u/ApertiV

This retelling is heavily based on a bizarre, documented string of events that actually occurred in the summer of 1969, right outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

~

The thing came off the bluff so fast John couldn't tell what was tree and what was animal until it was already on the hood.

Tommie came on with a blood-curdling wail, one that he had never heard out of her in seven years of marriage.

The lizard brain held his foot flat on the gas before his logical side caught up.

The Chevy's tires spun in the loose grit.

White fur in the windshield, the wiper arms torn off in one motion, then a hand. He kept thinking later it was a hand. Five fingers.

Long ones, thick as a man's thumb, with claws on the ends that scraped at the safety glass and left it spider-webbed but not broken.

The smell came through the vents. Wet dog and meat that had sat too long in a hot trunk.

"GO, JOHN, GO!"

"I'm goin', woman, I'm goin'!"

The car lurched and the thing slid sideways, dragging across the paint.

One claw caught the metal and tore a gouge from the hood ornament all the way back past the front wheel well. He would measure it later with Tommie's sewing tape.

A whole eighteen inches. Some of the paint was dragged away by the claw, he figured, wherever the claw was now.

The sound it made when it fell off the car. He would imagine it every single time, clear as it was yesterday.

He didn't look in the mirror. He didn't slow until they hit the gas station out on Jacksboro Highway.

The Texaco sign was the single most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Tommie's hand was on his thigh. Her fingernails had cut through the denim. He hadn't even noticed.

"John."

"I know."

"John, what was..."

"I don't know. Honey. I don't know."

The kid working the pumps, sixteen maybe, came around the side, wiping his hands on a rag the color of a rotten peach.

He looked at the hood. He stared at the gouge, then at John.

"Hit a deer, mister?"

John couldn't make his mouth work. Tommie answered for him.

"Sure. Big buck."

The kid nodded slowly, the way people do when they don't believe a word you say but they aren't going to be the one to start trouble now.

"That's some fine buck."

He filled the tank and didn't say anything else. He kept looking at the gouge.

By noon the next day, half the west side of Fort Worth knew.

By three, the phone in the kitchen wouldn't sit still.

By dusk, there were trucks parked all the way down to the mailbox.

Ford F-100s mostly, a couple Chevy C10s, a beat-up Studebaker that belonged to Wendell Mott 'cause his daddy left it to him and he wasn't going to be the one to junk it.

Earl pulled up in his green pickup with a .30-30 Winchester racked across the back window.

He stepped out and spat a wad of Beechnut onto the overgrown grass before taking a long swig off a can of Lone Star.

"So, where's this gawl-damn boogeyman at, Johnny?"

"Out at Greer."

"Out at Greer?" Earl said it like he was testing the words for poison. His face scrunched up.

"Cousin? You tellin' me there is a Sasquatch out at Greer Island?"

"I ain't tellin' you it's a Sasquatch. I'm tellin' you what I saw with my own two eyes."

"Well." Earl hitched up his belt. "What'd you see, exactly?"

John lit a Marlboro. His hand was shaking some, and he hated the fact that Earl noticed it.

"Big. Seven foot. White fur on the chest, somethin' dark on the back. I mean, look, it was on me in about a second and a half. I didn't take a damn picture."

"Smelled, though?"

"Smelled like the dump in August."

Earl looked at him for a long time, then at the Chevy, then at the gouge in the hood. He ran a calloused thumb over the exposed bare steel.

He leaned down, inspecting the sheer depth and leverage required to make those cuts.

"Well." He spat again. "I'll be go-to-hell."

Earl turned around and faced the growing crowd of local roughnecks, mechanics, and farmers milling about the yard.

He let the silence hang for a heavy second.

"Something big and ugly thinks it owns Greer Island," Earl projected his voice, thick with sudden, unwavering authority. "Something that thinks we are just prey."

The shift in the front yard was palpable.

The mood violently morphed from primitive, superstitious fear to absolute, righteous defiance.

This was Texas. This was America in the summer of 1969.

In exactly a week, human beings were going to step out of a tin can and walk on the lunar surface just because they willed it to happen in the face of the Commies.

These men had paved over the untamed wilderness and conquered a hostile continent with iron rails and rifle lead.

They were the undisputed masters of this rock. They were absolutely not about to surrender their local fishing hole to some overgrown, scaly swamp ape.

