/K/-Day T + 19 hours San Antonio Police Department, Northwest Substation, Prue Road The parking lot, inside one certain police squad car (A tape recorder is turned on, next to a large cardboard box filled with unused blank tapes) (Now playing: The Talk by Jan Hammer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_BVTrq-15A ) “Day One, I have been assigned by Captain Martinez to make an electronic record of what happens around this substation, for whomever it may concern in the future. Today has been the official worst day I’ve ever seen in my 5 years as a policeman, and it appears that it will only get worse in the coming days. As I have been instructed to use my personal point-of-view to describe events, I hope that records from other officer’s can fill in anything that I have glossed over. For the record, my name is Arin Noverski, and I am a sergeant in the San Antonio police department, assigned to the Northwest substation on Prue Road. I am recording this approximately 19 hours after the first anomaly was reported.” “This morning, we received emergency warnings from our local counterparts in other major cities, not to mention our federal and state law enforcers, that unexplainable anomalies were appearing all over the world. None were reported yet in this city, so I am to assume that our city council and their “underlings” did not take the threat seriously. Several minutes after the last warning, multiple large-scale anomalies appeared throughout the city. According to phone calls records, this whole thing started sometime around 8:00 AM. Before all hell broke loose, creatures and human-like beings of a fantastical nature, my fellow officer Marcos Saravia's words, not mine, were appearing all over the city. Some got here by large-scale portals, some by simple teleportation. These large-scale portals have all ceased to function as of the time of this recording. "Shit, which part of the folder was the one with the missile info? Page 3? No. Page 6? No. Page 9! No. Ah, here we go, Page 14." “We attempted to continue our duties, to some success. What I would describe as dragon-like creatures, set off fires all over the northwestern part of this city, and I believe at the moment that most of Helotes, and the Alamo Ranch area, is still up in flames. Within city limits, we were able to put out most of the fires, with police officers and fellow citizens assisting the fire department in putting them out. 3 hours after the anomalies began, the dragons proceeded to fly in a pack, towards the southwestern part of town, which is where we have no situational awareness at the moment. My highest hopes are that the Air Force has already blown them out of the sky. We also received calls that claimed that 2 dragons appeared to be fighting each other over on the western edge of town, somewhere near the Potranco road area. Several minutes after this, 2 massive sky-funnels of unknown energy appeared, one was about 2 miles west of Palo Alto college, another by the Nelson Wolff baseball stadium. At about high noon, a missile that apparently came from the Army, exploded somewhere in the northern part of Pearsall Park. It was most likely nuclear, and on a southwards trajectory to annihilate some unlucky foreign city. Only problem was that it got caught within the energy cone of these two anomalies, and detonated prematurely. Or at least that's what the memo from the Department of Energy said. The energy cones absorbed the heat and flash that would have normally vaporized us all in a few seconds. But since energy can't be destroyed, only changed into another form, an electromagnetic pulse went out and wiped out nearly all unshielded electronics, in what I am told is a slightly-more-than-15-mile radius. Or at least, that’s their best guess so far. Fuck if I know anything about the missile. I asked an Army official several minutes ago about it’s full explosive yield. He stonewalled me, by stating nothing more than that every detail regarding that missile was deemed highly classified.” “The strangest part was that when the missile exploded, a large amount of the city’s population literally disappeared into thin air, along whatever they had on them at the moment, such as clothes, backpacks, and phones in their hands. It will take some time to run a census on exactly how many were taken, and how many have simply skipped town by conventional means, in the midst of all this insanity. For unknown reasons, the northwestern part of town barely saw any anomalies, and most people that are still here, have been instructed to stay in their homes. I, and many other law enforcers have spent the rest of the day arresting and shooting looters, along with apprehending any of these human-like beings that have come here. They are definitely as intelligent as you and I, and most speak English, or what they refer to as Common Street. I do not yet know if they can write or read it, however. As I speak, these “people” are being taken to the Dub Farris sports complex