Crazy Seduction(erotica)

Gordon thought that was overkill and would generate more attention, but he wasn’t being asked his opinion. He nodded.

“There seems to be a number of the larger pseudo-clouds congregating in Missouri. You might want to take your team there to start. Thank you for taking on Colonel Devlin’s mission.”

“It’s my honor, Director.” He stood as the briefing was obviously over. He placed the docket in his briefcase, locked it, and then nodded to the men and left the meeting room.

He had his marching orders, and he’d much rather be out in the field than in some stuffy meeting room any day.

Today, Gordon was once again returning from that meeting room. The pseudo-clouds’ incursions were increasing, and months after that initial meeting, they still had no definitive plan for stopping them. They’d discovered it was possible to kill them, but their current methods were inefficient and not always successful.

Meanwhile, there’d been some disturbing news from the other side of the world. A colossal breach had formed over the south pacific midway between the islands east of Australia and west of Fiji. It was caught by the satellite cameras of the Climate Research Division of the EPA. Where previous breaches let in individual pseudo-clouds, this one gave birth to a monster. The cameras were now tracking the vast cloud bank’s trajectory, taking it eastward towards Wallis and Futuna, seemingly flying against prevailing air currents. Then it was discovered to be releasing smaller pseudo-clouds on multiple vectors. It was being likened to a flying aircraft carrier, only twenty times larger than anything the US had on the seas. They would have to do something about it before it got too close to the US west coast.

More disturbing were the stories of entire populations of remote Pacific island chains disappearing after these storms passed overhead. There’s no sign of them or foul play, and their boats remain where they left them. No clues were left behind to explain their disappearance at all.

Crane’s current mission had him heading back to the wheat belt, Nebraska this time. His team’s research into the pseudo-cloud’s internal anatomy was looking promising. They’d had the eggheads in engineering build them some new mapping radar tech. They planned on using it to discover what was inside the fluffy masses that let them direct their movement and store the energy they used to zap each other.

Satellite imagery showed two massive beasts moving towards each other, and they’d likely meet tonight at dusk.

He and his team intended to be there to meet them.

-=-

The huge clouds rumbled and collided above the expansive wheat fields as Sam sat in his harvester watching from the edge of the property. Bolts of lightning occasionally shot down between them to strike the ground, and he grinned each time he saw it.

He’d been a storm watcher since he was a little kid. While his sister would run and hide under her blankets, he’d be right there by the window, taking it all in, fascinated and excited at the same time.

These new storms, though, he’d never seen anything like them. The clouds seemed… different. They didn’t behave…. normally. They seemed to move with a will of their own. He’d even seen them move against the wind!

The two thunderheads he was currently watching looked like they were bumping chests threateningly. Well, that’s what it looked like to him.

He picked up the mic on his radio to call his buddy Jake in the harvester idling next to his.

“Do you see them? They’re fightin’!” he gushed.

“Sam, they’re clouds. Clouds don’t fight. Hey! Didn’t you hear that guy on TV last night? He explained this. It’s just oddly charged ions accidentally released from that Commie nuclear power plant over in Russia. The stuff got up in the sky and collected in the clouds. I’m not buying that it was accidental, though!” his friend grumbled. Jake was convinced the Ruskies were the source of most of their woes.

Sam hadn’t watched TV the night before as he’d been driving the back roads with Jeannie, his wife, who was also an avid storm watcher. She liked to make love in their truck while lightning flashed in the skies above them. His mind took him back to how wild she’d been last night.

Jake’s voice interrupted his sexy thoughts. “The science guy said there was no danger from radioactivity, but the ions were makin’ the clouds push other clouds with the same charge. Like magnets.”

“Magnets?!? Pffft! What a load of crap that is!” Sam scoffed. “These clouds ain’t behaving like magnets. I’m tellin’ ya, they’re alive and acting like… like…” he strained his mind to think of a creature Jake would recognize had the same behavior.

“Walruses.”

Sam burst into laughter at Jake’s quiet, almost reverent, suggestion. He looked over at the man in the cab of the other big farm machine and was glad he hadn’t pressed the mic button. His friend was watching the vast clouds bumping each other, and his mouth was hanging open in awe. Sam was more than a little impressed with his friend’s ability to take that leap. He pressed the button. “Exactly! It’s like they’re fightin’ for dominance!”

