“Charlie,” Rick said, softening his tone, “they knew the risk in what we’re trying to do. They understood the dangers and accepted them. Don’t lessen the sacrifice they made.”
“I’m not,” he answered without glancing at his young companion. “It’s just that this whole damned world is out of kilter. Those eight shouldn’t be dead. They should be at home with their families, bouncin’ grandchildren on their knees. And young folks like Sheryl Lee and
yourself should be off makin’ grandchildren for old goats like me to spoil.”
“In time we’ll get back to that,” Rick said. “But right now we’ve got another task at hand.”
“Yeah, I know.” The heaviness in his words matched the feeling in Rick’s chest. “And that job just might kill the rest of us.”
Together the two men stepped from the cedar break into a hundred-foot clearing sprinkled with prickly pear. Squatted amid the flat-leafed cactus were two skyfighters.
“Ugly things, ain’t they?” Charlie sucked at his teeth. “Fly like a helicopter, jet, and space shuttle rolled into one, and look like a wingless dragonfly. Think I’ll stick with my Mustang, thank you.”
“Come on, let’s get this over with.”
Rick lifted the energy rifle he carried and darted to the side of the first craft, while Charlie shot to the second. They nodded at one another, then ducked inside the ships.
A sigh of relief escaped the Californian’s lips when his gaze took in the ship’s interior. It was empty. Then he cursed. There were no more weapons inside except for the skyfighter’s own armaments. The hike to the ships, at least as far as this one went, had been a waste of time.
Hopeful that Charlie’s luck was better than his own, he exited the craft and entered the second. His companion stood over the fighter’s controls, staring at the blinking panels of lights. He edged back his cap and scratched his head.
“More complicated than the Mustang’s controls, eh?” Rick smiled.
“Well, to tell the truth, I was just thinkin’ how familiar all this looks.” Charlie turned and grinned at his young friend. “Can’t tell a hell of a lot about some of these buttons and switches, but these levers here at the side of the pilot’s seat resemble a joystick. Wonder what she flies like?”
“Too bad these aren’t squad vehicles.” Rick surveyed the cramped interior of the small ship. “With two squad vehicles, we could fly the medical supplies into Fort Worth and Dallas right under the Visitors’ noses.” “Now that would make things a mite easier for everyone involved.” Charlie lowered himself into the pilot’s chair and pressed a glowing yellow button.
“Fort Worth Patrol LBB-2 requests permission to enter next sector,” a static-popping voice came from a grille set in a panel directly before the pilot’s seat. Another voice answered, “Fort Worth Control affirms negative report of Weatherford search. Permission to continue reconnaissance in the Stephenville sector.” Charlie chuckled. “Now this would be a nice little gem to carry with us. We could keep tabs on everything the snakes were doing in the air.”
Rick’s eyes shifted between the man and the controls. “Charlie, can you fly this thing?”
The older man’s head jerked up, and he stared at his companion. “You’re serious, ain’t ya?”
“Dead serious,” Rick replied. “With one of these, we’ve got air support for our convoy. Can you fly it?” For a heavy, silent moment, the old fighter pilot continued to stare. Then with a heave of his chest, he said, “Guess there’s only one way to find out. Strap yourself in and keep your fingers crossed. I ain’t goin’ to guarantee anything except that you’re in for an interestin’ ride!”
While Rick crossed to the co-pilot’s chair, Charlie’s fingers moved hesitantly over the control panel. “Here goes nothin’!”
He tapped the largest of a series of green buttons before him. And he was right—-nothing happened.
“Let’s try the next one,” he said as he tapped a smaller green button.
Again nothing happened.
Nor did any of the live green buttons produce a noticeable result. In reverse order, he pressed the buttons again. “I know they have to be for something more than decoration. Now this red one . . .”
A slight vibration ran through the skyfighter the instant he depressed the button. The familiar whine of the craft’s engines filled Rick’s ears. He glanced at his friend and smiled.
