One Minute to Midnight

One Minute to
Midnight
More Strange Tales of the Unusual

STEVE LANG

This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are
either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Please find this and other
work by Steve Lang at:

http://SteveDLang.com

Copyright © 2016 Steve
Lang

All rights
reserved.

ISBN:
1530077605
 

ISBN-13:
978-1530077601
 

For Brandy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my wife Brandy and son Nicholas
for their endless patience as I sat behind my computer day after
day, night after night, to create the world of short stories you
are about to read. I love you both very much. Thank you Charlie
Michener for your editing expertise. Our work is not yet complete
and there are many more novels yet to write.

DEAR READER

2 Minutes to Midnight and
the follow up, One Minute to Midnight were inspired by my love of
history, science, and science fiction. In November, 2014 I decided
to write a story a week for a year to hone my craft as a writer.
This proved to be a challenging adventure, and one I am glad I dug
into, because I was afforded the ability to walk many unexpected
paths.
When I was sixteen stories into my personal challenge I watched an
interview with Ray Bradbury and in that interview he said: If you
want to be a writer, write a story a week for a year, and then
you'll be a writer, and write what
you
like to write about, so I did. I
began to write two stories a week, sometimes three at one
time.

I am delighted to present my second
anthology in the hope that you take something away from the words,
emotions, and crazy situations my characters get themselves into.
Thank you for reading,

STEVE LANG

the Eye

The following transcript was discovered in a
secret storage compartment under the floor of Nathan Choudry's home
in northwestern Pennsylvania by private investigators. After his
disappearance, his mother had hired a local agency to find her son,
and they recovered the document that you are about to read. This is
his final testimony.

Interviewer: Can you please tell us your name,
former rank, and occupation in the United States Air
Force?

Nathan: Nathan Choudry, Technical
Sergeant, turboprop mechanic, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Interviewer: Nathan, can you relay the
events of October fifth, 1997 at South Fork Air Base in
Utah?

Nathan: Well, I was there because I
had just been granted top secret clearance, and they were
retrofitting a chinook helicopter with some new stealth
technology.

Interviewer: Why were you selected for
clearance?
Nathan: It had to do with the rotor assembly and a whisper quiet
drive system, and they were also attaching a reverse engineered
laser weapon onto the helicopter. I had several years of experience
working on those engines and I guess I was just lucky, or
unlucky.
Interviewer: What do you mean reverse engineered? Reverse
engineered from what? Or is that information classified? What was
the laser weapon?

Nathan: I was never told that this was
classified information, not officially anyway. I want to make that
clear for the record before I discuss this further. They, the
military, had recovered part of an alien craft the army had shot
down, and had sent it off to a defense contractor to have it
patented and produced for military application. The laser was
something straight out of Star Wars. Essentially, it was a
controlled pulse that could be rapid fired in short bursts, and
could hit a target on the moon if given enough juice. The problem
was that in order to utilize long-range targeting like that
required huge amounts of power. That’s what the new drive system
was for.

Interviewer: Can you tell us what you
experienced on the night in question?

Nathan: What we saw that night was
something I'll never forget, and I feel lucky to be
alive.

Interviewer: Without any more
interruptions from me, would you care to tell your story? I think
listeners of Paranormal AM would like to hear what you saw, and the
details of that night. The diehard fans already suspect that
information is being kept from us by a shadow government, but
you've got some information that will remove all doubt. Go ahead
when you're ready.

Nathan: Sure, I'd be glad
to.

A crate arrived at the
underground base known as
The Cave
sometime around 1600 hours, coming in on an
unmarked white van. I thought it was a part for the helicopter, but
a team of guys in white lab coats came out and put the crate on a
crash cart. One of them had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and at
first I thought it was in case any of us tried to touch the crate,
but later I knew it had nothing to do with me or the other people
in the underground hangar. I was standing with another one of the
maintenance guys, Stan Peterson, and we were both curious about the
contents of that crate. Don't ask me why
that crate
and not the million other
odd things that would show up there every day.

"What do you think's in there?" Stan
asked me as we stood watching.

"I don't know and they don't pay me to
care." I lied.

The parts we needed for the helicopter
arrived and we began putting them on. While we did, I became
curious about the mechanics of the devices we were installing. The
laser was mounted on the nose of the helicopter, and the other
round device with a splined gear hole in the center was mounted
between the compressor and fan blades inside the engine. This was a
bizarre little device, and it connected via one fiber optic cable
directly to the electrical system of the laser. Our shop chief
Senior Master Sergeant Will Garcia was walking by and I asked him
about it.

"Hey Sergeant Garcia, do you know what
this thing is we're installing?" I asked him. He looked sideways at
us for a moment and I could tell he was debating on whether to
spill information.

