The DX Chronicles (Book 1): Not Against Flesh and Blood
Page 41
Chapter Eighteen: Monday, 3 May [Part Two]
As David descended to the immediate airspace around the city, he scanned the dozens of buildings bearing scars or still coughing smoke. The sirens, then, were distant, and, as he looked miles across the open sky, past the skyscrapers, and towards the campus of his schooling, he found an amassment of vehicles clogging the streets and producing a visible gleam in the early morning. Then, just before descending past the heights of buildings and passing the battered structure through which the obsidian jet had crashed, David looked easterly, towards the slight increase in illumination that signaled the sun’s drawing within the hour. He then looked towards his landing point, about two hundred yards from the craft, and looked to the individuals crossing roads and hopping over vehicles to meet him. Sighing, David touched down in the center of the road. Converging around him were his teammates, their armors and faces scuffed, but their forms upright. “So…” he began as he reached to the back of his right shoulder and rubbed it.
“Some pretty decent teamwork”, Shawn remarked as he lifted his facemask.
“Uh, no, not really”, Nate groaned as he unzipped his hoodie.
“Yeah, we were pretty bad”, Erik replied, “but we got the job done.”
“That, we did”, David replied as he turned to the crash site. “So…” he began as he looked back and smirked, “anyone dying?”
“No”, Bryen replied, “my toes and fingers are a little numb, but I figure it’ll pass.”
“My ears hurt even with plugs”, Turrisi groaned.
“My ears hurt without plugs”, Nate continued.
“I’m dying for some food”, Erik remarked. “We should’ve gotten two-dozen donuts.”
“You guys want to hit up Roanoke again?” Shawn asked.
“I call ‘not driving’. We might as well fly. We just saved frickin’ Lynchburg, so they should give us that much”, David noted.
“I don’t know; sunrise is about thirty minutes off, and if we’re sighted, we might cause more panic”, Bryen explained.
“Well…” David looked to the tightest cluster of buildings exuding smoke. “Yeah…I guess I’ll drive”, he sighed.
“Do we know how many were killed before we got here?” Bryen asked.
“Do we want to know?” Nate muttered.
“I’m sure Lamback will fill us in, if he doesn’t turn us over to the FBI or whoever will detain us for acting illegally”, Erik replied as he pulled off his goggles. “If it’s anything, since this area had already been abandoned during the attacks, we had to worry less about collateral.”
“Even more than that”, Shawn began as he stepped back. “It’s after five in the morning; if this had happened two hours from now, the deaths could’ve come closer to ten times the amount we probably saw; it’d be a slaughter.”
“Another Nine-Eleven”, Turrisi finished. “So, what are we going to do now?”
“I’m parked_” David turned and pointed beyond the craft’s resting place, “about a mile that way. So, let’s go to my car, maybe chill in there for a few minutes, have Erik call Lamback, and we’ll figure it out from there.”
“Sounds good”, Shawn replied.
The team started down the empty road, over chunks of rubble and towards David’s distant vehicle, and, too, the aircraft they had fought. They moved side-by-side, having, by then, calmed enough to conceal the adrenaline providing them with a third wind amidst twenty hours of consciousness.
“I’m curious”, David began.
“About the jet?” Turrisi interjected as he walked along the left of the group.
“No…I’m pretty sure I watched you guys bring your helmets out of my trunk”, David noted.
“Yeah; thirty seconds after you took off, we kind of just ditched them by the sidewalk”, Erik remarked as he walked on the right side.
“Field of vision and such”, Nate continued as he walked next to Erik.
“Huh…” David murmured.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I had a couple close calls with lots of bullets involved”, Shawn remarked as he walked next to David. “Maybe…I’m seeing the reasoning for using the helmets.”
“I don’t see it”, Bryen noted as he walked next to Turrisi.
“I don’t know. Our safety probably would’ve been a little more guaranteed if we had brought them”, David noted.
