Flightsuit (21 page)

There were a lot of police watching the car.   Three police cars were parked in one lane of the road.  The police were only allowing cars to go through the open lane if their driver's license indicated they lived deeper in Bumpas Cove.  Three of the cops were looking in the windows of Taylor's car, which was parked in the sandy gravel near the river's edge.  Hack's call to the Sheriff warned them against opening the car doors.  The Sheriff himself was on his way.  They'd recognized Hack's name, and the Sheriff and two more deputies were on their way.  They assumed that Hack was involved in another major terrorist infiltration and wanted in on the capture.  One of the deputies printed an article on the Cane Creek terrorist raid and made copies for each of them in case they had a chance to get Hack's autograph.

They hadn't yet arrived.

Ethan and Leo agreed that Ethan would stay in the grass while Leo would sneak down to the car.  Assuming the flightsuit's camouflage stayed on, it should be easy to sneak in undetected.  Leo wasn't sure how he'd activated the camouflage, so he was a little concerned that it might turn itself back off again just as he walked down into the group of police. 
I hope this helmet is bulletproof
.  He thought about it, and added,
I hope the rest of the suit is bulletproof too
.

He crawled away from Ethan.  He wanted to get clear of him before he stood up just in case the camouflage deactivated.  Twenty yards away, he looked at Ethan through the helmet.  Ethan was scanning the area around him. 
Ha.  He still can't see me.  That's a good sign.  Ok, here goes
.  Leo stood up, watching the cops closely for any sign they saw him.  The three cops that were looking in the car windows were now talking beside it.  A fourth was talking to the driver of a car that had pulled up as Leo crawled away from Ethan.  None of them reacted.  Leo thought they probably would have noticed someone just popping up in the weeds, so he assumed he was still camouflaged. 
Well, that's good
.  He stepped forward, trying to move the grass slowly as he passed.  After a few steps, his boot came down on a stick.  It broke with a SNAP! All four of the cops looked straight at him.  Leo froze, as he watched them through the helmet. 
Please be on camouflage.  Please be on
.

Apparently, it is
, he thought after the cops started talking again a few seconds later.  "Whew," he breathed out slowly, then clamped his lips, reminding himself not to make sounds.  There was no way to know if the suit might decide he wanted to talk with the cops and amplify the sound so they could hear through the helmet. 

Leo looked down.  He'd have to watch more closely where he stepped going forward.  The next steps were quieter, although it was hard to tell how much noise he was making from inside the suit.  He made it to the edge of the road.  The cop waved the driver past and stood in the open lane watching in both directions.  Leo stood for a moment.  He kept expecting to be discovered.  Any moment the cop was going to yell, "Hey you!"   To Leo's surprise, he hadn't, yet.  

He stretched the toe of the boot out, making an exaggerated tiptoe step.  Then another.  He smiled, then grinned, thinking how ridiculous he'd look if he
weren't
invisible.  A giant bear-sized suit tiptoeing directly in front of a cop.  He was careful not to let himself laugh out loud. 

He reached the edge of the road and realized closing the distance to the car was going to be much harder.  For one thing, he was close enough to the cops that they'd hear any sound his boots made.  The river's edge was all sand
, with smooth river-polished stones and grass patches.  He could easily spot occasional sticks and dried leaves.  The sand helped reduce his footfalls, but there was no way to avoid making footprints.  Even an unobservant person would notice footsteps appearing in the sand, and he still wasn't sure how much movement the suit's camo system could handle.  The cops would definitely notice a shimmery haze this close. 

He looked for a grass patch and put his foot just behind it, hoping the footprint would be hidden from the cop's view.  He waited, balancing himself, watching for any reaction. 
Ok, next.

He stepped behind another patch.  One
of the cops directly facing him looked down at the sand.  He stepped away from the car and knelt down to look at the footprint.  Leo was petrified and held his breath.  The cop reached down to touch the footprint with Leo's foot still in it.  His fingers jammed into the camouflaged boot, and he jerked them back. 

"Ouch," the cop said.  "What the heck?"  He reached his hand to the footprint more slowly the second time.  His fingers touched the boot again.  Mystified, he rapped on Leo's boot with his knuckles
, making a heavy metal sound.  The other two cops came over, standing behind the kneeling cop.  They were huddled around Leo, oblivious to his presence, for the moment.

