Standing the Final Watch

by William Alan Webb

  Everyone in the valley stopped whatever they were doing and peered around. Paco squinted. Nothing moved in the deep shadows that lingered in the valley, but the sound grew louder, echoing from the canyon walls and making it hard to tell which direction it came from.

  Someone shouted and pointed to the south.

  “¿Donde?” Paco asked. “Ernesto, what are they pointing at?”

  “There, in the air, see the sun reflecting off of something?” Ernesto’s eyes bulged.

  “Mi Dios,” Paco said. “¡Esos son los helicópteros!”

  Two dark shapes headed straight for him, and Paco realized what the metallic blurs were. His aunts and mother had told him of flying monsters the Mexican Federales had used to patrol the empty lands around their village, fire breathing demons named helicopteros. Paco assumed El Emir had sent them, but why? If the Emir controlled giant flying monsters, why send them to re-capture some runaway girls and kill a few old men? The Emir knew Paco would not fail him, so it made no sense. And if the Emir had not sent them, who else could have?

  One of the helicopteros split away from the other and headed for the ridge. The other kept coming, and Paco heard the faint sound of music over the droning whop-whop-whop. As the monster neared, Paco felt more fascinated than afraid. He started waving, but as the beast came closer, he could see through its huge eye into its soul, and what he saw looked like two men with bubbles on their heads. Were those the souls of bad men they had eaten? He could not explain it any other way.

  Then two bright lights appeared on either side of the monsters’ belly, strange lights that flickered. Paco knew those lights well, but a millisecond’s delay between his mind processing what it saw and deciding what action to take had a high cost in blood. He had just opened his mouth to scream a warning when dust and debris flew up the canyon floor, speeding straight toward him.

  Men disappeared in sprays of red — the men who’d traveled north from Mexico with him a decade ago, seeking loot. His childhood friends, cousins, brothers — the men he’d kept safe for so long.

  They weren’t safe any longer.

  Trucks and cars jumped and flipped around as jagged bits of shrapnel zipped through the air. Men screamed, tires exploded, and trucks ignited. Those not killed in the first firing pass wound up spattered with gore. One second Paco saw Ernesto standing twenty feet in front of him; the next his cousin’s upper body vaporized in a storm of bullets. The legs and hips stood for a moment before collapsing. The river of bullets sped his way.

  Paco dove under a nearby truck as dozens of fifty caliber slugs tore up the spot where he had stood. Before he stopped rolling, pain lanced through his left hand, left shoulder, and leg. Bullets ripped through the truck and smacked all around him. A splinter struck his left eye and the stream of shells moved on.

  It had taken less than four seconds.

  Closing his eyes he said a quick prayer. In his mind he made the sign of the cross, careful to show no outward sign of doing so, or to utter the name Jesus. Either would lead to a bullet in the head from his Islamic masters. He could not be sure they cared whether he truly had converted to Islam or not, but they cared a great deal about people who openly had not.

  Paco inspected his wounded hand and tried to roll over. The pain felt like something sharp and hot lodged in his shoulder, while his leg had gone numb. The truck sagged low to the ground, so he had a hard time twisting his body. Several times he banged into the metal chassis. A hole in the palm of the wounded hand caused the muscles to spasm into a claw. Skin hung loose from the exit wound and blood ran down his wrist. He could feel his shirt and pants getting sticky and wet, and knew he was bleeding out. He needed to crawl out from under the truck and stop the bleeding, but when he moved the pain caused him to black out.

  Seconds later, Paco woke to a smell so dangerous it penetrated the fog in his brain — gasoline. Blinking away tears, he twisted his neck forward, where a stream of gas poured from a ruptured fuel line, pooled, then ran straight toward him. All around him vehicles exploded and burned. One spark and he would burn to death under a truck in the middle of nowhere.

  The whop-whop-whop faded away.

  He yelled for help but none came. Using his good arm and leg, he scooted and slid clear of the truck. His shoulder throbbed; his wounded leg still felt stiff but not painful. His vision blackened at the edges. Half stumbling, dragging his mangled leg, he moved away from the knot of trucks and toward some heaps of rock fifty yards away.

