She moved the ATV over to the pumps and tried them. They buzzed at each selection until she got to super. That pump gurgled, spat some gas, then gurgled and spat again. As luck would have it, it kept doing that, discharging a few ounces each time. Kathy figured it was worth her time and kept at it. In a few minutes the bike’s tank was full. She picked up one of the empty five-gallon cans and continued.

  The minutes ticked by as Kathy filled the first five-gallon can and grabbed another. When that one was half-full the spurts became more intermittent. When it was just a bit short of full, no more gas came out. She carefully turned off the pump and returned the nozzle, noting how much the total sale was and deciding she’d already left enough money on the counter. She strapped her cooler back in place, stowed the backpack full of snacks, and went to climb on the bike. Her head came up as she heard a massive “CRUMP!”

  That was an explosion, she realized. It wasn’t thunder, it was explosions.

  Past the station in the direction she’d been heading, the distance reverberated with the deep “Crump! Crump! Crump!” of more exploding bombs. She’d been to Fallujah; she knew that sound only too well. She cursed herself for not realizing it sooner. Suddenly the thunder she’d heard earlier became infinitely more ominous in her mind’s eye as did the choppers and all the planes she’d seen. “Shit, shit, shit,” she cursed as she quickly checked to make sure she had sufficiently secured the bike’s load. She’d just put her thumb on the starter when the first truck came into view.

  Kathy looked around in a panic. She could run into the convenience store to hide, but that meant abandoning her bike and trailer. The curve around the boulder was almost 100 yards away. As she was desperately considering her options, she saw the truck had a machine gun on its roof, and the guy behind it was looking right at her. Any thoughts of running died on the spot as she thought they might kill her if she made a break for it.

  The truck rumbled down the road, leaving a trail of angry, black diesel smoke. It seemed to be really moving. As it got closer, she could make out the U.S. Army markings on the hood and breathed a small sigh of relief. Maybe it would race on by. Instead, it slowed as it approached and turned into the aisle next to where she parked. The gunner turned to her, but left his huge weapon pointed forward. “¿Qué estás haciendo aquí?”

  Kathy blinked and looked at him. “I’m sorry?” she asked.

  “American?” the gunner replied in surprise. “Girl, what in the ever-loving fuck are you doing here?” He had a distinct Texas accent.

  “I was on vacation,” she lied quickly. “I’m camped a few miles away.” The passenger door opened, and another soldier dropped down. He didn’t give her a second look, but headed right to the pump. “The gas is empty,” she said, and hoped they wouldn’t realize that she had two full cans.

  “How about the diesel?” the soldier asked, his hand on the pump handle.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said and patted the tank on her ATV. “It burns gas.”

  He grunted and pulled out the handle, flipped on the pump and aimed the nozzle. It spurted out a noxious stream of amber liquid. “Looks good,” he said and set about pumping it into the truck’s sizeable tanks.

  “Corporal!” the gunner called out. “Check inside for civilians and supplies.”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” a voice called from the back. A door opened, and another soldier jumped down. His boots left dark red prints in the dirt, and a stream of red liquid began to pour from the back of the truck.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, unable to take her eyes away from the stream.

  “Look, lady,” the gunner said, “there’s a…disturbance down the road. You need to break camp and evacuate north immediately.”

  “What kind of disturbance?” she asked. There were moans from the back of the truck. She found herself moving that way, her feet operating outside of her will. The gunner and the man fueling the truck were watching
the man going into the store and not paying any attention to her. She could hear more trucks coming down the road and more explosions, too. Someone screamed from the back of the truck.

  “Corpsman,” the sergeant behind the machine gun barked, “report!”

  “The Mexican LT is convulsing,” another man called out.

  “I thought you said the bite wasn’t critical.”

  “It doesn’t appear to be, Sergeant. Just a soft tissue injury to his bicep!” There was another scream, followed by a feral snarl. “Damn it!” the corpsman yelled. “Stop it! Basta, basta!” The truck rocked as someone inside landed against a wall. “Sarge, help!”

  “Goddamn it,” the gunner snapped, and dropped out of sight. A second later the truck rocked again. “Corporal! Get back in here!”

