LOSS OF REASON Read online

  “Uh, excuse me, Colonel Marsh, General.” A sergeant had been standing by, leaning foot to foot like he had to go to the bathroom. Anders’ and Marsh’s eyes shot to him. “I—I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly, “I think I saw him too. He scooped some dirt off the landing gear of one chopper into a water bottle—”

  “What!” Anders yelled. “We can’t have that! Arrest him!”

  “Yes sir. He disappeared somewhere into the row of jets here. I spoke to the same guy earlier this morning. He said he came on a Williams jet.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Long dark hair. Leather jacket. Blue eyes.”

  “Well, search every single aircraft if you have to. Start on this end and work your way back.”

  “There’s a big Williams Gulfstream up a little ways,” one of Marsh’s men said.

  “That minister at the gate this morning, Sarge?” another man put in.

  “You seen him?” the sergeant barked.

  “He just got into that small Lear up at the beginning of the row. The one with Williams painted on it. I went past a minute ago and the door was closed. I think it’s leaving for the runway right now.”

  Anders turned to Marsh. “I want three men.”

  “Sergeant Rodriquez,” Marsh commanded, “you, Bell and Zimmer follow the general’s staff car . . . ”

  Holding Melissa in his lap, Franklin looked back through the cockpit door at the people traveling with them. Fourteen children and adults were belted to the white leather seats. There was a sense they were consciously avoiding the luggage door that shielded the wide black rubber bag—the way the parents had placed their kids away from the aisle.

  The owl was shaking.

  A single worry pushed the rest away: This owl looks pretty sick—that young woman, her little boy, the two old people who brought them too. Will Melissa be next?

  He watched the jet two ahead turn onto the runway and accelerate to takeoff speed. Two old green staff cars with large stars on their doors sped down the opposite taxiway.

  “What’re they doing?” Everon said.

  The cars crossed the runway and stopped abruptly at Hunt’s smaller Lear, two jets back. Soldiers jumped from the cars. One banged on the Learjet’s door.

  “That’s General Anders. And that security guard Vandersommen is with him!”

  “They think we’re in there,” Everon said. “Whoa!” Bushes whipped around outside, then bent over. Just as suddenly, all was still.

  “I—I think they might actually be looking for me,” Franklin said.

  Globs of black pelted across the jet’s windshield. Big sloppy chunks.

  Franklin leaned forward to see back through the cockpit window. It was falling all over the wings.

  “Will the jet take off with that stuff on it?” he asked. “I remember you saying even a little snow can really cut a plane’s lift. That stuff looks a lot heavier than a little snow.”

  “Unless it slides off. It increases the required runway length. A bunch. And we’re fully loaded.”

  Franklin grabbed Chuck’s meter. He extended its probe. Waved it around the cockpit’s ceiling and walls. “It’s radioactive! The windshield’s off the scale! What do we do?”

  Without waiting for a change in clearance, Everon made an illegal turn onto a runway access closer than the one assigned, braked the big jet and keyed his mic.

  “Gulfstream—Five-Five-Six-Six-Sierra-Whiskey to Teterboro tower. Ready to depart Runway Two-Four.”

  For many, many miles the second fish had been swimming patiently beneath the water’s surface. Nowhere near its planned destination, its nose hammered directly into shore. To the fish’s small but potent brain, the impact made one thing clear:

  It had arrived.

  Eight shakes of a second later it became nothing more than a ball of pure expanding energy.

  Jet Confusion

  Hunt Williams’ Learjet joined the line of those waiting to depart. Two old green staff cars roared along the taxiway and screeched to a stop beneath Hunt’s wing. Out stormed General Anders.

  Through the Lear’s front window, Hunt watched Everon taxi the big Gulfstream into position. A moment later, the monstrous WILLIAMS helicopter came overhead and turned south.

  A fist pounded on the Learjet’s door. Hunt rose from his seat and opened the door himself.

  “Mr. Williams?” Anders’ face tight, eyes squinting. “What are you—? Who’s in your plane?”

