Moon Dreams

by M.A. Harris

Cut Off

  In the thin protection of the mobile office the Sheriff was talking to a big greasy man with a heavy belly and a leather coat that was too small to zip up. Kathy half listened to the two men as she sipped a coffee. Kathy had decided to stick with the Sheriff after the disaster at the plateau. He had, by force of character and simple common sense, gotten the Marshals reorganized and pulled back from the plateau. They’d left a couple of guards and one of the big black trucks at the site, but had pulled everything else back to the intersection of the highway and canal access road. Here they had set up a temporary command center.

  She looked out the window, it was getting dark, it was almost nine hours since they had driven away from the pyre of five murdered men and women. The airwaves and phone lines had been buzzing for most of that time. Two old office trailers had appeared out of nowhere less than an hour after they had arrived back here, now there were also two big situation trucks, one with the markings of the Utah State Police and the other with no markings, apparently attached to the Federal Marshals. The field behind the parking lot cum command center was a temporary air base; helicopters with the logos of the Utah National Guard, Utah State Police, FBI and ATF were sitting on the ground.

  Kathy’s attention was pulled back from the dimming world outside by the Sheriff’s suddenly sharp tone, “For God’s sake John, why didn’t you call me and tell me there was shit going down at the Canal.” The Sheriff was beginning to lose his temper; though Kathy was fairly sure he lost it only when he wanted too.

  The big, black haired man shrugged, “How was I to know it was really crook Mike? Hell if I’d known the egg heads up in the Hollow were nut cases I’d have told you, but I didn’t. Seen things spinning down but figured it was just the normal crap, idiot managers, shit for brains engineers, dick head supervisors, you know?”

  The Sheriff shook his head, “You were told yesterday not to report to work this morning. You saw me drive by yesterday, I saw that old death trap you call a truck in the yard at the plant, almost certain it was you jacking that rig around with a big pipe on the low boy.”

  “Uh, well, yeah I was there, I mighta seen you but why would I have called you about a work stoppage?”

  “You’ve known things aren’t quite right for a while John, you saw me, you got the call, you know me well enough you could have called me with a tip damnit.” The Sheriff’s voice was rough.

  “Yeah…well…yeah I shoulda I guess.” The big man hung his head and kicked the floor like a big kid. Kathy realized that in many senses that was about what the big man was.

  “OK John, get out of here, get home, stay sober for once will you, and stay inside.”

  “Yeah, sure Mike, whatever you say, you call if you need any help, you hear.” The big man was sidling away quickly as he said that. The door slapped shut as he jumped over the steps.

  Marty, Captain Martin Quinn, Federal Marshals, Malcolm’s second in command and now the senior Marshall in the state apparently, was leaning his hip against one of the two old desks. “He’ll skedaddle if I don’t miss my guess.”

  Mike shook his head, “I doubt it, he’s dumb, not stupid, and he didn’t do anything. I was just leaning on him to feel him out. I don’t think he knew a thing before today.”

  “Yeah, well we have the whole town locked down right now so if he does run we’ll pick him up.”

  The Sheriff looked at the Marshall with a frown, “You routing traffic around us?”

  “Yeah, story is an avalanche closed the road. The same avalanche cut the data trunk.”

  Kathy was startled, she gasped a little, the Marshals black eyes rotated to consider her, “Ma’am I’m not sure what good your hanging around is going to do. This is far and beyond any kind of accounting shenanigans. I could give you a pass to get out of the valley if you want, as long as you swear to keep mum about this until it’s all over.”

  She shook her head, “I started this disaster, triggered it anyway, I won’t leave until I understand what is going on. Captain, Malcolm and those people died because of a call I made. If I’d just let things lie, gone back to Salt Lake City and put the paperwork through the process this wouldn’t have happened. They’d probably have been done with whatever is so damned important to them and been gone before it came to a head. It was my impatience, glory hounding, which killed your people.”

  The Sheriff was shaking his head vehemently, so was the Captain, who spoke first, “Ma’am, Kathy - those bastards on the plateau killed Malcolm, Scott, and the others. You had nothing to do with that, with their decision to kill. You’re no more to blame than I am. I know it’s hard to accept sometimes but you’re blameless in this, if anything you too are a victim. No one should have to face that sort of thing - no one.”

  Kathy shrugged, squeezed her eyes closed, “OK, I suppose I know that, but still I feel culpable somehow. I need closure; I can’t scuttle away like some scared little green eyeshaded mouse.”

  This imagery made both men smile faintly, this time the Sheriff spoke first, “Kathy, you’re about as far from a green eyeshaded mouse as I could ever expect to meet. You aren’t to blame but I understand how you feel. If you want to stay you have my permission to do so, just stay out of the way please.”

