“I got this, Mom,” said Winston. “Actually, I may not have this. I don’t know.”
“I know,” she said. “You’re my hero, son.”
That did it. Alyssa felt the first tear spill onto her cheek. She looked away, blinking furiously, and wiped at her eyes. When she turned back, she saw that Winston had lifted his goggles to do the same.
Amanda stepped back, and Colonel Bauman surveyed Winston from head to toe. He immediately put Winston’s goggles back into place.
“Make sure they’re tight!” he admonished. “You won’t be able to hear a thing except the wind, and if you lose your goggles, you’ll be half-blind, because you’ll have to squint like mad and your eyes will tear up like you’re crying your head off! This is a problem because you need to watch the trees!”
“To not crash into them?” asked Winston.
“No, because right around the time they stop looking like trees with branches and not little dark dots, that’s when you want to pull your chute!”
Shade raised his hand to be called on. The colonel rolled his eyes. “Is this the second grade?”
Shade seemed offended. “I was only trying to be polite!”
The colonel made a rolling motion with his hand, telling Shade to get on with it.
“We’re in the Nevada desert!” Shade pointed out. “Are there trees down there?”
Colonel Bauman stiffened slightly, and Alyssa worried that her grandfather was going to lose his temper at Shade for second-guessing him. Instead, the colonel pursed his lips as he thought for a bit, then he said, “Fair enough!” He looked at Winston. “So I have bad news and good news! Pick!”
Winston swallowed. “Bad!”
“For about five seconds after you let go, you’re going to be completely disoriented! Your brain will be pickled with adrenaline and the rest of your body will be in a state of panic! I’ve known people to throw up or pass out, which is one of the reasons you always do your first jumps in tandem with an instructor!”
Winston looked like he was about to puke just standing here. “And the good?”
“Assuming you don’t pass out, then you’ve got twenty-five to thirty seconds to enjoy the free fall! You need to count out loud: one one thousand, two one thousand — understand?”
Winston nodded.
“If you wait too long, your chute may not have time to open! Open too early and you might wind up miles away from your target!”
“That would be bad!” Shade offered.
Winston responded with a sour glare.
“In the desert, you bet!” said the colonel. “So once again!” He set Winston’s right hand on a little fabric loop next to his butt that poked out from the bottom of the parachute pack. “This is the drogue! You deploy by giving it a strong tug, pulling it out of the pouch, then you let go! It’s a mini-chute that pulls out the closing pin! With the closing pin gone, the rest of the main chute deploys — first the bridge, then the D-bag!”
Shade snickered. He leaned around the colonel and mouthed to Winston, “D-bag.”
“Deployment bag,” emphasized the colonel without even needing to see Shade’s face. “Then your lines will come out, along with the risers, slider, and canopy! You need to look up at make sure that everything has deployed properly! Got it?”
Alyssa stared at Winston’s face and could see anxiety painted all over him. He bit his lips when he was nervous.
The colonel lifted Winston’s left hand and set it on a series of three metal rings near his right shoulder. Below these was a dangling rectangle of thick black nylon. “In about one out of every thousand dives, the main canopy — the big chute — fails to open! I’m telling you this because I didn’t pack your chute and you need to be safe! If something goes wrong, you pull this flap. It will release the three rings! Your whole canopy will pull away and deploy the reserve chute!”
Winston offered him two thumbs up and a big, very forced grin. The colonel grimaced and backed away.
Alyssa stepped into her grandfather’s place. The tears were still there, pulsing on the tides of her heartbeat. She leaned in close to him and said, “Don’t die.”
His smile looked fragile enough to collapse from the next air pocket jostle. “I’m really gonna try.”
“Just come back soon. I’ll make it worth your while.”
And for just an instant, the fear dropped away from Winston’s face as his imagination blossomed with a dozen different possibilities of what she might mean. Without thinking, she decided to make sure he understood.
