Halloween had worked out poorly, but Jacob tried to understand the circumstances, even as he sat at his desk, in his bedroom, in the home in which he'd grown up. His first year of University ought to have come with parties, the possibility of a little under-aged drinking, the chance to get out from under his parents' watchful eye and experience a tiny bit of independent living.
Maybe even meet a girl,
Jacob sighed.
Sadly, as he'd learned from friends currently living on campus and attending classes, the straitjacketing of the students and other restrictions had made the whole place at least as bad as the option he'd taken -- online classes from home.
Sure, the family house had a decent Internet connection and he could learn from there, but Jacob still felt ripped off. His older brother, Bill, had left home early enough to get the full University experience. The guy even had a degree now and a job that let him keep working through the whole mess of "quarantine" and "social distancing".
Not me,
he sighed,
stuck at home with Mom and Dad.
As it happened, however, his parents had gone off for the night, attending a party small enough they wouldn't get charged or fined under the restrictions put in place at the beginning of the month.
Leaving me at home without even the nine people to keep me company I could legally have,
Jacob shook his head, wishing at least one, maybe two of his friends hadn't gone off to a far flung campus somewhere.
Dammit.
He stood up from his desk, flipped off his bedroom light and ignored the homework on the little laptop for a moment, turning and walking over to look out his bedroom window. The overall plan for his education, Jacob acknowledged, made a lot of sense. He could get through school in a slightly boring way and come out of it with a university degree, by which time the corona virus and all the crap associated with it should have long passed.
Halloween shouldn't be wasted this way, though
, he protested with a shake of his head,
and it's a Halloween on a Saturday with a full moon!
Jacob watched that moon rise to the tips of the trees behind his house, silhouetting the very tallest of them as they towered watchfully over the old subdivision.
Cold as fuck out there,
he sighed, but the house seemed too close, too warm and too stuffy.
With a shrug, daring the cold to enter his room and chill his frustrations, he unlocked the little safety peg at the centre of the frame and slid the old storm window aside on its rails. Behind it, a screen protected against the entry of mosquitoes. This too he slid aside, knowing that the mosquitoes had left sometime between when the summer heat had drained away and when the leaves had turned colour and fallen.
In the distance, Jacob heard a crack, a sound that rolled a bit like thunder, but at the volume of an amateur's firecracker.
Someone else having fun,
he thought,
someone who isn't me.
Jacob jerked as the moon seemed to flicker in front of him. He brushed a stray strand of his dark hair aside from his eyes and leaned out to look more carefully. For a moment, he could have sworn he'd seen a trail of smoke crossing the face of that perfect, bright circle. He squinted and stared.
Again!
The trail started thin, black and narrow, almost completely opaque. But in less than a second, it widened and dissipated, leaving nothing for any witness who hadn't stared directly at it.
Another crack sounded, louder and closer.
Strangest goddamn fire crackers,
Jacob's face twisted in wonder,
unless somebody's got a weird-ass drone out there. Do they make drones that fast? With smoke trails?
He listened to the soft, cold breeze playing through the trees, wondering if such a wind could really diffuse a smoke trail as quickly as he'd just seen.
In the air above his window, Jacob heard a fast, hissing sound, a swish through the air so loud and close that he flinched and ducked his head. The black trail appeared overhead, heading directly away from his window, dissipating as it went. This time, however, he got a long look at it until it disappeared over the trees.
What the hell? How many of these are in the sky tonight?
Jacob felt he would have heard about a drone that could do that and, now that he'd seen it, he couldn't imagine a drone creating that much smoke.
How much mass can a drone carry, anyway?
More smoke trails appeared, crisscrossing the sky, filling it with flitting black arrowheads which zigged and zagged apparently at random. The sky cracked with anger and a green burst fired out of one of the moving clouds.
Jacob stared in fascination as the sky became a conflagration of green beams of light and thunderous cracks, all punctuated with the creepy, sizzling sounds generated by whatever lay at the front of each smoke trail.
The night sky cleared suddenly, the black jets going off in different directions and spreading out, leaving an eerie silence behind. A moment later, Jacob became aware of a distinctive, low rumble almost ominous in nature as it grew in volume.
They're all coming back?