  “Everon Student. He’s going out west to pick up equipment and personnel.”

  “Out west? Where?” Anders asked.

  “Nevada,” Hunt replied. “Talk to him about it when he gets back. He’s returning to Pennsylvania to work for me.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Restoring my company’s part of the power grid.”

  “Is there a dark-haired man in a black leather jacket with him?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Big black blobs fell on the general’s windshield, the plane’s wings. A chunk of the stuff fell on the general’s shoulder.

  “What do you call that?” Hunt asked.

  The general’s eyes went big. “Crap!”

  “Exactly.” Without another word, Hunt stepped back and pulled the door.

  Anders threw himself into his car, hand out. “Give me the mic!”

  There was no answer from the tower. Everon began to wonder, will they clear us? “Take that headset, Bro.” He pointed to a switch. “Make sure everybody’s buckled in tight.”

  “Please make certain your seat belts are secure,” Franklin announced over the intercom, looking back into the cabin. Children held on parents’ laps. Every seat was full.

  A familiar controller’s voice came over the radio. “Teterboro tower to Gulfstream Sierra-Whiskey—”

  “Sue!” Everon whispered.

  “Cleared for takeoff, Runway Two-Four. Have a safe flight.”

  Everon put a hand on the throttle, ready to push up the engines, when a black kitten with matted fur skittered frightfully across the runway in front of them.

  “How much worse can it get?” Franklin muttered to no one in particular.

  “Probably a lot,” Everon replied nodding to their right, and gave the big Gulf full throttle. Off the jet’s right side a mob of thousands was climbing the airport fence. They disappeared behind.

  Long seconds later, he eased back half an inch on the yoke. The jet didn’t lift.

  “What’s going on?” Franklin asked.

  “That goo’s giving us a real problem,” Everon said through clenched teeth, easing the yoke back still farther.

  The runway ahead shrank to nothing.

  “That flight never received military authorization,” Anders shouted at the tower. “I understand they’ve got bodies in there! No one’s seen their death certificates. And we can’t have them spreading rumors of radioactivity scares and panicking people!”

  “Your people approved the flight,” The female voice radioed back.

  “We thought it was Hunt Williams onboard. This is a direct violation of Emergency Executive Order 16-176. No unauthorized flights until national radar coverage has been re-established.”

  “Too late, sir.” Anders’ sergeant interrupted.

  The big jet was already rolling, gaining speed.

  “Goddammit!” Anders roared.

  “Why isn’t he lifting off?” the sergeant mumbled.

  Ignoring him, Anders steeled back an angry retort then let out a blast of air.

  “General, sir!” Colonel Marsh from the second car, braving the black chunks, tapped on the general’s window. “Sir!”

  Anders lowered the glass. “What is it?”

  “We’ve lost all communications with Washington!”

  “What?”

  “I was talking to General Thompson’s aide for you at the Pentagon and—they
just weren’t there anymore. It’s like there’s nothing there.”

  “Is it the satellite again?”

  “I don’t think so. It never came back.”

  With less than two hundred feet to spare, the Gulfstream’s nose left the ground. The rear wheels weren’t going to clear the airport boundary fence.

  They did.

  Everon felt like they missed the trees by inches. Immediately he banked west.

  Straight into the nearest rain cloud he could find.

  Vandersommen, the security guard who’d tried to prevent the brothers going in to rescue their family, stood on the Teterboro ramp watching the jet fly away as the first fat black drops came down.

  The airport’s conical red windsock rotated randomly. North. East. Then south. The windsock hung limp against the pole.

  And then it blew.

  General Anders’ call to move had come too late. Tents flared and billowed in the cold increasing wind. Dark, gooey drops left stinging red marks on the skin of half a million Teterboro refugees.

  Meters came out.

  Radiation! A lot of it.

  The black rain poured down. The cold dark water gathered in rivulets. The rivulets became streams that flowed through the tents, deadly even to the touch.

  “Get out!” a confusion of voices exploded.

