David got two shots off before the thing was on him, grabbing him, and lifting him off the ground, knocking the gun from of his hand. This Fedora was solid black, no hints of iridescent blues, greens, or purples. Its wings were like the wings of a giant termite; long, thin, and insectile. They were wings that didn’t look like they could fly but they were and were strong enough to carry the Fedora and a human.
It appeared larger than the other Fedoras and, worse yet, its stinger looked sharper and it was trying to sting David with it.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a female Fedora or not. It was larger and not colored. I vaguely remembered something about female animals having a duller, drabber coat so they had an easier time hiding. The fact that she could fly meant she might be able to breed and I had killed a bunch of her mates. It might mean she was a queen of this hive or colonizing force or whatever the hell it was.
David struggled in her grip, twisting his body back and forth to avoid the stinger while punching her for all he was worth. I could see blood on his face and hands and realized he wasn’t punching her with his fist but with the bowie knife he wore on his belt. While he was getting pummeled, he was giving as good as he got.
I couldn’t let him fight her alone. I ran out to the street and picked up his gun. The safety was off and I pointed the gun at them but I had never fired a pistol before and it was different than the shotgun. I followed them with the gun, not sure I could hit her. I might hit David and make things worse.
He was tiring and it looked like the queen was tiring too. She flew higher and higher, four stories up, the buzzing of her wings taking on a jerky quality. Sudden she dropped him and he caught one of her legs before he could fall to the ground, losing his knife as he did so. The queen, losing altitude, tried to stab him in the face with her stinger.
I followed them with the gun and then fired five bullets from the gun before it was empty. I had no idea how many bullets hit her but I know at least one hit her wing and she spiraled in a controlled fall with David holding on for dear life. I dropped the gun and ran back to where my bat lay. I thought twice about it and retrieved the shotgun.
When I turned around, David was lying on the ground and the queen was crawling away from him, leaving a trail of black blood behind her.
“Oh, no you don’t, you bitch.” I cocked both of the hammers and went after her. “You don’t get to live.” I put the shotgun to my shoulder like I’d been taught, aimed it at her head, and pulled the trigger twice. My shoulder hurt like crazy from the shotgun’s recoil but that Fedora wasn’t going anywhere without a head.
“Six down, one to go,” I told David then turned around to see him twitching on the ground. I ran to his side, dropping the shotgun at his feet. His head was lolling back and forth and he was gasping for air. It looked like he was going into an anaphylactic shock. There was a puncture wound near his clavicle and I realized that he had been stung.
Patting his pockets, I found several of the epi-pens he brought with him to help keep him awake. I read the instructions and then jabbed the business end of it against his upper thigh and pushed the button. There was a jolt as the needle deployed, I held it steady and counted to ten. When I pulled back, David’s breathing had evened out.
“David? You okay? David?” I shook his uninjured shoulder. I stuffed the rest of the epi-pens in my coat pocket next to the shotgun shells.
His eyes rolled in his head and then focused on me. For a couple of seconds he blinked without recognition and then nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”
I helped him sit up. “You were having a reaction. It stung you.”
He tried to look at his shoulder and winced. “Yeah. I think it did.”
“Trust me. You’ve got a hole the size of my little finger. Now you have to get up.” I stood and offered my hand, terrified he would refuse it.
“Do I have to?” He rested his head in his hands.
“If you don’t want to die, you do.”
He looked up at me, suddenly remembering the sleep-death field.
I gestured again with my hand and put on my best Arnold impersonation and said, “Come with me if you want to live.”
David laughed weakly and accepted the help up. We were both a little unsteady on our feet; him from the sting, the fall, and the adrenaline; me from all my injuries reminding me they were there. I pulled out my phone and looked at the time. “Two and a half hours before this place goes boom. Let’s go.”
While David stopped to pick up his dropped pistol and his fallen bowie knife, I retrieved the shotgun and reloaded it. I had four shells left. Four shots. I had to make them count. Every movement hurt but I knew it was finish this or die. David looked a lot worse for wear when I turned back to him. He must have seen the concern on my face because he visibly straightened and smiled. “Lead on.”
