“There’s something else,” Tom told Lena.
“What?”
“Someone took Io.”
Lena frowned.
“We saw Emily on the way over here,” Tom said. “She was totally freaked. She told us some guy came to her place and just… took Io away.”
“Just took her?” Lena asked. “Was it Family Services?”
“We don’t know.”
Lena looked at Sparrow, who didn’t say a word, simply nodded.
And then they heard sirens suddenly start wailing from every direction, all around them.
“What’s going on now?” Tom asked above the din.
“I don’t know, but I think I smell smoke,” Lena said, wrinkling her nose.
“Maybe we should go higher,” Tom suggested.
They flew further up until they could see most of the city spread out below them. A kaleidoscope of lights as fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers raced along the streets toward a fire raging near the student ghetto. Even in the darkness they could see that thick smoke wafted through the air like black phantoms. There was another fire closer to the edge of town by the interstate, and another in the Duck Pond area not too far away from downtown, and another, and another, and another.
Gainesville was burning.
“Oh my God,” Sparrow said. She was shivering. Tom noticed.
“It’s cold up here,” he said. “Maybe we should head back to Dave-O’s Shop.”
“What about Hanna?” Lena asked.
“We need to find her,” Sparrow answered.
Then… they heard a buzzing sound. It sounded like a fly trapped in the bedroom, late at night, insistent, persistent, buzzing in a far corner, then close to your ear, then in another corner. Maddening.
But this buzzing sound got louder until it sounded less like buzzing and more like a Saturday morning lawnmower symphony in suburbia.
“The helicopter!” Sparrow yelled suddenly, recognizing the noise from years of day-after-day and night-after-night take-offs and landings over the Blue House.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “You’re right!” He had to shout to be heard over the increasing noise level.
“It sounds like it’s coming this way!” Lena shouted.
“Are we in the flight path?” Sparrow asked.
They heard screams as the helicopter seemed to get closer, but they still couldn’t see it.
Suddenly a shape zipped past Tom, a blur of leather and bleached mohawk, like an ICBM with attitude, ballistic, and barely recognizable with a wine skin of ouzo still around her neck, face warped in terror.
“Wasn’t that… ?”
“Hey, that was… !”
ChugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugchugCHUGCHUGCHUGCHUG!!!
The helicopter burst from out of nowhere, spitting sparks and chasing four more punks, faces contorted in desperate fright as they zoomed through the sky, launched from the same silo as Tom, Sparrow, and Lena. Flight of Fancy. Metal teeth flashed in moonlight, and then there were three… and a half. A young skinhead, one of the ‘Nameless local high school kids who flocked to the shows like fleas to a mangy dog, was half-devoured by the helicopter creature. A spray of blood misted Tom, Sparrow, and Lena. The upper half of the skinhead fell away into a well of dark, rising smoke. The helicopter creature, or heli-dragon, continued its pursuit of the remaining punks, all disappearing into the darkness, the metallic growl of the creature diminishing until it was gone.
“That didn’t just happen,” Tom said after a moment of silence. “I mean, not really.”
“There’s no way,” Lena echoed.
Off in the distance there were screams, choked off, then a blood-freezing Godzilla roar and a column of fire in the sky in the direction the chase had gone. More screams… then two human-shapes fell, burning, flailing, screaming.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said.
ChugchugchugchugchugchugchugCHUGCHUGCHUGCHUGCHUG…
“It’s coming after us!” Sparrow yelled.
They bolted straight down. Sparrow led the way, then Lena, and finally Tom. The heli-dragon followed them, a growling, gear-grinding machine demon with blood-stained metal teeth and death reflected in its bulbous eyes. The chase was on. Sparrow led them down to street level, then straight through downtown six feet above the road. Silently, she vowed never to do LSD again as buildings whipped past on either side of University Avenue. Lena, her face an inch away from Sparrow’s Converse sneakers, wished she could blink her eyes and go back to her time-to-make-the-bagels existence. And Tom, rocketing right behind Lena, felt burning tongues of flame flicker close by as the heli-dragon spat fire at them.
