The thing that scared her most was the silence.
Back at Armstrong, the hustle and bustle of a proper, if barely functional, air force base had given her a constant background of white noise; there was always the hum of a fluorescent light, the melody of power tools or the lyrics of a frustrated crew chief. Here, at Forward Air Base Constellation— if you could even call a dirt strip with makeshift hangars an air base— the band had reached a rest, and the silence screamed into her ears a deafening roar.
She had been at this lovely little makeshift airfield for… three days. In place of the walls and ceilings of the old airbase— rubble now, she reminded herself— they had tents. They were pretty large tents, many of them; but they lacked the concrete stubbornness of solid walls; had they still bothered to keep her prisoner, there would be very little keeping the pilot from freedom beyond the actions of the few armed guards and partisans.
Is it bad that I miss prison? She shook her head. Ugh. I just miss having a bed. And a gym. And food that wasn't MREs.
The reverie stirred her from her sleepless rest, and she rubbed tired eyes with a tired hand as she struggled up to tired feet. Is this how it's gonna be? She struggled to think of an alternative. Looks like it.
The mess was, well, a mess. A larger tent with pallets of MRE boxes, like everywhere else, seating was nowhere in sight. It had been annoying the first day, but as she dropped into a cross-legged sit next to her squadmates on the pockmarked blue tarp, she smiled. "So," Jackal said with a grimace. "Wonderful weather we're having. Did you catch the game?"
"Oh, very funny, David." Burn rolled his eyes and sighed. "Man, we're really gonna need something to talk about if we're just going to be stuck here doing fuck-all for eternity."
"Eternity?" Dagger chuckled. "Someone's an optimist."
"Optimist?"
"Yeah, dumbass. The Feds are gonna find us a lot sooner than eternity."
"You guys, maybe." Bluejay walked over from the one table in the room, a distribution station for the rations. "I'll be a ghost on the wind. I ain't going back to jail. You get it, right, Spook?" He laid out the six MRE packets, today's menu an appetizing Garden Vegetable Lasagna. "Breakfast's ready."
BASH held up one of the brown packages. "They're already open. And basically everything is missing."
"Yeah, them's the breaks." Bluejay sighed. "Good news is, nobody would ever steal veggie lasagna, because someone would have to want it first. Bad news is, somebody ratfucked the store room before the evac."
Dagger gave Bluejay a blank stare of utter annoyance. "And pray tell, who might that have been?"
"Her, actually." Bluejay pointed at Nicole. "It was her."
She grit her teeth, taking her attention off the depressingly empty meal pack. "Oh, fuck off, Bluejay. You told me to."
He held up his hands. "Oh, does it really matter who did what? That's all in the past. Can't we just put this behind us?"
Nobody felt like talking after that.
It was the first time in a long time that they had any free time. Usually, there was always something to do; training, tactics, talking to the maintenance crews; but now, there was little else to do. They had been ordered off alert to not tip off the Feds to the location of the base; they wouldn't fly Combat Air Patrol until the bases further south needed someone to pick up the slack or until the other forward airbases came online and ready. They were told to avoid sorties if possible; their planes weren't all designed to operate from dirt strips.
Why couldn't we have gotten, like, a highway or something? She sighed. Oh well. I'm no stranger to the short end of the stick.
She couldn't shake a thought from her head. "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" That was the interviewer's question. She didn't remember her answer, all those years ago, but she knew it had been wrong.
She hadn't laughed like that in a long time.
If there was one thing that was nice about being stuck in the Cascadian countryside, it was the scenery. The pilots of CIF-77 had decided to start working off the long slog of nothing until the base became operational by going for a jog.
She didn't object to the Major's suggestion. It'll be nice, some much-needed fresh air.
"You know, I wasn't kidding." Jackal said between breaths. "The weather has been wonderful lately."
"Yeah, but you can't say that," his wingman replied. "You'll jinx us."
"What? You don't actually believe that shit, do you, Dag?" He laughed.
They felt it before they saw it, and saw it before they heard it. The earth started to rumble beneath their feet, shaking a few of the runners to the ground. In the distance arose massive clouds of dust, torn asunder by bolts of lightning that looked more like electrified fire, and the scene slowly started to repeat itself all across the horizon, distant yet terrifyingly close.
She shuddered as a terrifying thunderclap— at least, it sounded like a thunderclap, and if it was not she dared not wonder what else it could have been— swept over her. Her breathing quickened, and she glanced all over her surroundings, searching, fixating on any vague sign, any subtle tell, that whatever disaster had wreaked devastation so far away was about to hit them next.
Burn fell to his knees, but not from the still-shaking ground; he clutched at his gloved hand, and stared to the skies as distant pillars of flame rose among the smoke and dust, infectious amber spilling across blue skies.
"I… I see them."