Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  There didn’t appear to be any reason to wait, so Jack, Hector, and the remains of the airframe team started walking toward the police station.

  * * *

  Gene Whitney found some rope, and Peter, ever the engineer, rigged it to the hood of the Honda, turning it into a sled. Soon they were trudging up the debris-littered street, Peter limping on his wound, Beth towed behind, her leg elevated on the plastic pail they’d found.

  Three blocks from the police station, Gene said, “Travois.”

  “Yes! Right. Thank you. Trying to remember that word was driving me nuts.”

  * * *

  Casper the Friendly Airship had been ordered to fly, and fly it did. But with Ginger LaFrance dead and her remote control destroyed, the airship meandered aimlessly, pushed this way and that by the winds.

  Fortunately, the same winds that blew the forest fire toward Twin Pines pushed the airship to the west—away from the fire.

  That ended at the southwest tip of Twin Pines, as Casper dragged the Frankenstein version of a Claremont VLE through the heavy-duty fence surrounding the Helena Valley Energy Co-op substation. It held the flight deck of the dead ship, forming a shape like a soccer net, binding it in place. As the forward-thrust engines of the airship struggled, the nose of the Claremont edged within a foot of the substation’s massive step-down transformers. But the thick fence held, and, with a metal-on-metal groan, the Claremont slid backward three feet.

  Above it, Casper began oscillating, its butt end swinging left, then right.

  * * *

  Daria set a grueling pace but got them around the three west-side fires. The southern edge of Twin Pines was defined by two perfectly straight lines of railroad tracks, elevated on an eight-foot berm. Tommy was winded and his head ached but he kept quiet about it. Kiki limped on her wounded leg. The three of them snuck behind a ranch-style home with peeled aluminum siding and a vast array of broken and disheveled children’s toys in a yard of packed dirt, gorse, and a curved trail, front to back, pounded into the ground by a largish dog that had paced incessantly for years.

  Daria went to one knee, motioned the others to pause, and glanced around the corner of the house.

  The graceless, battered airplane fuselage hung four feet off the ground, its nose cone jammed under the top bar of a sturdy security fence that surrounded a power station. The fence’s top bar had been horizontal but now curved upward over the shattered windows of the flight deck, the coiled razor wire atop the fence looking like a crown of thorns.

  Above the substation, the bulbous white airship groaned and struggled, its tail end swinging, trying to obey the last orders of its mistress: Fly.

  Kiki whispered, “You see him?”

  Daria shook her head. She scanned the street, mostly residential save for the energy substation. The houses were identical, each a mid-1970s design. Four of nine homes had For Sale signs in the yards. The signs were sun-faded. Not much water from the massive tankers had made it out this way but the smoke from the downed air tankers was drifting west and swirled among the low-slung, single-story homes. The street was abandoned.

  Tommy glanced around. “You gals cover me. I’m going in.”

  Kiki said, “Why you?”

  “First, ’cause I always wanted to say that. Second, ’cause Dee here doesn’t know what we’re looking for. And third, ’cause the way you been holding your side, you cracked open that rib again. Plus, your leg’s bleeding.”

  Daria said, “Calendar could be inside already.”

  “I don’t think so. Guy makes his presence known, y’know?”

  Daria nodded. She pointed the Browning Hi Power in her left fist toward another house, the next one to the north. “Kiki. Stay here. I’ll head that way. If Calendar comes from between the two nearest fires, he’ll emerge between us.”

  With that, Daria darted around the corner and disappeared. When she was gone, Tommy said, “There are times I’m glad she’s on our side.”

  Kiki said, “And yet…”

  “Yeah. You ready?”

  He stepped out from the shadow of the ranch house and jogged across the dusty, poorly paved street toward the substation. Tommy had served as a field surgeon in Kuwait, and while the idea of running while knowing that someone might shoot you wasn’t new to him, it was as sickeningly horrifying as it had always been. He bit back the surge of panic, the acidic taste of adrenaline at the back of his tongue making him want to wretch.

  * * *

  Bedraggled and limping, Jack, Hector, and the remains of the airframe team arrived at the police station, walking from the east, coughing in the smoke, just as Peter and Gene arrived from the west, Beth Mancini’s leg elevated on the travois.

