THE GROWING

Written by:  Susanne Beck and Okasha 

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

What a man will do for love.

Manny stands just inside the shadow of the hanger, his harness strapped and buckled, his helmet in the crook of his elbow.  By main force of will he banishes what he knows is a sappy, lovestruck grin from his face.  At least, he banishes it for a moment.  His watch shows his copilot/navigator due in less than three minutes, and it costs him an effort o refrain from tapping the toe of his boot against the runway apron.   It will not do to show eagerness.  He has flown a couple times before with Ellen Massaccio, an experienced and careful pilot; he has no reason to believe she will not be prompt today.  That gives him a few more moments to contemplate the object of his affection as she sits on the tarmac, her silver skin gleaming in the spring sun, her slender form made all the more enticing by months of abstinence and flying helicopters.

For Manny, his Tomcat is not a male of any species.  She is a she, a lady sleek and sure and deadly, a lioness stalking the high cloud savannah, her fur silvered by moonlight.   She is, as she was originally, Tom’s Cat, the brainchild of Admiral Tom Connolly, the last and most perfect in a series of his brainchildren.  After forty years of refinement and the shift from pure naval deployment to air defense, the craft is still the fastest, meanest fighter in the world.  And Manny is as enamored as he was the first time he set eyes on her, as desperate in his forced estrangement as any deserted lover.  Their reunion will be sweet. 

At least I didn’t out and out grovel to get to fly this mission.  Not quite, anyway.

All right, he had almost groveled.  He had been prepared to and would have, if Kirsten had not shown immediate understanding when he had asked for the assignment.  Instead, she had merely agreed that his request to go was reasonable and pointed out that for a single day on Base, at least, she was unlikely to need more protection than Andrews, Koda, Maggie, a three- pound Sig Sauer and Asimov could provide.  Put like that, the Colonel had agreed that he should be the one to fly recon.  Somewhere in the back of his mind, there lives the nasty suspicion that he would have copped the assignment anyway, given that he knows the country better than any of the other surviving pilots and can navigate by sight or with an AAA map if he has to. 

Nothing wrong with taking out a little insurance, though. 

Or a little self-satisfaction.

“Yo, Rivers!”  Manny turns to the sharp rap of bootleather on concrete.  Massaccio carries her helmet tucked under one arm and a sheaf of paper in her free hand.   One, incongruously, is a folded map which flops back and forth, flashing the Triple-A logo, as she waves it under his nose.  “Tell me, Manny my man, that we are not actually going to have to find Offut by  following the highway signs.”

“Okay,” he says amiably, “we are not actually going to have to find Offut by the highway signs.”

“But?”  A scowl appears between Massaccio’s blonde brows.

“No buts.  We’re going to fly straight south till we pick up the main fork of the Platte east of Scottsbluff.  Then we’re going to follow it till we get to the Missouri. That will bring us within sensor range of Offut.  Straightforward as it gets.”

“Riiiight,” she drawls.  “No GPS, no air control.”

“Cheer up, Ellen,” he answers, grinning.  “If Lindbergh could do it, so can we.” 

Fifteen minutes later, Manny looses the throttle on the shuddering bird as it idles at the end of the airstrip and sends it streaking down the mile and a half of runway.  The force of it presses his back and shoulders into the padded ejection seat, jams the back of his head against the lining of his helmet.  The rush that takeoff always brings starts somewhere around his solar plexus, a tightening pressure almost like the oncoming climax of sex, rises up his spine until his head seems unbearably light and the howl of the engines rises in his ears and the airstrip and the buildings lining it streak by under him until the nose leaves the tarmac and the lift of the wings carries the Tomcat into the blue air, and they are floating free.  The earth falls away behind to become an abstract pattern of green and brown veined with deep-cut watercourses.  The Cat becomes almost an extension of his own spine, his own limbs, as he pulls back hard on the stick, sending her into an almost vertical climb, then levels off and banks hard left, steering their course out over the creased and folded basalt of the badlands.

They skim along above the bare rock barely a mile high, low enough for visual contact with the ground.  The barrens give way almost immediately to prairie, long empty expanses pale green with new grass.  Some of it is pasture; some of it, he knows, is fields plowed and left fallow through the winter, now reclaimed by native vegetation.  At widely spaced intervals, he can make out the parallel rows of small patches of growing crops, and he keys them into his topography display.  “Infrared giving you anything back there, Massaccio?”

“Some,” she says.  “Scattered readout.  Some blips are probably horses and cattle.  Might be some humans in here, though.  At least, something roughly the same mass as humans, and something in their vicinity that’s probably a machine heat source.”

