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“Aw, shucks,” said Lars. “It was nothing but a daydream after all.”
“What was?” Abe asked.
“Getting my hands on a bona-fide FAA-approved, FCC-approved, heavy-duty, reliable antenna, and ready-made to receive the exact frequencies we need to hear. Shucks!”
“Well, let’s go back then,” said Jason. “No need to take more risks out here in the open on a mountain peak where the whole world can see.”
“Negative on that, my friend,” said Lars. “Now we have to collect bits and pieces of metal—hopefully copper, but I don’t have much hope for that—so that I can build an antenna.”
This is bad. Very bad. Instead of grab and go, this is a scavenging operation. This is bad. I’m cold. I should throw up now. This is the time to throw up.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Lars said, suddenly without his usual humor. “Stay close, Jason. Abe and me, we’ll hand you stuff. As for you, keep your eyes and ears peeled.”
“For what? Aluminum?”
“No, dum-dum, for bad guys.”
“Oh.”
This is bad.
The trio made the now-easy leap across the gully to the crash site, where there were plenty of aluminum bits lying about, mostly in ribbons, but plenty for the taking. Personal effects were absent, as were any corpses. No pieces of anything larger than the size of an iPhone remained on the shelf. There were no iPhones or electronic devices of any sort. The remaining wreckage made the absence of any intact items all the more eerie.
“Yeah, just strips!” said Lars. “It’s okay to pick up bigger pieces, but I think I can twist the strips together. I need enough material to build an omnidirectional antenna and a beam antenna.”
Lars and Abe were bent over, poring through the debris, which was scorched, and they were intent upon discovering blackened metal amidst the blackened gravel. Abe heard Lars utter an epithet, “Shoot, I just remembered: I’m going to need a pole of some sort, a beam, so I can line up the Yagi elements.”
“What?” said Abe.
“Never mind. Just look for a metal pole or something.” He scrounged around a bit.
“Guys,” Jason said.
“No, scratch that,” said Lars. “I can mount them on a straight sapling, I think. The elements are not electrically connected. I keep forgetting about that.”
“I hear something.”
“The driven element has to be insulated from the beam, so just get ribbons and long pieces and such.”
“Guys!”
“What?”
Abe and Lars stood up, each bearing fistfuls of springy strips of aluminum. Abe was marveling over the forces required to scrape heavy-gauge aluminum into thin strips of ribboned material. When their burdens stopped clanking, and Lars’s jaw stopped yapping, they heard through their overstuffed padded hoods an unmistakable whine.
“That’s a motor,” said Lars.
“You’re a real Sherlock Holmes,” Jason said, drily.
“That’s a motor under stress,” said Lars. “And it’s getting closer to us.”
“And in a hurry,” Jason said. The pitch of the whine rose, and the thunder of air being whipped became apparent.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Let’s go!” Lars said. The three of them ran without further prodding, leaping across the gully with their treasure, but this third escape was quickly frustrated by the emergence of a gigantic helicopter, whose black reflective soullessness was made all the more apparent by the unhesitating release of machine gun bullets.
This is not so bad.
They heard the thud of bullets bouncing at their feet while they watched spent casings pour like a waterfall into the abyss below. Lars unslung his rifle and took one knee, dropping his aluminum ribbons. He fired a round. There was no evidence the bullet was effective against the helicopter. The machine gun continued spinning for an eternity, but the result was the same: bullets bouncing off the ground like spent bees at first frost. Finally, it stopped spinning.
No problem. Abe felt himself smiling. Superpowers. Super. Powers. We…stop bullets!
Lars was giving a command of some sort, but his voice was drowned out by the thunder of the helicopter, which was turning broadside to them. A door slid open, and they saw a man pointing an automatic rifle in their general direction. Abe and Jason laughed and waved while he emptied a magazine at them. Lars was still aiming with his rifle.
Why doesn’t he shoot?
Finally, Lars raised his voice to a mighty shout: “DROP THE POWER I HAVE A SHOT.”
Jason blinked. Lars squeezed the trigger. Through the open door they saw the pilot’s head snap. As the helicopter spun a full turn, they saw the look of utter surprise on their adversaries’ faces, men in black, just like in the comic books and the action movies, and when they saw them again during the second turn, they saw the men in black with looks of sheer terror, not at all like in the movies. Grim death had approached, having been near at hand while they had so readily reckoned to kill Abe, Jason, and Lars for the crime of surviving a plane crash.
Death-dealing comes at a price, and the cost was now being realized before they could be paid.
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The helicopter tail rotor hit the shelf, and, being under no control, the entire machine lurched to one side and fell awkwardly, gyroscopic forces causing it to bang against the cliff wall once more, then into silence.
Yes, now would be a good time to throw up. Right after my heart returns to my chest. I can’t feel my heart. What just happened?
“I’ll bet they had a decent antenna, too,” said Lars. He bent over, collapsing onto all fours, and promptly threw up. When the first spasm left him, he spit and began to cry. “Jesus!”
