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He scanned the area quickly. All I need is a little —
There was an oblong-shaped corner of the airport still open, several helicopters there already. Can I glide it that far? And then he heard that harsh, asshole voice again —
“Where are you planning to land? I hope you’re taking us directly to the hospital,” Kone yelled.
“We’re losing altitude goddammit!” Everon snarled through his teeth. “This thing’d fly a whole lot better with less weight. Care to step outside, Mr. Kone?”
“Please be quiet,” Franklin whispered forcefully to the little bureaucrat. “You’re not helping.”
Perspiration dripped from Everon’s forehead. “Hold on!” he yelled and lowered the collective to the floor.
As if the bottom dropped out, the Pelican fell. Fast.
No one said a word.
Falling Down
Houses rose toward them — a baseball diamond. Could I make that? Too far. That parking lot? Power lines. Everon fought himself not to white-knuckle the machine, to continue feeling the controls.
“It’s going to be close,” he muttered.
Franklin kept one eye on Melissa, the other on his brother’s face. He couldn’t recall ever having seen Everon like this, this — pure focused rage it looked like — none of his typical sarcastic humor. Franklin’s fingers slid off the triangle base of the small gold cross beneath his shirt, then brushed the soft feathers of the owl’s head.
And then he saw it clearly. It had been a personally dangerous, altruistic and foolhardy thing they’d done to release all those people on the bridge. He and Everon had put their own lives at risk out of grief and desperation. Thinking we’d failed Cynthia and Steve. How could I have let these strangers become more important than my own sister?
Now that they were certain Cynthia was dead, Franklin felt a kind of pure, blind hatred like nothing he’d ever felt before. But nobody knew who to hate. Only a desperate need to somehow strike back, do something drastic.
In the co-pilot seat to Everon’s left, Clarence’s hands clenched around the base of his seat cushion. He felt his stomach rise, the ground coming toward them at an alarming rate, trees, buildings — Fuck! I knew I should have worn the green shirt yesterday! Life is always better, safer in the green shirt! But it was so hard to sell newspapers when he was smelly.
Down ahead of Everon, a power line appeared across their path. But they were committed. A messy crash — death for everyone if he snagged it. He pushed the yoke forward.
They fell faster.
The transit engineer looked at his digital wristwatch. Strange. He hadn’t noticed. The numbers hadn’t changed. Eight-zero-zero. Does it mean something? Can’t be good. Stomach feels like it’s in my throat. Certain numbers had always been lucky for him. Never double zero.
Are we going to make it past this power line? Everon asked silently. With no engine, they were dropping on a steep angle, free-falling, only a small amount of resistance from the main rotor, in full auto-rotate. No time to bring the tail around. He jerked hard back on the yoke. Shoulders hunched, Everon pulled his head into his neck waiting for the tail to strike.
Despite cold air whistling through the cracks, small bubbles of perspiration formed on Tyner Kone’s upper lip. As the Pelican fell, he rushed to make certain he was balanced. With his right hand, nervously he tapped his left shoulder, then more softly with his left hand tapped his right. Too hard on the left, he thought. Must have balance!
There was no deadly tilt, no sudden jerk. Ground flying at them, Everon’s left hand yanked on the collective arm almost ripping it from the floor.
The Russian woman Kat felt like suddenly she weighed a thousand pounds. Despite the security of Petre’s arm around her shoulder, she had known this was how it would end for them since yesterday. That flock of pitch-black crows in Queens landing on a street pole, beaks cawing loudly — right at her! The most evil sign! A warning she hadn’t understood — until now! The bomb! The subway! To die finally smashed into the ground!
They slammed in hard. Then bounced! Off the Pelican’s balloon tires — six, eight, ten feet in the air. Then fell, hit again, not so hard this time, and settled — to near stillness.
Everon’s breath shot from his lips. FFFFffff . . . like air going from the tires. He looked around.
“Alright back there?”
“We’re okay!” Franklin yelled.
“Well I’m not —”
But for the semiconscious Walter van Patter, the again bitching Tyner Kone, they all clapped and cheered.
They were on the airport runway. A hundred feet from the nearest tent.
The Press
Of the people running toward the helicopter, Franklin spotted several hauling video cameras. Photographers and reporters. The rest, wearing pale hospital greens, carried stretchers, pushed wheelchairs. They helped Walter van Patter, now conscious again, into one; Victoria Hill into another.
“Which one of you’s a doctor?” Kone whined indignantly. “I feel like I’m ready to fall over, after everything I’ve been through!”
The wind was calm in New Jersey, Franklin noticed. Just as it had been at the fountain minutes before it changed directions. The black cigar-shaped cloud jutted out. Has it reached the river? How much time does it leave us to get out?
Everon pulled one of the medic’s collapsible stretcher dollies next to the cargo door. Franklin got to his feet with Melissa. His jacket halfway open, the owl poked its head out between his white shirt’s middle two buttons again. A photographer snapped a picture. The flash scared the bird back inside.