Alyssa reached and laced her fingers behind his neck. Suddenly, her mouth was on his and the world behind her eyelids exploded with sweet, blissful nothingness. His lips were cool and soft. She felt one of his hands at the small of her back and the other behind her head, nestling into her hair.
Shade let out a whooping, “Woo-hooo!”
Colonel Bauman boomed, “Hey, hey, heeyyy!”
They separated quickly. Alyssa felt her face flush with hot embarrassment and perhaps something more. She saw the color rise in Winston, as well, creeping up from his pale neck and into his cheeks.
“You’re both too young!” the colonel reprimanded as he pulled gently at her shoulder. “You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you.” He scowled at Alyssa. “Well, at least you do.”
A series of three loud chimes played from the plane’s overhead speakers. Colonel Bauman pointed through the side door opening onto an infinity of nothing.
“Clench up, Chase!” he said. “You look like you might piss your pants!”
“Thank you, sir!” said Winston.
“Really!” said Shade. “You kinda do!”
Winston grabbed the colonel’s upper arm. “No, I mean for helping us. I appreciate everything.”
Colonel Bauman grimaced, but he took Winston’s hand in his own and clasped it. “A long time ago, I promised myself I was going to hate all of Alyssa’s boyfriends! Don’t be so fast to ruin an old man’s dreams!”
The colonel smiled, and one quick laugh escaped from Winston.
“Remember to arch your back!” shouted Colonel Bauman. “You’re trying to belly flop the whole way down, right until you count to twenty-five and pull the pilot chute! Which is where?”
Winston put his fingers on the nylon flap behind him.
“Good! Now, Management says they’ll have people looking for you when—”
A whitish-blue light flashed behind Alyssa. The expression of horror on Winston’s face told her what to expect even before she turned to find the last of the blue sparks vanishing into the King Air’s floor and a man in dress slacks and a white shirt standing in their midst, just before the cockpit. The fingers of his left hand formed a bowl in which floated and spun two metal shapes, one silver and one black. His eyes were alight with an insane intensity as his chest heaved with excitement.
“All right!” he exclaimed as he reached into a pocket with his free hand. “Easy as pie!” He surveyed the group as he drew out a green ball. It took Alyssa a second to recognize the device for what it was. Her grandfather almost knocked her down as he twisted and took a long, rushing step toward Bledsoe, but the man pulled out the safety ring and pin with his teeth. Her grandpa froze as Bledsoe held the grenade above his head and spit the ring onto the floor.
“I should thank you all for gathering like this!” he called. He beamed from ear to ear. “All the eggs in one basket!”
“Bledsoe!” Winston cried. “We can make a deal!”
Bledsoe rolled his eyes. “Again?! Haven’t we already done that dance?!”
“I’ll give you Little e!”
Amanda’s eyes flicked back to Winston, then to Shade and Amanda. No one dared to move.
“You’ll give me everything!” Bledsoe hollered. “No more games! You have the girl bring them to me by five, and everyone gets to live!”
“Five o’ clock?” asked Shade.
Bledsoe ignored him. “One!”
“Hold on!” cried Winston. �
��You gotta see—”
Amanda interrupted him. “I’ll go with you!” she begged to Bledsoe. “Just take me and let—”
“Two!”
Winston put a hand on the top of his backpack. His trembling fingers tried unsuccessfully to pinch the zipper’s pull tab.
With cold, absolute certainty, Alyssa knew that they were all going to die here. Or worse.
No. She wouldn’t allow it to be worse.
She covered Winston’s hands with her own, holding them still. Then she gripped the side of his neck with one hand and pulled him to her. Her lips pressed into his, and she could feel his shaking through them. He felt so cold. All she wanted was to wrap her arms around him and let him know how much she cared for him.
“Three!”
Her lips moved over his, feather light and achingly brief. “You come back to me, Winston Chase. Or else.”
Without daring to meet his eyes, knowing that if she did her resolve would shatter, she shoved him with all her strength.