  The soldier who had gone into the convenience mart came running out, his arms laden down with sports drinks, and raced past her. When he got to the back of the truck he took one look, dropped his burden, and leaped inside.

  Maybe it was her reporter’s curiosity. Kathy found herself inexplicably moving toward the back of the truck. A moment later she beheld a scene from hell.

  The back of the truck was full of shelves holding stretchers. Wounded men and women occupied all of them, some holding two or three. They all looked ashen-faced; some weren’t moving. Several sat and watched the three soldiers locked in a hand-to-hand struggle with one strong soldier. He wore a different uniform—Mexican, she assumed. He was a beefy guy, and the expression on his face was utterly insane. The beefy soldier pinned the man she assumed was the corpsman and was trying desperately to bite him. The gunner and the corporal were trying to pull him off while trying to avoid his snapping jaws. The gunner moved in quickly, slipping an arm around the Mexican officer’s neck, going for a choke hold. The crazed man was faster, and all the gunner succeeded in doing was feeding his forearm to him.

  “Fuck!” the gunner cried out as the Mexican officer bit down with enough force to tear loose a chunk of flesh. “Damn it, get him off me!”

  In a flash, the corporal drew his sidearm and swung it cross-body, connecting with the side of the officer’s head. The man let go of the sergeant and rolled to the rear of the transport, coming up on hands and knees, looking right at Kathy.

  “Oh shit,” she said and backpedaled. Blood and meat dripping from his lips, he screeched an inhuman sound and jumped at her. Kathy managed to cut sideways so all his outstretched arms got was her shirt sleeve, but he held it in an iron grip. Kathy tried to pull away, almost jerking the insane officer off his feet, despite his grip. Her pull turned into a spin as she desperately tried to keep him at arm’s length in a macabre ballet of death. The officer pulled at her sleeve, his jaws snapping, his hunger insatiable. Kathy screamed, and her shirt tore.

  The officer stumbled, looked at the torn shirt in his bloody hand, then threw it aside as he regained his balance and relocated her. Released from the centrifugal force of their spin, Kathy fetched up against the side of the truck, hard. The impact knocked the breath out of her, and her legs collapsed. The officer came around, spotted her, and snarled as he prepared to leap.

  A series of thunderclaps behind her assailed Kathy’s head with enough concussive force to make her scream and put her hands to her ears. The upper part of the man’s torso exploded in a shower of blood and gore. What remained hit the gas station’s concrete pad with a wet thud.

  Several .50 caliber casings clattered off the back of the truck and landed next to Kathy, who was shaking uncontrollably, hands over her ears. One of the rounds had missed the officer and passed through a gas pump, ricocheted off the blacktop, and punched a hole through the convenience store. The upper third of the officer’s chest and head lay twitching less than a foot from her feet. She shook once, leaned over, and puked all over the truck tire.

  “You okay, ma’am?” asked the corporal when he came around the back of the truck. He took no real notice of the slaughtered officer who’d been trying to kill them only moments before.

  “Yeah,” she said, her ears ringing, and wiped her mouth on her arm. She noticed that half her shirt was gone, exposing her bra, and flecks of blood stained the fabric over one breast. She didn’t really care.

  The soldier eyed her shirtless torso for a moment, his expression somewhere between clinical and indifferent. “I think we have some shirts,” he finally offered.

  “I got this,” she said and rose unsteadily to her feet. The back of her head hurt where it had struck the truck. She walked a little stiffly over to her ATV. Taking off the shredded shirt, she stood half-naked and used it to wipe the blood from her breasts and stomach as the corporal watched. He didn’t appear interested in the way a man might have been when watching an attractive topless woman in any other situation. He only seemed to be observing. With as much of the gore cleaned off as possible, she tossed the shirt into the dirt and fished out a clean one from her pack.

  “Maybe you ought to come with us,” the gunner said. He was back in his seat where he’d killed the officer, calmly applying a pressure bandage to his profusely bleeding forearm.