The collective pride of man is a terrifying force. Word spread through the county like a wild brushfire fed by kerosene. They bypassed the police entirely because the law handled speeding tickets.

They counted a militia of roughly forty-three men in the yard, contributing to the atmosphere of B.O. and cigarettes.

Hollis Yarborough was three fingers into a fifth of Old Crow and kept walking in and out of the line and getting counted twice.

He had brought a single-shot .410 that had belonged to his daddy and he was, by his own admission, going to be no goddamn use to anybody, but he came anyway because that is what a man did when his neighbor called.

Walt Pickens showed up in his Korea-era field jacket even though it was ninety-two degrees an hour after sundown.

Some old habits a man does not unlearn.

He had a Remington 870 pump and three boxes of double-aught buck, and he'd said maybe eight words since he stepped out of his truck.

"What's the play, Walt?" somebody asked him.

Walt looked at the dark line of cedar across the field.

"Quiet and slow now. Don't shoot each other."

That was the play, at least.

The deputy was a fresh-shaven kid named Reese, twenty-four years old, fresh enough his uniform still had the creases the factory put in it.

He had been sent because the old sheriff didn't want to come himself but didn't want forty rednecks running through the brush at night without a badge somewhere nearby to take the heat when, not if, it went sideways.

Reese had his service revolver, a flashlight, and an expression that said he wished he had called in sick.

"I want it on the record," he announced, holding up both hands, "that I am tellin' all y'all to go home. I am here in an observational capacity. I am not, repeat, not deputizin' anybody."

"Bless your heart," Earl said.

"I mean it, Earl."

"I know you do, son."

Greer Island in July at full dark has a smell to it. Mud, cedar bark, lake water gone warm and still. The ninety-degree heat trapped under the canopy was suffocating.

Three or four flashlights swept the brush ahead and behind, while some swung at the canopy of the trees. They moved the rim trail in a loose column.

John was up near the front because Earl had decided that was where the storyteller belonged.

He'd brought his daddy's .30-06, a Winchester Model 70 with a Weaver scope on it, though what good a scope did at night he could not have told you.

"Y'know what we look like right now?" Hollis said from somewhere in the middle of the line.

"What?"

"Bunch of damn fools."

Walt held up a fist. Everybody stopped. He didn't say anything.

John strained his ears.

The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water poured directly down his spine.

The woods were dead silent.

Ten minutes ago, the local cicadas and bullfrogs were screaming so loud you had to shout to be heard over the hum.

Now, there was absolutely nothing. Nature damn well knew something was in the dark with them.

The smell crept in.

It did not hit them all at once, but started as a faint waft of rotten eggs, then rapidly blossomed into a nauseating, putrid wave of dead fish and raw sewage.

Walt pointed.

The bluff was sixty yards on, give or take. The trees thinned out toward limestone. There was something on the rocks.

Reese had drawn his revolver. His thumb was on the back of the frame. He had not cocked it. Walt reached over and put a hand on his wrist without looking at him.

"Slow."

"What's it doin'?"

"Don't know yet."

The shape moved.

It stood up.

It stood up and it kept standing up.

Whatever it was, it was tall. Seven feet, maybe more. The flashlight beams found it and caught on the chest.

White-gray fur, matted, with something dark across the shoulders. The eyes threw the light back red, like a coyote's, but bigger and set wide.

Somebody behind John whispered, Oh, sweet Jesus.

Earl raised his rifle. Walt pushed the barrel down with one hand without taking his eyes off the bluff.

"Wait."

"For what?"

"For it to do somethin' first."

The shape bent down. The flashlights tried to follow it. It did not cower from the blinding lights but slowly lowered its heavy head, baring jagged teeth.

Beside the creature rested an old bias-ply spare tire, still fully mounted on a thick steel rim. The thing easily weighed sixty pounds.

Without breaking eye contact with the mob, the creature bent down and grabbed the tire with one massive, clawed hand.

It moved with sickening fluidity, effortlessly hefting the heavy steel rim backwards over its shoulder, its two massive, pale yellow eyes reflecting the harsh lights.

It held the tire over its head with one arm. One arm. Like a man holding up his hat to keep the sun off his neck.

"Get down!" Walt said.

The creature violently whipped its arm forward.

John heard the heavy displacement of air as it moved.

The sixty-pound chunk of steel and rubber sailed like an incoming artillery shell.

