A Private Little War(30)

“Unusual like how?”

“Unusual like unusual, Roadrunner. I don’t know. Do you see anything unusual right now?”

“It’s nighttime. It’s dark.”

“Which means you have nothing to report, so clear the channel.”

“Diane, what happened to Antoinne?”





Ted was up when Tanner, one of the other flight controllers, knocked on the door of his tent. Unable to rest and sick with a knot of worry that felt like a stone in his throat, Ted had gotten into the gun cases between which he normally pressed his shirts and trousers and had begun pulling out files and papers, maps, supply logs and repair records. He needed to make some kind of plan. On his table, the clock mocked him with every negative number. He’d removed his sidearm and put it away in a drawer.

Ted got up and jerked open the door. Tanner stood with a hint of attention still in him. He was young, so recently out of service (which one, Ted couldn’t recall) that the tatters of discipline still clung to him like the rags of a uniform he couldn’t quite completely remove.

“At ease, Tanner,” Ted said. “It’s the middle of the night. Why are you bothering me?”

“Diane told me to come get you,” he said, swallowing the “sir” only with visible difficulty.

“She have a reason?”

“Something wrong with Captain Carter’s mission, I think.”

Ted closed his eyes, sucking a deep breath through his nose. He suppressed the urge to cough, so choked instead, strangling on the shit in his lungs.

“She said she needs you now.”

“About face,” Ted croaked.

“What?”

“Turn the fuck around!”

Tanner did, and Ted doubled over—half coughing, half vomiting in the dirt outside his tent with his shoulder pressed into the frame of the door. He did it quickly, coughed again, then stood, shot the cuff on his jacket, wiped the back of his mouth with his shirtsleeve, straightened his jacket, and told Tanner to turn back around.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Tell me the problem while we walk.”





Carter just happened to be looking over the side of the plane—out past the forward edge of the lower wing—when the world ended. He was squinting down into the big black nothing below him, comparing it in his head to the big black nothings in front of him and to either side, trying to make it resolve into some kind of answer by force of exasperated will alone when, quite unexpectedly, it did.

For just an instant, as the first bright blooms of the explosions flared blindingly below him, Carter thought that somehow he had done this: that his hatred of this place and its people had suddenly been made impossibly manifest in scourging fire from his eyes. He watched, dumbstruck and gawping like a yokel, frantically touching hands to all of his controls, wondering, in a panic, if he’d accidentally triggered a bomb drop even though he wasn’t carrying bombs and none of the planes here were capable of carrying anything large enough to look like Alfred Nobel’s wrath from a mile up.

And then, suddenly, Carter’s fracture experience—last vestige of the peace of the ignorant and all-powerful—is ripped from him, carried away on the rising energy of the shock wave that lifts them up, the man and his plane, and carries them briefly free of gravity and airflow and elevator control; lifting them as if on top of a bubble, expanding the sky around them into a torrent of disturbed molecules that, if they had a color, would be like the halo around an angel’s head. A shade of preternatural grace and fury.

Together, they billow straight upward, then are dropped like something vile. Carter stomps and throttles Roadrunner into a wide, falling inside bank and flies straight into the collapsing bubble of a second wave that swats them toward the ground with the weight of atmospheres righting themselves. Air cascades onto them like a waterfall, rushing down to fill the pressure void. Carter doesn’t even realize he is yelling until he splits back east, comes out of the mess, and feels the control surfaces find some traction.

He levels out into a choppy glide. His throat hurts. His mouth is dry as bone. Ducking behind the windscreen, he pulls his goggles down, says a brief thanks to the man who invented the condom catheter, and then pants like a dog until he gets his breath back.

The radio squawks. Carter’d never closed the channel. Diane was probably deaf now, he thinks. Maybe it served her right.

The flight computer is out, screen black and cold as a dead eye, and Carter is lost, bubble altimeter holding at eight hundred feet, compass nosing east-nor’east. His stopwatch rattles around somewhere by his feet and the radio is clacking now—squelch, squelch, squelch. Distress sign. Diane asking if he is dead or dying or knocked brainless or what.