Christina Eliopolis' Interview

PARNELL AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, TENNESSEE

 [Gavin Blaire escorts me to the office of his squadron commander,
Colonel Christina Eliopolis. As much a legend for her temper as for her
outstanding war record, it is difficult to see how so much intensity can
 be compacted into her diminutive, almost childlike frame. Her long
black bangs and delicate facial features only reinforce the picture of
eternal youth. Then she removes her sunglasses, and I see the fire
behind her eyes.]

 I was a Raptor driver, the FA-22. It was, hands down, the best air
superiority platform ever built. It could outfly and outfight God and
all his angels. It was a monument to American technical prowess…and in
this war, that prowess counted for shit.

 That must have been frustrating.

 Frustrating? Do you know what it feels like to suddenly be told that
the one goal you’ve worked toward your whole life, that you’ve
sacrificed and suffered for, that’s pushed you beyond limits you never
knew you had is now considered “strategically invalid”?

 Would you say this was a common feeling?

 Let me put it this way; the Russian army wasn’t the only service to be
decimated by their own government. The Armed Forces Reconstruction Act
basically neutered the air force. Some DeStRes “experts” had determined
that our resource-to-kill ratio, our RKR, was the most lopsided of all
the branches.

 Could you give me some example?

 How about the JSOW, the Joint Standoff Weapon? It was a gravity bomb,
guided by GPS and Inertial Nav, that could be released from as far as
forty miles away. The baseline version carried one hundred and forty
BLU-97B submunitions, and each bomblet carried a shaped charge against
armored targets, a fragmented case against infantry, and a zirconium
ring to set the entire kill zone ablaze. It had been considered a
triumph, until Yonkers. 1 Now we were told that the price of one JSOW
kit—the materials, manpower, time, and energy, not to mention the fuel
and ground maintenance needed for the delivery aircraft—could pay for a
platoon of infantry pukes who could smoke a thousand times as many Gs.
Not enough bang for our buck, like so many of our former crown jewels.
They went through us like an industrial laser. The B-2 Spirits, gone;
the B-1 Lancers, gone; even the old BUFFs, the B-52 Big Ugly Fat
Fellows, gone. Throw in the Eagles, the Falcons, the Tomcats, Hornets,
JSFs, and Raptors, and you have more combat aircraft lost to the stroke
of a pen than to all the SAMs, Flak, and enemy fighters in history. 2 At
 least the assets weren’t scrapped, thank God, just mothballed in
warehouses or that big desert graveyard at AMARC. 3 “Long-term
investment,” they called it. That’s the one thing you can always depend
on; as we’re fighting one war, we’re always preparing for the next one.
Our airlift capacity, at least the organization, was almost left intact.

 Almost?

 The Globemasters had to go, so did anything else powered by a “gas
guzzling” jet. That left us with prop-powered aircraft. I went from
flying the closest thing to an X-Wing fighter, to the next best thing to
 a U-Haul.

 Was that the main mission of the air force?

 Airborne resupply was our primary objective, the only one that really counted anymore.

 [She points to a yellowed map on the wall.]

 The base commander let me keep it, after what happened to me.

 [The map is of the wartime continental United States. All land west of
the Rockies is shadowed a light gray. Amongst this gray are a variety of
 colored circles.]

 Islands in the Sea of Zack. Green denotes active military facilities.
Some of them had been converted into refugee centers. Some were still
contributing to the war effort. Some were well defended but had no
strategic impact.

 The Red Zones were labeled “Offensively Viable”: factories, mines,
power plants. The army’d left custodial teams during the big pullback.
Their job was to guard and maintain these facilities for a time when,
if, we could add them to the overall war effort. The Blue Zones were
civilian areas where people had managed to make a stand, carve out a
little piece of real estate, and figure some way to live within its
boundaries. All these zones were in need of resupply and that’s what the
 “Continental Airlift” was all about.

 It was a massive operation, not just in terms of aircraft and fuel, but
 organization as well. Remaining in contact with all these islands,
processing their demands, coordinating with DeStRes, then trying to
procure and prioritize all the materiel for each drop made it the
statistically largest undertaking in air force history.

