Flight



  Also by Bernard Wilkerson

  The Worlds of the Dead series

  Beaches of Brazil

  Communion

  Discovery

  The Creation series

  In the Beginning

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Defeat

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Book 1

  Earth

  Bernard Wilkerson

  Copyright © 2015 by Bernard Wilkerson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.

  Requests for permission should be submitted to [email protected].

  For information about the author, go to

  www.bernardwilkerson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo courtesy of NASA.

 

  Episode 2

  FLIGHT

  8

  Wolfgang Riebe’s head throbbed.

  He squeezed his eyes, then tried to open them, but he couldn’t. He shook his head a little but stopped immediately. It hurt too much.

  He tried to bring his hands to his face to help himself open his eyes, but his hands didn’t cooperate. They hung limply at the ends of his arms, his arms hanging over his head. It didn’t make sense. His arms were hanging up.

  He tried to remember what had happened and where he was. He remembered being in an Army supply truck with American soldiers and with Leah, the Swiss girl from his hiking club. They had driven through Eastern France and into Switzerland. They learned the aliens hadn’t spared even the neutral Swiss. He remembered Basel.

  Several large craters marred the once beautiful city, the industrial section of town vaporized by a meteor that struck it. Smaller meteors had destroyed government buildings and both rail hubs. The American soldiers speculated that the aliens wanted to isolate parts of the continent from each other and the rail hubs in Basel were key connection points.

  Along with the railway, parts of the freeway and a key bridge were destroyed also. The Americans had driven their truck for hours through side streets to get around the damage. Wolfgang and Leah watched people sifting through debris, pushing shopping carts filled with what remained of their goods, or trying to clean up. The people looked desperate, afraid.

  Wolfgang and Leah wanted to help, but the soldiers pressed on, driven by their need to follow orders, to get to an evacuation point in southern Italy. Wolfgang’s sadness grew as he witnessed out the passenger window of the truck the devastation wrought by the aliens. Rubble lay everywhere and dust covered everything.

  The Swiss border guards who warned them about the damage in Basel also told them of reports of meteors falling not just in Switzerland, but all over the Earth. The brief nuclear exchange had been instigated by humans, according to the reports which they claimed were half rumor and half fact, but the meteors had been too precise to be accidental. The aliens had to be behind them.

  Wolfgang knew of defenses against nuclear weapons. Systems that destroyed missiles in mid-flight, although such systems had not defended his home town. Had not defended his wife. Had not defended his little girl.

  They existed nonetheless.

  But what would defend against meteors?

  South of the city they found the freeway intact and had been driving on the deserted road since then. They were just into the Swiss Alps when Wolfgang fell asleep.

  Then he remembered.

  A bang. A flash.

  Shouting.

  Roaring and pain.

  What could it have been?

  Thinking about it, he decided it had been an explosion.

  Then Wolfgang remembered the truck tipping over. Everything made sense now. The truck had been attacked, had hit a mine or something, and crashed, flipping over and landing on its roof. He was upside down, hanging in his seat belt.

  Except not everything made sense.

  Why had they been attacked?

  Wolfgang swung his arms together, hitting them against each other. He could feel nothing. Something, his seat belt, must have cut off circulation. He moved his arms around some more, shaking them. A little feeling started to return, accompanied by the unpleasant sensation of tiny needles being stuck into his fingers.

  He tried to open his eyes again, but his eyelids still didn’t work and his head throbbed worse.

  A moan came from somewhere in front of him and he heard swearing in English. One of the Americans.

  “Okay?” Wolfgang asked. His voice sounded hoarse.

  “You alive back there, Wolfie?”

  “I not open my eyes.” It hurt Wolfgang to speak English. It required too much thought.

  “You’re not opening your eyes, or you can’t open them?”

  Wolfgang struggled to understand the man’s words but latched on to one that made sense.

  “Can’t.”

  A pause. Then he heard the man speak again.

  “Your face is covered in blood. Let me get out of this contraption and I’ll try to come back and help you.”

  He finally recognized the voice as Captain Wlazlo, the American soldier with a Polish name. He felt pretty sure the man had been driving.

  “What happened?” Wolfgang’s mouth tasted like blood when he tried to talk. He licked his lips and felt two large sores.

  “Nothing good. Your girlfriend okay back there?”

  The insensitive American knew Leah wasn’t his girlfriend. Wolfgang had just lost his wife and daughter. How could anyone ever think of someone replacing them?

  His thoughts made him want to cry. He certainly didn’t want to listen to the man any longer. He focused on trying to open his eyes.

  He heard a thump and another loud curse.

  “Awww, Smith,” Wlazlo cried.

  There was a moan.

  “Colonel, you alive?”

  “Uhhh.”

  “Cyrus didn’t make it, sir.”

  “Wha’ happened?” asked Lieutenant Colonel Robertson as if saying the words took a monumental effort. They probably did. Wolfgang’s head still throbbed and he couldn’t imagine the others being in much better shape.

  “Probably a roadside bomb, sir.”

  A roadside bomb? Wolfgang thought. Not a mine?