Charlie reached down and grasped the controls to each side of the seat. “I’d feel a mite better if we could close that door back there before try in’ to get this thing off the ground. Give a couple buttons a push.”
At random, Rick touched a fingertip to a long blue panel. Two balls of sizzling energy blasted from the skyfighter’s duel nose cannons. Rick jerked back. Two more blasts came from the guns. “How? I didn’t touch it again.”
“These buttons on the control levers,” Charlie said with a grin. “System redundancy built into this baby. Try another.”
Far more hesitant than on his first try, Rick tapped a round green button. The ship’s engines whined down. Immediately, he tapped the button again, and the engines reawoke. He glanced at Charlie again.
“Don’t look at me, son. I don’t know what the lizard engineers were doin’ when they designed this thing.” Charlie shrugged. “Keep tryin’.”
He did. Another blue button turned off the craft’s interior lights. A pink button appeared to do nothing. His fingers skipped over the only black button of the panel to tap a white one that turned on the exterior loudspeakers. Another press turned them off. He reached for a yellow button that blinked alive at his touch—and the door hissed shut.
“It’s called flyin’ by the seat of your pants.” Charlie grinned. “It worked for ol Orville and Wilbur. Now let’s see if it works for us.”
Gently he eased back on the lever to his right. The engine whine doubled its pitch and the ship shuddered but did not move. He pulled back the lever, muttered something about “southpaw lizards,” and shifted the left lever slightly. The skyfighter lurched in a little hopping motion. Charlie grunted and worked the two levers together. The ship floated into the air, wobbling from side to side.
“As easy as it looks,” he said aloud, although Rick was certain the older man’s words were meant as much to reassure himself as to comfort his passenger. “Now let’s see what this machine can do!”
An invisible fist slammed into Rick’s chest and remained there, forcing him back into the seat’s cushioning. Outside, the West Texas forest of oak and cedar was transformed into a green blur.
“Jeb, Billy, Will, pile as many of those branches as you can into the back of the jeep,” Charlie shouted to his friends. “We’ve still got a use for them.”
“Fly?” The disbelief in Sheryl Lee’s voice matched the doubt on her face. “Charlie can handle a skyfighter?”
Rick reaffirmed the events of the past half hour with a nod and a grin.
“Like I was born to those controls,” Charlie added, his chest swelling. “No wonder the snakes are such good pilots. One of these things practically flies itself. Hell, I could have Rick flyin’ one in a day or two.”
“And you flew to Fort Worth?”
“What’s left of it,” Rick answered, trying not to remember the wholesale destruction he had seen during the flyover.
“There’s no way into the city except by the main highways. And those are crawlin’ with lizards,” Charlie
said while tossing an armload of cedar branches into the jeep. “That’s where the skyfighter comes in. With Rick as tailgunner and me at the controls, we can give you aerial support. Shoot a path through the Visitors.” “And commit suicide in the process, as well as gettin’ everyone left in this caravan killed.” Sheryl Lee bit at her lower lip. Her reprimanding gaze shifted between the two men. “A head-on blockade run won’t work, and both of you know it.”
“We’ve considered that.” Rick glanced at Charlie, who nodded. “We can’t see any other way of getting into
the city. It’s an all-or-nothing situation.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” Sheryl Lee rubbed a hand over her brow, pursed her lips, and stared at the ground.
“But you said earlier that the resistance is expecting you from the air, that they aren’t ready for an overland convoy,” Rick protested.
“Yes, yes, I know. It’s been eatin’ at me since I woke up this afternoon. I’ve been tryin’ to come up with some way of contactin’ my friends.” Sheryl Lee’s head lifted. “Now Charlie’s given me the way to do just that.” Rick frowned, uncertain what the redhead had in mind.
“Are you thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’, li’l* lady?” This from Charlie.
Sheryl Lee’s head bobbed in affirmation. “If you could fly me into Dallas, I can get us help. Some plan can be worked out that will at least give us a chance of succeedin’.”
“You can’t be serious.” Rick shook his head.