The back of Winston’s head banged into the bottom of the rolling door, but Alyssa kept pushing. His body bent in the middle. She worried that he might try to grab her arm in his confusion, but his hands merely went up and outward.
She heard him cry out, “Aly—!” then his body vanished.
Behind her, Alyssa heard her grandfather shout, “No! Don’t!”
Alyssa spun on her heel to see the grenade leave Bledsoe’s hand, sail into the cockpit, then bounce off the control console. Glass from one of the LCD displays sprayed out from the impact. The grenade bounced out of sight.
True to the end, Colonel Bauman sprinted down the aisle, aiming for the cockpit, hoping that he could find the grenade in time.
There was no time to do anything, Alyssa knew.
Bledsoe’s shape burst into a pillar of sparks and disappeared as suddenly as he’d arrived.
Tears welled in Amanda’s eyes.
Shade reached for the woman’s hand.
That, thought Alyssa, was one hell of a first kiss.
4
Desperate Descent
Winston felt the sharp edge of the plane door slip past his hand and, as the colonel had promised, he immediately lost all sense of spatial orientation. Wind howled past him, trying to flay the clothes off his body with vicious, frigid claws. The earth below spun out of control as Winston turned and rocked and flailed. He was vaguely aware of a dark shape against the brightening sky falling farther and farther away.
No. That was the plane. It wasn’t falling. He was.
That was up. The ground was down. He had two reference points.
Then one of the points exploded.
The King Air’s nose disappeared in a ball of orange flame and black smoke that almost instantly vanished as the aircraft continued on its trajectory and whisked through the explosion. However, black smoke continued to pour from the blown-out windows and still-open ramp.
Desperate thoughts tried to crowd into Winston’s mind: His mom! Shade! Alyssa! What had happened? She’d kissed him and then…?
Then what? He couldn’t remember. The wind scattered every shred of thought before the pieces could meet and stitch together.
Bledsoe.
A countdown.
Explosion.
Everyone left to him had been on that plane.
Something struck Winston in the left shoulder, and his first impulse was to think he’d been shot. Searing pain burst from just below his collarbone, and the force of the impact set his body to spinning around and around. The plane began to tip forward and descend out of his sight.
You come back to me, Winston Chase. Or else.
Now, there was no one to go back to, and impending death was his “or else.” Eventually, the desert floor would be there to meet him, and he could forget all about losing people. All he had wanted was a family. His mom should have been enough. Wasn’t all this because he’d wanted three of them? Because he’d kept that photo of his dad’s hand reaching for him and stared at it every day?
The world and history and everything else was a footnote. He had wanted a life with two parents when he should have been content with one who loved him enough to give up her entire life for his safety.
They both had, though. And because Winston hadn’t been good enough, fast enough, strong enough, smart enough…everyone was gone. All his special abilities and toy artifacts had amounted to nothing.
You should be counting! part of his mind howled over the wind.
He didn’t know how long he’d been falling. It felt like forever. And it didn’t matter.
Soon, nothing would matter.
Except one thing.
Shade had joked about him surviving a fall because of his reinforced bones, and he had replied…what? His organs. Bleeding out.
He would be a dead splatter on the desert rocks, but perhaps not everything would be broken. Not his backpack.
Not the Alpha Machine.
Winston suspected that the artifacts were built to withstand incredible abuse. Hadn’t they survived a UFO crash? In this exact desert, in fact?
The terrible coincidence almost made Winston laugh as grief overwhelmed him.
Someday, someone would find his body and wonder what those strange objects were.
No, not someday, he realized as the memory of Bledsoe vanishing into a cloud of blue sparks returned.
He hadn’t even hesitated to pull the pin on that grenade. He had used the geoviewer to watch Winston and wait for the right moment. If Winston wouldn’t hand them over willingly, all he had to do was retrieve them from Winston’s pulverized corpse.