Forty grown men flinched, some hitting the dirt.

Hollis tripped over his own feet and went down on the .410. The tire passed over them.

It passed over all of them, over the whole column, and came down in the cedar thirty yards behind the last man. The cedar exploded in a spout of branches, bramble, and dirt. A pop and crackle of breaking wood.

Five hundred feet from where the creature stood to where the tire came down. The sheer, impossible physics of it shattered every law of biology John knew.

Somebody's nerve finally snapped under the pressure.

Earl was the first to shoot.

He fired the .30-30 from the hip, and the bright muzzle flash instantly blinded the man next to him. That was the spark in the powder keg.

"Fire! Fucking kill it!"

Total, unadulterated chaos erupted as forty guns went off simultaneously in the closed canopy.

The overlapping concussions felt exactly like taking a heavy sledgehammer to the sternum and eardrums.

There must have been a hundred rounds emptied downrange in the first ten seconds. Pump shotguns, lever guns, surplus M1s, and a couple of pistols wildly ripped the surrounding oak leaves to total shreds.

The .410 was going off in the dirt because Hollis had landed on the hammer.

Showers of loose dirt and sharp chunks of limestone exploded violently off the bluff directly behind the creature.

The bluff lit up like a Pentecostal tent revival in the strobing yellow flashes. Men were screaming in pure terror.

Hot brass shell casings rained down on John's neck and shoulders, burning his skin in a frantic, uncoordinated mess of human error and mob panic.

When the firing stopped because everybody had to reload, Reese was screaming at the top of his lungs, frantically waving his arms in front of the active firing line.

"Cease fire! Cease fire goddammit, you are going to kill each other!"

It took a minute for the band to calm. A man with a hot barrel and adrenaline in his blood doesn't come down easy. Thick, acrid blue smoke hung heavy in the humid air, fiercely stinging their eyes.

When the smoke thinned and the flashlights came back up, the bluff was empty.

They went up to it because they had to check. Walt led. He moved like a man who had done this before in another country and didn't enjoy doing it again.

He found the tracks at the lip of the rock. He pointed at them with the barrel of the 870.

"Hell of a foot."

Sixteen inches if it was an inch. Three toes. Splayed wide at the front. The dirt was kicked up at the toe like it had pushed off hard going downslope.

"It went over the edge," Walt said.

"That's a forty-foot drop."

"It went over the edge."

Earl walked to the lip and looked down. He scratched the back of his neck under his cap.

"That ain't possible."

"Lot of things ain't possible," Walt said. "I seen most of 'em."

Hollis was sitting on a rock, breathing hard. The bottle of Old Crow was open in his lap and he looked at it like he wasn't sure how it got there. He took a pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I'm goin' home," he said.

"I am goin' home, and I ain't tellin' my wife a thing about this, and I ain't tellin' nobody else a thing about this, and the next time John Reichart calls me to come look for a goddamn boogeyman, I'm pullin' the phone outta the wall."

The story was in the Star-Telegram by Sunday.

The Dallas papers picked it up. Then the wire services. Then it was a joke, then a punchline, then a thing children dared each other to look for on summer nights.

Somebody wrote a book. Somebody wrote a song. There were people still hunting it twenty years later to this day.

John didn't talk about it much. When people asked, he would tell them what he saw, plain, and then he would change the subject to the weather or the Cowboys.

Ten days after the bluff, on a Sunday night in July, he sat in his living room with Tommie and watched a man named Armstrong come down a ladder onto the surface of the moon.

Earl was over; Walt was not. Walt didn't own a television.

The picture on the screen was gray and grainy and far away. The voice came through tinny.

Earl had a Lone Star in his hand, and he was looking at the picture like he was trying to find the seam in it.

"You believe that, Johnny?"

"Believe what?"

"That a man's walkin' around up on the moon."

John lit a Marlboro. He thought about the smell coming through the vents. He thought about a sixty-pound steel tire turning over and over in the dark.

"Earl," he said, "I'll believe damn near anything anymore."

The eleventh of September, in the year of Our Lord 1777, somewhere in the rolling green of the Penns' colony, half a day east of nowhere a man like me would ever put on a map.

We were drawn up in column of march, third division of the line, when Hodge come stumbling out of the treeline.

Hodge was our forward scouting picket. A thin lad from Stepney with a permanent cough, he was.