Which at least, Manny reflects wryly, leaves out rabbits.  Deer, bears and elk are still possibilities, even if they are unlikely to be driving a tractor.  Locating survivors is a secondary objective of the mission.  At best, they can be recruited into support positions, freeing more trained military for fighting the droids.  At worst, it may be possible to warn them of the advancing enemy.   He pulls the plane around in a graceful loop to make a pass over the coordinates Massaccio punches into his readout, activating the zoom on the powerful camera riding among the Sidewinder and Phoenix missiles nestled underneath the Tomcat’s wings.

“What’s the radar look like back there?”

“Negative.  No company at all within range.”

Not that he expects any.  According to Kirsten, no androids have ever been programmed as either pilots or navigators, one of the few precautions the Pentagon had agreed to in its enthusiasm for soldiers that would never come home as political liabilities in body bags.

Wounded Knee passes beneath them, the empty black lanes of Highways 18 and 20, the blue ribbon of the Niobrara.  They are over Nebraska, the rolling hills of the western rural counties stretching empty to the horizon.  The shapes of farms and ranches remain clear despite their abandonment, the pale lines of fences marching across the land, the rectangular fields defined by windbreaks and the hatched checkerboard created by the last harrowing after harvest.  Silent blips appear on his topo screen as Massaccio punches her readouts forward, but there is nothing of note.  Scattered readings that may be human appear sporadically, along with occasional clusters that are probably surviving farm animals, or, more likely, deer.  Manny knows he does not have the mystic streak that runs through his uncle’s family—and he is happy not to have it, thank you very much—but even he can see the future in the air that shimmers over the bare earth.  Even now, even a mile up and years in their past, he can almost see the dust cloud raised by the myriad hoofs thundering across the prairie as the buffalo return, and with them the wolf and the bear, the puma and the river otter.  As it was in the beginning, in the time of the People’s coming forth onto the broad shelf of  Ina Maka’s breast, so it will be again.

“Rivers, you there?”

The squawk comes through his earphones, jarring him out of the interstices of time-not- yet.  “What is it?”

“Something about twenty miles off to the south—moving toward us, not very fast.”

Without even thinking, Manny hits the switches to arm the missiles under the Cat’s wings.  “Civilian aircraft?  Chopper?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Let’s check it out.”  He pulls on the stick again, laying the craft over onto her side in a wide turn.  The blip comes up on his screen, and he frowns at it..  Massaccio is right; whatever it is, is slow. Damned slow.  To slow to stay in the air almost, unless it’s a helicopter. Low, too.  Only a thousand feet up or so.  He kicks Cat’s nose up, getting a bit more height.  Just in case.

A few miles to the north of the Platte, movement appears on the horizon, a sweeping,

undulating mass riding the wind that scuds over the Kansas flatlands to the south.  It is at least a mile wide, perhaps twice or three times as long.  Manny feels his muscles go slack, losing their unconscious tension, and he slaps the missile controls a second time, deactivating the preliminary launch sequence.  As they pass overhead, he can make out the beating of thousands of wings, hundreds of thousands, as a kettle of hawks makes its way north toward their nesting grounds in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. 

“What the hell are those things?”  Massaccio demands.  “There must be a million of them!”

“You a city girl, Massaccio?  Those were hawks, probably broadwings.  Koda could tell you for sure, but I don’t think anything else travels in kettles that large.”

And it comes to him that it is beginning already, the return of the winged ones and the four foots.  Without humans to shoot them for sport, without humans to poison their prey, unprecedented numbers of the hawks have survived to make the spring flight north from their wintering in Central and South America.  Which means that there, too, the humans must lie dead in the millions.

With the sun at their tail, Manny guides the Cat along the course of the Platte.  Once or twice they pick up a blip that may be a watercraft.  Or maybe rafts of debris, floating down toward the Missouri with the thaw.   As they pass Kearney, just west of the spot where the river splits and flows in parallel streams for fifty miles or so, the infrared picks up multiple heat sources, all of them mechanical. 

“Droids on the move?”  Massaccio’s voice comes over the com.  “I don’t see any readout that looks like anything but a vehicle.  And I’m getting hits on the metalhead scanner.”

Not good.  “Let’s get some height here.  I’m gonna take her from here on compass. We’ll make a pass straight over Omaha and hope they don’t put up any surface-to-air.”