After all that sacrifice and pain, Bledsoe would win. Winston was essentially handing him the pieces, just as he’d asked.
Come back to me, Winston Chase. Or else.
Bledsoe dishonored everything Winston’s friends and family had done for him. Winston didn’t care about himself, but that disgrace could not stand. Shade had never given up on a game in his life. Winston had seen him make a quarterback sack while running a 102-degree fever. If Shade had been falling here beside him, Winston knew his friend would poke him painfully in the chest and tell him to not be a loser. You fight until you drop. And then you fight some more.
Deep within his well of sorrow and panic, a small red flicker of anger ignited, like the afterglow from watching a grenade burst. Winston was dropping. But he might still have some fight left.
He twisted and squirmed, feeling like a cat thrown into a swimming pool, but he finally had his face and chest pointing toward the ground. In many ways, this was worse than before. The rushing air pushed mercilessly into his nose and tried to pry his mouth open so it could pour into his body. He could now see the brown earth as one continuous horizon under a pale blue sky.
How long had he been falling? It had to be at least a minute. But no. The colonel had said that he would only have twenty-five seconds to count. And he would see branches. Only, as Shade had predicted, there were no trees.
Perhaps it was a trick of the ascending sunlight, but to Winston the earth now looked more gray than tan. Instead of being only a flat jumble of erosion lines wiggling across the earth like spider veins on an old man’s legs, Winston could clearly see the shadows of bluffs rising from the desert floor. He floated above a long, pale region, rounded on the bottom with a sharpened tip to the north. Craggy bluffs formed a wall to the region’s east, save for a gap through which a string of roadway ran, adorned only by what had to be a farm — two tiny rectangles of green in an ocean of dust. How could anyone possibly irrigate a farm out here?
Higher mountains to the west and east penned in this low area. Winston realized that if someone was going to pick a place for covert experiments, you couldn’t get much more secluded or insulated from the outside world than this. Back in 1948, an underground nuclear blast could have gone undetected out here.
Winston also made out patches of dots that he assumed were scrub brush, although he was still too far away to see branch
es.
If he could see bushes, though, was that close enough?
Better too early than too late. He’d studied the map his mom had shown him on the plane’s main monitor. He knew that little road and the crescent-shaped cliff it eventually reached. That was enough.
“Find the tag,” Winston tried to say out loud, but the wind filled his mouth and tried to pry his throat apart. His cheeks pulled back to his ears. He could feel them flapping, like a dog’s lips when hanging out a car window.
Winston closed his mouth and reached with half-numb fingers behind himself for the pilot chute tag, only to find that doing so upset his balance and sent the world rocking and spinning dizzily again as he constantly over-compensated.
He forced himself to make smaller movements, adjusting with his limbs rather than his core. When he had his belly flop stable again, Winston reached back more slowly, sliding his hand first to his side and then down his hip. When he found his jeans pocket, he felt the nylon tag flap crazily against his fingers like a frantic bird’s wing. It wasn’t supposed to do that. Perhaps he’d snagged it on the doorframe when Alyssa pushed him.
The flap smacked his palm. He tried to close his fist around it, only to feel the whipsawing fabric snap through his fingertips.
Winston tried to reach farther and find where the flap connected into his chute, but the wound in his shoulder flared into a lightning bolt, forcing him to stop.
Winston made himself take a deeper breath and let it out slowly. He couldn’t panic. Panic meant death.
He could feel the air warming as the ground approached.
Winston tried again, walking his fingertips down the side of the chute pack and bending as much as he could at his waist.
Don’t panic.
The flap rapped against his knuckles. He strained sideways, fighting for a couple of extra inches. The horizon began to tilt again, but he didn’t try to correct it.
The side of his hand pressed against the slit where the flap tucked into the pack, and his fingers locked around the piece of nylon. The invisible knife started to bite into his arm again, but this time Winston used the pain and pulled back as hard as he could.
Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy Page 65