Yes, I sure have. I totally Love Ringo's Books. My favorite one is Gust Front.
One of the most memorable scenes in the book (For me) was with the single
mother character Shari. When She was at the Target getting supplies for
her and her two children when the ship landed
Wait a minute....
Ok
Heres a link for you folks out there to a free e book version of it.
WebScription Ebooks - John Ringo
Yeah you heard me its a free LEGAL, TOTALLY LEGAL, EBOOK from the
publishers Baen books. (They give away some of they're books free to
promote business.) Worked on me, I bought the whole set. And others I tried
out as well. Theres a whole library check it out folks.
Anyway I located the section of the book I realllllllly enjoyed. It gave me chills
So I'm going to do a spoiler "quote" (just a really long one) here of it. Enjoy
and Live Well.
* * *
A note of warning this can be disturbing to some people. Just so that you're
aware of it. (Frak, it still makes me tear-up)
***
Shari finally made it out of Target, after what seemed like hours and she only
had half the things she felt like she needed. For once the problem was not
money. By prior plan on the part of the Target corporation and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, the store offered everything for free. One
person had quipped that that really meant the world was coming to an end.
The problem was reaching the merchandise.
Everyone in Fredericksburg seemed to have come to Central Square at once
and there were fights breaking out everywhere. Twice she was sure she had
lost Billy in the crowds and even as she fought through the crowds she had
things snatched from her basket.
Finally she decided that whatever she had was going to have to do. All of
her acquisitions were in four shopping bags, three that she carried along with
the baby and one that Billy lugged. Two boxes of cereal bars, diapers, wipes,
some bottled water and juice, a few batteries. It was not much to make a
run for it.
She heard them saying that the Posleen were coming to Fredericksburg but
wrapped in her own straitened world she had not assimilated it. As she
fought through the crowds towards her distant car, the movement and noise
around her dropped off, the crowd in front of her stopped. She was forced to
stop as well and looked up with everyone else in the parking lot.
* * *
In the east, the sky was on fire. A new sun made up of hundreds of glowing
red landing craft tight-packed into a giant disk was an eye of Baal
descending upon the Virginia tidewater. The sight was unreal in the dusky
afternoon sunshine, a blazing circlet of death picked out among the fleecy
clouds and the darkening cerulean blue sky.
Every human in view of the spectacle stood transfixed as the circle grew and
grew, swelling from a moon-sized ring to a horizon-spanning wall in moments.
In the time it took to scream, the circle went from a speck to a ring to a
blazing wall of fire and then snuffed out as the landing craft slowed below
orbital velocities. As the meteoric reentry slowed, the individual ships could
be picked out, the twelve-sided polygons of the command craft surrounded
by their rings of protective landers. Moments later the sonic boom hit.
The sound was too large to be real, an aural Krakatoa beyond the ability for
human hearing to accept. Most in the parking lot were driven to their knees
and many lost their hearing permanently. None were spared.
* * *
Shari screamed with everyone else, her hands flying to her ears, for once
matronly protectiveness being driven out by self-preservation. Billy and the
other children were writhing on the ground in agony when the crowd began
to surge. She snatched her children up, overcoming her own pain, dropped
her hard-won possessions and stumbled into the lee of a truck that, for the
moment, was stationary.
The crowd around her broke into riot as everyone individually did whatever
they thought was the best for themselves. Some tried to get back into the
stores, some ran for their cars, some, like Shari, huddled in the shelter of
unmoving vehicles and some began firing randomly into the air. She held her
babies as the world around her went mad and they screamed in pain and
fear, from the riot as much as the sonic boom. Her ears ringing madly, she
cradled her children in the space afforded by the shadow of the truck and
waited for the panic to subside. Instead it increased, the crowd surging first
one way and then the other as more shots rang out. She steeled herself to
look, needing to know the cause of the newest panic and was nearly
panicked herself as the shadow of an interstellar craft swept across the
parking lot.
The lander drifted across the shopping center, like a zeppelin before a
zephyr, and settled as gently as a dandelion seed onto Salem Church hill.
The appearance of weightlessness was abruptly dispelled as the titanic craft,
as tall as a fifteen-story skyscraper, dropped the last few feet.
As the reverberation of the landing crashed across the crowds, the lower
fifty feet of the facet facing the parking lot dropped outward with another
resounding clang. Moments later the Posleen came pouring out, a yellow tide
of hunting centaurs.
Virtually every armed human, the vast majority of the immense crowd,
pointed various weapons at the yellow mass and opened fire.
Shari on the other hand took one look at the tide of Posleen pouring out of
the landing craft, put Kelly's left hand in Billy's, picked up the baby, took
Kelly's right hand and began walking towards town.
It was not hard. Just stand up, drop everything and go. Like the time that
Rorie finally got too drunk and crazy. All the other times, the cops would tell
her to go to the shelter but she stayed. She told them she would know when
it was time. And it was time. Not hard, just pick the babies up, walk out, get
in the car and drive. When the time came you just went. Maybe later there
would be time to go back and pick up all the things you left behind. And
maybe not. As long as you got away alive and unmaimed that was the thing.
Just walk away and keep walking. As guns go off on either side, and a high,
whispery racket goes overhead with a crickety-crack. As a line of giant holes
suddenly appear in a Jeep ahead of you, and the policeman that was firing
from behind it flies backwards in a mass of intestines.