“ ’Fraid she is, son.” Charlie shrugged. “I think we’d better hide that second skyfighter, then take us another little trip into Fort Worth.”
“Dallas,” Sheryl Lee corrected.
Below, six pickup trucks minus Charlie’s jeep moved off the highway into an abandoned junkyard on the outskirts of a town that, to Rick, was but a black dot and a name on a map—Mineral Wells.
“They should be safe there until we get back.” Charlie glanced at Sheryl Lee in the co-pilot’s seat and at Rick, who stood behind her. He then nosed the craft westward.
Rick smiled as the junkyard slipped by beneath them. The automobile graveyard was a stroke of genius on his part, even if he had to admit it himself. Let the snakes scour the countryside for the convoy. They’d never think of looking among the lines of wrecked cars for the mud-splattered pickups, which from the air appeared to be nothing more than junkers.
“Best get on back to the tail,” Charlie said, tilting his head to the rear of the alien craft. “With luck, we won’t need those rear guns, but ...”
The older man’s words trailed away as Rick turned and took his position as tailgunner. Neither he nor Sheryl Lee needed to be reminded of the ifs and buts surrounding the flight.
Reaching down the left side of the seat, he found a single black switch and flicked it. A series of green-glowing circles and a pair of cross hairs appeared on a mini-display screen that slid from the right arm of the chair, then swung around in front of him. He rested his hands around the firing grips on the seat’s arms, then looked out the wide window that filled the rear of the craft.
“I’m slippin’ down to pick up Interstate 20,” Charlie explained as the ship banked to the south. “We’ll follow that into Fort Worth.”
Moments later twin ribbons of concrete appeared below. Rick saw little else until the skyfighter sailed above the Fort Worth city limits. The scene outside made no sense. Here was block on block of homes with green lawns and cars parked in their driveways. There, but a street away, lay charred mounds of rubble.
Rick saw no rhyme or reason to the selective destruction the Visitors had wrought on the city. It was as though some madman had randomly decided this portion of the city would live and that portion would die. He sucked at his teeth. Even the insane often had method in their madness. No madman’s twisted mind had decreed For Worth’s fate—nor had that mind even been human, but an alien brain, a reptilian intelligence bom on a planet that circled a sun more than eight light-years from Earth.
“To the north,” he heard Sheryl Lee say. “That used to be Carswell Air Force Base. The buildings there at the end of the runway are new. The Visitors have set up a processing center there. They have another on the south side of town. We’ve taken out four centers in the area already—and still they build them.”
Rick saw the swath of scorched earth that surrounded runways pockmarked with blast craters. He remembered Joe Bob mentioning that this had once been a Strategic Air Command base. Now it was an alien meat-packing plant. He closed his eyes and drew a deep, steadying breath.
Garth watched a skyfighter shoot overhead and disappear eastward toward Dallas. His eyes lowered to the line of abandoned shops Major Lawrence had brought him to.
He smiled when his gaze alighted on a shattered sign on the ground before one of the stores. It read FA tast C w RLDS.
Fantastic Worlds, he mentally filled in the sign’s missing letters. Beyond the shop’s broken windows were overturned display cases, which gave no hint of the wares a human merchant once peddled within. Which was only the way it should be. Soon this whole planet would be without a trace of the sentient creatures it had given birth to.
“They’re gone!” Major Lawrence stepped from the missing doorway of a shop to the right of the sign that held Garth’s attention. “But they were here. They left their garbage—cans, bottles, candy wrappers. From the trash piled up, I’d say they’d been hidden inside for at least a week, maybe two.”
“But they’re gone now.” Garth repeated what he had known would be the case. Others might underestimate the human resistance movement, but not him. “A week, maybe two, and so close to our Carswell processing center. Right under your nose, wouldn’t you say, Major?”
Major Lawrence stiffened at the accusation but offered no reply.
The fool! he thought, but said, “Never mind, Major. It grows late, and I must get back. The afternoon reports on the search will soon be in. Recall your men. It’s time I returned to the processing center.”
