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 enoug
h, 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 branches.
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.
The flap came free.
He felt a tug, like someone trying to pull him back from cutting places in line. He had just enough time to wonder whether he should look up when a bus rammed into his body.
The straps around his shoulders, chest, and groin all tried to scissor through his bones at once. What little air had been in his lungs gushed out as sure as if Brian Steinhoff had sucker punched him. His head jerked up as his legs flopped down.
Disoriented and gasping, Winston had enough wits still functioning to hear something snap above him and know that it was either the chute inflating or…something bad. A spider web of white cords extended high above him. Except for one. One strand of the web whipped freely in the wind, threatening to tangle among its mates. Above these, the oval blue of Winston’s canopy billowed, but part of it, probably the part where the broken cord was supposed to connect, flapped and folded backward around a gash, probably where the debris that had sliced his arm had also nicked his parachute.
Did that matter? Could he complete the jump safely with a broken line and a not-completely-inflated canopy?
Winston didn’t know. That scenario hadn’t been in the lecture.
His heart jackhammered madly, and he felt fear threaten to swamp every thought trying to form in his head. Even the steadily descending trail of black smoke in the distance, and the thicker column of smoke now rising from the earth at the trail’s end, barely registered. He didn’t have a second to think about that. The crash was beyond his control. Right now, he had to make a choice.
The ground pushed up toward him, slower now, but only to taunt him before opening its jaws to swallow him up.
Winston might live with one busted cord, but he might not. And was that tear in the canopy getting longer? What if his fear was fooling him?
Better safe than sorry.
Without daring another moment to think himself into further delays, Winston reached up to his shoulder and yanked hard on the cutaway handle. It came free in his hand, like a pin pulled from a fire extinguisher. In the space of a heartbeat, his main chute snapped away and billowed into the air above him. Winston felt himself whipsawed up and down
, as if he were riding a demon-possessed elevator. He plummeted freely for an instant, feet down, arms flying up over his head, and he opened his mouth to scream into the wind. As he did so, his other hand found the reserve handle near the left strap over his chest, just above his backpack. He pulled it, and almost instantly his body jerked violently upward again.
The reserve chute deployed above him, rectangular and ribbed, but also plain white and smaller than the previous chute. It was also, much to his relief, anchored by another web of nylon lines, all of them untangled and unbroken.
Winston found a new set of bright yellow handles dangling from the straps on each side of his head. He gripped these and began to experiment, giving each side a gentle tug to see how it affected his downward trajectory. Sure enough, Winston found he had limited control over his lateral movement.
At last, he could look down without moderate certainty that he was about to die. So long as Colonel Bauman was right and his falling speed wasn’t much more than twenty miles per hour, he knew from his jump off the top of Safeway that he should be OK. More or less.
Winston had to make up his mind on where to try to land. If the map had been correct, the old nuclear explosion, and thus Area X, would be only a few hundred yards northeast of the pass between bluff ridges. From up here, Winston couldn’t see any signs of activity, but that didn’t mean anything. A labyrinth of tunnels had once flowed under this dried-up lake bed. If the place was important, there might still be military staff or at least surveillance out here. If he landed to the east, it would be a hot trek over miles of nothing, and he would be in plain sight the whole way.
Winston trusted his gut. He aimed for the flat area between the pass and the farm. If he ran into trouble, he might find help within range at the farm. If not, he could hop back to 1948, proceed straight east through the gap, and hike on to Area X.
Something moved on the ground below him. It might have been the sun reflecting off a shiny surface or the shifting of a shadow. As Winston focused on it, though, he soon made out the tiny figure of a walking man. Winston was still too distant to discern facial features, but the black pants, white shirt, and shiny, shifting object floating above his hand left no doubt. As Winston watched, the man morphed into a pillar of sparks, vanished, and then reappeared in a similar lightshow almost directly under Winston.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 3