Free The Filter Trap by A. L. Lorentz

here, folks,” the pilot’s speaker barked. “What’s left of it, anyway. They told me to drop you off at the Presidio, but I’m not going to be able to touch down.”
    “ Drop is right!” LARS looked down with trepidation. “I haven’t jumped since basic.”
    “Aren’t you a pilot?” Allan asked, happy to not suffer his fear alone.
    LARS nodded and leaned over to Allan. “I prefer two Pratt and Whitney’s with 35,000 pound-feet of thrust to escort me to the ground, not a big piece of canvas. Pilots only see parachutes when something goes wrong .”
    Lee rolled her eyes. “Just enjoy the view, probably your last chance to relax for a few days.”
    “I have a feeling the view won’t help us relax,” Nana said, pointing at the columns of smoke outside.
    SIMI, sensing Allan’s trepidation, tapped him on the chest. “You’ll love it, Doc. I got you, don’t worry.” He grabbed a parachute and brought the harness up around Allan’s shaking legs. A few uncomfortably tight strap pulls later and SIMI bumped his fist on Allan’s shoulder. “Ready!” SIMI put Allan’s hand on the red tab just above his opposite collarbone and lowered his voice. “Just remember to pull this if you want to stay alive, okay?”
    Allan, shivering with fear, managed to nod.
    The cool fog of the bay whistled in as the back of the chopper opened.
    “Ready!” the others shouted in turn and made a makeshift jump line by the window into the sky.
    “Drop point, Presidio, thirty seconds,” the pilot advised.
    “Let’s go!” Lee shouted at Allan, pulling him into the line behind her. “I saved you a spot.”
    LARS, behind Allan, put a hand on his shoulder and leaned in. “She always goes first when we’ve got something tough to do, that way the rest of us can’t back down from a challenge. Now you can’t, either.”
    The gaping maw started to look less like sky and more like a smoking patchwork quilt stuck in the San Francisco Bay.
    “Hey!” Lee shouted and snapped her fingers in front of Allan’s eyes. “You’ll be fine, just watch me, and when I open my chute you open yours, then grab the handles and pull. You’ll get it, it’s intuitive.” Raising her voice for the others, “If these dumbasses can do it, you can too.”
    Lee leaned onto the platform, slowly walking the plank. Beyond her the miasma of colors gave way to individual details, familiar buildings and public parks mangled almost beyond recognition.
    “Looks like they put the city through a washing machine then lit it on fire,” LARS said.
    “Don’t look at the bay!” SIMI shouted, which of course brought their eyes there.
    “What are those, fish?” LARS asked about the many bobbing white objects in the flooded edges of the bay.
    “ They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. All foul, all rotting, all dead ,” Lee whispered cryptically.
    “What!” Allan yelled.
    “She’s just showing off her library again,” SIMI said.
    “I get that, the Dead Marshes, but what are those down there?”
    “Bodies.” LARS solemnly realized.
    “ All dead ,” Allan repeated Lee’s quotation to himself.
    LARS nodded. “Victims of the tsunami.”
    Lee, almost at the edge of the platform, shifted and pointed at their destination, high flat cliffs covered with tens of thousands of newly minted homeless between the dead marshes and the Pacific.
    “The Presidio!” she shouted. “If we lose each other watch for my flare!”
    “ Candles of corpses ,” Allan mumbled through a shiver. He felt hands at his neck and jerked around.
    “Easy buddy,” LARS shouted, pulling Allan’s shirt up over his mouth. “Try not to breathe that smoke.” He leaned to Allan’s ear and whispered, “Or you’ll light little candles of your own.”
    “You too?” he asked, acknowledging LARS’s awareness of at least one of Lee’s literary references, despite the latter quotation coming from a popular film adaptation. Allan pointed at Lee’s back.