Obviously, Bledsoe had not been on the plane when the grenade exploded. He could not have seen everyone die. But he did see the explosion and the plane falling. That meant he had to leave the plane…
“Oh, you’re kidding,” said Winston, raising his hands as if to push the idea away. “That’s impossible.”
“Would the Omega Mesh give me an exception for that?”
Bernie showed the barest hint of a smirk.
“Nice!” That wasn’t a plan yet, but Winston thought he saw a crack of light widening in the darkness. “So, there’s this time between when Bledsoe disappears and when the grenade explodes. That’s what we have to work with?”
Winston began to pace about the living room, trying to work through options. He stopped before Bernie. “What if I intercept the grenade? Bledsoe throws it, teleports away, then I show up right next to it and throw it out the door?”
Bernie nodded once and raised his left hand, palm up. All around Winston, the air started to ripple. Dark mists formed in bands and waves. These lines overlapped, and the places where they joined thickened, sometimes growing and sometimes condensing into darker points. After several seconds, Winston made out the ghostly outlines of people, seats, and curved walls filling his living room. He made out six people, and quickly they took on the rough appearances of Bledsoe, Winston’s mom, Winston himself, Shade, Alyssa, and her grandfather.
Wide-eyed, Winston mentally kicked himself for assuming that Bernie had cleared the room’s middle for making a rudimentary model out of cutlery and cooking supplies.
The mote figures stood motionless, but Winston could sense the alarm from their postures. Winston and Alyssa stood by the open plane door, with her body shielding Winston from Bledsoe. Amanda and Shade both had their knees bent, hands held out and separated, as if ready to leap. Bledsoe held a round object in his right hand while the ring and torus geo pieces floated above his left hand. Winston couldn’t make out much detail in any of their faces, but he could at least see that Bledsoe was smiling.
Winston knew what would come next. He sat in the threadbare plush seat, elbows on his knees, heart in his throat. He nodded at Bernie.
The Bledsoe figure tossed its grenade down the center of the fuselage. Colonel Bauman made a grab for the orb but missed. It landed in the cockpit and bounced around the controls. Before mote-Winston could react, Alyssa jammed both hands into his chest and shoved him out of the plane. Mote-Winston gently dissolved into a fine mist on the rug and disappeared.
Bledsoe’s head turned to see what had become of Winston just as Colonel Bauman lunged down the aisle for the grenade. Shade dove for Bledsoe, and Bledsoe vanished, with the mote mist doing a fair job of imitating falling sparks.
Shade straightened in surprise. Alyssa turned from the open door, one hand clasped on the doorframe. Only Amanda remained essentially motionless.
It felt like ten seconds as Winston tried to take in the entire scene. He knew he should be focused on the timing and people’s positions — the logistics — but all he could see was the ghosts of people he loved. People who had died for him.
The grenade exploded, and in unison every mote shape disintegrated into nothingness.
Winston closed his eyes tightly and bowed his head. He got the point even before Bernie explained it.
“How long?” croaked Winston, lifting his head.
“No, this one.”
Bernie thought for an instant.
Winston straightened. “Vary? Why?”
Winston imagined it and immediately saw the plan’s flaw.
“No smoking, falling plane means Bledsoe knows something’s up.”
Bernie nodded. Winston spotted another problem.
“And wait. We don’t care about the total fuse length, right? What really matters is the time from when Bledsoe leaves until the grenade explodes.”
“Geeze!” Winston spun in a circle, remembering mote shapes that were no longer there. “How am I gonna do this in three seconds? It can’t be done!”
He stepped into the middle of the room, right next to Bernie. He pointed into empty space, remembering Bledsoe’s position. Then he glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where the cockpit had been. If he stood between his mom and Alyssa, he could grab his mom and yell for Alyssa to grab him. That was two seconds. He might be able to get Shade to hold on in the next second. But Colonel Bauman? No way.
There was no way to save all four.
Winston tried to imagine the look on Alyssa’s face when they rematerialized and she figured out that her grandpa had been left behind in a plane that just blew up. She would never forgive him. And rightly so.
