Lt. David Westfield turned from looking down at the choppy clouds below that rolled away at a lazy rate, to his copilot that was tapping him on the shoulder. He looked up just in time to see a clipboard with a large picture of a 4x4 clipped to it instead of navigation data. In the brief second he looked, he could tell it was a nice truck. Although it had a gawdy color, neon green.
"I’m thinking about getting this sucker soon to replace the old Ford. What’ll you think?" Jim, his copilot shouted over the roar of four Pratt and Whitney j57-P-43W turbojets.
Westfield spoke into his mic while replying, "I think I better get our local Lady of the Sky to tell us where we’re heading before we veer off course."
The radio hissed in reply, while Nav control officer Sara Bradford said, "We’re ok Dave as long as your better at keeping this Lady steady then you were with me." She said. A tone crept into her voice.. was it bitterness or sarcasm? Westfield gave up. It was tough having an ex be part of your own crew while you worked. But it was him that made the mistake of trying to hook up with her in the first place.
Something still hurt inside and he turned to concentrate while he lowered the bird through the thick stormy atmosphere. It was like as if his heart had healed from its breaking from her leaving, but had not fully healed. The scar tissue had the pain of remembrance.
The rough forces of the wind caused the plane to peter off a little as its landing gear lowered, but it soon came back into alignment, aiming between the rows of shining lights in the surrounding Kansas darkness. Suddenly the lights winked out just as he had the plane perfectly aligned.
The moment’s surprise cost him and he was now not sure if he was properly aligned with the runway. "Carlson Field, this is niner two one zero, your lights just died, over."
There came no reply over the line, only an ominous hiss that sounded not unlike static.
"Shit." Dave cursed softly to himself. "Jim, see if you can get them. I have to bring her in, we’re too close to the ground to turn back now."
There came no reply.
The BUFF’s wheels touched down suddenly, recklessly as it was immediately apparent that it was on the ground, not on pavement. The plane shuddered and there was the sick gut wrenching sound of metal being twisted and run against other pieces of metal.
Dave didn’t need to look outside to know that the right wing had been brought straight through a chain-link fence. Their asses would be in a real bind now. Applying the airbrakes, the large steel bird finally came to a halt.
He quickly unfastened his belt and flight harness and turned. He was alone. Nobody else was in the aircraft with him any longer. For a brief but frantic twenty minutes, he searched every where inside and around the plane to no avail.
An hour’s search later would find him discovering that there was nobody else on the airstrip. And at least an hour after that, he now knew that he was the only one on the entire base. They had all vanished..
It was almost a strange relief to find nobody else, just to know the search was over. But a deep primal fear of abandonment as well as concern for his comrades stabbed at the centers of his mind. But he was a grown man, and as adults did, he cursed himself slightly and held back the tears he didn’t understand. There had to be a logical way of explaining this. Maybe it was all some how an elaborate joke? Sara...
Lt. Westfield strode down the empty airstrip forlornly as the cloudy sky swirled overhead. There was a light some where, he could see it shining partially in the sky, bouncing off the cloud cover like as if it came from a headlight.
It was in the direction of the NCO (Non Commissioned Officer) Club and turned out to be some one’s car. The engine was still a little warm and the keys were in the ignition. The really strange thing was that it was still running, like as if whom ever parked it here had run off leaving it here or simply vanished. For once the latter seemed like the most probable.
He attempted to open the driver’s side door to turn the car off. It might be a cheap foreign car, he thought, but nobody wants even one of those to run down its battery. First problem, hotshot. The door was locked. Apparently nobody bothered to unlock it when they left.
Westfield shrugged and walked up through the driveway into the Club. It was a nice little place known as the Shark’s Den and was done in a ridiculous island motif. They served mixed drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic of all kinds and colors. Adding, of course, the silly little ‘island’ umbrellas as their trademark.
The bar appeared closed although everything seemed lit up inside and there was sparse evidence that somebody had been here recently. A coat hanging on a rack here, some spilled peanut shells or chip crumbs there.
David sat down uncomfortably at a clean table and rested, stopping to think this madness out. There simply was no easy answer for what was going on here. It wouldn’t make sense for everybody to abandon the base even if it were a drill, real or not real. Besides, how would his crew leave the plane so fast without him noticing?
Strangely, he felt like as if he was being watched. It was not something that made him comfortable or that he took that well either. It was just something he had grown up with, one of his stigmas. He could take vertical climbs and sudden engine stalls. People or things looking at him that he could not see, was something altogether different.
The night’s stress combined with the last meal he had suddenly combined during that cold feeling that runs up your spine when you are being watched to form a burning solid mass in his gut. He instantly broke into a run for the bathroom and spent the next twenty minutes on the can. Stress can really suck sometimes.
Finally after there was no longer any more food in his body, he washed his hands, popped a pill, and walked out of the Club. It was still watching him, the hairs standing on the back of his neck, having never gone off duty for the last half-hour or so.
It took him awhile but he finally got used to the sensation and was no feeling like he was going to heave. Stupid stomach. It was hard to find his little pad where he lived on base in the dark since all of the apartment-like buildings looked exactly alike. But he found it, getting his first ‘guess’ right.
Laying down on his cot, feeling completely exhausted, Westfield stripped off his boots to rest his feet amongst a heavy buildup of blankets on one end of the makeshift bed on the floor. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford to buy a mattress, he was just too lazy to go back out into the ‘dangerous’ civilian world of malls and Poke’mon to buy one.
It was incredibly cold, and it felt like the floors and the very air in his place was collecting invisible ice rapidly since he had first stepped foot inside. He turned the heat up before attending to staring at the ceiling for awhile. Normally he wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping here, being too exhausted for the noise of half-drunk neighbors to disturb him. But now the utter silence literally crept into that primordial parts of your being that said ‘Something’s out there!’. His mind gave him wonderful imagery of his throat being cut by some kind of enemy while he slept peacefully.
Looked like it wasn’t going to exactly be a good night’s sleep here. David tried to turn on the radio to at least make some kind of noise. It only hissed at him, dead cold static, there was nothing on any of the local or broad channels. Now he wished he hadn’t turned the radio on. Was that moaning he heard just under the electronic distortion? He switched it off.
Trying to calm himself, he then pulled out a book of Tao meditations to find something that would help him meditate into sleep. He flipped to today’s teaching:
Disaster.
Mute black light, Sudden Fire. Destruction.
He sighed and went on to read the rest of the text. It went on to explain in its usual complicated but yet simple way that disaster happens and that we should continue on with our lives. Translation: shit happens. Thinking about this for a second, Westfield shrugged again and sat still, folding his hands before him, appearing like one who is being placed in their coffin as he concentrated and drifted off to sleep.
He awoke from a very peaceful rest. It was still staring at him. He watched it calmly with both eyes wide open, not really in touch until his conscious mind was finally caught up with his body. Instinctively he jerked back in horror. It looked like a giant eyeball, about the size of a basketball floating in midair. A fleshy shell like substance wrapped around it where otherwise it would appear to be an eyeball ripped out of the head of a giant.
David saw it clearly but yet there was something about it. It wasn’t completely corporeal, appearing ghostly as he saw his collection of books on their shelf on the other side of the room through its peeping iris. Was it an alien? A demon? Did Sun Tzu and Philip K. Dick ever suspect that such a critter would be haunting their works?
No, that was a silly thought, Westfield thought to himself. Just what was this Squinty he had before him?
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