Burning Skies (Book 1): The Fall

by Ford, Devon C.

  She never got to finish her sentence.

  Behind her, even before the shockwave and the flying debris and shattered glass had a chance to fly across the road to her, the blossoming fire of an explosion grew from inside the plate glass of a department store. Before the feed was cut, the final recorded frame was frozen on the screen, still bearing the banner ‘LIVE’ as the reporter’s hair had caught fire and the flesh was burned from her cheek. That gruesome, grotesque, and horrifying freeze-frame was suspended for a few seconds, showing the world an uncomfortably close-up view of a woman being blown to pieces. The screen went black.

  Butler carefully put down the TV remote he had been clutching, lining it up at perfect angles with the others, and stood tall.

  “To answer your first question, son: No. The power outages aren’t us,” he said, straightening the uniformed shirt he wore.

  “And to answer the second question you haven’t yet asked: No. That bomb wasn’t us either. We had five backpack devices for the subways, one small IED, and one RPG for the diversion. So no, son, we did not knock out the power and we did not blow up that reporter.” He walked away, head high but mind on fire.

  Sitting at his desk to try and find some space for his brain to react to what he had just witnessed, he clenched the fingers of his left hand into a fist to stop it shaking.

  “Unexpected bonus?” Suzanne’s voice asked carefully, interrupting his moment of internal concern.

  “What?” Butler asked her, almost angry that she would feel the loss of an innocent life was anything but a tragic necessity in the fight for their freedom.

  “I mean the power outages,” she said, her face showing an equal distain that he might think she enjoyed watching the reporter get killed. “Won’t a blackout accelerate the timeline? Create chaos in the city quicker?”

  “Yes,” Butler replied, leaning back and backing down, “it certainly will do that.”

  “So, this is a good thing?” Suzanne offered carefully, trying to massage Butler’s ego into accepting her way of thinking. “Better than expected?”

  “Suzanne,” Butler said seriously, “I expect nothing—nothing—but that my men do the things asked of them. If the plan fails and men have done their duty, then the fault lies with command.” With that, Butler had evidently ended the conversation.

  Suzanne walked away, angry at pompous military men with their fatalistic views on actionable problems. Maybe they didn’t make all the mess in the city right now, but the plan was to shut down the money, close off the island as much as possible and let it tear itself apart for a night. After that the president and his senior staff, all of whom were under the strict protection of Major Taylor’s unit in Washington, would issue instruction for the military to reestablish order.

  After seeing how badly the Movement could damage the infrastructure, of how connected and powerful they were, the new era could begin.

  Butler could almost see it now, as he was brought in as the national security advisor to the president. He would have key members of the Movement everywhere, and they would puppet the existing administration through fear of their ability to bring instability. It would be a perfect, near silent coup d’état.

  Taylor’s men had already succeeded in securing POTUS, and the whole area was locked down after the White House reported that a terror attack on the president had been foiled by National Guardsmen. Those same guardsmen had the senior politicians secured underground and would be heralded as heroes who acted on instinct and stormed the White House to save the day.

  The truth was what the newspapers reported after the shit had hit the fan, just as history had always been written by the victors.

  Saturday 5:20 a.m. Local Time, Beijing

  The stony-faced woman in the dark suit barely blinked as her eyes scanned the wall of screens. Occasionally she would shout a number, and the corresponding television would play the sound through disassociated speakers until she had heard enough. She waved a hand for the sound to be turned off again and took her eyes away for a second to make sure she connected the tip of the cigarette to the intense flame jetting out of the windproof lighter.

  Eyes flicking back up, she pocketed the lighter and rested an elbow on her hip as she smoked, digging the fingernails of her right hand into the pad of her thumb one by one. The small pain helped to focus her, helped her to stay alert and connected. It was a thing she did when she was tired, when she needed to concentrate, and at times she had even drawn blood.

  A man stopped as he walked past her, turned to follow his nose in the darkened room and opened his mouth to protest about her smoking inside the control room. Before any words left his mouth, his brain saved him from pain and humiliation and he closed it in silence. In a building where not wearing identification could get you searched at gunpoint and dragged off site, the fact that she wore nothing indicating she had a right to be there worried him deeply. Only people from certain walks of life could get away with being in this building and so obviously flaunt their anonymity. He decided that if this ghost wanted to smoke in the control room, then it wasn’t for him to offer an opinion otherwise.

  Walking away as the woman took another long drag and smiled at the back of his retreating head, she saw him kick the chair of an analyst who was leaning back to stretch, and heard him bark orders for the analyst to keep working and not to relax.

  Kick the cat? the woman thought, is that what the English say?

  “There! Thirty-six,” she said, her voice deeper and more powerful than her small stature would indicate.

  “Take it back and show me,” she snapped, dropping her half-smoked cigarette into the glass of water in her other hand, and reaching out to swap the glass for a large tablet the analyst held. The swap didn’t materialize immediately, so her fingers snapped twice to indicate that everyone around her was failing.

