by Unknown
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beneath her shoes as she paced nervously.
On the street, cars whizzed past, mostly in the direction of the Wal-Mart. People on their way to grab whatever was left from the shelves, she supposed.
“School’s out early, eh?”
Maria turned to the familiar voice. Her sister was walking toward her, hands buried in her jacket pockets, breath steaming out in the frigid air.
“I thought you had to work this morning.’
Mica shrugged, “Boss closed up shop, and sent us all home. Did you hear about Star Harbor?”
“Yeah, I can’t believe it. My teacher was crying.”
The buses appeared from around the corner, and began pulling up to the curb. The girls boarded the right one as soon as its doors opened. The driver looked appropriately ill at ease, checking his watch, likely in a hurry to get home himself.
The kids loaded on, talking excitedly. Maria and her sister exchanged knowing looks with one another. The thrill of the unknown was fuelling the chatter. Those other kids had obviously not endured the months of worry and preparation by their parents, nor had any real idea of what might be coming.
The driver barked for them to be quiet as he closed the doors, and steered out onto the road. With his free hand, he fiddled with the dash radio, trying to get a clear signal. He cranked up the volume, and the kids settled down, listening to the news broadcast. As yet, there was nothing new, just rehashing of the attack on Star Harbor, and the growing anxiety across the nations. There were reports of rioting in some cities, and the looting of stores. The Army and National Guard was mobilizing. The surface navy had ordered
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the immediate deployment of vessels away from coastal ports.
The bus had to weave through unusually thick traffic, the driver honking irritably. At one point, he drove over the corner of the sidewalk at the overpass intersection, so that he could get around the lines forming for the gas stations. Maria and her sister gawked at a fist fight between two other drivers. One had apparently tried to cut in line. Other people were shouting at the station attendant as he brought out a sign that read ‘Out of Gas.’
“If it’s like this here,” Mica told her little sister, “imagine what it’s like in the big cities.”
The bus ride took a good forty-five minutes, thanks to the various stops that had to be made to drop kids off along the way. Maria and Mica had the second-to-furthest stop on the route.
They were relieved to find their father waiting at the end of the snow-bound county road. The school had done a good job of informing parents what was going on. Without a word, they bounded from the bus to their dad, and climbed on. As her father reared the vehicle around, Maria glanced back at the bus as it drove on up the road, not knowing that it would be the last time she saw such a thing.
Clay sped as fast as he dared, taking care not to jounce his daughters off when they clipped the sharper drifts. At least with the temperatures being so low, the snow was hard-packed, and made the going easier. Maria did not feel safe until they were pulling into their lane.
Her dad drove right into the open maw of the barn, parking beside the other cars and farm implements that had been moved in before the weather turned bad. He killed the engine, and pulled his parka hood down, craning his head to look back at them.
“Into the house, girls.”
Omaha, Nebraska
Leslie Compean checked her shopping list against what she saw in the pantry, marking off some items, and adding others, humming to herself as she did so. She wanted to be certain that she forgot nothing at the market. This would be the first Thanksgiving that both her family, and her husband’s would be spending in their new home, and she was determined that everything would go off without a hitch.
From the living room, her three year old son was enthralled by the cartoons on TV, munching dry Cheerios, scattering more of them on the carpet than what actually made it into his mouth. Robbie was laughing happily at the antics of the characters, and offered her a happy smile when she peeked around the corner to check on him. She was thankful to have found a station with something for kids, it seemed as if every channel was tuned to the Global News Network. The doom and gloom that was on the air every hour of the day was so tiresome!
To her near despair, the screen went blank right then, changing to a solid blue background with the new Civil Defense symbol. The emergency broadcast system began its irritating howl. Of all the times for yet another test!
“Toons! Toons!” Robbie protested, throwing his bowl at the TV.
“Calm down, honey. We’ll find you some ‘toons.”
Leslie took the remote from the side table, and began surfing the channels. One after another, it was the same thing no matter where she scanned.
Then the power went out.
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“Well, damn it!”
Robbie sat quietly on his blue blanket, the well-worn one that his gramps had given him for his birthday. He had lost interest in the TV, and was looking toward the front bay window, head cocked, as if listening to something. Leslie then noticed the sound, too. The faint keening of the tornado siren was wailing morosely from the direction of city hall.
She frowned, confused. Why would they be sounding the tornado horn in November?
“Hang on, Robbie. Mommy’s going to look outside for a minute, okay?”
“K.”
She donned her coat, and stepped out onto the front stoop. The air was cold, and damp from the recent dusting of snow. The sky, though, was cloudless, and bright with morning sun. No hint at all for a storm. It must be a coordinated test, she reasoned. Things were just getting too damned far out of….
Leslie spotted them by chance, from the corner of her vision as she was turning to go back inside. She froze in mid-step, unable to believe what she was looking at. There were better than a dozen hot, white trails of exhaust streaking skyward from the horizon. Missiles being launched from the defense batteries on the other side of the city.
Fighter jets roared low overhead, banking left, and rushing east.