“How?” he asked Bernie, fighting a losing battle against despair. “How can I get all four?”
“So her grandpa has to die? Damn it, that wasn’t in the deal!”
He wanted to stomp his feet and punch furniture in frustration, although he hadn’t actually done such a thing for years.
Winston blinked at him. “What? He’d tell me three out of four wasn’t bad or something. Which is easy to say when the guy isn’t your responsibility!”
He was, Winston realized. They all were. Somehow, he had gone from being responsible for little more than homework and computer repairs to claiming responsibility for people’s lives. He wasn’t sure what to think about that.
“Bernie, I don’t know! Movie quotes. That I should ask Alyssa out. That I need to join the track—”
He remembered Shade standing before him, index finger spearing into Winston’s chest, that mile-deep crevasse between his eyebrows as he railed against Winston. You can’t do it all yourself! When are you going to start trusting other people?
A team.
Winston stared at Bernie. “I can’t do it…by myself.”
Bernie nodded.
“Bernie.” Winston shook his head, unwilling to ask another person into this situation, but unable to see another way. “Will you help me? Can you go with me onto the plane and help get them all?”
Winston whispered, “Is that a no? Or a yes?”
“YEAH!”
Winston arched his back and did a double fist-pump in the air. Then he grabbed Bernie’s shoulders and pulled him in close for
a hug.
Winston hadn’t planned on the embrace, and he felt entirely awkward after only a second or two. He stepped back, all smiles, shifting his weight from foot to foot with nervous energy. Bernie stood stiffly, as usual, although Winston thought he saw the alien take a much deeper breath than usual and hold it, as if trying to control himself.
“Thank you, Bernie. Thank you so much.”
Winston lightly punched him in the arm. “Well, we all gotta die someday, right?”
Bernie glanced down at the spot where Winston had nudged him.
Well, crap. That shattered the mood like a sledgehammer.
Winston backed away, nodding. “Right. You’re right.” He exhaled and rubbed his hands together. “So…no failing. Bring the scene back. Let’s run through it.”
27
Three Seconds to Survival
Winston and Bernie drilled for over an hour. They had to make many assumptions, starting with the fact that the distracted and frantic passengers would recognize Winston, accept and trust Bernie on sight, and obey Winston’s command to grab on to the two of them — and still have enough time for Bernie to make it back to Winston’s arm.
In three seconds.
Winston shook his head. Too bad this wasn’t like those old action movies where bomb blasts could take ten or fifteen seconds to casually stroll down a hallway, barely faster than the heroes trying to outrun them. In real life, shrapnel would slice through them instantly. No sauntering wall of fire, just dozens of jagged metal fragments ripping holes through their bodies.
“While still trying to collect everyone,” said Winston, knowing the alien was right. “Can you help me?”
“So, I handle the people, you do the steering.”
The weight of it all constricted around Winston’s heart. He would only get one chance. Three seconds. And if he blew it, then it would all be for nothing.
Winston paced the room again. By now, he knew where every element in the plane lined up with the features of his living room. He knew how far he had to reach for his mom and how far she’d need to reach for him. Colonel Bauman and Bernie remained the big question marks. If the Colonel took so much as a second to give up chasing the grenade and come back to them, he would likely be lost.
“I still don’t think we’ve got this worked out right. Let’s try it with—”
Bernie stiffened and extended a hand toward Winston, turning his head as if to listen.
A pulse of anxiety rocketed through Winston’s body. He wasn’t ready.
“I thought you said hours!”
He glanced out the curtain and saw a black, unmarked van turning onto the cul-de-sac.
Winston’s chest felt unable to draw air. He realized he didn’t know which way to stand, where to face, how to hold onto Bernie so that they would be optimally oriented. He threw on his Fred Meyer All-Weather Ugly Special and zipped it. He grabbed Little e and set the Alpha Machine pieces to spinning, but he suddenly wasn’t sure how best to find their target.
Bernie’s fingers tightened on his forearm, and he gazed calmly down into Winston’s eyes.
