When the Dust Fell, page 13
She looked at him hoping to read his face, hoping to see something there that might make his request seem less mercenary. Less heartless. She saw nothing. He never took his ice-colored eyes off the view ahead. She turned away from him and wiped her face, certain now there’d be no more tears. She looked out through the front windscreen as the big helicopter accelerated forwards toward Amsterdam. Clouds had moved in and the sun had lost its brilliance.
After several moments, she put the spool of gold on the console between them. Galygin took the gold and pushed it into the big, flapped pocket of his Russian army jacket.
“I understand,” she said softly, more for herself than for him.
17
The bang was loud and accompanied by the sickening sound of metal ripping. Before Sarah could ask what had happened, or scream the question, the chopper pitched violently to the left and the cabin filled with shrill, short blasts of sirens along with a woman’s urgent voice repeating a single word in Russian over and over. She didn’t need to know the language to know something very bad was going on.
“What’s happening?” Sarah finally managed to shout. “Did we hit something?”
“Radio tower maybe.”
She tried to orient herself to the topography, but night had fallen and wherever they were had no electricity. The view out the windscreen was nearly pitch black. Her only sense of orientation came from her stomach, which did not have good news to share. They had definitely stopped their forward momentum.
“Is it bad?” she yelled over the din of the cockpit’s warning system, hoping for an answer that contradicted everything the blinking lights and the woman’s pleading, digital voice told her. The aircraft began to spin, providing an answer of its own.
“We lost the rear rotor.” Despite the g-forces that were making her queasy, and the obvious struggle he was having with the stick, Alexey Galygin’s voice had no panic in it at all.
“We’re going to crash, aren’t we?” Sarah said.
“We’re going to land, soon, yes.” He turned to her with eyes that almost looked apologetic. Until he laughed.
18
When the Kalelah had crashed Sarah hadn’t actually thought about dying. The ship listed dramatically, sharply enough to sweep Captain Laird from her feet and everyone around her as well. They all slid swiftly downward toward the leading edge of the ship. The same thing happened to all of the more than twenty-two thousand crew members. It was a scene from the sinking of any great sailing vessel. Rooms of people tumbling, screaming, weeping. The doors of storage compartments thrown open, their contents exploding outward into the cascading chaos. In fact, for Laird and hundreds more, the crash had proved fatal. Sarah, however, had felt no fear. As she was sliding across the tiles of the plaza floor, gravity clasped firmly around her ankles and yanking downward like she had no weight at all, her elbows heating up from the friction, she had never once considered the possibly of her death.
The Kalelah was so enormous, so solid, so weighty, and in her Earthly eyes so completely magical, Sarah hadn’t imagined the real implications of the sudden shift in attitude that had her and everyone around her falling uncontrollably toward the far wall of the grand plaza of the main stem. By layer upon layer of nanowool, by the bolts and straps that kept the heaviest and most lethal objects in place, by her distance from any alarms that might have been sounding in the CC, by the glass that didn’t shatter and the wind that didn’t sting her face, she had been shielded from the actual violence of the crash. The crash of one city falling upon another.
The falling Mi-26 was different. Big as it was, it felt helpless against the forces of untamed torque and gravity hauling it downward in nauseating spirals. The crash seemed to take hours. By miracle, or perhaps the last-ditch effort of the stone-cold Galygin, the monstrous machine managed to spin itself onto an outcropping of equally giant oak trees. The grove acted like an accidental catcher in the rye, its thicket of ancient limbs absorbing the chopper’s thrashing energy until it was released again in a less potent form by their own breaking. All the parties not yet dead were screaming at the top of their lungs: Sarah, the trees, and the skin and bones of the world’s most powerful helicopter, its aluminum screeching a frightening aria of danger as it tore. In the end, the Mi-26 plowed a ten-tree clearing in the grove before it stopped. Sarah was awake through it all.
In the movies, helicopters didn’t simply fall down. They fell down and blew up. This Law of Hollywood was the first thing to run through her mind as she hung upside down, still securely strapped to her seat by the thick, four-point harness. The aircraft that, to her, had always smelled of gasoline was now reeking with the odor of fuel. She took quick stock of herself. There were small pieces of tempered glass in her mouth and lots more in her hair, but she could move her fingers and toes, and nothing felt broken.
Fucking metal clothes.
Shielded only by the cotton of his shirt and the leather of his Russian Army jacket, Galygin was not so well protected. A six-inch branch of oak tree had pierced his side of the windscreen, his chest, and the back of the pilot’s seat. He hung lifeless, blood dripping from behind his seat, his eyes open and colored in a new, colder shade of ice.
She reached over to the pocket where he had stashed the gold meant for the Pols and the African and retrieved the ball. Careful not to let herself simply fall the eight feet down to the ceiling of the helicopter, she raised her legs until her feet were as close to over her head as she could manage. She unlatched the center buckle on the harness and as the straps flew away, she kept hold of the buckle and rolled backward feetfirst out of the seat until she was three feet from the ceiling and then let go of the buckle. She found her bag quickly but didn’t even try to find where Galygin had stashed her original down payment. Those movie images of fireball crashes were burning brightly in her mind and telling her to get out and away as quickly as possible.