and UTSA’s main campus for holding, perhaps one of them knows what caused this entire situation, or how to send them back, or to at least stop any further anomalies from occurring. Our fleet of police helicopters and ground vehicles are still fully functional, that is, the ones that had been covered or shielded by concrete. But their cameras have shorted out from the EMP blast, along with most of our bodycams. Once I am done dictating this record, I have orders to meet with Army and Marine officials from Camp Bullis, as a civilian law enforcement representative, to assist with coordinating a full military response to retake the city, all reservists have been called up to report there as well.” “On unimportant side notes, almost all the humanoids that appeared seem to be mixtures of humans and species that correspond to the local wildlife, such as coyotes, jackrabbits, bovines, bobcats, and even roadrunner birds, to name a few. We’ve heard nothing from Lackland-Kelly AFB, or Fort Sam Houston, but we still have contact with Randolph AFB, their distance from the explosion made them unaffected by the blast, but as a training facility, they haven’t got much resources to send to us, and their hands are tied re-establishing order to their side of town, along with maintaining checkpoints along I-35, I-90, and Loop 1604, to prevent out-of-towners from driving right into this mess. The TBRI, the SWRI, and the NSA’s complex, all slightly north of Lackland-Kelly, all appear to still be functional, our helicopters reported that their lights were the only ones still on in that entire section of the city, most likely due to underground back-up generators. We’ll send scouting parties to relieve them in the morning.” “God, scouting parties. That’s a phrase I never would have imagined to say as a cop. What in all the saints’ is going on out there? At least I got the tip-off that once I come back from this meeting, I’ll be promoted to captain for my ‘hard work.’ Hard work, my ass, all I did was tell some volunteer fire-fighters where to put some fires out, and turn on my loudspeaker to tell reservists to report to Camp Bullis! At least that bitch-ass McClaren got to eat shit. Stupid fuck was bragging all month ‘bout how he was gonna retire in 2 days without ever having to shoot someone, and now he’s blown away 2 teenagers for looting. Think he’s still in the broom closet, crying like a bitch. Well, maybe once this cools off a bit, I can authorize myself to take a break, then pull up to Dub Farris and see what kind of alien tail I can pull. Hehehe, probably some literal tail, at that.” “Oh shit, It’s still recording!” T + 1 day, 3 hours Right outside of a makeshift command center in the conference room on the 2nd floor of the UTSA University Center (Captain Noverski, having just left the conference room, discusses the conference with 2 US Army officers in the student meditation room 2 doors down. An intercom plays classic rock music, at the insistence of a Marine sergeant. The irony of the song choice, Breaking The Law by Judas Priest, does not escape Noverski. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXtPycm5dGc ) (A.N.) Thank God for bean-bag chairs! I was getting a cramp in those fake-leather chairs. Can you believe the bullshit from that Marine? ‘wE nEeD to reINfOrCe I-10 GoInG nORthBouNd.’ What a dipshit, nothing’s happening in the north! We need to be rolling as many APC’s and SWAT vans into downtown as we can fit on the road, and we needed them yesterday! We haven’t heard anything from headquarters, downtown’s gone completely dark since that missile went off. As far as we know, their thumbs are jammed up their asses, waiting for us to relieve them! (Officer 1) “To be fair to the commandant, we really don’t know what’s waiting for us past Boerne. Castroville and Hondo went dark, and they weren’t even in the blast radius, nothing should be screwy on their end. There’s something out west, waiting for us to make the first move, and we haven’t got a damn clue as to what it is. Randolph’s using everything they got on keeping eyes to the northeast, even worse since some kind of electrical storm is blasting San Marcos and south Austin apart, heard it’s going as far northwest as Marble Falls. Places up north like Boerne and Bulverde are swarmed with people trying to get out of town, it’ll take a week just to assemble ourselves into fighting shape, and another week for Navy and Marine reinforcements from Corpus Christi to get here, assuming their hands aren’t full either. We’ve even tried requesting an uplink to any satellite we can keep in a slow orbit over the county, but someone beat us to it. And by someone, I mean a spook with the same kind of clearance level that the brass at NORAD has. Or so I’m told.” (Officer 2) “Not to mention that Helotes is still blazing. Hope to God that those dragons fucked off south to, like, Poteet, or something. Hell, maybe even down to Corpus, down there they won’t last 15 minutes before the Navy