He could hear something outside roaming in big circles. It sounded like a clothes washer on the spin cycle.
“What the hell’s going on?” Jack asked, his own voice sounding muffled. The inside of his mask was slick and a little sticky.
“No time right now. I’m gonna unbuckle your seat belt, and you’re going to fall. I need you to be ready. Are you ready, Jack?”
He nodded as firmly as he could, then he heard the click of the harness and he dropped to the floor. It wasn’t a very big drop, and he managed to get his arms crossed in front of him, but he still managed to land partially on his head.
There was a strange tugging sensation around his midsection. He thought it might be the seat belt, but he discovered that it was his arrestor cable, its hook still attached to a guidebar in the doorway. His hand found the release button, the cable snaked back into its housing, and the unpleasant pressure was gone.
Lisa Albright took Jack’s hand and started pulling him upward. “I know it hurts, but we can’t stay here. Whatever’s out there is getting closer and I don’t want to be here when it shows up. Can you stand?”
With Lisa’s help, Jack climbed to his feet shakily. It felt like he was lifting a cement truck on his back. “Yeah. I’m fine,” he said. He wasn’t fine.
When he was half-way up, Albright pulled his arm over her shoulders and together they shambled back into the cargo hold. The room was lit from two gaping holes lined with torn and shredded steel, and the raging dust storm could be glimpsed outside. Lifeless bodies in metal restraints lined the walls, beaten and bloodied exhibits in a museum of death. Seven seats were empty, and five corpsmen were standing near the open ramp at the far end.
Jack was in a haze. He was lost in a bad dream. None of this was real, a shaky voice in his head claimed. He recognized Leonid Nikitin, the lighthouse, standing above everyone else with an extra service-pack slung over each shoulder. The rest were mysteries; orange jumpsuits and gas-masks with unknown occupants. Everyone was loaded with as much equipment as they could carry.
“You find anything other than that sad sack o’ shit?” Nikitin asked, pointing at Jack.
“Flare gun and a couple rounds. I raided the first aid kit, too. Some extra bandages, iodine, morphine, mixed auto-injectors. Not a bad haul.”
The flying clothes washer’s pattern was tightening, getting closer, louder.
“We’re out of time. Let’s move,” Nikitin shouted.
The four unknown corpsmen didn’t need to be told twice; they all wanted out of the charnel house. They clambered through the cargo door under cover of the half-destroyed ramp. Meanwhile, Nikitin took two long strides over to Jack and grabbed the arm that Lisa had over her shoulders. “I’ve got him. Go keep the rabble together.”
Five-foot Lisa Albright nodded her head and trotted off ahead. Now with the great Ukrainian holding him up, Jack felt like a little kid and he was glad for it. Even with his strength coming back, he wasn’t ready to walk on his own. Nikitin wasn’t gentle, but he was strong enough to carry an ox if he wanted to, and the two made good time catching up with the others.
The world outside the leviathan was more unsettling than the inside. Whirling dust and rocks painted the air a ruddy beige, hiding the blasted landscape beyond. What could be seen was utterly destroyed; a churned up mixture of raw earth and debris, like an endless compost heap.
With Albright leading, the squad moved quickly over broken ground and took cover in a jagged ravine, where the upturned roots of a fallen tree provided some meager shelter. Jack was glad to be back off his feet, if only for a moment.
Something was getting closer. All around them, the oscillating sound of the clothes washer drowned out every other noise, even the bitter howling of the wind. In another second, a silhouette descended through the maelstrom, and the source of the noise was revealed.
The strange thing emerged from the fog and hovered above the wrecked helicopter. It was shaped like half a tear drop, with its flat side facing the ground. The body was circled by a single undulating fin that moved in time with the sound, like some perverse, airborne imitation of a cuttlefish. The rest of the thing was covered in sharp edges, bony outcroppings and stalactites, except at its tail where there was a series of overlapping panels resembling silvery gills.
It floated to one side and then the other. Nikitin, holding a pair of binoculars up to his mask, leaned over toward Jack and said, “It’s inspecting the kill.”
Short arms on gimbals extended from either side of it, then angled down toward the leviathan. All of the corpsmen made educated guesses about what would happen next and covered their ears.
Each of the arms flared and then fired a bright cyan round that screamed into the fallen helicopter, and on impact exploded in a shower of blinding sparks. There followed a groan like steel girders sheering under too much weight, and nothing remained but a smoking puddle of glowing slag.
The floating cuttlefish lifted back up and disappeared into the whirling dust, apparently satisfied with its work.
It was a long time before anyone spoke. They sat there in the ravine, catching their breath, licking their wounds and looking through their gear. It was busy work, the kind people do when they don’t want to think. The previous two hours were a lot to take in, even for corpsmen who face catastrophes for a living.
Nikitin finally something after twenty long minutes. “Thing I can’t figure out,” he said, with everyone turning to listen, “is how to smoke a cigar with this stupid mask on.”
Albright shook her head, but the rest let themselves laugh a little. That included Jack, who would’ve preferred not to, thanks to his aching head. He consoled himself with the discovery that he didn’t have any cracked ribs, even if the rest of his body was thoroughly tenderized and sore.
“What now?” one of the other four jumpsuits asked.
“Find water,” Nikitin replied. He looked up and down the ravine they were hiding in. “This used to be a creek, I think. Should lead us toward water, give us a little break from the wind as we go.”
Jack could hear two or three more flying cuttlefish in the distance. Either that or his head was worse than he thought. “Yeah, it’ll keep us out of sight, too. Anyone know where we are?”
Nikitin shook his head. “Fat chance. Everything looks like landfill, and this shit’s so thick I can’t find the sun. Could you make out any landmarks from the cockpit?”
Jack’s memories were still scattered, coming back in flashes that faded just as quickly as they arose like embers spitting out of a campfire. He closed his eyes and tried to play through it, and all he saw was a dust cloud stretching off to the horizon. “Nope,” he said.
Nikitin looked down at his watch. “Well, we’ll have a better idea at sundown. I should be able to figure something out, what time zone we’re in at least. Until then, let’s make tracks.”
Weary and bruised, the corpsmen climbed back to their feet and dusted themselves off. The jumpsuits that were once bright orange were already growing dingy, turning the same shade of brown as everything else in sight.
Jack knew that Nikitin was doing the right thing; they had to keep moving. The weight of their situation might sink in if they stood still too long, but there was always hope as long as they were moving forward. Better to keep going, keep pressing on toward something, toward anything at all. Settlements clung to running water, and with a little luck, they might find some scrap of civilization that had survived the massacre.
For the first time, Jack realized he wouldn’t even mind running into Blade Aerospace or Carbon Corp troops.
Nikitin looked up and down the ravine again. To Jack, both directions looked equally inhospitable, but using some method that he couldn’t guess at, Nikitin picked a direction and said, “That-a-way.”