Black Hawks From a Blue Sun Page 7

  Now it is a still and blighted place.

  The suburban dwellings are little more than ash beneath the Operators’ boots. The mighty skyscrapers are sheared off, toppled, or totally collapsed in ragged heaps. And the city’s nucleus is a five-kilometer-wide crater filled with murky water.

  The Chesapeake Bay has risen to meet the city, its surf gently scouring the southeastern sections through the centuries. The Potomac River, slowing drastically upon meeting the Chesapeake, has silted into a narrow river delta which buries the western areas of Foxhall, Palisades, and Burleith, along with most of Arlington and all of Potomac Heights. Despite the cleansing flows of water and wind, there is no living thing to be seen.

  “How bad’s the radiation?” Thompson asks with a metallic voice, picking greenery from his armor plating.

  Argo frets at the display on his labset. “Bad. You can see this place took numerous hits. It’s glowing hot.”

  Thompson looks out at the rubble-strewn black desert. He had hoped to search some of the old government buildings in the city’s heart and the Pentagon in particular. Nothing left of them at all.

  His search is not without possibilities, however. A line of structures, built on the back side of a hill, stands with lower floors intact. Their frames stick up and curve away from the blast center—the skeletal ‘hands’ he saw through his rifle scope.

  Much of the city remains hidden behind high points of land. One such point is only a couple of kilometers away with a broad flat top. Another is farther away to the south, but has a more commanding view.

  “How long can we stay?”

  Argo arches an eyebrow. “Stay? We can’t stay here. We…”

  “How long?” Thompson restates more forcefully.

  Argo sighs and looks across the scorched landscape. “Four hours and we’ve exceeded our rad limit. Anything past six hours…” Argo trails off.

  “Six hours, yes?”

  “Six is the absolute limit. You know I hate to do this, but as your medical superior, that’s an order.”

  Thompson grimaces. “Fine. Six hours. No longer. Argo, you check out that row of wrecked buildings. Beckert, you get to that high flat top and choose your target. I’m taking that far hill. Set your timers to rendezvous in four hours. That’ll give us a buffer if something goes wrong or if we find something important. Radio silence unless emergency. Then rally here, at this point. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir!” Beckert chimes.

  “Understood,” Argo replies.

  Thompson stands and checks the cloudy sky for patrolling planes.

  “Move out.”

  Mud and Rubble

  Argo slogs through small streams and silty mud before reaching the first in his row of buildings. Though fractions of their former selves, the ruined buildings loom large like conquered gods. Corroded girders extend from the upper floors, stripped of their concrete and glass flesh. On the side, five floors up, the building is scorched in an angled line pointing up into the sky.

  All of the surrounding buildings have fully collapsed, mingling into a terrain of weathered blocks and rust. The Brick’s sure feet pass the obstacles nimbly, and he stands at the southwest corner.

  Where to begin?

  The ground floor is stuffed with the rubble of upper floors, and he jogs around the rear of the building in search of an entrance. As he continues his run, the Brick notices an occasional cross member, many floors up, connecting the buildings together.

  This was all one structure…

  The twisted girders make it clear the building was also tall, but just how much taller is a mystery. This must have been a phenomenal construct in its day, and the fact that any part still stands proves it was made to a higher standard than the failed buildings around it.

  The northwestern corner seems to have fared best, and Argo spots a gap in the ground-floor rubble. Warily, he steps in through a window, tiny bits of glass still clamped in the frames. The floor is a loose mud of powdered concrete and blown-in dust that slides greasily under his heel. The ceiling sags between joists. Walls are little more than corroded beams, broken pipes, and decayed wires.

  Aware of his weight, he edges his way inside. To his right, heaps of rubble pile up through the next floor. To his left, all the way to the building’s corner, the space is open. Wind whistles through the exploded window panes. Slow drips seep through cracks in the bottom of the sags, the plip, plip, plip, providing the only accompaniment to the whistling breeze.

  The hairs on his neck and forearms stand on end. He whirls about, knowing there was no sight or sound of the enemy to alarm him; yet something reached out to him, subliminal and elusive. His eyes squint as they roam the decayed walls, finding nothing to justify the odd sensation. With an annoyed grunt, he suppresses it and continues inside.

  He slide-steps through the mud, searching with his toes for solid footing, testing each step before committing his bulk to it. The sags above appear ready to fall at the slightest disturbance and he takes care to stay beneath the ceiling joists.

  Late afternoon sun streams in alongside him. Where the rays end, however, the interior is very dark. He clicks on his helmet lights.

  The beams shine across frayed cords, naked wall supports, and broken masonry. Toward the middle of the building, they illuminate a tight group of intact walls. Argo shuffle-steps to the enclosure with a watchful eye to the dripping ceilings.

  He steps around the walls of the enclosure, and the mud thins at an open doorway. When his lights shine inside, he finds two staircases: one ascending, one descending. Excited, he moves to the descending stairway, but the enthusiasm dims when he sees murky, standing water only half a flight down.

