The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1) (17 page)

“Angel Actual, this is Rapier CAP, we are less than a minute away from you, can you turn and make your heading at … two-seven zero, over,” Barrow said as he kept looking at his radar, but he still couldn’t see any other aircraft in range as the two fighters began to encounter thick clouds over the area.

“Affirmative, CAP, we are now turning to two-seven zero, over. Am I glad to hear from you guys.”

As the two Raptors flew just above the thick grey clouds, they finally got a visual on Air Force One. The president’s plane was a blue and white VC-25, the military version of the venerable Boeing-747. They could see that it was making a rapid ascent at full throttle to try to rise above the clouds. Within seconds, the two supersonic Raptors closed the distance and they soon slowed down and maneuvered themselves until they were flying parallel and to the side of Air Force One.

“Angel Actual, where did you see the unidentified aircraft, over?” Barrow said.

“CAP, we were about forty-five thousand feet and cruising when one of our passengers noticed something flying just below us. We quickly made a distress call and climbed above the cloud cover.”

“Did any of your crew make a visual identification?”

“Negative, CAP, none of my crew made full ID other than seeing a glimpse of it, but cloud cover obscured full identification.”

“Clyde, bogey at five o’clock … just below us!” Foles said.

Barrow glanced down to the right side of the glass canopy and noticed what looked like a black wing hidden by some clouds below. He quickly put the engines to near full throttle and banked right, his wingman following right behind him. “This is CAP, I have tallyho on a bogey at thirty thousand, turning to engage.”

The two Raptors began to use radar sweeps over the clouds, but they still couldn’t get a contact as Air Force One veered away and tried to get some distance from them. Barrow cursed. Whatever kind of a plane that was, it must be able to vanish into thin air. The radio was silent other than the heavy breathing of the two fighter pilots.

And then they saw it, or at least a slight glimpse of the creature. It flew up slightly where it poked its head above the clouds before diving back into the mists. It looked like a gigantic black bird, its condor-like wings were close to fifty feet across, its entire body the size of a small building, with a massive, hooked black beak equal in size to the Raptor’s nose cone. And it had glowing red eyes.

Barrow pulled at the control stick with his right hand that sent the fighter down towards the massive cloud cover ahead of them as his wingman followed. “Tallyho! I have contact … it looks like a giant bird. It’s almost as big as an aircraft carrier!”

“Jesus, Clyde! Did you see the size of that thing?” Foles said over the radio.

Barrow cursed as his sensors continued to see nothing. “McFly, can you get a tone?”

“Negative, no tone.”

“Switching to boresight mode,” Barrow said tersely as he toggled his four AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles into free guidance mode, this meant that his missiles could lock onto the first thing it sees after being fired, rather than having to wait for the target lock via radar before it could be released.

Both Raptors descended rapidly, hoping to catch the creature below the haze, but as they flew out just below the clouds, there was nothing but an empty sky down below.

Foles continued to turn his head in order to scan what was at their flanks and behind them. “Where the hell is that thing?”

As both fighters continued flying just below the mists, the once tranquil white cloud cover somehow began to transform itself into a storm front within seconds, as the clouds began to coalesce into a swirling grey haze of high force winds. Electric sparks could be seen as lightning bolts began to flash all around them.

Barrow’s grip tightened on his control stick as it began to wobble due to the violent winds now buffeting his aircraft. “What in the hell is going on?”

“Clyde, I think I see something up in the clouds just above us, one o’clock,” Foles said as crackling thunder began to deafen their ears. The whole thing was just unbelievable.

Barrow pulled up on his control stick. “Climbing.”

As both Raptors gained altitude, they ended up in a swirling, haze-filled fury of rain, thunder, and lightning that was all around them. Barrow’s electronic HUD began to go haywire as frequent lightning bolts had touched his aircraft. Although modern day fighters had built in insulators against lightning strikes, frequent exposure would corrode these defenses over time. Barrow felt like his Raptor was hit by over a dozen electrical bolts within just a few seconds as his radar indicator suddenly went blank. Just as he took his left hand off the throttle and started to toggle with the controls of his HUD, the giant bird dove down until it was less than half a mile in front of them.