They whipped around the Hippodrome State Theatre in a tight turn, putting the massive, granite building between them and their LSD-fueled, industrial nightmare. Blaring car horns and screeching tires were the reaction to the heli-dragon’s appearance. Smashing glass, twisting metal, screams…
Sparrow, Lena, and Tom kept going, not looking back, zoomed back up above the treetops in an afterburner boost of speed. It was Tom who dared a glance back behind them and realized they were no longer being pursued. The heli-dragon had found easier prey.
“Sparrow! Lena!” he yelled. “Slow down! It’s gone!”
Sparrow and Lena looked back, saw what Tom had seen, and slowed until they were hovering well above downtown Gainesville again. Sparrow breathed hard, the effort of leading the way, slicing through air like a bullet, had worn her out. Lena was wild-eyed, at the threshold of sanity.
“Oh, God, we’re dead,” she whispered. “We are dead, we’re dead, we’re dead.”
“We are not dead,” Tom told her.
Lena shook her head.
“Yes, we are dead,” she insisted. “We’re in Hell. We’re flying angels in Hell.”
“We’re not dead!” Sparrow screamed at her. “We’re… in an altered state of consciousness, that’s all. We’re on a psychedelic rollercoaster, okay? We’re tripping our brains out, Lena, so just chill!”
“That what it is,” Tom added, although he did not sound entirely convinced. “It’s all the drug.”
Sirens, down below, loud, and several police cruisers sped toward the Hippodrome and the hovering heli-dragon, spewing fire and people tried to escape from their cars. A man was doused with flame as he ran, was charred into ash in an instant. The police cruisers poured into the street. The heli-dragon turned to face them. Cops jumped out, revolvers drawn, and the heli-dragon slowly moved toward them. They opened fire, the pop-pop-popping of their guns drowned out by the chugging roar of the heli-dragon’s rotary wings.
“God, I hope this isn’t really happening,” Lena said.
The scene was like something from a Hollywood remake of a 1950s monster movie. The heli-dragon darted forward and vomited fire. Police cruisers exploded. A mushroom cloud of flame and smoke erupted into the air, scattering body parts like pieces of broken toys. Sirens blaring and lights flashing, fire trucks arrived on the scene. The heli-dragon spun around and its buzzsaw tail ripped into the ladder truck, which kept going and plowed into the fluted columns and marble steps of the Hippodrome.
Two other helicopters, both news choppers with a cameraman standing on the skids, arrived on the scene and maneuvered close to the heli-dragon.
On the ground, more police cruisers arrived: Gainesville city police, Alachua County Sheriff’s Deputies, and Florida State Troopers. Gunfire popped, sirens screamed, chopper blades growled in the air.
“Land the helicopter!” a voice suddenly boomed out over downtown as a fourth helicopter showed up. This one was a S.W.A.T. chopper with a sharpshooter standing outside, on one of the skids. He aimed a high-powered rifle at the heli-dragon. “Land the helicopter and give yourself up!” the voice boomed out again.
“They think someone’s inside that thing!” Lena yelled. “Don’t they realize it’s alive?”
“Maybe only we see it that way!” Tom yelled back to her.
He didn’t have time
to say more. The heli-dragon roared in metallic defiance at the police chopper. The sharpshooter fired, the report of his rifle a distinctly harder sound than the popping of the guns the police on the ground were using. The heli-dragon roared again, its mouth wide open to reveal rows of gleaming razor teeth, and belched forth a jet-stream of fire. The police chopper tried to swerve away but was caught dead on by the blast. It flew, burning, out of control and slammed into one of the news choppers, and both fell to the ground in a tangle of metal. The pilot of the other news chopper must have decided they had enough footage, as it turned tail and darted across downtown toward campus. The heli-dragon went after it. It closed in on the news chopper swiftly and clamped its metal teeth down on the tail, then swung it around like a dog shaking an old sock. It let go, and the news chopper sailed out of control into the only high-rise building in downtown Gainesville, the Seagle building, slamming into the top two floors and exploding into a shower of sparks and metal as the crumpled machine and its occupants fell twelve floors to smash into University Avenue below.
