I was driving back from somewhere in the Southwest (probably from my folks' old place in the desert) back home, and I took a slight detour to pass by a really remote military base that I always loved because there was always weird stuff going on there. (I think it was supposed to be Groom Lake, or Dulce, but it mostly looked like Mojave.)
As I approached, I saw a huge fleet of B-52 bombers taking off from it. But they were taking off in extraordinarily quick succession-- minimal-interval scramble launches-- and they were taking off in tilt-wing Osprey VTOL fashion-- the wings would tilt and the engines would lift them straight up, then they'd gracefully tilt slowly back and the Buffs would start pushing out instead up. I could see a huge line of dark black bombers stretching off into the distance; clearly they'd been doing this for a while.
Then, as I got closer, I noticed something even weirder: The entire base appeared to be evacuating over land... There were thousands of troops on foot streaming out of the base in ranks, plus tons of armor, support vehicles... and towering above them and the landscape, four aircraft carriers on huge tracked vehicles like the one that moves the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
They had left the base and were passing through the little town nearby, and I pulled my car to a stop and got out for a closer look.
The troops were walking three abreast-- not really marching, just strolling along at ease but alert. There were at least a couple thousand of them in a huge long line. The entire evacuation was proceeding along a railroad line that went from the base through the town and up into the foothills. But the weirdest thing about all the troops was that none of them were in uniform-- or, rather, they all had different uniforms. Every one of them was wearing some different kind of attire-- fatigues, dress blue jackets over white t-shirt, camo, desert beige, long pants, shorts, whatever. At first I didn't see any sort of insignia or emblems on any of them, and I began to wonder if they were actually American or if the "new world order army" crackpots were right. But then I noticed that they were, in fact, all wearing American flags on their shirts or jackets somewhere.
They were all very young, though, and with the random mix in uniform appearance they didn't look so much like US military forces so much as they looked like the rebellious high school kids in Red Dawn. Except that some of them were packing much more serious firepower on them.
I watched them stroll silently by for a while; one of the aircraft carriers passed by, looming overhead with a thrumming sound that reminded me of the command ship from Tron. Then I noticed a hole in the regiments coming up-- a place where only two walked abreast instead of three-- and I made a rather hasty decision. I checked to make sure my flight jacket had an American flag on it (it doesn't, in real life) and I just sort of fell into the ranks when the opening came up. I just started walking along with them.
They were a curious bunch of guys. Nobody seemed the list bit bothered by what I'd just done. They mostly walked in silence; occasionally one of them would say something to everyone else nearby-- a joke or something. But I was able to get a couple of them to actually start talking a little bit-- they would tell me everything about themselves, their families, where they grew up, ebarrassing anecdotes about each other... but none of them would touch the subjects of what this whole evacuation was about, or what their purpose was, or where they (we, now) were going.
My car and my old life fell ever further behind as we began heading up into the hills, and I knew that while nobody would ever tell me what this was all about at any point, I'd still somehow know what to do when we got to our destination.