With a horrific, tearing sound, hordes of the little trails converged in the sky overhead and a horrendous crack tore through the night, a green flash emanating from where their paths crossed.
Have the idiots smashed up all their drones?
But, no, Jacob could see that most of the trails continued on past the point of intersection. All but one them, at least, which tumbled in a slow spin toward the ground.
It's going to come down right in the forest behind our house,
he realized, peering at it more closely in the moonlight, now that it had slowed down.
Whoever controlled it, however, still had a bit of juice left. The thing at the head of the smoke trail righted itself, ceased its spin and set itself on a track.
It's coming toward the house,
Jacob realized, hoping it wouldn't hit the roof.
Maybe the drone will make it, or at least crash in the front yard.
At the last moment, however, as the hiss grew to the loudest sound he'd heard yet, the mysterious shape at the head of the black smoke trail dipped directly toward him.
"Shit!" Jacob shouted, jumping back onto his bed.
The hissing, smoking mess flew through his window, right in front of his face, narrowly missing him as it filled his room with choking, black smoke. It crashed into his dresser across against the far wall with a thunderous crack of breaking wood.
==================================
Jacob rubbed the back of his head where it had struck his bed's wooden headboard and surveyed his room. Too much had happened all at once for him to even feel anger at that point. Urgency ruled his concerns. The stupid drone would probably keep belching its black smoke inside his room until he either stomped on it or threw it back out his window. But how could he find the infernal device in a room full of sulphurous-smelling black smoke?
And god, what damage did it do? That crack it made on collision sounded awful.
To his surprise, once his vision cleared of stars and little black spots, the room didn't seem smoky at all. A brief, grey-ish haze hung over the room, but even that quickly dissipated.
In the darkness, Jacob peered toward his dresser and saw a large, amorphous dark pile of... of what? He tried to remember if he'd left a hamper of laundry for the drone to smash into.
At least it isn't smoking, or whirring around trying to get airborne again.
The pile twitched and Jacob jumped.
Then it moaned.
What. The. Fuck.
Jacob moved quickly across his room toward the door, his instincts driving him thoughtlessly in that direction with the twin concerns of shedding light on the situation and making an escape available should the light reveal something dangerous.
The moment he flipped the light switch on, filling the room with a blinding light, the shape on the ground moaned again.
"No light," it begged, weak and hoarse, holding its black-cloth covered arm over its face. "They'll see."
The voice, Jacob realized, sounded female, and it didn't excite him to feel threatened. His instinct to maintain a path of retreat dissipated as quickly as the black smoke had faded. She needed help and she feared someone finding her.
Without a further thought, he doused the lights, immediately sorry for having endangered her.
She shifted again, moaning, her half-raised body collapsing to the floor. Though the smoke had left, the smells of char, sulphur and other, more awful burning odours still lingered.
She's hurt, whoever she is.
Jacob knelt next to her and, by the faint light from his dimmed laptop screen across the room, he inspected her. She smelled of burning fabric and the black layers she wore looked tattered and frayed. He made out the hue of her skin made as an extraordinarily pallor, a trick of the light lending her a tint of green.
"What happened?" he whispered to her.
She twitched, her eyes opening as if she'd lost and suddenly regained consciousness.
"The window," she breathed urgently. "Close it... quickly."
Her voice commanded respect, even in its weakness, and Jacob leapt up to obey, sliding the screen shut and locking it. The thicker glass window, however, remained jammed against his attempts to slide it even the least bit.
"Good enough," she breathed to him across the room. "Good enough..."
Outside the window, now that he could pay attention, Jacob made out the sounds of swishing overhead. Black trails darted across the sky, aimless and confused.
Are they searching for her? Planning to finish her off? Apparently I don't need to close the glass part of the window, but won't she get cold?
He returned to her side.
"Are you alright?" he whispered. "What can I do?"
She only moaned, her bleary eyes fluttering closed.
Jacob considered his options. Despite everything that had happened, including what he had come to understand as a great battle waged across the sky over his house, the woman had crashed through his window and destroyed his dresser but still seemed to be in one piece. On the other hand, she smelled burnt, could be bleeding, and might need help and protection.
Leaning over, he slid his arms through her rags and under her body, finding her shoulders and the undersides of her knees.