  The pad appeared, and she tapped the screen to play footage of an up-close version of what she had just seen at a distance, only this time with sound. Her finger swiped across the bottom of the screen, replaying the explosion frame by frame with each tap of a delicate digit, and a smile crept across her face. Almost throwing the pad back, she stalked back to the corner she had been stood in and spoke over her shoulder to the shadows behind.

  “Our assets are in play,” she said. “Power grid is failing and secondary explosions have begun. By tomorrow the American puppets will have lost any credibility they could have gained and there will be chaos.” She reached back into the pocket of her suit jacket, retrieving another cigarette and the miniature flamethrower she used to light it. A snap of fingers from the recess behind her echoed, making her hand back the one she had just lit and incinerate the tip of another for herself.

  “Activate the rest. All of them,” said a voice even more menacing than her own. “Let them tear themselves apart for now and then we will turn the vise tighter.”

  She half-cocked her head toward the source of the orders, nodded slightly in a bow of acknowledgment, and walked away.

  Friday 6:40 p.m. – New York City

  The man flipped up the rubberized antenna of his satellite phone and answered the call with a single word.

  He listened, repeating his acknowledgment two more times, before ending the call and stowing the phone in his backpack. Six other men and three women were in the room in Midtown with him, and all eyes were on him.

  “We go soon,” he said, “when it is darker.” He walked through the room and made eye contact with his whole team as he went.

  “Any target is legitimate,” he told them. “NYPD, National Guard, banks, shops, local thugs. We tear this city down. Work your sectors in pairs, stay out of sight, and be back here before sunrise.”

  He knew his team wouldn’t be the only one active that night, and he reiterated their area of operations, their limits of exploitation, nervous that they would end up in a firefight with another team of insurgents intent on their own goals of destabilization and carnage.

  The eight other peo
ple in the room all stood and sketched a bow at the man in charge, before pairing off and preparing to head out to the areas allocated to them. They would spend the night sniping at police patrols, throwing grenades into shop windows and setting fires. None of them doubted that many residents of the city would take very little encouragement to riot, but they had been activated to accelerate the process.

  It had been a simple thing to overload the power relays remotely and shut down the supply to the city. Now nothing that didn’t have its own generator would be dark, and anything that did would attract a load of attention it probably didn’t want.

  Chung Fei, thirty-one years old, unmarried, and a dedicated servant to his beloved country, checked the top pocket of his backpack as his team prepared themselves similarly. He smiled at the sight of the fifteen incendiary grenades within easy reach. Having spent months working in the city being treated like dirt, he had more than a few places in mind he wanted to pay a visit to that night.

  HOLDING PATTERN

  Friday 6:58 p.m. - Ninety-Eight Hundred Feet Over NYC

  “Phantom this is Banjo, here to relieve you, over,” came the southern drawl over the F-35 pilot’s headset. He still had almost forty-five minutes playtime on station before he and his wingman would be bingo-fuel and in any other setting he would want to stay up in the sky hunting.

  Today was different.

  “Banjo, Phantom,” he said with none of the bravado of his fellow fighter jock. “Skies are all yours, we are RTB. Stay Safe and stay high. Phantom out.”

  “Wilco, Phantom. Go get a cold one for me,” replied the fresh pilot as he banked hard left in his holding pattern to get a satellite view of Manhattan. Only he couldn’t see the island. He could barely see anything below without switching to use the fighter’s high-tech array of sensors, but even at this height he expected to be able to see the outline of the island.

  Levelling out and keeping his plane in the wide figure-eight that the previous two pilots had worked for their duration, Christopher ‘Banjo’ Redden mentally prepared himself for the next five hours of dull inactivity as he screamed around the skies above New York at close to three hundred miles per hour, waiting for his relief to come at midnight.

  Friday 7:20 p.m. – 13th Precinct Station House

  “Sarge, I’m telling you, this guy saw it happen,” Jake Peters told his overworked supervisor, as though repeating himself would make any difference.

  “Look kid,” the sergeant said, turning and bumping his considerable gut into Jake’s lean frame. “We got car wrecks, the city’s in gridlock, we’ve lost guys in the explosions and in the chopper crashes, and you want me to prioritize some British guy who got himself too close to something that went boom?”

  “There’s the robbery victim too,” Jake said weakly. “Come on, Sarge. It was felony assault right in front of me. I drew my off-duty weapon. I gotta write this up!”

  Jake Peters was a pain the sergeant’s ass on most days, but today he just couldn’t handle him arguing to fight the good fight just like every other day he’d known the kid.

  “Fine. Go get your complaint,” he told him. Jake smiled and went to turn away before he was stopped. “Tomorrow,” the sergeant said, “because right now I need you up on 23rd stopping traffic coming up the one-way streets, okay?”

  Jake never got a chance to answer. For an overweight man, the sergeant really knew how to move when he wanted to.

  His deployment was unprecedented as he wasn’t usually called to guard street entrances for minor traffic violations, but he guessed that the real reason for it was to try and get a cop on every street corner and not for any traffic-related reason as that responsibility had been farmed outside of the NYPD years before. What was unprecedented, for him at least, was going anywhere on duty alone, but he guessed that needs must.

