sighted through the scope again and squeezed off another shot. The gun bucked against his shoulder. Visibility was poor because of the rain and I wondered how he could hit anything, but he did. The fleeing chopper plummeted from the sky like a stone. There was no explosion or big orange fireball like in the movies. Never is. There was just a sickening crunch as metal collapsed and shredded and the whirring blades tore into the earth. The engine sputtered.
Then there was silence, followed seconds later by the sound of people screaming.
Then silence again, except for my harsh breathing, Carl’s asthmatic wheezing, and the quiet click of Earl reloading the gun.
And the rain in the background, of course. Always the rain.
None of us moved. We just stared at each other. Earl pulled more ammo from his pocket and slid them into the gun.
Carl gripped his club tightly. “What the hell is going on, Earl?”
“I got them,” Earl whispered, a grin splitting his grizzled face wide open. He worked the rifle bolt and trudged toward the twisted, smoking wreckage. So intent was his approach that he didn’t see Carl sneak up behind him with the length of wood. Earl didn’t suspect a thing until Carl cracked him in the back of the head.
Earl dropped to the ground with a groan, his face sinking into the soggy mud.
Carl looked up at me, his face shocked. “You don’t suppose I killed him, do you?”
“Not with that hard head of his. But pull his face out of the mud so he doesn’t drown.”
While Carl did that and checked Earl’s pulse, I grabbed the rifle from where it fell. Then we loped toward the crash site. I clutched the gun so hard that my knuckles turned white. Carl picked up another fallen branch and held it out in front of him like a sword.
“Oh, those poor people,” he murmured. “You reckon anybody is alive in there?”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
The stench of scorched metal hung thick in the air.
Carl bent over, coughing. “Good Lord…”
“You gonna be okay?” I asked him. “Because I need you here with me right now.”
“I’m all right. Just been a while since I saw something like this. Since the war. I’d forgotten how the adrenaline rush can make a man sick. I’m fighting it off.”
“Me too,” I said, even as the bile rose in my throat.
Black, oily smoke twisted from the crash site, but there was no fire. The weather had taken care of that. It certainly didn’t look like a helicopter anymore. Bits of wreckage lay scattered across the field. The cockpit rested at the end of a deep trench gouged into the mud. It was this piece we approached. It had split in half. One section contained something unrecognizable—wet and red, with steam rising off of it. It wasn’t until Carl began to retch behind me that I realized what it was.
The pilot. Or what was left of him. I’d seen the worst acts of human butchery during the war; seen living, breathing men reduced to nothing more than piles of shredded, smoking meat, seen the black stuff bubble out from deep inside their bodies—but it had been a long time.
This brought it all back. Carl knelt on the ground, mud squirting through his clenched fists, and threw up his breakfast.
The pilot must have been wearing his seatbelt, and that was what killed him. He was cut into sections, horizontally from his left shoulder and down across his chest to his right hip, and then severed in half again at the waist. His legs and groin remained in a sitting position on the gory seat, along with a steaming loop of gray intestines and splattered feces. His other two pieces had fallen to either side. His innards were spread across everything. As we watched, one length of intestine slithered off the seat like a snake, and plopped into the mud.
It reminded me of a worm.
Carl wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a brown smear of mud across his face. He rose unsteadily. His face was stark white.
I found the pilot’s head lying in the mud. His lower jaw had been sheared off, and rainwater pooled in his vacant eyes. I bent down and closed them.
“You okay?” I asked Carl.
He spat onto the ground. “Yeah. I’ll be fine. Like I said, it’s just been a long time since I’ve seen something this bad. Tell the truth, I’d hoped never to see it again.”
“I know what you mean. I thought things like this were behind us now, in our old age.”
Carl gagged, and then covered his nose with his hand.
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked again.
“I—I’d forgotten what it smells like. Blood and people’s insides.”
The stench had gotten into my lungs as well and it was making me sick. I fought it off, trying to keep my head. My body ached, reminding me that I was no superhero, just an old man who’d been out in the rain too long.
I turned around to check on Earl. He was still lying in the mud, unconscious.
“We’re gonna have to deal with him,” Carl said.
I nodded.
There was a groan behind us. We turned and found an old man, probably about our age, lying on the ground and bleeding in a puddle. Carl knelt to examine him and the man moaned, sputtering as the cold rain showered him. His shirt sleeve had ridden up and I caught a glimpse of a black, faded tattoo on his bicep—a pair of anchors and a
“Who—” he began and then broke off, seized by a great, racking cough. He sprayed blood and spittle all over Carl’s raincoat.
“You just lay back and rest, mister,” Carl assured him. He glanced up at me and then down at the man again. I followed his gaze to the man’s leg. Just below the knee, a jagged piece of bone, covered with pink bits, sprouted from his khaki pants. Arterial blood jetted from the wound, turning the rain puddle beneath him a rusty color. The man didn’t seem to notice. He lay back as Carl had told him to. Then he began to shake, his eyes rolling and teeth clenching.
“K-Kevin,” he hissed. “S-Sarah? G-got t-t-to get…it’s in… in the water. Th-the Kraken!”
“What’s he saying?” Carl asked me.
“He’s in shock,” I said. “Get your belt around his leg, or he’s gonna bleed to death right here in the field.”
Someone else cried out from the other half of the wreckage. I noticed a petite, bloodstained hand adorned with long, peach-colored fingernails. I stared at them in fascination, marveling that only one nail had broken.
I realized that I was going into shock myself, and I jumped when Carl called out to me.
“Get them out of there, Teddy.” Now he was okay and I was the one starting to lose it.
I shoved a piece of steel out of the way and clambered over the frame to where the hand was. I cleared the wreckage and found it was attached to a pretty young woman with long blond hair, sprawled beside a bloodied young man. Both of them were probably in their mid to late twenties, and they seemed unharmed, except for deep cuts in his forehead and shoulder, and the woman’s broken nail.
They both blinked at me with big, round, horrified eyes.
“Howdy.” I tried to smile.
“We—Are we alive?” the man asked, bewildered.
“You are, indeed,” I said. “Must be lucky, I guess. Are you hurt?”
“Th-there was a man,” the woman stammered.
“Some son of a bitch was shooting at us,” the man said, then noticed Earl’s rifle in my hands. “You! It was you!”
The woman whimpered, throwing her hands up in front of her face.
“Now hang on there,” I said softly. “Just hang on a minute. It wasn’t me. The fellow that was shooting at you is my neighbor, Earl Harper. He’s a crazy cuss, and I apologize for that. But the important thing now is to get you folks out of this weather and into safety. Are either of you hurt?”
The young man shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“My head hurts,” the girl complained. “But I’m okay.”
