A Time to Die

by Mark Wandrey

  The brakes were barely restraining the plane. The squeal of tires on concrete was clearly audible over the straining engines. The plane started to yaw to starboard. Andrew decreased that engine a notch and it straightened out. He glanced at the doors behind. They were almost open all the way. He hoped it was enough and punched the brake release with his foot, and yelped as he was jerked forward. His face smashed into the control yoke.

  “Shit!” he said, putting a hand to his face and having it come away bloody.

  The plane fairly rocketed backwards. He had a half a second to worry about the wings clearing the doors. That was all the time it took for the plane to fly through the doors and out onto the taxiway. Andrew applied some brake and the tires screamed, smoke flying they tried unsuccessfully to bite into the concrete. It took him a full second to come to his senses, the plane careened over the taxiway and halfway across the runway before he grabbed the throttles and yanked them to neutral. `He jammed the brakes on and the plane actually skidded to a stop on the opposite taxiway.

  As the turboprops reduced to a dull roar, Andrew could hear the calls of consternation from the back. It sounded like the passengers had been tossed around fairly well during his…unconventional maneuvers. He feathered the props and glanced over the instruments quickly to make sure he hadn’t damaged anything. But as his eyes passed glanced at the gauges on the overhead he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked. There were hundreds of the crazies racing right at them.

  He keyed the intercom. “Hang on back there!”

  “Could have said that earlier,” Chris came back. He could hear the sound of them dogging the door over the speaker.

  Andrew reached down, changed the pitch forward a hundred percent, and gave it some throttle. At the same time, he flipped the cross over and ignited #1 Engine, glancing out the window to see the prop starting to spin.

  “We’re going to have company!” Chris yelled over the intercom.

  Andrew craned his head and saw several dozen crazies only a few meters behind the tail of the plane. He gave it more throttle and spun the front wheel control, turning them on the tarmac towards the end of the runway. He looked out the left and saw the hundreds who’d assaulted the hangar now sprinting after the plane. The hangars were about midway down the runway. Either way he went it was going to cost him concrete. He gave it more throttle, sending them up to almost seventy miles per hour on the taxiway. He realized he was driving into the wind and felt that feathery sensation on the yoke. The plane was trying to take off!

  He looked toward the end of the taxiway. About three hundred meters, no more. There was a perimeter fence about a hundred meters beyond that, and then a radar dome that stood at least three stories tall. “I’m fucking nuts,” he realized even as his hands went to the controls. He flipped the flaps control to 40%, surprised at how quickly they deployed, and then shoved all three running engines throttles to the firewall.

  The plane leaped ahead. It might not be an F-35, but the acceleration was still noticeable. He gave it some rudder to compensate for the yaw from the missing engine and watched the ground speed sweep past a hundred miles per hour. He kept the nose down for another second, gaining speed and looking up at the rapidly approaching end of the taxiway, and a dozen crazies racing out of a maintenance building right into his path.

  “Great,” he grumbled and pulled back on the yoke. The plane’s nose came up just as he ran into the crowd. He felt a couple thumps as a few bounced off the nose gear and one was rode under to be pulverized by the big wide trucks under the fuselage. It was one big dude who had to be a football player, or something, that Andrew watched. He’d been a little behind the others and that put him square under the starboard wing. The massive four-bladed prop, spinning at well over 2,500 RPM, hit the man square on and turned him into meat confetti.

  Streamers of meat and bone splattered against the plane’s fuselage. Andrew pulled his head back as a few bits actually flew through his window and a fine red mist floated in. “Ewww!” he groaned. The starboard engine’s RPM dipped a fraction and recovered.

  The plane came up into a surprising angle of attack. Andrew watched the airspeed continued to climb and nodded in appreciation. The thing really was a beast. He cleared the radar dome by at least fifty feet and banked into a wide turn to port, looking out and down at the runway almost covered in crazy fucks. If he’d come around and used the runway he wouldn’t have hit a half a dozen, he would have had to plow through dozens, if not hundreds.

  “That was insane!” Chris yelled over the intercom. Andrew could hear the other passengers cheering as well.

  He nodded and checked the instruments. All three engines were in the green. With one more check on consumables he slid the cockpit window closed, wiped the blood from his hand, and set a course north.

  Chapter 20

  Sunday, April 22

  Interlude

  The Surgeon-General had asked for two days, five had gone by. Elements of the Third Army Regiment out of Fort Hood were sent to Mexico, at the request of their government. The regimental commander informed them that they’d set up a defensive line west of Monterrey, assisting Mexican Army units. Then word that a wave of refugees were coming through telling crazy stories about murder and cannibalism. Twenty-four hours ago, all contact had been lost with them. Within hours, NORAD reported solid evidence of nuclear detonations within Mexico, backed up by satellite imagery.

  And now the UN knew about the blast and the story was about to break on the international news. The Mexican government was dark; no official communications went in or out. And the Border Patrol was going crazy, their detention facilities were filled with hundreds of thousands of illegals. The order by the CDC to isolate them only made it worse. The chief of staff was reading a report from the Nogales section reporting that an ‘incident’ had happened in their detention facility. More than a thousand were dead.

