by Richard Bard
In the mirror, Tariq’s face paled, his eyes lolled, and his head slumped forward in his seat.
Jake pushed the throttles to the max. He put the Pitts into a high-speed climb toward the Pacific Ocean. He had to move fast. Tariq would regain consciousness in less than thirty seconds. He’d be disoriented for a minute or so, but that wouldn’t prevent him from detonating the explosives strapped to his chest.
Or those he’d placed at the school.
At two thousand feet, Jake reduced power and trimmed the nose into a shallow dive toward the water. He unfastened his safety harness and headset, flipped a middle finger to the unconscious man in the backseat, and jumped out of the plane.
Chapter 4
Malaga Cove, California
THE ROUND CANOPY OF THE EMERGENCY CHUTE snapped open above him, jerking Jake from his tumbling free fall into a controlled, eighteen-feet-per-second descent. His pounding heart felt like it wanted to break out of his chest. For just a moment, he felt a slight tingling in his left hand. His breath was short. He sucked in deep lungfuls of air to calm himself. The sensation passed.
The altimeter on his watch read fifteen hundred feet. He was over the water but the breeze was pushing him back toward the shore. In ninety seconds he’d be on the ground, or at least in the breakers. Craning his neck over his shoulder, Jake watched as the Pitts descended toward the dark blue water. The starboard wings of the biplane began a slow dip as it lost trim. In another few seconds, the double wingtips would strike the water and the plane would cartwheel to a gut-wrenching end.
Jake reached for the smart phone he usually kept in his breast pocket. He came up empty-handed. The phone was still in its cockpit holster on the plane. Too bad, he thought. The crash would’ve made a great YouTube video. In any case, the violent scene he was about to witness would be forever ingrained in his brain. Like so many others.
Jake watched in fascination, counting down the seconds to impact. A small part of him would die with the loss of the Pitts, but every part of him was glad to say good riddance to the suicide bomber in the backseat—and the detonator that threatened to blow up the people he loved. He prayed that Francesca had heard his warning.
The Pitts was at eighty feet and dropping fast. The wings dipped farther.
Right…about…n—
The biplane’s altitude shifted abruptly. The lower wingtips jerked upward. The whine of the three-bladed prop surged. The plane leveled off just above the undulating water. Every nerve in Jake’s body seemed to fire off simultaneously. He jerked his head toward the approaching shore, willing himself to fall faster. Five hundred feet above the water. The school’s nearly a mile away.
The drone of the plane behind him increased in pitch. Jake twisted in his harness to get a better look. The Pitts accelerated as it skimmed over the water. It was headed straight for him. It didn’t take a genius to calculate that the plane would be on him before he completed his descent. He pulled down on the starboard riser, twisting to face the approaching plane. With both hands on the risers, he fought to maintain his position against the offshore wind.
At three seconds before impact, Jake was sixty feet over the water. The Pitts streaked straight at him.
Two seconds.
Now!
Jake dropped his hands and snapped open the chute’s quick-release levers. He slipped out of the harness and fell like a stone.
Before he hit the water, Jake saw the Pitts veer sharply away from the collapsing chute. It headed directly toward Francesca’s school.
**
Francesca knew better than to hesitate when she received Jake’s mental warning. “Bradley,” she said as she raced over and pulled the red fire alarm handle on the wall. “Get the kids out of the building now!” She grabbed her cell phone from the desk, punched in 9–1–1, and rushed into the hallway. Sarafina was at her side.
With the phone clasped to her ear, Francesca shoved open the door to the next classroom. The startled teacher and children were lined up at the window. “Quickly,” Francesca shouted, her voice controlled but urgent. “Outside. Now. This is not a drill.”
Before she could elaborate, the emergency operator came on the line. “Nine-one-one. State the nature of your emergency.”
Francesca turned her back to the class. She cupped her hand over the phone. “I’m calling from the Hathaway Middle School. There’s a bomb in the building. This is real. Get here fast!” She snapped the phone closed, took Sarafina by the hand, and ran to the next classroom.
**
Jake’s head broke the surface of the water. He took a huge gasp of air, ripped off his leather helmet, kicked off his flight boots, and broke for the shoreline fifty yards away. He saw the Pitts circle toward the school.
Jake’s brain kicked his muscles into afterburner. The crests of the breaking waves in front of him seemed to suddenly move in slow motion. Licks of foam reached upward like rising oil in a lava lamp. A pair of surfers sat on their boards, their mouths agape as Jake sliced through the water. It must have looked to them like a fast-forward video of Michael Phelps at the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Jake embraced the changes that had occurred to his brain. A freak accident during an earthquake had caused the MRI scanner he was in to go haywire and send him into a seizure, giving him incredible mental and physical capabilities afterward. One of the most shocking changes was the ability to move very fast for short periods of time. Like the burst of strength a parent might find to lift a car to save their child, it seemed Jake was able to call upon that ability at will. The accident had also sent his terminal cancer into what he prayed was a permanent remission.
