Catastrophe
President Auer's secretary worked in Mobotropolis' tallest building, the Colossus Skyscraper. She arranged appointments between the president and other international diplomats. Her work station was a room just outside of Leo's penthouse office.
Leo must have had an important meeting today. He hadn't been out all morning, nor had he asked for anything. At first, the secretary put it out of her mind. But as the hours ticked by, she began to get suspicious, and wondered why Leo hadn't come out for lunch. Soon she decided to walk in and check up on him.
She walked up to the door and knocked. There was no reply.
"Mr. President? Is everything alright in there?"
Silence.
"Leo? Can you hear me? Please respond if you are able."
No response.
Dismayed, she tried the door. It was locked.
She walked back, and then ran at the door, concentrating all of her momentum into her shoulder. Aiming for the lock, she broke it and entered the room.
The room was empty. Leo was not behind his desk. A horrible stench of decay filled her nostrils, and it mixed with another pervasive, unpleasant odor. A haze seemed to hang in the air, making her eyes burn and water. The only sound was an ambient hiss in the background.
She looked towards the bathroom door. She had seen him enter the office. The bathroom was the only place he could be. Timidly, she walked up and knocked. There was no reply. She tried the handle and it turned. The door swung outward because weight had been propped against it; Leo's lifeless body fell and landed on the secretary.
The secretary screamed and wrestled her way out from under the body. Leo landed face down. A bullet hole was visible in the back of his neck. When she turned him over, an even more horrifying sight met her eyes. Blood trickled from slits on Leo's face, carved out to resemble whiskers. She looked down and saw a blood-spattered note clutched in one of Leo's hands. Trembling, she pried apart his fingers and read it:
"Animal Filth. This is the price you pay for raping our glorious empire. You will all burn in Hell."
Scrawled under the message was a silhouette of a four-armed, four-legged human, with its appendages sprawled out across a circle. It was an Aryan symbol. She turned the note over.
"Look to the lavatory door and follow the wire."
She looked to the door and saw a wire running over to a timer on the president's desk. It read fifteen seconds. She saw that it was a switch that connected another circuit. It led to a Jacob's ladder that had been placed on the desk. Then she realized what the haze and the pungent smell was; gas had been diverted into the office through a main.
Time slowed down as the secretary dashed out of the office. She escaped seconds before the timer hit zero.
-----
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at the economic, political, and financial center of Mobotropolis and, for that matter, of the entire UFM," the tour guide explained to the visitors. "The Colossus skyscraper was constructed almost sixty years ago and as you can see, it still remains, if you will excuse the pun, at the height of architectural ingenuity."
Predictably, the tourists chuckled. Harry Zapruder, a zebra, took out a camcorder and started filming, much to the sarcastic eye-rolling of his fiancé nearby.
"Despite its age, Colossus stands as tall and strong as it ever did, and its safety ratings are second to none."
A translucent fireball bloomed out of nowhere on the top level and then disappeared as quickly as it had materialized. Zapruder caught the entire thing on tape. For a moment, time froze, daring the silent, horror-stricken tourists to believe their eyes.
BOOM. As the sound finally reached the tourists, it broke them out of their silence. They milled around nervously, still in denial of what they had just seen. Then they saw thousands of light specks falling towards them; shards of glass glinting in the sunlight. A scream sounded from across the street, and the tourists fled the scene in a panic.
The spectacle set off a string of fender-benders as drivers stopped in the middle of the streets to gawk at the fire on top of Colussus. Officer Bill Griffith of the MPD radioed over to the Mobotropolis emergency center.
"Hey, whoever's on the line, we need lots of people over in Central Mobotropolis, now."
"Sorry, sir, we're understaffed, and we have to deal with an earlier call right now. We work on a first-come, first-served basis," replied a surly young emergency response worker.
"Damn it, you little punk, thousands of lives are in danger! Now listen. Colussus is burning on its rooftop. Send over every emergency vehicle you can spare! Fire control, medical response, rescue operations, and more police vehicles too! If you can take care of that sometime today, we'd appreciate it! Think you can do that??"
"Uhh, of course, sir. Right away sir."
"Thank you."
Griffith closed the radio link.
-----
Jonah Carver sat at his desk at MNN, the Mobotropolis News Network. He finished his lunch and his coffee and lit his afternoon cigar. An office worker burst into the room.
"Sir, I got a call from the city and it sounds like there's a crazy development going on."
Carver paused for a second.
"Well, what is it? What's going on? Why did you come bursting into my office? How dare you?? You're fired! No, wait, rehired, because I want to hear about this. Now answer me, or I'll fire you again!"
"Colossus is burning."
"Burning?? Good lord! No way! This is terrible! No! This is great! This is the greatest news story ever! What's our coverage right now?"
"Just some tourist named Zapruder."
