A nerve-jangling clap of gunfire rang out overhead, then echoed throughout the stairwell.
Ahead of her, Cornelia saw Rick flinch and flatten against the wall. Seeing her behind him, he gave her a look of murderous intensity. “Get out of here, goddamn it!” he said through clenched teeth. “You’ll get yourself killed.” When he saw the entourage in his wake, he let out a string of particularly imaginative curses.
Another shot rang out somewhere overhead. If they didn’t get killed, Cornelia reasoned, they would surely go deaf.
But her ears hadn’t been punished enough not to notice the trample and echo of running feet several floors below. So was the entire globe team on its way up? Was Murakami down there? Jerry Peretti?
Cornelia made the mistake of leaning toward the edge of the stairs, trying to see down the well to catch a glimpse of who was coming up. For a moment she was glad to see what appeared to be uniforms. Hospital security—
And then a shot rang out again.
She felt a grip on the back of her shirt yanking her back and slamming her against the wall. She could hear the whine of a bullet whizzing by, ricocheting off the concrete.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Rick hissed at her as he let her go.
Pain radiated through the back of her head where she had been knocked against the wall.
“Now stay here!” Rick ordered, and bolted up the stairs.
In the other direction, Lacy sprinted toward her, taking the stairs two at a time. “Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Cornelia gasped, and listened to the running feet echoing through the stairwell overhead. “Come on!”
As she and Lacy continued upward, two more shots rang out.
Cornelia thought the adrenaline surge was knocking her heart against her ribcage now. Then another shot blasted out, and she thought she heard a bullet rebound off of metal. Moments later another jarring metallic crash sounded out.
There was silence after the gunshot, a stillness in the shaft, but then….
Air? Cornelia’s mind raced.
She was sure she felt a draft now.
“Come on,” she said to Lacy over her shoulder. “I think they reached the roof.”
“Corner that bastard,” Lacy replied. “I wanna throw his ass to the street below.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Not if I do it first.”
When they reached the top of the stairwell, they were looking into yet one more set of stairs. These ones, Cornelia noted, were made of metal grating. They appeared to rise toward some kind of a metal structure.
“We’re on top of the hospital,” Cornelia thought aloud as she looked toward the top of the stairs. She could see Rick crouching up there, the bright blue tropical skies above him.
“What’s that?” Lacy asked.
“Hey, wait a minute!” a male voice came from somewhere below. Cornelia thought it sounded like Rafferty.
“I think that’s a helicopter landing pad,” Cornelia said.
“Yeah,” Lacy replied, ignoring Rafferty. “A nice wide place for that psycho to be exposed.”
“And for us to be exposed, too. He has the gun, remember?”
“And a limited number of rounds,” Lacy said, and sprang past Cornelia.
This time taking the steps three at a time, Lacy went up to join Rick at the top of the stairs. As Cornelia followed, she noted the fury in Rick’s eyes as Lacy crouched beside him. When Cornelia had nearly caught up to them, she heard something new. It was a rhythmic, steadily increasing sound from overhead.
“It is a helipad, isn’t it?” she asked as she tried to squeeze in between Rick and Lacy.
Neither of them replied. When Cornelia took stock of the situation on top of the building, she realized why.
Just as she’d suspected, they had been led to the hospital’s helicopter landing platform. Except the gunman was not standing in the middle of the structure alone. He was waving his pistol at a woman in light blue scrubs. A doctor perhaps, Cornelia surmised. Off to the left of the stairwell she also noticed a structure on the edge of the platform. It appeared to house an elevator shaft leading off the roof, its opening wide enough to accommodate teams of doctors and nurses and gurneys to move patients in and out. And right now the opening to the elevator was crowded by what looked exactly like a collection of doctors and nurses.
So Cornelia’s gaze went to the sky. She looked for the source of that rhythmic sound, because a team of medics on a hospital’s helipad meant only one thing.
8.
The medevac helicopter made its approach to the landing platform with no awareness of a problem. How that could have been, Cornelia couldn’t imagine. There must have been radio communication between the aircraft and the hospital, even if the pilot couldn’t have guessed that there was something amiss below. For some reason, its landing gear extended, the helicopter touched down in the middle of the platform.
“Or maybe because the emergency’s bad enough that he can’t turn away,” Rick yelled over the roar of the helicopter’s turbines and the blast of air all around. “Or he was told to land or people start dying down here.”
As the helicopter settled on the platform, its left side-hatch slid open. Cornelia could see the EMTs inside huddled around a figure on a stretcher.
“He’s gonna trade the patient for the chopper?” Lacy hollered.
Except Cornelia couldn’t be sure of that since none of the hospital personnel by the elevator made any moves. The gunman, however, did. He ran straight for the chopper the moment its hatch was wide open.
Cornelia felt vibrations on the metal stairs beneath her. The other team members must have been bringing up the rear. For the moment, though, her attention was riveted on the helicopter and the gunman.