He had been gone an hour.

He come back without his musket. Without his hat. White as a Sunday tablecloth, and one leg of his breeches gone dark where he had let go of his bladder.

"Sir!" he said. And then nothing else come out his throat for a long second.

"Sir."

Lieutenant Wescott was nineteen years old and had purchased his commission three months prior with his uncle's money out of London.

He had not yet learned to look at men like Hodge with anything other than mild distaste and a sour face.

"Speak, Private. Where is your weapon?"

"He's coming, sir!"

"Who is coming?"

"Wash..."

Hodge's tongue worked. He looked at the ground, then the sky, then at Sergeant Crisp like a drowning man looks at a thrown rope.

"Washington, sir. The General. He's. He's coming up the road and there's. There's. Sir, you have to. You have to see it, sir, I cannot. There are not words."

Crisp stared. He was forty-one years old, Yorkshire-born, had fought Frenchmen at Minden when Wescott was being suckled.

He stepped forward and took Hodge by the front of his coat and shook him once, gentle as you would shake a child.

"Tom, lad. Words now. Plain ones. What did tha see?"

"I cannot, Sergeant. God strike me. I cannot."

Wescott pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it the way a starving eyes a chicken.

"Form up the line. Two ranks. Mr. Crisp, see to it. I will hear no more of this prattle until I have observed the rebel column with my own eye."

So we formed up. Eighty-six men of His Majesty's 23rd Regiment of Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, though most of us hadn't seen Wales since we were lads if at all.

Brown Bess muskets at the present, cartridge boxes on the right hip, bayonet on the left.

White breeches gone the colour of porridge with march-dust, our coats the colour of dried meat in the sweltering September sun.

I was on the front rank, second file from the left. Corporal Massey on my right elbow, O'Connell on my left.

O'Connell was nineteen, from somewhere outside Belfast, and he never shut his bloody mouth.

"Y'reckon Washington himself then?" His lips barely moved. Crisp would clout him otherwise.

"Or's Hodge gone soft? Lad's gone soft. He's gone, hasn't he. Hasn't he but."

"Quiet, Paddy."

"I'm only sayin'."

"I know what th'art sayin'. Be quiet."

We heard it before we saw it.

I have been at sea in a gale off the Bay of Biscay. I have heard a thirty-two-pounder fire from twenty paces.

I have heard a horse scream when its belly was opened by a Frenchman's lance. I tell you on my father's grave I have never heard a sound like that sound.

It come up the road like the throat of Hell itself. A roaring.

A deep, low, terrible roaring, the sort of noise that rattles the teeth in your jaw and the buttons on your coat, and beneath it a higher whining, like the demons of the air had got hold of harmony and were singing it.

O'Connell crossed himself. Half the front rank did the same.

"Steady," said Crisp. He did not shout. Crisp never shouted. "Steady, lads. Make ready."

Eighty-six locks came back to half-cock. Eighty-six pans clicked open. The drill is the drill is the drill.

Tear cartridge with the teeth, powder in the pan.

Shut your pan, cast about.

Powder and ball down the muzzle.

Ramrod. Return. Bring to the present.

I tasted the saltpetre on my lower lip. My hands did not shake, dear Mother, I want you to know that. My hands did not shake.

They'd come over the rise, all three of them.

I had thought it would be a column. I had thought regiments. Cavalry, maybe, with cannon trailing.

Three.

In that field, that day, what I saw was three iron beasts the colour of nothing in nature, black and orange and bone-white, low-slung like wolves at the run, and they come over that ridge at a speed no finest horse alive could match.

Not one horse, not ten.

The middle one had a flag. Christ Almighty, the flag.

It was the rebel banner but vast, enormous, hung out the side and snapping in the wind of its own passage so the stripes whipped like the tails of a hundred angry felines. Red and white.

The blue field with the stars, only the stars were so many you could not count them.

And behind the glass of the lead beast there was a face.

Long-jawed and pale, wig powdered, the mouth set in a line so flat and grim it might have been chiselled out of Stuart marble.

It was him.

Now you will say to me, you will say, Hodge had told you it was Washington, you were primed to see Washington, any tall man in a wig would have looked like Washington to you.

To which I reply: I saw the man.

I have seen the portraits since, in the houses of gentlemen and in books printed at Philadelphia. It was the same man. I will swear it to my last breath.