  “We can no longer deny that a mass exodus of infected from Mexico are on their way here,” the man in the computer window in front of the chief said. He had the look of someone who wasn’t used to being argued with. “We’ve controlled the outbreaks here—”

  “We don’t know that,” the chief of staff said, looking up from the printout. “There are reports of scattered outbreaks.”

  “Nothing like Mexico,” the man insisted.

  “The SG reported, just before he had his stroke last night, that they had yet to isolate the source of the infection.” He glanced at another printout. “There is evidence of multiple vectors.”

  “Experts I know say that isn’t possible.”

  The chief of staff shrugged. “That doesn’t change the fact that there is evidence.” He found another piece of paper and read a line. “Some researcher at the New Mexico State University, down in Las Cruces, guy named Amstead, has been making noise about aliens too.”

  “Aliens?!” the man said incredulously.

  “Yes, aliens. He says he has evidence and wants to convene some group calling themselves Genesis.”

  “That group put together for alien contact,” the other man mumbled, turning away from the pickup on his side. “Might be a useful distraction.”

  “You should know that advisers of the POTUS are suggesting he activate the internet kill switch to keep the Mexican news from getting out.”

  “That would take quite a cover story.”

  “There are always some terrorists to blame,” the chief smirked.

  “Russians?”

  “Works as good as any of them.” The chief was quiet for a moment as he thought. Maybe the whole alien crap could be crafted with the internet shut down? “Speaking of Russia, what about the news of the outbreak in the Ukraine?”

  The other man consulted his own documents. “Their own disease control agency relayed through the WHO that they had contained it inside the city of Pivne. According the WHO, that makes five sites now under control. It looks like only Mexico is in complete meltdown.”

  The m
an nodded. “What about that CBP officer, the one bit by the cow?”

  “CDC has him in their Dallas facility. He’s going to be transferred to Atlanta this afternoon. They got him out of the Nogales hospital before there was any spread.” The chief read from a green paper with the CDC logo on the bottom. “The cattle from that train were all quarantined and blood samples taken. A few apparently got loose. The local police are looking for them.”

  “I suppose you want me to take care of the cows too?”

  “Don’t be funny,” the chief of staff said. “Continue coordinating the disinformation. And stay out of trouble.”

  The chat session ended and the man closed the lid on his laptop. Outside his hotel in Laredo he could hear people partying as the sun was going down. He’d tracked another outbreak here

  He grabbed the remote and turned the TV on to GNN. There was some nonsensical story about a group in Congress pressing for laxer immigration laws. He chuckled and shook his head. They’d be lucky if any of them survived thanks to the current incredibly lax laws. His job would continue until either they won, or the bug did.

  Chapter 21

  Monday, April 23

  Morning

  Three delays had pushed the test into the early morning hours. The sky behind the Laguna Mountains was already turning blue and Jeremiah Osborne was almost out of time. If this didn’t happen soon, another day was wasted. And worse, more money he didn’t have. “What’s holding it up?” he asked into a handheld radio that he hadn’t put down for hours.

  “A general lack of understanding?” was the exasperated reply. A hundred yards away floated a tug that had seen better days. Once named DBB Prosperous, Jeremiah had gotten it for scrap though it still had a functioning generator and could manage (with some coaxing) about five knots. It leaked like a sieve and smelled like a barrel of oil mixed with bad whiskey. The electrical system was prone to failure and if you left the pumps off for more than a few hours the engine room would be up to your knees in water. But it was built like a tank and exactly what they were looking for.

  On the tug, renamed Angel One, Alison McDill put the radio down and couldn’t resist giving it the finger in disgust. One of her techs just chuckled as he tried to get the computer to do what they wanted it to do. The radio out of the way, she settled down to try and understand why the machine wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

  She was the nominal captain of Angel One for the test. A test that thus far had been a complete dud. Jeremiah had handed over the machine to her forty-eight hours ago with the task of getting it to work. When she’d succeeded in a bench test and suggested the next step, maybe a small car or a trash dumpster, Jeremiah jumped the shark and bought a 149-ton trash-heap that was once a working tug.

  “What’s the power reading?” she asked the tech.

  “We’re pushing nearly 2 kilowatts into it,” he said.

  Alison looked at the gauge that most interested her, a modified stress meter wired into the tug’s keel. It stubbornly hadn’t budged. On that now infamous bench test, it had taken less than 1-milliwatt to lift the metallic ammo can. The metallic component proved vital. But the machine worked, it took ferrous metal to transmit its ability. Thus a small fiberglass sailboat was out of the question. That test operated with a nine-volt battery for hours. However, from twenty-five pounds to almost 300,000 was a bit of a jump. Only five orders of magnitude. Even with that astounding jump in size, she’d estimated it should have only taken 300 watts to lift the tug. The hypothesis hadn’t been born out.

  “Temperature from the interface?” she asked.

  “Holding steady at 150,” another tech told her. Interfacing with the machine to transfer power turned out to be a challenge. They had ended up using a rare earth nearly-superconductor. Though it would degrade with use, it proved to be the best choice at the time.

