I leap. Time stops. The chopper hangs suspended like a mobile above my fully extended body—even my toes are pointed—and there is no sound anymore or draft from the blades lifting the Black Hawk up or pushing my body down.
There was this little girl—she’s gone now—with skinny little arms and bony little legs and a head topped with bouncy red curls and a (very straight) nose with a special talent only she and her daddy knew about.
She could fly.
My outstretched fingers banged on the edge of the open cargo doorway. I caught hold of something cold and metallic, and I locked down on it with both hands as the chopper soared straight up and the ground sped away from my kicking feet. Fifty feet up, a hundred, and I sway back and forth, trying to swing my foot onto the platform. Two hundred feet, two-fifty, and my right hand slips, I’m hanging on with just the left now, and the noise is deafening, so I can’t hear myself scream. Looking down, I see the garage and the house across the street from the garage and down the road the black smudge of where Grace’s house once stood. Starlight-bathed fields and woods shining silver-gray and the road stretching from horizon to horizon.
I’m going to fall.
At least it will be quick. Splat, like a bug against a windshield.
My left hand slips; thumb, pinky, and ring fingers thrum empty air; I’m attached to the chopper by two fingers now.
Then those fingers slide off, too.
55
I’VE LEARNED it is possible to hear yourself scream over the jet engines of a Black Hawk helicopter after all.
Also, it isn’t true that your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. The only things that flash before mine are Bear’s eyes, unblinking plastic, bottomless, soullessly soulful.
There’s several hundred feet to fall. I fall less than one, jerking to a stop so hard, my shoulder’s nearly ripped from its socket. I caught nothing to abort the plunge; someone caught me, and now that someone is hauling me on board.
I’m slung facedown onto the floor of the chopper’s hold. First it’s like, I’m alive! Then it’s all, I’m going to die! Because whoever rescued me is yanking me upright, and I have basically three choices, four if you include the false choice of the gun, because firing a gun within the metallic cocoon of a helicopter is a very bad idea.
I’ve got my fists, the pepper spray contained in one of the twenty-nine million pockets of my new uniform, or the hardest, most terrifying weapon in all of Cassie Sullivan’s formidable arsenal: her head.
I whip around and smash my forehead into the center of the face, crunch!, breaking a nose, and then there is blood. As in a lot of blood, practically a geyser, but the blow has no other effect. She doesn’t move an inch. She doesn’t even blink. She’s been—what word did she use to describe the incredibly creepy and scary thing Vosch did to her?—enhanced.
“Easy there, Sullivan,” Ringer says, turning her head to spit out a golf-ball-sized wad of blood.
56
RINGER
I PUSH SULLIVAN down into a seat and shout in her ear, “Get ready to bail!” She doesn’t say anything, just stares up into my bloody face uncomprehendingly. Arteries cauterized by the microscopic drones swarming in my bloodstream, pain receptors shut down by the hub; I may look horrible, but I feel great.
I climb over her to the cockpit and plop into the copilot’s seat. The pilot recognizes me immediately.
It’s Lieutenant Bob. The same Lieutenant Bob whose finger I broke in my “escape” with Razor and Teacup.
“Holy shit,” he shouts. “You!”
“Back from the grave!” I yell, which is literally true. I jab my finger at our feet. “Put her down!”
“Fuck you!”
I react without thinking. The hub decides for me—and that’s the terrifying thing about the 12th System: I don’t know anymore where it ends and I begin. Not fully human, not wholly alien, neither, both, something loosed within me, something unbound.
Afterward I realize the brilliance of it: The most precious commodity of any pilot is his sight.
I rip off his helmet and shove my thumb into his eye. His legs kick; his hand flies up to grab my wrist; and the chopper’s nose dips. I intercept his hand and guide it back to the stick as I pour myself into him: Where there is panic, calm. Where there is fear, peace. Where there is pain, comfort.
I know he won’t go all kamikaze on us, because no part of him is hidden from me. I know the desires he would deny even to himself, and there is no desire within him to die.
As there is no doubt in his mind that he needs me to live.
57
ZOMBIE WAS RIGHT all those months ago: As sanctuaries in the apocalypse went, the caverns of West Liberty were damn hard to beat.
No wonder the Silencer priest claimed them for his own.
Gallons of fresh water. An entire chamber stocked with dry and canned goods. Medical supplies, bedding, cans of heating fuel, kerosene, and gasoline. Clothes, tools, and enough weapons and explosives to outfit a small army. A perfect place to hide, even cozy, if you ignored the smell.
The Ohio Caverns reeked of blood.
The largest chamber was the worst. Deep underground and humid, with very little ventilation. The smell—and the blood—had nowhere to go. The stone floor still shimmers crimson in our lights.
A slaughter took place here. Either the false priest picked up the spent shell casings or he sliced his victims open, one by one. We find a spot against the wall with a sleeping bag, a stack of books (including a well-worn Bible), a kerosene lantern, a bag full of toiletries, and several rosaries.
“Of all the places he could bunk, he chose this spot,” Zombie breathes. He’s pressing a cloth against his face to filter the air. “Crazy SOB.”