  Up, then.

  He places one foot gingerly on the first step. Eyelids squeeze shut, teeth clench, breath holds, and hands clamp to his cannon. He shifts his weight onto the step.

  It holds.

  His breath rushes in a great exhale, and he brings his other foot up. Bouncing lightly, he tests the stairway and it feels solid. More confident in his progress, the Brick climbs to the next floor.

  The second floor is barren. Wind flows through the empty space, creating eddies of dust behind the main support columns. Sunlight spills across the sagging depressions in the floor where chunks from the ceiling have come to rest. Small puddles fill the shaded bottoms.

  If the sags on the floor seem near to collapse, the low hanging ceilings of this floor are bubbles on the verge of bursting. The concrete at the center has fully separated such that only the corroded internal reinforcements knit the gap.

  Delicately, he steps away from the staircase and walks over the grid of floor joists. The absence of walls makes short work of his search, where only a single heavy door attracts his attention. Still in its frame, the door defiantly bars access to a room whose walls have all blown away.

  Argo moves freely toward the southern sections, able to pass between the rubble piles on the narrow joists. A group of standing walls encloses another stairwell, but thoroughness forces him to complete his search before leaving the floor.

  At the end of the building, Argo looks up through the floors above and sees sky. Each level has failed, its debris cascading to the next until the ground floor filled. Twisted and decayed beams droop from the edges of broken concrete.

  Lowering his gaze, he looks across the gap at the building’s southern segments. The floors on those sections have likewise failed and all that remain are hollow frames.

  He turns northwest, looking back over the terrain they have crossed. Setting sunlight washes out his vision, and he shades his eyes with one hand. Tiny reflections shine above the lone ridge where they revived Beckert and rested.

  In a panic, he realizes what a dark figure he cuts against the light concrete, sunlight full on him.

  Stupid! Stupid!

  He fades back into the middle of the building, watching for any change in the clustered reflections. The Brick’s heart thuds in his chest. No change.

 
; His jaw muscles flex and he chides himself for lack of caution. He looks again at the distant reflections. Still no change.

  With a healthy dose of self-chastisement and head shaking, Argo climbs the staircase to the third floor. He glides north along the joists, looking down through wide holes to his left and right. Nearly back to intact flooring, Argo spies some strange hardware dangling above one of the open floor pits. He picks his way toward the oddity, hugging the support beams and stepping around them to keep his bulk on the floor joists. The shape of the hardware suggests it was once square, as though something was mounted here and was wrenched free.

  At the big man’s feet the floor is broken away to the joists, but the next floor down has a square hole punched through it. He looks again at the mount on the ceiling and guesses the dimensions to be very close.

  Something heavy and solid was installed here, he reasons, and fell through to the floors below. It’d have to be massive and strong to punch through reinforced concrete. Strong enough to still be intact?

  Argo sets his cannon down and lays himself like a plank across the joist. He extends out, hoping to see the bottom. The best he can manage, however, is an angled view of the first floor.

  Determined, he gets his feet beneath him, collects his cannon, and hurries to the southern section of stairs. Delicately, he tests the steps and descends.

  The correct area is easy to find from the symmetrical hole punched through the concrete. Argo sets down his cannon and lays prone again, using his toes and palms to nudge himself toward the hole. He peers over the edge into a dark pit with velvety black walls. Mirror-like water at the bottom reflects his lights. Just beneath the surface, however, there is the faintest outline of something rectangular.

  What is that?

  There is a loud crack at his feet, and the floor bends away beneath him. Helpless to the force of gravity, he snatches at exposed lengths of rebar. They break like dry twigs in his hands, and the Brick tumbles into the pit.

  The slab drops after him. It catches the sides of the floors below, exploding dust and sandy chunks.

  Argo crashes feet first into the murky water. His mass pulls him swiftly to the bottom, where he sinks waist deep in a cloying muck. The slab slams flatly onto the water above him. He raises his arms in time, diverting the slab beside him, but the weight of it pushes him down to his armpits in the loose silt.

  He strains his powerful limbs, and the black sediments draw him deeper. His helmet beams shine just a few centimeters into churning, dark currents.

  The Brick’s teeth grind. “Should’ve seen that coming.”

  A More Fitting Icon

  Thompson scurries over and around great mounds of ash-loaded glass. Long cracks cross the rounded heaps with razor-sharp edges, wedged apart by ice and sun. The knife edges slice the wind rushing by and divert gusts through the inner hollows with brittle, crystalline moans. Unique inner fractures of each mound offer their own symphonies—some strike dissonant chords with the breezes, others harmonious.

  The sun dips below the mountains to the west, and in the twilight his armor makes him a shadow within shadows. He sprints uphill to the high point of land, feinting around massive blocks of pale, blasted stone. At the hill’s apex, he takes shelter behind the root of what must have been a tremendous wall and crouches. Looking back the way he came, he sees glinting specks of reflected sunlight drifting above the horizon.