  But why? Why a roadside bomb? And why in Switzerland? Those things happened in Arab countries, not in Europe.

  Whether it had been a mine or a roadside bomb, it still meant the same thing, he decided. He debated scenarios that would lead to a military vehicle being attacked by a roadside bomb and concluded it could only mean one thing.

  “Ambush,” he tried to say, but it came out in a hoarse whisper.

  “What?” Wlazlo called back.

  Wolfgang rubbed his tongue on the roof of his mouth and tried to swallow the saliva. It tasted salty and made him want to retch. But it lubricated his throat a little.

  “Ambush,” he repeated, stronger this time.

  The captain swore. He had a foul mouth. Wolfgang didn’t like it.

  “We gotta get outta here, sir.”

  There was another thud and more swearing. The truck rocked a little. It sounded like the colonel must have gotten free of his seat belt and fallen to the roof.


  Wolfgang felt a hand touch his, and he heard a female voice.

  “Still alive?” Leah asked him quietly in German.

  Wolfgang nodded and it hurt. His eyes remained glued shut.

  “Yes,” he replied, also in German. “Are you okay?” He used the familiar form of ‘you’ with her, the first time he had done so. The familiar form is reserved for family, children, and close friends. And girlfriends. He hadn’t meant to use it and wondered what she would think. Perhaps it would mean nothing to her since her native tongue wasn’t German. Despite their situation, Wolfgang still felt embarrassed at the slip.

  He moved his arms around again, but they remained mostly numb. Without being able to see or feel, he didn’t know how to unlatch the seat belt. It was actually a harness, not a standard belt, and crossed over both shoulders with a quick release buckle that sat on his chest. The harness had probably saved his life.

  He heard a light thump next to him. Leah had gotten out of her belt more gracefully than the two soldiers. He wondered what happened to the third soldier, although he guessed from the conversation that the man was dead.

  “You two need to get out of there,” an American voice urged.

  “We’re trying,” Leah replied in English. “We need water.”

  Wolfgang heard movement, jostling, and more swearing. He wished he could see. Then he felt water on his face.

  “You’re hurt,” Leah said gently. She used the formal form of ‘you’.

  Wolfgang felt rubbing on his face, around his eyes. He tried to open them again and finally succeeded. He could see a little.

  Leah rubbed his face with the bottom of her t-shirt, stretching it out from her waist.

  “Better?”

  He nodded. It hurt again.

  “Wounds in the head. Much blood,” she said. She pointed to the seat belt. “I will open it. We have to get out.”

  Wolfgang agreed. An ambush was coming and his arms were still worthless. He felt helpless.

  Leah maneuvered under him, putting her shoulder against his shoulder, her face next to his. Despite the blood, he smelled her perfume. She straightened, pushing him up and relieving the pressure on the belt buckle on his chest.

  “Hold on,” she grunted, then released the buckle. Wolfgang fell on her and the pair collapsed onto the roof of the truck.

  “You two done making out in there?” Wlazlo called from somewhere outside. Wolfgang didn’t know what the man meant. He often used words that Wolfgang had never learned in school, so he ignored him.

  He tried to crawl off Leah and she squirmed out from beneath him, speaking softly and reassuringly to him. He kept crawling, aiming for daylight, for the empty window frame outlined with shattered glass and the only obvious exit out of the truck.

  His numb arms cooperated poorly and he struggled, finally pitching forward and falling on his face. Someone reached in and pulled him out.

  “You’re a heavy s.o.b., aren’t you?”

  Outside of the vehicle, Wolfgang rolled over onto his back and tried to breathe. He looked up at the sky and it was a dingy gray. A bridge loomed high overhead, a smashed and torn guardrail making it obvious where they had gone over the edge. Only the sturdiness of the military truck had saved them. Its roof had been partially crushed and all the windows blown out, but the frame held. A lesser vehicle would have crumpled, killing everyone inside. Captain Smith, the third officer in the group, hung from his seat belt, his body partially exposed by the mangled front passenger side. There wasn’t much left of his head.

  Leah moved quickly next to Wolfgang, helping him sit up. She held a bottled water to his lips. He drank some, swishing it around his mouth and spitting, getting water and blood on his shirt. A tooth came out.

  She gave him more water and he swallowed. It felt good. He looked at her face and her eyes were filled with concern. She also had a gash on her right cheek.

  “You’re hurt,” he whispered. He used the familiar form again.

  “I’m fine.”

  She continued to wash his face off, but now with a small cloth. The front of her shirt had blood on it, down near the waist, and Wolfgang realized it was his blood. It would stain and the cloth was stretched out. She’d ruined her shirt for him.

  She gave him another drink, then helped him lay back. Wlazlo stood over him.

  “You took a pretty good shot to the head there, Wolfie. It’s a good job that piece of shrapnel that caught you couldn’t penetrate that thick Teutonic skull of yours. Otherwise you’d have ended up like poor old Smithy over there.” Wlazlo nodded towards the truck.

  Wolfgang closed his eyes. The pain was too much. He heard words but they simply blended together into gibberish.

  9