John’s support was unequivocal, but the rest of my coworkers were less certain.
Even so, we kept traveling. The blocked road had forced us to backtrack, so we had eighty miles before the most direct path home diverged from the route we'd need to take to Albuquerque.
“Aren’t hot air balloons really slow?” Kurtis asked. “I actually went to that thing near Huntsville once. I’d forgotten, because nothing happened. Got up early, drove over there, and then was told the weather was too dangerous for the balloons to take off. It was a nice day!”
John winced. “Well… that can happen, yeah. Balloons move with the wind, and if it’s too windy, you can’t launch ‘em right. Their envelope will just thrash all around as you try to inflate it. Standard balloon is going to go five, maybe ten miles an hour.”
That slow?! The news made my heart sink. “Wouldn’t it just go at wind speed?”
John waggled a hand. “Well… Yes’n’no. Once you’re in the air, you might catch a burst of speed from a rogue windstream, but it makes taking off and landing real dangerous, and it’s not all that safe when you’re in flight, either. Like Kurt said: the pilots and engineers won’t risk high winds on purpose.”
“And 'high' winds are anything over ten miles an hour?!" I was aghast. "What makes it so dangerous? Maybe we can mitigate it.”
“Well…” John wrinkled his nose. “From what I recall, the takeoff problems are mostly because the pressure in the balloon is so low: equal to the outside at the open bottom, after all. ‘Swhy you need such a big honkin’ balloon to lift a bitty little weight. That pressure’s even lower when you’re trying to fill it, so you’ve just got an open flame and a big sail whipping back and forth, pulling the basket around. Balloon material’s not real flammable, but I wouldn’t want to stand in that basket as it got dragged around. Landing problems are related, I think. You want to land, not get dumped across the ground like a kicked bucket.”
What John said made sense, but I didn’t want to give up so easily. “What if we gave it some structure? Maybe a lightweight aluminum frame or something.”
“Could help. Don’t know as much about blimps, but I think they’re like that and I’m pretty sure they can go much faster. Course, we’d have to be careful about weight. Your average balloon isn’t gonna lift more than a thousand pounds, passengers included, which is… about what all of us weigh, put together, with no basket or propellers or fuel or anything. I assume we’d add propellers? Wind in the US usually goes west to east, which is good for us, but drifting on the breeze seems unreliable.”
I nodded, thinking. “We’d need propellers, yeah, and some method of steering… but weight! I just remembered. During the challenge I went to, the aliens made me really heavy for part of it. Maybe there are abilities that manipulate gravity too? If we could make ourselves lighter…”
“Or our machinery.” Davi agreed. “Let me check my notes from Captain Beember. There’s definitely a Flight ability, but it’s too weak to use for more than a few seconds at minimum synergy. I wonder how the flight is achieved. If we could reverse gravity, that would generate tons of lift. Whoever reaches an ability threshold next needs to check for gravity abilities.”
Kurtis waved this down. “There probably is one, if they did that to Vince. I think you’re right that we could make a blimp or something like it, but do we want to? Ten miles an hour? Best-case scenario? Even if we had perfect air conditions, that’s more than 100 hours of flying to get home, and we’re having to go 100 miles in the wrong direction to even get started.”
I shrugged. “We’ve been on the road for 10 days so far. About 100 hours. We’ve traveled much further, but with all the side trips, indirect routes, and backtracking, we’re only about 200 miles south of Denver, and dealing with other people… I’ve been worried for our lives every day. It just doesn’t have to be that good to be much better than what we’re doing.”
Kurt was silent.
I pressed him. “Don’t forget, we’re going to get another new monster in a few hours. I’d bet a good steak dinner that it’s a ground-based enemy. The last one was a flyer, true, but the first three weren’t. Most of humanity is on the ground, and that’s where the vast majority of hazards will be.”
“Doesn’t mean the hellbats won’t be an issue,” Byron said. “One of those could tear a balloon envelope easily.”
“They could,” I countered, “But I don’t think they would. They attack us if we’re outside, but I’ve never seen one go for Frank’s windows.”
“You want to find out you’re wrong a mile or two up in the air?” Byron asked.
John cleared his throat. “Tears aren’t that dangerous, actually. Like I said, envelope’s not high-pressure. Rips just make the pilot use more fuel.”
“See?” I said. “No problem. We’ll have you with us, and you’re basically infinite fuel. And if we weren’t following the roads, stopping off to check on your family in Texas would be much easier.”
Byron looked unconvinced.
…
The new monsters appeared, some kind of evil cross between an umbrella, a wolf, and an ostrich. They died easily to Frank’s snowplow, so we celebrated at first, thinking they’d be a nonissue.
Then, shortly after we cracked a window to get a breeze in Frank’s cab, Davi frowned at the rearview mirror. “Huh. The wostriches follow a lot longer than the spacedogs.”
“Let me shut the window,” Kurt said. The blue glow of his power activated, raising the glass pane and sealing us off from the outside world. Almost instantly, the wostriches slowed. We left them behind in short order. Some tension left Kurt’s shoulders. “Okay, good. They’re like the spacedogs. They only chase if they think they can get at us.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“How long will they chase, though?” Byron asked. “Clearly longer than the little guys.”
We decided to test. The little rodentlike spacedogs would barely follow us for a few hundred feet. The wostriches kept going. After a mile, we had nearly twenty trailing behind us. They weren’t fast enough to catch us, but they showed no signs of giving up.