 We tried to stay away from consumables, things like food and medicine
that required regular deliveries. These were classified as DDs,
dependency drops, and they got a backseat to SSDs, self-sustaining
drops, like tools, spare parts, and tools to make spare parts. “They
don’t need fish,” Sinclair used to say, “they need fishing poles.”
Still, every autumn, we dropped a lot of fish, and wheat, and salt, and
dried vegetables and baby formula…Winters were hard. Remember how long
they used to be? Helping people to help themselves is great in theory,
but you still gotta keep ’em alive.

 Sometimes you had to drop in people, specialists like doctors or
engineers, people with the kind of training you just can’t get from a
how-to manual. The Blue Zones got a lot of Special Forces instructors,
not only to teach them how better to defend themselves, but to prepare
them for the day they might have to go on the offensive. I have a lot of
 respect for those guys. Most of them knew it was for the duration; a
lot of the Blue Zones didn’t have airstrips, so they had to parachute in
 without any hope of pickup. Not all those Blue Zones remained secure.
Some were eventually overrun. The people we dropped in knew the risks
they were taking. A lotta heart, all of them.

 That goes for the pilots as well.

 Hey, I’m not minimizing our risks at all. Every day we had to fly over
hundreds, in some cases thousands, of miles of infested territory.
That’s why we had Purple Zones. [She refers to the last color on the
map. The purple circles are few and far between.] We set these up as
refuel and repair facilities. A lot of the aircraft didn’t have the
range to reach remote drop zones on the East Coast if in-flight
refueling assets weren’t available. They helped reduce the number of
ships and crews lost en route. They brought our fleet survivability up
to 92 percent. Unfortunately, I was part of the other eight.

 I’ll never be sure what exactly brought us down: mechanical malfunction
 or metal fatigue combined with weather. It might have been the contents
 of our payload, mislabeled or mishandled. That happened a lot more than
 anyone wanted to think about. Sometimes if hazardous materials weren’t
packaged properly, or, God forbid, some shit-for-brains QC inspector let
 his people assemble their detonators before crating them for
travel…that happened to a buddy of mine, just a routine flight from
Palmdale to Vandenberg, not even across an infested area. Two hundred
Type 38 detonators, all fully assembled with their power cells
accidentally running, all set to blow on the same freq as our radio.

 [She snaps her fingers.]

 That could have been us. We were on a hop from Phoenix to the Blue Zone
 outside Tallahassee, Florida. It was late October, almost full winter
back then. Honolulu was trying to squeeze out just a few more drops
before the weather socked us in till March. It was our ninth haul that
week. We were all on “tweeks,” these little blue stims that kept you
going without hampering your reflexes or judgment. I guess they worked
well enough, but they made me have to piss my kidneys out every twenty
minutes. My crew, the “guys,” used to give me a lot of grief, you know,
girls always having to go. I know they weren’t really putting the hate
on, but I still tried to hold it as long as I could.

 After two hours of banging around in some seriously heavy turbulence, I
 finally broke down and turned the stick over to my copilot. I’d just
zipped up when suddenly there was this massive jolt like God had just
drop-kicked our tail…and suddenly our nose was dipping. The head on our
C-130 wasn’t even really a toilet, just a portable chempot with a heavy,
 plastic shower curtain. That’s probably what ended up saving my life.
If I’d been trapped in a real compartment, maybe knocked out or unable
to reach the latch…Suddenly there was this screech, this overpowering
blast of high-pressure air and I was sucked out right through the rear
of the aircraft, right past where the tail should have been.

 I was spiraling, out of control. I could just make out my ship, this
gray mass shrinking and smoking on its way down. I straightened myself
out, hit my chute. I was still in a daze, my head swimming, trying to
catch my breath. I fumbled for my radio and started hollering for my
crew to punch out. I didn’t get an answer. All I could see was one other
 chute, the only other one that made it out.

 That was the worst moment, right there, just hanging helplessly. I
could see the other chute, above and north of me by about three and a
half clicks. I looked for the others. I tried my radio again, but wasn’t
 able to get a signal. I figured it had been damaged during my “exit.” I
 tried to get my bearings, somewhere over southern Louisiana, a swampy
wilderness that seemed to have no end. I wasn’t sure exactly, my brain
was still misfiring. At least I had sense enough to check the bare
essentials. I could move my legs, my arms, I wasn’t in pain or bleeding
externally. I checked to make sure my survival kit was intact, still
strapped to my thigh, and that my weapon, my Meg, 4 was still jamming me
 in the ribs.

