Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Her hands slipped to where the karambit blade was hidden. She didn’t draw the weapon yet—it was too soon for that—but she was relieved that even while tangled in the metal mesh she could still get to it. She’d be ready when the time did come.

  Bobby-Leigh met the cruel eyes of one of the men with the long spear-like weapons and took a deep breath, but before the fun could set off, everybody’s attention was drawn to the sky as a small plane flew by overhead and started circling. The small motor roared over the excited hooting and hollering that burst out of their capturers, breaking the deadly cold silence and precision they’d operated with up to that point.

  * * *

  Brennachecke had never actually seen how Beverly’s blood pirate army took their victims down on Highway 1, and while it wasn’t exactly irony (except maybe to Alanis Morissette) that the first time he would witness it, their prey would turn out to be people he knew—one of whom he himself intended to kill—it was something. Fate? Poetic justice? Fortune? He didn’t know what the right word was. He didn’t really care either. Had he been a different man, he’d have just settled on fucked up as his descriptor of choice, but he wasn’t ever going to sway into language like that. Besides, the bigger question, and the only one that he did care about, was how he was going to manage the situation now.

  The cards were on the table. The players were all in. One by one the cards would turn. No more bluffing. The strongest hand would take it all. Everybody else would be dead.

  It had been decades since Brennachecke had played a high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em, but still, that was where his mind immediately went. As long as Beverly was back at the Raj, and the MIC was with him in the air, and nobody on the ground did anything stupid, he still might get what he wanted without a fight. But even as the thought came to him, he knew how unlikely that was. The MIC had pulled a full house on the river, and his king-high straight wasn’t worth the price of admission anymore.

  But that wasn’t actually the truth, he realized. Finding the girls like this was just a reshuffling of the cards. They were now back to the game he’d thought they were going to be playing from the beginning. Still, as he circled the plane around for another pass and tried to hold on to the sense of hope he’d had when he and Dan had set off for the airport a day ago, he felt his confidence flicker. Maybe he should smash the plane into the heart of the abduction scene they were witnessing from the air and just kill everybody and be done with it. But as tempting as it was in that moment, that was not actually something the old soldier had it in him to do.

  “Those the two little twats you looking for,” the MIC yelled into the radio headset. It wasn’t a question, but it wasn’t a statement either.

  “Yes” was all Brennachecke responded with. Twat was a particularly ugly word to his ears. It left his self-righteousness ringing and moved the needle in the smash-the-plane-into-the-ground direction (if only in Brennachecke’s head).

  Flying a plane was exponentially easier once it was in the air and before you tried to put it back on the ground, so that had been where the old soldier had decided to begin his small-plane aviation crash course with the blood pirates’ Man-in-Charge.

  They’d been airborne for almost an hour and a half already. The MIC was picking things up quickly, though how much the man retained of the instructions for emergency procedures Brennachecke had rattled off throughout their time in the air, he couldn’t begin to guess at. Not that he really cared. This was going to be a quick and dirty kind of deal. It was all he had time for. Now that the girls were in the pirates’ clutches, even this speedy version of flight training might take too long.

  He had intended to show the MIC how to take off, keep the plane in the air in good weather and without any mechanical issues, and put the plane back on the ground using a stabilized approach and without killing himself. He’d get him to the point where he could do it on his own once, maybe twice, walk him through how to maintain the aircraft, and then get the heck out of there before his luck ran out. He’d intended to just mention that things were much harder in the wind and verbally walk him through how to adjust his landing, manage the flare, and execute the rollout to deal with it, but that was back when he was just trying to get out of Vedic City alive. Now that the girls were actually in the picture, he’d need to revert back to the original plan, which meant actually teaching the man how to land.

  “Our deal only stands if they remain unharmed,” he said to the MIC over the headset. “If your men down there hurt them, or if I find out they’ve been mistreated back in Vedic City, I’ll make sure neither you nor any of your people ever get off the ground.”

  “Oh, you will, now? Well, that’s unfortunate, since I can’t exactly stop anything from happening from up here,” the MIC mockingly shouted through his headset, knowing how empty Brennachecke’s threat really was; the old man was going to teach him how to fly one way or another. If these little bitches made it easier to get it done, then so be it, but regardless of what happened to them, the MIC would see to it that his little army took to the sky.

  Brennachecke could see everybody on the ground below looking up at him, momentarily distracted by the shiny plane in the sky. But they were not going to stay distracted by the plane for long and the MIC was right—if Brennachecke wanted the man to control his men, he needed to get him on the ground so he could give the order. Brennachecke circled around the cheering and shouting blood pirates as close as he could without crashing, making sure they could see that the MIC was with him. More than just with him, the Man-in-Charge was actually in the pilot’s seat. Brennachecke hoped it would look like their leader was already an ace in the sky and not just sitting there in the seat observing the trick moves the actual pilot, he himself, was now making. He circled wide one more time, calculated his approach, and prepared to put the plane on the ground as close to the action as he could without getting tangled up in the power lines over the road. If he’d been able to only show the MIC the stabilized approach method of landing, he was confident the man would never have known that it could be done any other way. But that was no longer a viable option.