Jake looked over with a grin. “King of the Clouds?”

Sam shared a laugh with him.

Suddenly the sky flashed a brilliant blue-white, and the ground below their machines hummed loudly. The engines shut down on both harvesters, and the lights went off. They looked back at the towering clouds to see one had an enormous rip down its side. It began to slowly drift lower. Sam noticed the other cloud was rising twice as fast as the wounded cloud was falling. Rain began to hit the harvesters’ windshields and seemed to be coming from the rip in the dropping cloud.

He cracked open the side window and saw Jake do the same. “Does that look like a wound to you?” Sam called out across the gap.

“Shit, yeah. Is this rain supposed to be the cloud… bleedin’?” Jake replied, his voice strained by wonder. “What’s the rising cloud doi-GEEZUZ!!!”

While they’d both missed the lightning strike that caused the gash, they got an eyeful of the next. An enormous bolt of pure white light shot down the side of the rising cloud to stab deeply into the dropping one. There was a second flash, this one yellow and coming from the core of the injured cloud. An enormous fireball erupted upwards following the path the bolt had carved. The upper cloud was now in trouble as the flames climbed up its outer surface. It released a deluge of rain after a moment, shedding its outer layer to cool the rising fire. The victorious but now smaller cloud moved off to the south.

As Sam and Jake sat in their harvesters gawking at the light show overhead, the rain began to taper off.

The cloud that… exploded was quickly thinning out into a misting rain. Sam spotted something a little more substantial and shiny drifting down to land in the field not too far ahead of them.

He suddenly had a burning need to see that… thing from inside the dead cloud.

He needed something to carry whatever he found, so he grabbed his lunch bag and took his sandwiches out of the resealable container Jeannie had packed them in. She always put his lunch in sandwich bags, then the rigid plastic container to keep him from squishing them, then that went into his lunch bag. For once, he was grateful for the extra packaging. Dropping the now empty container in the lunch bag, he opened the door to his harvester and stepped out, item carriers in hand. The mist cooled his skin as he turned his face up to it. It felt good!

“Sam! What the hell are you doin’? Get back inside! You don’t know what that stuff will do to you!” Jake yelled from the now open door of his own machine.

“It’s just water! Besides, didn’t you say the science guy said it was harmless?” Sam grinned at his friend. He climbed down from the cabin to the ground and set off across the field while he still had light to see with the late afternoon’s setting sun poking under the clouds from the horizon.Content from NôvelDr(a)ma.Org.

“Dammit, Sam! Wait up!” Jake called out.

He waited for his friend to catch up, then the two men walked out into the field.

“Where are we going?” Jake asked, turning the brim of his baseball cap to keep the rain from his face.

Sam wiped his own face and pointed to a spot not too far ahead. “Something fell out of the dead cloud,” he said and grinned at Jake’s cautious look.

“Why are you bringing your lunch?”

Sam snorted. “I’m not. Just the container in case we find something worth keeping.”

Jake nodded at his friend’s quick thinking.

They came upon a sizeable ring-shaped scorch mark in the wheat and stopped beside it. The burned section was a good three feet from its outer to inner edges, and the inner circle itself had to be around twenty-five feet across.

“What the hell is this?” Jake exclaimed.

Sam looked at it, then looked up. Glancing back at the distance they were from their harvesters, he smiled. “I got it! This is where the first lightning bolt from the surviving cloud touched down. It musta been a tube!”

“Well, it burned the wheat to a crisp!” Jake growled.

“Yeah, but look at the growth inside the burn! Look how healthy it is!” Sam gushed.

They walked around the scorched zone and admired the tall, strong stalks. All the wheat was much taller and healthier than it usually was this time of year. They didn’t normally harvest this early in the season, but the grain was ready, so they had to be, too. Sam turned away and hurried on to the spot where the shiny substance fell. Jake caught up to him and looked down at what seemed like aluminum foil.

“Tin foil?!? We came out in this rain to look at tin foil?” Jake complained.

Sam scowled at him. “It was inside the cloud! That means something! Maybe it’s like one of those foil party balloons! Or a weather balloon! This could prove they’re man-made! Maybe there’s some kind of radio control receiver nearby!”