 Did the air force prepare you for situations like these?

 We all had to pass the Willow Creek Escape and Evade program in the
Klamath Mountains in California. It even had a few real Gs in there with
 us, tagged and tracked and placed at specific marks to give us the
“real feel.” It’s a lot like what they teach you in the civilian manual:
 movement, stealth, how to take out Zack before he can howl your
position. We all “made it,” lived, I mean, although a couple of pilots
washed out on a Section Eight. I guess they just couldn’t hack the real
feel. That never bothered me, being alone in hostile territory. That was
 standard operating procedure for me.

 Always?

 You wanna talk about being alone in a hostile environment, try my four years at Colorado Springs.

 But there were other women…

 Other cadets, other competitors who happen to have the same genitalia.
Trust me, when the pressure kicked in, sisterhood punched out. No, it
was me, only me. Self-contained, self-reliant, and always,
unquestionably self-assured. That’s the only thing that got me through
four years of Academy hell, and it was the only thing I could count on
as I hit the mud in the middle of G country.

 I unclasped my chute—they teach you not to waste time concealing it—and
 headed in the direction of the other chute. It took me a couple hours,
splashing through this cold slime that numbed everything below my knees.
 I wasn’t thinking clearly, my head was still spinning. No excuse, I
know, but that’s why I didn’t notice that the birds had suddenly beat it
 in the opposite direction. I did hear the scream though, faint and far
away. I could see the chute tangled in the trees. I started running,
another no-no, making all that noise without stopping to listen for
Zack. I couldn’t see anything, just all these na\*\*d gray branches until
they were right on top of me. If it wasn’t for Rollins, my copilot, I’m
sure I’da been a goner.

 I found him dangling from his harness, dead, twitching. His flight suit
 had been torn open 5 and his entrails were hanging…draped over five of
them as they fed in this cloud of red-brown water. One of them had
managed to get its neck entangled in a section of small intestine. Every
 time it moved it would jerk Rollins, ringing him like a f\*\*king bell.
They didn’t notice me at all. Close enough to touch and they didn’t even
 look.

 At least I had the brains to snap on my suppressor. I didn’t have to
waste a whole clip, another f\*\*kup. I was so angry I almost started
kicking their corpses. I was so ashamed, so blinded by self-hate…

 Self-hate?

 I screwed the pooch! My ship, my crew…

 But it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.

 How do you know that? You weren’t there. Shit, I wasn’t even there. I
don’t know what happened. I wasn’t doing my job. I was squatting over a
bucket like a goddamn girl!

 I found myself burning up, mentally. Fucking weakling, I told myself,
f\*\*king loser. I started to spiral, not just hating myself, but hating
myself for hating myself. Does that make any sense? I’m sure I might
have just stayed there, shaking and helpless and waiting for Zack.

 But then my radio started squawking. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone out
there? Anyone punch outta that wreck?” It was a woman’s voice, clearly
civilian by her language and tone.

 I answered immediately, identified myself, and demanded that she
respond in kind. She told me she was a skywatcher, and her handle was
“Mets Fan,” or just “Mets” for short. The Skywatch system was this ad
hoc network of isolated ham radio operators. They were supposed to
report on downed aircrews and do what they could to help with their
rescue. It wasn’t the most efficient system, mainly because there were
so few, but it looked like today was my lucky day. She told me that she
had seen the smoke and falling wreckage of my Herc’ and even though she
was probably less than a day’s walk from my position, her cabin was
heavily surrounded. Before I could say anything she told me not to
worry, that she’d already reported my position to search and rescue, and
 the best thing to do was to get to open ground where I could rendezvous
 for pickup.

 I reached for my GPS but it had been torn from my suit when I was
sucked out of my ship. I had a backup survival map, but it was so big,
so unspecific, and my hump took me over so many states that it was
practically just a map of the U.S.…my head was still clouded with anger
and doubt. I told her I didn’t know my position, didn’t know where to
go…

 She laughed. “You mean you’ve never made this run before? You don’t
have every inch of it committed to memory? You didn’t see where you were
 as you were hanging by the silk?” She was so sure of me, trying to get
me to think instead of just spoon-feeding me the answers. I realized
that I did know this area well, that I had flown over it at least twenty
 times in the last three months, and that I had to be somewhere in the
Atchafalaya basin. “Think,” she told me, “what did you see from your
chute? Were there any rivers, any roads?” At first, all I could remember
 were the trees, the endless gray landscape with no distinguishable
features, and then gradually, as my brain cleared, I remembered seeing
both rivers and a road. I checked on the map and realized that directly
north of me was the I-10 freeway. Mets told me that was the best place
for an S&R pickup. She told me it shouldn’t take any longer than a
day or two at best if I got a move on and stopped burning daylight.

