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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/MathematicianWide930 on 2024-10-28 01:56:11+00:00.
A quickie… I fixed most of the typos…I think. It’s the first off the cuff story since my stroke a few years back. Halloween is getting close, after all.
Slipping the Cooler
By Adderworks
June 12, 1945 - 50 miles east of Okinawa
Lieutenant Vince “Iron Hands” Moretti didn’t pray anymore. That part of him had died on teh streets of Chicago, somewhere between his first collection run and his first murder. Or, was it the second? Either way, he nursed his P-38 Lightning through the near pitch black storm clouds, fuel gauge damn near empty, he found himself remembering fragments of old prayers as the plane bucked around him…
Through the armored glass, white lightning flickered in the sky around him. Real lightning, not the kind that came from his guns. The kind priests had once told him was God’s wrath back in the day. He’d seen plenty of wrath since then, none of it divine. Vince was usually the source.
“Rattlesnake Three, you’re off course.” The radio crackled. “Storm’s pushing you toward contested airspace.”
Vince watched the compass needle swing wildly. The magnetic storm was playing hell with his instruments, just like the briefing had warned. “Copy that, trying to correct.” His voice was casual, the same tone he’d used back in Chicago when telling worried shopkeepers that accidents could happen to anyone.
The P-38’s twin engines growled through the turbulence. She was a good plane, better than anything he’d flown running bootleg liquor across Lake Michigan. Sometimes he wondered if that’s why he’d been so good at combat flying - all those nights dodging Coast Guard patrols had been better training than anything the Army Air Forces taught.
Movement caught his eye. Through a break in the clouds, black shapes against the grey dawn. Zeros. Three of them.
Vince 's hands tightened on the controls, muscle memory from dozens of dogfights taking over. The cold mathematics of aerial combat ran through his head: altitude, speed, angle of attack. Just like planning a hit back home, except at 300 miles per hour.
“Rattlesnake Lead, we got company.” He pushed the throttles forward, feeling the Lightning respond. “Three bogies, my six high.”
Static answered. The radio was dead, that didn’t help.
The first burst of Japanese fire traced past his canopy, close enough that he could hear the rounds over the engine noise. Vince snap-rolled left, dropping into a dive that would have made his flight instructor scream. The P-38 shuddered, protests of overstressed metal mixing with the thunder. He heard a rivet pop in the body of the plane as he turned into the dive.
He pulled out of the dive hard, g-forces crushing him into his seat. Two Zeros followed. The third was somewhere above, waiting. Smart. Professional. Deadly.
“Okay, you sons of bitches.” Vince bared his teeth in what might have been a smile. “Let’s dance.”
The Lightning rolled inverted, then down, engines screaming as he pulled into a vertical dive. The Zeros followed, just like the cops had followed him that night in '38 when everything had gone wrong. When he’d learned that sometimes the only way out was through.
He waited until the altimeter showed 1,000 feet, the grey ocean filling his vision. Waited until he could see individual whitecaps. Waited until every instinct screamed to pull up.
Then he waited one second more. So good, so far.
The P-38 pulled out of the dive with a groan of tortured metal, skimming the waves. One Zero followed too close, too eager. It hit the water like a stone, disappearing in a fountain of spray. The second Zero pulled up and away from him. Perfect.
Vince allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. Then the third Zero, the one he’d forgotten about, put a 20mm cannon round through his cockpit.
The pain was instant, terrible, and somehow distant. Vince watched with detached fascination as his blood mixed with the hydraulic fluid leaking from shattered lines and glass. The Lightning’s nose dropped, engines coughing on seawater. His last thought, as the grey waves rushed up to meet him, was that maybe this was God’s wrath after all.
The P-38 hit the water at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. There was a moment of horrible noise, then darkness.
Then silence.
Until, thirty-three years later, someone in a white suit opened a file and smiled.
The Interview
The Devil’s office looked exactly like the recruitment office where Vince “Iron Hands” Moretti had enlisted in 1942 - right down to the peeling “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster on the wall. Only difference was the temperature, about thirty degrees hotter, and the recruiter himself: tall, lean, in an immaculate white suit that somehow looked wrong.
