Helicopters (standard:mystery, 775 words)
Author: Lynda Doane	Added: Jun 02 2002	Views/Reads: 3722/3	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Darien was being hunted down by an unknown enemy in helicopters. He was at a loss as to who they were and why they were after him. Story takes an unusual and supernatural twist at the end.

Helicopters!  Darien's heart raced as he jumped out of bed.  A
sun-bright light and deafening blast engulfed the quiet darkness of his 
bedroom.  Immediately, the light was replaced by the dreaded sound of 
the helicopters.  The horror always started abruptly. These strange 
enemies seemed to appear from the nowhere.  He barely made it out of 
the house when it blew up behind him, dissolving what was left of his 
life into splintered rubble. 

He ran in a zigzag pattern as machineguns fired all around him. He dove
into a small lake and swam underwater as long as he could hold his 
breath.  With lungs burning, he surfaced and took a long gulp of air 
before going back down.  He swam along the lake bottom to the other end 
surfacing only when absolutely necessary, to gasp for another lungful 
of air.  He made it to a copse of pussy willows where he thought he 
could hide.  He realized this was a bad judgment call when he felt 
someone thrust a knife blade into his leg. Instinct took over as he 
jumped out of the lake and charged across the muddy shore, only to come 
up against a barbed wire fence.  The entity that had emerged from the 
lake was gaining on him.  The barbed wire seemed to be less of a 
challenge than his pursuer, so he hurdled the barbed wire, allowing his 
cut and bruised body to crash onto the marshy ground.  The open field 
in which he landed afforded him no cover from his assailant.   With 
pain tearing at every part of his body, he dashed across the field. 
Squinting, he saw a safe haven in the form of a house in the distance 
and focused on that little dwelling as if it were his only hope.  As he 
ran, bullets sprayed within inches of him.  Wasting no time, he worked 
to close the distance between himself and that little refuge.   
Suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. First he saw the 
familiar blinding light and then the helicopters unexpectedly 
disappeared. 

The sky was quiet.  Darien was left once again wondering what had just
happened.  To look at this quiet neighborhood, one would never suspect 
that only an hour before, a war had befallen his home.  The only clue 
was that where his house once stood, there was now a conglomeration of 
burning wood, broken glass and concrete.  Who are they?  Where do they 
come from?  And where do they go? 

Six months ago he'd had a family, a job and an average, unremarkable
life.  The memory of the fateful day it began was burned into his brain 
for all eternity.   He and his family were sitting at the dinner table 
when a flash of light accompanied by an earsplitting explosion intruded 
itself into their home. Then they heard helicopters.  As they crowed 
the doorframe to take a look, their hearts were filled with terror.  
Helicopters bristling with guns were flying low and firing directly at 
their front door.  Darien felt the bullet sting his arm before he 
actually heard the rat-a-tat sound of gunfire.  As he came to his 
senses, he swiftly turned to push his loved ones back to the safety of 
the house.  He was too late.  They all lay dead in the doorway.  
Another explosion of blinding white light and the helicopters were 
gone. 

That strike was the first of many that turned his life upside down.  He
never knew where he would be when the helicopters materialized, but 
over the next six months they pursued him, injured him and very nearly 
killed him. 

Now, as he wandered through the dust of his destroyed home, his senses
were coming back to him.  He remembered that when the light exploded 
this time, he happened to be looking in the very direction of that 
burst.  What he remembered stunned him.  For a split second, he had 
witnessed a mirror image of his world.  As the helicopters disappeared 
into that hole of light, they continued to spew their never-ending 
bullets at their terrified victim.  A victim that looked up at them 
from a world beyond this one and who was an exact duplicate of Darien 
himself. 

For six months, Darien had been haunted by an accidental rip in the
fabric of reality that separated his world from a parallel universe.  
That was the last incident he ever had to endure.  The barrage of 
attacks ceased as the extraordinary portal closed for the last time. 

Police records concerning the events have been labeled as “unsolved.”
Only Darien knows that the crimes committed against him will never be 
unraveled in this world. 


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