"It’s a quantum energy generator." He
said.
"Ha ha! Good one, sir. What is it, really?"
"That device has the capability of generating more energy than a
nuclear power plant. It makes the laser on the front of this
helicopter a weapon of precision killing power from any distance.
All you need to do is acquire a target via GPS and once the laser
guidance system locks on you have a crater where a bad guy once
stood."

"That's amazing! Will we get to see it
work?"
"Get that helicopter back together and we can all take a ride. The
pilot's been sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes
since you guys dismantled his engine, wasting government dollars.
He's a contractor out of Raytheon, so there's not much I can do
about it since he doesn't report to me. Just hurry it up and we’ll
see what we can do."
We worked quickly to get the engine reassembled and ran a few
initial engine checks just to ensure the rotor wouldn't fly off and
kill us all when we tried to lift off the ground. After it was all
back together, Sergeant Garcia and the pilot came out to see our
work. A full bird colonel by the name of Smythe was present with
them. He had a constipated look on his face as he followed behind
the pilot and Garcia. The helicopter rested on an elevator that
would lift it through two blast proof doors at the top of the cave.
So, with the press of a button, we were suddenly rising through the
cavern and watching as the ceiling opened up to an amazing night
sky, filled with stars. They looked like tiny flashlights in the
sky, and I couldn't wait to get closer to them.

Our pilot turned the engine on and the
first thing I noticed was the silence. The engine made no sound and
the rotor blades were whisper-like, as advertised. The environment
was such that we could still carry on a conversation in a normal
tone of voice while the engine was working at full power. We lifted
off and began to climb high above a canyon and then our pilot
pushed the stick forward and then we were off, soaring over the
desert. He picked a rock outcropping to test the laser on and fired
a short beam. The rocks exploded as if a bomb had gone off, sending
rock fragments in every direction and proving the success of the
device. That's when it got weird. I suddenly noticed a
saucer-shaped craft hovering in the sky, flashing green lights in a
geometrical pattern.

"Hey, you guys see that?" I asked
them.

"See what?" Sergeant Garcia
asked.

I'd been in the military long enough
to know that when a superior asks you a question like that, your
answer can go one of two ways. The safe route, the one that keeps
you out of trouble or the not so safe career-limiting answer that
ruins an otherwise OK day. Garcia had to have seen it, but
acknowledgement of a UFO is strictly verboten and can get you stuck
in rank for the rest of your days, and can even get you demoted in
some cases. I'd heard of it happening before. "I guess it was
nothing, sir." I said. Garcia nodded and turned back around in his
seat.
The object was still out there, hovering, watching. We flew west
and the disk followed. The pilot shot a few more times into the
dark desert landscape below, and from the daylight simulated
monitor we watched a cactus explode.

"Damn! This is a whole lotta' fun!"
The pilot yelled.

Meanwhile, back at
the cave
, the four
scientists who had carted the crate back to their lab were opening
the box, but they had no idea what was waiting for them inside. It
was an orb about the size of one of those desktop globes, but it
looked like a bloodshot eye. It sat there staring at the scientists
like a demented bowling ball. Later on, one of the survivors told
me about it. It was extracted from one of the crashed spacecraft
and had been an enigma to the army investigators when they examined
it. None of them could figure out exactly what it was, so it was
sent to
the cave
for further investigation. I personally suspect they just
wanted to get rid of the object.

We flew around for a while longer
while I tried to ignore the flashing lights off to the west, and
the other two did the same. Just before we were about to head back
to the cave, I got the shock of my life. Beside me, on one of the
jump seats, was a tall gray man, who, aside from the color of his
skin, looked just like a human, but he was dressed in a silver
space suit and was looking at me. I was scared beyond the capacity
to move and stared back at him hoping that Sergeant Garcia and our
pilot—whose name I still didn't know—would see this encounter as
well. The space man looked over at them and back at me.

"Guys, we have company." I blurted
out. It was all I could think to say.

Sergeant Garcia turned around and his
mouth dropped open. Our pilot couldn't see a thing from his vantage
point, but he lost his train of thought and the helicopter began to
dip.

"Please, don't be alarmed. I'm here to
talk, nothing more, and I need your help." He said to me. Except
when he talked, he never opened his mouth.

"What can we do for you?" I asked in a
weak voice.

"You have a prisoner of mine in your
underground base. His name is Void the Omniscient and I need him
back before he becomes unstable again." The man said.

"Who are you?" Sergeant Garcia
asked.
"My name is Klactu, and I'm from a planet known as Green, in your
neighboring galaxy. A craft transporting Void the Omniscient to the
prison cube Rylon 5 was knocked off course by Void when he broke
free of his electrogrid containment unit and killed my partner
before crash landing on your planet."
"What do you mean? We don't have any alien life forms down there. A
crate with some parts came in earlier today, but that was it and we
only have military personnel and scientists in the cave." Sergeant
Garcia said.