“It’s up this way. Maybe we should drive.”
David thought for a moment. “I don’t think I should try driving like this. I’m woozy.”
“Do you want me to drive?” I frowned at him. His face was starting to swell. It made his skin shiny.
“Do you know how? Are you old enough?”
I pretended a nonchalance I didn’t feel. “If we find a car with an automatic transmission I can. Most kids around here know how to drive by the time they’re ten. So yeah, I’m old enough. Even if it isn’t legal.” I looked closer at his face. He was white now. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
He shook his head. “No. All I want to do is sleep. I don’t think I should sit at all. I think we need to walk.”
“All right. We’re about two miles away.”
On any normal day, the two mile walk would have been a breeze. As it was, my side and my thigh were throbbing within half a mile and all I really wanted to do was lie down and nap. Again, I wondered if my recent weird sleeping habits were because of what had been going on and getting hurt or if it was because of the sleep-death field. Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B. When I realized that I was staring at my feet instead of straight ahead I pulled myself together and shook my head. I would have tapped my cheeks but my hands were full of Mister Bat and Mister Shotgun. It was scary how comforted I felt carrying these weapons.
I noticed David had fallen more than a step behind me. When I looked back, his face was an unhealthy shade of gray and he had dark circles under his eyes.
“How you doing?” I asked.
“I’ve been better,” he admitted.
“Is it the sting?”
“No. I think it’s the quarantine zone. It’s getting to me.”
That scared me. “Even with the adrenaline? Do you need another?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I’m still moving…” He dug a small white packet out of his pocket.
I blinked at him,. “Cocaine?”
It was his turn to be surprised, “No. Smelling salts. Cocaine? Really?”
“You said you had drugs. You didn’t say you had those.”
He broke open the package and inhaled deeply. It was like he had slapped himself. His eyes opened wide and he jerked his face away from his hands.
“Damn.” He blinked his eyes clear of the tears. “I’m awake. I’m awake.” He started walking again with renewed energy in his step.
We walked along in silence for a couple more minutes before he asked, “So, wanna tell me about the whole mailbox incident?”
“What’s there to tell? It’s all in the file.” I glanced sideways at him, wondering why he asked.
“What you did is in the file but why did you do it? What happened? I’m asking because if I have something to concentrate on, I won’t remember how tired I am or how much I hurt.”
I was silent for a few steps before I said, “You know that my parents were killed on my thirteenth birthday.” He nodded. “From the moment that happened, I ceased to be me. I became that girl whose parents were killed by a drunk driver, that girl who was orphaned, that girl who survived. I became a thing, an object, something to be pitied, a statistic.”
I tucked the bat under my arm and wiped at my face, surprised that I wasn’t crying. I guess I was all cried out for the moment. “What no one cared about was the fact that the guy who hit our car stopped and pulled my parents from the wreckage before he got back in his car and drove away. I saw him do it. I was thrown from the car and lying in some tall grass. He never even noticed me. He would’ve gotten away with it. The kicker? My dad was still alive and bleeding to death. He had a broken neck. The driver could have helped my dad. All he did after pulling them out was look down at them, say ‘Well, damn,’ and readjust his hat before he got back in his car and left.”
“Harsh.”
I nodded. “For the next three months, someone had to come over and say how sorry they were. They weren’t. All they really wanted to do was get a look at me and see how Sharon and Matt were dealing with suddenly being my guardians. We were the talk of the town and I hated it. I was already on meds and this made it all worse. After a while I stopped being polite, stopped smiling, and stopped playing the small town polite chitchat game. I started telling people to fuck off.”
“Makes sense.” His voice was neutral. It was the kind of thing people said when they had nothing to say but wanted you to know they were listening.
“So that day, someone had come by to see if they could get new gossip for the mill and I wouldn’t see them. I pretended not to be home. By that time, I couldn’t stand to be around anyone who wasn’t family. I don’t even know who it was. They left a sympathy card in the mailbox. I can still remember what it said. ‘There is a reason and a plan for every pain that comes our way. What does not kill us makes us stronger.’ Handwritten was, ‘Be happy. Now God has two new angels to keep Him company.’”