  News media helicopters circled the scene, although all the smoke was making their job difficult. Chief Paul McKinney hadn’t been found yet and a sergeant had gathered the surviving, noninjured officers. But all three said they planned to go find loved ones and inspect their homes.

  The sergeant looked around at the utter destruction and the deploying guardsmen. “Yeah,” he said, nodding to his men in resignation. “We’re done here.”

  He meant it. The last, sad remnants of an already undermanned police department disbursed.

  The Montana National Guard team set up a field hospital. They got Beth into the makeshift hospital—it used to be a Ford dealership—cut off her pant leg, and sterilized the entry and exit wounds.

  “Bet you’ve never seen this before,” Beth said, her face shiny with sweat, the shock wearing off and the pain ratcheting up. She thought the EMT-3 looked to be all of eighteen years old.

  He smiled up at her and said, “Rebar through the leg? You’re my third.”

  * * *

  Tommy made it to the fuselage. This close, he could see its end section swaying, arcing back and forth, struggling to push forward or escape the trap of the heavy security fence. The fence itself moaned in protest. Tommy put both hands on the floor of the amidships door—the one he, Kiki, and Isaiah Grey had walked through, just a few days ago—and hoisted himself up onto his stomach.

  As he did, a sickening crack! echoed close. A gunshot? No, deeper, less metallic. Tommy glanced over his right shoulder and saw that one of the vertical support poles for the substation security fence had wrenched itself half out of the ground, its rough arrowhead of cement one-third emerged from the sidewalk.

  He felt the Claremont nudge forward a few inches, struggling to take advantage, like a snared lion sensing which edge of the net was weakest.

  Your ass is hanging out in the street! Tommy reminded himself. He swung one knee up and tumbled into the fuselage.

  * * *

  Relative to the Claremont fuselage, Daria was at five o’clock and Kiki was at seven o’clock. Both had tail-cone perspectives. Thus, neither realized that, as the security fence began to give, the nose of the fuselage inched closer to a hulking, iron, step-down transformer the size of a UPS truck, if it stood on its hind end, grille to the sky.

  * * *

  Jenna Scott had gambled that she could get to the Claremont first by scrambling between two of the aircraft pyres, rather than circling around them. It had proven to be a mistake and almost a fatal one. The jet-fuel fires were spreading laterally.

  With one arm of her shirt turned into a bandage, Jenna cut off the other sleeve and turned it into a bandanna for her nose and mouth to block the smoke. She was grimy and soot-covered by the time she emerged to the west of the fires, closer now to the airship.

  A block away, she spotted one of the crashers, the tall redheaded woman who held an arm wrapped around her rib cage, her other hand hefting a professional-looking Glock.

  The redhead glanced her way. She turned, raising her weapon.

  Jenna put her Sten on Single-Fire and snapped off a bullet.

  * * *

  Kiki saw the tall, soot-covered figure in the bandit-style bandanna fire at her. She ducked back behind the ranch house, firing instinctively but not aiming. The newco
mer’s fire pinged against the aluminum siding, not three inches from where Kiki’s head had been.

  * * *

  Inside the fuselage, massive holes in the starboard side and roof let in plenty of late-afternoon light. Jack’s airframe guys had tossed bits of evidence into the fuselage topsy-turvy to get everything out of harm’s way.

  It was the first time Tommy had seen the fuselage in daylight since the crash. Blood was everywhere, along with dirt and mud and bits of foliage from the forest floor.

  He stepped forward just as the double clap of gunfire erupted outside.

  He hit the wall of the fuselage, pressed tight, just inside the amidships door. He tapped his comm unit. “What the fuck!”

  He heard more gunfire. He recognized it as Daria’s Browning.

  Please God in heaven … he chanted to himself, until, with a click, Kiki’s voice came back.

  “It’s Calendar! He’s a block to the east. I think we have him pinned down. Tommy, hurry!”

  Tommy reached into his shirt, removed the Star of David that hung from a simple steel chain, and kissed it. “Gotcha, babe. Hang on. Keep the bastard busy.”

