by William Oday
“Get everyone on the chopper!” Anton shouted. He looked at Mason as he rubbed his injured shoulder. He grinned wickedly. “I might’ve thanked you for keeping my daughter safe, Mr. West.”
The operator flipped around the rifle pinned to his head and then slammed the butt into his face.
The world winked out.
60
ELIO grunted as one of the soldiers in black shoved him into a seat. The same man pushed Maria down next to him.
“Buckle up!” the soldier shouted to be heard above the roar of the helicopter’s spinning blades.
Elio clicked his lap belt and helped his mother with hers. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. She said something but he couldn’t make out the words.
CRACK. CRACK.
The gunshots punched through the blanket of sound buffeting the cabin. Two soldiers sat on the lip of the doorway with their feet braced on the skids below. They picked off the faster deltas that broke free from a pack approaching from down the street.
CRACK.
“We need to get this bird in the sky!” one of the soldiers shouted as he pulled Ahmed into the cabin and shoved him toward a seat. They were all inside. All except Mason.
Elio stared at the group of hunters closing in. They would find Mason sooner or later. And there was nothing any of them could do to change that.
“Hold tight!” the pilot shouted.
The whine of the engine increased. The helicopter lurched to the side as it broke contact with the street and jumped up into the air. Elio gasped as the lap belt dug into his waist. One of the soldiers on the skids lost his balance and tumbled forward. He fell ten feet and smacked into the pavement.
CRACK.
A bullet punched through the metal skin of the helicopter. Elio couldn’t tell where it ended up.
The man howled in pain as the first delta reached him. The others piled on.
“Leave him!” Anton shouted.
“But, sir. He’s got no chance on his own.”
“Then he shouldn’t have fallen out. Take us up!”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.
The helicopter lifted into the air and the screams of the dying man quickly faded away. A soldier slammed the door shut and then dropped into an empty seat.
Elio’s stomach rolled over as the chopper clawed for altitude. It slid sideways through the air in a sickening way that reminded him that he never wanted to ride a helicopter again. He turned to Theresa and saw the tears in her eyes. He touched her forehead. The skin burned his fingertips. The fever was getting worse.
Beth sat on the opposite side of Theresa. Their eyes met as his hand drew away. The hollow look in her eyes told him she knew what was happening. Theresa was infected and there were only two possible outcomes.
Bleeding to death as her body broke down, or worse, changing into a delta.
She held Theresa tight and looked away, staring blankly at nothing in particular. He recognized the emptiness in her eyes because he’d seen it many times in his own mother’s. As much as Elio wanted to fight his way free to help Theresa and rescue Mason, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe it would do any good. He wasn’t a scientist or a soldier. He was a kid.
And he wasn’t even that great at that job either.
Iridia sat at the front of the cabin with her father. Anton was his name. The man definitely wasn’t what he’d pictured for a super smart scientist guy. He looked more like Elvis past his prime. A used car salesman with a splash of crazy.
Anton glanced at Elio and his eyes narrowed as he studied him.
Elio squirmed in the seat and wanted to look away. Anton regarded him with a cold calculating gaze. As if Elio were bacteria mashed between two glass plates and being studied under a microscope.
No. As unimpressive as Anton appeared on the outside, Elio could tell he was a dangerous man.
His eyes watered and yet they could not blink. Anton’s gaze hypnotized and dissected him.
Iridia pulled her father’s attention back to whatever it was she was shouting in his ear.
The mind control ended and Elio’s eyes dropped. He took a big breath after realizing he’d stopped breathing. There was something dangerous, something mesmerizing about her father. He projected the self-assured mania of a false prophet. His absolute expectation of your obedience almost ensured it.
One of the soldiers sat near the front with Clyde in his lap. The poor little guy tried to escape toward Noor but the soldier held him tight.
The helicopter lifted higher and Elio gasped as he stared into the distance.
Los Angeles was destroyed.
Smoke billowed into the air from innumerable fires below. A solid, frozen river of cars choked every highway. The unbroken mass disappeared into the distance in every direction. Freeway ten to the east. The four-oh-five to the north and south. Millions of people in millions of cars all trying to escape at once. It was never going to work. It was like trying to push a watermelon through a water hose. The roads simply weren’t made to move that volume of traffic.
They only kind of worked on regular days because everyone didn’t want the same thing at the same time.
They crossed over the ten and headed toward the towering skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles. In the mid-day sun, the air hanging above the city looked darker than usual. He would’ve thought that without all the millions of cars spewing noxious chemicals into the air every day that the smog would’ve cleared out in no time. And maybe it would have. But the hundreds of fires around the city spewing dark smoke more than made up for the decrease in emissions.
Elio’s stomach jumped into his throat as the chopper jerked to the side and dropped altitude. He gritted his teeth to keep from puking, and then they stabilized. He squeezed his mother tight as much to reassure her as himself.
A beeping alarm pierced the noise of the blades chopping through the air. A red light in the ceiling of the cockpit flashed on and off. The pilot checked gauges and flipped switches trying to handle whatever the problem was.