“It’s real,” Sparrow said, barely audible above the noise of chaos.
“What’s real?” Tom asked.
“No, Tom was right,” Lena said. “It can’t be real! We’re the only ones who see this… we’re tripping, Sparrow, remember?”
Sparrow shook her head.
“It can’t be real,” Lena repeated.
The heli-dragon roared, as if defying anyone to unmake it, to make it unreal again.
“What the fuck is going on?” Lena asked, but it was a question directed at neither Tom nor Sparrow. It was a question for God, or whomever happened to be in charge of Things, if anyone was.
“I still say we’re just tripping,” Tom said. “It may be the worst damn trip in the history of tripping, but tomorrow, or whenever this stuff wears off, everything’ll be back the way it was.”
“What if it never wears off, Tom?” Lena asked. “What then?”
“Then we’ll just have to deal with it,” Sparrow replied for Tom. She sounded angry, impatient.
“Listen… LSD is a drug of the mind,” Tom said. “Whatever we see, whatever we feel… whatever is happening around us, it’s all in our heads. We control whether this is a good trip or a bad trip.”
“It’s a state of mind,” Sparrow added. “And don’t forget: set, setting, and dosage.”
“What does any of that have to do with what’s happening now?” Lena asked.
“We’re obviously not in the right mindset,” Tom told her. “There’s all this paranoia in the air. It’s affecting how we experience things. Okay, so maybe there really is something going on with the police downtown, but it’s not necessarily what we saw. Come on, you know what happens when you bring cops into the equation. They always cause trouble.”
“Okay, so what are we supposed to do now?”
“Let’s just get happy, okay?” Tom said, forcing a grin. It made him look crazed, not happy.
“Get happy?” Sparrow asked, arching an eyebrow at him.
Lena shook her head.
“That’s the dumbest suggestion I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said. “The town is being burned to the ground by a Goddamn dragon-copter, or whatever it is, and you want us to sing ‘Don’t worry, be happy’?”
Sparrow closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath.
She was starting to get angry, and it wasn’t good to get angry while tripping. Lena was freaking out, which was understandable given the circumstances. At that moment, though, she just wanted to throw water on Lena and watch her melt. She took another breath, though, and after a moment the anger had subsided.
She opened her eyes.
Lena was gone. Tom floated there, looking like a little boy who let the dog out when the dog wasn’t supposed to be let out.
“Where… ?”
Tom pointed. Sparrow looked, but Lena was already out of sight.
“Tom, where the fuck did she go?”
“I think she mumbled something about Dave-O.” Tom said.
“We should head that way,” Sparrow said. “Hanna might be there, too.”
Another explosion downtown.
“Is this really happening, Tom?”
Tom just looked at her for a moment, then let out a long sigh.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Sparrow replied.
“Before we go,” Tom said urgently, as Sparrow looked like she was about to fly toward the Shop. “I think Lena knows what happened with us.”
“So?”
“Well, I think she might be a little upset about it.”
“Oh.” She looked away.
“What about you?” Tom asked.
“What about me?”
“Are you upset about it? That it happened, with you and me?”
She shook her head. “I’m not even sure it really happened, Tom. But if it did… no, I’m not upset about it. I’m glad it happened.”
Another explosion downtown sent out a shockwave that vibrated Tom’s and Sparrow’s bones.
“Let’s go,” Tom said.
They flew to Dave-O’s, Sparrow leading the way.
They stayed low. Smoke, thick and black, created a night within the night and hung in the air just above the treetops, making it difficult for them to see anything. Whenever there was a break in the smoke they saw the wreckage of a car or truck on the road, cut in half and still burning. And bodies, chopped, sliced, diced, or ground to hamburger, strewn about. Tom and Sparrow flew in silence, awed by the magnitude of the destruction around them. They hovered briefly over a church van on its side, two wheels still spinning, the roof peeled back and inside the burned bodies of the faithful, black and crisp.
