Clearing Force

Force

  By Nathan Hale

  A Short Story by Nathan Hale

  Copyright 2012 Nathan Hale

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Monday, June 14

  Sergeant Harris, NYPD, SWAT Team 1

  When the huge, cigar shaped, vessel landed in Central Park it appeared to float the last few hundred feet straight down out of the sky almost like a balloon settling to earth. Although it had appeared to be lighter than air, the far end of the over two mile long, 200 foot diameter, prolate-spheroid vessel had crushed, without difficulty, several of the buildings it had contacted while it was landing.

  Even at 03:00 Central Park had a scattering of individuals inside it and anyone that hadn’t moved fast enough had been crushed under the weight of the towering vessel as it settled to earth. By 03:05 my SWAT team, along with all our other teams, had been alerted and we were on our way to the scene along with a flood of emergency workers and uniformed police.

  Once my team and I had gotten into position on the roof of one of the buildings surrounding the park; I attempted to call my wife and tell her what I had seen. Several weeks ago I had insisted that she take our kids and stay with her parents in their expensive Battery Park City Condominium. At that time the civil unrest had made the city virtually a combat area. We were being involved in firefights with both criminals and citizens on an almost daily basis. Over the past month the cell phone service had gone from intermittent to virtually non-existent. My attempt to call her was useless, the cell phones were still dead, and, at the rate it was going, so was this city. That was why a bunch of us had decided to quit the force at the end of this shift and leave the city. Seeing the huge spheroid vessel below me I knew that quitting was probably no longer an option.

  I was doing pretty much the same job for the New York City Police Department that I had done in the Marines, I was a sniper. My weapon of choice was a .416 caliber, semi-automatic Barrett with a Leupold Mark 4 ER/T M5 scope. After eighteen years on the force, twelve of which were in SWAT, I had thought this city couldn’t possibly throw anything at me I hadn’t seen before. I had been wrong, very wrong.

  Two months ago, as the economy faltered, no, let’s say it correctly, as the dollar went into a tailspin and the entire world’s economy began to fail, the situation in New York City began to quickly degenerate. With prices on goods, especially food, almost doubling on a weekly basis because the value of the dollar was falling like a stone, and almost 60% of the city’s residents dependent upon government assistance for survival, the rioting began shortly after the citizens realized that their welfare income would no longer cover even their most basic need, food.

  Then, as the situation outside of New York City also fell apart, the transportation system had virtually ceased to function, creating a shortage of everything from energy to food, everywhere across the world. If there is no system of exchange available the world abruptly dropped back into a barter economy except where our Federal Government felt it had sufficient force to require that people continue to accept worthless paper for real goods and services. Even then, it didn’t work, because the citizens that had anything of value were loath to surrender it for worthless paper, even when the government thought it could enforce such an exchange.

  Their attempt at micro-managing the cities was part of the problem especially since the Federal Government no longer had the force it thought it had. As the economy had unwound they had downsized our military, including the National Guard, until it was a mere shadow of what it had once been. Most of that shadow was also still overseas, continuing the nearly two decade long war on terror. America just didn’t have any real military forces available inside the country, at least not enough to restore sanity inside every city across the country, and the forces of sanity, us, were losing.

  Hungry citizens had been rioting. Criminals had remained quiet at first, but for the last three weeks, they had been using the weapons that only they had to establish their own fiefdom inside the city. At first the city government had attempted to regain the areas lost to the criminals. Now they were simply trying to slow down the criminals as they worked to gain complete hegemony over the city. With the landing of this huge vessel, I somehow doubted that the criminals would be our main problem any longer.

  I had an excellent position although, even though I was twenty-two stories up, the top of the spherical vessel wasn’t more than one floor below my position. Whatever this thing is, it is huge! I could see fire trucks already attempting to extinguish some of the fires caused by flammable objects touching the still extremely hot, slightly glowing, surface of the object.

  From what I could see and hear, it was obvious that the vast majority of our available officers had been vectored to this area. That worried me slightly because it had taken an all-out war to re-secure the bridges and tunnels coming into Manhattan from the gangs that controlled a large portion of the surrounding area, but that decision was also far above the pay grade of a Sergeant.

  Over the radio Police Chief Harahan ordered everyone to “stand down” because the Mayor wanted to present a friendly face to our obviously alien visitors. That made me question if I had missed something because this huge ship had collapsed several large buildings, killing an untold number of people, across the park from my position. I, for one, certainly wondered just how peaceful they could be or if they even considered us to be intelligent, because they had so far demonstrated only a blatant disregard for human life. It really didn’t matter what I thought, he was still my boss.

  Two of our police helicopters were circling overhead shining their spotlights on the object and undoubtedly searching for life with their FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red) cameras. They were trying to keep the space over the thing clear while also attempting to keep the three news helicopters away from the area directly over the object. Frankly I was surprised, for over a week none of these helicopters were anywhere to be seen because the fuel they guzzled was both difficult to obtain and prohibitively expensive!

  We waited for over an hour as the massive ship slowly cooled. From my vantage point I could clearly see the Mayor and police chief, surrounded by both uniformed officers and two swat teams, drinking coffee and talking, in the doorway of a building twenty two stories down and 400 yards away from my position. There were so many portable lights shining on the silvery object that it was lit up almost as well as daylight. Other than that the only excitement was when two of the circling helicopters almost hit each other.

  My brother officers had set up a police line that appeared to encircle the huge vessel. Standing behind that line was a mass of New York’s citizens, obviously the word had gotten out about what we had here and they were flocking to the site in droves. I saw where several people attempted to rush the vehicle and my brother officers struggled to stop them.

  One of the news helicopters must have gotten low on fuel, or perhaps the station just didn’t want to pay the fortune required to purchase more fuel, and had flown away. Down below, every news team in the city had to be standing there with the color announcers trying desperately to generate some interest in a huge, silvery, prolate spheroid sitting in what had been Central Park that was doing absolutely nothing!

  Suddenly, a series of large doors in the side of the object facing me slid open. More doors appeared in the top of the huge machine and, from the reaction of the crowd, another set of doors must have slid open on the side facing away from me also. When the lower doors opened I could see an exposed latticework of small rectangular openings, maybe twelve inches wide by not more than eighteen inches tall.

  The roof also had a latticework of openings, but these
were far larger. My estimate of their size was something like 10 by 12 feet. I had resumed my shooting position although there was simply nothing to be seen, so far.

  The remaining news helicopter, probably ignoring police commands, zoomed in and hovered several hundred feet directly over the top of the closest open grid on top of the object. The police helicopters had also begun to move closer when one of them desperately attempted to veer away from the object.

  I was mesmerized as I saw huge creatures flying upward out of the top of the object. At least one of the creatures was struck by the hovering helicopters blades and dismembered although the impact also severed the blades causing them to hurl into the surrounding buildings while the helicopter