  The Marshal Captain nodded, reluctantly, “I still feel you’d be better going home, but if you feel that you must, then stay.”

  The door squeaked and the whole flimsy structure shivered as a massive presence made itself apparent, “Sheriff, Captain, Ms. Scudder.” The voice was booming and warm, words that well fit General Smitts, Adjutant General, Utah National Guard. He was a mountain of a man, only lacking the white beard to make a perfect Santa Claus. The General had played nose guard for Army during his years at West Point; he’d retired as a Major General to his native state and happily taken up politics, a pastime that had gotten him his current position.

  Kathy didn’t know much about the man, like most politicians in Utah he had a squeaky clean reputation and was a church going man, but until now she’d had no impression of his competence. She’d quickly decided that, while the General might be a good man, he might not be the best soldier in the world. He was far out of his element and was not getting the respect he felt he deserved; consequently spikes were showing through the smooth politician’s shell.

  The Sheriff’s face was emotionless as he turned to face Smitts, “General, you’ve spoken to the governor?”

  “Hours ago Sheriff, hours ago, can’t have this sort of thing going on in our state.”

  “No sir.”

  “No is correct. I’ve also been talking to the damn Feds, ah, excuse the term Captain, ah, Ms. Scudder. None of them have the guts to do anything to get this mess wrapped up. Won’t let me fly my boys and girls onto the plateau even! Afraid of something going wrong!” this last was in a savage mimicry of Carlos Santiago’s tenor, the senior FBI agent in charge of the situation since he’d arrived, an hour before the General, and the General didn’t like either the situation or the agent.

  “Ah sir, we’re not sure what hit the chopper, and we know they have snipers and probably heavy weapons on the plateau. The scouts we have in overlooks say there appear to be troops on the plateau - and weapons emplacements.” The Sheriff was speaking softly, Kathy could tell that saying that hurt him, Mike was blaming himself for not knowing what was going on at the plateau, he was also puzzled because no one could figure out how all those people and weapons had gotten there in the first place.

  “Maybe, but I’m not convinced! I think it may be just regular folks panicking because the Feds over-reacted to something.”

  Kathy felt her spine stiffen and saw the Captain’s face darken, but it was the Sheriff who spoke, “Sir, I was up there and the last guard I spoke to was not a local, I am almost certain he was a professional soldier. And regular folks don’t shoot a helicopter out of the air for no reason.”

  The General harrumphed, “Well I don’t know, don’t
know at all. Don’t like it, the Feds buffaloed me at first but I’ve been thinking, doesn’t make any sense, seems like we’re going to get ourselves another Fed overreaction debacle.”

  The door behind the general squeaked again, this time two people entered, Carlos Santiago, the senior FBI agent, and Susan Morrissey, the senior ATF agent. With the six of them in the little portacabin it was crowded.

  “General, I heard that you have ordered some heavy weapons moved up?” Susan was a cadaverously thin woman, with gray shot brown hair pulled savagely back from a narrow face dominated by a huge beak of a nose; overall she gave the impression of a vulture in human guise.

  “Two M-1A tanks and a fire team of self propelled howitzers, they’re bringing smoke and flare shells. The tanks are only bringing ammo for the coaxial machine guns, but they’re equipped with dozer blades to clear roadblocks.” His chest was puffed up.

  Santiago sighed, “General that’s way over-reacting as yet. You know that both highway cuts are visible from the plateau, anyone up there will see them coming. My negotiation team’s trying to talk to them, get them to see sense. That sort of thing’s only going to make things worse.”

  The general snorted, “They won’t see a thing, they’ll be here in about another hour, well after dark.”

  There was a silence, broken by the ATF agent, “General, it’s very likely that they have night vision equipment.”

  The General’s mouth opened then snapped shut. He was about to say something else when Susan shook her head and spoke again, “This is not going to be resolved with heavy weapons. I need to get a recon team up on the plateau this evening so they can see what’s going on close up.”

  She nodded at the slight Latino FBI agent, “Carlos tells me we’re going to get an over flight by a spy satellite sometime soon. Thought about asking the Air Force but if they can shoot down a helicopter who knows what they can do? Why take the risk? Anyway, we should get a good stripe of pictures in about half an hour. My recon team’s getting ready to move in after they’ve had time to review the satellite’s take.”

  The General was swelling again, but kept his mouth shut, a discrete buzz sounded. The FBI agent pulled a rather old fashioned flip phone out of a pocket, “Santiago?” He listened with a frown, “What, who? The PP list…oh…oh shit!” His eyes were bulging. Everyone stood watching as the FBI agent’s face went from dark to ashen. Kathy had never seen anyone look so shocked. The questions Santiago got out were incoherent and uninformative.

