“Left collarbone is broken and I have some cracked ribs I think. My right knee is twisted pretty badly, but I can walk. My left eye is hard to keep open but I’m managing it.”
“Yeah, you look rosy. I don’t know if I can walk or not, but I can try if we need to.” Ridley felt the stick in his shoulder and decided to leave it the hell alone.
“That’s just it, Bull. I’m not sure where we would go.” Rene sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.
“Any idea where we are?”
“Yeah, I think we’re about eighty kilometers north of Bethune and maybe ten or twenty south of Calais.”
“What about the aliens? You seen any since you been on the ground?” Ridley felt through his torn garments hoping to find water or an MRE or something — no luck.
“None. They all seem to have headed off to the east right after we went down.”
“Hmmm. Hey, tell me something. Just how the hell did you survive that fall?” Ridley tried to grin.
“I was tossed into one of those things chest first. I bear-hugged it and hung on for dear life, until it crashed into the treetops. I fell from there. And you?”
“Hell if I know!” Ridley laughed and then grimaced in pain.
The two men rested in silence against the tree for a few minutes more. Ridley finally decided to test his strength and forced himself up to his feet. He could put all his weight on his right foot with pain that he could endure from his toes, which were mostly numb now. But his left foot would not support his weight for more than a few seconds without sending unbearable pain up his body. Ridley sat back down.
“Rene, you think you could tie a splint around my foot with that bum collarbone of yours?”
“We’ll do what we can, sir.”
Ten minutes later the two men were hobbling along through the woods of France, trying to make their way north toward Calais. They had been told that would be the rearward evacuation point for the attack. Ridley leaned heavily on the rough walking stick that Rene had found for him, but was able to walk slowly. At their present pace they figured to reach Calais in a couple hours, but with any luck they would find help long before that.
“No, sir, it doesn’t sound good,” the medic replied to Ridley and Rene’s questions. “Everything I’ve heard so far is that all communications have been lost with the troops as soon as they make contact with the aliens. You two are the first survivors I’ve come across yet.” Fortunately, the two of them had stumbled across a highway and decided to follow it. Before long, an evac convoy heading north to Calais came along and rescued them.
“That sounds about right, Specialist. We lost contact with the AWACS long before we ever made contact with the boomerangs,” Rene said.
“Boomerangs, sir?”
“That’s what they look like,” Ridley grunted. “Shiny, metal, and the shape of a fat boomerang about a meter or so across. The damn things ate our entire flight squadron of F-16s. The two of us are, as far as we can tell, all that’s left of the NATO-Euro Falcons.”
“Just sit tight, sir,” the medic said, tying a last bandage in place. “They’ll take care of you in London. I wouldn’t want to mess with that stick if I didn’t have to.”
“There,” Specialist Werry said, waving at the treeline. “What was that dot?”
Werry was twenty-two, with light brown hair cropped to stubble on the side, fair skin that refused to brown no matter how much time he spent under searing desert skies, and a scar on his cheek courtesy of an Iraqi improvised explosive device. His unit had been one of the last to leave Iraq and he found it odd that they’d been chosen to “show the flag” in France. Couldn’t somebody
“What dot?” Sergeant Cordette asked. The light-brown infantry sergeant wasn’t much older than the specialist but he had two extra tours of being shot at and blown up. In about a month he would have been trying to decide whether to end his second hitch and try the college and civvie route or reup and become a “lifer.” But with the state of emergency the choice had been made for him. One less stress in life was fine by Eshraka Cordette. He was looking north and looked to the east as the specialist waved in that direction.
The two soldiers were forward of their company, holding down a look-out point a hundred meters towards the treeline. It could have been worse, but Cordette wasn’t sure how.
“There was a dot,” Werry said. “At about eleven o’clock. It just popped up then back down.”
“I don’t see,” the sergeant said, shielding his eyes. Then he did. Everyone did.
