The sonic boom from a squadron of Air Force fighter jets hit their ears as five of them streaked their way through the sky. The jets broke formation before they reached the spot where the three were floating, intent on eradicating the threat that had breached United States air space.
Annabelle whooped, her yell whipped away by the wind.That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
Can you get us down any faster?Katie wanted to know.
I’m trying,Sean said.
He got a little distracted when an explosion ripped through the air. All three of them looked to the right where a jet had exploded in midair, pieces of it falling to the earth below. Two fighter jets banked away from the target they’d just taken out, curving back around their way.
The enemy wouldn’t land, so they shot him out of the sky,Annabelle said.
Sean turned his attention from the sky to the ground, gritting his teeth. The sooner they reached the ground, the sooner they could maybe figure out what the hell their next course of action was. Luckily, that wasn’t his job anymore. Figuring out his own personal exfil was no longer on the table. Katie was in charge, and Sean happily ceded that task to her.
When they finally landed in the middle of a field—the middle of nowhere really—Sean breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Freefall, phased or otherwise, was not his favorite pastime. He didn’t let go of Katie or Annabelle, unsure of the status of the aerial fight above. He wouldn’t put it past the remaining enemy fighter pilots to strafe them.
“Were you able to get anythin’ from the pilot’s mind?” Annabelle asked.
“Nothing of note. He seemed to have been kept out of the loop like Jansen. I couldn’t dig deep before he got blown up,” Katie said.
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer flyboy. Bless his heart.”
Sean snorted. “Yeah.”
Katie shifted on her feet, squinting against the harsh sunlight. It was spring, but it looked more like summer in the Great Plains. The field they stood in was a patchwork of brown prairie grasses with clusters of bushes and trees scattered in the distance. If the weather hadn’t become so harsh over the years, this area of Kansas might have been thriving.
The farms that used to fill the middle of the country had all faded away beneath high temperatures and lack of water. Tearing up the trees to make room for more fields nearly two hundred years ago had created the second great Dust Bowl, a manmade disaster exacerbated by climate change.
That’s when most of farming started to move northward, into the green zone near the border shared with Canada. Huge vertical farms were erected to better control crop yields and irrigation. Corporate ranches producing cattle, pigs, and chickens could no longer be subsidized by the federal government. The food and water shortages during that time had killed off a lot of people, and not only in the United States.
Standing on the cracked bones of the old world, Sean only hoped the MDF arrived soon.
“Base knows our rough location,” Katie said, and Sean half-wondered if she was reading his mind. “I can guide them to us once they’re within range of my telepathy. For now let’s find some cover.”
Annabelle pointed at a copse of trees in the distance. “What about over there?”
“Let’s go.”
Katie led the way, all three of them keeping a critical eye on the sky. The dueling fighter jets had disappeared over the horizon, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t return. He didn’t let go of Katie or Annabelle, not even when they were hunkered down beneath the flimsy shade found beneath a scraggly group of trees. Until they were in the clear, Sean wasn’t going to risk their lives.
Some fifteen minutes later, Katie broke the quiet that had settled between the three of them. “Fighter jets are returning to their base. They managed to take out another enemy jet, but the third got away.”
“Have to wonder where the hell Declan is hidin’ them,” Annabelle said.
“Private airfield maybe?” Sean mused.
“They could’ve launched from anywhere if they traveled through atmo. Someone’s head is going to roll, it just won’t be ours,” Katie said.
Sean nodded agreement. A breach of the country’s borders was no small issue and a review was definitely going to happen. “Stanislav must have helped Declan plan the attack. Question is, did they hope to kill all of us, or just Jansen?”
Annabelle snorted. “Shootin’ that bastard out of the sky is one way of keepin’ him outta the loop.”
Conversation drifted away from what they’d just survived to lighter subjects as they passed the time until their pickup arrived. A little over an hour later, Katie looked up at the sky and nodded to herself.
“Extraction in two minutes. Let’s meet them in the field,” she said.
“Stay phased?” Sean asked.
“I think we’re in the clear, but we’ll stick close.”