“You didn’t even bother to unpack your helmet”, Bryen countered.
“Well, I don’t really need one; now do I?” David groaned. “Anyways; what were you saying, Turrisi?”
“The jet”, Turrisi began, “is anyone curious about that jet or whatever it is?”
“The fact that its wings kind-of-flapped, or the lack of a sizeable cockpit?” Bryen asked.
“It was probably a UAV”, Erik suggested. “Without the need to provide a supportive human environment, you can load more weapons, make it more rugged, and other good things required for warfare. We’re not the only country working on them.”
“No, well yes, I figured that as well.” Turrisi jogged ahead of the group. He turned into a sidestep, his left facing the nearing crater marking the jet’s crash site. He pointed towards that jet, and he maintained his point as he looked back. “I saw it crash into that building, I heard it hit the ground—what?—three times, and I watched it shoot itself two or three times with its own munitions before that. Erik cut its guns, Shawn and Piekarsky dragged it through the air, and B-money burned out one of its engines. Shawn had tried beforehand to burn out another engine, and Nate engulfed it in electricity, but, besides all of that, besides two grenade rounds, besides two bouts with Piekarsky, and, I repeat, a totally burned-out engine, the only damage I can see on that thing are the missing guns. It hit the ground at hundreds of miles per hour, went through a building, and, for the most part, is still intact.” Turrisi stopped, just beyond one hundred feet from that jet, and he glanced to it before looking to his slowing teammates. “Does that bother—no—scare you guys? What materials have you ever heard of, besides these suits, that are so durable and lightweight that the jet could fly with sustained speeds nearing, and, I’m assuming, surpassing the sound barrier? To my knowledge, our own military is nowhere near this capability.”
“It’s just one more loose end that’ll keep me up at night”, Erik replied. “As much as possible, I’d like to forget about it for now. We stopped it, we kept the deaths down, and we haven’t been arrested. We should probably think more about our legal options.”
“I call the good lawyer”, Bryen uttered.
Turrisi looked to his friends and then turned back to the jet. His suspicions were founded; he surmised that they knew as much, but he knew that they were correct. They lacked the understanding and the patience to look too far into the future or into the past and towards the many interconnecting strands leading to that attack. For those few moments, they could rest in the knowledge of their victory. He sighed, nodded, and started forward, the others following him as he angled rightward to walk a wide curve around the crash site.
The moment during which the group stepped within one hundred feet of the jet, a whir sounded from it, pulsed under their feet, and halted them. They spun to the jet, and, with widened gazes, tightened their fists, clasped their weapons, and spread their legs. They stood, breathless, for the next few moments. “Did anyone hear that?” David whispered.
“Yes”, Nate replied.
“What do we do?” Shawn inquired.
“If it does anything else_”
“We’ll attack?” Erik suggested.
“No”, David replied, “no, we’ll run into the nearest alley, wait a couple seconds, and then attack.”
“That works”, Turrisi stated. The moment he finished, a rumble travelled from the jet. They lunged backwards, and Turrisi unlatched and aimed his rifle, while the remainder of the group huddled behind him. “Wait, that’s not fair”, Turrisi muttered.
“It’s okay, you have a gun”, David replied.
“Turrisi, this isn’t time for excuses!” Shawn murmured.
The jet moved, folding its wings into an arch that hoisted its body above the ground. They next expected it to take off, or to attempt to take off, but they would stop—they had all come to that conclusion—the moment it would move a third time, they would attack with as much fervor as necessary to keep it down. A third sound followed, one not of greater volume, but of a more high-pitched screech, the sounding of grating and whirring joints, the separation of parts, and the initiation of an opening. In the very center of the craft, a circular indent formed and split in three portions; those portions rolled away to open a gape going through the craft, continuing out of the bottom end, and revealing a connected, hanging shape.
