“Exactly,” her mother said. “You hear that, Jonathan? The kitchen table is no place for mechanics.”
“Yes, well, this isn't some lawn mower or generator here. This is a radio and radios have hundreds of very small, sensitive parts. Half of which I can't seem to find just now.”
Tanya chuckled and withdrew the pitcher of lemonade.
“But they
are
here,” he said. “Somewhere in this pile. If I'd torn into this mess in that shed, there's no telling where they'd run off to. You'll have your table before supper. I promise.”
“Sure I will.” Her mother winked at Tanya and feigned disgust.
A muffled beating flickered in the back of Tanya's mind, that same hum she'd heard just before entering. Like a moth caught in the window. She poured the yellow drink into her glass. A breeze lifted the curtain from the kitchen window, carrying with it that moth sound.
But it wasn't a moth, was it? Not at all, and that fact occurred to Tanya when the tumbler touched her lips, before she'd drunk any of the lemonade. The sound came from large blades beating at the air. She froze there, her arm cocked. Jonathan lifted his head from the radio pieces.
“What is it?” Tanya asked.
“A helicopter,” her father answered. He turned to his wife. “Were we expecting a helicopter this afternoon?”
Tanya sipped at the liquid, feeling the cool juice flow down her throat.
“Not that I was aware of,” Heidi said and leaned to the window, pushing the curtain aside.
It occurred to Tanya that the helicopter sounded somehow different, a higher pitch than the Hughes she'd grown accustomed to. A layered
whit, whit,
whit
. Maybe two helicopters. Or more.
She lowered the tumbler to her waist, imagining five or six of the things hovering to a landing on their back lawn. Now that would be something different.
The glass in her hand suddenly shattered and she jerked. She dropped her eyes and saw that it had just crumbled like a piece of old dried lace. Glass speckled the wood floor and she thought it would have to be swept before anyone stepped there.
Then every motion fell into a surreal slowness, unfolding like dream fragments. The room shuddered, surrounding her with a rapid thumping sound as if a giant had mistaken the house for a drum set and decided to execute a long roll.
Tha-da-dump, tha-da-dump
.
The counter splintered at her elbow and her father leapt from his chair. Tanya's heart slammed in her chest.
She jerked her head up and watched white holes punch through the ceiling in long ragged strings. She heard the roar of machinery scream overhead and it occurred to her that these were bullet holes in the ceiling. That bullets had slammed into the counter, ripping it apart. That a bullet had smashed her glass.
The realization fell into her mind like an anvil dropped from a high-rise crashing into concrete. She turned toward the window, stunned. An arm grabbed her midsection, throwing her to the wood floor. Her father's voice yelled above the din, but she couldn't make out his words. Her mother was screaming.
Tanya sucked at the air and found her lungs suddenly stubborn. She wondered if she'd been hit. It was as if she could see everything from an outsider's perspective and the scene struck her as absurd. She lowered her eyes to her stomach, feeling gut-punched. Father's hand was there.
“Quickly!” he was yelling. He tugged at her arm. Blood seeped from his shoulder. He'd been hit!
“Get in the cellar! Get into the cellar!” His face twisted like crow's-feet around watery eyes.
He's hurting
, she thought as he shoved her toward the hall. The hall closet had a trapdoor built into its floor. He was motioning for her to climb down the trapdoor and into the cellar, as he called it. Then adrenaline reached her muscles and she bolted.
Tanya yanked the door open and shoved aside a dozen shoes littering the floor. Using her forefinger, she frantically dug at the ring her father had attached to its lip, hooked it with her fingernail, and pulled. The door pried up.
Tears ran down her father's face, past his parted lips. The chopper's engines had retreated for a moment but now they drew near once again. They were returning.
Behind Jonathan, Tanya's mother scooted along the floor toward them, her face ashen white and streaked wet. Blood dripped to the floor from a large hole in her right arm.
Tanya spun back to the trapdoor and thrust it to one side. A thought careened through her skull, suggesting that she had broken her nail while yanking on the trapdoor. Ripped it right off, maybe. Hurt bad enough. She swung her legs into the hole and dropped into darkness.
