Apocalypse Machine (17 page)

“One!” I shout over Graham’s ‘two’ and relinquish my grip. I fall from the open hatch, twisting as the line attached to me snaps taut, deploying my parachute. I fall into the ash-laden daytime twilight and see the plane above me. It’s missing a wing, still spinning, but its climb has stopped.

Graham and three other Rangers drop from the back, but then the 69,300-pound C-130—129,300 pounds fully fueled—with the rest of Reaper squad and two pilots, careens over and falls behind them, plummeting toward the ground.

Toward me.

17

I lose sight of the falling cargo plane and four Rangers when my chute snaps open. My body is flung around so all I can see is what’s ahead of and below me, which right now, looks like endless sunlit gray snow. Then I see the ground, rushing up at me, and I don’t mean that in the cliché sense of the term that actually means
I’m
rushing toward the ground. I mean, the surface of the Earth actually appears to be rising up below me, swelling and ready to burst, like a frog’s vocal sac. As much as the parachute has slowed my descent, the rising ground will still greet my body with enough force to crush my bones.

And then, just as I’m sure I will never see my family again, a wave of pressure, thrust up by the massive shape, shoves against my parachute, lifting me higher, until I match the flat surface’s momentum. Boot tips reaching, I try to touch down, but the ground below me falls away.

I look up, expecting to see the plane falling, ready to swat me from the air, but all I can see is my parachute, billowing out hard as the pressure wave becomes a vortex, sucking me down.

I flinch as feet swing into view just over the top of my parachute. Graham swings around ahead of me, controlling his descent.

“Next time you get close, detach the chute,” he says.

He sounds calm. How can he sound calm?

The other two Rangers drop down into view. One of them is ahead of us by a hundred feet. The other is to our right.

A line of black, rising up from below and stretching in the sky high above, slides out of the gray mist, swinging toward us. It’s massive. Comparable in scale to the Eiffel Tower, but taller, its height indeterminable. “Look out!” I shout, like there is something any of us can do to avoid it.

The black tower—for lack of a better word—cuts through the sky. When I see its trajectory, I scream. Not for myself, but for the man ahead of us.

The streak of black, emitting a red-orange glow through crisscrossing seams, passes just fifty feet in front of me. It collides with the Ranger, sweeping him out of existence. Before I can feel revolt or sadness, or even shock, the wind generated by the massive tower pulls me and the remaining two Rangers hard to the right. Feeling like a kid on a carnival swing-carousel, I’m pulled sideways and given my first glimpse of the sky since leaping from the plane.

I scream again.

The plane is there.

Right
there.

Nose down.

Falling toward us.

I see the pilots in the cockpit, fighting for control, despite missing a wing. The plane pinwheels downward as I’m pulled to the side, just out of range of its rotating wing and still buzzing propellers. The C-130 plummets past.

“Give the devil his due, boys,” Graham says a moment before the plane reaches the shifting ground below and erupts into a ball of fire.

The heat from the explosion hits me at the same time as the concussive force, which slaps into my parachute and shoves it up, slamming me back into an upright position.

“This is it,” Graham shouts. “Get ready to detach!”

The ground rises up once more, the pressure wave leading it pushing the chute higher and keeping me from slamming against it. When the rough, ruddy surface slows to a stop three feet beneath me, I yank the ‘three-ring release’ dangling from my right shoulder strap, cutting away the parachute and letting the breeze snatch it away.

I hit the ground hard, bending at the knees like I was landing with a parachute attached. The surface beneath me is unforgiving and jagged, like I’ve just landed on a large chunk of beachside granite. I roll once and come to a stop on my back, coughing and groaning. An “oof” turns my attention to the side, and I see Graham rolling beside me, much more gracefully. He gets back to his feet in one quick movement. The Ranger off to the right is nearly close enough to drop, but the ground starts moving away from him. A twisting sensation fills my gut, like I’m in a fast moving elevator, dropping down.

The Ranger detaches.

The ground falls away, and we fall with it.

For a moment, it appears the soldier is flying, his downward momentum matching that of the descending surface. But he’s not flying. He’s falling. And when the ground begins rising again, if it does, he’s going to impact at terminal velocity.

“Pull your reserve!” Graham shouts.

The Ranger grips the small handle hanging over his chest and pulls hard. The pilot chute pops out, catches the wind and snaps upward, pulling the reserve parachute.

Fabric expands, billowing out with hope.

And then the ground slows to a stop, reverses direction and erases all hope. The partially deployed parachute does little to slow his descent. I close my eyes when the Ranger collides with the ground head first, but I can still hear the crack of his armor and his bones slamming into the solid ground.

Silence follows.

I catch my breath, clinging to the moving ground, trying not to throw up as the constantly shifting world twists my gut with nausea.

“This is Supernatural. Anyone copy?”

“I copy,” I say, and then I realize he already knew I was fine.

I’m the only one who replies.

“Beehive, this is Supernatural. Do you copy?” he says, using the current codename for the command structure above us, monitoring the mission. He takes a moment to crouch by the fallen Ranger, but doesn’t bother checking for a pulse. I can see from here that the twisted heap of a man is dead.

