At 97 one thousand, I go.
And damn does the world seem blindingly bright after bursting from my woolen cocoon.
Clear the bay doors, sharp right, then fields, trees, stars, road, and chopper, six feet off the ground.
And rising.
Crap.
Beside the Ringer-hole, a whirling shadow by the broken earth and another shadow that moves so slow in comparison, it seems as if it isn’t moving at all. Ringer’s sprung her trap on the search party. Sayonara, search party!
I’m running full out toward the Black Hawk, and the supplies in my uniform make me feel like I’m weighed down with bricks, the rifle bouncing against my back, and, shit, it’s too far away and rising too fast, pull up, Cassie, pull up, you’re not going to make it, time for Plan B only we don’t have a Plan B, and two minutes, what was that, Ringer? If you’re the tactical genius in this operation, then we’re so totally screwed, and the space shrinks between me and the chopper while its nose dips slightly, and how good’s your vertical, Sullivan?
I leap. Time stops. The chopper hangs suspended like a mobile above my fully extended body—even my toes are pointed—and there is no sound anymore or draft from the blades lifting the Black Hawk up or pushing my body down.
There was this little girl—she’s gone now—with skinny little arms and bony little legs and a head topped with bouncy red curls and a (very straight) nose with a special talent only she and her daddy knew about.
She could fly.
My outstretched fingers banged on the edge of the open cargo doorway. I caught hold of something cold and metallic, and I locked down on it with both hands as the chopper soared straight up and the ground sped away from my kicking feet. Fifty feet up, a hundred, and I sway back and forth, trying to swing my foot onto the platform. Two hundred feet, two-fifty, and my right hand slips, I’m hanging on with just the left now, and the noise is deafening, so I can’
t hear myself scream. Looking down, I see the garage and the house across the street from the garage and down the road the black smudge of where Grace’s house once stood. Starlight-bathed fields and woods shining silver-gray and the road stretching from horizon to horizon.
I’m going to fall.
At least it will be quick. Splat, like a bug against a windshield.
My left hand slips; thumb, pinky, and ring fingers thrum empty air; I’m attached to the chopper by two fingers now.
Then those fingers slide off, too.
55
I’VE LEARNED it is possible to hear yourself scream over the jet engines of a Black Hawk helicopter after all.
Also, it isn’t true that your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. The only things that flash before mine are Bear’s eyes, unblinking plastic, bottomless, soullessly soulful.
There’s several hundred feet to fall. I fall less than one, jerking to a stop so hard, my shoulder’s nearly ripped from its socket. I caught nothing to abort the plunge; someone caught me, and now that someone is hauling me on board.
I’m slung facedown onto the floor of the chopper’s hold. First it’s like, I’m alive! Then it’s all, I’m going to die! Because whoever rescued me is yanking me upright, and I have basically three choices, four if you include the false choice of the gun, because firing a gun within the metallic cocoon of a helicopter is a very bad idea.
I’ve got my fists, the pepper spray contained in one of the twenty-nine million pockets of my new uniform, or the hardest, most terrifying weapon in all of Cassie Sullivan’s formidable arsenal: her head.
I whip around and smash my forehead into the center of the face, crunch!, breaking a nose, and then there is blood. As in a lot of blood, practically a geyser, but the blow has no other effect. She doesn’t move an inch. She doesn’t even blink. She’s been—what word did she use to describe the incredibly creepy and scary thing Vosch did to her?—enhanced.
“Easy there, Sullivan,” Ringer says, turning her head to spit out a golf-ball-sized wad of blood.
56
RINGER
I PUSH SULLIVAN down into a seat and shout in her ear, “Get ready to bail!” She doesn’t say anything, just stares up into my bloody face uncomprehendingly. Arteries cauterized by the microscopic drones swarming in my bloodstream, pain receptors shut down by the hub; I may look horrible, but I feel great.
I climb over her to the cockpit and plop into the copilot’s seat. The pilot recognizes me immediately.
It’s Lieutenant Bob. The same Lieutenant Bob whose finger I broke in my “escape” with Razor and Teacup.
“Holy shit,” he shouts. “You!”