Free LZR-1143: Redemption by Bryan James Page B

turn out for you?”
    “Jesus, you’re infuriating.”
    She screwed her face up and mimicked my voice in a childish, baby-voice.
    There was no winning with her. Only escape.
    Teenagers.
    “I’m going forward,” I pointed at her abruptly. “Stay.”
    She shot me her patented look and rubbed the sleeping dog’s head. He groaned and lifted a leg absently.
    I grabbed the walls as the plane shook again, and moved forward, careful not to touch any of the controls or panels, and marveling at the massive gun barrels that protruded from the side of the machine. I never knew how impressive they were, although I had heard my brother talk about them for years.
    A single 25mm Gatling style gun, which we had already used; a larger, 40mm Bofors cannon, and the mother of all aerial armaments—the 105mm cannon. The Gatling gun was like a shredder, tearing its victims to pieces. The 40mm cannon was a fiery rain, using incendiary rounds to make things go boom. And the 105mm—otherwise known on the ground as a Howitzer—could be fired at an average rate of 3-4 rounds per minute, delivering a massive payload for optimum disbursement. My brother had taught me well.
    He had always wanted to fly one of these beasts.
    It was the first time I had thought about him since New York, and I tried to push past it, but the airplane brought it all back. His love of flying, his rough divorce. The fact that he got motion sick but he loved flying too much to quit.
    I harbored no illusions. I had little hope that he was alive. We were separated by more than just thousands of miles now.
    We were separated by worlds.
    The pilots had shut the door to the flight deck after we took off, and I looked through the small window before knocking. Lightning flashed in the distance, and a massive storm system boiled to our right. Rain slashed against the windshield in sporadic sheets, and heavy cloud cover obscured the landscape below.
    I knocked lightly, and the co-pilot gestured curtly. I opened the door and found a seat in the flight engineer’s chair. The co-pilot turned to me and I saw the lieutenant colonel silver oak leafs on his uniform before I saw his name: Crawford.
    “Colonel,” I nodded, extending my hand. He took it, and nodded once. “Thanks for the pick up.”
    “Don’t mention it,” he said, and the pilot turned once, nodding quickly before turning back to wrestling the yoke.
    “How are we doing?” I asked, looking out the window at the storm. “I heard we need a port in the storm.”
    He gestured at one of a million dials and readouts. “We are at about twenty percent right now. Way too little to get to Seattle from here. We are aiming for Ellsworth in South Dakota, but it’s going to be a race. Our range is about twenty-five hundred miles, and we took off slightly over half full. But if we have to keep fighting this weather, it’s not going to happen.”
    “Where are we now?”
    He pointed at the GPS computer, which meant nothing to me, as it appeared to be only a green screen with numbers and lines.
    “About a hundred miles past Chicago, give or take. But we don’t have weather information coming in, as all the sat links have been disabled. It’s old-school cross-country flight,” interjected the pilot, a full bird colonel who was still staring out the front windshield.
    “Is Ellsworth secure?”
    “It was the last time we checked. We’ve made a few of these runs, at least as far as San Diego. We’re doing cluster extermination, mopping up after the napalm and incendiary with some high yield explosive rounds. We stopped at Ellsworth a week ago for fuel. They’re remote enough that they haven’t been attacked in force yet. They’re pulling the same trick as the Western Army in Seattle, stacking old shipping containers to make a perimeter, and using drones for decoys.”
    “Do we have an ETA?”
    He shook his head. “No, largely because we don’t know what the weather is going to do. But one way or another, we’ll be on