Sarah ran to the door and yanked up on the lever. Nothing. She tried again, harder, her panic raising. Again, nothing. It took three more tries, each more frantic than the last before she remembered the door was upside down. To open it now, she’d have to push down rather than lift up. She cursed herself, pushed down, put her shoulder into it, and the door flew open. The stairs were above her and useless, even if they could still be deployed. It was a good ten feet down from the door opening to, well, she didn’t know what.
When she was a little girl, probably seven, she had climbed up onto the roof of the shed in the backyard. She had taken the ladder from inside and propped it up against the wall and hoisted herself on top. The shed, a bright red miniature barn purchased as a kit from Home Depot, had been a pride point of Jack’s. He had poured its slab foundation and assembled it himself and had often said it was the one thing about where they lived that wasn’t falling apart. The rest of the property, the weedy lot and the shotgun bungalow her mother insisted on calling a cottage, were leftovers from her mother’s first marriage and therefore, according to Jack, were not his problem. “You can’t fix stupid,” he liked to say, quoting the chipped coffee mug he carried around for hours every morning.
While the gambrel peak of the little barn roof had been no more than eight feet high, and the vantage it offered hadn’t even matched the view from the bedroom window she shared with her sister, mastering the climb and conquering the ridge had been exhilarating. She had sat up there in the summer sun feeling tall and grown up for nearly an hour. It was only when she’d decided to come down from the roof and discovered that the ladder was gone that her thrill took a turn toward something else.
“What’d I tell you about my stuff, Blon-dee?”
Jack.
She had to carefully turn the other way and climb back up to the ridge to face the sound of his voice. He was sitting on the tiny porch behind the kitchen door, his feet on the crooked step below, his legs akimbo, a cigarette dangling loosely from between the first two fingers of his right hand. He was smiling the way he always did right before he’d insult her mother’s cooking, Sarah’s hair, or her sister’s acne. It was the same smile that appeared before he’d lock Sarah and her sister in their room for watching the wrong TV channel.
“Not to touch it,” she had answered, that familiar coldness already creeping into her stomach.
“Ah, you do know the rules.” He gestured his cigarette over toward the ladder that was now leaning up against a tall weed tree between the back of the house and the little red barn. “So what got into that dumb, Blon-dee head of yours?”
Blon-dee. She hated that word, and the mocking tone that had always accompanied it. She never answered his question about what had gotten in her head. Curiosity, adventure, challenge, accomplishment—these were all ideas she didn’t quite have the words for then. Not that it would have mattered if she had. There’d never been any real answers to Jack’s questions. He had simply been taunting her. Manipulating her. The same way he’d been taunting and manipulating her mother since the first day he’d come to live with them.
He stood and flicked his cigarette across the yard. “Well, I guess you’ll have to figure out another way down from my shed roof. And that ladder better be back where I put it when I come out here again.”
He turned to go back into the house. Sarah had watched him and caught a glimpse of her mother in the kitchen window looking out toward the shed, nibbling at her nails. When the kitchen door slammed shut, her mother quickly dropped her hand and turned away from the window.
It had taken Sarah more than an hour to get down from that roof. Eventually, she had gotten on her stomach and slowly backed herself off the roof until she was hanging from the edge, the sharp pebbles of the asphalt shingles digging into her fingertips. After a minute of that, she had simply let go, landing heels first and falling backward hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She lay on the ground trying to catch her breath waiting for her mother to come. She never did.
Sarah stood at the edge of the chopper now contemplating once again the best way down from a ledge she shouldn’t have been standing on in the first place. The fastest way was to jump. Her sister, the baby, Trin, they all flooded her mind at once.
“Now would be a really stupid time to break a leg,” she said aloud. She sat down on the sill and eased herself off the edge, like she had on that shed roof, and managed a shorter, controlled drop. Once her feet hit the ground, she ran like hell.
It was so dark she tripped twice in the first few seconds of her run. She scrambled up fast each time and sprinted in long, adrenaline-pumped strides until she reached a clearing. The going there was not much easier. The grass was thigh deep and she could feel ruts in the earth as she ran. She stopped to get her bearings and catch her breath. She bent over, her hands on her knees, gulped air, and waited for the sound of the fuel tank exploding. It never came. After a few minutes her eyes adjusted better to the dark. She had no idea where she was or which direction to run. Behind her she could see the black shape of the small woods out of which she had just come. She considered pulling out the communicator from her pack. She could use its locator function to calculate which way was north. It would make things a lot easier for her. It could also risk alerting Trin. The second she powered it on Kalelah would know where she was. Meaning, if Trin were fusing with the Code when she hit the switch, he’d know where she was. It would undo everything she’d done to keep him from following her. Everything she’d done to keep him safe. She kept the communicator in the bag.
Across the field was the dark silhouette of more trees. Beyond that she saw the straight lines and angles of small buildings. A town, perhaps. She considered hunkering down right where she was until the sun came up and offered a sense of direction. The grass was a good cover, which meant it was likely a great place for animals to hide as well.