The cellar was tiny, a box reallyâa crate large enough to hide a few chickens for a few hours. Tanya squeezed to one side, allowing room for her father or mother to drop in beside her. The guns were tearing at the roof again, like a gas-powered chain saw.
“Father, hurry!” Tanya yelled, panic straining her throat.
But Father did not hurry. Father dropped the lid back onto the crate,
Clump,
and pitch-blackness stabbed Tanya's wide eyes.
Above, the bullets were cutting the house up like firewood. Tanya sucked at the black air and threw her arms about to orient herself, suddenly terrified that she'd come down here alone. Above, she could hear her mother screaming and Tanya whimpered below the clamor.
“Mother?”
Her father's muted voice came to her urgently, insisting something, but she could make out only her name.
“Tanya! Ta . . . ugh!”
A faint thud reached into the crate.
Tanya cried out. “Father!”
Her mother had fallen silent too. A numbing chill ripped through Tanya's spine, like one of those chain guns blasting, only along her vertebrae.
And then the hammering stopped. Echoes rang in her ears. Echoes of thumping bullets. Above her only silence. The attack had been from the airâ no soldiers on the ground. Yet.
“Fatherrrrr!” Tanya screamed it, a full-throated, raw scream that bounced back in her face and left her in silence again.
She panted and heard only those echoes. Her chest felt as though it were rupturing, like a submarine hull fallen too deep.
Tanya suddenly knew that she had to get out of this box. She stood from her crouch and her back collided with wood. She reached above her head and shoved upward. It refused to budge. The door had somehow been locked!
Tanya fell back, gasping for air, stretching her eyes in the darkness. But she saw only black, as if it were thick tar instead of emptiness around her. Her right elbow pressed against a wooden slat, her left shoulder bumped a wall, and she began to tremble in the corner like a trapped rat. The musty smell of damp earth swarmed her nostrils.
Tanya lost it then, as if an animal had risen up within herâthe beast of panic. She growled and launched herself elbows first toward the space through which she'd descended. Her arms crashed abruptly into rigid wood and she dropped to her knees, barely feeling the deep gash midpoint between her wrist and elbow.
Trembling, she swung her fists against the wood, dully aware of how little it hurt to smack her knuckles into the hard surface. Impulsively, as a course of reflex alone, she sprang every responding muscle and stood, willing her head to break from the grave.
But her father had built the box from hardwood and she might as well have slammed her crown into a wall of cement. Stars blinded her night and she collapsed to the floor, dead to the world.
Shannon Richterson had watched Tanya down the path, fighting the urge to run after her and insist she stay. She'd glanced back with those bright blue eyes twice, nearly destroying him with each look, and then she'd disappeared from sight.
She'd been gone for an hour when the distant fluttering caught his ears. He lowered the knife he'd been aimlessly whittling with and turned first one ear and then the other to the south, testing the sound carried among a thousand jungle noises. But that was just it; this beating didn't come from the jungle. It was driven by an engine. A helicopter.
Shannon rose to his feet, slipped the knife into the sheath at his waist, and jogged down the path toward the plantation, a mile south. He hadn't noticed a chopper on today's schedule, but that didn't mean anything. His father had probably drummed up something special for Uncle Christian.
Shannon covered the first half-mile at a fast run, taking time to judge his footing with each long stride. Another, harsher sound joined the beating blades and Shannon slid to a stop, a hairline chill nipping at his spine. The sound came againâa whine punctuated with a hundred blitzing detonations. Machine-gun fire!
A chill erupted and blew down Shannon's spine like an arctic wind. His heart froze and then launched him into overdrive. His legs carried him from standstill to a blind sprint in the space of three strides. He streaked over the path and covered the last quarter mile in well under a minute.
Shannon burst from the jungle fifty yards from the two-story Victorian house his father had built fifteen years earlier when they'd first fled Denmark for this remote valley. Two images burned into his mind, like red-hot irons branding a hide.