David grimaced. “First, that sympathy card writer needed to be fired. Second, that person was an asshole.”
“Yeah. I lost it. I ripped it up, stomped on it, and then got my bat to beat the ever-loving crap out of the mailbox so I never received another piece of mail like that again. I didn’t stop at my mailbox. I kept going down the street.”
“And the hat thing?”
“The next day, my doctor upped a couple of my meds. Seroquel. That doc didn’t believe me when I told him it wasn’t working. It didn’t go well. I already didn’t like people. I tweaked. I started thinking people wore hats to hide the alien inside. Somewhere along the way, I decided the guy who left my parents to die wasn’t human. One thing led to another… I was arrested for destroying Federal property and then juvie which, with my meds, was a bad idea. Which eventually ended the court case with house arrest and bi-monthly meetings with my doctor and probation counselor.”
He glanced at me. “You seem to be doing well now.”
“Yeah, I guess. I suspect I’m going to have a complete breakdown after we save the world.”
“I hope not.”
“I hope not, too. I do have problems though. I hallucinate under stress. There is a small part of me that is praying to God you aren’t one.” I didn’t realize I was going to admit that fear until it was out of my mouth.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m real and here. Just like I promised.”
I didn’t tell him that when I hallucinate, sometimes it is so real I believe I feel things. Like now. I smiled and covered his hand for a moment. “I know.”
His hand was too hot. I knew he had a fever. The epi-pen must not have stopped the poison. We really were running on borrowed time. We knew it, and we were both ignoring it. I looked up and saw the airport within sight.
“What about you? I told you my deepest, darkest secret. What’s yours?”
David looked off towards the horizon and I wasn’t certain he was going to tell me until he began to talk.
“I told you I was in the Army. I spent most of that time over in Afghanistan. It was hard going. Kandahar. We got shelled a lot. In the movies, there’s a nice whistling sound when any form of incoming indirect fire comes down. Rockets, however, travel faster than the speed of sound. If you aren’t looking in the right direction, the first time you know you’re under rocket attack is when the first rocket in the volley impacts and explodes.” He shrugged at me and smiled a sick smile.
“When it comes to explosions, the sound is ambiguous. It’s the fact that the shockwave from the blast is slapping you in the face and your body that eliminates all doubt about it being an explosion. You can’t tell exactly what kind of explosion it is or how large it is. Essentially, how an explosion feels is mostly a factor of how large it is and how far away you are. So, a small explosion close by can feel about the same as a big bomb farther away.”
He rubbed his cheek, a habit of his, it seemed, when he was uncomfortable. “We were out on a mission—I can’t really tell you about it—it was highly classified, highly dangerous, and very important. Someone messed something up somewhere and we got caught between a rock and a hard place and someone started shelling us. It was loud and close. I think we were all practically deaf before we got out of there.”
His voice had taken on an emotionless quality that seemed weird next to his normal way of talking. “An extraction team was called and when they got there, we got hit hard. One of my guys, Sergeant Crusett, was killed. Because of the fire we were taking, we couldn’t even get his tags from him. We left a man behind because we had no choice. I left a man behind. It was my decision, my command.”
I could see the pain of the memory on his face as we made the turn down the road towards the airport in front of us.
“Only he wasn’t dead. He was unconscious and hurt but alive… and I was the one to leave him behind. Three days later, we got word that he was a prisoner of war. Three months later, he really was dead—beheaded on camera.”
David looked at me, his eyes bleak. I didn’t think he was looking at me. He was looking at the man he’d left behind and I suddenly understood why he was here, risking his life to try and save mine. I had no idea what to say to him until the words popped out of my mouth.
“You’re here now.”
He looked at the airport, checked his gun and his knife, and nodded. “I’m here now.”
We both looked at the airport and knew that it wouldn’t be as easy as turning off a switch. We just didn’t know how hard it would be in the end.