That shape, locked in place by four tubes, was silent and, as the series of churns and whirs signaled its release, unmoving. The tubes retracted, releasing the shape and letting it drop. It dropped to the center of the crater, shook the road under the onlooking group’s feet, and uplifted a cloud of dust under the jet’s rearing form. As the dust settled, the shape reared up, and, as the dust cleared, its glossy-white form appeared to those six. David tensed, Bryen gasped, and Shawn spun to David for confirmation of the mechanical shape before them—for vocal acknowledgement that it was the form against which they had battled in New York, its elongated white hide and its glaring, blue eyes radiating in the early morning, its arms hanging, and its legs spread to shoulder-width. It looked towards those six, not with a direct glare to one, or all of them, but more, as if it were capable of looking through them. Its gaze was spearing; though mechanical, it seemed lifelike; though animated, it seemed cold, nigh-cadaverous, and devoid of human sentiment. To those who looked upon its frame for the first time and to those who were locking gazes once more, it bore the guise of a phantasm, a distant and unfeeling shade which had taken on substantial form in order to destroy.
“Is that it?” Erik whispered, his right arm twitching as two urges—the want to clasp his blade, and the want to avoid sudden movements—battled within his mind. “Is that the thing that attacked you guys? That killed Sterling Blue?”
“Yeah”, David replied, his voice a toneless gasp as his hands balled and released.
“No.” David looked to Bryen stepping back. “That’s not it.”
“Wait, B, that is”, Shawn replied, “I remember it clear as day…well, it might’ve been nighttime, but_”
“No, I mean”, Bryen swallowed as he shifted his feet and glared at the machine. “That’s it in a way…it’s the same type, but that’s not the one we fought. It doesn’t have the cracks it had when it attacked us or the scuffs we were able to deal to it. Whereas what we fought was tested in battle, perhaps even a little seasoned, the thing standing before us is new, perhaps_”
“Fresh”, David finished, “it’s fresh. If robots, hypothetically, could become exhausted, this one is farther from that point than the one we fought. It’s ready to go, and it’s fully loaded… great.”
“What do we do?” Turrisi muttered as he motioned his finger for his rifle’s trigger.
“We can’t just go charging in there. We need a plan”, David replied, “and we’ll need one fast. We don’t know if it’s listening, and we don’t know if or when it’ll decide to attack…we don’t even know what’s holding it back right now…”
While they planned and recalled for a chance against that machine, the machine itself, unmoving to the point of appearing lifeless, detected their voices and recorded their sounds, but, instead of attacking, performed another task. None heard the electronic processes, the lines upon lines of code which were beamed from the automaton and blasted into the atmosphere, and which moved beyond detection or discernibility before rushing miles from their source, being gathered, and then being deciphered by their three targets.
***
Northeast, north, and then northwest of the machine’s location—receiving that signal, the three invisible masses which had, days before, been ejected from the sky, responded in silent activations. With a wave of light, they, though separated by miles and concealed by brush, were made visible. As that glow swept across their surfaces, their shapes, rectangular cylinders thirty-three feet in length, thirteen feet in height, and ten feet across, regained their opacity and their hue—a gleaming silver, layered in hundreds of individual plates which reflected against the brightening sky, while, along their longitudinal centers, a line crept along the surface, slinking up the front and then descending along the back. In a sharp hiss from all three of those containers, the central fissure divided the cylinders into two portions, and those two portions plunged. Taking their places were standing forms.
In six rows of ten per container were machines, fashioned, like their alabaster summoner, in the likeness of man. They stood upright at six feet, and their hides were colored a matted dark-grey. Unlike the white machine, which was slender but massive in weight, they were lighter and more proportioned to resemble the musculatures of an athletic man. Whereas the white machine bore a visage mimicking a human expression, those mechanizations bore no nose, and only flattened plates in place of an ovular face, while their eyes and mouth were rectangular slits. They, however, were armed with shortened barrels on the tops of their right wrists, and they, like the machine, bore the capability of rocketing flight as roars sounded below them.