“I don’t believe it!” Rick yelled as the shooter reached the helicopter. “That miserable bastard….”
Apparently there was to be no trade, Cornelia realized in horror as the gunman leaped into the aircraft. Or was he just going to throw the patient out and force a takeoff before the hospital staff could leave the elevator? But a moment later the answer to that question became obvious as well. The helicopter started to shift, lightening the load on its landing gear.
“He’s making them take off!” Rick shouted.
Cornelia, of course, understood…except she didn’t understand what Rick did next. He sprang from the stairs and bolted across the landing platform, moving straight for the helicopter’s open hatch.
Cornelia, as well as Lacy, remained speechless as they watched Rick dive into the aircraft as it lifted about a foot off the platform.
“What’s happening?” a shout came from behind now. It was Rafferty pushing his way to the top of the stairway.
He was ignored, however, as both Cornelia and Lacy lunged upright, moving forward in some shared unconscious gesture of futility. Rick was already inside the helicopter, and the aircraft was moving higher and higher into the air.
Except the chopper didn’t continue on any kind of steady and controlled departure pattern. At about thirty feet off the ground it paused in a brief hover, then went into two wild rotations, drifting all the while lower and lower again and closer to the elevator structure.
The medics around the elevator bolted in all directions, not unreasonably fearing that the out-of-control aircraft was about to crash into them.
They’re fighting, Cornelia’s mind screamed in realization. However, she didn’t realize the full extent of the danger until someone was tugging on her shoulder, urging her to start backing away.
“Come on! Move!” Rafferty screamed now, tugging at both Cornelia and Lacy.
And the scientist was right, Cornelia recognized a moment too late. The helicopter’s erratic movements changed direction again, this time lurching to its right—straight toward Cornelia, Lacy, and Rafferty�
�s position—its nose dipping, then bolting forward.
“Move!” Rafferty and Lacy howled at the same time.
And Cornelia did so.
The helicopter, Cornelia’s panicked mind just realized, was so low now that as it moved forward—its nose lowered—its blades actually stood a chance of instantly pureeing her and her companions in a matter of seconds. They had to run faster than they had ever run in their lives, and they needed to get off the platform. To do so, they bolted for the platform’s edge, leaping over the threshold and plunging to whatever awaited on the roof-proper some twenty feet below.
Cornelia now knew full well what they meant about time slowing down at the moment of an absolute life-altering catastrophe. She could feel herself hanging in the air, drifting through space, imploring gravity to take hold and pull her down to the roof as the medevac helicopter was upon her. She could sense the individual blades slice the air at the precise spot her head was at just fractions of a second ago.
The helicopter zoomed overhead and past the edge of the building as Cornelia, Lacy, and Rafferty pounded into the roof. Pain racked her body and the air left her lungs, but Cornelia couldn’t help looking toward the edge of the building, trying to find the out-of-control aircraft. Rick was inside that thing, fighting with a gunman, and apparently the pilots had a tenuous hold on the aircraft’s controls in the middle of it all.
Rising to her feet and staggering toward the edge of the roof, Cornelia caught sight of the chopper at last. The machine halted in midair again, this time its nose rising upward, then spun into a wide, wobbling rotation.
Cornelia felt as if all the blood circulating through her body had turned to ice while her heartbeats thundered in her ears. She saw movement by the chopper’s open hatch, then a figure plummeting out, tumbling toward the ground hundreds of feet below, arms and legs flailing in useless near-death reflexes.
“No!” she heard Lacy gasping beside her.
But the helicopter’s wild movements stopped soon after one of its passengers was ejected. The aircraft’s rotation ceased, the machine gaining altitude and coming back in for another approach of the platform.
“The stairs!” Cornelia exclaimed. “Where are the stairs?” She needed to get back on top of the platform immediately.
As Lacy helped Rafferty—who’d either broken or sprained an ankle—stand, Cornelia lunged into a sprint, circling the perimeter of the helicopter platform, desperately looking for a stairway or a ladder to the top.
She eventually found a metal-grate stairway next to the elevator structure and scrambled to the top as the besieged helicopter touched down. Fighting the buffeting winds of the rotor blades’ downdraft, she struggled closer and closer to the aircraft as Rick stepped from the open side-hatch.
9.
SITES OF LOCAL LEGENDS OVERRUN BY GLOBE-WATCHERS
DESPITE HOSPITAL VIOLENCE
By: Nancy Akiona, Hawaii Tribune-Herald
Since the Hawaiian Islands have been identified as having one of the highest concentrations of people with a special sensitivity to the globe phenomenon, crowds have been flocking to sites connected to local folklore in ever greater numbers. Even the shooting incident at King’s Medical Center has not deterred these globe pilgrims. Some, however, are concerned about the impact on the local ecology and the safety of these historical sites.
“The Hawaiian islands have a particularly rich history of spirituality and legends,” explained Maxwell Kekumano of the Polynesian Cultural Center. “So many people are asking if our historical sites might explain the unusually high number of people who have been experiencing the hum and vibration phenomenon of these mystery globes.”
