Fear of airplanes?
It was just Bridgie and I, living together in an apartment in some other small town. We were taking an after dinner drive just because, down this stretch of two lane highway leading straight out from the city. The plan was just to drive for a little bit and maybe park and watch the sunset and go home. Our vehicle was bigger than the one we have, maybe a minivan or something.
There’d been a lot of weird planes lately, test planes we figured, over the city. We’d seen some that seemed to maybe generate some kind of cloud cover, and we wondered about it all. Now as we were on our drive we heard the sounds of planes and we pulled over and turned around to look back and see them. There were a couple blimps, one of them looking like a framework of a blimp with clear material stretched over it or glass or something. These were emerging from some clouds and we guess they had some way to create them because there were some little white puffs of cloud that were expelled in geometric patterns at the end. From behind the blimps came a whole squadron of squat big planes in formation. The colors were bright and showy, not typical camo paint or grey. I think the design of the planes was conjured by my brain from playing Skyrates too much. We watched the squadron flying in low towards us and felt uneasy for reasons we could name, but we couldn’t see a logical reason to be and so we pulled back onto the road to continue on. I think, inexplicably, Bridgie was the one driving.
We were still turned facing the wrong way in the lane, back towards the city, when we saw sparks and fire from the bottom rear of one of the planes. It happened to be one that was flying on a path aligned with the freeway we were on, and it was crashing fast. I told her to hit reverse fast, and we gunned it backwards as the plane crashed and skidded on the road before us, sending out sparks and shrapnel. We weren’t in immediate danger of being hit by the plane itself but I was worried about the on fire bits setting our car on fire. Unfortunately another plane in line with the first, but behind us, was also crashing. It looked like the planes all around were dropping, starting small fires. The one on the road in front of us was still skidding and we were afraid of getting sandwiched by the crashes. I said ‘this isn’t working…’ and we switched, and I drove us up the grassy side of the road into the hilly area beyond. The ground rose up on either side of the road but what was beyond was small hills and hillocks and basically very rough riding. The weird part was that the grass was all short and even, and my conscious brain thought that was weird even at the time. It was almost like really convincing Astroturf or something. You couldn’t pay someone enough to mow the grass in terrain like that! We drove through the hillocks a short ways, then we saw a group of people coming towards us, spread out and all wearing the same light olive green color. We figured they were survivors from one of the other crashes, and probably military. We stopped the car and got out to see if they were okay. The men were army crawling along the ground rather then walking, so we kind of crouched down to meet them, confused.
The man in the lead approached us in a crouch, and he looked exactly like Patrick Stewart, only with a little pencil thin goofy mustache. He said that all his men that got out were fine, and we told him there were a couple crashes back along the road and that was why we’d pulled off. He shook our hands, and was very kind and friendly, but he told us “Don’t go back to the city tonight. If you had a destination away from the city, or were on your way back from somewhere, you should go there tonight.” His army waited behind him, keeping low.
They all looked like Patrick Stewart. It was an army of Patrick Stewart clones.
We didn’t find that weird at the time, what we found weird was that they were trying so hard to keep low, like an army trying to avoid enemy fire, but the planes had all looked alike and flown together so you’d assume they were all part of the same army. Also the crashes had all our mostly happened once they were past the city, and were outside of it. We nodded and thanked him for the advice and then he and his clone army went on their way toward the road, still crawling.
We were unsettled and confused and we didn’t have anywhere outside the city to go, so we just sat in the car watching the city, and the fires of the crashes, and eventually we slept in the back of the car with the back seats folded down. When we woke the next morning it looked like the fires were out, and there was no one around. All our stuff (and possibly the cats?) were back in our place in town, so with no other real option we headed back. I drove us towards the road and then drove parallel to it in the hills, since the road itself was still covered with wreckage. We saw no military though, and no other cars but there hadn’t been other cars the night before either, so we didn’t find that strange. There was a surreal, uneasy feel to the air. As we got close to the city, to a point where I could have pulled back onto the road, I stopped the car and the engine. There were no sounds from the city, no lights, no motion of cars or people. We both looked at the city warily for signs of life, but it was a ghost town. We talked about it, could they have evacuated? But they couldn’t have gone out by this road because it was still blocked with wreckage. Could there be some weird radiation that had killed people? Should we risk it and go back to see? What about the military Commander we talked to? Something was clearly amiss…
Unfortunately I woke up then, and never got to investigate further.