Her mind put all of the things together, and terror filled her heart. She gasped as her knees went weak. She had to reach out and lean on the porch wall for support.
“Robbie!”
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She had to get her baby, and get down into the storm shelter. That was what her husband had drilled into her many times before. If something happened while he was at work, she was to hide down there until he came home.
As Leslie was moving back inside for her boy, Omaha was vaporized in the line of nuclear suns to bloom across the United States that morning.
Washington D.C.
The White House
President Reyes happened to be on the phone with her joint chiefs of staff when it went dead in her hands. They had been operating from one of the secure bunkers that were hidden along strategic points of the seaboard, a precaution given the active threat the world was now facing from the Storians. Her Vice, and members of the Congress and Senate were being rounded up, and evacuated to fallback facilities as well.
The order had gone out the moment the first shot was fired from the Kuiper belt. It had been a madhouse all morning, breakfast forgotten, as reports and broken transmissions flooded in. For a time, they had attempted to oversee it all from the antiquated bunker beneath the White House, but decades of disuse, and lack of maintenance from a simple absence of need meant that there was a crippling disadvantage to being down there. For one, the computer systems had never been upgraded for compatibility with the new Anderson Transmission Beam transceivers. Reyes, frustrated beyond words by the long delays in data that resulted, left the
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bunker, and returned to her office. It was actually faster to speak with Green and Parks over the secure phone, having them relay intel to her from their location.
When Star Harbor was hit, her aides practically lost their hair trying to get her to return downstairs. She’d had to tel
l her Secret Service contingent to remove them from the Oval Office, so that she could concentrate.
There was a lot of conflicting information as to how badly the harbor had been damaged. Off-world comms were becoming garbled at that point, something about a loss of signal from the Lunar Array.
Then the last ring of defense, the 3rd Fleet, went into action. The Storians were clearly attempting to make their move on Earth. That was the latter part of the conversation that she had been having with her command admiral when the phone line went dead.
She was looking blankly at the useless receiver in her hand when the door burst open, and a trio of Secret Service agents came storming in with wild-eyed expressions. They actually knocked one of her secretaries completely off their feet, sprawling over the coffee table like a tumbling linebacker. Papers flew everywhere, some lighting in the damned fireplace. One of the agents bore a plasma-Uzi in his hands.
“What in the hell…!” Was all she was able to get out before one of them navigated around her desk, and grabbed her roughly by one arm, yanking her to her feet.
The other pair joined him, surrounding her with their bodies, and proceeded to roughly half carry, half drag her out of the office, and down the main hallway. She wanted to demand an
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explanation, but did not even have a chance to. It was chaos. There was an alarm braying, strobes flashing, and people being herded toward the exits. There were some women screaming from the direction of the public areas, where guided tours were given.
The agents veered down a separate hall, descended a flight of stairs, and angled away from the elevator that would take them back down into the bunker. The agent apparently in charge was shouting into his wrist piece, something about the package about to be delivered. She assumed that meant her, but did not understand why they were not going back down the shaft.
“We’re not going to the bunker?” She managed to ask the agent that had an iron-grip on her arm.
The man looked scared out of mind, “It’s not safe enough, Ma’am!”
The lead agent body-slammed the panic bar, fairly exploding through the door, and Reyes was taken on through. She found herself outside on the snow-dusted lawn, where Helo One was waiting, engines idling at the ready in high scream. The helo-shuttle was designed to look exactly like the traditional rotor-driven model, with the only difference being its Anderson jet power plant. It was also heavily armored.
Circling above were a pair of Cobra attack chopper-shuttles, providing cover.
The side door of Helo One slid open, and a pair of fully armored marines jumped out, assault rifles held at the ready to guard her approach. The agents rushed Reyes to the open door, and for all intents and purposes, fairly tossed her inside, where four more marines waited. One of them reached down, and helped her get to an open seat, his face invisible behind the helmet visor. The two outside hauled themselves back in, and pulled the door shut, closing off the din and cold, swirling air.
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The instant the door had sealed, there was the dropping sensation in her stomach of lifting off. Through the hatch window, she watched the ground fall away, and the people growing smaller. The dome of the White House was at eye-level, and then sweeping out of view as the helo banked, still climbing.
One of the marines pulled a harness over her, and locked the clip into place, pulling the straps tight.
“Are we heading for Air Force One?” Reyes had to shout to be heard over the engine noise within the cabin.
The marine reached up, and lifted the helmet visor, revealing a young, frightened face of a girl that was barely touching twenty.
“Air Force One is no longer an option, Madam President!”
Reyes was surprised, “Why is that?”
The marine simply pointed toward the hatch window. Reyes followed, and gawked at what she saw. Along several points of the skyline, there were bright missile trails rising toward the heavens---the ground defenses going active on targets in the upper atmosphere. That told her that the Storians had not only broken through the 3rd Fleet, but was already initiating a planetary attack.