  He scrambled over boxes and computers and bits of electronic gadgetry, the nature of which he could not guess. When the aisle was too cluttered, he climbed over seats. He stepped on the seats he and Kiki had been assigned. He thought of her, barefoot, long legs stretched under his, sleeping serenely as they flew.

  He spotted the food-service cart, hiked over a pile of suitcases. He sat on a Samsonite hard-sided case and began to open drawers. He found water, soft drinks, juices, wine, and beer. He found little packets of peanuts. He cracked open a water and half drained it. Evidence, shmevidence.

  He heard more exchanges of gunfire outside.

  In the drawer that held pretzels he found an aged saddlebag. He pulled it out, opened it, and withdrew a leather portfolio. It contained three sheets of Malatesta, Inc., letterhead, a hand-edited speech.

  Tommy said, “Gotcha.”

  He pulled a sketch pad out of the saddlebag and thumbed through it. It contained page after page of weaponry designs.

  Behind him, Calendar cocked his gun.

  * * *

  Jenna, blond hair worn short, six feet tall, wearing jeans, boots, and a now-grimy camisole, plus the bandanna around her mouth, was easily mistaken amid the smoke for the silver-haired assassin. Daria and Kiki kept her pinned down behind an overturned wheelbarrow, so neither got a terribly good look at her.

  * * *

  Tommy turned, still sitting on the luggage. The silver-haired man leaned against a row of seats. His gun was pointed at Tommy’s back.

  “Do you mind removing your communications device?”

  Tommy paused, then pulled out the ear jack and removed the controls at his belt, set them on the deck.

  “Thank you,” Calendar said, his voice neutral. “I never heard where they’d found the speech and sketchbook.”

  Tommy said, “You’re Calendar. I thought my friends were in a shoot-out with you.”

  “Not me. It’s Montana. Plenty of guns. Who are you?”

  “Dr. Leonard Tomzak. Pathologist, NTSB. And while I’m not sure, you might just be the most fucked-up mercenary. Ever.”

  Calendar smiled serenely. “You think?”

  They heard more gunfire close-by.

  Tommy said, “Job was to kill this Malatesta guy, make it look like an accident, right? Coulda done it in his home, in his car. Whole Foods, make it look like, whatever, fifteen-grain pasta fell on his ass. But no. You bring down a goddamn airliner. You kill a bunch of folks, but not the right ones. Then you start killin’ crashers. Meanwhile, every passing hour, we learn more and more because, hoss, that’s what we do. We learn stuff. Finally, you have an assassin’s wet dream and pretty much kill a whole town.”

  Calendar said, “I really do hate this town. May I have that bag, please?”

  “You’re the Paris Hilton of assassins. You’ll be famous for being famous.”

  He pointed the gun at Tommy’s head.

  “You know, our jobs have a lot in common.”

  Calendar paused. He smiled. “Well, no. They really don’t.”

  “You kill people to shut ’em up. I cut up dead people to make ’em talk.”

  “That’s … one way to look at it. The bag, please?”

  “You killed the pilot, right? But the other pathologist, Dr. Jain? She got him to tell her he was up and walking around the flight deck. That was after the crash resulted in a significant spinal injury at the fourth cervical disk.” Tommy snorted a laugh. “Yeah, right. You killed a fella named Isaiah and he told me all about you. You see, you keep killing folks, then we draw the noose closer and closer. So, again, and I’m not trying to be mean here, but you’re the worst bad guy in history. Your father must be proud of—”

  Calendar shot Tommy.

  34

  DARIA DIDN’T HAVE ONE of the communications rigs the crashers carried, and she was too separated from Kiki to shout out a plan. But she knew a little about winning firefights.

  It had come to her attention that the opponent was carrying a Sten gun. Calendar hadn’t been carrying the popular British 9-millimeter submachine gun. He was also a somewhat better shot than their current opponent. But if Calendar wasn’t shooting at them, he had to be somewhere nearby. This fight could go quickly from two-on-one to even-steven, as the Americans say.

  Kiki was proving an adequate distraction if not an actual threat. She was brave enough but inexperienced with the Glock. Still, she was keeping the bandanna-wearing shooter pinned down and unable to relocate to a better angle.