  Turning forward, he peeks over the low wall at total devastation to the southeast. What he mistook for one large crater is in fact five, closely overlapped and filled with murky water. The surrounding terrain is uniformly smooth and black.

  Such firepower…

  His visor shows plumes of heat rising from well below the surface of the unnatural lake. They emerge from the murky water in billowy columns that drift with the prevailing breeze. He raises his rifle and looks through the scope.

  Spots of boiling and bubbling deep below the surface feed the wisps of warm color. Thompson lowers his weapon and watches for several seconds, unsure of what the hotspots mean.

  Turning west, he looks over a shallow valley. The valley’s far side is swept clear all the way to the new river delta. On the near side, there is an unusually tall heap of rubble. Returning the rifle scope to his eye, he zooms in and discovers the heap is propped up by a standing ruin behind it. The ruin’s long foundation points directly at the cluster of craters, and Thompson understands the blasts must have been absorbed by the building’s front three quarters, leaving the back quarter intact. In a sweeping arc from northeast to south to west, no other building stands. Choice made easy, he runs downhill past the mounds of sighing glass and weathered stone blocks.

  Away from the central craters, the terrain is rough with crumbled structures. Thompson’s long legs propel him gracefully over the shifting slabs and jagged fragments until he can see the building’s standing walls. Rifle ready, he takes cover behind a toppled pillar and studies the outlines of the structure.

  The long front section has utterly collapsed and the debris has spread out into an enormous pancake of hard-packed material. From the midsection back, the building rises one intact floor at a time in a concave ramp up to the standing rear section. Most of the brick façade has dropped away and melted into red clay at the foundation. Leading away from the foundation and down into the valley beyond, a swath of fine red sediment stains the dark soil. Wide, empty windows permit the sea breezes to pass with a low howl.

  After a couple of quick breaths, he bursts from his hiding place and sprints toward the building. He crosses the distance with Olympian speed then short-steps to a halt beside a ground floor window. Peeking through the crooked frame, he sees the space inside is hollow in its lower levels, where all but the upper-most floors have dropped to the ground in thick layers. Horizontal bands encircle the interior walls at regular intervals, marking the former placement of each collapsed floor. Only the most rugged supports and load bearing columns remain in place and even these are fractured beyond belief, leaning visibly toward the valley. His eyes trace the weakened support columns up seven floors to a heavily cracked and bowed ceiling.

  No way I’m climbing those.

  He moves to the front of the building where the long ramp of destruction piles against the standing ruin. Time has reduced the mixture to coarse cement, making the ramp remarkably compact.

  He follows the easy slope to an open floor. From all appearances, the flooring should have fallen away decades ago—fractures and cracks crisscross every bit of the decking, walls, and ceiling. With one foot planted on the ramp, he jabs at the broken flooring with his other. Sandy dust kicks free but nothing else. He puts some weight on it, ready to leap away. The floor holds.

  Thompson eases his way off the ramp and onto the cracked floor. Loose chunks crunch and shift beneath his boots as he makes his way inside. There is the slightest bounce with each step, making the Gun stare at his feet with confusion. Where the cracks end, the bouncing sensation ends as well, and he thinks no more about it.

  The space inside is open. All of the interior walls are down, leaving only the support columns to interrupt his view. Though better preserved than the ragged entryway, the interior is severely dilapidated. Not one of the windows maintains its square corners. All of the internal braces and supports lean. The entire building has shifted, giving nature a billion cracks to wedge apart with ice and time, yet it has not fallen. It is as if the building wills itself to stand out of spite for gravity.

  With his rifle held tight to his shoulder, Thompson speeds across the floor, searching every corner, beam, and niche, finding nothing of interest.

  Next floor, then…

  The Gun stands beneath a gap in the ceiling and leaps. His strong hands grip the edge, and he pulls himself up. Half through and propped on his elbows, he looks around. It is a very similar scene to the one below: crooked windows, crumbled supports, fractured flooring.

  He lowers his head to push himself all the way up and sees what loo
ks like a transparent fabric at the edge of the gap. The threads are so fine he has difficulty focusing on them.

  Thompson lifts his hanging legs through the gap and kneels at the edge. After a quick glance around, he clicks his helmet lights on low and puts his face to the floor.

  Delicate, reflective strands reveal a gossamer encasing the edge of the gap. He recoils from the oddity, sitting up. As his lights shine out into the open, he finds reflective strands everywhere. All around him, between the support columns and crisscrossing every surface, the netting glints in his helmet lights.

  The Gun looks down at himself and sees fine silks have gathered in the joints of his armor, the ends flying weightlessly in the flowing air. He lifts the gathered strands from the crook of his arm and rolls them into a cord. Tugging the cord between his hands, he notices a significant resistance before it snaps. Individually, the strands are insubstantial—he never noticed them walking through—but combined, the tensile strength is amazing.