Massey, next to me, said, "Oh."

That was all he said. Just that. Oh.

Wescott had his sword up. A pretty little smallsword, more for ballrooms than battle. His arm was trembling like a struck bell. "Pres," he started.

"Pres. Pres."

He could not get the word out. Present. He could not get it out.

The roar of the beasts doubled, then tripled.

They were coming down the slope now and the engines of them, those engines, what I now know were engines, they bellowed like the bulls of Bashan in the Psalm.

The lead one's wheels threw up great gouts of black earth behind it.

The middle one fishtailed in the wet grass and corrected with a sound like a woman screaming in childbirth, then opened its throat wider and come on faster.

O'Connell threw down his musket.

The Bess sailed three yards and landed flat in the mud and he was already running before it hit.

Running into the treeline. Running with his hands up over his head, as though that would do any good against anything.

"O'CONNELL!"

That was Crisp. Crisp shouting. I had never heard Crisp shout. "O'CONNELL, YOU IRISH BASTARD GET BACK IN THE LINE!"

But the line was already going, moving.

I do not remember dropping my musket, but I am told by O'Connell I did.

I am told I ran perhaps eighteen paces before I caught my heel on a tussock and went down full length in a patch of thistle.

As I went down a man behind me, I never learned who, took my comrade Massey across the cheek with the point of his own bayonet.

The man had not meant to. He had been running with his musket held high and Massey had stopped short to gawk at the flag.

The bayonet opened Massey from the corner of his mouth to the soft place behind the ear, and his teeth came through the new hole, and the noise he made was not a noise a Christian man should ever have to make.

He went down on his knees in the grass clutching his face with both hands and the blood went between his fingers thick as a sauce. He was still trying to say oh. He could not get the h out.

I lay flat in the thistles. I put my face in the dirt.

The smell of horse-shit was in my nose and I heard the iron chariots go past not five feet from my head, and I felt the ground shake, and I felt the heat of them on the back of my neck like a baker's oven door opened, and I waited to die.

I did not die.

When I dared to look up the field was empty. The road was empty.

There was a long black mark on the grass where one of the wheels had spun, and it was smoking, and it smelled like nothing I had ever smelled in my life, sharp, burnt, oily.

There was no body of Washington, nor of any rebel.

There was only the British army of His Majesty King George the Third, scattered across a half mile of Pennsylvania pasture, and a few muskets lying in the dirt, and Hodge sat down on his arse in the middle of the road with his head in his hands.

Crisp found me an hour on. He had his hat back.

He had Massey over his shoulder, alive but quiet now, the side of his face packed with a sleeve cut off some private's shirt.

Crisp set him down in the thistle next to me and did not speak for a long time. Then he rolled a quid of tobacco and put it in his cheek and he said, slow:

"Tha know what, lad."

"What, Sergeant."

"I reckon them yanks are going to win this bloody war."

I looked at him. He was looking down the road, the way the chariots had gone. There was something on his face I had never seen before.

"They've got. I don't know what they've got." He spat red into the grass. "They've got summat we have not. I'll tell thee that for nowt."

He stood, brushed the grass off his breeches.

"Dodge Challengers,"

he said, like he was tasting the word in his mouth. "Those devil horses."

I asked him what they were.

He said he did not know. He said he had heard one of the rebels call it out as they went past.

Or perhaps he had only thought he heard it. Perhaps the wind had said it. He was not sure.