With that, Bernie reached out to Winston, and their tactile network snapped into place. Time nearly froze, and the world’s solidity frayed into waves and particles. Winston couldn’t help but stare with fascination at the ripples of light emanating from the kitchen’s ceiling light, which in turn danced and wavered as the matter comprising it seemed at constant, shifting risk of disintegrating into a static-like haze.
Bernie extended his awareness toward Little e, and Winston eagerly gave him access.
Winston understood. Soon, he’d feel like microwaved goose poop. Wonderful.
Outrage bloomed in Winston’s mind, immediately followed by frustration at having no physical way to express the feeling.
Yes, he was procrastinating. Winston knew even a year of practice wasn’t going to improve his chances at extracting four people from a plane in under three seconds.
This was suicide.
Yet there was no other choice. Winston wanted to object and rationalize a hundred reasons why they should wait, but he knew Bernie was right. For what it was worth, they were in the same boat. If they failed, this would mean the alien’s death, as well.
Do or die.
Here goes nothing, Winston thought to Shade, wherever he was in time and space. YOLO, my dude.
Together, Winston and Bernie located Amanda and the plane. In the time crawl of their tactile network, the plane also seemed to move at a glacial pace. At least that made coordinating their jump easier. Winston found the moment when Alyssa pushed him from the plane and nudged to the exact instant when Bledsoe vanished. With a deep mental breath, Winston pulled all the energy he could muster from within himself and, with Bernie doing the same alongside him, pushed it out to Little e.
***
“You come back to me, Winston Chase,” Alyssa said. “Or else.”
Then she shoved him out the airplane door.
He cried out her name, even as his legs tumbled up and his torso fell back. Then the howling wind ripped him away from sight.
“No! Don’t!” her grandfather shouted.
Alyssa turned away from the door just in time to see Bledsoe lob the grenade in an appallingly lame underhand pitch. It sailed over her grandfather’s head, and perhaps twenty years ago he might have had the reflexes to get a hand on it. As it was, he missed the grenade by a foot and watched open-mouthed as the orb passed over his head and bounced against the plane’s ceiling.
To her left, in the gap between the yawning plane door and the last seat row, Winston’s mom stared at Bledsoe’s empty hand, eyes wide with terror. Even Shade, still rooted in the entryway to the plane’s rear section, seemed paralyzed. His expression of complete, tragic loss had to be a mirror of Alyssa’s own features.
To her grandpa’s credit, his recovery time was impressively quick. His hands hit the nearest seats and immediately pushed off them, reversing his course. He was already shifting back toward the cockpit even as the grenade struck the instrument panel with a clearly audible crack.
The six-foot tall figure of Bledsoe disappeared behind an eruption of blue and white sparks that originated from a point above his head. No sooner had Bledsoe completed vanishing than, an instant later, a similar but larger fountain of fiery particles exploded almost immediately before Alyssa. She recoiled instinctively and might have been sucked out the
open plane door if her shoulder hadn’t met the wall just to the exit’s side.
Alyssa made out two bodies within the new shower of sparks. Then the sparks fell away, swirling across the floor in the wind that whipped through the cabin, revealing Winston holding hands with—
Even in her shock and terror, Alyssa still could form the coherent thought: An alien. That has to be Bernie.
Within Little e’s tubes, four Alpha Machine pieces revolved — two linked tori within two slender rings.
A sudden, high-pitched ringing filled her ears, as if she were hearing the aftermath of a gun firing near her head. The sound hit her in a wave that drowned out even the roar of air from the open door, and through it emerged Winston’s voice, seemingly forming three words of utter urgency in the middle of her brain.
Alyssa saw Winston’s left hand extended toward her and instantly grabbed it.
As soon as their hands clasped, Alyssa saw the world freeze. At least…it nearly froze. The end of her ponytail hovered in space before her, tossed by the wind, leaving the ends of her hair still whipping slowly past straight and into a J-shaped curve. One by one, she saw the sparks left by Winston’s entrance wink out on the floor and seat backs. Everything bulky seemed to fray around its edges with strange static, and the screens arrayed in the cockpit instrument panel gave off translucent ripples of yellow and blue light.
Alyssa felt slightly indignant that he would be so dismissive of her question.
Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy Page 86