“Jimmy, kick it, man. They’re gaining on us.”
“We’re already over Mach Two.” Jimmy sounded woozy.
“So push it!” Once again, the two pilots were flattened against the backs of their cockpit chairs. The instrument panels showed that they were pushing their planes way beyond the intended limits, zooming out across the California desert at twice the speed of sound.
“Gotta get off the ground, partner. I’m… uh, I’m feeling… I don’t know.” Jimmy was losing consciousness. He knew increasing his altitude would make the landscape, now flashing by at a dizzying pace, appear to move slower.
Steve thought the attackers showed some reluctance about getting too close to the ground, but Jimmy was already building altitude, so he followed.
“Keep it straight, Jimmy, you’re veering right.”
“You get out, Stevie.”
“Don’t start that crap on me. We’re together all the way, you hear? But you gotta keep your speed up, man.”
Steve slowed to keep him in sight, watching his jet continue to drift right. The attackers began to close in. “We gotta go, Jimmy! Gotta push it!”
It was no use. The attackers were tucked in tight behind them, tracer fire whizzing past. Steve screamed into his microphone, begging Jimmy to wake up, but it was no use. He took a quick glance backward and saw his partner’s silver jet flying itself, already miles away. Just as he was about to turn and follow, he saw the flash of light. The enemy planes had split up and the one following Jimmy had shot him down.
Steve screamed with his whole body and began shaking the controls, making the plane convulse with his anger. He rammed the engine thrusters forward so hard he bent the shaft against the stop, and still screaming, he pushed the plane to the very limit of its speed. At Mach 2-plus, the desert was a fast blur of brown scrub hills crossed by flashes of highways and small towns. It felt like being in the flight simulator with the pursuit speed setting stuck on “Impossible.” For a couple of minutes, anger and pain still clouding his mind, Steve flew in a straight line without checking behind. Given the opportunity, he would have flown kamikaze, head-on into any attacker in his way. His rage subsiding, he finally checked behind and found he had a single attacker at five o’clock, trailing him patiently. He knew there was no way he could win a firefight. Escape was his only hope. But, as he flew through a cloudless sky over the vast empty stretches of Death Valley, there weren’t too many places to hide. Something glinted far out on the white horizon of the desert, a city rising out of nowhere. He banked north and flew that direction. Within seconds, the distant city was beneath his plane. Steve could see enough, just enough, to tell him the city was Las Vegas.
The engines were feeling the strain. Their whining told Steve they wouldn’t take this kind of punishment much longer. Still running north, he flew past what looked like a small airbase with a pair of crisscrossed runways built on a dry lake bed. A pair of radar dishes were pivoting on their towers, and it looked like there were camouflage trucks parked next to a couple of hangars. His eyes searched for any sign that they knew what was happening to him and were sending help. He didn’t recognize the place at all, didn’t know of any base this far north of Vegas.
Then, all at once, he knew exactly what he was going to do. He pulled a hard right over the airbase and lifted over the chain of hills that had created the lake bed ten thousand years before. He checked his compass for due east and turned in that direction. In less than two minutes, he found what he was looking for, his secret weapon: the Grand Canyon.
He cut his engines without warning. The stingray ship, surprised, sailed past as Steve executed a soft dive over the edge of the canyon wall. He drove the plane deep between the red rock walls until he was almost low enough to fish in the Colorado River, the body of water which, over millions of years, had cut this awesome, jagged wonder out of the hard desert floor. The attacker followed him down and caught up in no time.
“Okay, jerk-off. Let’s have some fun.”
Weaving at high speed through the twisted, eerie rock formations, Steve put on a clinic in advance aerobatics, banking, diving, and swerving like mad. The much larger attack plane followed clumsily behind, the tips of its wings chipping spires of rock into the abyss below. The alien’s protective shield allowed him to make mistake after mistake and survive. Not only that, but he seemed to be getting the hang of flying through this obstacle course, managing to get off a few shots at Steve’s F-18.