 As I was about to leave, she stopped me and asked if there was anything
 I’d forgotten to do. I remember that moment clearly. I turned back to
Rollins. He was just starting to open his eyes again. I felt like I
should say something, apologize, maybe, then I put a round through his
forehead.

 Mets told me not to blame myself, and no matter what, not to let it
distract me from the job I had to do. She said, “Stay alive, stay alive
and do your job.” Then she added, “And stop using up your weekend
minutes.”

 She was talking about battery power—she didn’t miss a trick—so I signed
 off and started moving north across the swamp. My brain was now on full
 burner, all my lessons from the Creek came rolling back. I stepped, I
halted, I listened. I stuck to dry ground where I could, and I made sure
 to pace myself very carefully. I had to swim a couple times, that
really made me nervous. Twice I swear I could feel a hand just brush
against my leg. Once, I found a road, small, barely two lanes and in
horrible disrepair. Still, it was better than trudging through the mud. I
 reported to Mets what I’d found and asked if it would take me right to
the freeway. She warned me to stay off it and every other road that
crisscrossed the basin. “Roads mean cars,” she said, “and cars mean Gs.”
 She was talking about any bitten human drivers who died of their wounds
 while still behind the wheel and, because a ghoul doesn’t have the IQ
points to open a door or unbuckle a seatbelt, would be doomed to spend
the rest of their existence trapped in their cars.

 I asked her what the danger of that was. Since they couldn’t get out,
and as long as I didn’t let them reach through an open window to grab
me, what did it matter how many “abandoned” cars I passed along the
road. Mets reminded me that a trapped G was still able to moan and
therefore still able to call for others. Now I was really confused. If I
 was going to waste so much time ducking a few back roads with a couple
Zack-filled cars, why was I heading for a freeway that was sure to be
jammed with them?

 She said, “You’ll be up above the swamp. How are more zombies gonna get
 to you?” Because it was built several stories above the swamp, this
section of the I-10 was the safest place in the whole basin. I confessed
 I hadn’t thought of that. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, honey. I
have. Stick with me and I’ll get you home.”

 And I did. I stayed away from anything even resembling a road and stuck
 to as pure a wilderness track as I could. I say “pure” but the truth
was you couldn’t avoid all signs of humanity or what could have been
humanity a long time ago. There were shoes, clothes, bits of garbage,
and tattered suitcases and hiking gear. I saw a lot of bones on the
patches of raised mud. I couldn’t tell if they were human or animal. One
 time I found this rib cage; I’m guessing it was a gator, a big one. I
didn’t want to think about how many Gs it took to bring that bastard
down.

 The first G I saw was small, probably a kid, I couldn’t tell. Its face
was eaten off, the skin, nose, eyes, lips, even the hair and ears…not
completely gone, but partially hanging or stuck in patches to the
exposed skull. Maybe there were more wounds, I couldn’t tell. It was
stuck inside one of those long civilian hiker’s packs, stuffed in there
tight with the drawstring pulled right up around its neck. The shoulder
straps had gotten tangled on the roots of a tree, it was splashing
around, half submerged. Its brain must have been intact, and even some
of the muscle fibers connecting the jaw. That jaw started snapping as I
approached. I don’t know how it knew I was there, maybe some of the
nasal cavity was still intact, maybe the ear canal.

 It couldn’t moan, its throat had been too badly mangled, but the
splashing might have attracted attention, so I put it out of its misery,
 if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was
another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don’t write their eulogy,
don’t try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how
they came to be this. I know, who doesn’t do that, right? Who doesn’t
look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It’s
like reading the last page of a book…your imagination just naturally
spinning. And that’s when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard
 down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you. I
tried to put her, it, out of my mind. Instead, I found myself wondering
why it had been the only one I’d seen.