  After a few minutes the General got restless, obviously impatient to know what had so visibly shaken the FBI agent. He started rocking back and forth, which made the whole flimsy cabin shake rather alarmingly.

  Another tone sounded, Martin Quinn tapped his wrist pad, “Quinn?” He listened for a moment, “Thanks.” He looked at the General, “Your convoy’s a little early General, it’s just starting down the grade into the valley.”

  “What, what did you say Martin?” Santiago’s tenor was squeaky, shaking.

  “The General’s convoy is coming down into the valley.”

  “Oh shit, oh God, stop them, pull them back…now.” He leapt for the door slamming it out of his way.

  “What the hell do you mean?” the General yelled at the departing agent.

  Everyone scrambled out of the room following the slim man.

  He was standing in the open looking up, “Oh shit.” He pointed up, straight up, near the zenith of the sky; among the faint stars was a brighter spark, one that moved. “They saw them coming, they have recon sats of their own.” Santiago’s voice was full of pain.

  “What the hell is this…?” The general’s voice died.

  The spark was moving faster now, across the sky, brightening as it came. Brighter, faster, the spark was more than one, Kathy couldn’t tell, there might be as many as four clustered together. In utter silence they flashed down across the sky, plunging into the looming blackness of the valley wall. The flash of impact was so brilliant that pain stabbed into Kathy’s brain. She staggered back, flinging arms up to protect her eyes. Thunder pealed followed by a deep roar that faded then the ground trembled and the thunder redoubled before fading.

  Yells surrounded her. The flash had hurt like a flash bulb in the dark, she wasn’t burning up as she might if someone had detonated a nuke.

  “Incoming, look!” someone screamed.

  “What the hell are they going after this time?” The General’s yell was almost a squeal.

  The dart of fire fell to the south this time, splitting up much earlier.

  Kathy realized she was next to the Sheriff; instinctively she had stuck with him, he swore, “The cuts, they’re going after the highway and railroad cuts in the south ridge.”

  The darts of fire fell across the sky in their last swift dash, plunging into the ridge as the Sheriff had predicted. This time Kathy closed her eyes at the last instant, and opened them after the flash of impact, this time seeing the fading clouds of fire rising from the strikes with horrified fascination

  “Why?” Susan Morrissey yelled.

  “They’re the only land routes out of the valley, or at least the only ones that cars or trucks can use that don’t go right past the plateau. Most people are trapped here, at least overnight.”

  “Why…Oh crap, are there still people from the Plateau in the town?”

  The Sheriff hesitated for an instant then shook, “I don’t think so…?”

  Then someone yelled, “Incoming!

  The Sheriff jerked, “Oh Christ, we’re almost the only possible target!” His chest inflated and his voice roared out, “Run...run away from the vehicles! run everyone, get as far as you can and take cover!” The Sheriff’s voice was almost a physical blow it was so loud. Then he was running, dragging Kathy into a sprint for the road, after a few steps she was running with him, fear driving her legs like never before.

  There was confusion, yelling, a voice boomed over a loud speaker, “Everyone out, run for it, away from the vehicles. NOW, NOW, NOW.”

  The road was ahead of them. They were on it, suddenly it was getting brighter around them, and Kathy knew she was going to die. She saw other figures running across the road in the deadly illumination. Then they were on the other side of the roadbed. The Sheriff was dragging her down as the sky exploded.

  -o-

  An instant before they struck tiny linear charges in the cores of the two impactors detonated. In a fraction of a second two tons of concrete converted from solid darts into showers of gravel. A huge amount of the weapons’ kinetic energy was converted into heat and the mass slowed by two thirds in a few hundred feet, but the shower of gravel was still moving faster than a rifle bullet at the muzzle when it hit. The searing shock wave that accompanied the flail of white-hot gravel was almost worse.

  Helicopters, cabins, trucks, cars, people, were hammered, shredded and immolated. Fuel blasted out of flayed tanks, mixed with air and exploded. Fragments of metal, plastic, rock, flesh and bone splashed out from the core of the holocaust.

  -o-

  The shockwave ripped over Kathy, she felt the terrible pulse of heat through her clothes. The ground slammed up at her and the air tried to squeeze her, sound filled the universe, pain stabbed inwards from her ears, she screamed, she knew she was going to die, was dying, the flames were going to eat the flesh from her bones.

  Roaring filled her ears, but the heat was gone, cold air was blowing across her instead. She opened her eyes, it was much lighter than it had been a few minutes before, but the light was the terrible red orange glow of fire, not the clean light of the sun. The roaring in her ears didn’t diminish but now she realized that it was because of stunned nerves in her head, not from the outside.

