The Children of Roswell (Book One) The Swift Chronicle
Kelly found himself suddenly pulled in two directions. The violent transformation taking place in front of him and the voice of General Macon were opposed; diametrically; literally. He could run to the entrance, away from the transformation (the danger was less by the guard shack he thought). He would talk to Macon. ‘I still have to get,’ he paused his thought; ‘We still have to get out of here. There will be a lot of firepower out there; waiting for us when we open that blast door. Perhaps Macon can be tricked into helping us.’
In his heart he knew that wasn’t going to happen. Macon undoubtedly knew that he had defeated Brandt at Marana, and he had beaten the force sent to intercept him at the Mohawk Valley. And now he had escaped to the sanctuary of this bunker. ‘No,’ he thought, ‘Macon will NOT give me another chance at trickery.’
As a small piece of granite glanced off his shoulder, he turned away from the big loaders at the far wall and made a dash for the relative safety of the second doorway. He huddled under the huge steel header that defined the upper track of the sliding mechanism.
“Kellerman, I know you can hear me. There is a handset in the guard shack. Pick it up so that I can hear you.”
He gave one last look at the loaders at the back of the room. His eyes lingered on the discs as the ripples became waves, flashing, stuttering, changing hue and color. They looked like two giant cuttlefish, flashing an alien language back and forth. He could not see, from his position, but the front of the remnant F-eighty-six fuselage and the leading edge of the San Agustin disc were as liquid metal; flowing into one another. The transformation was beginning.
He bolted for the guard shack, dodging granite boulders as he saw them leave the ceiling above him. Not slowing, he slammed into the rear of the shack, spun, and for a moment he watched the chaos he had left behind. From here the discs now glowed a brilliant red-rose, the color combining with the chrome and moving through each disc in waves like rolling, billowing clouds.
The guard shack was made of steel with side columns that acted as shoring at the entrance. Heavy mesh cribbing along its back wall was keeping the loose rocks at bay for now. Feeling in no immediate danger, Kelly reached for the telephone hand-set on the standing-desk in front of him.
“Hello,” he voiced tentatively.
“Lieutenant Kellerman, this is General Macon.”
Kelly was reasonably certain that his little charade was over now, at least where Macon was concerned. That left him at a bit of a disadvantage not knowing just how much the General knew. He decided to continue with the ruse a bit longer, in hopes of gleaning at least a little information.
“I am called YorEel.”
“Yeah? … and this is the damned tooth-fairy Lieutenant. Now cut the crap and stand at attention. You’re talking to a superior officer. Do you understand me, Lieutenant?”
“Not much of a diplomat, are you General?”
“I see no need for diplomacy here son, I’m holding all the cards.”
“And what cards would those be General.”
“Listen son,” the general apparently switching to father/son mode, “I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I’m not foolish enough to tell you what I’ve got waiting for you out here, and I’m guessin’ you’re not dumb enough to believe what I tell you anyway, so, like I said, let’s cut the crap. If you want any hope of keeping your career in the Air Force, or of even staying alive, I suggest you open this door and let’s settle this little problem.”
“General, let me understand you clearly. Are you telling me that …?”
Kelly turned quickly as the rumble of a large chunk of the ceiling between him and the discs slammed to the floor sending shards of rock in all directions.
Having felt the vibrations from his position outside, the General queried, “What in Hell’s going on in there Kellerman? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine General. I’m working on a little surprise for you.”
Ignoring Kelly, Macon continued, “Don’t be a fool son, this can only end one way, we both know that.”
“General, the way I got it figured, there’s at least three ways this thing can end: You kill me; I kill you; or, the most likely scenario,” Kelly paused, “you nuke the place.”
“Nuke the place,” Macon guffawed, “what on Earth makes you think I’d do such a thing?”
“General,” Kelly continued in a knowing voice, “if that option’s not on the table, then why the B-thirty-six?”
“Lieutenant, listen to me, the sun’s going down and it’s getting cold out here. You’re not going anywhere, and neither am I. Let’s quit the word games and solve this. If you open the door now, I will give you my solemn word, you will be safe. No one will harm you. We can work all the details out later, but for now, I guarantee you your safety.”
Kelly stood in silence, thinking about the General’s offer and his reaction to his last sentence. Then it struck him, “My God, he talked all the way around the B-thirty-six. He doesn’t know. He really doesn’t know.”
“General Macon, listen to me very carefully. No bull-shit this time.” Kelly swallowed hard and tried to curtail what little bravado he was projecting. “Don’t ask me how I know, you wouldn’t believe me anyway, but there is a B-thirty-six at fifty thousand feet over the eastern horizon. It’s headed this way and it’s authorized to drop a piece of high-yield ordinance right in the middle of our little party.”
There was nothing but silence coming over the line now; inside it was still pure bedlam. The two discs were locked in a slow-motion wrestling match, their surfaces at times flowing like molten metal, and other times freezing in place like cold-set solder.
‘Something is wrong,’ Kelly thought. ‘This is taking way too long.’
