with the Coast Guard ship that had been bombarding the city. The news was bad, actually far worse than bad. The animals were quickly spreading throughout the island and the navy had teams of men on shore hastily rigging all the bridges with explosives. The tunnels had all been flooded in an attempt to keep the animals contained. They had been shelling the alien ship without effect and were now targeting the huge creatures in an attempt to stop their destruction of the city.
But worse was coming. There were bombers on their way to drop air fuel explosives on the creatures regardless of the amount of damage that would do to the city. They should be here in about a half hour. A carrier task force would be close enough to launch its planes in just over two hours while the states surrounding New York had called up the remnant of their National Guard.
Then the Coast Guard officer that Dad was talking with told him the bad news. One of these alien ships had landed just a few miles outside the West Point Military Academy in New York, in Washington DC, Orlando, Florida, Mexico City, and twenty one other places throughout North America. But that was just the tip of the iceberg because they knew that over six hundred of the vessels had landed around the world. This was some kind of an invasion although they were uncertain who, or what, was actually invading and what their object was.
Dad then burst the Coast Guard Officers bubble when he told him that the little monster he had batted into the water hadn’t sunk, but had swam back to shore. Taking down the bridges would slow them down, but when they ran out of food on Manhattan Island, they would merely swim to the next source of food.
The river was crowded with boats and ships of every size, all of them fleeing what was happening in New York City. Although the exodus was reasonably orderly the Coast Guard was enforcing order literally through the barrels of their guns. Several times they issued an order to one of the large cargo ships to slow down because they were endangering the small boats also attempting to flee.
Right on schedule, almost a half hour later, the sounds of explosions coming from the city behind us could be heard and shortly after that it appeared that a large part of the city was on fire. The column of smoke was massive, so large that the only thing that appeared to be missing was the mushroom cloud generated by a nuclear explosion.
Once we cleared the final breakwater the full force of the oceans waves could be felt and, even though they were running at six to eight feet, they weren’t a problem for our yacht. Unfortunately, some of the smaller boats were in serious difficulty and even though the Coast Guard had several cutters out rescuing folks, the scope of the problem was beyond their current capabilities to manage. There were simply too many boats out here that shouldn’t be.
One of the small boats near us had been rolled by the waves and there were three people clinging to it screaming for help. Dad maneuvered as close as possible to them and the guys threw them ropes with floats attached so we could bring them aboard.
After the man and two women were aboard one of the shivering people told Odeler that there was another man thrown from their boat when it rolled over. Even though the man had a life vest on, we couldn’t see him anywhere. After looking for almost an hour, Dad decided it was time to go especially when the Coast Guard Cutter could be seen steaming past the break wall, headed into the Ocean doing at least fifteen knots.
Over the radio the Coast Guard was ordering all ships to steam away from New York City at maximum possible speed. So with our sails set, in only a few minutes we were at our maximum speed of slightly over eight knots sailing in a brisk wind. Almost everybody aboard was already suffering from sea sickness while the yacht moved briskly through the ocean under a cloudless sky.
Distantly we could hear the sounds of large explosions as the bombers dropped their load onto the city not quite fifteen miles behind us. Above us we could see the contrails streaming behind the bombers as they turned back towards shore, although we couldn’t hear anything. I wondered how the battle was going but the only thing we knew for certain was that New York City was burning. The huge column of smoke was being blown inland on the morning wind, but was clearly visible to us.
Less than an hour later, over the horizon, there were a series of brilliant flashes, six in all. Within minutes it was obvious what had happened as six large columns rose into the sky behind us with their tops quickly spreading into the distinctive mushroom cloud. Even though we were almost twenty five miles away from the city the rush of wind coming from the explosions almost caused us to capsize.
There was nothing we could say, someone had decided to cauterize the infection before it could spread. New York City, and the surrounding area, had ceased to exist. God help the millions of people caught up in the nuclear hell unleashed by our politicians because they would need every bit of help they could get.
Dad set a course for Bermuda. Even if one of those ships had landed there, the area had thousands of islands so there had to be someplace safe for us to stop, we hoped!
From the author;
I hope you enjoyed this short story which is actually Chapter 7 of my latest book Extinction Earth!
Thank you for taking your time and reading my work. I hope you had as much enjoyment reading it as I had in writing it.
Nathan Hale
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