https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
Which made my choice of ride entertainingly ironic, given that nobody else was in the bomb bay and it was too cold for electronic devices. So I took a nap; sleep may be another optional feature for me, but I like it. I just rarely have an excuse to go have some, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.
The Air Force was kind enough to give me a claxon when we were five minutes out from the drop zone, which was plenty of time for me to wake up, check that nobody had inexplicably managed to steal my gear while I slept, and position myself for when the bomb bay doors opened. I allowed myself the luxury of a little sweat, then. I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect that it’s all tied up with my need to think of myself as still being human. That’s ridiculous of me, probably. Humanity is a state of mind, right?
I hadn’t decided how to answer that before the bomb bay doors opened and I was suddenly falling at twenty-five thousand feet with no air bottle. And no, no parachute. It’d just get in the way.
They say, out in the mundane world, that it takes about two and a quarter minutes to fall twenty-five thousand feet. I was in kind of a hurry, so I just tucked myself into as much of a ball as possible; I don’t know if it helped much, but it made me feel useful as I streaked to the ground. In the last few seconds, I straightened out, feet down, and — stepped onto the permafrost lightly, as if I had just hopped down from the last step on a staircase. No impact, no flash of energy, not even a dramatic sound effect.
I looked around to check, and was gratified to see that there were no physicists in the area. That was good. Any competent and creative scientist who sees people like me in action immediately becomes a high-risk candidate for catatonia. I may still be human, but I’m not exactly natural.
As I brushed myself off, out of sheer automatic reflex, I looked around. Mundane-officially, I had landed somewhere in the former village of Pifuffik, abandoned after an unfortunate incident with plutonium contamination. Occult-officially, I was supposed to be in a multinational clandestine occult defense facility that maintained a permanent courtesy gate to the JOE’s home dimension, and there should have been somebody waiting to make sure I didn’t end up on the ice.
In reality… in reality, I was in the middle of a slightly smoking battlefield. Which was definitely not supposed to be a scheduled item. Possibly my boss should have assigned me this job a little earlier?
Obviously, there’s a checklist for this sort of thing. First, call it in. Always call it in. Then, start looking for survivors — or failing that, somebody with an intact head for the field necromancers to interrogate. Finally, find out what did this, and kill it. OK, fine, there’s a lot more, but that’s the gist: tell your bosses, find your buddies, kill the baddies. Easy enough for anybody to remember.
And I swear that I was about to start the checklist when the zombie polar bear popped out of nowhere and smashed my head clean off my shoulders.