  She rolled over and saw the Sheriff was still lying on his back, his eyes staring up. Kathy realized he was watching for any more incoming weapons. They had to be weapons but they had been more like the meteors she had s
een in movies about asteroid impacts than any weapon that she had ever heard of.

  The Sheriff rolled over and came to his knees looking up over the road, back towards the temporary camp. His face was etched with anger, grief and strain, terrible in the firelight.

  Kathy got onto hands and knees and lifted her head up as well. The view across the road was horrible, a pond of fire around the smashed, mangled, flattened, flayed remains of vehicles. One of the trucks she had seen parked on the far end of the row next to the road was still identifiable though it was burning savagely, nothing else was identifiable, it was as if a junk yard had been set alight.

  Her ears were humming now and she could hear other sounds, all along the road she could see figures rising to their feet, all of them looking into the hellish cauldron. A crack sounded, and then a string of them, people went diving for the ground, most of them pulling their side arms as they went. The Sheriff was crouching next to Kathy again, he leaned over and yelled, “ammo cooking off in the wreckage, it won’t be safe to go near it for some time.”

  “What about survivors?” She yelled back.

  He nodded, heaving a sigh and stood up, he scuttled across the road. After a pause Kathy followed, it had been her idea after all.

  She stopped as she almost fell over him on the other side; he was hovering over something that glistened terribly in the firelight. Kathy gasped realizing that it was someone lying against the embankment, their back flayed to the bone. She staggered back and turned away retching. A few moments later the Sheriff was next to her, he yelled, “It’s Morrissey, she didn’t make it.”

  A figure appeared in the hellish gloom, the slim figure almost immediately recognizable as Martin Quinn, he waved into the conflagration, “The general’s in there somewhere, the idiot ran for his chopper.” He flicked a thumb over his shoulder. “Santiago’s back that way, counting noses. I’ve talked to my people, believe it or not all my people made it. Once bitten twice shy I guess.”

  The Sheriff nodded, “Good! What about the rest of the General’s staff and the state troopers?”

  “Don’t know; saw the State Trooper major wandering around back that away.”

  “I’ll go talk to him.”

  -o-

  A half hour later the surviving senior officers stood in a circle, with Kathy an observer on the outside. They had finished collecting the survivors, as far as they could tell, half of the people at the command center had died there. The ATF had lost three of its six-person contingent, the FBI had five dead out of twelve, the state troopers four out of ten, the marshals, already hit hard, had gotten out without a scratch. The only survivor from the National Guard’s ten-person contingent was a sergeant, curled up in catatonic shock. Several other survivors were nearly as bad. Disconcertingly there were no physically wounded, people had either died instantly or survived.

  Their situation was dire; nothing much had survived the hit. The town was in truth completely cut off from the outside, at least for the night, probably for days. The trunk lines had been cut, no data links out of the valley, cell phones worked as long as you had a local service; with the long distance down a lot of peoples’ cell phones had quit working except for the 911 service.

  None of the five men seemed to want to say anything, they stared at each other in the gloom lit by a lamp someone had taken off the fire truck that had come screaming out of town a few minutes after the catastrophe.

  The Sheriff looked around, “Well I guess I’ll start, can anyone explain what the hell happened here?”

  Carlos Santiago replied, “We got hammered by orbital bombardment weapons controlled by Aristide Industries.”

  “What the hell crap is that…why, how?” The State Trooper Major barked.

  The FBI agent shrugged tiredly, “I don’t know really, I’m an agent not a scientist. It appears that Aristide Industries has developed some kind of propulsion system that gives them access to space about as easily as you or I can go to the store. They’ve been selling their services to some mercenary outfit and gun runners apparently. My guess is that’s who we met at the Plateau.”

  “Shit,” snarled Susan Morrissey’s bitter second in command, “Who the hell would give mercenaries that kind of fire power?”

  The Sheriff spoke up, “I suppose that’s as much explanation as we get right now. Unfortunately, it all fits what we know so we have to go with it. It’s dark now, they’ve made sure we’re ineffective, I expect they’ll be down soon to pickup whoever it is they want, then they’ll be on their way.”

  “Are they going to go into town, anyone they’ll want to take? If they do we need to get into town and stop the bastards.” The simmering rage in the ATF agent’s voice was as much fear and shock as anything else. .

  The Sheriff spoke, “I’ve had my deputies checking, there were a few folks working on the plateau who lived in town but they’re all gone as far as we can tell.”

  “Yesterday there were cars and vans full of personal goods and people heading for the facility.” Kathy spoke up.

  Santiago looked around then spoke up “I guess we need to make sure they don’t drop in for some hostages or something but other than that we just need to keep an eye on the plateau and report back. This is a military operation not a police one.”