As Kelly was about to ask his Brother for some small bit of reassurance, he heard the General bellow over the phone line, “Damn-it, those fools!” Macon had just been on the horn to the radar officer back at the hangar, and was told that there was indeed a large bogey at fifty thousand feet, headed directly toward his position. Macon was in such a state of disbelief that he had squeezed his handset and accidently pressed the key-to-talk button.
“Ballenger,” he yelled to a subordinate (as Kelly listened) “get a couple engineers over here immediately. I want the back of this electrical box cut open. We have to get to the internal wiring and over-ride the intruder lock-out.” Then as an afterthought, “But first get Washington on the line, I want to talk to assistant director Farley at the CIA … and Ballenger, make sure the operator knows it’s a priority-one call.”
After hearing that Macon was now intent on breaking in, he turned his attention back to the discs. The floor of the bunker in the first room was littered with stone and a heavy coating of dust. The air was so thick the discs themselves were barely visible in the far room beyond the second door. The area under the door header was still relatively clear of the debris; the huge header still doing its job of holding up the ceiling above its massive span.
As he made his way to the safety of the second door header, he heard the intensity of the gravity drive change. He had not thought it possible to make any more noise than it already was, but he was wrong. The high pitched scream finally increased to a point that he could no longer hear it. Now it became painful. Falling to his knees, he grabbed his ears and pressed tightly. It did no good for the sound waves were now passing through his entire body.
His own skin again flashed and rippled, keeping time with the wildly pulsating discs. The huge bucket on the rubber-tired loader closest to the San Agustin disc began to sag, and then flow, melting onto the granite floor where it stood. The molten metal flowed back against its front tires and after a few seconds of acrid black smoke, both tires exploded with the sound of a howitzer, sending pieces of their steel rims, molten metal and rubber flying in all directions. The lights hanging overhead increased in intensity until Kelly thought they would blind him, then, mercifully, they began to exp
lode, sending sparks, glass and burning filament pieces throughout the room like fireworks.
Kelly closed his eyes and tried to bury his head between his legs as larger and heavier granite chunks fell around him. The pain in his head was reaching a point that he thought it would surely explode. The sound was now so loud that it simply beat against him; through him; in a constant stream of pressure and pain. As his senses filled to the point of overload, he rolled to his side, his body now in a fetal position, helpless. “Dying?” he asked himself, “Am I dying? … please ...”
THE NEW DISC AND GENERAL MACON
Silence
Silence
“Silence? … no … not complete silence,” he thought. Although the sound came from only yards away, to Kelly it sounded a hundred miles in the distance. It was the sound of the gravity drive, now a soft whine, decreasing in pitch as it lowered itself to an idle once again. He lay there, breathing in the acrid smell of burning rubber and electrical insulation; not caring.
Darkness
In time, he tried to open his eyes, only to find they were already open. Staring into darkness, every movement of his eyeballs brought a sharp, dry pain to his forehead. The space between his ears rang with the sound of a thousand church bells. He slowly came to realize that the lights in both underground rooms had all been destroyed, except … except … for over there … way over there.
Turning his head slowly, painfully, he could just make out the faint light. With a little concentration he recognized the guard shack at the entrance, its single light bulb the only surviving light source in all this blackness.
He had been unconscious now for nearly twenty minutes and was just now beginning to realize where he was. He had no way of knowing that General Macon had made great progress, despite his engineer’s trepidation about the noises and rumbling coming from inside. In fact, they were ready, on the General’s command, to fire up the auxiliary compressor that had been brought up from one of the hangars, and start the slow process of rolling the door open.
Slowly gaining his faculties, Kelly lifted himself to a sitting position, wincing each time a sudden head or eye movement produced a burning, white-hot pain across the inside of his forehead. He slid himself backward a foot or two and gently leaned against the edge of the huge steel column that supported the door header.
Unable to see, he felt himself: his arms; his chest; abdomen; his legs (without bending so far that it hurt his head again). He was still in one piece, but he would have given anything for a handful of aspirin.
Remembering, he turned his head slowly in the direction he was sure he had last seen the discs. There was nothing but a dark void; blackness.
“Strange.”
He had been able to see well enough in the dark before.
“Why not now?”
As he pulled his eyes away from the darkness, a small flicker of light grabbed him in his extreme peripheral field. There, halfway to the rear of the room, was a small, faint light. He recognized it. It was a reflection of the lone remaining light in the guard shack at the other end of the first room. He must be looking at the central bulge of the new disc, he told himself.
“The new disc, why can’t I see it Brothers?” he called out loud, “why can’t I see it? What has happened? What is wrong? I cannot see.”
For the first time, his Brothers did not respond.
“Brothers,” he yelled and his voice echoed through the emptiness.
“Brothers,” he called softly one last time, leaning his head against the cold steel.
Nothing
***
General Macon gave a quick nod to the engineer and the sergeant pulled the lever back on the jeep’s power take-off. When he let the clutch out, the driveshaft at the front of the jeep turned the flywheel on the trailer mounted compressor. As the air pressure built, they waited. At one hundred and fifty pounds the General nodded again and everyone watched with silent expectation as the lowly private threw the air valve to the open position.