Stories of people who report hearing a low-frequency hum near the appearance of a globe were first reported in San Francisco. Although the doctors and various scientists working for a newly formed study group run by a joint military task force announced that it does not yet understand what makes people hear these noises, what the government calls an “unusually high” number of people have come forward in Hawaii and claimed to be suffering this same affliction.
To date, other high concentrations of hum-sensitive people have been reported in Sweden, in Tanzania, in Ghana, Uzbekistan, and Austria.
On the Hawaiian Islands, just as in the other highly afflicted areas, many people are wondering where the next globe will appear. Many have been flocking to places like the Temple of Mu and Mahaulepu on Kauai, Nahuma Point on Maui, or the Kazumura Cave on the Big Island, hoping to see the appearance of a globe.
“This is a world-changing phenomenon,” said Cynthia Reynolds, who traveled all the way from Baraboo, Wisconsin, in hope of seeing the next globe, “and I believe it will be a life-changing experience for me if I get to witness one appearing. This trip was worth everything for me. And sure, I was frightened by what happened at that hospital, but this is just something I need to do.”
“Peace will always win out over hate and violence,” Rudolph Metz, a visitor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said. “We can’t let the hateful people win. All of this will lead to something positive, I’m sure of it.”
For those concerned with protecting these cultural and ecological sites, however, the massive influx of tourists and globe enthusiasts is a worry.
“We understand the significance of these globes,” said Kekumano, “but we are also imploring visitors to do their best not to damage these very important locations.”
Chapter 9
A Brief Escape. Senator Bling. Game Changer?
Emergency Powers. On the Beach. In the Philippines.
1.
“…and they have what that we don’t? Little Timmy, come on! I mean, seriously, can you explain it to me, dude? One of these globe things appears in the Pacific…and it’s in the Philippines? Come on! What kind of B.S. is that? The Philippines?”
Rick was snapped out of his deep, restful sleep by the sort of radio programming he despised the most in the world: the Wacky Morning Personality Show. He was about to slap his palm on the snooze bar except the gears in his brain fell into place quickly enough, and he was able to pick out the key phrases of the shrill, obnoxious rant on the nightstand radio.
Globe thing?
Philippines?
“What the hell is this?” he mumbled, and tried to focus all of his attention on the radio.
“…Dude? Little Timmy? You gotta help me out with this, brah!” the star of whatever show the radio was tuned to kept haranguing some obligatory sidekick.
As much as he wanted to make sense of the material on the radio, Rick’s complete attention could not focus on the show exclusively. Something was missing, and that was a major problem he could not ignore at the moment. Namely, Cornelia was not in bed beside him.
“Yeah, man! I don’t like that either, man!” The obligatory sidekick had the obligatory moronic slacker dude inflection. “The Philippines? That’s just not right, brah. Like, you know, we’re the U.S.A. and everything, and we’re number one. You know what I’m saying?”
A woman’s cackling joined in the festivities of the morning madness on the radio…or whatever this cretinous show was called. In Rick’s experience, wacky morning shows, no matter where in the U.S. they aired, were invariably called “Morning Madness,” or “Morning Madhouse,” or “Morning Zoo” or some such iteration on the phrase.
“Little Timmy for president!” the woman’s voice on the radio said.
“For real!” said the star. “Eileen, you’re a genius.”
“But yeah, brah,” said Little Timmy. “This is like total bogus, you know what I’m saying? We like saved the Philippines during World War One…you know?”
Eileen howled with laughter.
“I heard about this big granite ball showing up in the jungle in the Philippines last night,” the star of the show said, “and, you know, it just makes my blood boil.”
> “It pisses me off, Jazzy Jim!” Little Timmy said.
“We have far superior jungles to anything they got in the Philippines,” Eileen opined with mock graven seriousness.
“And we’ve been hearing all this stuff about people all over Hawaii hearing vibrations and everything,” the star, Jazzy Jim, said, “and we still don’t get a granite ball of our own. So what’s that all about? And, you know, those douches in California’ve already gotten three balls.”
“I hate California!” Little Timmy blurted out.
“Tell me about it,” said Jazzy Jim.
“I want balls right here in Hawaii,” Eileen added. “The Philippines are like in the big-ball club now, and we still got nothing.”
“I feel for you because you really love balls, don’t you, Eileen?” said Jazzy Jim.
Little Timmy let out a round of lascivious, snorting laughter.
“What can I say, Jazzy Jim?” Eileen replied. “I totally love balls. Great big, massive balls. I can’t get enough of ‘em.”
“All right, so if the aliens or whatever are monitoring the airwaves now, we demand our own balls right here in Hawaii, in the U.S. of A. For Eileen’s sake.”
“Pleeeeeze!” Eileen whined.
“All right,” said Jazzy Jim. “So how about we send a message to the aliens from AC/DC with an oldie but a goodie. What else? ‘Big Balls’….”
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