Up and level again, Manny opens the throttle and lets the Cat scream across the sky, afterburners blazing.  The readout passes across his screen so fast he cannot process it, only hope that the sensors record everything the telemetry picks up.  “Incoming!”  Massaccio yells, and he has it on his radar almost simultaneously, a long, slim shape streaking toward them from the ground. Manny hauls the plane into an evasive corkscrew and fires a Sidewinder at the rising missile, noting with satisfaction the blossom on the LED screen as it makes its kill. So much for hoping to go unnoticed; one of the trucks has radioed the Base.  A second surface-to-air missile bores at them on the heels of the thought; a second Sidewinder leaves its nest and scores a second kill.  Yet a third goes wide, missing them and inexplicably detonating in a cloud of white smoke a thousand feet above them. 

Or maybe not inexplicably.  Maybe the droids haven’t modified their weapons’ guidance systems and their GPS is fritzing out. 

One for our side.  Aloud he says, “You got what we need back there?”

“Got.”

“Okay, then.  Let’s go home.”

Their course takes them north along Interstate 29, checking still for movement along the highway.  They are over Sioux Falls and about to swing west along 90 for home when the plane falls out of the sun, coming straight toward them on an intercept course, visual contact almost as soon as it shows up on the screen.  “Unidentified!” Massaccio yells in the same instant that Manny comes to the same conclusion for himself and dives just as a missile separates from the F-15 and comes snaking toward them, its contrail white in the clear air.  One of their own Sidewinders takes it, and Manny looses a Phoenix at the unknown fighter as they pull up and away, looping back to evade the enemy’s guns as it fires and corkscrews away.  “Massaccio! You get any signal at all off that fucker?”

“Negative. No markings that I can see, either. You wanna try talking to him?”

“Not after that introduction.  You still got him?”

“Here we go again.  He’s turning.”

Manny hauls back on the stick and puts the Cat’s nose straight up into a vertical climb, then pushes it down again, diving on the other plane.   The sun glitters off its unmarked silver fuselage, off the canopy behind which a helmeted shape is visible for the fraction of a second it takes to sweep past, kicking out another pair of Phoenixes at close range.

The Eagle spirals down in evasive action, swinging away to the south.  “No joy,” Massaccio reports.  “He’s not hit.”

Manny comes to a decision.  “Screw this.  We can’t afford the risk.  We’ll just have to outrun him.”

With that he levels the Cat out with the sun to his left and opens the throttle.  He feels the shock as he hits Mach 1, then the plane leaves its own sound behind to skim silently along the air.  The Eagle follows, falling steadily behind until it turns back somewhere north of Minot.  “Lost him,” says Massaccio.  “Headed east.”

“Terrific,” Manny observes wryly.  “That means he could be from Offut, or Grand Forks, or Willard Hall.  Assuming he’s headed back to base, that is.”

“The Colonel is not going to like this.”

“Nobody’s gonna like this.”  Manny throttles back to subsonic speed and heads south.  “Let’s go home and tell ‘em.”

******

“Redtail one, this is redtail two. What’s your twenty?”

Rolling her eyes, Dakota unracks the mike and puts it to her lips.  “Right in front of you, pinhead.” 

“Hey!  I resemble that remark.”

“Yeah, yeah.  What’s up?”

“Isn’t old Boney Markham’s hunt shop around here somewhere?”

“Boney died about six years ago, thiblo.”

“Yeah, I know, but I heard his son took over for the old coot after he kicked it.”

“Terrence?”

“Yeah.  Didn’t you go to high school with him?”

“Don’t remind me. What a nutjob.”

“He was scary alright.  You still didn’t answer my question, though.”

“Yeah, I think it’s up another mile or so on the left.  Why?  You up for a little looting?”

“I prefer to think of it as ‘creative acquisition’, tanksi.”

Koda laughs.  “Call it whatever you like, thiblo.  But if Terrence comes out with a shotgun pointed at your head, don’t come screaming to me.”

Tacoma joins in the laughter.  “Like I did when old man Johnston caught us stealing pumpkins from his patch that time?”

“You, brother dear.  You got caught.  I wasn’t the one getting rocksalt plucked outta my ass for weeks afterward.”

 “Hey!  Is it my fault you can run faster than me?”

“Yup!  Sure is.  Hang on,” she says to her front seat passenger, a young airman with the down-home name of Joe Poteet.  He does as she asks, grabbing the rollbar as she swings the big truck around an overturned John Deere that is pulled halfway onto the road.

“Nice driving, Ma’am,” the young man remarks, slowly removing his white-knuckled grip from the bar.