There’d been a lot of weird planes lately, test planes we figured, over the city. We’d seen some that seemed to maybe generate some kind of cloud cover, and we wondered about it all. Now as we were on our drive we heard the sounds of planes and we pulled over and turned around to look back and see them. There were a couple blimps, one of them looking like a framework of a blimp with clear material stretched over it or glass or something. These were emerging from some clouds and we guess they had some way to create them because there were some little white puffs of cloud that were expelled in geometric patterns at the end. From behind the blimps came a whole squadron of squat big planes in formation. The colors were bright and showy, not typical camo paint or grey. I think the design of the planes was conjured by my brain from playing Skyrates too much. We watched the squadron flying in low towards us and felt uneasy for reasons we could name, but we couldn’t see a logical reason to be and so we pulled back onto the road to continue on. I think, inexplicably, Bridgie was the one driving.
We were still turned facing the wrong way in the lane, back towards the city, when we saw sparks and fire from the bottom rear of one of the planes. It happened to be one that was flying on a path aligned with the freeway we were on, and it was crashing fast. I told her to hit reverse fast, and we gunned it backwards as the plane crashed and skidded on the road before us, sending out sparks and shrapnel. We weren’t in immediate danger of being hit by the plane itself but I was worried about the on fire bits setting our car on fire. Unfortunately another plane in line with the first, but behind us, was also crashing. It looked like the planes all around were dropping, starting small fires. The one on the road in front of us was still skidding and we were afraid of getting sandwiched by the crashes. I said ‘this isn’t working…’ and we switched, and I drove us up the grassy side of the road into the hilly area beyond. The ground rose up on either side of the road but what was beyond was small hills and hillocks and basically very rough riding. The weird part was that the grass was all short and even, and my conscious brain thought that was weird even at the time. It was almost like really convincing Astroturf or something. You couldn’t pay someone enough to mow the grass in terrain like that! We drove through the hillocks a short ways, then we saw a group of people coming towards us, spread out and all wearing the same light olive green color. We figured they were survivors from one of the other crashes, and probably military. We stopped the car and got out to see if they were okay. The men were army crawling along the ground rather then walking, so we kind of crouched down to meet them, confused.
The man in the lead approached us in a crouch, and he looked exactly like Patrick Stewart, only with a little pencil thin goofy mustache. He said that all his men that got out were fine, and we told him there were a couple crashes back along the road and that was why we’d pulled off. He shook our hands, and was very kind and friendly, but he told us “Don’t go back to the city tonight. If you had a destination away from the city, or were on your way back from somewhere, you should go there tonight.” His army waited behind him, keeping low.
They all looked like Patrick Stewart. It was an army of Patrick Stewart clones.
We didn’t find that weird at the time, what we found weird was that they were trying so hard to keep low, like an army trying to avoid enemy fire, but the planes had all looked alike and flown together so you’d assume they were all part of the same army. Also the crashes had all our mostly happened once they were past the city, and were outside of it. We nodded and thanked him for the advice and then he and his clone army went on their way toward the road, still crawling.
We were unsettled and confused and we didn’t have anywhere outside the city to go, so we just sat in the car watching the city, and the fires of the crashes, and eventually we slept in the back of the car with the back seats folded down. When we woke the next morning it looked like the fires were out, and there was no one around. All our stuff (and possibly the cats?) were back in our place in town, so with no other real option we headed back. I drove us towards the road and then drove parallel to it in the hills, since the road itself was still covered with wreckage. We saw no military though, and no other cars but there hadn’t been other cars the night before either, so we didn’t find that strange. There was a surreal, uneasy feel to the air. As we got close to the city, to a point where I could have pulled back onto the road, I stopped the car and the engine. There were no sounds from the city, no lights, no motion of cars or people. We both looked at the city warily for signs of life, but it was a ghost town. We talked about it, could they have evacuated? But they couldn’t have gone out by this road because it was still blocked with wreckage. Could there be some weird radiation that had killed people? Should we risk it and go back to see? What about the military Commander we talked to? Something was clearly amiss…
Unfortunately I woke up then, and never got to investigate further.