  Daria crouched behind two garbage cans, waited until this shooter switched targets to fire at Kiki. When the moment hit, she rose as if spring-loaded, taut brown arms pistoning, well-worn combat boots churning up dirt. She sprinted to the driveway of the dilapidated ranch house, twenty feet closer to the shooter.

  Kiki apparently saw Daria’s gambit and let off three bullets in a row, pinning down the shooter. Daria slid, feet first, weight on her right hip, and made it to the body of a Camaro up on cinder blocks, right front corner panel missing altogether, the frame covered in more Bondo than paint.

  The three opponents made a triangle: Daria’s move widened the side of the triangle between herself and Kiki, shortened the side between herself and the shooter. It also narrowed the space behind the overturned wheelbarrow, which their tango had been using for cover.

  Then she heard the boom of a fourth weapon. The sound came from behind her. From the direction of the Claremont. Daria sat with her back to one of the cinder blocks, scanning the neighborhood. If Calendar had them in a pincer, the odds had just gotten considerably worse.

  She didn’t see him. But she did see Kiki’s eyes go wide.

  “That came from the plane!” she shouted.

  Oh good, Daria thought. Please alert our opponent to your primary concern. That helps.

  The shooter understood that Daria’s move worsened the situation and shifted from single-shot fire to rapid fire. Bullets pinged off the other side of the Camaro, a few landing in the dirt and bouncing up into the metal chassis.

  Daria watched Kiki turn from the fight and launch herself, limping but fast, toward the aircraft like a futbol striker heading for the goal. Daria assumed the better-armed shooter could see the tall redhead leave the engagement. Even-steven.

  Daria took three very quick, very deep breaths, grabbed a rusty hubcap off the ground, and rose to her feet, hurling the hubcap like a Frisbee, as hard as she could. The dull aluminum glinted in the smoke-dimmed sunlight, arcing to Daria’s right, to the shooter’s left.

  Daria gambled that the shooter would see the movement and track the hubcap, if only for a few meters. A flicker of the eye or wrist, that was all she needed. She emerged from around the grille of the Camaro, diving sideways, gaining sight, if only for a split second, of the shooter’s legs. The opponent lay prone. Daria fired as she fell, her left hip and
ribs taking the impact.

  * * *

  Tommy lay on the deck of the fuselage, the saddlebag by his knees, his right hand bleeding badly, cradled in his left hand. His eyes were squeezed tight.

  “There are a lot of bones in the human hand,” Calendar said. “And I just broke a whole bunch of them. Don’t really know what that’s going to mean for your career. Not really my problem.”

  He stepped forward, gun aimed.

  Tommy keened, “Fucking … bastard…”

  “Don’t get me wrong.” Calendar cocked his gun. “I’m going to kill you. I just wanted to hurt you first.”

  He stepped on Tommy’s hand, bones crackling. Tommy screamed.

  * * *

  Kiki was still twenty paces from the dangling fuselage when another of the upright posts of the security fence gave way, an inverted cone of cement groaning as it pulled free. It sounded like a Norse frost giant on the hunt.

  The Claremont surged forward another foot and the broken, dented nose cone slammed into the Helena Valley Co-op’s step-down transformer.

  A corona of sparks blossomed like Independence Day fireworks. Bits of flaming shrapnel arced in every direction.

  Kiki pulled up so fast that she ended up flat on her ass, broken ribs grinding together, the crook of one arm thrown over her eyes.

  * * *

  Inside the fuselage, sparks snapped, electricity arced and popped, and the smell of sulfur filled the space. Calendar ducked, arms over his head. Tommy blindly flailed both legs, got lucky, connecting with Calendar’s knees. The assassin stumbled back into the food-service cart, overturning it, becoming entangled in it and the pile of luggage. Tommy rolled to his side, grabbed the shoulder strap of the saddlebag, got one foot under himself, and dragged his sorry ass toward the rear of the ship, to one of the ragged holes in the fuselage wall. His ruined hand against his chest, he leaped out, hitting the street four feet below him, landing with all the grace of a brick.

  Ten feet away, Kiki sat, legs spread, looking stunned.