"That's it?! What the hell do I pay you for?! Now I'll lose money to MBC! And guess what? That money is your wages! You're fired again! On your way out, round up some people and get our network out there! Send a chopper! No! Send two choppers! But wait! You can't send choppers unless you work here! You're hired again!"
"Thank you, chief!"
"No problem!"
Carver paused, expectantly.
"Well what the hell are you waiting for?! You want to get fired three times in five minutes?! Get going! Do your job! And get me some more coffee! Good coffee! Not the crap from the break room you served me for lunch! That's your coffee!"
"Yes sir!" The assistant sped out of the room.
-----
"This just in: a terrifying spectacle is unfolding at the Colossus skyscraper. Eyewitnesses reported that at approximately twelve thirty the roof of the building was engulfed in a massive fireball. As of now we do not know the fate of President Auer but for the time being, we fear the worst."
David Rose had just switched on the television set. He called over his wife.
"Lisa, I think you should watch this."
His wife sat down on the sofa next to him. She saw the story caption. She paled and put a hand to her mouth.
"Oh my god. This can't be real."
"We now go live to one of our Channel 54 choppers. What do you see, Frank?"
-----
Channel 54 hovered about one hundred feet from the building, level with the top floor. The penthouse was ablaze. A man in a suit and a red shirt addressed the situation.
"It is the most horrifying scene I have ever witnessed. I don't want to have to say this, but I just can't see how President Auer could escape alive. I'm separated from the fire by about a hundred feet of cold, high-altitude wind and I still feel singed. It looks like emergency responders are arriving now."
Far below, fire engines and ambulances were visible on the ground. A police chopper approached the Channel 54 chopper. A door opened and a policeman appeared, holding a megaphone. He switched it on.
"ATTENTION NEWS CHOPPER! THIS BLAZE IS CREATING UNSAFE AIR CURRENTS! THIS AIRSPACE IS NOW OFF LIMITS TO ANY NON-EMERGENCY AIRCRAFT. FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY AND SO AS NOT TO IMPEDE EMERGENCY RESPONSE, WE ORDER YOU TO VACATE THE AIRSPACE IMMEDIATELY!"
Frank turned to the pilot. "Ignore him. We need more footage. He can't do anything to us without endangering us."
The pilot nodded, even though the megaphone was still blaring at them.
"We need to slide left. There's a piece of rubble blocking the view."
The news chopper edged toward the police chopper.
"A little bit more. A little bit more."
"CHANNEL 54! DO YOU READ ME! VACATE THE AIRSPACE IMMEDIATELY AND FLY IN THE OTHER DIRECTION! YOU ARE TOO CLOSE!"
"No we're not," Frank said to the pilot. Indeed they were a considerable distance away from the other chopper. Unfortunately, Frank was not a helicopter pilot. He did not know that in addition to physical clearance, a helicopter must allow itself a wide berth so that it can correct if it encounters a sudden gust of wind. And sure enough, just as the policeman said, the blaze generated a blast of wind that caught Channel 54 off guard. There was not enough distance between the two choppers for either one to correct their position. The rotor blades of the news chopper shattered the police cockpit windshield, killed its pilot and policeman, and sheared off on the police chopper's sturdy metal skeleton. The skids of the two choppers got caught on each other, and without enough propeller radius to stay airborne, the news chopper lost altitude and started dragging the police chopper down with it.
Channel 54's center of gravity pivoted around the skids, and it swung upside down from the police helicopter. The police chopper swung from side to side dangerously and entered into a flat spin. Frank couldn't strap himself in fast enough. The centrifugal force ejected him from Channel 54 just over a thousand feet above the ground.
The engine of the police chopper strained to maintain altitude under the added weight of the news chopper. Its engine overheated and caught fire. The heat weakened the bolts that held the rotor blades onto the shaft. As their rotations slowed down, they flexed dangerously, buffeted around by the wind resistance. Finally the metal sheared, the rotors ripped off, and the two helicopters were no longer just losing altitude. They were plummeting.
Suffocated by the black smoke issuing from the console, and beaten mercilessly by the airframe, wind, and g-forces, the pilot of the news chopper, the last soul alive, died before the helicopters hit the ground. The firefighters and police on the ground saw them coming and frantically evacuated the street to save lives. It would have to be the lives of the people on the ground. Nobody could land a chopper without rotor blades.
The choppers hit the ground and exploded. Horrified bystanders were blinded by an enormous fireball that rose two hundred feet into the air, deafened by an earth-shaking BOOM, and singed by a horrendous wave of heat that overpowered even the sweltering, summer-afternoon temperatures. Smoking shards of metal rained down seconds later, along with smoking shards of other things. Organic things.
A few blocks down the street, a rescue worker found Frank. Had it not been for the shattered video camera, he never would have been able to identify who was scattered forty feet along Main Street.