The kneeling cop raised his fingertips from the boot tip up the shin of the suit and then sprang backward to sit on the sand.  The two standing beside him jumped back a step and reached for their holsters.  Leo jumped back too and ran around the back of Taylor's car.

The cops jerked their pistols into two-hand grips and aimed directly at Leo, although they only saw a hazy, ghostlike distortion.  In the weeds across the road, Ethan stood up, watching the scene unfold. 

Leo looked in the passenger window of Taylor's car with the cops aiming their guns directly at him.  He tried to open the door,
but couldn't get the gloves in the handle. 
It's probably locked anyway
, he thought.  He drew back his arm and held it for a moment, preparing to smash the window.  They'll probably shoot when I do this.  He glanced up at Ethan standing in the grass and decided he'd better hurry before someone spotted him.  He jabbed his arm forward.  The suit took over, and his gloved fist impacted the window faster than his eye could follow.  The passenger window imploded into glitter, spraying a lightshow of sunlight.  The driver's-side window burst out in larger pieces.  A twisted lightning-bolt crack ran across the front windshield. 

The cops ducked away from the explosion, shielding their eyes with elbows. 

Leo's fist was frozen within inches of the point of contact.  The suit relinquished control, and Leo grabbed a thick green journal from the passenger seat.  There was a wide rubber band around it holding loose pages.  As Taylor packaged his thoughts, he couldn't put the book and the bag out of his mind.  They were his prizes, at that point, all he had left, and they would provide his dreamt-of future.  Leo saw them in the background as they'd communicated and knew Taylor was eager to rid himself of the alien and get back to them.

Now the duffle bag
, he thought.  Then the first bullets hit him in the chest.

The exploding glass peppered the nearest cop when the car windows blew out.  A dozen pieces cut through his blue shirt and embedded into his forearm.  As they stumbled backward, he dropped his pistol into the sand and sat down staring at the outside of his forearm, trying awkwardly to see how badly he was injured.  All three officers had been saved worse injury by their Kevlar vests.  The other two were further from the car, and although later examination would find several pieces of glass in various locations, they'd not yet, in the excitement of the moment, realized they were injured. 

They both thought there had been a bomb in the car.  The suit's camouflage system hid Leo so thoroughly that only the curious cop had seen anything.  When Leo lifted Taylor's journal from the passenger seat, they saw the journal float out of the
car window and hang in midair.  They had a target, and training took over even though there was no explanation for what they saw. 

They fired seven rounds before stopping.  Five rounds hit Leo in the chest and abdomen, two coming through the journal first. 

As it stood on the cliff face, waiting for Taylor to arrive, the suit's energy systems had collected solar and neutrino energy preparing for the blast of focused energy that would send Leo and the alien's essence, in the form of a neutrino pattern, hundreds of light-years away.  Having fulfilled the final routine of its programming, it would continue collecting energy until fully recharged and would then detonate.  The explosive release of energy would have created a ½ mile wide crater and flattened trees for a full mile around. 

When the return trip routine cancelled, the suit was left with a full charge.

The bullets tore through the air, faster than sound.  Computer programs written on a planet, eons away in time and space, processed information through photonic processors, 800,000 times faster.  Against such a slow attack, the flightsuit's programming determined that a full-cover repulsion field was unnecessary and raised the field only in calculated impact areas. 

Then the flightsuit waited for the bullets to arrive.

As the bullets reached the field's outer periphery, two inches from the flightsuit's glass-metal surface, the suit began its analysis of the arrival vector.  The program allowed the bullet to travel almost to the other side of the field, the outermost surface of the suit, as it collected trajectory data.  Then, it reassigned the bullet's kinetic energy back to the vector's point of origin.  Since the bullet's inbound velocity was so low, relative to the suit's defensive design parameters, it drew energy from storage and boosted the bullet's return velocities.

The two rounds that deflected through the journal flew back through the same holes they created.  The suit's calculated point of origin for these rounds sent them harmlessly past the two cops.

The other rounds returned to their precise points of origin with a thousand times their initial energy.  The result was horrific. 