The Beehive stays silent.

“Comms are local,” he says, looking at me now. “Take a moment. Get your bearings. But then I want your assessment as to what the hell just happened, what killed my men, and where the hell we are.” Before I can reply, he starts walking away, struggling to stay upright as the world shifts directions again, tilting to the side. I’m about to ask where he’s going, terrified that I’m being abandoned, when I see he’s heading for the only real landmark in sight: the flaming wreckage of the C-130 a quarter mile away.

Kneeling on the rough surface, I’m thankful for the body armor protecting my knees and the gloves over my hands. Without them, I’m sure my injuries would be far more substantial and bloody. The ground beneath me is covered in a thin layer of volcanic ash that falls from the sky. But it doesn’t stick like snow. The light flakes shift with the breeze and lift away as the ground drops down once more. I brush a section of the ash clean, revealing an obsidian surface, marbled with streaks of bioluminescent red light, giving the impression that the surface is also somehow transparent.

I’m struck by a sudden lightheadedness, and it has nothing to do with the movement. I recognize the texture and color. The spike jutting from the Icelandic glacier. We haven’t landed on some kind of quaking landscape. We’ve landed on the aberration’s colossal back.

I look left and right, seeing no end to the barren living world we’ve dropped onto. If visibility wasn’t reduced by the endless ash floating about, maybe I’d see some end to the creature’s back, but right now, my whole world is gray sky, this black-and-maroon streaked shell and the orange fireball now silhouetting Graham. His figure warbles from the heat, and for a moment it seems to disappear, like he’s been teleported onto the starship Enterprise.

“Graham,” I say, blurting out the name, and then correct myself too late. “Supernatural.”

“No one can hear us,” he says, sounding grim. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I know where we are.”

His silhouette shifts as he turns back to me and starts walking. “Spit it out.”

“We’re on top of it.”

“On top of
what?
”

“The aberration.”

Graham stands motionless, his head scanning the terrain around us. He sways as the landscape shifts again.

“It’s walking,” I say. “We’re feeling its footsteps.”

“This is its…back?”

“That’s my guess.”

“But…” He twists around, scanning the area. “I can’t see the end of it.”

“I know.”

I see the faint shadow of a looming tower rising up to our right. It stretches up into the sky, fading away long before reaching any kind of terminus. It’s what struck the Ranger out of the sky. Maybe even what hit the C-130. But it’s not a tower at all. It’s a spine, rising up at an angle from what looks like a hill, but what I suspect is something closer to a massive pore. I point to it. “Look.”

“This is FUBAR, Science Guy.”

“Very.”

“Can we do anything here?”

I take a small kit out of my hip pack. Inside are several sample bags along with a sampling of collection tools, including a battery powered core drill and an old school hammer and chisel. “Maybe.” I start with the drill, attaching the diamond tipped core blade and placing it against the hard surface. The drill bit can chew through most any hard stones, steel reinforced concrete and cemented gravels. Aside from the strongest metals, there isn’t much it can’t chew through. I pull the trigger. The blade spins and slips to the side so fast that I nearly fall over. There’s not even a scratch on the surface. “Okay…”

With the drill clutched in both hands, I position the blade on a rough patch. No chance of it slipping here, and once it digs into the rough surface it will keep on going. I pull the trigger again. Sudden sharp pain tears through my fingers, wrists and arms. The diamond tips caught the rough surface, but instead of chewing through, the drill spun free of my hands, nearly breaking my wrists.

Guess I’ll try the old fashioned tools.

I discard the drill, place the chisel on the hard surface and give it a solid whack with the hammer. My hand holding the hammer stings from the blow, but once again, I don’t even blemish the surface. I place the chisel against a small imperfection, aiming to chip it away. I slam the hammer down with all the strength I have left. The impact sends a jolt of pain from my already aching wrist to my shoulder. The small lump remains intact. I lift the chisel and look at the blade. It’s as clean as it was the moment I lifted it from its carrying case.

My mind flashes back to a similar moment in time, two days ago, when I held an ice ax rather than a chisel. The ice ax failed to break a piece away, but it wasn’t clean. It was covered in a thin layer of black. I doubt the ice ax was any sharper or more powerful than the chisel and hammer, but maybe, after sitting in the ice for so long, the shell was softer? Or perhaps it was because it struck the very tip of such a thin spike.

My eyes turn back to the distant tower, and I see it in my mind’s eye, rising high into the sky, a mile or more, tapering down into a spike thin enough to prick a toe. Is
this
what Kiljan stepped on? What I grasped in my hand?

“I already have a sample,” I say to myself.

“What?” Graham asks.

When I look up, he’s standing above me. I flinch back, falling onto my ass with a shout of surprise. “A sample. I think I have one.”

“You chipped this with a hammer?” He taps his foot on the solid floor and sounds dubious.

“An ice ax. In Iceland. Before all this started.”

“Where is it?” he asks.

“If the Secret Service is true to their word, delivered to my front porch. In New York.”

“
New York?
If you tell me this whole mission was a waste of time…” The threat lingers, but is never finished.

“We need to look around,” I tell him. “There could be more to learn.”