SNAFU: Hunters

They followed the direction set by the candle’s flame. It was tough going. The JSLIST suits had not been designed with operator comfort in mind and they were weighed down with as much equipment from the Stryker as they could carry.

Blake almost had to physically carry Carroll too. The old man seemed truly terrified of dying. Once he had realized this was no normal hunt, his whole demeanor had changed. But the man realized being alone was no guarantee of safety either, so he had eventually agreed to come with them.

Blake tried to keep him talking, asking him all kinds of questions about his time at the Nevada Proving Grounds. It helped to lighten his mood somewhat and it was all useful information.

“What about that shield thing?” Blake asked. “How does that work?”

“It’s called a circle of protection. It’s a holy space. Things work differently inside it, like the candle.”

“And the bad guys can’t get in?” Blake asked as they trudged on.

“Nothing can get in until the circle is broken from the inside.”

“Hey, Sarge!” said Lyons. “How do I get me one of those?”

“It won’t work for just anyone, son,” Carroll replied. “It takes practise and something to focus your faith on.”

“The chain?” Blake asked.

“Chain, chalk… it doesn’t really matter.”

The storm grew stronger until pushing through the wind felt like trying to walk underwater. Then, without warning it was gone.

Something else disappeared too; the constant clicking from their portable Geiger counter. Just seconds ago it had been so fast that it had sounded like the white noise between radio stations. Blake had just tuned it out. Now it was gone altogether.

Blake looked to Pollin who was holding the small instrument. “Fault?”

“No, Sergeant, not that I can tell. Just no reading. Not even normal background radiation.”

Blake spotted something glinting ahead; Howard had seen it too.

“What the hell is that?” the marine asked.

It hung, glinting in mid-air. It appeared to be metal – twisted and ridged like a section of spine from some metal beast.

“It’s a crankshaft,” Lyons said. “Part of one anyway.”

He was right. It had been scoured clean and gleamed like it was freshly-milled. It hung impossibly in the air. Blake waved his rifle barrel above and below it and then to the sides, but there was nothing holding it up. It was hovering.

He looked to Carroll. “You want to fill us in on why gravity seems to have taken a day off?”

“Search me,” Carroll replied with a shrug. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Blake reached out and carefully touched the crankshaft. It felt entirely normal and entirely solid. After his first tentative touch he wrapped a fist around it and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. He would have had more of a chance to right the fifteen-ton Stryker than to budge the floating crankshaft.

“There’s more over here,” Fernandez said. Blake looked over and saw a tiny metal leaf floating in mid-air – a piece of torn metal plate with viciously sharp and jagged edges.

“There’s paint underneath,” Fernandez said.

Blake peered beneath; in a hollow protected from the wind, some of the original paint remained.

They moved onwards through a cloud of suspended debris – not just metal, but also splinters of charred wood and what looked like shards of black glass fused from the Arizona sand itself.

The debris grew thicker, forcing them to weave through a three-dimensional maze of immovable particles until they eventually came to the source.

It was a house, or rather the remains of one. It seemed to have been caught mid—explosion. The troupe faced the back wall of the property. It was still relatively intact; the door was fixed in its frame, hanging open. A rear window hung like a shattered cloud just outside its frame. The front of the house was just gone. Through the open door Blake could see the front rooms standing open to the street, its contents pushed against the walls as if a great broom had swept through and cleaned the room furniture and all.

To the left and right other houses defined the edge of a dirt road.

“What the hell is this place?” Pollin asked.

“Ghost town,” Fernandez said. “I saw one on Sixty Minutes. There’re ghost towns all over this county, old mining towns just abandoned after the silver dried up. Nothing else out here worth staying for, so folks just up and walked away.”

“Not everyone,” Lyons said, pointing to a car beside the house. Like everything else, it had been frozen at the moment of the explosion. The car stood almost upright in a permanent, impossible pirouette around one of its front wheels, but apart from that it looked to be fairly new and in good condition. It was certainly better than any abandoned vehicle should be after years in the desert.

“Looks like someone set up here. You think it was the terrorists?” Blake asked.

“Drug runners more like, or maybe organised people smugglers,” Fernandez replied.

Blake glanced at Carroll and noted the look of alarm on his face. “Carroll, you got any idea how much energy it would take to freeze a town like this?”