Giving him a smirk, Koda continues on over the slight rise.  Beyond it, a small shopping center, three stores in all, comes into view on the left.  As she pulls into the empty parking lot, Koda scans the area.  The store to the far left, Tamke’s Hardware and Feed, has been obviously looted, as has the Video Store to the far right.  Shattered glass sparkles in the sun like diamonds on the dark macadam of the lot.  Doors hang loose from their hinges and trash is strewn everywhere.  The sign from the Video Store, its letters obliterated by blasts from a shotgun, sways in the slight breeze, its rusted hinges squeaking a discordant, depressing melody.

Dakota brings the truck to a slow stop, its fat tires crunching complacently over trash, gravel and glass.  Opening the door, she swings out, bootheels clocking on the macadam, and watches as her brother pulls in, followed by two other olive green trucks. 

“Damn,” Tacoma remarks as he jumps down from the truck.  “Looks like old Boney’s place was the only one that wasn’t hit.”

“Yeah, well there’s a reason for that,” Koda replies, gesturing toward the heavy metal grate that covers the entire front of the store.

“You any good at picking locks?”

“With what?  My fingernail?  Besides, I thought you military types learned lockpicking about the same time you were learning the difference between your rifle and your gun.”

“Left my lockpicks in my other uniform,” Tacoma mumbles.

Koda shakes her head.  “Poteet, Catcham, go around the back and see if there’s a way in from there.  The rest of you, look sharp.  We don’t know if any friends are lurking about.”  She shoots a look to Tacoma.  “Be right back.”

Several minutes later, she reappears from the depths of the looted hardware store, two portable blowtorches in her hands and a pair of protective goggles tucked under one arm.  Seeing her, Tacoma grins.  “Interesting looking lockpicks ya got there, sis.”

“Ha. Ha,” is the droll reply as she slaps one of the torches into his hands.  “Hold this.”  Grabbing the goggles, she slips them over her head.  “Poteet have any luck?”

“Nope.  Only way in or out is through that door.”

“Then step aside and watch the Master at work.”

Tacoma’s jaw snaps shut with an audible click as his sister gives him a very pointed look that aborts any quip he might have thought to utter. 

Leveling a wink at him, she turns to her work, and all falls silent in the lot.

*******

With a sigh of weariness, Kirsten slumps against the low-backed stool she’s occupying and picks up the blackened circuitry board she’s been staring at for the last two hours.  While the others work quietly, continuing to piece what they can of the droid back together, using tweezers in a high-tech game of jigsaw puzzle, she flips the piece back and forth, glaring at it as if it will give up its secrets simply by the force of her will.

Jimenez moves to stand beside her, running a hand through his short-cropped black hair.  “You look beat, Ma’am.”

“I’m alright,” she replies, though she knows that’s far from the truth.  Rather than being tired, though, she’s feeling…vague, out of sorts. She finds her mind wandering off on strange tangents instead of focusing on the task at hand.  This is nowhere near normal for her, and it frightens her, just a bit.  The fact that this dazed feeling coincides perfectly with Dakota’s absence leaves her feeling not one whit better about the whole situation.

With a reluctant nod, Jimenez steps away just as Kirsten flips the board in her hand.  The shaft of light let in by the young Lieutenant’s movement strikes the charred board in a way that causes Kirsten’s eyes to widen.  “Jimenez!” she shouts happily, jumping down off the stool. “Consider yourself promoted.”

“Ma’am?”

“Never mind.  Is there a microscope around here anywhere?”

“I don’t--. What kind of microscope, Ma’am?”  It’s obvious the man’s confusion is deepening.

“A microscope!  You know, the kind you played with in Junior High science lab?”

“I…guess there’d be one at the hospital, Ma’am.  Or at Dr. Rivers’ clinic, maybe.  For looking at slides and stuff?”

“Perfect!  Grab a pad and pencil and come with me.”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

******

With a last, precise cut, the part of the grating that contains the lock breaks free and falls to the ground with a loud clink.  Satisfied, Koda shuts off the blowtorch, slips her goggles off, and grabs the gate.  It slides grudgingly, sounding out a rusty squeal of protest.  A second later, a simple wooden door is revealed.

Tacoma steps forward and gently pushes his sister aside.  “Can’t let you have all the fun, chunkshi,” he says, grinning.  A moment later, the door is a splintered mess courtesy of a swift kick amidships.

Koda rolls her eyes as Tacoma. “You’re so butch.”

“With a role model like you, how could I not be?” he teases, delivering a light elbow to her side and ducking into the darkened shop before she can retaliate.

Koda follows close behind, clicking on the flashlight she’s appropriated from Poteet.  Tacoma whistles.  “Not bad,” he whispers, “not bad at all.”