On impulse, Barrow toggled the weapons switch to activate his aircraft’s 20mm Vulcan cannon embedded in its right wing root. Just as he sighted the creature on his helmet, it turned to face them while still maintaining its velocity as a massive electrical bolt surged at them from its open beak. Barrow instinctively made a hard turn to his left as the energy surge only glanced off his aircraft’s fuselage. In the split second, he veered away from it, but his wingman wasn’t so lucky as Foles’s Raptor took on the full force of the mystical lightning bolt. Foles screamed for a split second. The intense energy from the monster engulfed the cockpit and ignited the fuel tanks while detonating the missiles in the second Raptor. The resulting explosion instantly tore the plane apart in midair.

Barrow struggled to keep his plane steady as it entered into an uncontrollable spin. The energy surge had shorted out his fly-by-wire controls and HUD. His Raptor began to tumble out of the sky as the intense G-forces made it hard to breathe and he moved in slow motion. It was as if there were multiple anvils on his chest, shoulders, arms, and legs while the pounding headache got worse and started to blur his outer vision. All he could see now was his gloved left hand that slowly reached down and activated his APGS, the auxiliary power generation system, the one thing that could save him since it had a self-contained battery. The seconds seemed like an eternity as his fingers slowly touched the switch and flipped it on twice. By the second click, he instantly heard the turbines restart themselves as his left hand quickly grabbed the throttle stick; his right flipped the switches back on to get some power before the aircraft hit the ground. All the while, the onboard computer kept giving him the stall warning.

He was less than five thousand feet off the ground as the Raptor’s engines got to full throttle and he pulled the control stick up to climb again. Barrow’s radar indicator and most of his electronics were malfunctioning due to being burned out by the lightning surge, but he still had his guns. Even though his wingman was probably dead, he still had a duty to protect the president with his life if necessary.

Just as the Raptor finally tore above the storm clouds, he quickly saw that the cause was lost as the monster bird had closed in on the president’s plane. Barrow screamed in rage. The creature had somehow accelerated close to Mach 1 as it got right behind Air Force One, even though the president’s plane was making a hard right turn and diving to avoid it. Barrow felt like he was living a nightmare as the creature’s huge claws started tearing at the veering plane’s left wing and finally ripped half the section right off just as its massive beak snapped the tail rudder in two. Air Force One plunged sideways and into the swirling mists below as the monster bird seemed to have noticed the closing Raptor and turned to face it.

“Goddamn you!” Barrow screamed as he fired off several hundred 20mm rounds at the creature as the monster opened its hooked beak and let loose with another lightning blast at him.

As the white energy surged all around him, Captain Barry Barrow screamed in pain and rage as he pulled on the handle of his ejection seat. He didn’t hear the explosive bolts in time, blacking out as the searing white heat was engulfed him.

Arizona

When Tara Weiss woke up it was already mid-morning. She noticed that Larry was still at the wheel and it looked like he had driven all night. As they left Phoenix, they had to take a number of detours because most of the main roads were blocked by burning and abandoned cars. They could see rioters clashing with police, a few punks even threw some stones at them, but they narrowly missed the van, as Larry was able to get over a divider and drove away on the other side of the highway. As night fell, there were plenty of clouds as well as flashes of lightning and thunder that gave her the creeps; she felt them so close to the point where she would silently count the seconds between the flashes of lightning and the cracklings of thunder. Tara even got surprised once when she saw a lightning bolt hit a bare tree just ahead of them at the side of the road and rip it in two. The ear-splitting sound of thunder felt like a sonic boom; it even startled Larry and he inadvertently swerved just to dodge it, but what was really strange was not a drop of rain fell even after all that.