Feeling the pressure, Steve ducked into a much smaller side canyon. Here there was almost no room for error. The serpentine path narrowed in some places to only twice the jet’s wing span. Steve knew better than to fly defensively at a time like this. He hit the gas and attacked the turns, climbing and falling with grace. He felt certain that if he kept this ballet going long enough, his clumsy dance partner would eventually plaster himself facefirst against the rocks. Then a sensor on the instrument panel began flashing on and off. His fuel tank was almost empty.
“Damn it! You’re really starting to burn me up, you damn Darth Vader wannabe.”
Not far ahead, a massive wall of stone stood where the canyon came to a dead end. Knowing that once he was out of the canyon he was a dead man, Steve decided to go for broke. He eased off on the speed and hit a switch labeled “Fuel Drop.” Reserve fuel in both tanks spewed into the air behind him, splattering the gray ship. Then he hit the afterburners, igniting the fuel in the air, leaving a trail of superheated fire in his wake. Steve looked back just in time to see the attacker burst through the wall of flame, undaunted.
“Damn you! Okay, if you’re the sucker who’s gonna take me out, I want to see if you can fly under cover.”
Pulling the cord marked “drag chute,” a large parachute suddenly shot open behind his fighter. With a lightning reflex, Steve hit the release, detaching the cords from the plane before he was rear-ended. As he hoped, the chute fluttered shapelessly in the air for a second before the attacker ran into it nose first. The alarm buzzer was now ringing in Steve’s earphones, the signal that his fuel was completely gone. He felt the engines hesitate as pockets of air came through the fuel lines.
“Now let’s see if you’re fully equipped.”
Steve unplugged his headset, tightened up his seat belt, and pointed his plane right at the dead end wall. Behind him the attacker brushed against the side of the gorge tearing the parachute away. He accelerated hard to catch the F-18.
Two hundred feet from impact, Steve shut his eyes and yanked up hard on a cord running down to the bottom of his seat. A moment later, there was an ear splitting thwack as the plane demolished itself against the precipice.
The alien pilot saw what was coming and swerved violently upward. He came within ten feet of cleanly scaling the wall, but instead, the stingray ship went nose to nose with a boulder one hundred times its size and lost. Sending a shower of dust and splintered rock into the air, the craft plowed into the rock, then glanced away, flipping end over end over end, crashing across the rocky desert floor until it finally came to rest, looking like a coin bent almost in half.
Still strapped in his pilot’s chair, Captain Hiller laughed as loud as he could at the broken UFO. He was slowly falling through the hot Arizona morning beneath the shade of his open parachute. When he finally hit the ground, it was a quick, hard landing. Rolling over, he popped the buckles on the chair and freed himself. Wasting no time, he marched across the sand and rock toward the nearby attacker, the cicadas chirping a strange high pitched tone in the scrub brush. He was dazed, maniacal, angry.
The closer he came, the more menacing the fallen attacker appeared. It was protected by a dozen plates of armor. One of these had torn partially loose where the tail of the ship had bent upward. Beneath the gray plate, it had the raw look of a freshly skinned animal. The ship’s muscles, tendons, and ligaments were actually thousands of tiny interlocking mechanical pieces. A delicate, ghastly white, they lay exposed to the sun, embedded in a thick layer of transparent, stick
y gelatin.
Steve took the last few steps toward the ship slowly, hands out in front of him, feeling for the invisible protective shield. It was down. Spotting what looked like a hatch that had been broken open, he hoisted himself up onto the wing, and after seven full strides, he came to the center of the craft. With all his might, he yanked the door fully open.
Immediately, he screamed and jumped backwards. Just inside the door, struggling to pull itself out of the plane, was a living creature, an alien. A large shell-like head emerged unsteadily into the sunlight. Beneath deep empty eye sockets, the creature had a protruding snout, a tangled mask of cartilage jutting forward like the oily white roots of a tree. Moist tentacles ran off the chin and ears, feeling the edge of the escape hatch. Its thick bony neck flared outward before tapering to a point at the top of its head. A deep gash ran right up the center of the face from the chin to the tip of its pointy head, where the two halves of the skull had fused together. It looked like the result of a crossbreeding experiment between a fully armored medieval warrior and a cockroach.