  He sighed as he turned away, knowing that he would be walking the two blocks back to 23rd where he had first met Cal stumbling toward him bleeding. He wished he could take something heavier than the Glock, if only to reassure himself. He doubted the general population would feel similarly reassured.

  It would definitely reassure me, he thought, convincing himself that it was a childish want to take one of the shotguns stored at the station house, even though he got a foreboding feeling that he may require more firepower before the night was out. Jake stood rooted to the spot, trying to find a way to get through to his supervisor and be permitted to return to the Waldorf, but he sighed and did as he was told. The lights in the station house flickered, going dark briefly before they weakly returned to life.

  He was scared, and the fear was almost as intense as his need to help people, to be the hero, only now that his chance came he felt the fear pulling him away more than he hoped it would. Against all regulations, and more out of fear than anything else, Jake took the harness to hold his off-duty weapon and put it on under his uniform jacket. He carried his service weapon, a Glock 19, which was effectively the same gun just not shrunk down, and the three full magazines for it. Wishing he could still carry something heavier, he made for the door and walked north toward his post.

  It took him three times the normal walking distance to make the two blocks. Every second person stopped him to ask what was going on, if he had seen someone who they were looking for, if he could help them.

  After barely being able to move for the mob around him wanting answers in the growing dark, he raised his voice and held up both hands to get their attention.

  “People, please return to your homes and lock your doors. The NYPD is doing everything we can to find out what’s going on. Please, go home.”

  He tried to walk on, to push through the crowds of scared people—the people he had sworn to protect—but he heard more questions shouted at him.

  Why don’t the phones work? When is the power going to be restored? Who did this to us?

  Jake had no answers to anything, he only repeated his advice for them to return to their homes and lock the doors until this had passed. He hoped that sounding confident would make the people believe him, like he was repeating official advice from the department, and they wouldn’t think that he was just as scared and clueless as they were.

  He turned up the dial on his radio to hear the traffic in his earpiece but heard nothing. That was unheard of for any time of any day, let alone late on a Friday when the city was in panic. He pulled the radio from its pouch on his belt and checked he was on the right channel. He was, but it was dead. He tried to call up for a commo-check but there was no answer. Trying to convince himself that it was just a black spot, one which hadn’t been there on any day of the last year and a half he’d worked this precinct, he pulled his cell from his pocket. Also dead. Nothing which required a signal still worked, but Jake pushed it all aside and told himself that he would get to his post and do his job until he was needed elsewhere.

  That kind of delusional thinking got him through almost two hours of yelling, pointing, and being shouted at on 23rd Street. He yelled at drivers to leave their cars after the first six people tried to drive the wrong way down streets to get through the traffic. Desperation did funny things to normally law-abiding citizens, and the thought of abandoning the car they had worked hard to afford was unimaginable to most people, and Jake had argued repeatedly until he realized that the cars which had piled down the wrong way only added to the gridlock on the avenues heading south and north.

  People left their cars and walked, carrying their belongings, their children, even their pets.

  “Hey!” a male voice snapped from behind him petulantly. Jake turned to see a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase as he stepped out from the back of a stranded town car.

  “Hey!” he said again, testing Jake’s patience.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Jake said, professional but with a hint of steel in his voice.

  “You could do your damned job and get these cars outta my way,” the man said, earning himself a place at the absolute head of Jake’s shit list. Before he
could answer, the man compounded his problem.

  “Are the ferries to Jersey still running?” he snapped, shooting a cuff and checking his watch before looking back to Jake with wide eyes as though he was absolutely certain the officer was an idiot. He began to repeat his question pronouncing each word slowly.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Jake said with a formality which was intended to shame the obnoxious businessman into changing his attitude.

  “Well, get on your little radio and find out from someone who does know then,” he ordered Jake, as though his undisclosed status gave him the right to commandeer a New York City police officer for his own errands.

  “Can’t do that,” Jake answered, dropping the ‘sir’ as he decided the man didn’t deserve even a sarcastic amount of manners.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do that?” said the man, his face cracking into anger.

  “I mean, sir,” Jake said, leaning forward toward him and reinserting the sarcasm, “that police radios are down. So are the phones. And the city is in gridlock.” He let that hang, seeing the anger on his opponent’s face sag into something nearing abject fear. “So, I’d suggest that if you want to find out if the Jersey ferry is running, then take a walk and find out for yourself.” He relaxed, stood more upright and continued. “Alternatively, you could get your ass back to whatever building you came from and stay indoors until this mess is cleaned up.”

  The man said nothing. His mouth opened and closed twice, wordlessly, then he straightened himself and went to walk back to the rear of the town car to wait in conditions more befitting his status.

  He never made it.

  A burst of gunfire erupted from a first-floor window, indiscriminate in aim and intended only to make the street below ignite into instant panic. A single round punctured the throat of the businessman, sending a flood of hot sticky blood down the collar of his hundred-dollar shirt, over the knot of his sixty-dollar tie, making his body drop back to the sidewalk as he choked out on his own blood.