 That was a practical survival question, not just idle musings, so I got
 on the radio and asked Mets if there was something I was missing here,
if maybe there was some area I should be careful to avoid. She reminded
me that this area was, for the most part, depopulated because the Blue
Zones of Baton Rouge and Lafayette were pulling most of the Gs in either
 direction. That was bittersweet comfort, being right between two of the
 heaviest clusters for miles. She laughed, again…“Don’t worry about it,
you’ll be fine.”

 I saw something up ahead, a lump that was almost a thicket, but too
boxy and shining in places. I reported it to Mets. She warned me not to
go near it, keep on going and keep my eyes on the prize. I was feeling
pretty good by this point, a little of the old me coming back.

 As I got closer, I could see that it was a vehicle, a Lexus Hybrid SUV.
 It was covered in mud and moss and sitting in the water up to its
doors. I could see that the rear windows were blocked with survival
gear: tent, sleeping bag, cooking utensils, hunting rifle with boxes and
 boxes of shells, all new, some still in their plastic. I came around
the driver’s side window and caught the glint of a .357. It was still
clutched in the driver’s brown, shriveled hand. He was still sitting
upright, looking straight ahead. There was light coming through the side
 of his skull. He was badly decomposed, at least a year, maybe more. He
wore survival khakis, the kind you’d order from one of those upscale,
hunting/safari catalogs. They were still clean and crisp, the only blood
 was from the head wound. I couldn’t see any other wound, no bites,
nothing. That hit me hard, a lot harder than the little faceless kid.
This guy had had everything he needed to survive, everything except the
will. I know that’s supposition. Maybe there was a wound I couldn’t see,
 hidden by his clothes or the advanced decomposition. But I knew it,
leaning there with my face against the glass, looking at this monument
to how easy it was to give up.

 I stood there for a moment, long enough for Mets to ask me what was
happening. I told her what I was seeing, and without pause, she told me
to keep on going.

 I started to argue. I thought I should at least search the vehicle, see
 if there was anything I needed. She asked me, sternly, if there was
anything I needed, not wanted. I thought about it, admitted there
wasn’t. His gear was plentiful, but it was civilian, big and bulky; the
food needed cooking, the weapons weren’t silenced. My survival kit was
pretty thorough, and, if for some reason I didn’t find a helo waiting at
 the I-10, I could always use this as an emergency supply cache.

 I brought up the idea of maybe using the SUV itself. Mets asked if I
had a tow truck and some jumper cables. Almost like a kid, I answered
no. She asked, “Then what’s keeping you?” or something like that,
pushing me to get a move on. I told her to just wait a minute, I leaned
my head against the driver’s side window, I sighed and felt beat again,
drained. Mets got on my ass, pushing me. I snapped back for her to shut
the f\*\*k up, I just needed a minute, a couple seconds to…I don’t know
what.

 I must have kept my thumb on the “transmit” button for a few seconds
too long, because Mets suddenly asked, “What was that?” “What?” I asked.
 She’d heard something, something on my end.

 She’d heard it before you?

 I guess so, because in another second, once I’d cleared my head and
opened my ears, I began to hear it too. The moan…loud and close,
followed by the splashing of feet.

 I looked up, through the car’s window, the hole in the dead man’s
skull, and the window on the other side, and that’s when I saw the first
 one. I spun around and saw five more coming at me from all directions.
And behind them were another ten, fifteen. I took a shot at the first
one, the round went wild.

 Mets started squawking at me, demanding a contact report. I gave her a
head count and she told me to stay cool, don’t try to run, just stay put
 and follow what I’d learned at Willow Creek. I started to ask how she
knew about Willow Creek when she shouted for me to shut up and fight.

 I climbed to the top of the SUV—you’re supposed to look for the closest
 physical defense—and started to measure ranges. I lined up my first
target, took a deep breath, and dropped him. To be a fighter jock is to
be able to make decisions as fast as your electrochemical impulses can
carry them. I’d lost that nanosecond timing when I hit the mud, now it
was back. I was calm, I was focused, all the doubt and weakness were
gone. The whole engagement felt like ten hours, but I guess in reality,
it was more like ten minutes. Sixty-one in total, a nice thick ring of
submerged corpses. I took my time, checked my remaining ammo and waited
for the next wave to come. None did.