While the major followed his commander, Garth returned to a squad vehicle and settled into the co-pilot’s seat. He had accompanied Lawrence and his men on the slim chance the raid might bear fruit and take him a step closer to the human female he sought. His only possibility of success now lay with the air search that was under way west of the city.
* * *
Even the early evening dusk could not conceal the destruction over which the skyfighter passed. What had once been downtown Dallas was now mountainous mounds of debris.
Twisted metal girders, shattered bricks, and splintered panes of glass covered the ground for as far as Rick could see. He recalled old World War II newsreel footage of bombed-out European cities that he had seen on television. This was worse. In those aging black-and-white films, partially standing buildings and walls were seen. Here it was impossible to even imagine that the rubble had once been skyscrapers, let alone the heart of one of the country’s major cities.
How many had died beneath structures toppled by the Visitors’ unmerciful assault on Dallas? How many more were daily being shuttled aboard the Visitors’ Mother Ships? Rick could only guess. The estimated tally churned his stomach—hundreds of thousands!
“Where should I set us down?” Charlie spoke from the front of the ship.
“Anyplace that looks safe.” Sheryl Lee stared at the ruin of what had once been a great city. “We’ll have to cover a lot of ground on foot. I don’t want to lead the snakes to our headquarters.”
“Those miniwarehouses ahead look good. I’ll just set us down alongside them. We’ll wait for dark before lookin’ for your friends.” Charlie nosed the skyfighter toward the ground.
A half hour later night covered the city. Three blocks from the warehouses Rick found a dust-covered station wagon. A brick opened the driver’s window, and it was a simple matter to hot-wire the car.
“At least we won’t have to walk. ” He grinned and slid across the front seat to the passenger’s side, letting Sheryl Lee take the wheel. “It’s your show now.” The moment Charlie settled in the backseat, the redhead eased the station wagon into drive and pulled
away from the curb. Without either headlights or streetlights, Rick could tell very little about the city they passed through. One thing that did surprise him was the trees. These were real trees, towering monsters with thick, solid trunks and lofty branches that often spread overhead to canopy the streets Sheryl Lee maneuvered through.
Twice the redhead pulled under the protection of these leafy boughs and halted to avoid the probing search
lights of Visitor squad vehicles that passed above. On four other occasions, she wheeled the station wagon into shadow-cloaked alleys at the approach of twin headlight beams that announced the snakes’ ground patrols.
After forty-five minutes of weaving her way around block upon block of total destruction or through streets littered with abandoned automobiles, Sheryl Lee steered the station wagon into a parking lot containing row upon row of deserted eighteen-wheelers, rusting monsters that once ruled the nation’s now barren highways. A sign partially blasted from a building on the south side of the lot proclaimed this had once been headquarters for a trucking company.
“We’re northwest of the downtown area,” she said as she opened her door and stepped out. “I don’t want to risk drivin’ any closer. We’11 have to do the last few blocks on foot.”
Those “few blocks” stretched to ten long ones through a warehouse district. From shadow to shadow, they ducked and ran.
Rick’s senses were honed to an almost preternatural sharpness. His eyes and ears were constantly alert for a movement within the night darkness, the whine of Visitor ships overhead, the rumble of ground vehicles, or the snap of a twig or the crunch of gravel underfoot that would give away the presence of snakes waiting to snare the careless.
“Just across another street now,” Sheryl Lee whispered while she pressed flat against the side of a brick building and nodded toward an electronics warehouse ahead. “Careful now. Take it slow and easy. There’ll be guards posted.”
“Right,” Rick answered and froze.
From out of nowhere the distinctive cold roundness of a pistol barrel pressed to the back of the young man’s neck. A deep, masculine voice warned:
“Slow and easy. And don’t make any sudden moves— any of you. There’s only three of you and four of us.”
How? Rick shivered when the hard steel nudged his flesh. He was unable to conceive how one man, let alone four, could have crept up behind them.
V 11 - The Texas Run Page 12