Anton grabbed a headset clipped to the wall and slipped them over his head. He yelled into the mouthpiece as if that might help the situation.
The helicopter bucked again and Elio barfed into his mouth when it rolled over onto its side. He doubled over the seatbelt with his arms and legs dangling freely. He looked through the closed side door at the ground some two hundred feet below. His back slammed into the metal wall as the chopper rolled and righted itself.
The piercing alarm continued to whine as the pilot wrestled with the controls. The nose dipped forward and they plunged downward like the big drop on a roller coaster.
Only they weren’t on rails and Elio didn’t expect to make it off this ride.
61
His mother screamed and her vice grip around his hand tightened further. He realized it would’ve hurt if his brain had the extra bandwidth to process the sensation. But it didn’t. It was fully occupied with the certainty that he was about to die.
The ground rushed up to meet them.
Elio’s head swam. The weirdest sensation assured him that he was stationary and that it was the world falling toward him. Cars that had moments ago looked like children’s toys grew larger as they plummeted.
The chopper bucked forward and a large, yellow school bus came into view. It rushed at them at a dizzying speed.
Elio pinched his eyes shut. He held his mother’s hand with all the strength left in his body.
The chopper jerked up at the last second. His stomach bombed out of his throat. His hip bones dug painfully into the thinly padded seat. He blinked his eyes open as the front of the school bus disappeared underneath the front of the chopper.
And then it crashed.
His head slammed into the metal wall as everything jerked to the right.
A terrifying screech stabbed the air as the blades dug channels into the pavement before shearing off completely. Sparks flew and the side door peeled away as they skidded over the concrete
. The cabin rolled several times and then slammed to a stop into the side of a building.
Elio sat motionless wondering if he was dead. A thought dimly occurred to him. He couldn’t be dead if his whole body hurt this badly. Right?
He licked his lips and tasted the salty metallic bite of blood. He squeezed his eyes open and realized they were upright. He checked on his mother. She had a gash on her cheek dripping down onto her chest. She moaned, which meant she was alive. On the other side, Theresa slumped in the seat blinking slowly as Beth ran her hands over her daughter’s body.
Across the cabin, the soldier sitting next to the missing door had a fragment of metal protruding from his chest. Blood poured from his mouth. He stared at the jagged tip. A shaky hand touched it and then he passed out. Or died. Elio wasn’t a doctor, but the injury didn’t look like something you could survive.
The remaining four soldiers hurried out of their harnesses. Two climbed out of the twisted wreck, one of them had Clyde wrapped under an arm. Another helped Anton and Iridia out of their seat belts. The others climbed into the cockpit to check on the motionless pilot.
Elio looked across the cabin. Noor had already gotten free of her belt and was trying to help Ahmed do the same. His right leg was bent at an impossible angle. A stick stuck out of his torn pant leg. The jagged end was pale and white.
Not a stick. A bone.
Ahmed screamed as he tried to move that leg.
One of the men from outside returned.
“We have to beat feet, sir. We’ve got tangos gathering to investigate the crash site.”
Anton nodded and wobbled before catching himself. “How’s the pilot?”
The soldier in the cockpit shook his head. He glanced toward the back of the cabin. ”What do you want to do with them?”
“Bring them. They might be useful.”
A soldier reached for Beth’s seatbelt, but she swatted his hand away.
CRACK. CRACK.
A voice yelled from outside. “We’ve got contact!”
“Sir, we have to move out!” another yelled.
Anton glared at Beth. “Get them out of the helicopter!”
“Get up, now!” the soldier shouted.
Elio didn’t require encouragement. He flung off his seatbelt and helped his mother to her feet. The soldier shoved them toward the missing door. Elio stumbled forward and would’ve landed face first outside if the cabin floor hadn’t been flush with the ground.
He stumbled out and caught Maria before they both ate asphalt.
Theresa and Beth came out next with the pushy soldier roughly urging them on. He turned back and saw Ahmed’s leg. “Can you walk?”
“I will try. Help me out and give me the dead man’s rifle.”
Ahmed screamed as the soldier helped him out onto the street. He accepted the black rifle and flipped the barrel to the ground. Leaning on it like a cane to keep weight off his right leg, he managed a few steps. He looked down at Noor at his side and forced a weak smile. The source of his remaining strength was no secret.
Elio would’ve taken the work of the cane, but he was already struggling to help his mother along. Her already weakened state wasn’t improved by the crash.
Theresa was in no shape to run for several blocks either. The fever burned through her like a flame through a snowflake. Beth had Theresa’s arm wrapped over her shoulder. She urged her daughter along even as she bore most of her weight.
Anton huffed and puffed alongside Iridia. Their levels of physical fitness couldn’t have been further apart. They appeared to have escaped relatively unscathed.
And yet, as battered as some of them were, they still had a chance. Mason didn’t even have that. Theresa’s father had become something like a father to him since the outbreak. Maybe finding out the truth behind his own father’s death in Fallujah had dissolved an invisible barrier between them.
It would do no such thing for his mother if she ever found out.