 It was another twenty minutes before Mets asked me for an update. I
gave her a body count and she told me to remind her never to piss me
off. I laughed, the first time since I’d hit the mud. I felt good again,
 strong and confident. Mets warned me that all these distractions had
erased any chance of making it to the I-10 before nightfall, and that I
should probably start thinking about where I was gonna catch my forty.

 I got as far away from the SUV as I could before the sky started to
darken and found a decent enough perch in the branches of a tall tree.
My kit had this standard-issue microfiber hammock; great invention,
light and strong and with clasps to keep you from rolling out. That part
 was also supposed to help calm you down, help you get to sleep
faster…yeah, right! It didn’t matter that I’d already been up for close
to forty-eight hours, that I’d tried all the breathing exercises they
taught us at the Creek, or that I even slipped two of my Baby-Ls. 6
You’re only supposed to take one, but I figured that was for lightweight
 wussies. I was me again, remember, I could handle it, and hey, I needed
 to sleep.

 I asked her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, if it
was okay to talk about her. Who was she, really? How’d she end up in
this isolated cabin in the middle of Cajun country? She didn’t sound
Cajun, she didn’t even have a southern accent. And how did she know so
much about pilot training without ever going through it herself? I was
starting to get my suspicions, starting to piece together a rough
outline of who she really was.

 Mets told me, again, that there would be plenty of time later for an
episode of The View. Right now I needed my sleep, and to check in with
her at dawn. I felt the Ls kick in between “check” and “in.” I was out
by “dawn.”

 I slept hard. The sky was already light by the time I opened my eyes.
I’d been dreaming about, what else, Zack. His moans were still echoing
in my ears when I woke up. And then I looked down and realized they
weren’t dreams. There must have been at least a hundred of them
surrounding the tree. They were all reaching excitedly, all trying to
climb over each other to get up to me. At least they couldn’t ramp up,
the ground wasn’t solid enough. I didn’t have the ammo to take all of
them out, and since a firefight might also buy time for more to show up,
 I decided it was best to pack up my gear and execute my escape plan.

 You had planned for this?

 Not really planned, but they’d trained us for situations like this.
It’s a lot like jumping from an aircraft: pick your approximate landing
zone, tuck and roll, keep loose, and get up as quick as you can. The
goal is to put some serious distance between you and your attackers. You
 take off running, jogging, or even “speed walking”; yes, they actually
told us to consider this as a low-impact alternative. The point is to
get far enough way to give you time to plan your next move. According to
 my map, the I-10 was close enough for me to make a run for it, be
spotted by a rescue chopper, and be lifted off before these stink bags
would ever catch up. I got on the radio, reported my situation to Mets,
and told her to signal S&R for an immediate pickup. She told me to
be careful. I crouched, I jumped, and cracked my ankle on a submerged
rock.

 I hit the water, facedown. Its chill was the only thing that kept me
from blacking out from the pain. I came up spluttering, choking, and the
 first thing I saw was the whole swarm coming at me. Mets must have
known something was up by the fact that I didn’t report my safe landing.
 Maybe she asked me what had happened, although I don’t remember. I just
 remember her yelling at me to get up and run. I tried putting weight on
 my ankle, but lightning shot up through my leg and spine. It could bear
 the weight, but…I screamed so loud, I’m sure she heard me through her
cabin’s window. “Get out of there,” she was yelling…“GO!” I started
limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must
have been comical, this frantic race of cripples.

 Mets yelled, “If you can stand on it, you can run on it! It’s not a weight-bearing bone! You can do this!”

 “But it hurts!” I actually said that, with tears running down my face,
with Zack behind me howling for his lunch. I reached the freeway,
looming above the swamp like the ruins of a Roman aqueduct. Mets had
been right about its relative safety. Only neither of us had counted on
my injury or my undead tail. There was no immediate entrance so I had to
 limp to one of the small, adjoining roads that Mets had originally
warned me to avoid. I could see why as I began to get close. Wrecked and
 rusting cars were piled up by the hundreds and every tenth one had at
least one G locked inside. They saw me and started to moan, the sound
carried for miles in every direction.

 Mets shouted, “Don’t worry about that now! Just get on the on-ramp and watch the f\*\*king grabbers!”

 Grabbers?