God help the man who stands in its path.

~~~

Authors Note: Finished the inspired story? Now see it live in this 1-minute Dodge Challenger Ad!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnQXRxW9VcQ

Roach was twenty-three minutes from going home when his beeper went off. At least, that was always how it started.

It wasnt in the briefing room at oh-six-hundred with PowerPoints and lukewarm Folgers, the way they trained for, but in the locker room with one boot off and a turkey sandwich in his teeth, or on the can, or once, memorably, in his daughter's school parking lot during the Christmas pageant.

Every operator he knew had a story about it.

The pager beat the pilot.

Always.

He spat the sandwich into the trash, picked up the boot and started sprinting.

Four minutes later, he was strapped into Reaper Zero-Three, the canopy hissing down on its rails, Mendoza thumping the side of the jet and giving him the salute and the auxiliary power unit whining like a kicked dog.

The brief, trickled down from Cecil, had been forty-five seconds long. Not a brief, but a shove out the door.

"Reaper One, push to Compass on tactical. They'll fill you in airborne. Just go."

He went.

By the time the four-ship rolled out at three-zero on Two-Eight, sweating through his g-suit and tasting tin in the back of his throat, Roach had not eaten lunch.

Hexi rolled up on his right wing at fingertip, helmet visor down, and gave him a thumbs-up. He gave one back.

Behind him, Ditch was running his pre-takeoff checks aloud to nobody on his open mic, which he always did.

"Throttles, mil. Brakes, set. Flight controls, free and correct. Honey, if I die, the password's the dog's name backwards."

"Channel Two, you idiot," Booger snapped.

"Aw, hell, son. Y'all heard nothing." A pause. "Throttles, mil."

They lit the burners and went.

Compass came up on push at angels twenty-eight, the city sliding under them, the lake to the east a sheet of beaten lead under the spring overcast.

"Reaper One, Reaper One, Compass. Vector zero-eight-five for ten. Single track, hostile, currently angels twelve, climbing. Speed is, uh. Speed is. Stand by."

A long pause that pilots are not supposed to have on the radio.

"Reaper One, Compass. Speed is reading Mach six and accelerating. We have visual confirmation through GDA satellite. Threat is hostile asset Omni-Man. Cleared to engage, weapons free. Do not, repeat do not, engage the asset code-named Invincible. Out."

Roach kept his hand on the stick.

"Compass, Reaper One. Confirm. The hostile target is. The man. The flying man. Moving at Mach six."

"Reaper One, Compass. Affirm."

In his peripheral, Hexi's jet rocked once on its axis, just a tiny correction.

He felt his own jet do the same. They were all rattled.

"Compass." Hexi's voice. "ROE check. How are we engaging?"

"Reaper Two, Compass, weapons free, AAM authorized, gun authorized. Engage at maximum standoff. Out."

That was it. It was the whole friggin' brief.

Ditch came on the intra-flight. "AAMs. They want us to shoot 120s at a guy in spandex?"

"I don't think it's spandex," said Booger. "I think it's like a unitard."

"Y'all are missing the goddamn point. This guy is flying."

"Knock it off, you two." Roach didn't yell. Yelling on the radio was how you ended up talking to a board.

"Combat spread, two miles. Ditch, take Booger high. Hexi pushes left, I push center. Ditch, you've got high cover. We crank when we see him."

"Crank when we see him, copy."

"Hexi, copy."

"Booger copies."

The kid's voice was not steady, Roach had noted. Booger had eighty hours in type. He was twenty-three. His mother sent him boy scout cookies every month.

Roach on the other hand was thirty-eight. He had two daughters. The older one was learning piano.

He had heard her play "Heart and Soul" twelve times in the last week and it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

"Eyes up," he said. "Compass, Reaper One. Push it."

He shoved the throttles to the gate. The afterburners roared as the city dropped away.

Compass came back. "Reaper One, your bandit is bullseye one-niner-zero for eight, angels seventeen, climbing through your altitude. Coming hot."

"Coming hot. Copy."

He didn't see anything yet. The HUD showed a target at the indicated bearing but the radar return was wrong.

The APG-77 wasn't built for a target the size of a man. The signal kept losing him and re-acquiring him, the lock box flickering.

"Tally one!" Hexi shouted. "Tally one, low, my eleven o'clock!"

Roach jerked his head left. There was nothing there for a half-second.

Then, there it was. A streak of red and white and something dark.

Then a man-shape, holding still in the air the way nothing held still in the air, a quarter mile off and a thousand feet below them, watching them come.

He held a second figure, black and blue, in a chokehold.

"Jesus God," said Ditch.

He had a mustache. Roach could see the mustache. He was that close.

"Engage," Roach said. "Engage, engage. Reaper One, Fox Three."

He pickled off the AMRAAM. The missile dropped, lit, and arrowed out on a hard left turn for the contact.