  A man without legs reached out to him, mouthing something incomprehensible, and Paco recognized his cousin Jorge. Horrified, he limped faster for the safety of the rocks. When he was close enough to lower himself behind the shield of stone, his vision blackened again from blood loss. The world spun. He blinked and tried to stay on his feet.

  Here came the whop-whop-whop again, heading back for another attack run. Paco turned as it flashed by. A huge white star was painted on the helicopter’s side, and there were letters on its long tail — U.S. ARMY. Paco could not read Spanish, much less English, but his memory was excellent and the letters burned into his mind. As the blood flowed freely from his torn body, Paco fell unconscious into a clump of stones.

  “Ripsaw Real, I’ve got at least fifty Ali Babas over here in the rocks, I’m going to make another pass.” Plotz’s voice remained keyed up but professional.

  Banking his own Comanche for a second pass, Randall could not help smiling at the mention of Ali Babas. “Ripsaw Two, flashbacks of Iraq?”

  “You know it, Double R. Fun times. I’m about to stream live; we can swap war stories after.”

  “Roger that. Drinks on me.”

  Flaming vehicles littered the valley as tiny figures scattered, like roaches when light caught them in the open. Many more lay still in the dirt. Two trucks sped off to the east and Randall turned toward them, slowed, and hovered. Carlos armed two Dragonfires. The holographic display in Randall’s helmet gave him adjusted real-time flight path and target data, and prompted him to fire when the circle with the crosshairs lit bright green. When it did, Carlos punched the launch button and the first Dragonfire sped from under the helicopter’s thick starboard wing. Flight time clocked at less than one second, and the explosion ripped the lead truck’s chassis in two, scattering metal and body parts for a hundred yards.

  The driver of the second truck, a battered Volvo, swerved hard right to avoid the cart-wheeling wreckage. He cut right in front of Randall’s gunsight at a range of three hundred yards. A burst from the miniguns tore through the Volvo. The driver disappeared in a spray of gore and the vehicle jackknifed, rolled over three times, and rested on its side. Flames engulfed the wreck and Randall spotted someone staggering in the fire.

  The rest of the burp’s panicked and scattered. For fifteen minutes Randall and Carlos hunted the valley without mercy. No vehicle made its escape and no refuge proved safe against the relentless stream of fifty caliber shells. Men vanished in clouds of bloody mist. A few tried to fight back, but Randall stood off and smoked them without ever being in danger himself. By the time he ran out of targets, the valley floor resembled a scrap yard choked with shredded steel, dead bodies, and the reek of burning gasoline.

  “Ripsaw Two, this is Ripsaw Real. Burps all smoked. What’s your sitrep?”

  “Double R, still a few Ali Babas playing hide and seek in the rocks. Could use help if you’re free.”

  “On our way.”

  Caught between the two Comanches, the remaining men were hunted down one by one and wiped out. A few buried themselves deep in the rocks, but a well-placed Dragonfire solved that problem. The last man climbed onto a large outcropping, knelt, pressed his hands together, and held them up, begging for his life. Plotz got to him first. She held her gunship in a hover fifty feet away and watched the man sobbing. Tears glistened on his cheeks in the morning sun. She watched him a moment longer before pressing the trigger.

  Several of the girls rose, peering over the makeshift rock wall, watching the figh
ting with their eyes opened wide. Tompkins waved and yelled for them to get down, but nobody heard him over the screams of the wounded, the whump-whump of helicopter rotors, and the ripping stutter of the Gatling guns. He tried to duck-walk down the line to pull them under cover, but those days had vanished. Having no other choice, he rose and half-stumbled, half-trotted the fifty feet to where the women and girls were pressed hard against the stones. Panting from the exertion, he pulled the standing girls down and out of the line of fire.

  “What’s going on, Major?” asked Mama Powell.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think we’re being rescued.”

