BACK    CONTENTS

= ORWELL IN ORBIT 2084 =

Dystopia USA

by John Argo

Page 6.

There was no mistaking now—something violent and noisy was happening not far away in the thick, roiling fog in the river basin. Whatever it was, the thick reeds towering twenty feet, and the gloomy oaks and willows, were not giving up their secrets.

He heard a splash and looked down. The quietly flowing river was visible directly below, where the fog was thin. Starlight gleamed on fast-moving water. Something was causing undulating waves.

He heard that cry again, this time of someone in pain. Maybe it was an illegal being mauled by a mountain lion. But there were none of the growls and cat-wails one might expect, not that Mack was an expert in such matters.

Reaching down under the driver's seat, he pulled out his favorite weapon—a three pound, two-foot flashlight of black steel.

He walked into the deepening gloom as far as he could before he had to turn the light on. The fog all around blinded him. He aimed at the ground just ahead of his feet. He walked forward in the glow that must have made him into a target big as an elephant. "Hello?" he called. "Anyone there?"

Silence.

But the thrashing noises continued, and the screech of some strong material being torn, the banging of bending tin or some other metal, continued without respite.

He turned the light off and quickly stepped aside, in case someone or something was targeting him. The light was more of a liability than it was worth.

He stumbled over a large, snaking tree root. In trying to regain his balance, he stepped over the edge of the river bank, landed with one foot on a muddy slope slippery as ice, and slid down until his right boot was in the cold water. The flashlight rolled and bounced, like a carnival wheel, into the water. He caught a last glimpse of it sinking down into feet of soft muck and its glowed dimmed and disappeared. The river here was about thirty feet across, with spots where the muck was like quicksand. He wasn't going after it—too cold, wet, and creepy. The noise would expose him to whatever was going on around a bend in the river.

Getting his sleeves cold and muddy, as well as his rear end and back, he crab-walked backwards up to the road.

A snake rattled loudly and then slithered away into dead bamboo and dry, yellowed reed debris.

He had never dropped his gun. That was in his right hand in an iron grip. Two tours in the Army, with combat in the Middle East and elsewhere, had taught him if you lose everything else, hold on to your weapon and your ammo. You can get another flashlight, another sandwich, another dry shirt or whatever, but you're as good as dead without a means of defense.

He walked around a bend in the road, as it curved with the river, and saw something so strange he shook his head and wiped his hands over his eyes, gun and all.

For a moment, he thought the large metal craft, which hovered some six or eight feet above the water, was a helicopter—but there were no rotors. It was a cross between an egg and a bus, and had three stubby side fins with huge airline-style engines on them.

There was movement in the water below—too much to take in in one glance—people in pilot suits fighting, no helmets—and a dead person hung out of the open hatch.

The dead woman's upper torso lay on the river bank—hair and face burned beyond recognition, skull-teeth glittering. The lower half of her body, from the belt down, still in its flight suit, hung down from a tangle of seatbelt webbing.

The markings on the craft were strange, too—a hodgepodge of cuneiform that looked like chopped salad. He took in all this in a second.

Several men were in the water, punching and beating each other so that the water foamed white all around them.

From the smell of scorched flesh, and acrid smoke in the air, he deduced the woman had been alive minutes earlier. That smoke wasn't gunpowder, though—more like molten metal, or maybe magnesium, tortured with electric currents and extinguished in a mess by dirty water.

The aircraft itself was cream-colored, but dented and blackened around the woman's dangling corpse.

Hearing the radio squawk a few hundred feet away, Mack ran back to the car. At least, being called on the radio was something he could understand. Amazing how far he'd come. He slipped and fell on mud, rolled back upright and kept running. He could hear the voice of Leo Roberts, his partner. "Ten ten, base to Mack, come in, we're scrubbing…"

Before Mack could reach the car, something massive roared along above his head—a black aircraft or space craft studded on all sides with knife-like blades of light.

It wasn't a Federal chopper, but another of these mysterious aircraft with the triple nacelles on stubby wings.

A second later, three or four pillars of light, rippling with grainy purple-green energy popcorn, which sizzled and spluttered, slammed down on the car and melted it down into a mass of smoking, glowing slag.

The heat drove Mack backwards. He tore his cell phone from his inside pocket, whipped the clam open, and with trembling fingers pressed the pre-dials. He held it under his lapel to stanch the blue light, which still leaked out. Leo answered in a tense and gritty voice. "Mack, what's going on?"

"You tell me." As he breathlessly spoke, leaning over the phone, Mack noticed a faintly glowing figure about fifty feet away, a woman, completely encased in a dull gray astronaut garment complete with bubble helmet, intently studying a data tablet held in both hands.

"Mack, speak to me," Leo snapped anxiously.

"Hold on." The screen in the woman's hands sent a faint luminance up against her face plate.

The aircraft above roared away across the desert. Still deafened by the noise, shocked, Mack staggered back a step or two.

He heard a series of popping noises from behind him—men shooting each other in the water.

Dazed, he turned to go back for another look—when a dull, massive pain wrenched his right wrist and made him drop the gun. As he looked at his wrist and went to reach for it with his other hand, a fist crashed into his face. He just glimpsed raw, ochre knuckles and pale, hairy fingers sailing into his face as the lights went out. The cell phone fell to the ground and was lost.

TOP  |  MAIN

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.