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dISaSTEr aReA

(1/1)

Atariangamer:
You've been flying for hours.

At least that's what your chronograph showed, only 6 hours into your deployment mission. Your body is screaming at you to sleep, after the hectic scramble that was the emergency dispatch of your flight crew and about 20 soldiers directly into the front lines via your helicopter. The alarms had rang out from all sides at 0248 hours, and the copter was taking off at 0330 on the dot. After the rush to finish the massive damage to the twin turbojet engines, fuel it up, and compress an hour's worth of checklist down to the essentials to 15 minutes is no small feat. But you and your men pulled it off, and the transportation has gone smoothly since.

But that was hours ago, and you can barely see the sun through the clouds gathered at the high altitude needed to make the stealth drop. Due to the lack of visibility, the NAViComp is handling the flying, thankfully running off of 2 secure beacon location frequencies, as well as the fallback GPS navigation systems. You can hear the soldiers in the back, anticipating the moment they pull off a dangerous high altitude drop. You wake your co-pilot and tell him to watch the computer. He's a bit more skilled with the MultiDisplays anyway, so you leave him to run diagnostics and go warn the group they're just a few minutes from ground zero.

Ground zero...the term was an odd one, especially since there actually had been a nuclear test quite near the drop zone. The conflict line was nicknamed 'ground zero' after one of the Privates had erroneously picked up an old map and marked the location as such. You knock three times on the door, and they knock back twice, the confirmation code decided upon before the mission. As you shuffle down the narrow corridor back to the cockpit, you feel something not right- the slight shift of the rotors. You run up to the controls and pull up your laptop. You've always been laughed at for carrying such an old piece of junk, what with MDs built into everything and palm devices becoming a standard in controler, but in this situation, you were flying through the controls, hacking open the system to get to the logic and find out why the darn thing had made the change. The whole mission was on the line if they didn't know why the NAVi had shifted. Suddenly, the Comm. light blinked with an incomming shortburst transmission:

"WARNING: This is the Army International Warning System, pertaining to all units in the areas of "Ground Zero". Urgent recall to all mid-mission transport. Repeat, recall to all mid-mission transport. NAVi systems are being jammed. Do not trust your NAVi. The beacon on frequency 1,203.567MHz is now tuned to a Russian number station. Fall back to GPS navigation immediately. This has been the Army International Warning System." Your co-pilot has been working on the NAVi, trying to switch it to GPS, when he finally yells that the antenna is not responding. The troops finally come of the intercom asking if the mission was aborted. Before you can answer, the anti-weapons system flashes up. 3 M-Strykr missiles are homing in on your heli. You order him to get to the drop box and prepare for dispatch, go or no go. You reach up and punch in the evasive maneuvers and flak cannons...but the NAVi protests strongly. You curse the Russian resistance group and manually dip below the clouds trying to get a view of the land, only to get sight of a massive storm settling right over ground zero. The Anti-WepS flashes in your HUD, and you pull some manual evasion. You think you may have lost em, when suddenly the target lock tone goes flatline...by reflexes you jam the controls in the opposite direction, punch the throttle, and reach for the manual cargo eject...

...but its too late. the three rockets slam into the armor and detatch the tail, then the engines pull out, and slowly all the electrics die. The copter tumbles on end as it falls like a rock into the side of a mountain. You see the earth coming up fast in the window, pass out, and know nothing more.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pain. Pain is the only real thing now.

You just got shot out of the sky by three rockets, smashed into the earth at a significant number of kilometers per hour, and tumbled almost 1000 paces from the wreckage. Another 1000 paces, the dinged and empty cargo container, thankfully showing no signs of blood or dismemberment, meaning that all 20 soldiers were probably OK somewhere...Your co-pilot is nowhere to be seen, as is your mechanic and your engineer. You roll on your back, feeling the bruising all over where you smashed through the bulletproof glass. Thank God for the medical suits designed for copter and jet pilots, able to withstand thousands of pounds of pressure and protect the person inside. You reach for the controls and pump in some morphine, hoping to clear your head of the pain. Slowly, your vision steadies, and you see the road.