The store is good sized and filled, seemingly, with everything a hunter or fisherman could want, and more besides.  Along the leftward wall is a glass case filled with handguns of all makes, models and sizes.  Tacked up to the wall behind the case are dozens and dozens of rifles, shotguns, and several highly illegal fully automatic weapons.  “Damn,” Tacoma remarks, gazing at a proudly displayed Uzi.  “He must have had some cops on the payroll.”

Dakota snorts. “And this comes as a surprise to you…how?”

Three more soldiers enter, their own flashlights brightening the interior and bringing more of the varied merchandise into easy view.  Tacoma turns to the men.  “Jackson, Carter, start gathering up those guns and all the ammo you can find. Pack ‘em in tight.”

“Will do, Cap.”

“The rest of you, look around and box up anything you think we can use…which is probably most of the stuff in here.  Move.”

“We’re on it, Cap.”

After watching them for a moment longer, Dakota strikes off toward the rear of the store, her flashlight making sweeping arcs along the dusty floor.  “C’mon,” she says to her brother, “let’s check out the storeroom.”

“Right behind ya.”

******

“Jimenez, you have your pencil ready?”

“Ready and waiting, Ma’am.”

“Good. I want you to take down these series of letters and numbers for me.”

Adjusting the eyepiece just slightly, she squints as the charred numbers come slowly into view.  “S...D…Zero…zero…A…four…six…. No wait, make that a five.  Yes, five.”  Even with the benefit of the microscope, the information is difficult at best to read.  Blackened streaks and smudges all but obliterate what’s underneath. She looks back over her shoulder.  “You getting this?”

“Yes’m.”  Jimenez, with his round rimmed military-issue glasses, pad, and poised pencil, looks more like an accountant than one of the worlds’ best fighter plane mechanics.  Kirsten can’t help but smile.

“Good.” 

Ten minutes later, the task is done.  Not as complete as she would have liked—not by a long shot--but given the rather sizable string of numbers and letters completely obliterated by their fiery ending, she’s more than content with what she’s managed to recover.  With instincts borne of literally decades of experience, she senses what she has will be more than enough for her current needs.

Her smile tells the story, and when she turns it upon Jimenez, he blinks at her, dazed.  “Ma’am?”

“Take the rest of the day off, Lieutenant,” she replies, snatching the pad out of his hand.  “Catch up on your sleep, read, hell, pick dandelions for all I care.  You’re dismissed.”

“Did—did I do something wrong, Ma’am?”

“No, my friend,” she laughs and, uncharacteristically, goes up to her toes to plant a soft kiss on his clean-shaven cheek that leaves him seeing stars, “you did everything right.  Now scoot!”

He does.

*******

Tanski, you got a minute?”

Sighing, Koda looks to the left, where her brother’s flashlight bisects the shadowy interior.  “I’m up to my elbows in ammo, thiblo.  Can it wait?”

“I think you might wanna come take a look at this.”

Passing her duties off to a nearby soldier, Dakota rises to her feet and wipes the sweat from her forehead with a negligent swipe of one long arm.  Following the light trail her brother has lain down, she comes up next to him at the door to what appears to be Markham’s private office.

With a flair for the dramatic, Tacoma pauses, then sweeps the light in a wide arc until it is pointing directly into the office.  He stands quietly, awaiting his sister’s reaction.

Koda gives a low whistle as she peers inside the good-sized room.  “My, my, my,” she remarks softly, hands on hips, “looks like someone was a naughty boy.”

The room is filled with items that would make Richard Butler fall on his knees and weep for joy.  A huge white cross, complete with the suffering Jesus, is flanked on both sides by flags of the Third Reich, Aryan Brotherhood, Confederacy, Ku Klux Klan, Concerned Christian Men, and a half-dozen others.  Above a rickety television set, an old framed photograph of a long dead Austrian private hangs in the place of honor, gleaming forelock forever drooping over one crazed eye.

On the splintered coffee table, several dog-eared copies of The Turner Diaries share space with Mein Kampf, a whole slew of Soldier of Fortunes, and a broad range of other far right wing paramilitary and religious propaganda.   Bits and pieces of dismantled weaponry cover the floor like a macabre carpet, and the room stinks of old sweat, old urine, and old hatred.

“Damn,” Tacoma whispers.  “I didn’t think he’d go down so deep.”

“I did.”  Grabbing the flashlight from her brother’s hand, she shines it in the direction of a white hooded robe.  Behind it, she can just see the seal of a door.  “And I’m betting the jackpot’s behind door number three.”

*******

Ah well. The end of another chapter.  To those of you still with us, hope you enjoyed!  Drop us a line, if you will, at swordnquil@aol.com and let us know how we’re doing!  Until next week.

Continued - Chapter 38

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