 The ones reaching through broken windows. On the open road, I at least
had a chance of dodging them, but on the on-ramp, you’re hemmed in on
either side. That was the worst part, by far, those few minutes trying
to get up onto the freeway. I had to go in between the cars; my ankle
wouldn’t let me get on top of them. These rotting hands would reach out
for me, grabbing my flight suit or my wrist. Every head shot cost me
seconds that I didn’t have. The steep incline was already slowing me
down. My ankle was throbbing, my lungs were aching, and the swarm was
now gaining on me fast. If it hadn’t been for Mets…

 She was shouting at me the whole time. “Move your ass, you f\*\*kin’
bitch!” She was getting pretty raw by then. “Don’t you dare quit…don’t
you DARE crap out on me!” She never let up, never gave me an inch. “What
 are you, some weak little victim?” At that point I thought I was. I
knew I could never make it. The exhaustion, the pain, more than
anything, I think, the anger at f\*\*king up so badly. I actually
considered turning my pistol around, wanting to punish myself for…you
know. And then Mets really hit me. She roared, “What are you, your
f\*\*king mother!?!”

 That did it. I hauled ass right up onto the interstate.

 I reported to Mets that I’d made it, then asked, “Now what the f\*\*k do I do?”

 Her voice suddenly got very soft. She told me to look up. A black dot
was heading at me from out of the morning sun. It was following the
freeway and grew very quickly into the form of a UH-60. I let out a
whoop and popped my signal flare.

 The first thing I saw when they winched me aboard was that it was a
civilian chopper, not government Search and Rescue. The crew chief was a
 big Cajun with a thick goatee and wraparound sunglasses. He asked,
“Where de’ hell you come from?” Sorry if I butchered the accent. I
almost cried and punched him in his thigh-sized bicep. I laughed and
said that they work fast. He shot me a look like I didn’t know what I
was talking about. It turned out later that this wasn’t the rescue team
but just a routine air shuttle between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. I
didn’t know at that moment, and I didn’t care. I reported to Mets that I
 got my pickup, that I was safe. I thanked her for everything she’d done
 for me, and…and so I wouldn’t really start bawling, I tried to cover
with a joke about finally getting that episode of The View. I never got a
 response.

 She sounds like a hell of a Skywatcher.

 She was a hell of a woman.

 You said you had your “suspicions” by this point.

 No civilian, even a veteran Skywatcher, could know so much about what
goes into wearing those wings. She was just too savvy, too informed, the
 kind of baseline knowledge of someone who had to have gone through it
herself.

 So she was a pilot.

 Definitely; not air force—I would have known her—but maybe a squid or a
 jarhead. They’d lost as many pilots as the air force on resupply hops
like mine, and eight out of ten were never accounted for. I’m sure that
she must have run into a situation like mine, had to ditch, lost her
crew, maybe even blamed herself for it like me. Somehow she managed to
find that cabin and spent the rest of the war as one kick-ass
Skywatcher.

 That makes sense.

 Doesn’t it?

 [There is an awkward pause. I search her face, waiting for more.]

 What?

 They never found her.

 No.

 Or the cabin.

 No.

 And Honolulu never had any record of a Skywatcher with the call sign Mets Fan.

 You’ve done your homework.

 I…

 You probably also read my after-action report, right?

 Yes.

 And the psych evaluation they tacked on after my official debriefing.

 Well…

 Well, it’s bullshit, okay? So what if everything she told me was
information I’d already been briefed on, so what if the psych team
“claim” my radio was knocked out before I hit the mud, and so the f\*\*k
what if Mets is short for Metis, the mother of Athena, the Greek goddess
 with the stormy gray eyes. Oh, the shrinks had a ball with that one,
especially when they “discovered” that my mother grew up in the Bronx.

 And that remark she made about your mother?

 Who the hell doesn’t have mother issues? If Mets was a pilot, she was a
 natural gambler. She knew she had a good chance of scoring a hit with
“mom.” She knew the risk, took her shot…Look, if they thought I’d
cracked up, why didn’t I lose my flight status? Why did they let me have
 this job? Maybe she wasn’t a pilot herself, maybe she was married to
one, maybe she’d wanted to be one but never made it as far as I did.
Maybe she was just a scared, lonely voice that did what she could to
help another scared lonely voice from ending up like her. Who cares who
she was, or is? She was there when I needed her, and for the rest of my
life, she’ll always be with me.