***~sigh~ Ok, I'm slapping my forehead here. I shoulda slipped this in a little sooner. This occurs at the same time that The Drow are teaching Sariel and before they move to Azrael's home. The reason that I mention it is because in the last chapter and this one - it's still summer. See? This is the reason that I end up with sticky notes stuck all around the periphery of my screen.0_o
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It was a little after eight when they came to wake Monnie up. She smiled up at the pair of them, seeing that they were so excited. She could only imagine how it had been for them, preparing for this one day for years, and never saying a word to the Colonel in all of that time.
"We've got a busy day ahead," Billy said, "we would have had a lot of flights to make, but we started a while ago with Hank and me slinging containers over there from a little after dawn to set them down near where we'll live. We've already got containers of spare parts and enough material to make another one of our little refineries for the fuel."
Hank nodded, "All there is left is three trips," he said, "one to haul the last full fuel bladder, one to haul a bladder full of old kerosene that we can freshen up into fuel as the first batch when we get the refinery going and one trip with weapons to shoot up the Colonel's boat, since we know where it's moored."
"I don't understand any of that, "she laughed, "I just love to see how happy you are to tell it."
But her smile faded as she stared at what it was that she'd be riding in. "What is that?" she said, as she looked at a rather ungainly thing sitting outside in the sunshine. It was mostly white with some red here and there.
"It's called a Sea King, "Billy said as he opened a door for her, "You just sit here and don't touch anything. I'll be happy to show you what everything is and what it does after we get it all done. Oh, and be sure to keep your feet off those pedals there."
She climbed up and he strapped her in, explaining how to get out of it in a hurry if she needed to. Monnie looked around at all of the switches, knobs and gauges while Billy set to the engine start-up.
He placed a set of headphones on her head. "What is this for?" she asked.
"It gets loud in here when it's running," he said.
There was a crackling whine for a few seconds, followed by a strange roaring sound. The whine could be heard again and then a second roar. The dark bobbing things in her view outside began to move, and the whole thing shook a little unsettlingly. Monnie looked over at Billy often during all of this, but he was looking intently at things in front of him. He did turn at one point, and Monnie was amazed to hear his voice in her ears.
"It's supposed to do this," he smiled, and she didn't feel even a bit better. "We have to be in the air before Hank comes in another minute. That's why I'm not talking much."
She thought about it. He'd said that they had to be in the air. In all of this, Monnie had forgotten that she didn't really know what this entailed. She didn't know it could be done. Flying in all of the many forms developed over mankind's history was now a non-existent art. Nobody just flew unless they were birds or, ... demons.
It was impossible to fly.
But she decided that she had to trust them. They'd been doing this for a while, she told herself. They knew what they were doing, she said to her nervous stomach.
Monnie couldn't decide whether to undo the straps of the safety harness holding her in her seat and jump out, or if she ought to just throw up again.
In the end, it was Monnie's fear of the thought of actually flying which prevented her from going with them. No one knew what an aircraft was. Nobody had seen one fly in hundreds of years. Monnie wanted to go with them.
She just couldn't.
She told Billy as she yelled at him and he offered to blindfold her, something, anything, but they couldn't afford to waste the fuel of even one more start, because if they weren't on the island with everything, they'd be, at worst, in another place far from where their ability to make more was. He called Hank on the radio and they both tried to reason with her, but by then it had become a visceral thing in Monnie.
She unfastened her seat harness, opened the door and ran. Billy eased back to ground idle and reached over and grabbed the door that she'd left open. When he was back in his seat, he keyed his mike.
"What are we gonna do, Hank?"
He heard his brother's sigh, "We've been trying to get away from here for a few years now, Billy. I dunno. I'm in a shaky hover with the fuel bladder under me. I can't set down without you on the ground unless I hit the release and drop it and we can't afford that. All I can think of is to get these loads over and look for her when we get back. We'll know better then if we have the fuel to spare to look for her. I only hope that we can find her and get her to try again."
To Monnie as she looked back, the machine that Billy rode in looked more like a huge carnivorous insect which had captured him and was taking him away. The thought made more sense that seeing it as a tool to transport people. It sounded angry as it rose into the air.
