D. MacHale - SYLO

We started back toward the car, finishing the full circle around the downed plane.

That’s when I saw it.

I stopped short.

“What?” Kent asked.

It was a simple clue, but unmistakable. If the sun hadn’t been hitting it at just the right angle, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it because it was the same shade of black as the skin of the craft. It stood out only because it had a slick sheen that reflected the sunlight.

It was a logo, no more than ten inches wide. There was a star inside a circle with two flaps, like wings, to either side with three stripes on each. Normally it would be red, white, and blue but there was no mistaking the monochrome version.

“This is no alien spaceship,” I declared, pointing to the logo.

Kent joined me, took a look, and gasped. “Oh, man.”

It was the logo of the United States Air Force.

We had been in the middle of a monstrous battle between two different branches of the military from the same country. My country. It was no drill. It was no training exercise.

“So what does that mean?” Kent asked.

“It means that the United States of America is at war with itself.”

Tori said, “It’s the second Civil War.”

It was almost too much to accept that such cataclysmic events, events that were sure to shake the world, had begun in my own backyard, at a high school football game, on a warm fall evening that turned out to be the perfect night for death.

The first death.

How many more were to come and how far would we have to go before it would end?

“Do you hear that?” Olivia asked.

We all held our breath and listened.

Portland was dead. Dead quiet. There were no normal sounds of life. No traffic. No voices. No screams or laughter. All we could hear was the forlorn cry of seagulls floating on the ocean breeze…

…and music coming from the sky.

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Copyright © 2013 D.J. MacHale

ISBN: 978-1-101-60076-4

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.