A Time To Run - Softcover

Colin Hudson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0953822613 ISBN 13: 9780953822614

Publisher: Rapture, 2002

Synopsis

Set in the very near future, 'A TIME TO RUN' opens with the strange and sudden, ' in the twinkling of an eye', disappearance of millions of the earth's citizens.

Married couple, Matt and Jenny Jacobs, attempt to escape the stranglehold of a Global State ruled over by a thoroughly evil World President, Byron East.

In a cashless society the currency is electronic credits. Unless fully tied into the One World System, there will be no credits, no means to buy or sell, no ability to afford travel or the fuel to travel....therefore no means of escape!

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"You'll be alright, Lisa, flying is as safe as houses these days. Just look at it this way," Gary glance at his watch, "four hours from now and we'll be sitting in the sun by the hotel pool."
Gary Blacket was trying to comfort his wife. She was afraid of flying and so had never been as far as Spain before. She had been to France a couple of times via the channel tunnel but to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary gary had talked her into flying to Majorca for a month in the Mediterranean sunshine.

It was almost nine o'clock in the morning and they were sitting in the back of the taxicab holding hands, and every now and then Gary would tighten his grip slightly and smile reassuringly at his wife. They were about five kilometres from the airport and were watching the aeroplanes, mainly large jet airliners, approaching to land on the near side of the airport, while others were lifting off from the far side. Aircraft were taking off and landing continuously, and evenly space, as if there was an invisible conveyor belt in the sky. gary was enjoying the spectacle but Lisa was nervous. he hoped that his wife would be able to relax once they were into the flight.

as the taxicab neared Manchester airport, several aircraft, on their final approaches, fle right over the vehicle. The one that really caught the Blackets' attention was also the last one that they saw: it was a gigantic, four-engined airbus with two full-length decks, one on top of the other, and it was dressed in American Airlines livery. For such a monster, which fully-loaded could carry eight hundred passengers, it was surprisingly quiet. With it's undercarriage and flaps down, it approached the runway threshhold. Suddenly, one wing lowered and the airborne leviathan banked away from the airport. Gary and Lisa watched in shocked amazement as the aircraft made no attempt to level off; instead, the bank angle became steeper and the nose dropped.

"Height, one thousand feet. Speed, one-eighty knots."
Pete Jefferies, the pilot of American Airlines super-heavy, callsign, Bigbird, had switched off the auto-pilot, which incorporated the staccato tones of the cockpit computer's quasi-human voice, and taken manual control of the aircraft for the final minutes of the flight from New York. he was concentrating on keeping the airliner in the correct attitude for touchdown, while his co-pilot, Dan Erikson, was watching the cockpit displays and reading out aloud the information given on altitude and speed. both parameters were decreasing as expected in a normal, safe, landing routine.
If visibility had been bad they would have left the whole landing procedure to the aircrafts very capable computerised systems. But the only break in the boring routine of long-haul commercial flights was the opportunity to revert to something like hands-on flying during take-offs and landings. both pilots preferred to be actively involved in these usually more exciting phases of any flight.
If they had left things to the onboard computers, the aircraft would have made it to the ground safely.

Erikson, feeling the sudden lurch to starboard, shot a concerned glance towards the pilots position, but the seat was empty.
"What the....!?"
The co-pilot realised he did not have time to figure it out, or even to finish talking to himself, as he made a desperate grab at the controls to try and right the doomed airliner; but they were much too low and by the time his thoughts could turn into physical actions, he had been buried and cremated in a school playground near Manchester.
For sixty years a school, with two parallel rows of semi-detached houses behind it, had stood just off the northern end of the airport; it now disappeared into a massive fireball as the super-jumbo-jet dug it's nose into the school-yard and exploded. gary and Lisa looked at each other, horrified. They turned to the taxicab driver, but he was not there. For a moment they stared in disbelief while the taxi continued somewhat more slowly along. Coming to his senses, gary attempted to get into the front to control or stop the vehicle. he was quite sprightly for his sixty-two years and Lisa watched anxiously as he moved with deceptive speed towards the driving seat. he almost made it, but not before the taxi had idled it's way across into the oncoming lane of traffic.

The fear hit lisa's nervous system like an acute physical pain and her senses were overwhelmed by the terrifying, ear shattering blasts of the horn that seemed to play in harmony with the blinding pulses of white light from the four headlamps of the truck which was charging right at them. The truck driver swung hard over. For a moment the twenty-ton vehicle balance precariously on it's nearside wheels. But somehow, by a hand's breadth, it missed the taxicab.
The large, air-conditioned, luxury coach, travelling behind the truck, did not miss. The coach was carrying sixty pensioners on a day-trip to the seaside. It slammed, head on, into the taxi at one hundred kilometres per hour, creating another, but lesser fireball than the one Gary and Lisa had only seconds ago witnessed. And, although the fireball which engulfed the coach and the taxi was much smaller than the one down by the school, to Gary and Lisa and the majority of elderly citizens in the coach, it was every bit as fatal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rapture
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0953822613
• ISBN 13: 9780953822614
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364