The lead soldier pointed at two of his men. “You two cover our six. I’m on point. Move out!” The three soldiers surrounded their small group and guided them away from the crash site and out into the middle of the street.
Up ahead, about four blocks away, was the Milagro Tower.
That was the good news. Unfortunately, there was also bad news. Very bad news.
Numerous packs of deltas emerged from side streets, all heading in their direction. The closest group was no more than a hundred yards away and closing.
A soldier grabbed Elio’s shirt and shoved him forward.
“Run!”
62
They hobbled along as fast as they could. They would’ve already been run down, but the closest group of deltas paused at the crash site. Perhaps drawn by the scent of fresh meat. Whatever the reason, the delay didn’t last. Still a couple of blocks from the building, and another group was on their tail and catching up.
Elio had his arm wrapped under his mother’s and helped her along as fast as he could. As slow as they moved, Ahmed moved slower still. He hopped along using the rifle for support. His mangled right leg dragged along the ground leaving a continuous trail of blood.
The screeching and howling from behind echoed through the canyon of tall buildings.
CRACK. CRACK.
The two soldiers guarding the rear followed about twenty yards behind, stopping now and again to pick off faster deltas that charged ahead of the others.
The lead soldier halted mid-stride and waved the group on. “Keep moving!”
Elio glanced back. The nearest hunters swept over the two trailing soldiers. One soldier disappeared beneath the frenzy of limbs. The other soldier turned the gun on himself and the back of his head exploded.
“No!” the lead soldier yelled.
The body collapsed and a delta was on it before it hit the ground.
Elio’s limbs felt like lead. His life was in danger and he knew he’d never run faster. At the same time, it felt like he’d never run slower either. He urged his mother on with all the strength left in his body.
Two more blocks to safety.
Ahmed tripped and crashed to the pavement. He rolled over and the palms of his hands bled from where the skin had been shredded away. Noor tugged at his shirt to get him to stand up. He tried and then collapsed again. He shook his head.
“I can go no farther. You must go, my dear.”
“No, Baba! No!” Tears streamed down Noor’s cheeks.
Ahmed wiped her face leaving trails of smudged dirt. “Habib Albi,” he said and then kissed her forehead. “I’m so sorry.”
Beth wrapped her arm around Noor’s shoulder. “We’ll take care of her. I promise.”
A single tear welled in the corner of Ahmed’s eye. It broke free and raced down his colorless cheek, disappearing into the thick beard. “Thank you.”
Beth pulled Noor away while the hysterical girl fought to stay with her father.
The remaining soldier retrieved Ahmed’s fallen rifle and placed it in his hands. He pulled a baseball-like grenade off his vest and placed it on the ground. “Yank the pin and release the spoon.”
Ahmed nodded. He rolled over into a seated position and brought the rifle up into his shoulder. He watched Noor and the rest of the group continue down the street.
Elio choked back tears. For Ahmed. For Noor. For Mason. For Theresa. For his mother. For the world of suffering.
A torrent of gunfire cut loose. Several deltas fell and then the rifle went silent.
“Don’t look back!” Beth yelled as they made it to a half a block from safety.
“Allahu Akbar!”
BOOM.
The exploding grenade echoed down the street like rolling thunder.
“No! Baba! No!” Noor yelled as Beth pulled her onward.
Elio glanced over his shoulder. Ahmed’s sacrifice slowed down their pursuers. But it didn’t stop them. Several lay dead on the street. Several more staggered around screaming. Another pack appeared from between two building
s and closed in. Now, less than twenty yards back.
The lead soldier carrying Clyde sprinted to the entrance area of Milagro tower.
Elio marveled at the odd destiny that connected him to this building. Less than two weeks ago, it held the promise of his death. Now, it held the promise of his life.
What had once been an elegant entrance of all glass and shining metal was now a patchwork of plywood and security fencing. The soldier kicked open a makeshift door and waited at the entrance, waving them forward.
Elio and his mother lagged a little behind the others. He’d practically carried her the last block and his strength was failing. Failing fast. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to.
The cries of the hunters were right behind them. Their nearness threatened to drown his reason, subdue his will to survive.
He knew their hands would pull him down at any second.
Theresa, Beth, and Noor made it inside first. At least they would live. Iridia pulling her father along made it through next.
If only he’d been stronger. It was the story of his life. Forever coming up short. Forever one step behind the pace. He regretted the failure more for his mother than himself. She’d suffered so much over the years. She deserved better than to die like this.
A hand grabbed his shirt and tugged backward. The fabric ripped and Elio broke free.
The soldier waiting at the door fired.
A bullet snapped by Elio’s head and a body thumped the ground.
The gun fired again as Elio rushed his mother through the door.
The soldier slammed the door shut and barred it from the inside with a couple of two by fours.
“Get to the elevators!” he shouted.
Elio pulled his mother across the wide expanse of marble floor and into the open elevator where the others waited. The soldier joined them and Anton flashed a keycard over the black pad protruding from the mirrored wall. A vaguely robotic female voice responded.
“Hello, Dr. Reshenko. Where do you wish to go?”