Their systems heated, their engines strengthened, and, in three simultaneous eruptions, three formations of sixty exploded into the atmosphere, ascending, in three mechanized swarms, to two thousand feet, levelling off and darting for the southwest, the south, and the southeast.
***
As the first explosion sounded beyond view of the six’s standoff, it was ignored or surmised to be the loss of integrity from one of the damaged buildings. Another minute passed before the next explosion. Another followed ten seconds after, and a fourth, but a second after, resounded through the air, while the ground trembled.
“What’s that?” Shawn muttered as he locked eyes with the machine, another blast sounding beyond view.
“It sounds like_” Turrisi began.
“It is”, Bryen interjected, “it also sounds like there might be jet exhaust with it, but…”
“It could be a trap to distract us”, Nate suggested.
“We’re gonna charge soon”, David whispered. “Get ready to follow my lead, but stay back_” another blast, one of greater stridence moving with a pulse of light, sounded several hundred yards to their left and down the road. Erik was the one to break formation, to turn and to look to a pillar of smoke.
“This is weird; something’s off”, Erik replied as he jumped back.
“Garcia!” David called out.
“Cover me; I’ll provide recon and distract it if it goes after me!” Erik bolted into the air in a fiery lunge, across the road, over the aircraft, the machine, and onto the roof of another building. As he landed out of view, another eruption sounded, and, as Nate and Turrisi glanced to one another, two more followed. “Guys!” All except for David looked up to the roof. Nate and Turrisi followed, with Nate magnetizing the bottom of his feet to the building’s side, grabbing Turrisi by the arm, and then, with a swing of his left, sending them into an even, upward, magnetic slide.
“Piekarsky”, Shawn muttered, “it sounded…” Shawn examined David’s hardened posture. David wasn’t moving, wasn’t blinking, and, it seemed, wasn’t breathing. Shawn looked to his left as Bryen backed from David. They both knew of the machine’s capabilities, but, as multiple blasts thundered around them, they turned, and Shawn, with his flight, and Bryen, by the adhesion of his shadow, raced to the top of that same structure, leaving David and the white machine.
Though conscious of his friends’ leave, David thought it secondary compared to that pale form, until another wave of blasts and then a steadier bellow sounded above him. He lo
oked up but then back down in the same second, his gaze, though skyward for only a moment, finding a vapor trail snaking over the road. David then looked on to the machine, still unmoving—perhaps it was the distraction. Groaning, he stepped back. Huffing, he ascended into the air, and, with a quick thrust, he rushed to that rooftop, finally pulling his gaze as he landed and jogged towards the roof’s far end, where his team looked out.
David ran to Erik’s side, inhaling to speak as he scanned his teammates, but choking as he looked to the city’s northern end. His eyes widened as a pyretic flash ascended along the top of a building, and his mouth fell as he watched another flash occur beyond that. A dozen towers of smoke ascended from the ground, filling the once clearing atmosphere with a dense smog, and masking the motions of those responsible. Winding through the clouds, speeding around the tops of buildings, and cutting vapor trails above the northern end of Lynchburg were score upon score of metallic shapes that gleamed in the early sky and moved by deflagrant propulsion. Some flew in groups of as little as seven, diving in and out of view as they wound through the distant streets and shot at buildings damaged but still standing, while others sped overhead in amorphous throngs of up to fifty, circling the business district and dispersing into smaller formations, while others swarmed in their place. “What_?” David gasped as he stepped back. “What is_?” he stopped again and looked towards the road where the white machine remained. He then stepped towards the ledge, and looked out towards that massive battlefield, the smoke, the flames, and the destruction—Harrisburg.
“Dave!” David looked to Erik on the phone. “Lamback!” Erik bellowed as he stepped from the ledge and dragged his hand through his hair.
“Erik, what’s going on now!?” Lamback howled.
“The city’s under attack; not like aircraft, but…it’s hard to explain…there are things flying everywhere; there are explosions_”