At such close range, the suit precisely calculated the point of origin for the five rounds.  One bullet actually impacted another round as it left the barrel.  The other four rounds hit the guns and the cop's hands.  The impact force blasted gun and bone fragments backward, instantly transforming them into a maelstrom.  The cop's arms exploded backward into their face and chest.  They stood for seconds with the stumps of their arms still extended.  One round continued its travel, exiting the cop's disintegrated shoulder blade.  Their faces went instantly white as they stood looking at their destroyed hands.  The younger cop turned around to stare at the curious
one who'd fallen to the ground when the car windows blew out.  His face had a stunned look as if he was asking, "Is this really happening?"

The curious cop stared at the scraps of skin and bone hanging from his partner's elbows and then at the bone and pistol shards still sticking from the bloody Kevlar vest.

Leo could not believe what was happening.  He'd snuck down to the car thinking he could snatch the journal and bag without any plan other than sneaking close to the car.  The suit had massively overreacted to the attack and rather than the bullets just bouncing harmlessly off like he thought they would, it had blown them back at the cops. 
Their arms are blown off
.  He just kept thinking
their arms are gone
as he stood there gawping. 

He took a step toward the injured cops.  His natural reaction was to help them in some way and apologize, as if that were possible, for what the suit had done.  He stopped himself
, realizing that the suit might actually, somehow, do something even worse. 
Just get the bag
, he thought
.  Just get the stupid bag and hide
.

For a moment, both of the injured cops stood.  The younger cop, a new father, fell first.  His eyes lost focus, staring into the air and he leaned over backward.  His head hit a smooth brown river rock laying in the sand.  In thousands of years, no human had moved this rock, never sat upon it.  It was unnoticed and unremarkable until the young cop's head split open upon it like a ripping melon.  It would sit upon the curious cop's desk until his retirement years later – as a terrible reminder of how close he'd come.

The curious cop stared in horror as blood ran off the rock and into mica-sparkling sand.  The young cop's exploded open wrists bled into the sand with the last beats of his shocked heart.

The curious cop looked up, but not in time.  The older cop fell across him, knocking his pistol into the sand.  The older cop reached up to him with the shattered stump of his arm.  It slid
down his shoulder before falling leaden onto the ground.  He'd wish afterward that he'd held his friend and said something comforting as he slipped away.  But his reflexes were faster than his good intention.  He slid himself out from under the body and watched his friend pass alone, too horrified to even say anything.  Their eyes met.  After a few seconds, he realized nothing remained behind his friend's frozen gaze.

Shaking now and near shock, he remembered the ghost.  He looked to the car and saw nothing at first.  Then he saw the journal bobbing in the air.  It moved toward the trunk.  At times he could see the journal in full, but it occasionally disappeared altogether or was only visible
as a sliver. 

As he watched, blinking, trying to focus the hazy apparition into clarity, the car dipped and shook on its shocks.  The bouncing stopped and the haze disappeared entirely, leaving only the floating journal to mark its presence.  Then it screamed. 
That didn't sound angry
, the cop thought,
it sounded frustrated.  Maybe scared.  What is this?

Then the haze returned, and the cop saw the apparition take form.  For less than a second
, he saw it.  He'd later tell the NSA agents, it looked like a man in a spacesuit.  He saw the figure's arm swing from overhead to crash into the car's trunk.  The impact almost lifted the car's front tires off the ground.  As the bounces settled, he watched the trunk lid rip itself loose and fly out across the road.  It clanged into a heap against the rock wall and fell noisily to the ground.  A large black duffle bag jumped out of the trunk and floated in the air with the book.  The cop shook his head, trying to clear his vision, but could only see the slight haze now, along with the book and duffle.  They floated around the car and toward him.  They stopped ten feet from him and just floated in the air.  He looked over at his pistol.  He could reach it, but didn't want to try after seeing the thing defend itself.  He looked back up at the thing he knew was there. 

The ghost said, "I'm sorry.  I didn't mean for it to hurt anyone.  Please help them
, and don't let them die."

Then the bag floated slowly to
ward the road.  Reaching the road, it shot through the air to land on a hilltop of tall yellow grass.  The cop watched, but it never reappeared.