  “There are three stages to landing a plane,” Brennachecke said as he set his airspeed and stabilized his pitch and roll with tiny adjustments to the throttle, ailerons, elevator, and rudder. “Landing starts with an approach. Key factor here is airspeed. Try to always fly into the wind if there is any. You try to land with the wind hitting you from the side and the odds of maintaining a good approach without a lot of experience are pretty bad. And that means you’ll probably bend some metal and die. As we do this, remember that the headwind changes your ground speed. We’re going seventy knots here, and we’ve got a ten-knot headwind, so our ground speed is sixty knots.

  “See how I’m smoothly leveling off using elevator control and reducing my power toward idle? This is called the flare. I’m attempting to fly as close as possible above the road as I can without actually touching it while my airspeed drops to a stall. Your airspeed is crucial here, but notice how I’m not actually looking at the indicator during the flare. That’s because at this point you’ve got to be watching what’s happening around you. Keep the plane just a couple of inches above the ground until you run out of lift.”

  As if on command, the plane’s wheels softly touched the pavement of the highway. The MIC laughed like a little boy. To the old soldier, it was obvious that the man was genuinely impressed by Brennachecke’s skill as a pilot and happy to be learning how to fly himself (and most likely relieved to have returned to ground safely as well). He hoped that those feelings would keep this exchange going smoothly to the end, but as the plane rolled down the highway, he knew better than to depend on it.

  “Just because your tires touched the ground, that doesn’t mean you’ve landed yet. You’ve still got to do the final part. We call this the rollout. You let your guard down here and you’ll still crash. Your flight controls are less effective on the ground, and that makes maintaining control throughout the r
ollout harder than you think it will be. You’re going to need to increase the upwind aileron deflection here. Your instincts will tell you to reduce it, but I promise you, neutralizing your flight controls on touchdown is a surefire way to bend some metal.”

  As the plane finished its rollout, Brennachecke added, “If your airspeed is too high in the flare and you think you don’t have enough runway, pull back up, circle around, and try again. You start pushing forward on the yoke, or releasing the back pressure, in an attempt to force the plane onto the ground before running out of runway and you’re going to get a nosewheel-first touchdown that’ll bounce you and jump from wheelbarrowing into severe porpoising in less time than it takes your heart to beat. You’ll lose directional control, collapse your nosegear, and smear your plane across the runway. You never force it. Just take her back up and try again. Got it?”

  “Aye, Captain!” the MIC shouted through the headset, sounding for the first time like the pirate he actually was, as the plane finally came to a stop.

  * * *

  If they hadn’t been so distracted by the plane, the blood pirates would have been readying themselves for what they called the bloodeo. Because the effects of berserker blood were so much more potent if the blood was drawn in the middle of a breakout, and because there was no way to know when berserkers were going to reveal themselves, blood pirates had to be prepared to harvest the sweet red monster nectar at any time during their capture process. To that end, IV lines would be attached to the heads of their pikes and run to storage banks. This tubing would carry the berserker blood from the host to bags that were kept in temperature-controlled coolers. The pikers, as they liked to be called, would then stand by while the other members of the ambush crew pulled the long cable out of the back of one of the fortified vans and clipped it to the rings at each corner of the steel net that held their captives. But none of this happened, because Jen never berserked out, and the plane rolled right up to them, thoroughly sidetracking the entire capture protocol.

  Bobby-Leigh coldly watched the blood pirates react to the plane, trying to decide if she was better off staying and risking her sister berserking out, or looking for an opportunity to strike and run away. It was a question of chaos or control. She didn’t know what she was dealing with. They were significantly outnumbered and outgunned. With those kinds of unknowns the argument for control was pretty weak. If she waited to act, she might not get a chance to act at all.

  Never in her life did she think she’d wish she was back in that stinking dark room in Walmart facing those two diseased pedophiles, but she’d much rather be there than where she was now. At least in Walmart she’d known what to do. Uncle Allen’s training had been perfectly tailored for that situation. But this current situation had not been in the don’t-get-raped handbook at all. What the fuck are these assholes doing with those weird-ass spears? she thought. And where the hell did they get a goddamn airplane? Control seemed like a joke. But embracing chaos was suicide.

  Lost in the turmoil of her thoughts, Bobby-Leigh hadn’t noticed that Brennachecke was in the plane at all. She didn’t see him step out with the fat, redheaded stranger. She didn’t hear the Mr. Bad Comb-Over tell his men, who would not stop cheering, to shut up and stand down. It wasn’t until she heard her old surrogate father’s voice that her mind was able to wrench away from the paralyzing indecision that was consuming her.

  “I don’t suppose you’d just let me take them now?” Brennachecke said.

  To Bobby-Leigh, his words were like a hard slap in the face, followed by a bucket of ice water over her head. The blood drained from her face as all the questions in her head fell away and were replaced by just one: How is Brennachecke here?