After watching the repulsive animal struggle toward the sunlight for a moment, Steve performed his sworn duty. With one savage punch, he clocked the alien square in the face. With a sickening crack, the monster’s bony head bounced off the side of the hatch then collapsed, knocked unconscious.
He stood over the alien’s limp body until his anger and fear subsided. Eventually, he sat down and reached into his breast pocket, withdrawing a slightly damaged Victory Dance cigar. He bit off one end and spit it into the face of his unconscious enemy. Then he lit it up and took a long, angry puff.
“Now that’s what I call a close encounter.”
*
In Death Valley, the refugees spent the night milling about under the stars, locked in a thousand grim strategy sessions. They were gathered in a bone-dry valley, their RVs and trailer homes parked at odd angles to one another. All night long, groups of people congregated in the dusty glare of headlights, silhouettes holding coffee cups and shotguns, ready to defend their campground against unwanted visitors, terrestrial or otherwise. Dead Joshua trees were collected to fuel a central of bonfire around which one plan after another was proposed, hashed out, and agreed to, until some new motorist arrived with a fresh supply of rumors. Then, all their arrangements fell apart and had to be renegotiated from scratch.
Russell, for once, had done well. Not once did he mention his famous abduction, and he helped keep the others in his group focused and steady. He held fast to the very first plan they had made: drive into Las Vegas for gasoline and supplies, then get into the open space of Arizona.
By midmorning, the fifty or so trailers the Casses planned to travel with were in the final stages of preparing to leave the campground. Some were already parked alongside the road, their motors idling while the drivers stood around in weekend Tshirts and baseball caps waiting impatiently for the others. The Casse family, however, was distracted by Troy’s condition. He was getting worse, the way he did when he’d had his first seizures. Blotches were coming out on his skin and although he wasn’t in convulsions yet, he was starting to get awful shaky.
Miguel decided to try once more. For the third time since they arrived, he went through the camp, going door to door asking for medicine. He knew he was unlikely to find any hydrocortisone, but hoped someone might be a diabetic who could spare some insulin. Lots of people offered hydrocortisone cream, an anti-itch medicine, and were a little put off when Miguel didn’t stay to explain the difference.
The morning was turning hot outside, but Troy lay in the bed shivering under a thick pile of blankets. Russell sat next to him, wiping down his forehead with a cold compress while Alicia made him some more sweet tea.
“You know, you’re just like your mother used to be. She was stubborn too. She was a sweet, sweet woman—rest her soul—but when it came time to take her medicine, she’d get ornerier than a mule.”
Troy was scared. “I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have wasted the medicine. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, that’s past history, Troy-boy. We’ll find some more, you’ll see.”
“I’m not going to die like Mom, am I?”
The question caught Russell by surprise and hit him hard. Before he could dismiss the idea and reassure his weakening son, he remembered sitting at Maria’s bedside telling her the same thing.
“You’re going to be fine,” Alicia was adamant. “Of course you’re going to get better. Don’t even say that.”
Miguel returned to the trailer, empty-handed. “I tried everyone. I couldn’t find anything. And now everybody’s packing up to leave. Some guy drove by yelling that a spaceship is heading this way.”
The family looked at one another, startled by this news. “Then we’d better make ourselves scarce. We need to leave anyhow,” Russell said with a nod toward the boy.
“Don’t let the spaceship get us, Dad. Let’s go. I’ll get better.”
“Our group’s headed south. We’re going to take back roads the whole way, but we’ll pass a hospital near Las Vegas. It’s only a couple hours away, so I think we should leave now.”
Russell agreed. Then a knock came on the door. Alicia edged past Miguel and stood in the doorway. On the other side of the screen was someone she recognized, a handsome boy of sixteen, with a mop of reddish hair. He had something in his hand.