Not just any road, but a nice, paved road. But it was massively cracked, and looked as if it hadn't been taken care of for years. having nothing else to do, you raid the wreck for some supplies, grab a pistol and some ammo, and trudge down the road. Your chronograph shows its been 10 hours since you started all that time ago. 4 of them were spent unconscious under an ejection seat. Who knows what happened at ground zero by now? Maybe they sent another dispatch; maybe they sent a search team. but without the GPS location antenna, they had no idea of our location. Or more specifically, my location. You close your eyes at the thought, and just walk.

Suddenly, as the first signs of a building appear on the horizon, you hear a tick. Not just any tick, but a special tick. A tick with a meaning that escapes your mind. You get closer and closer, and finally it reveals as a towering skyscraper. But this one is special: its not shining. In fact, it almost looks like its leaning over. The ticking gets more frequent. You walk past a gate that has long since rusted away, walking into this city. Russian signs with obvious warnings are everywhere, but you ignore it. You're alone, and this is where you want to be. You look around at the trash, the dirt in the streets...if you could call them streets. Concrete slabs, buckled with years of no usage and care, buildings falling in on top of themselves, skyscrapers with no more glass, and swaying in the heavy storm winds. It was peaceful. Except for the ticking, which was getting annoying. You admire the beauty of the cars, some with the keys still in the ignition, their paint peeling, their styles out of date. You aren't thinking clearly, but finally the ticking comes to mind...Geiger...radiation...poisoning...death...heh, death. Radioactive death...ground zero. You walk deeper and deeper in, drawn toward this one point. The building wasn't fancy. The stacks weren't that tall. There was a gaping hole in the side where an obvious fire had burned and poluted the air oh so many years ago. There was signs of explosions, security breaches, evidence of carelessness and ignorance, remnants of disaster...this area was a disaster. Then the morphine wore off.

Flashbacks to gruesome images of distorted faces, chemical burns that killed from the outside in, a once thriving city turned into a still life, wasting away into a half-life of itself...and half again, and again, and again, and again till one day, thousands of years from now, the ticking wouldn't happen. Kids could run in the repaired streets, people could once again work in the tall towers, and the plain, damaged building could once again power the city of modern beauty. The Geiger counter was singing in a constant hum as you walked to your doom. You opened the front doors to the plant, swept your hands through the ashes and rubble, saw the controls which so long ago were shut down to create this monstrosity of a disaster...you go to write it in the dust on the wall...but are slowly being affected by the radiation...dISaSTEr aReA. You don't see you finish writing, but someone did...

Days later, you open your eyes. They burn, as does your entire body. You reach to pump more morphine, but notice you're in a gown. you finally refocus your eyes and see your co-pilot. His concerned look is enough to make you cry...if you could cry. He's wearing a lead vest, and the room is sealed tight, with an airlock at the door. Beyond the small window is everyone else from the doomed mission. Not a single one had even a scratch, but they had walked off to get their bearings to come back and find you gone and some supplies removed. They immediately knew where they were, and where you had gone...and feared you might not be thinking straight, and headed into the most radioactive disaster known to man. The doctors had been able to pull 95% of the radiation from your body, and even were able to use adult stim cells to restructure your eyes and skin, but could do nothing about the nerve endings, which were now in a state of rope which is constantly unraveling. Eventually they'd reach their end, and it wouldn't hurt so much, but it still pained you and everyone else to know that it had happened.

Years later, you're still alive. You've developed several prosthesis, amazingly advanced and integrated, as the radiation took away your legs and two arms. But you're alive. A living example of the effects of radiation. Medicine, physics, and nuclear research has skyrocketed since your encounter. In fact, they've been able to restructure much of you, leaving only the mechanics as a reminder of the past. The dISaSTEr aReA is there, and is long from being habitable, but who knows? maybe you'll go there in the end, to die in the peace and serenity of the slowly decaying half-life.






Alright, no idea what caused this. Linked by a GMod nuke to a real nuke, to nuclear power, to Chernobyl, and to about 3 pictures into one video, I got struck with some radical idea and just started writing. No moral, no good story, just a dump of my 2nd person story telling. IDK, love it or hate it, GO!

Datra:
Love it or hate it?
I love it! :D

brain candy:
**Likes** (Facebook style!)

It's haunting.... I really enjoyed reading it. I couldn't tell it was a mind dump of any kind either. I'm always used to my mind dumps being rather obvious, lol. :)

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