“What a nightmare,” Tom said.
Stark and bold, the landscape around them was a torched ruin, like the aftermath of a dragon attack in a Tolkeinesque war between good and evil.
“It’s almost beautiful,” Sparrow whispered. Then she giggled. It was the acid, she knew, and Tom knew. They grinned like two insane children in a candy shop of horrors.
As they got closer to Dave-O’s Shop the smoke cleared and the air became easier to breathe. A crowd of their friends all hovered in mid-air over the parking lot. Everything looked normal here, more or less. Lena was among them, smiling, a green bottle of beer in her hand, the label peeled off the bottle by nervous fingers.
“Hey,” she greeted Tom and Sparrow, then sipped her beer. “What’s going on?”
As if she didn’t know.
“Big party downtown,” Tom said, grinning. He felt sick and twisted, but he couldn’t help it. It was the acid, definitely the acid.
Jodiee and Holly, floating nearby, overheard.
“Party downtown?” Jodiee asked.
“Maybe we should go check it out,” Holly said.
“Don’t go downtown!” Lena practically yelled.
“Why not?” Holly asked.
“It’s a bad scene, that’s all,” Lena told her. “A really bad scene.”
“Cops?” Jodiee asked.
“Yeah, cops. A lot of cops. And do you smell something burning?”
Jodiee, Holly, and some others sniffed at the air.
“Yeah, now that you mention it,” Holly said.
“That’s downtown. The whole place is on fire.”
“Not just downtown,” Tom said. Holly and Jodiee looked him. Lena didn’t.
Sparrow giggled. When they looked at her, she shook her head.
“You guys got some good shit,” Jodiee said.
“Yeah,” Tom said. He scratched his head. “Let me ask you something…” They waited. “Do you feel like you’re flying?”
Holly and Jodiee looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Lena floated away. Tom followed.
“Hey,” he said. She made sure that her face was turned away from him.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“Come on, Lena. What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It’s not
hing,” she whispered.
“What?”
They floated over the Shop, and heard “Flight of Fancy” pouring through the skylight from the strings of Sam’s guitar.
“Lena, I’m sorry,” Tom said.
“Tom, it’s not that,” Lena said. “It’s not that at all. It’s not you at all. It’s this night… Something’s happening, and it’s more than what we saw downtown. I don’t know what it is… but it isn’t good.”
“It’s just a bad trip.”
She shook her head. “It’s more than that. It’s actually a pretty good trip. We’re flying, Tom.” She laughed. “That’s as good as it gets.” She was being sarcastic, it was obvious from the tone of her voice.
They were all flying. Converse sneakers, Doc Marten boots, and Birkenstocks dangled in the air above the parking lot. Tom looked around at his friends. Was Lena right? Was that as good as it would ever get? They were all together, but for how long? It was a college town, and sooner or later they would all move on. Maybe not all, maybe some would stay and make their lives in Gainesville.
Tom wished he had a pad of paper and a pen right then so he could describe what he saw, how he felt.
“It was beautiful, Tom,” Lena said.
“What was?”
“You and Sparrow. I felt it. I was there, I was part of it. It was beautiful.”
“I wasn’t sure if it really happened,” Tom said. “Like, I’m not sure that we’re really flying, or are we standing in Dave-O’s Shop listening to Sam play, our eyes closed? Maybe I’m imagining this whole conversation, and you’re imagining something else.”
Lena smiled warmly.
“It’s real,” she said, sounding confident. “We’re really flying. I know it. That’s why I’m scared. It isn’t supposed to be this way, you know. We’ve both done acid before, lots of times. This is wrong.”
“Or maybe we finally got it right, huh?”
Lena shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Dudes, we still don’t know where Hanna is. Can you feel her? I can feel both of you even when I can’t see you… like we’re linked or something. But I can’t feel her.”
Tom closed his eyes and tried. He imagined tendrils reaching out from his mind. One was linked to Sparrow, and one went to Lena. But there were more than those two. The others went off into a void. He was sure one was connected to Hanna, though. And the other was connected to… something else.
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