  The voice of the man who wanted to kill her cut savagely through Jen’s meditation, through her out-of-body exercise and into the cushion of Chinese hip-hop. Her eyes focused and cleared in an instant. She popped the earbuds out so she could hear clearly, all the while doing what she could to control her breathing, her heart rate, and the amount of adrenaline pumping through her veins. She didn’t bother trying to make sense of things. Doing so would require too much of her attention. It was taking all she had to keep the berserker inside her from erupting out. She took a deep breath, once again went inside her head, and took a step back outside of her own body so she could watch everything as if it was happening to somebody else.

  For all the time she’d been working on perfecting her uncle’s practice of detachment, this was the first real test of its worth. The incident with Jimmy had simply gone down too fast for her to try it. So far, so good, she thought vaguely, as she watched herself smile at her would-be murderer through the metal webbing.

  I could shoot her in the head right here and now, Brennachecke thought, as he looked at the knowing smile slowly spreading across Jennifer’s lips. Taking a gun from one of the idiots standing around would be easy enough, but the aftermath was hard to predict. Everybody was amped up. Trigger-happy. He could right the scales of justice for his son’s life easy enough, but he’d end up in a vicious little firefight as soon as it was done, for sure. He knew he’d be able to shoot his way out, but Bobby-Leigh almost assuredly wouldn’t make it out with him. He wouldn’t have time to free her and still have a reasonable chance of surviving the escape. And if he left her, even if she survived the crossfire of the gunfight, which was unlikely, the pirates would take her. Leaving a little girl to be raped and mutilated—especially a little girl who had been like a daughter to him only a couple of days ago—didn’t exactly right the cosmic scales.

  “What would you do if I just stomped their little cunt brains out right here in front of you?” the MIC asked him casually with a goading smile.

  Brennachecke didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. The MIC didn’t expect him to. The cruel Man-in-Charge just wanted a chance to watch Brennachecke. Study him. Get a look into his machinery.

  “Maybe we just fuck ’em to death right here, eh? Maybe we see how many dicks the little cunt can swallow until she chokes to death? Maybe we shove your cock in there too, huh? Bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Bet that’s why you want them so bad, ain’t it? They run away from your little surprise fuck party?”

  One look at Brennachecke made it clear that he was not in the least sexually interested in the girls, which only seemed to make the MIC happier.

  “No? Well . . .” He took a moment to find the words that would cut through the man’s stoic facade the most effectively. “Then maybe we chop your dick off first and you can just watch the little one choke on it while you bleed out.”

  The man was just trying to get a reaction. Brennachecke knew it. As long as the MIC wanted to fly, he was confident the man would keep his side of the trade healthy enough to make the deal worth his time. But enough was enough.

  “Maybe if you don’t watch your mouth, we’ll all just die right here and now,” Brennachecke said, turning to stare down the MIC with his cold blue eyes, drilling in the very real possibility that if the man didn’t heed his warning, he’d find a way to make it happen.

  The MIC laughed at him.

  “You want to learn to fly or not?”

  Still laughing, the MIC looked at his abduction squad and rolled his eyes mockingly, effectively showing that he was still the authority here. His men laughed the way subordinates do when their bosses make a joke, even if the joke isn’t funny. “These two little bitches are going to let us fly, boys. Like fucking angels. Blood angels, motherfuckers. You like the sound of that, don’t you? Yeah, you do! Take ’em back, put ’em somewhere safe until you hear from me, yeah? And ’cause Daddy Daedalus here is a fucking party-pooper, you keep your hands off ’em or you’ll answer to me, you fucking degenerates. He wants them whole and unsoiled.”

  Brennachecke didn’t point out that suggesting he was Icarus’s father didn’t bode well for the MIC’s ultimate success as a pilot, but he did wonder who the idiot was trying to impress with his obviously faulty knowledge of Greek mythology. Then
he remembered Beverly’s reference to her sirens out in front of the Raj and smiled in spite of himself. When a man continues to behave in a way that he thinks might impress a woman he’s sexually interested in, even when she is not there to witness the behavior, then it’s pretty safe to say the woman has the power in the relationship. If he had had any doubt before about whether or not Beverly was really in charge of the whole show, it was gone now. Though he’d never used the term himself, Brennachecke knew that the MIC was as pussy whipped as a rich but ugly freshman at senior prom. He also knew that Beverly didn’t care one way or another if the Vedic City pirates learned to fly or not, and that might end up being a problem.

  The abduction crew quickly clipped the cables extending from the van to the net and flipped the switch on the power winch inside. Before either of the girls or Brennachecke could respond, the cables whipped taut and yanked Jen and Bobby-Leigh across the pavement and into the van. Once the net and everything in it was hauled up and the van doors had swung shut, the old soldier and the Man-in-Charge turned and silently walked back to the plane. The abduction squad loaded up and returned up Highway 1 to Vedic City.

  “I’m going to need to see with my own eyes that they are okay when we get back.”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever,” the MIC said. “Walk me through taking off again.”

  Brennachecke sighed deeply. This was his bargain. He’d set the terms. He’d done the math. He’d thought it through backwards and forwards. And yet, if Beverly was the one who really had the power here, he’d done this all wrong. Suddenly, he couldn’t shake the feeling that things were inevitably slipping slowly toward the edge of a great abyss, and at the bottom of that deep, dark hole there would be no justice to be had, for the only thing waiting for him would be the fury of hell.