“You have an owl in there!” a reporter pointed.
“I found him on top of an apartment building,” Franklin muttered.
“We should call him Harry!” Victoria spoke up. “In honor of our narrow escape.” She pointed to Melissa. “Harry helped find this little girl!”
Flashes flashed. Video cameras recorded. Vandersommen, that same jerk airport security guard who nearly stopped them going into the city, emerged from the crowd. Before he could say anything, Everon said, “Emergency landing. Lost both engines. No choice.”
“You had no authorization in the first place.” Vandersommen wrote something in a small notebook, while looking at the Pelican’s tail number.
An Army major ran over followed by two of his men. “We’re commandeering this helicopter!”
“Go ahead!” Everon barked. He jumped down from the big cargo door. With Chuck’s help, they began to wrestle the Aztec cocoon out onto the dolly.
Franklin heard someone shout, “Victoria!” One of the reporters apparently knew her. He pushed a microphone to her face. Clarence nudged behind Victoria’s chair, freeing the woman in green scrubs.
“We better hustle,” Everon said as he and Chuck passed alongside with the Aztec cocoon. “Look!” he head-pointed. The dark cloud looked to be completely across the Hudson. “By the time that gets here we better be long gone! Meet you at the jet, Bro!”
Before anyone could thank them, Everon and Chuck pushed ahead.
“You were rescued by these men, Ms. Hill?”
“They pulled us out of a collapsed subway. They’re amazing.”
“And these EMS personnel are from where?” another reporter asked.
“They’re brothers,” Clarence cut in. “The pilot’s from Vegas.” He pointed at Franklin. “He’s a Congregational minister.”
“A what?” Victoria looked at Franklin, as surprised as the reporter.
“The big guy told me,” Clarence nodded at Chuck, pointed back at Franklin. “The dark-haired one is Reverend Franklin Reveal. The blond surfer guy’s the pilot, Everon Student. They saved us — and about three hundred thousand other people.”
“How’s that?” the reporter asked. “Three hundred thousand — ?”
Franklin walked faster.
“Be ready to expect a lot more survivors in about an hour!” the transit engineer put in. “They set thousands free when they opened a path on top of the GW.”
Communications must be out, Franklin realized. Nobody even knows what’s happening.
He passed soldiers adding to a row of tall green and white toilets. One woman lined up said to another behind her, “I just hate these porta-things, don’t you?”
Through the nearest tent’s entrance, Franklin saw people crammed on ankle-high cots. Doctors and nurses clearly past overload, bandaging foreheads, arms, legs. Selecting who would live, and who could not be helped, who would die. Franklin thought of the mob coming from the bridge.
People were crying, screaming, searching for the ones they’d lost. As if someone had torn away the reality in which they’d lived. The world was upside down, where nothing made any sense at all.
“Yea, brother!” shouted a homeless vagrant in tattered clothes and cutoff gloves, voice rising like an old-time revivalist. “The end of days is come!”
Mania was taking over.
An elderly bleached-blonde stepped in Franklin’s way. A camel-shaped brown stain ran across the bottom of her long torn skirt. Her right hand parallel with the ground just above her head, she asked, “White-hair, about this tall — have you seen my husband? They said they would bring him on the next helicopter . . .” her thick Jewish-Brooklyn accent trailed off.
“No, I’m sorry,” Franklin answered.
She wandered away screaming violently, “WHO HAS DONE THIS!”
No one told her to be quiet. It was the same question they were all asking. There was no victim list you could check to see if someone you cared about was on it. He doubted there ever could be such a list. There were so many like her. People who seemed not to know where they were or what they were doing. Only that something important had been taken from their lives. “Oh, please God . . .” voices trailed off nearby. A total loss of reason.
“What was it like over there?” a female reporter asked, pushing a microphone into Franklin’s face.
He stepped around her.
Franklin had no desire to talk about the city. He didn’t want to hate Vandersommen or this reporter or anybody. The only person he hated was someone he couldn’t see or touch or find. Someone who had set off a bomb that had caused fire and agony and so much pain.
Who’s Responsible?
The mob of GW Bridge survivors was halfway to Teterboro when drops of black goo began to fall from the sky. Fifty-one people squeezed in together atop a narrow raised concrete oval that housed the pumps of a Quick-N-Go GAS U-POURIUM.
On the platform’s front side, barely protected by the station’s overhang, the woman who’d hit Franklin with her keys struggled to keep her weight off her bloody right leg without being pushed off the pump platform into the growing black muck. Bonnie Fisk’s torn pants did not protect her from the goo’s backsplash, each cold ricocheted drop a little bit of fire.
The wind picked up, and where small globs of the black stuff splattered, bare skin turned red and began to burn. They tried to rub it off. Blisters formed. They screamed and cursed and packed in tighter. It was like being jammed into the bridge all over again. The cloud pushed
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