  After minutes that seemed like hours, the ruckous died down, with no more zip of the Gatling guns or pops of rifles. Even the wounded stopped screaming. The whump of the rotors became the only noise.

  Tompkins motioned them all to stay behind cover and rose to his knees, then to his feet. Several hundred feet away, one of the giant helicopters hung in the air, its front pointed to the ridgeline. Shading his eyes, he saw a man kneeling, hands clenched as if begging. There was a quick zip and the man vanished in a fountain of red. A glob of meat slid down the stone and fell to the valley floor.

  The two helicopters prowled back and forth above the valley without firing. Then one of them drew near the plateau, slowed, and landed in a swirl of dust and pebbles. Tompkins motioned everybody down again. The whine of the huge turboshafts quieted as the pilot idled the engine.

  He didn’t move as the pilot’s door opened and a man in an orange flight suit stepped down and walked toward him, holding a helmet. Although he could not believe it, Tompkins finally recognized the giant aircraft as the last helicopter gunship ever developed by the American military, the fabled Comanche. He had seen a squadron of them once, a lifetime before.

  The pilot stopped short of the wall and looked him up and down.Tompkins could not help staring at his shoulder patch, the American flag. For the first time he felt shame over his faded dungarees that might, or might not, have once been a uniform.

  “I’m Captain Joseph Randall, United States Army,” the pilot said.

  Tompkins cocked his head. “The United States Army? How is that possible?”

  The wind blew his mutter away and the pilot shook his head. He seemed so young. “Could you repeat that, please? I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I am Major Dennis Tompkins, also United States Army,” Tompkins said in a louder voice.

  Randall saluted and held it. Nobody had saluted Tompkins for decades and it took him a few seconds to remember protocol and return the salute. Everybody behind the stone wall crowded close, except for two small girls who ran to the helicopter, followed by their mother.

  “How is this possible, Captain? How did you get here? Better yet, where have you been all these years?”

  “I think we’d better leave the questions for debriefing, Major. We’re low on ammo and there could be more burps around.”

  “Burps?” Tompkins said.

  “Slang for butt-ugly raghead pricks. The people we’ve been killing.”

  “Oh. We call them Sevens.”

  “I suppose so, sir. How many people do you have?”

  The question snapped Tompkins back to the present and he glanced over his ragtag crew. Other than some cuts from rock splinters, and the flesh wound to John Thibodeaux, he could see no serious wounds and no fatalities.

  “Let’s see, twenty-three women and children, six of us, so twenty-nine total.”

  Randall scratched his neck, peering into the distance at nothing. “I don’t want to make two trips, Major, but I’m not sure we’ve got the room or lift capacity to take everybody in one. Hang on a minute; I’m going to see what my co-pilot thinks.”

  Randall trotted back to his helicopter. Tompkins turned. His men encircled him, with the women and children standing close. They all seemed stunned, anxious, as if this were some kind of fantasy.

  Thibodeaux spoke for them all. “Skip, are we saved?”

  Tompkins felt tears again and this time he could not stop them. “John, I think we are.”

  “Overtime Prime, this is Ripsaw Real. We are heading back with Ripsaw Two. Both of us have a full house. Request all available medical teams meet us in the hangar bay to treat civilians. We also have six United States Army personnel on board who may require treatment. Over.”

  “Read you, Ripsaw Real. What’s your ETA?”

  “About forty-five minutes.”

  “You are cleared to land when you arrive; the hangar doors are open. Will have med teams standing by.”

  Again another voice broke in, and Randall recognized it from earlier that morning. It carried more vigor this time. “Ripsaw Real, this is General Nicholas Angriff. Please verify that you are transporting United States Army personnel.”

  Joe Randall froze in his seat. That was why the CO’s voice had sounded familiar! Nick the A… shit! What was he doing there?

  Carlos nudged him and Randall came out of his shock.

  “I’m sorry, General Angriff. Yes, I have U.S. Army personnel on board, six to be exact.”

  “To be clear, Ripsaw Real, do you mean six survivors who have not been in Long Sleep?” Angriff said.