He pickled off the second one. Hexi did the same.

Four AIM-120Ds converging at Mach four.

Omniman looked at them.

That was the part that broke something in Roach's head.

The man looked at the missiles coming. He didn't dodge. He didn't move. He waited.

The first missile reached him. He caught it.

He caught it like a kid catching a tennis ball. Two hands.

The warhead's safety logic had not yet armed because the missile had been in flight only a few seconds, and they had launched from inside the safe-arming envelope, and the warhead was inert.

He held the missile in his hands for half a beat.

Then he turned and he threw it.

The missile flew straight at Ditch.

"Break right! Ditch, break right, break right!"

Ditch broke right. He broke hard, eight Gs hard, the kind that grayed the edges of your vision and squeezed the air clean out of your lungs.

The missile, an AIM-120D thrown by a man's arm at supersonic velocity, cleared his canopy by maybe ten feet.

The proximity fuse had been damaged by handling and did not detonate.

It speared past his tail and angled into the lake and made a small white spout where it hit the water.

The other three missiles never reached him. Two of them, he simply punched and crumpled out of the air.

He slapped away the AMRAAMs as they detonated on contact, two ugly orange balloons, and he flew through them.

The fourth missile he ignored. He let it go past him, dumb, until it ran out of motor and started its long fall back to the lake.

"He punched the missiles," Booger said. He said it in the same voice he had used at the squadron bar when somebody had told him he was getting deployed for the first time.

"He punched the missiles."

"Reaper, push it. Move." Roach pulled the stick into his lap and rolled inverted and pulled through. The G-suit squeezed his guts up into his throat. "Bracket and crank. Bracket and crank."

"Bracket, copy."

Hexi rolled left. Roach rolled right. The bracket was a tactic for forcing an enemy aircraft into an unwinnable position by approaching from two angles.

It worked because aircraft had limited maneuverability and could not turn faster than a missile. It assumed the enemy was constrained by physics.

Omni-Man, however, did not care for physics.

He jinked at an impossible speed and angle, decided to be in another place and he was there.

He caught Ditch from below.

There was no warning. There was no radar lock indication. There was no missile lock tone.

There was just a thump that Roach felt in his chest cavity, transmitted through the air itself, and a flash of red on his left peripheral, and then Ditch's voice in his ear going "oh, oh, oh, oh," in a high climbing tone like he was watching something fall.

His voice cut off in the middle of a sound.

The Raptor was liquidated as Omni-man flew straight through.

There was no fireball, no spreading of debris. The fuselage separated from the wings as if pulled. The cockpit section flew one direction and the engines flew another. Right wing tumbled away under its own momentum, the missile rails still attached, and Roach watched a single AIM-9X cartwheel away into the undercast.

The compressed cockpit section was tumbling. He could see Ditch's crumpled helmet through what remained of the bloodied canopy splayed in red and pink.

Roach looked away, suppressing a gag.

"Reaper Three is down! Reaper Three is down!"

Ditch was Reaper Three. He had a wife named Caroline who worked at the bank in Niceville and they had been trying for a baby for three years and the IVF wasn't working out.

"Reaper, Compass, copy your last. Continue prosecution. Continue prosecution."

"Continue prosecution, copy."

Hexi was still alive. Booger was still alive. Roach pulled hard left and went vertical, four-G, five-G, six-G, the smash pulling at his face under the mask. He came over the top. He looked down.

Omni-Man was below him. Two thousand feet. Holding still in the air. Roach saw the white of his face turned up.

"Booger, in on him from the south. Hexi, north. I'm going down the throat. Fox Two on tone, gun if no tone. Push it."

"Push it, copy, Reaper Four."

"Reaper Two, copy."

He pushed the nose down. He went into a vertical dive on the man.

He thought, this is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.

He thought, my older daughter is learning piano.

He thought, lock him up, lock him up, come on, lock him up.

The IRST seeker in the AIM-9X was not getting tone. It was not getting tone because Omni-Man's heat signature was not what an IR-guided air-to-air missile had been engineered to recognize.

He was warm, but not engine-warm.

The Sidewinder was looking for an engine.

"No tone, no tone, gun engagement. Gun engagement."

He flicked master arm to GUN. He pickled the trigger on his stick.

The M61A2 spun up in the right wing root and the entire airframe shuddered with the recoil and the rate of fire was a hundred rounds a second.

The Vulcan vomited 20mm depleted-uranium HEI at twelve hundred meters per second, a perfect hailstorm of human engineered lead designed to tear through tanks.