“Shut the window, Kurt,” John said. “There’s some cars stopped on the road ahead, and they might be blocking the way.”
Kurt hastened to comply. With the window shut, the wostriches in the front of the pack slowed, but they didn’t turn aside, continuing on in the same direction they’d been heading.
Worse, the snaking tail of monsters adjusted their speed, coalescing into a dense pack instead of a stretched-out chain, and the pack kept growing. Every time the group of wostriches passed another of their kind, the newcomer would match their pace.
The cars ahead were blocking the road, and John brought Frank to a stop, peering uncertainly at the side mirrors. “What do we do now?”
“Wait,” I said firmly. “Stay in the truck. Hope they keep going and run by us.”
“And if they just stop and wait for us to come out?” Davi asked.
I frowned. “Well… we’ll have to figure something out. Maybe Kurt can roll down the window a smidge and Byron can take them down slowly. That’s still better than standing in the open to fight thirty of them.”
I’d fought with one when the monsters had first appeared. They were larger than the spacedogs by quite a bit, but after I’d dodged a bite, the monster’s long, thin neck had been vulnerable. I’d been proud of how quickly that first altercation had ended, but now I wished I’d experimented more. Was biting their only attack? What could these monsters do? I’d assumed I would figure out more later. Now I might be facing a horde of them.
The wostriches pulled alongside Frank…
…and didn’t give us so much as a glance, the throng splitting to flow around us and the stopped cars, then continuing down the road.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “I guess this isn’t where we make our last stand.”
Kurt closed his eyes. “I’m letting them get at least 500 feet away before I open the door. We move the cars, clear off any pavemimics, and keep the damn windows closed from now on.”
The whole incident felt like a close call. We’d learned a lesson about the monsters, and the only cost had been a short delay. Now, we knew better. When we got on the road again, our attitude was cheerful. Maybe a little smug?
That didn’t last long.
When the wostriches had first appeared, they’d followed the same pattern as spacedogs, each monster arriving alone, pretty far away from others of its kind. Spacedogs would sometimes attack together, especially in areas where they were densest, like around the airport, but that was… happenstance. There wasn’t any coordination.
These guys were clearly different.
We could see for a ways around Frank, and now that we were watching for it, it was obvious. The wostriches sought each other out. When two monsters got close enough together, both would change direction slightly, angling toward each other, becoming a pack.
After twenty minutes, Frank wasn’t plowing into single monsters anymore, but into packs of two and three.
After an hour, packs of five or more were most common. We kept smashing through them just like we had with the smaller packs. The wostriches didn’t seem to quite understand the truck - they’d avoid the truck sometimes, but they didn’t try to dodge or avoid places we'd be soon.
The third time we plowed through a larger pack, the wostriches were a bit more spread out. The rearmost monster let out a squawk as we smacked into it, and the frontrunners turned at the noise. One simply accelerated as it saw the fading body of its buddy heading towards it, but the final monster jumped.
It leaped shockingly high, easily clearing the snowplow and almost making it over the nose of the cab. I had just a second to register it sliding across the top of the hood before it slammed into the plexiglass we’d inexpertly attached to replace our windshield.
I was fast enough to get my hand up before the barrier popped free, but I didn’t get it high enough to really help. The flat pane tilted over my hand, smacking my face hard. It followed closely by another burst of pain as the wostrich’s talons raked my scalp. Then, the weight of the monster disappeared from the plexiglass as it tumbled off into the rear part of the cab. Noises erupted behind me: crashes, shouts, and screams.
I tried to push the plexiglass off myself, but I failed. Something was weird about the world. It wasn’t working right. It didn’t look right. There was too many of it. Which way was I supposed to be moving?
“Wooooo….” I mumbled.
A moment later, things came into focus.
The hell was I doing?
I shoved the plexiglass up a few inches - successfully this time - and rolled off the chair into the rear part of the cabin. “Where’s the monster?”
Davi was bleeding, and the room was a mess, but I didn’t see the wostrich anywhere.
“Byron fried it,” Kurt said. “Is John okay? Is someone steering?”
“Oh shit,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed that the truck was still in motion… though it seemed to be slowing to a stop.
“I’m fine!” John said, stumbling out from under our MacGuyvered windshield. “Had to heal myself, is all. Let me give you a hand, Vince. You’re bleeding.”
I touched the back of my head, where the monster’s claws had opened my scalp. “I don’t think it’s that bad? The windshield hitting me really disoriented me, though. I think I might have had a concussion for a few seconds there before Rapid Regeneration took care of it.”
Getting healed up and getting the windshield back in place took us a half an hour or so, and Byron didn’t look happy when we were finished. “Well, there it is, but it’s a wind shield, not a monster shield. If another one comes crashing into it, the same stupid thing is going to happen.”
“We’ll have to get some better materials at the next town,” I said. “Some kind of metal supports for the back of it, and maybe something in front of it? Doesn’t have to be directly in front of it. Chain-link fencing around the hood might be good. Keep anything from hitting it.”
“That’s a good idea,” Byron said. “Won’t be durable enough for us to crash through mobs of these guys, but it might stand up to the occasional mishap.”
“Yeah. We’re going to have to stop crashing through big groups,” I said. “It’s a shame. Would have been great points.”
The wostriches weren’t that hard to avoid. Unlike the pavemimics, everyone in our group could see them, and they didn’t charge at the truck like the rams. The change didn’t slow us much.
In fact, as time went on, the groups of new enemies got fewer and farther between.
Unfortunately, the size of those groups kept growing.