  Kathy remembered the scene in the back of the truck. How many other injured were there back there? Were they potentially insane like that officer? In her mind, there was no doubt that what she’d just seen was connected with the recordings she’d made in Mexico only days ago. “I don’t think so,” she said. Without thinking about how the soldiers might react, she retrieved her .38 Smith & Wesson and stuck it in her waistband, within easy reach. “I think I’ll stick it out alone.”

  The gunner watched her tuck the gun with a nod. “As you wish. Mount up, Corporal.”

  “But, Sarge?”

  “You heard the woman,” he said and made a sweeping gesture with one hand. On the road another pair of trucks was pulling up. One had so many wounded, some were riding the running boards. She heard screaming from the back of another.

  The big truck roared to life and pulled out, the other truck pulling in behind it. A soldier jumped down and headed toward the store. Kathy noticed the gas pump was smoldering, and decided it was time to go.

  * * *

  “Fucking engineers,” Andrew Tobin growled as he entered another command on the slide-out computer screen. Flying the plane was like trying to hack the Pentagon computer networks. “We’re supposed to be pilots, not computer programmers!”

  The glass cockpit environment was configurable in more ways than he’d thought possible. Fighters were straightforward in their layout. Climb out of a 1970s F-14 Tomcat and into an F-22, and you’d find most of the controls in the same places. The A-380 was simply stunning in the sheer complexity of its systems. He was amazed it didn’t require a flight engineer, like planes used to have. Unfortunately, it used a large amount of computer automation to replace the flight engineer, and with that automation mostly out, he was feeling increasingly screwed.

  He looked back at the tablet sitting on his knee and tried to ignore the pounding on the door. “Fuel Low,” an audible warning piped up. He stabbed the override without thinking, found a code on the page and keyed it in. The problem he was having was that many of the configurable touch screens were trashed. When the pilot got his throat ripped out, it had sprayed blood all over the place. More than half the displays were either on the blink from the bloodbath or broken in the struggle. He put the code in, and most of the screens went blank.

  “That’s not good.” Fortunately, there was one screen still working, and it displayed a series of icons. He managed to access the maintenance configuration screen and could now assign any data to any screen. “Yes!” he said, and immediately began assigning critical info to the three working panels.

  He programmed navigation with altitude and course on the first one as well as a radar display, although the radar flashed to announce it was on backup; the main radar was out. On the next screen, he added consumables and power management. The final screen referenced his artificial horizon and flight surface feedback.

/>   They were doing 650 knots at 25,000 feet. “Why the hell are we so low?” he wondered. Normally he’d instantly begin climbing out of the storm. One glance at the fuel gauge killed that idea. He tapped the fuel icon, then the ‘Endurance’ option that appeared. Shaded in bright red, “24 minutes” flashed in response. Andrew stared at it for a moment, and it changed to 23. “Jesus Christ.”

  Before he even looked at Nav, he reached for the autopilot controls, luckily still on their own working panel, and he input instructions. He decreased speed from cruise to the minimum required to maintain altitude. The power management system showed all four turbines spool down, and the elevators changed their angles to compensate, bringing the huge aircraft’s nose up slightly. The endurance display jumped to 36. That would buy him some time, and time was everything. “As long as you’re flying, you’re living,” his first flight instructor had told him years ago.

  Nav was next. It took some fiddling to get the malfunctioning system to work. It kept trying to interface with their route and was having trouble as evidenced by the failure of the automated flight path. According to the ETA display they should have landed a half hour ago. When he eventually found a basic map, it made him hiss in frustration. They were over central Mexico! He glanced out the window, half expecting to see a Mexican F-15 on his wing. He saw only clouds and lightning.

  The radio was on its own panel as well and was redundant. He flipped to a regional ATC channel and pressed the transmit button on the stick. “This is Air Saudi Flight 66 Heavy over Mexican air space, and I am declaring an emergency. Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Air Saudi Flight 66, I say again, mayday, mayday, mayday.” Andrew released the button and waited. Nothing. He repeated the call. “I add; this flight was destined for Houston. We have experienced…” what the fuck could he say? “We’ve experienced a sickness on board, disabling the captain and flight crew. We have lost autopilot and have strayed off course. I have less than 30 minutes of fuel on board, and need directions for an emergency landing, soonest! Mayday, mayday, mayday!”