“Mr. Moretti,” the Devil said, not looking up from a manila folder. “Mandatory Purgatory. Before that, three years Army Air Forces. Before that…” He clicked his tongue. “Well, quite the resume with the family business in Chicago. You do good work.”
Vince shifted in his wooden chair. Even in death, even in whatever this place was, his neck still ached where the Zero had put a round through it. “If this is judgment day, you’re a few years late.”
“Oh no, nothing so dramatic.” The Devil closed the folder and smiled. It was the kind of smile Vince had seen before - on loan sharks about to offer a desperate man a deal. “I’m here to offer you a job.”
“A job.”
“How familiar are you with the concept of independent contracting? That’s whe-”
Vince’s ghostly hands gripped the chair arms as he interrupted. “Cut the shit. What’s the real deal here?”
The Devil’s smile widened. He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out what looked like a piece of newsreel film. With a flick of his wrist, it projected onto the wall - images of strange ships in the sky, cities in ruins, humanity on the run. The audio is a series of screams and the sound of fire.
“This is Earth, 1978. My investments. Or what’s left of it.” The Devil’s voice hardened. “They came from somewhere beyond the stars. They’re systematically wiping out my… investment. Humanity. My primary source of souls.” The Devil’s anger was visible in his eyes.
“And what’s that got to do with me?”
“I need pilots. Special pilots. Ones who can fly in combat. Ones who aren’t afraid to do what needs doing.” The Devil leaned forward. “Ones who’ve already got a bit of Hell in their souls.”
Vince watched the footage of the alien ships. “My plane’s at the bottom of the Pacific.”
“Oh, we can fix that.” The Devil produced a contract, the paper seemingly made of something that wasn’t quite paper. “Sign this, and I’ll give you back your plane. Better than new. I’ll give you power you couldn’t imagine. And all you have to do is what you do best - fly, fight, and raise a little hell.”
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch, Mr. Moretti, is that you’ll be working for me. Forever. But…” The Devil gestured to the footage of Earth burning. “Is that really worse than watching everything burn?”
Vince stared at the contract for a long moment. He thought about his last mission, about dying alone in the Pacific. About all the things he’d done in Chicago that had already damned him. “One condition.”
The Devil raised an eyebrow.
“I want my plane hot-rodded. If I’m going to hell, might as well make it fast. Real fast.”
The Devil’s laugh was like striking matches. “Mr. Moretti, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful partnership.” He slid the contract across the desk. “Though fair warning - the last few Ghost Riders didn’t work out so well.”
“Yeah?” Vince picked up the pen. “Well, they probably weren’t from Chicago.”
The pen touched paper, and somewhere in the Pacific, a sunken plane began to burn.
The Awakening
The P-38 Lightning had rested in its coral grave for thirty-three years. Fish had made homes in its twin booms, and anemones decorated its rusted fuselage like bloody flowers. The cockpit where Vince had died was now a garden of sea life.
Then the ocean began to boil.
It started as a whisper of heat, sending the fish scattering. Then came the glow - not the soft bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures, but something harsh and orange, like molten metal. The coral crackled and died as hellfire began to seep from the wreck’s seams.
Inside the cockpit, skeletal hands gripped controls that hadn’t moved since 1945.
Vince 's eyes opened - not eyes anymore, but points of flame in a skull that was somehow both bone and metal, fused together by infernal heat. His flight jacket materialized around his skeletal form, the leather blackened and smoking, his old squadron patch now bearing the grinning face of a demon.
The P-38 shuddered. Thirty years of coral growth cracked and fell away as hellfire ran through its systems like blood coursing through veins. The aluminum skin began to transform, the metal becoming something darker, something that belonged more in a furnace than the sky. The twin Allison engines jerked once. Twice more. They roared to life with a sound like damned souls screaming.
Vince 's skeletal hands moved across the controls, remembering. The gauges in front of him glowed red and repaired themselves. The hoses and lines filled with molten metal instead of oil and fuel. The compass spun wildly before the glass cracked and hellfire leaked out.
“Come on, baby,” he whispered, his voice like steel grinding on concrete. “Time to fly.”
The P-38’s propellers began to turn, slowly at first, then faster, the blades leaving trails of fire in the wa…
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