shoots ‘em down. Maybe they’ll finally bust the Lexington out of mothballs. You know actually, I’d get instantly erect if they were to reactivate that ancient battleship Texas. Over a hundred years old or not, those 14-inch cannons would make quick work outta any freaky monster on the coastline. I even heard word that those Air Force desk jockeys and their Air Natty Guard bros are paying civilians and what’s left of the Civil Air Patrol to pull everything they can use out of Stinson Airport. Sucks to be the city’s international airport though, they sent a lot of incoming flights to San Marcos and Austin, no doubt the storm’s killed them all by now. Everyone else got bus’ed over to FEMA camps out in New Braunfels and Schertz. Only totally safe zone left. Maybe Seguin’s fine too, but I haven’t heard anything from them.” (A.N.) “Well, gentlemen, thank you for the updates, even though I’m not exactly a serviceman, this joint effort shit won’t work unless we all stay in the same loop. On my end, we’ve got a line drawn on Highway 151, it’s Injun Territory south and southwest of there. And I know it must be hard on you service guys, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the room.” (both officers) Lackland-Kelly? (Officer 1) “We know they went rogue, hell we heard the speech, seems that they’ve defected to fucking France, of all places. You’d think that they’d fully gave up on Texas, back when Napoleon called it quits on North America, the mainland continent that is.” (Officer 2) “They’re Air Force flyboys anyways. Not my branch, don’t know any of ‘em, won’t shed tears for any of those traitor fucks. How do we even know that it was one of OUR missiles? Could have been a Russian or Chinese one mocked up to look like one of ours, but seeing how the situation wound up, I think this whole thing is a French false flag. They’re probably losing ground in Europe, so they realized that selling us the Louisiana Purchase, wasn’t such a good idea in hindsight. So, they’re taking some of it back, probably using that slice of land they got down in South America, as a launchpad for this horseshit. With our asses in the wind, and total regional loss-of-contact with D.C., NORAD, even Nightwatch, there’s not much we can do to stop them, and once the dust settles, they’ll use their nuke arsenal to force us into letting them keep whatever land they grabbed.” (A.N.) What the hell is Nightwatch? More top-secret EMP horsecrap that might blow up in our faces, again? (Officer 1) Nah, it’s a special Boeing 747 AWACS jet for the National Command Authority. You know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President, the White House Cabinet. A flying command post for the highest military and civilian authorities in the USA, and probably Canada too. Lots of people mix it up with Air Force One, but AF1 is really just a flying mansion that also happens to have an unbreakable connection to the Pentagon and NORAD. Nightwatch is all business, no party. I sure hope that they finally have unfiltered cigarettes onboard.” (Officer 2) “Hah, I understood that reference. James Earl Jones is always a real hoot.” (A.N.) “Now that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Use Air Force One and the President as a distraction or meat shield, so the real fate-of-the-world orders can get issued from Nightwatch. All this White House talk is really giving me the chills, not gonna lie. That crap is probably about 25 levels above my paygrade, and is absolutely NOT what I signed up for. But that’s how it is on this bitch of an Earth now. Moving on, in about 3 hours, I’ll be rendering radio assistance to a task force that’s maintaining a blockade on the overpass of Loop 410 and Bandera Road, I’d like as much awareness of the situation as I can, and if another EMP blasts us, I’d like to know what I’m up against. So as far as I know, we have: an entire rogue airbase to the southwest; some completely unknown weird stuff to the west; and MAYBE some weird stuff to the northwest? Not to mention all the looters and creeps and freaks already in the deeper parts of the city? Looks like this is going to be what they call ‘another day on the job’, in the New Normal.” (Officer 2) You’re preaching to the choir, Noverski, but look on the bright side, those NSA guys aren’t too far from that overpass, they might send some reinforcements to your pals. Plus, Lackland-Kelly is basically a training facility, you’re up against 18-year olds who thought they were gonna fly planes, but got a rifle smacked into their hands, they’re barely a step above the average street gangbanger. Plus, if this Boerne situation turns out to be just a false alarm, we’ll throw everything we got down south, and our caissons are gonna be rolling along, all over those faggoty French fucks! It’s close to a miracle that the Governor authorized every military asset in the state to do our things, just before all hell broke loose. Right now he’s holed up with 2 regiment’s worth of the State Guard in