“Armed?”

“Yes, Definitely.”

After the Civilian Disarmament Act, they weren’t used to hearing that.


State Patrol Trooper Dan Bolling, northbound on 15 a few miles north of the state line saw the stolen traffic car as he was copying its description. His brother worked for the state across the line. The two had just met for coffee. Matt would still be at the truck stop. Maybe they could make the collar together! How cool! Hitting the switch to disable his brake lights, Dan pulled off the road, killed all his lights and flipped around, turning his headlights back on under a hill. Throttle to the floor, he began to close on the reportedly stolen police cruiser.


“Hello?”

“Agent Albarran?”

“Yes?”

“Key your radio microphone and hold it down for five seconds so we can lock on your frequency, Ma’am.” The same voice, much louder, came over the radio speaker as soon as she released the push-to-talk button. “We will intercept you in ninety seconds. Don’t be startled. As we slow down, you slow down with us. We’ll be extracting you by air.”


Dan Bolling smiled smugly as he flipped the rocker switch for the cruisers’ mars lights. His expression changed to one of shocked surprise as the red and blue strobe flashes of his overhead light bar illuminated a huge metallic object that could not be there. It was just above him, moving considerably faster than he was, in the same direction. A long olive drab thing the size and shape of an oversize jousting lance with a couple of funnel cones, concentric with it, out toward the front. What the – a heavy duty looking wheel and tire followed it into his view. The wheel, perhaps six feet above his car, was attached to the bottom of something that looked like the removed nose section of a large airplane, hanging in mid air. The lance protruded from the front of it. Some kind of aircraft? The noise was incredible, a pulsing roar that made him cringe down into his seat to get away from it. A man sat in a phone booth window, facing him from the back of the disembodied airplane nose. He was dressed in a military flight suit with a large helmet. The man took one hand off a set of controls and pulled down a green visor down from the brim of the helmet, obviously to shield his eyes against the mars lights. After half a frozen moment, Dan slammed on his brakes, sliding back out from under the biggest helicopter he’d ever seen. Shaped like a praying mantis, the spindly main body of the thing extended aft from above the airliner-nose shaped ‘head’. A pair of huge jet engines flanked it on either side just forward of the rotor hub. The blades, viewed in stop-action from the flashing strobe lights spanned wider than the whole roadway easement – a lot wider. A pair of long landing gear legs hung from massive spreaders below and behind the engines. The machine was obviously made to land straddling something the size of a railroad boxcar, hook onto it, and carry it away. Centered under the rotor hub was a huge double claw hook. The man in the booth must operate the hook. He couldn’t be the pilot, facing backward like that. It was going forward at over a hundred miles per hour.


Matt Bolling saw it too. The science-fiction monster appeared like an apparition directly above his brother’s cruiser, still a mile away. Stopped across the roadway, blocking both lanes, he could only stare and blink at the thing as it closed on the stolen cruiser ahead of it.


Approaching the State line, Anna saw the roadblock car ahead of her before noticing the pursuing trooper’s car. Boxed in from both ways, her hope of rescue faded away, despite the promised rescue in 90 seconds. Then she found herself surrounded by machinery. First a wheel maybe four feet in diameter dropped down beside her window and began to slow down. As she slowed to match it, a man wearing a space suit of some sort appeared behind a window suspended in mid air at the front of her car. Mesmerized, she was aware the voice from her radio was that of the man in the window. The lips and gestures matched it. “That’s good, Agent Albarran. Stay with me, try not to fall behind, but don’t hit me either. We’ll be coming to a full stop tonight. Fun, isn’t it? Don’t you just love these exercises?”

Anna somehow brought the car to a stop more or less even with huge machine, the nature of which she was too shocked to even guess at. The man in the space suit told her to pull forward a little, just like the operator of a car wash. Anna never noticed the other wheel until they both dropped a foot or so to the road surface, followed a second later by a third wheel directly below the space suited man in the window. Riding a unicycle? She tried to blink away the surreal image. Then she noticed the claw. It closed rapidly around her, sharp looking forklift tines sliding under her vehicle. The man said something she couldn’t hear and the claw thing came up hard under the car, jerking it upward. The car’s front end dropped and she saw the road surface in her windshield along with the man in the window. He seemed to stand still as if attached to the car, but the road was rapidly falling away, taking the world with it. Instinctively she stomped on the brakes, which had no effect other than causing the man in the window to laugh. “Don’t worry, Ma’am. I won’t drop you.” Anna relaxed a little as she caught a glimpse of the roadblock car four hundred feet below.