All the King's Horses and all the King's Men
Something had gone drastically wrong with the world, Lain Shenske thought, if government agents were kidnapping cripples out of rehab hospitals. They hadn’t even let the fact that she loudly refused to go or was dressed in a hospital gown deter them. Pausing only to secure her hated wheelchair, they loaded her from the gurney into a Black Hawk helicopter. They handed her off at Langley Air Force Base, loading both her and her wheelchair into one of several C-17s carrying Army soldiers and tank-like Bradleys.
Yes, something definitely had gone wrong.
They landed an hour later at a tiny little airfield in the middle of farm country. The massive transport jet dwarfed everything in sight with nothing more hostile than corn in view. A sign identified the field as “Butler County Airport” and an American flag flew atop the flagpole. While the Bradleys rumbled out of the C-17’s belly, she and her wheelchair were juggled quickly into another Black Hawk with a new sunglass-wearing handler.
“Where the hell are we going?” she shouted as the blades spun up for takeoff.
“Pittsburgh.” The new handler was in combat fatigues with insignia identifying him as Army Intelligence.
Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh? Lain tried to find some logic in the madness and was defeated.
“Why?” She had meant “Why Pittsburgh” but he misunderstood and thought she had asked “Why me?”
“You’re the only fully trained xenobiologist currently available,” the officer answered.
That made sense. Xenobiology was still in its infancy. The title had been conferred on only a handful of people with astronaut training and doctorates in biology and astrophysics. Everyone of her caliber had either been killed in the explosion that had crippled her, was in orbit, or had just jumped through the newly activated hyperphase gate that the Chinese had in geostationary orbit over the China Sea.
But “xenobiologist” and “Pittsburgh” didn’t add together.
“Why Pittsburgh?” she asked.
Frightening enough, that professionally blank look vanished off his face, replaced with a confounded inability to explain the situation.
What in God’s name had happened to Pittsburgh?
“We’re coming up on it now,” the pilot radioed.
They hauled open the side door, blasting the cabin with spring-cool air. Below, several major highways tangled together. Clustered tight around the intersection was a sprawl of suburbia. Strip malls with massive parking lots lined the access roads with red lights every few hundred feet. Housing plans crowded the hills behind the stores, hundreds of cookie-cutter houses on aimlessly curving streets. The only green was postage-stamp yards and scrub trees growing in areas too hilly to build on.
“That’s the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I-79.” Her handler indicated the two major highways. “That’s Cranberry Township below us; Pittsburgh city limits should be twenty miles south of us.”
Should be. They followed I-79 south. Military trucks blocked the on-ramps. Eight lanes sat empty of traffic. Despite the ever-present pain in her body and the darkness of her soul, Lain found herself growing concerned for the people of Pittsburgh.
“There.” The officer pointed out the door toward a wooded area.
Lain opened her mouth to ask what she should be looking at and then she realized what she was seeing. The highway ended abruptly at the edge of a forest. A thick, uninterrupted green blanket of trees ran as far as the eye could see.
“Oh, dear God,” she murmured.
“It’s a twenty-five-mile radius,” the officer shouted over the green-scented wind roaring through the cabin. “A perfect circle. Gone—with this in its place.”
“What about the people?” she shouted.
“We estimate that there are close to three million people missing.”
Yes, something was drastically wrong with the world.
The helicopter landed on the highway near where it ended abruptly. Several branches of military were already assembled but, judging by the general milling about, were jointly confounded as to what to do next. Lain had hoped that with all the massed confusion, her arrival would have gone unnoticed until she was installed in the wheelchair and the wreckage of her body covered. A small crowd gathered, though, even as the blades were spinning down, as if her arrival was more interesting than a major US city vanishing.
“Oh, the joys of being famous,” she murmured. Her father had been an astronaut, host of a popular science television series and murdered when she was young. Her stepfather was impossibly rich, powerful and notoriously reclusive. Between the two, she’d grown up in the media spotlight but that was standing on two sound legs. Now the stark brilliance was too intense; it laid too much of her body and soul bare for public inspection.
Stripped of privacy, she wrapped herself in the thorns of power instead. “Who is the motherfucker in charge of this mess?”
That checked the crowd that had been gathering. Only one officer kept coming in the cautious half-crouch people used around helicopters. He was annoyingly tall, wide shouldered, and looked like he should still be in college, getting drunk and planning pledge hazing at a frat house. He was in army fatigues with a Pennsylvania Army National Guard badge on his sleeve.
“Ms. Shenske, I’m Lieutenant Perkins. I’m Major General Crocker’s aide-de-camp.” He put out his hand for a handshake. Considering the wave of army forces slowly following Lain in Bradleys, the National Guard was unlikely to be in charge for much longer.
“So you’re the asshole’s left butt cheek—congratulations. It’s Colonel Shenske. Some schmucks yanked me out of the hospital without a stitch of clothing. I need pants, shirt, socks, shoes, a coat and a blanket. And I want it now. I’m not going to sit around with my ass bare to this wind because you have your head up your ass. Get it for me, or I don’t care who the fuck you are, I’ll have your ass blistered for this.”
Lieutenant Perkins snapped to attention and saluted. “I—I didn’t realize—yes, ma’am, I’ll have a set of clothes pulled together immediately.”
“And if you expect me to be here at this camp for the duration, you better realize that I can’t so much as piss by myself. You have at best one hour before this becomes a very real issue. I’ll warn you now, if I end up soiling myself because some motherfucker thought up the smart idea to jerk me out of a hospital, heads will roll.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now tell me—what the fuck is going on?”
“At zero three hundred hours, all contact with Pittsburgh was lost. Satellite imagery confirms that a perfect circle of forest has…” Lieutenant Perkins paused as he ran out of military-speak to explain. “Well—it’s here and Pittsburgh isn’t. Governor requested a declaration of National Emergency at zero four hundred hours. Unidentified life forms have led us to believe the forest is extraterrestrial in nature.”
Her heart skipped at “extraterrestrial” but she clamped down on the jolt of emotions with steel-cold logic. There had to be some reasonable normal explanation—although she couldn’t even begin to guess at it.
As Lieutenant Perkins brought her up to speed, a knot of soldiers had lifted her hated wheelchair up and off the helicopter. They set the cube of metal down just beyond the spinning blades of the Black Hawk and stood eyeing it in confusion.
“It’s not that complicated,” she shouted. “Just hit the frigging power button and step back!”
One of them figured out the red button was the power button and there was a sudden scramble backwards as the chair unfolded its eight spidery legs.
“Hold your fire!” Lain shouted as half the soldiers whipped up their weapons and took aim on her wheelchair. “Hold your fire! God-damn stupid idiots.”