a bunker at some government ranch near Waco. We’re really taking Posse Comitatus to a whole new level, though not without reason. (Officer 1) More like Posse Cowboy-tatus, Captain Noverski here looks strapped to duel that Andrepont frog at high noon! [Noverski gets up from the seat to walk to his car, the 2 officers follow him] (A.N.) “You boys keep laughin’, but this Model 27 spinboy was a gift to myself for graduatin’ from the academy. I’ve taken down 15 junkies with this baby, all in one shot each. I whacked 7 of them yesterday, in fact. This gift just keeps on givin’, and since I’m a captain now, I make the rules of who uses what gun, and I say, ‘whatever the fuck you think’ll do the job’! Problem is, we got a lot of steps before getting to go Wounded Knee on the Foreign Legion and their cronies. Now onto personal business. The reason I came to you guys was because we’re getting assembled into a strike force. It’s me, the two of you, and a chopper pilot, whom we’re gonna be picking up from her temporary hotel room, right next to that Bass Pro Shops at The Rim shopping center. The two of you are taking a ride in a police chopper with that pilot, while I’ll be in my car. Your mission is to provide overwatch and fast-rope backup for me, while I comb the streets for our target. Don’t worry about the pilot, she’s pretty good and I’d trust her with my life.” “Now, according to the memo that was faxed to my station from the NSA, our perp is some mailroom clerk, works for the CDC. The schmuck son of a bitch’s name is Jonathan A. Walker, also goes by ‘Johnny’. 19 years old, farmer’s tan, 6 feet and zero inches, blonde & blue-eyed white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. No college education, lives with his parents in the Valley High North neighborhood, is possibly packing a longslide Glock 17 or a Ithaca 37, both are NICS registered to his father. Recent credit card information shows that he purchased a huge-ass blackpowder revolver earlier this week, but no one’s stupid enough to be using one of those fossils at a time like this. He’s taking orders from a cabal of assholes that have their fingers in a lot of three-letter agency pies, and he’s currently in possession of a flash drive that’s got at least 27 gigabytes of illegal bioweapon research, and here’s the real kicker, blackmail information on a ton of dirty politicians and corrupt civilian DoD employees. Now Johnny here, works at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute down on the corner of Southwest Military Drive and Loop 410. And it seems that he’s the iceberg tip of a crazy-ass virus-making operation that’s been going down at that facility. My boss says that the NSA’s been putting together a case on that whole program since 2011. Whole lid’s gonna go pop now, and a lot of people on both sides of the law are going to get sent to prison for a very long time. Or they’ll get the death sentence, whether by a jury of peers, or extra-judicially. The spooks that call Mr. Walker’s shots really want that flash drive, so they can destroy all that juicy legally-admissible evidence on them, without losing a shit-ton of research on highly illegal biological & chemical WMDs. Beats me as to why he didn’t just take the research, copy it to a separate flash drive, then hose down or burn all the servers that had the evidence. He is 19 though. Everyone makes serious fuck-ups at that age.” (Officer 2) “Shit bro, lemme see that medical record. We outta both take a look before getting into this.” (Officer 1) “Holy shit, this guy’d sure go far in a Steve McQueen impersonation contest. Or burglarize a Los Angeles high-rise while pretending to be a European terrorist. I would make a David Soul joke too, but this dude hasn’t got that ‘70s combination of a five-head and a balding comb-over. Does the NSA have files this detailed on everyone?” (Officer 2) “Who knows, who cares. None of it matters as long as I stay off the shitlist. Personally, I’m getting ‘60s Robert Redford vibes from this guy. Remind me to find some yellow-tinted aviators before the ‘hunt.’ He’ll look hilarious in the mugshots. You sure this dude isn’t German? And what kind of a middle name is ‘Anonymous’?” (Officer 1) “Close, but no cigar. Medical records and DNA tests say that his bloodline’s of purebred Scottish flavor. A note from the NSA agent that looked over his genealogical records, says that since he has no relations to the actual Clan Walker, it’s highly likely that his paternal surname was MacNucator. Family probably changed it to Walker, so they could fit into the Anglophone zone when they got off the boat in Savannah, Georgia, back in 1855. The family moved to Maine for logging jobs 4 years later, barely dodging a William Sherman-brand ass-whoopin’.” (Officer 2) “Damn, boy! Not even the haggis folks can resist that sweet Georgia peach tea.” (Officer 1) “You’re god-damn right that no one can. And I just figured it out. His middle name is a pun. Jonathan Anonymous. Johnny Anon. Rhymes