A brilliant flash turned the port black, activating its protective tinting. That was followed in a near instant by an incredible slap of turbulence. The helo rattled and shook, bucking up and down like a wild bull. Everyone grabbed at handholds or their own straps as the pilots struggled to maintain control of the aircraft. Tell-tale alarms were bleeping and chirping as the pilot wrestled with the stick and cyclic, shouting commands at the co-pilot. Outside, the world was filled with the roar of an angry god.
Reyes cringed, shutting her eyes while trying not to scream, sure that at any moment, they were going to slam into the ground. Something scraped against the hull, maybe like tree branches, as
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they slid sideways with sickening speed.
Then, they were climbing again, the quaking easing off. The hatch window began to clear, and the president opened first one eye, then both to see outside. There was a mammoth mushroom cloud consuming the D.C. skyline, boiling upward to heights that she could not imagine. Its base was sweeping outward, swallowing everything, backlit by the otherworldly glow of a firestorm.
Then they were banking, climbing higher, and pouring on the speed. As Helo One went supersonic, the shockwave shook the ground beneath them. Their Cobra escort was nowhere to be seen, likely slapped to the earth by the nuclear blast wave.
The interior alarms gradually silenced one by one, until a semblance of order was restored inside the craft. Reyes had a partial view into the cockpit, and could see the nav-computer spitting out coded coordinates. Keeping below a thousand feet, the pilot weaved, and bobbed as the landscape dictated, contour flying to remain below radar, and avoid being picked up by any unseen enemy aircraft that might be about.
Reyes did not know exactly where they might be heading, but had a fair guess. There was a command bunker buried deep in the Appalachian mountain range, and they did seem to be on a trajectory that was taking them further in from the coast. More and more, wooded areas were replacing the layout of the city. The expressways and clusters of buildings were being left behind. She counted another three mushroom clouds birthing in their blinding bursts of light, each at varying distances that travelled steadily south. She was quite certain that the last one had to have been taking out Norfolk Naval Station, and the surrounding city.
Time became surreal. It had to have been less than an hour, but felt an eternity. Reyes realized that she had actually been nodding off, shocked into wanting to withdraw into the
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comfort of sleep. She straightened, looking at the marines sitting around her. They, too, wore dull expressions. They were so young. Their youth struck her the most. She wondered if they were the product of her recruiting program, and a twinge of guilt pulled at her.
The helo was moving much slower now, nearly at a hover. Reyes looked out to see that they were indeed floating just above the treetops in a draw between two steep, wooded hills. Snow covered everything, and was swirling upward in the wash created by the engines. Down to the bottom of the ravine, barely squeezing between the whipping tree branches, Helo One touched earth.
The marine nearest the hatch pulled on the lever, sliding it open while another snapped the release on the president’s buckle. Out she went with her escort, into the artificial blizzard. Her hair was flying everywhere, and she had to keep her eyes squinted against the freezing assault, certain that it was even flying up her skirt.
One of the troopers picked her up like a ragdoll, and began carrying her through snow that was nearly knee-deep in some places, off into the woods, further away from the helo. After a few moments, it lifted away, and veered off to the south. She wondered where the pilots would go. There were so many unknowns, so many people whose sole purpose was her safety. What happened to them? Deep down, she knew. Just like those Secret Service agents, and staffers back in D.C. They delivered her from the fire, only to perish in it themsel
ves.
The armored plating of the marine carrying her was digging painfully into her side, but she resigned herself to being hauled like a football. It would be better than trudging through the snow pack in the middle of nowhere. At some point along the way, she’d lost one of her high-heel shoes.
The woods were eerily quiet. No birds, not even a winter crow. The last echoes of Helo One had faded, leaving a sense of
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isolation that bordered unsettling. The only sounds were those of armored boots slogging through the snow, and the heavy breathing of the marines.
The trooper in the lead, a young captain, was following readings from a small hand-held device, and changed course several times. After a short while, they came to a sheer outcropping of rock, and he began sweeping the piece of equipment before him, back and forth, up and down, all along the cliff face.
The marine carrying Reyes at last gently sat her down, and helped to balance her as she regained her senses, standing on her one shoed foot like a damned flamingo. The cold was starting to get to her, making the president hope that the captain would be able to find the hidden entrance soon.
Her jaw was shaking by the time it finally happened. The captain had waved the device over an area that was slightly concaved, and there came a loud, heavy clank. Huge locks released from within, and ever so slowly, the section began to cycle open. The door was easily four feet thick, solid, shining steel behind the false stonework.
Two marines scooped an arm under each leg, and carried Reyes inside, where the air was just as frigid as the outside. A single, red bulb illuminated the space, which was a simple ten-by-ten foot antechamber. Once they were all in, the captain touched a panel control, and the blast door began to cycle closed again. When it shut, steel bars the girth of a man’s leg slammed home, and pressurized air created a seal, making their ears want to pop.
By the dim light, the officer then plugged the top of his device into a slot on the opposite wall. There was another series of clunks, followed by a hiss as air was released into the next chamber, relieving the pressure on their ears.