“Penicillin,” he announced, holding up a bottle of pills.
“Hello, Penicillin. My name’s Alicia.”
When he realized he was being teased, he broke out in a warm grin. “Oh. I’m Philip. Philip Oster. You remember me from last night?”
A sudden rustling noise behind her in the trailer made the boy realize his question could be taken the wrong way. He raised his voice a notch and hastily added, “You told me your little brother was sick.”
That was true. After noticing each other several times during the long evening and engaging in several bouts of significant eye contact, they’d finally found the nerve to approach one another. They had a brief conversation about Troy’s condition, and Philip had promised to try to help. And now there he was with a vial of penicillin.
“Anyway, I know this isn’t exactly what he needs but it should keep his fever down.”
Alicia glanced down at the ground, blushing. “It’s really nice of you to help,” she said softly, opening the screen to accept the medicine. Behind her she could feel her father looking over her shoulder. Philip took a full step backward when he saw the large, unshaven Russell staring down at him.
“I wish I—I mean, my family wishes we could do more,” he stammered, “I mean, like, if—well, anyway, we’re leaving in a few minutes.”
Alicia’s face brightened when she heard that. A little too eagerly, she told him, “Us, too. We’re going with you!” Then, hearing her father groan behind her, she added, “I mean, we’re leaving, too.”
“Cool.” Philip smiled warmly. “That’s a great old plane you guys are towing. Does it work?”
Russell had had his fill of this tender little balcony scene. “That’s enough,” he grumbled. “Thanks for the medicine. Now quit sniffing around and get back to your own trailer.”
“Dad, please!” Alicia said through her false grin. But Philip didn’t seem to mind very much. With a charming smile, he backed away from the doorstep. “So, talk to you at the next stop?”
Smitten by this gallant young man, Alicia watched him jog back to his parents’ fancy RV. When he was gone, she turned around and found the Casse men, even ailing Troy, staring at her expectantly. “What?” she demanded. “I was just being nice to him because he brought us some medicine.”
“Yeah, right.”
*
NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense system, was the safest spot in the world. Built deep within Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, it was an impregnable underground military command post, a high-tech sanctuary for the nation’s leaders—the president in particular—in the event of nuclear a
ttack. The walls of the bunker were designed to withstand the force of a nearby nuclear blast by themselves. Buried, as they were, deep below the surface of the earth, they offered even greater protection. Everything could be controlled from the giant war room, which was at the heart of the facility. Even if every city in the U.S. were to be wiped out, the technicians in Colorado would be able to track enemy movement, coordinate troops stationed overseas, and launch several different kinds of missile attacks. The vice president, the joint chiefs of staff, their advisers and families were already safely sheltered in the mountain, waiting for the president to arrive. NORAD computers were linked to those aboard Air Force One.
Approximately twelve minutes into the bloody, one-sided dogfights in the skies over New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, the technicians crowded into Air Force One’s command center began losing the ability to coordinate the nation’s military response. First, they lost radio contact with the surviving F-18s. Next, global radar capability was interrupted. Finally, they lost their links with NORAD and had to switch over to microwave telephone.
“They must be targeting our satellites. We’re losing all satellite communication, tracking, and mapping.”
They switched over to Air Force One’s ULR (UpLooking Radar) then, and watched a sweep screen showing the positions of the most important Comsats. One by one, they were vanishing. The only explanation was that the invaders were up there, 33,000 miles into the heavens, the altitude where a satellite could stay in geosynchronous orbit over a fixed spot on earth. As the awkward multimillion dollar transmitters floated past, they were being blasted out of the sky.
The military had satellites stationed in different orbital paths at other altitudes, but switching over required ground crews in several locations to retarget receptor dishes. Before that work could even be ordered, the bases themselves came under massive, virulent bombardment. The last thing Air Force One heard from El Toro was the flight tower screaming, “Incoming! Hostile incoming!” Before a single plane could get off the ground, the base was transformed to a smoldering ruin. Slowly, the president’s flying fortress was being cut off from the rest of the world.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 16