The little Chihuahua lay curled up in her lap as it slept. Tara still didn’t tell Larry about the talking dog. She felt she might need an ace in the hole just in case things got ugly between them. She kept telling herself that he was kind to her so far and she could probably trust him. Larry kept twisting the radio dial all night as he drove to see if there were further updates, but it was mostly static. Most of the stations had already gone off the air due to a lack of power. He was able to find the occasional Emergency Broadcast System that pretty much just said to stay indoors and not to leave your homes as help was coming. Larry would start to scoff every time he heard that pre-recorded message. Other times they would hear stations that were evidently commandeered as all sorts of people would go on air and complain about how the government was to blame for everything and the lack of any help. As she drifted in and out of sleep, Tara started to nickname those kinds of stations Complaints FM or Ranters AM … it got so bad that she finally asked Larry to just turn the radio off so she could sleep.

But as she finally washed the sleep from her eyes using a wet handkerchief, she realized that Larry was listening to the radio once again. “Who is that?” she said. He appeared to be listening to a calm and compassionate voice that seemed to be delivering a lecture of some sort.

Larry kept his eyes on the road. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” she said as she shifted her weight slightly so she wouldn’t drop the sleeping dog from her lap. “Who’s that that you’re listening to?”

“Oh, that’s just a message from Pastor Burnley. Seems a lot of radio stations that are still working are now carrying his gospel hour show all of a sudden.”

“Who’s he?”

“You never heard of Pastor Burnley? He’s got a whole TV channel just dedicated to his shows. You watch JBN?”

“JBN? What’s that?”

Larry laughed. “The Jesus Broadcasting Network, silly.”

Tara shook her head as she took a sip of water from a plastic bottle. “We never had cable in the house.”

“Oh, it’s not just on cable, you can get it on regular TV too, it’s on UHF, I think. I think Burnley even has shows on TBN too.”

“I don’t watch those things. Boring.”

Larry played with the dials again since there was static on the radio once more. “Damn, seems like we’re outta range again.”

Tara stretched her arms and yawned. “Well that’s good. Last thing I wanna hear is some preacher talking all morning. That’s just boring.”

“I would’ve thought you were used to being bored since you hung out in that strip mall for days with just your dog as a companion.”

“I was more hungry than bored. Anyway, it gave me time to think.”

Larry glanced at her briefly. “You want to go back to your parents?”

Tara shook her head. “No. I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Well, just stick with me for now, Sweetpea,” Larry said as he grinned. “We make one helluva team and I’ve got a plan.”

“What’s your plan?”

“While you were asleep, I was listening to Pastor Burnley and his words made sense to me. You know, with all that’s happening right now I’m beginning to believe in him.”

“Oh yeah, what’s he saying about what’s happening that explains all of this then?”

“He’s saying that Jesus is now coming back in a few days and he will judge us all. This is the day of judgment.”

“Come on, you really believe that?”

“Why not? Have you got any other explanation for what’s going on?”

Tara shook her head. “Uh, nope.”

“Okay then, so it looks like Pastor Burnley is right.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t think of any other explanation, can you?”

Tara looked away. “Not really.”

“Okay, so we stick with the plan.”

Tara looked at him blankly. “What’s the plan?”

“Pastor Burnley says for all honest Christians to come join him in Kansas to await the coming of The Lord together. He says he can feed and shelter hundreds of thousands of God’s chosen.”

“So we’re going to Kansas then?”

“That’s the plan.”

For the next few hours, they took a number of detours around Flagstaff as they could see barricades and burnt cars out in the distance of the city limits. As they drove along a side road parallel to Route-40, they noticed a group of Mexicans along the road frantically waving at them to stop, but Larry stepped on the gas and accelerated instead as he nearly drove over a frantic old man waving a dirty handkerchief at them. Tara could see their anguished faces as the van passed them by; two wrinkly old women sitting on their suitcases looking dejected by the road along with a gaggle of small brown children who cried and screamed at them. She wished she could have helped them, but Larry had told her the night before that they couldn’t take anybody else with them because they just didn’t have enough food. As she looked down, she could see the dog was awake and stared back at her. Tara wanted to say something to it, but she didn’t want to break cover or make Larry think she was crazy if the dog didn’t answer back, so she just looked out of the window again and sighed.