Even through the five foot thick walls they could hear the locking pins as they backed out of the rod bosses and then slammed into their cradles. Then, with a loud groan, the huge locking rods began to slide from their respective bosses. As they banged loudly into their back-stops, Macon nodded once again and the private grabbed the air hose glad-hand and twisted it free. With the sound of the air still escaping from the open hose, he reconnected it to the next hand in line. With that, the huge door, resisting for only a moment, began, ever so slowly, to open.
Kelly slowly forced himself to stand. Everything seemed to be working for him, but his head still felt like something was trying to scratch its way out of his forehead. As he listened to the noises coming from the door, he could visualize the pins and rods moving. There was nothing he could do now, except wait.
As the door moved the first foot, a long blade, about six inches thick, along its vertical edge, stayed in the doors jamming surface. It was a mechanism that sealed the door by sliding into the jam about a foot farther than the door itself. It was pushed in place by giant springs after the door was closed, and now that the door was opening, the small locks along its edge would be released once the door pulled them free. As they released, Kelly watched as the blade collapsed back into the door, letting a one foot wide, twenty foot tall shaft of blinding sunlight suddenly fill his sanctuary. Holding the back of a hand over his eyes, he moved fully into the second room, leaning against the wall to hide himself. And now, as he looked through his fingers, his vision adapting somewhat to the light, he saw it.
‘It is,’ he thought, ‘the San Agustin disc.’
Slowly lowering his hand, he whispered, “No, it is not.”
It was different. It had changed. It was bigger.
“That makes sense, it should be bigger. It has two discs worth of material. It looked to him like it might, depending on how it was laid out inside, hold four or five passengers.
On the floor where his Sabre disc had rested before the transformation, was the dark residue of what once was the vestige of framework and machine guns from his old charge. The new disc was now pure living material.
He felt a nearly uncontrollable need to touch it, and as he walked toward it, one more item on the floor caught his eye. It was his larder bag. As he bent to pick it up, it glowed. He had rolled the top closed the last time he had partaken of a moon-pie, so the inside was relatively clean, but, as he raised it from the floor, he had to shake and then blow the last bit of granite dust from its outside. He held it with his back to the ever increasing brightness of the intruding sunlight and marveled. It was indeed, glowing. As he unrolled it, there in the bottom, along with the empty bottles and candy wrappers, were the four RC Cola bottle caps, glowing with the unmistakable rose tint of his Brothers.
His heart leapt to his throat and as his eyes watered, he implored, “Brothers, are you safe there … are you alright … are you alive?”
As he peered into the bag his eyes filled with a vision of his home world again. And, as before, over the beautiful canyons and tall spired cities, he could see his Brothers standing before him; hands outstretched, pleading, and Kelly now knew: they were dying.
Again tears poured from his eyes and his lungs filled to capacity. As Macon stepped through the now four foot opening of the blast door, Kelly felt the blackness behind him.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOO!” he screamed.
The General, startled by the chrome vision standing in the doorway of the second room, hesitated for only a second, then raised his sidearm. It was too late. Kelly had already clutched the larder bag to his chest and, with his right hand held far behind his head, he gathered all the darkness, all the hate, all the fear he could find within himself, and, concentrating it all into the palm of his hand, he threw it at the General.
Macon managed to squeeze off one round, the insignificant piece of lead being consumed by the pure ball of energy moving toward him. His eyes were filled w
ith wonder as he was pushed and strained through the heavy steel mesh at the back of the guard shack. His service cap, medals and belt buckle hung against the mesh for a moment before falling to the ground.
Kelly stood there … amazed, his arm still outstretched from the throw. He looked at his hand as he slowly rolled it into a fist and then, bending his arm to flex his bicep into a mighty bulge, he looked at the slowly opening blast door, and yelled again, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”
BATTLE AT THE BLAST DOOR
As Kelly strode toward the now nearly half open blast door, a soldier stepped half way inside, another poked his head just enough inside to look around the corner.
“General Macon, Sir, are you OK Sir?” one of them called. Then, as they both looked in Kelly’s direction, seeing what appeared to them, a chromed and naked apparition moving in their direction, their mouths fell open as if to scream, until the head sticking around the corner was able to mutter, “Holy Mother of God, what in unholy hell is that.” As the soldier half-in the door started to raise his rifle, Kelly’s hand came up to his waist directly in front of him, and as if dismissing a bothersome problem with a casual backhand, he loosed another ball of energy. The talking head dived for cover outside the door, but the man raising his rifle took the full force of the plasma. He was slammed to the far side of the door and half his body was pushed inside the slot that, only moments before, had held the huge sealing blade of the blast door.
Shouting … much shouting; Kelly could hear someone barking orders. Continuing to walk toward the door he heard a man yell, “Now!”
A smoking canister, then another and another flew through the still opening door. They were flash-bangs, and they went off in quick succession; each giving off a deafening sound and a near blinding, phosphorous-fed white light. If the ringing in Kelly’s ears had gotten any better since the transformation, it was now increased to the point of raging pain once again. And although his chrome eyes had helped somewhat, he was now nearly blind.