to the tune of John Anon. Anonymous means unknown. You know what’s another word for an unknown guy? John Doe. Very funny, Ross Walker, hilarious. Also his nickname and last name combined is a brand of scotch whiskey, but that was obvious.” (A.N.) “Okay, okay, let’s cut the trivia show. We ain’t practicing for Jeopardy. Nobody’s sure where his exact destination is, but we know he’s on his way to rendezvous with some unknown transport to get out of the city. I’ve got a working set of night-vision goggles in my patrol car, there’s NODs waiting for y’all on the chopper, and the chopper itself has thermal imaging and short-wavelength infrared cameras. The plan is that I tag him with paintballs that have IR-coating, he lights up like a Christmas tree on our NODs, you guys home in and fire some warning shots around him. He pisses his pants, then I get him to surrender and come in quietly. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES, are we to let him get away with the data. If the flash drive is destroyed though, it’s an acceptable loss. Our consolation prize would then be to hand over Johnny-boy to the FBI’s hardest pipe-hitting niggas. They’ll make him sing like a canary for a plea bargain, in no time. He’s got no backup, no vehicle, won’t be hard to spot a bicycler from the sky, and it’s highly unlikely that he has any means to shoot down a helicopter. You guys’ll probably wind up covering me from anyone or anyTHING else that interferes.” (Officer 2) “I’ll drink to that plan. Seems like a solid one. Only things that could go wrong are us running into some wacky shit that 4 heavily-armed guys can’t handle, or Walker gets himself killed and we lose the data too. I wonder what hardware is waiting for us on that chopper. You know that new Sig pistol they issued everyone a while back? I ditched mine this morning for the good ol’ Beretta 92, picked a clean-looking one off of some brain detail boys. They found it on a looter that got his head popped off by a sniper, up by that huge Chase office building on Huebner and I-10. Said sniper got strafed by a few 30mm out of an Apache,and some dumbfuck E-2 actually went up all 10 stories to double-check if the sniper was dead, found parts of his Remington M700, and parts of the sniper all over the place. But back to the Beretta, I’d rather trust that one, than one of our M9’s in reserve. Those probably haven’t been properly cleaned since 1999.” (A.N.) “Speaking of drinks, come with me. Let’s get some beers at that gas station across the highway from here, I’m gonna need to stock up so I can drink a bottle per day at the rate things are devolving into. We’re waiting until the evening to chase down Mr. Walker. I’ve already got the first two verses of that Bad Boys song from Inner Circle set to blast the minute I see that punk, the part until they sing about chucking everyone. Any transport comes for him during the day, they’ll be spotted and intercepted before they can cross the county line. At night, our night-vision and thermals and shit’ll give us an upper hand over him. And if he tries to slip through civilization, our roadblocks on the northeast I-35 intersections of Loops 410 and 1604 have their own “wanted posters” to arrest him on sight. And I’ve been thinking, with all those (ahem) exotic ladies out at Dub Farris, they’d be a bit happy to get some sleep in a warm bed with some brave, ‘virtuous’ warriors such as ourselves. Whaddaya guys say? All the science nerds are too busy running across town trying to analyse all the magic hocus-pocus energy, that there’s no one to give enough of a shit to stop us from giving out a bit of red-blooded American charm! And if some biologists tell us that we might risk getting magic AIDS or some other bullshit, we cut them in on some tail, or pay them off with whatever shit we pull off of looters and other scum that ate bullets!” (Officer 2) Whoa, whoa whoa, hold it there! You mean the Bad Boys song from COPS and those Will Smith movies, right? (A.N.) Hell yeah, brother. (Officer 1) Sick and slick. We’re in. I’m not stupid enough to jinx us by saying ‘what could possibly go wrong,’ but all we have to do is grab one guy, who isn’t even old enough to score booze or cigarettes yet, and one little flash drive. Let’s go out, find a nice alien lady or two, have some fun until sundown, grab this kid, go back to whatever little green woman we score, and sit tight until we get to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, once again. (A.N.) Then let’s rock and roll. [The three men get into Noverski’s patrol car, he drives out onto UTSA Boulevard, headed westbound. Arin grabs a custom CD labeled ‘Good Shit : Volume 4’ from a rack under the center console, pops it into the CD player, setting it to song number 5.] (A.N.) Hey, one last thing. You guys like Bob Seger? Rhetorical question, we’re listening to him. Get fucked, my car, my music. (Now Playing: Shakedown by Bob Seger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS-EGbXU_Fw ]