Abe rushed to him and threw his arm around him. At first, Lars resisted Abe’s comfort, but then, after another round of vomiting, he yielded, lurching from a gastrointestinal spasm to the spasm of grief and horror. He buried his head into Abe’s puffy coat while Jason looked on, bewildered.
“I thought all you survivalist preppers were tough guys,” he said.
“Shut up, you little Nip,” said Lars. He spit again and looked at Jason, saying, “I’m sorry I said that.”
“What?” said Jason. Abe looked confused.
“Oh, well, I heard it in a Pink Floyd song once, and I thought it was an unacceptable epithet.”
“Well, at least you’re sorry,” said Abe, still holding Lars close.
Lars wiped his face and laughed. “Okay, Abe, you can let go. I think I’m okay now.”
Abe, without thinking, kissed Lars full on the cheek. “Ew,” he said. “You smell awful.”
“Sour grizzly bear vomit does that to a man’s musk,” said Lars.
“Come on,” said Jason. “Let’s go before you throw up again, you little sissy.”
“Yeah,” said Lars. “That was something, wasn’t it?” He slung his rifle across his shoulders and picked up the precious aluminum. “I wish we had some of those casings. I’m sure all that brass or steel would have been helpful somehow.”
They struck for home. After a few steps, Lars looked back at the place where he had encountered death. “That was a bad idea,” he said, and leaned over to throw up again.
“How is it possible that you still have something in there?” Jason said.
“Ugh, I know. Give me a drink, would you? Next time I’ll let you kill a man.”
Abe unscrewed a plastic water bottle and gave it to Lars. Lars took a swig out of the bottle, made a face, and tried to hand the bottle back to Abe, who said, “Uh…you can keep it.”
About halfway down to the tree-line, they saw James Thurgerson and Umezawa making their way toward them. When they met, they were all smiles, saying, “We thought we heard machine-gun fire, and we feared the worst.”
“Lars shot down a helicopter,” Abe said, beaming, looking at Umezawa.
“Ugh,” said Lars. “Not exactly.”
“What happened?” said James Thurgerson.
“I’m not ready to tell, yet,” said Lars. “But let’s get back to camp. I’ll say this much, though, Jimmy: the immediate threat has been neutralized, but I think they’ll be sending some reinforcements."
When they got back to the bower, they were greeted by a lovely smell of boiling bear meat. James Thurgerson was smiling. He said, “We harvested all the salt packets from the vegan dinners we threw out. I threw in some spruce ends for a bouquet garni. It’s still craptacular, but at least there’s salt, now. Should be ready after dark sometime.”
“Sano and Blake?”
“Not back yet. You haven’t been gone that long. They’re likely to stay until after dark.”
Lars threw himself down on his bedding, pulled out the bottle of whiskey, stared at it, returned it to its place, lay down, and promptly fell asleep.
“Not even noon, yet,” said James Thurgerson. “What gives?”
Jason began to detail the adventure: “They shot a machine gun at us—”
“—machine gun?” James Thurgerson interrupted. “What did it look like?”
“It was hanging between its landing legs and the barrel spun as it fired,” Abe said.
“Holy moly!” said James Thurgerson, eyes bugging. “They shot at you with a Minigun?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Jason, sniffing. “I stopped every bullet.”
“Yeah, they fired until they ran out,” said Abe.
“Lars shot the pilot in the head with his rifle, and the helicopter went down,” Jason said.
“Yeah, they opened the door,” Abe said.
“They opened the door? That wasn’t very professional,” James Thurgerson said. “They should have just retreated and regrouped.”
Abe and Jason shrugged. Jason said, “They were, like, thirty feet from us, and they spent all that gunfire on us, and we were laughing and waving, and—”
“Laughing and waving?” James Thurgerson laughed.
“I mean, why not?” said Jason, shrugging again.
You killed a man, Stoic, and laughed while he died. You laughed at three men while they died. Shut up. You laughed; you did laugh. They were the bad guys. So? What’s a bad guy? In the end, Stoic, what is a bad guy? Someone doing something bad to you? Is that how this works? Laughter at the deaths of bad people? They would have laughed at me. Yes, they would have, Stoic, because they’re the bad guys. Did you see the look on their faces? Is that comical to you? No, not in the least. Oh, Stoic…
Umezawa was kneeling beside Lars, stroking his forehead.
“He’s not injured, you know,” said Jason with a fierceness that startled Umezawa.
“I’m just concerned about him. What’s it like to kill a man?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Jason curtly.
“He does,” said Umezawa, looking down at Lars’s sleeping face. Jason grunted and returned to silence.
After a considerable time of small talk and cold grizzly bear, they heard Blake and Sano at the entryway. The bower opened to them and they entered. Darkness was behind them, and a blast of cold air entered with them.
“Any luck?” Abe said to Blake.
“We saw a herd of elk,” Blake replied. “It was late, getting on to dark. We’ll try again tomorrow. What about you? Any luck?”
Lars spoke without rising, “Blake, my friend, I have seen the elephant.”
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