  Alison grumbled and looked at her screen. The temperature of just a little over one and a half over the boiling point of water confirmed that power was moving through the interface. However neither of the stress meters were moving, which means the machine still wasn’t doing its job, even at eight times the power it should have taken.

  “Try varying the input polarity,” she ordered. There were four power input points, and from the bench test they knew that it took power flowing through all four to make the device work. Even after the machine activated, removing power from any of the four stopped it. It was also particular about the type of power. It had to be 240 volts, with no more variation than 0.1%. She’d manufactured that power supply from scratch. It had to be DC, and two of them positive and two negative. The bench test wattage was so low and the amperage was almost nonexistent.

  For a few minutes they varied the input polarity of some very scary wattages of current with no results. She was sure the machine was ‘working’, but it wasn’t producing any measurable results.

  “Maybe it can’t handle something this big?” a tech suggested. “Didn’t it come out of a ship the size of a sofa?”

  Alison nodded, she’d said as much when Jeremiah had pushed for the jump in scale. He hadn’t really listened. A lot of people said it was one of Jeremiah’s few problems. He went off rather halfcocked sometimes, maybe a little more than halfcocked?

  One of the techs made a joke Alison didn’t hear, prompting several to laugh. One hard enough to slap the desk, and hit his computer keyboard. The computerized stress gauge let out a squawk and the ship MOVED. It didn’t move left, or right. It didn’t move forward or backwards. It unfortunately didn’t move up either. It went down.

  Metal groaned like a wounded monster as 149 tons of rusted, aging tug was shoved under water like a little toy in a baby’s bath. The acceleration was so precipitous that for a long moment they left an air wake behind them, like a bullet shot into a water barrel. Inside the ship, they felt nothing. Not the slightest hint of momentum or acceleration.

  Alison gasped from the sudden movement of the gauge, then three things happened. The light in the room turned blue, then green, a girl screamed, and the air pocket collapsed. Water crashed in against the upper superstructure with a resounding boom! It had been a chilly morning in San Diego, thank goodness, so all the portholes were closed. Even so, many began spraying high pressure water as the tug shot downward. It took her another half second to understand what was happening. In that time the tug slammed into the bottom of the bay with a bone-shattering crunch.

  “We’re flooding!” someone yelled, one of the qualified seamen who was overseeing the operation of the tugs nautical systems.

  “We sank!” someone else screamed.

  Alison was dimly aware of the sound of rushing water and some of her instruments began to fail. “Cut power!” she ordered.

  “What?” said one of the techs, turning to look at her with confusion and fear on his face.

  “I said cut the God-damned power!” she yelled. He just stared at her like she’d suggested ordering pancakes for dinner.

  Alison vaulted the desk she’d used to supervise the experiment and shouldered the confused man out of the way. Abandoning all subtlety, she reached to the back of the laptop he used to control and ripped out the connections.

  The machine died instantly, and so did the motive force that was holding them against the bottom of San Diego Bay. Angel One’s life as a tug required horsepower and buoyancy, two things it had possessed in spades. The impact with the rocky bottom fractured her spine and sent water flooding into the substantial bilges. If Alison had delayed any long, that buoyancy might have been gone, and the entire crew drowned. However, her quick action saved the day.

  The tug pulled free of the rocks and muck of the bottom and rocketed upwards, swaying violently from side to side as it ascended. This time everyone aboard felt it all in living color. The ship rocked violently, threatening to capsize on the way up. Alison later remembered never having a more exciting ride, despite being a lifelong rollercoaster enthusiast.

  They broke the surface at better than t
en knots, slightly tail first, and listing about twenty degrees to port. The stricken tug jumped and nearly cleared the surface before splashing back down like a flat rock dropped in a pond. Everyone aboard was sent flying around like leaves in a hurricane.

  “Holy fucking shit!” someone screamed, and the control room erupted in people screaming for their lives and others celebrating the return of light outside. The numbers were almost equally split between the two camps.

  “Yeah, we’re sinking,” the head of the ship’s operating crew told her when she finally got his attention.

  “Can you keep us afloat with the pumps?”

  “I don’t know how you did that or even what really happened, but we’ve fractured the hull pretty severely.” He glanced at a couple of displays again. “We’ve got three feet of water in the bilge and more coming in. I can slow it down, but not stop it.”

  “Understood,” she said and went looking for her handheld radio. The floor was a jumble of broken computers, upended monitors, chairs and vomit. Who the fuck puked all over the place, anyway? She found the radio, thankfully not covered in puke, and keyed it up. “Jeremiah, this is Angel One!”

  “What the fuck was that all about?!” he demanded in his typical piggish authoritarian voice. “I said take her up a few meters not turn it into a God-damn submarine!”

  “Not our plan either, I assure you. Might have been nice to scale up instead of going to a huge ship immediately, right?” Silence answered her and she grinned evilly. “Look, we can argue about this later. The ship is fucked. We hit the bottom and broke something. Your guy says we’re sinking.” She ignored his howls of protest and for the first time heard cries of pain. “Just shut up and get help over here, now. We need to evacuate, and we have injured. Unless you want your fancy toy and all the data I got at the bottom with the tug?”