No thanks.
Sarah headed for the buildings.
If it was a town, it was a small one. A short cluster of buildings huddled up along a narrow river. All around her were the dark shadows of shapes in the moonless night. No lights in any windows and no sounds except for the gentle murmur of the water as it moved past the pilings, rocks, and empty docks that defined the river’s shore. If this place wasn’t abandoned, it did a pretty good job of pretending to be. She scanned the little streets that ran perpendicular to the river as she walked. While the dead dark of the night kept her field of vision short, there didn’t appear to be any vehicles on the streets. The little one-story buildings and homes that faced the river had the lonely look of places without people. The adrenaline that propelled her run from the crash had ebbed now, and she was growing tired. She stopped in front of a little house with a squat gable roof and considered testing the door. She shook her head. She’d had enough surprises already and breaking into a house was like begging for another. She kept walking.
On the next short block, she could make out the darker form of a steeple against the gloom of the sky. She picked up her pace. The church was hardly bigger than the little house on the previous block. She walked slowly up the three shallow stone stairs to the landing. There were no windows on the river-fronting face of the building, only the slat wooden door. She pushed it gently and it moved without resistance. She kept going until the door was open enough for her to squeeze through and stood there on the other side for a moment.
The space inside was yet a deeper shade of dark, her field of vision falling off to nothing more than a few feet in front of her. She carefully headed toward the low black shadow of the pews up ahead. She slid onto the bench of the pew closest to the door, her pack at her side, her back straight and her ears straining to catch the slightest notice of danger. After a minute she brought her feet up on the bench, curled her knees up close, and made a pillow of her pack. Down in the pew row the darkness was near absolute, and she let it blanket her. Despite not knowing who or what else might be there in the church with her, Sarah’s fatigue won out over the events of the last hour. Sleep came quickly.
19
She awoke to the sound of a woman’s voice.
“Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle, tu dois te réveiller! Tu dois te réveiller!”
Sarah bolted upright. A woman stood at the end of the pew. Behind her the gothic shapes of windows were softly cut out from the dark by the dull, blue light of the early dawn.
“Ce n’est pas sûr ici.”
Sarah grabbed her pack and quickly stood, using the top edge of the next pew to steady herself. She was startled and confused all at once. Mental shards of the previous night crashed in on her efforts to wake and make sense of the situation.
“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I was lost last night and really tired. The door was open, so I came in.” She brought the pack to her chest and wrapped both arms around it tightly, quickly surveyed the space, and pushed past the woman toward the door she had used a few hours before. “Look, I’m going. No problem, okay?”
“Wait,” the woman said. “I did not mean to frighten you.”
Sarah stopped. “I’m not frightened. I just don’t want any trouble.”
“Moi non plus. I don’t also.”
Sarah took a moment to actually look at the woman. She was short and thin, older than Sarah, though maybe not by much, and dark-skinned, pretty with a sharp nose and thick brows. Her two most prominent features were her eyes, big pools of worried brown, and her hair. Or more accurately, her mane. It was black, thick, pulled away from her face, and tied somehow in the back. Yet even restrained, it still managed to wave and curl with abandon. Messy, dirty, and somehow still beautiful. Regal. It was the hair of a warrior princess, not of the frightened mouse standing at the end of the pew, picking at a thumbnail with an index finger.
“Then why wake me?” Sarah asked.
The woman’s face softened in apology. “It is dangerous for you.”
Sarah looked toward the door. “To sleep?”
“To be unaware. The world appears empty. But people…they are everywhere.” She said this with the gravity of a warning, as if she was talking about invisible deadly germs.
There was something about the woman that both worried Sarah and coaxed from her a wave of pity. She’d clearly been wearing the same clothes for weeks straight. Once, in a time Before, they were stylish and expensive. Now they were scuffed and shiny from dirt. A fitted, short leather coat, dark, tight jeans tucked into designer riding boots, high on the calf with short heels, a big leather purse, bulging with belongings and slung crossways over her chest. If she lived in this town, she didn’t dress the part. If she were traveling, she didn’t look ready for it.
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Thanks.” She began her way to the door again.
“You were in the helicopter, yes?” the woman called after her.
Sarah stopped once more and turned back to the woman.
“I saw it last night,” the woman said. “It was flying so low. Then I heard the crash. You have a scratch on your cheek and a bruise under your eye.”
Sarah reached a hand to her face. She hadn’t even noticed the scratch last night. “We hit something. An antenna maybe. I don’t know.”
“The pilot is dead.”
“You saw the wreck?”
“I thought maybe someone needed help.”
Sarah doubted that was the reason. The woman didn’t seem like the first-responder type. “Did you follow me here?”
The woman’s eyes darted away from Sarah’s. “As I said, it is dangerous for you.”
“I can handle myself. But thank you for your…concern. Merci.” Sarah turned to leave, and the woman grabbed her arm. It wasn’t a forceful hold. It had the soft desperation of a frightened child’s reach and Sarah made no moves to shake free or resist the gesture. The woman let go quickly and backed away just the same.