Just keep walking and don't look back, as the crowd tries to pluck your
babies away faster than the courts, and the chatter of alien voices and
boom of alien guns comes closer.
***
And this part is from later in the book with the same character.
Shari stumbled into the crowd behind the Public Safety Building and carefully
lowered Kelly and Susie to the ground. Billy let go of her skirt and sat down,
his eyes wide and unseeing. She slumped beside him as the two girls huddled
into her lap, Susie quietly whimpering from the broken blisters on her feet and
the sights glimpsed over her mother's shoulder. A woman coming through the
crowd stopped and stared, then walked over.
"Are you in the pool?" she asked abruptly.
Shari looked at her with wide unemotional eyes. It took a long moment to
register her question. "What?" she croaked.
"Are you in the basket? Did you enter your name to be drawn?"
"Drawn for what?" she gasped again, mouth and throat dry from dehydration
and agonizingly extended fear.
Finally the woman grasped that Shari was suffering from more than the
general shock of the loathsome afternoon drawn into evening. "Are you going
to be all right?"
Shari started to laugh quietly and the laughs began to segue into sobs.
Every step she took, from the parking lot to where the Army and police were
digging in along the interstate, she knew would be their last. Time and again
she heard the centaurs drawing closer, only to be delayed by some more
interesting target. When she was forced to pick up Susie, drawing her
already slow progress to a crawl, she was overcome with the utter certainty
that her babies were going to die. And from what she had heard behind her it
was going to be one of the worst of all possible deaths.
The pain-racked march was a drawn-out nightmare, in which the monsters
were always just behind you and you knew that at any moment they would
touch you and then you would die. But this was no nightmare; this was a
stark reality as the sun set behind her in a blaze of red and she dropped into
the shadows of Salem Hill to the accompaniment of dying screams.
The passing matron waved for one of the tending fire fighters as Shari began
to collapse into hysterics. The EMT came over, readying a dose of Hiberzine.
"No," said one of the other paramedics. She grabbed Shari by her shoulders
and forced her to look up. "You have to keep together," she snapped. "We
need you; we need all the mothers. You're Shari Reilly, right?"
Shari nodded her head, still unable to stop the sobs. The girls started crying
softly in response as Billy just sat and rocked, looking into the deepening
twilight.
"You came in from Central Park?"
"Uh-huh," Shari sobbed, unable to catch her breath.
"All you have to do is hang on until they call your name, okay? It's a lot
easier than walking from Target to the interstate. We got a call on you. Let
me see your daughter's feet."
As the paramedic tended to Susie, Shari slowly got herself under a little
better control.
"You're going through a normal reaction," said the medic, soothingly. "You've
had a shock, Jesus, we all have! But yours was worse. You go through a
reaction period. You held out until you were here, which is better than most.
You held it together getting out of the . . . the . . ."
"Out of hell," said Billy.
Shari squeezed her son to her. "Are you gonna be okay, baby?"
"I . . . I . . ."
"It's okay, baby, we're safe."
"No, we're not, Mom. Don't lie."
"Son," said the medic firmly, "the engineers are building the best damn shelter
they can to protect you, and the rest of us are going to try to make sure
there's nothing to draw the Posleen in. We're gonna do our level best to save
you, I promise you that."
"Is it gonna work?" asked Shari, catching her breath in a pause between
crying spells.
"I won't promise anything," said the paramedic honestly. "But it's a better
chance than without it."
"Excuse me," said a woman, looming out of the darkness, "somebody said you
were up at Spotsylvania Mall." The woman's voice caught for a moment. "Did
you happen to see a man driving," she paused, "driving a hunter green
Suburban . . ."
"My husband was a tall man . . ."
"Did you see . . ."
The women rose around her, closing in with desperate questions, but the
paramedic rose over her like an enraged lioness. "Look, people, I know you're
wondering about your . . . your families, your husbands, but this lady's been
through enough already . . ."
"No," said Shari, with a quavering voice, "I have to say it, I have to. . . .
There was nobody behind me, nobody at all. I'm sorry . . ." She started
crying again, quietly. "There wasn't anything I could do. I, I, just had to walk
away, you see? I had to save my babies, I had to walk and keep walking . . .
There was this little girl . . . she wouldn't come with me and I was carrying
my babies . . . I couldn't, I couldn't . . ."
"Shhh," the medic cried into her hair, "it's all right, it is. There's nothing to do . . ."
"We had to walk," laughed Billy. "We just walked and walked and never ever
looked back. You can't look back, you just have to walk and walk . . ." He
began to scream.
The paramedic leaned over and pressed an injector against his neck. In a
moment he was out cold.
"What was that?" Shari snarled, struggling to her feet.
"Shh, just Hiberzine. He'll sleep quiet. Unfortunately, when he wakes up to
him it'll be just a moment from now. So before anyone gives him the antidote,
make sure they know he's not tracking very well. We've put quite a few out."
The lost wives had faded back into the darkness and another paramedic
brought over blankets and soup.
"I put you in the drawing," he said. "The engineers are about to start loading."
"I wonder how they're doing at the interstate?" said the female paramedic.
* * *