"Eat shit, Fucker!"

The rounds hit Omni-Man in the chest. They sparked off him.

They sparked off him like a kid throwing pebbles at a bridge.

Then he was gone. He was not in the gunsight any more.

Roach pulled out of the dive at four thousand feet, gunsmoke flooding the cockpit through the bleed air, and he heard Hexi screaming on the radio.

"He's on me he's on me he's on me oh fuck he's"

She did not finish the word. The transmission cut.

Roach craned his head over his shoulder.

Hexi's jet was below him and to the left, two miles maybe, and a man-shape was on top of it.

On top of the cockpit. Standing on the cockpit. As if the canopy were a porch.

Hexi's jet was in a flat spin. The thrust vectoring was trying to correct and could not because both vertical stabilizers were missing.

They had been pulled off.

Roach saw the bare attachment points at the rear of the fuselage where the twin tails should have been.

The man-shape on the canopy raised one fist.

"Hexi!"

The fist came down.

The canopy of an F-22 Raptor was made of single-piece polycarbonate.

It was rated against bird strike at low altitude. It was not rated against this. The canopy went.

It went all at once, in a starburst, and then the man's fist was inside the cockpit, and then the man's fist was through the cockpit, and then the man straightened up and lifted his fist out, was the shape of a thing that had been a head.

The jet spiraled into a flat unrecoverable spin and started its long way down toward the water.

Hexi had wanted to be a writer when she was a kid. She had told him this once at the squadron BBQ, drunk on Tecate.

She kept it all in a notebook in her locker, although nobody had ever read it.

He thought of the notebook in the locker and his throat closed up so hard he thought he was choking.

"Booger," he said. He said it on intra-flight. "Booger, you copy?"

A long silence.

"Booger, Reaper One, you copy, over."

"I copy." The kid's voice carried a wet tone under it. He was crying. "I copy, lead."

"Get out. Get out, Booger. RTB, vector zero-niner-zero and get out."

"Copy, RTB."

"Compass, this is Reaper One, Reaper Four is RTB, vector him out, vector him out, you copy."

"Reaper One, Compass, copy your last, Reaper Four cleared egress."

The kid put his nose east.

Roach watched him do it.

Booger's Raptor lit its burners and Roach watched the four-ship's last living wingman accelerate away over the lake and he felt, for the first time in his career, a kind of relief. Get out, kid. Get the hell out.

The man-shape was suddenly a half-mile in front of Booger's jet.

"Booger, break, break, break, he's"

The man-shape met Booger head-on at a closure rate of about Mach five.

There was a thing that happened. Roach saw it in real-time and his brain refused to render it.

The aircraft and the man-shape touched and the aircraft folded around him. The aircraft folded the way a soda can folds when you step on it.

The wings came up around the cockpit like leaves wrapping a stem and the engine nacelles imploded forward and the cockpit was suddenly inside of itself. The pilot was inside the cockpit.

There was no fireball. The fuel didn't had time to ignite.

The compression event was so fast that the JP-8 in the tanks, eight thousand pounds of it, was atomized and dispersed by the shockwave before any oxygen could get to it.

It would rain down later in pink mist on the rooftops of Old Town. It would mix with the other rain. With what was left of Booger.

Roach was all alone.

He keyed the radio.

"Compass, Reaper One, I'm Winchester on AAM, twenty mike-mike at three hundred rounds, joker fuel."

"Reaper One, Compass."

"Compass. Request permission to engage with airframe."

The pause was very long.

"Reaper One, Compass, repeat your last."

"Permission to engage with airframe. I want to ram him."

Another long pause. Another voice came on. He recognized the voice.

He had only ever heard the voice once, in a brief two months back.

The voice belonged to the man at the desk in the long room without windows. Cecil Stedman.

"Reaper One, Guardian Actual. Negative on ram. Negative. Return to base. We have other guardians on standby."

"Sir, with respect, I'm closer than the other assets."

"Reaper One. This is a direct order. Stand down and RTB."

He looked at the city below. He looked at the column of smoke rising from somewhere in the West Loop, between two of the taller buildings, two small figures locked in close combat in the air.

One of them was the man with the mustache. The other one was a smaller figure in blue and yellow.

They were moving so fast he could only follow them when they slowed for an exchange.

He thought about his older daughter. The piano. "Heart and Soul."

He thought about Hexi.

He thought, as a part of him had been thinking the whole flight, that he was already dead.

That the moment he had taken off he had become a dead man, and the only question now was what kind of death he made of it.

"Compass, Reaper One. That's a negative."