  “Affirmative, sir. That’s what they claim, anyway. And sir, they’re all… well, they’re not young men.”

  “Ripsaw Real, if they are survivors of the collapse, they should be at least in their seventies. Does this appear to be true?”

  Randall turned in his seat. Tompkins and his men squatted just behind the cockpit, squeezed in tight and ears cocked to one side of the conversation. “Yes, sir, that would appear to be the case.”

  Someone tapped his shoulder; it was Tompkins. Randall slipped off his right headphone cup and leaned close.

  “Captain, did I hear the name General Angriff?” Tompkins shouted. “Or was I imagining it? It’s very loud back here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Randall said. “It looks like General Angriff is our CO.”

  Tompkins could not have looked more shocked. “Nick Angriff? Nick the A?”

  “I wouldn’t call him that, sir. Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met,” Tompkins said.

  Randall waited for him to say more, but he did not, so he slipped his headphones back on. “General, this is going to sound pretty weird, but their commanding officer says you two have met.”

  Chapter 17

  I left behind all of my friends, in the stream of Time that never ends;

  But when I saw your face again, I knew that I should make amends.

  The wrongs I did were never right, and the rights were never wrong,

  Now I have one final chance, to sing one final song.

  “Lament,” Sixtus Calliphus, 3rd century A.D.

  June 18th, 0934 hours

  Somehow, somebody had found Angriff a cup of coffee and he could not believe how good it tasted.

  “Ripsaw Real, say again.”

  “The commander of the army personnel on board says he has met you, General. He’s a major.”

  “Ripsaw Real, does he mean that he knew me before I went cold, is that what he’s trying to say?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “Please verify.”

  While he waited Angriff looked around his new command. Hard to believe enough money had been found to build such a place. He’d expected to wake up to a single battalion with nothing more than the bare necessities of survival, maybe living in tents and hunting food. From the look of it, he got a mountain crammed with enough military gear to win a war against a small country. Or maybe even a big one.

  “Overtime Prime, this is Ripsaw Real. Sir, that’s affirmative. He says he knew you before the Collapse. His name is Tompkins.”

  He knew the name, which meant he knew the man. But how? His eyes roamed as he tried to remember. Forgetting radio discipline, he said, “Did he say where we met?”

  “Sir, he says you met on top of some castle in Austria.”

  The terra-cot
ta landscape raced by as they skimmed south at more than 150 knots. Tompkins caught a glimpse of some animal running for cover, then, straight ahead, the rising silhouette of a mountain range. The peaks rose for thousands of feet but the Comanche flew at barely two hundred feet. When more seconds passed without the helicopter going up, he started to panic. They were getting real close!

  After a jolt, airspeed bled away. Winds hugging the mountainside buffeted the helicopter as it approached the wall of bare rock. Below them, the slope began to rise. The aircraft crept forward, suspended in the air like a kite as the pilot fought to hold it steady in the strong air currents.

  Inside the helicopter, bodies had shifted and Tompkins could no longer see straight ahead. He shouldered into the packed bodies of his men. Between the pilot’s headrest and Thibodeaux’s cheek rose the mountain, less than fifty feet away, but instead of rocks and trees, an enormous gate had opened, revealing what appeared to be a hangar. The impossible sight disoriented him and he leaned back, shaking his head.

  The overloaded helicopters passed into the rocky slope. Tompkins had a brief moment to inspect the massive sliding doors themselves, and could not believe the how much the texturing matched the surrounding landscape. Inside, the helicopter hovered over a bright landing area and then descended until the wheels touched down with a light bump. The whine of the engine died as the Comanche powered down.

  Once the rotors stopped turning, the cargo doors slid back. A crowd poured from tunnels into the hangar and surrounded the aircraft. Gentle hands began helping the women and children down.

  Needing a moment, Tompkins deplaned last. His legs ached and he feared the four-foot drop to the hangar deck would cause them to buckle. Strong hands reached up, however, and lifted him down into the group of men and women wearing the uniform of the United States Army. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, patting him on the back and asking him questions, then silence fell like a blanket.