  “Run!”

  “Where?”

  People locked themselves inside porta-potties that in minutes floated in the new lake then fell over sideways. Others stood on plastic milk boxes in the tents, anything they could find. People stopped worrying about treatment and simply tried to escape.

  Yet some doctors and nurses stubbornly ignored the cold burning black as it flowed around their bare ankles. Continued triaging patients until they couldn’t bear the pain, then joined their patients on gurneys, trying to wash down their own legs and ankles with bottles of saline.

  In one of the tents, terror now gripped Cheri Enriquez. Pain in her joints, a dizzy, cold, sweaty kind of flu—realization set in. It was coming on so fast. This was not like any sickness she’d ever known. Among the scrambling crowd, she held Johnny against her knees in the burning mud. Maybe she deserved this sickness. She shouldn’t have let old Mrs. Goodman talk her into leaving home. Maybe Jáime was looking for them. Making the sign of the cross, she puked out the last words that would ever leave her lips:

  “But Johnny, God, why Johnny?”

  In seconds the brothers were hit by extreme turbulence—bouncing groans shook the plane.

  The right wing dropped forty degrees or more. Everon struggled to bring it back up, over-correcting thirty degrees to the left. BAM! Turbulence hammered the wings in the opposite direction.

  Franklin could see nothing through the windows. He felt his butt leave the seat, the seat belt tight across his lap, and nearly lost his hold on Melissa as his head hit the ceiling. “Can the plane take this?” he shouted, pulling his belt snug.

  “It’ll take it,” Everon grunted, trying to pull the wings level again. “It’ll have to. We have to get that stuff off.”

  “All this turbulence is from the cloud?”

  “I—I don’t know. I don’t see how.”

  The right wing dropped again. Everon corrected hard, yoke twisted full left. There was almost no effect. The cabin continued to rotate.

  “No!”

  But the air was not to be denied.

  Over they went.

  Franklin heard cries from the plane’s rear. It was all he could do to hang onto Melissa. Harry flapped into the cabin air. The engine whined, its pitch rising. BAM! something hit the big jet.

  Far in back a man held onto his young son by the strap of his blue jumper. Behind him the luggage door flew open. The wide black body bag slammed upward against the web of Franklin’s climbing rope Everon had laced it down with.

  The plane was upside down. Twisting metal screeched. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

  “Fuck it!” Everon shouted. Reversing the yoke, he accelerated the roll. Franklin could just make out the words uttered through his brother’s clenched teeth. “Hunt’s. Just. Going to have. To deal with it—”

  The jet’s lights went out. All of them.

  All Franklin could hear as he felt the nose pitch down, hanging from his seat belt, clinging to Melissa, was a slamming sound and the dropping whine of the big jet’s engines winding down.

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  Miles A. Maxwell is out of

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  Contents

  Back Cover

  1 Family

  2 Turbulence

  3 Into The Dirt

  4 On The Edge Of Reason

  5 Brothers Once Removed

  6 Connections

  7 Frustration

  8 Loss And Desertion

  9 A Red Cross Man

  10 The Old Pelican

  11 Magic Words

  12 Victoria’s Rising Water

  13 Desperation

  The City

  14 Flying Into Death

  15 The Giant’s Hand

  16 Cheri And Johnny

  17 East Side Horror

  18 Andréa Tries To Get Through To Hunt

  19 Search For Cynthia

  20 The Awful Truth

  21 Rising Water

  22 Losing Franklin

  23 To The Chopper

  24 Hopeless

  25 Giving Up

  26 Death On The Blue-Gray Span

  27 Out Of Control

  28 A Loss Of Reason

  29 Cynthia And Steve

  30 Cynthia

  31 Dead Man Walking

  32 The Dolls

  33 Return To Jersey

  34 Falling Down

  35 The Press

  36 Who’s Responsible?

  37 The Bird

  38 Hunt’s Desperation

  39 A Dangerous Sample

  40 A Drop Of Rain

  41 Jet Confusion

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