Resident Evil: Exodus - The Tale of Elza Walker

Chapter 25 - Resolution

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The wrecked Blackhawk lay tilted up on its port side in the hayfield some distance away from the highway, having left a long curved skid mark on both the pavement and the hard-packed earth, as it had plowed through the short stubble of the cut hayfield. It had also left an even more wide field of debris and wreckage in its passing that ran almost all the way back to the Stagla station, where it had taken its fatal hit from the Tyrant. Only one badly bent and broken blade remained on the twisted spindle shaft of its shattered main rotor. The others, or rather pieces of them, were scattered far and wide across both hayfield and highway. The tail boom had broken off when the Blackhawk had first pancaked on the road, snapping away even as everything and everyone inside, except for Elza and the pilot, were sent flying out like a double fistful of freshly fired bottle rockets. The broken boom had found its way to the other side of the highway, having spun and tumbled off into the parking lot of a cluster of rental storage buildings, and had only stopped moving once it had impaled itself through the cab of a parked Ford pickup. The tail rotor was missing and nowhere to be seen. The bodies of those who had been thrown out of both sides of the crashing Blackhawk were scattered hither and yon in and around the debris field that covered both highway and hayfield. Some were slowly moving, and some were not. Some would never move again.

The fact that the Blackhawk had not caught fire during its crash was later credited to the actions of Lou, its late pilot. He had dumped most of his bird's fuel earlier in an effort to lighten the load and keep his wounded bird flying, saving only enough to get them to the edge of town and safely down before his crippled engine failed completely. Thus it was that when the Blackhawk had been brought down by the Tyrant, it had crashed with fuel tanks that were mostly empty. What little remained was splattered and scattered when the tanks ruptured during the initial impact on the highway, and so it was that the occupants were granted the mercy of not having died by being burned alive. Another thing Lou had done that the subsequent Army investigation later determined was his dropping to as low an altitude as possible before the attack by the Tyrant. This kept his bird from having enough time to roll over or even flip as it crashed. Had it done either, as was usually the case in many helicopter crashes, then everyone on board would have almost certainly been killed. Yet another thing that had aided in saving lives during the crash was the stout construction of the Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter itself. It was not completely crash-proof, and nothing can ever be, but it had been built to be as crash-resistant as possible. Such a crash in the older Vietnam-era Bell UH-1 Iroquois, or "Huey" per its beloved nickname, would have both broken the back of that bird and killed everyone on board. Being in a helicopter crash is never an ideal thing, but this one could have wound up being far worse that it was, had it not been for the actions of the late Lou and the stoutness of his newer bird. Even so, it was bad enough, and the resulting scene that would have greeted the eyes of any outside observer was testimony to that.

In its last moments, the screeching and sliding wreck which had once been an Army Blackhawk helicopter had plowed nose-first into a collection of large round hay bales located some distance into the hayfield. That had been an unfortunate thing for Lou the pilot, for he had been killed instantly in that head-on impact. The wreck had then bounced off and around the now broken and partly scattered bales of hay, skidding and swinging to starboard as its momentum, having been largely absorbed by the hay bales, finally dispersed and it came to rest. It was during this final swinging slide, however, when the wounded Elza Walker was flung from the helicopter. Two of the latches that had been holding her stretcher to the floor of the passenger compartment had failed when it had pancaked into the highway, and the remaining two failed from the impact with the stacked bales of hay. Both Elza and her stretcher, for she was still strapped to it, were catapulted from the wreck and flung into the hayfield. There was nothing that Elza could do except keep her arms tucked in, pray that the straps around her upper waist and paralyzed legs didn't fail, and turn the unbandaged side of her face into the stretcher fabric to shield it as much as possible. The stretcher began to tumble as soon as one of its pole-like handles hit the ground, and Elza was immediately put through the helicopter-wreck equivalent of a gyrotumbler before she smacked up hard, practically standing on her head, against one of the bales of hay in the field. This last impact both knocked the wind out of her and rendered her almost senseless. She could never after remember either seeing or feeling her stretcher balance almost vertically for a moment, then fall back down against the bale of hay before it slid all the way down to the ground.