As soon as Jake’s knees scraped the sand, he peeled off his soggy socks and charged toward the rocky escarpment that hugged the coastline. The incline was steep. He scrambled upward on all fours as sharp-edged rocks cut into his feet. He ignored the pain, but the swim to shore had sapped his reserves. His heart raced like a machine gun. He couldn’t seem to draw enough air into his lungs to keep up with the demand for oxygen. A wave of dizziness assaulted him.
But he refused to slow. The ridgeline was just ahead. Jake pulled himself over the edge and pushed to his feet. He was at the edge of the hillside neighborhood that fronted the school. A quarter mile to go. He looked up at the plane circling over the school. Jake knew in his gut that Tariq was watching him. Taunting him.
He sprinted toward the road, his bleeding feet slapping painfully against the concrete. The wings of the Pitts wagged in the universal sign of acknowledgment.
Then it dipped from view.
A moment later there was a huge explosion over the ridge. From his vantage point, Jake could see only the top edge of the fireball that rose over the rooftops in front of him. Chunks of debris spewed into the sky.
“Noooo!” Jake screamed.
###
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Author Bio
Richard Bard draws on his own experiences as a former USAF pilot and cancer survivor to craft compelling characters who risk it all for love and loyalty. Born in Munich, Germany, to American parents, he joined the United States Air Force like his father. But he left the service when he was diagnosed with cancer and learned he had only months to live. He earned a management degree from the University of Notre Dame and ran three successful companies involving advanced security products used by US embassies and governments worldwide. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Redondo Beach, California, with his wife and remains in excellent health.
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Acknowledgments
Brain
rush is my first novel. It was a lifetime in the making—which means that the list of people to thank stretches from here to forever. So instead of listing them all—in this first of what I hope will be many acknowledgments—I’d like to share some insight on what inspired Jake’s story, while offering my heartfelt gratitude to the most important person of all:
My mother always said, “Ricky, you can do anything you set your mind to.” I believed her. If I failed at something, I figured it was simply because I hadn’t done it right. So I’d try again. I can’t tell you how many times I sat in church, or class, or the library and stared at the back of someone’s head, focusing my thoughts, willing them to turn around, or sneeze, or twitch—anything! (Yes, I really did that.) Of course it never worked. But I never stopped trying, no matter how impossible it seemed. I’d hear stories about people with photographic memories, or ESP, or incredible math or artistic skills, and I’d think, “Hey, if they can do it, why can’t I?”
Some people are so gifted that their abilities boggle the mind. Like Kim Peek, the autistic savant that inspired the movie, Rain Man (1988), whose incredible brain allowed him to recount countless ball-player statistics in exacting detail. He even memorized a good portion of the phone book, among other things. Or the legally blind crayon artist, Richard Wayro, whose works sells for up to $10,000 each, one of which resides on the Pope’s wall. Or what about Stephen Wiltshire? After only a fifteen minute helicopter ride over London he spent the next five days drawing a highly detailed 12-foot mural depicting seven square miles of the city, right down to every street, building and window. Incredible.
My research for the Brainrush series revealed that there are a growing number of accounts of “ordinary” people that develop incredible mental and physical abilities following trauma to the head. In one example, ten-year-old Orlando Serrell was hit in the head by a baseball. Not long afterward he was able to recall an endless list of license-plate numbers, song lyrics, and weather reports—as if a switch had suddenly been thrown in his brain. That suggests the abilities were resident in his brain in the first place, just waiting to be unlocked, right? This “sudden genius” or “acquired savant” has been the focus of study by Dr. Darold Treffert, a recognized expert in the field. His book Islands of Genius is packed full of similar examples.
Other groups, including one led by Dr. Alan Snyder, who holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind at the University of Sydney, are working on methods to unlock these abilities—without the need for a fastball to the noggin. What’s it going to be like, when each and every one of us is able to tap into that well of creative genius?
The world as we know it will cease to exist.
So I guess my mother was right. Not just about me, but about all of us. We can do anything we set our minds to. For me, I’ve decided to write. Maybe later, after the technology’s been developed to throw that switch in my brain, I’ll become a concert pianist. In the meantime, if you’re sitting in church or the library someday and you suddenly feel an unusual tingling at the back of your head, turn around and make my day.
Thanks, Mom.