On another level in her brain, she was seriously asking herself if she'd just lost her mind. She'd found two people who really cared about her and she was watching what had to be the only chance at happiness that she'd ever have leave her behind, the way that she felt.
She doubted that Billy could see her, but she stepped out from the corner of the hangar that she'd hidden herself behind and began to run after him, waving.
But then the noise of his machine was overshadowed by something louder and she saw a second one of the machines as it flew past the space between the hangars. It was much larger than the first one and it looked evil to her. She stopped, and the next thing that she knew, she was running for her life again.
They made five crossings back and forth that day, returning to the old base twice for more of their things. Both times that they returned, they spent precious minutes of their air time searching for Monnie. The second time, they both rode in the larger attack helicopter, since it was also made to carry a heavy load. Billy sat in the weapons officer's seat ahead of and a little under Hank.
They looked for twenty minutes - hundreds of pounds of fuel to them, but they didn't see her. They landed and loaded up for the last time. It was the position of the sun in the sky and the amount of fuel that they had left which forced them to leave. They didn't speak as they lifted off that time, and said nothing as they flew toward their new home.
Monnie was miles away by then, making her way south back to Lozenjellis, but she watched the heavy thing as it hunted for her while she hid from it in the ruin of a motel next to the road. When she couldn't hear it anymore and it was far out of her sight, Monnie Aldergrove sat with her face in her hands and cried.
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A solitary figure stood on the sand of what had once been known as Manhattan Beach in the late afternoon sunlight. He was wiping blood from the blade of a large sword with a piece of cloth taken from the body of one of the unfortunate victims of this. She wasn't one of his victims; she was just one of many who had perished before he'd arrived. He was getting better at predicting where he thought these demons would appear, but he'd gotten here too late for many here.
When he'd begun as what he was, he usually arrived days afterward.
At least a few of the others had gotten away, he thought. The beach was a popular place to come to swim and bathe and it could be a little crowded, now that there were more people coming to live here.
He looked around. There were a few other torn human bodies, none living now. The rest of the carnage, most of the ripped-up flesh here had belonged to the ones that he'd come here to kill, demons, every one of them, both genders, all sizes. He knew that there were a couple more still here somewhere close by.
He heard the soft sounds of footfalls on the sand and turned, seeing the pair of males who came running at him. A third was in the air above them on the way down. He groaned. He was tired and had just cleaned his blade. With a wave of his flung-out hand, they shrieked and fell backwards in a red spray of their blood. The one in the air fell wetly just beyond him on the sand.
If only he knew how they got here, he thought as he turned back to walk into the city.
Demons in Lozenjellis, the report had said in his mind. He wanted to shrug. There were almost always demons here these days, more than anywhere else. It was a big place, after all, and he couldn't be everywhere at once. He looked down at himself. His leather clothing was wet with their gore.
He groaned again and turned back to pick up the cloth once more. If he dipped it in the Pacific Ocean, maybe he could use it to wash most of this filth off of himself.
He froze suddenly, hearing that odd sound again. He looked out to sea and stared trying to see into the glare of the sun which, while not nearing the horizon quite yet, was still making it hard to spot whatever this was. This was the fifth time today that he'd heard the sound, a strange beating roar out to sea.
He saw it then, not far off the horizon, a large black dot which flew in a horizontal path perpendicular to the direction that he was looking in. There was a brief flash as though the sunlight had reflected off a shiny surface for a second. He saw no wings. If it was a beast of some sort which could fly, wouldn't it have wings such as he himself had? That was how he flew, after all. He wondered briefly about taking off himself to give chase. He wanted to know more.
But he was tired at the moment, and he'd been here all day, mostly. His seeking had brought him no closer than somewhere called Elscondo, though he wasn't certain if that was the right way to say it. So many names had been tortured and lost. He hadn't landed that far away, it seemed, but he'd lost a lot of time trying to get his bearings in the jumble of a massive dead city made up of many of the smaller cities which had once grown around it.
He decided to leave it be -- for now. He had resources to learn about what this was, and anyway, it seemed to be going back and forth to that island out there, just visible as a smear along the horizon. He knew that he'd likely be back soon enough anyway.