The first was the two adults who stood in the front lawn, their hands lifted to the cloudsâhis father and Uncle Christian. The image threw abstract details his way. His father wore khakis, as always, but his shirt was untucked. And he wore no shoes, which was also uncommon. They stood there like two children caught at play, facing west, wide-eyed.
The second image stood in the sky to his right. An attack helicopter hovered fifty feet from the earth, a stone's throw before his father, motionless except for the blur of blades on its crown. A round cannon jutted from its nose, stilled for the moment. The thing hung undecided, maybe searching the ground for a landing point, Shannon thought, immediately rejecting the notion. The whole lawn below was a landing pad.
Warning klaxons blared in Shannon's skullâthe kind that go off an instant before impact, the kind that usually render muscles immobile. In Shannon's case his tendons drew him into a crouch. He stood on the edge of the jungle, his arms spread at his hips.
And then the helicopter fired.
Its first burst shifted it to the rear a yard or two. The stream of bullets cut into his father's abdomen, sawing him in two with that first volley. Shannon watched his father's upper torso fold at the waist, before his legs crumpled below him.
A high-pitched scream split the air, and Shannon realized it was a woman's screamâhis mother screaming from the houseâbut then everything was screaming around him. The engine hanging in the sky, screaming; that nose-mounted chain gun, screaming; the jungle to his rear, screaming; and above it all his own mind, screaming.
His uncle whirled and ran for the house.
The helicopter turned on its axis and spit a second burst. The slugs slammed into Uncle Christian's back and threw him through the air, forcing his arms wide like a man being readied for the cross. He sailed though the air, propelled by the stream of leadâtwenty feet at leastâand landed in a heap, broken.
The entire scene unfolded in a few impossible moments, as though stolen from a distant nightmare and replayed here, before Shannon in his own backyard. Only a small terrified wedge in his mind functioned now, and it was having difficulty keeping his heart going, much less properly processing cohesive thoughts.
Shannon stood nailed to the earth, his tendons still frozen in that crouch. His breathing had stopped at some point, maybe when his father had folded. His heart galloped and sweat streamed into his bulging eyes.
Some thoughts slurred through his mind.
Mom? Where are you? Dad, are
you gonna help Mom?
No, Dad's hurt.
And then a hundred voices began to yell at him, screaming for him to move. The helicopter suddenly sank to the ground and he watched four men roll to the ground. They came to their feet, gripping rifles. One of them was dark, he saw that. Maybe Hispanic. The other was . . . white.
The latter saw him and yelled. “The kid . . .”
It was all Shannon heard.
The kid
. In an American accent.
Something in Shannon's skull snapped then, just as the khaki-clad American lifted his rifle. He stared into that man's eyes and two simultaneous instincts flooded his mind. The first was to rush toward the bullet that AK-47 would hurl his wayâspeed its collision with his front teeth. He had no use for life now.
Shannon blinked.
The second instinct blasted down his spine in streams of molten fire, screaming for this man's death before his own. Shannon's muscles responded in the same instant he blinked.
He jerked to his left, snatching his knife from his belt as he moved. He lunged forward in a crouch, snarling, muttering in barely audible gutturals.
Shannon sidestepped midstride and felt the whip of slugs whirl past his right ear.
The soldier dropped to a knee and shifted his sights. Shannon dove to his left and decided there, midair and parallel to the ground, with bullets buffeting the air to his right, that it would have to be now.
At the last moment, he tucked his shoulder under, rolled topsy-turvy twice, and came to his feet with his knife already cocked. He slung the blade sidearm, carrying the momentum of his rise into the delivery.
Everything fell to slow motion then. The man's rifle still fired, following Shannon's tumble, kicking up dust just behind and below, overcompensating for Shannon's forward motion and undercompensating for his lateral movement. The knife spun, butt over blade, crossing the path of bullets, flashing once in the late sun, halfway to the man.
Then the blade buried itself in the man's chest. The soldier staggered back and struck the helicopter's opened door. The gun fell from his hands and Shannon was rolling again.
A second soldier lifted his weapon and Shannon bolted for the corner of the houseâsurvival instincts were shouting above the other voices. He pelted full tilt, arms and legs pumping. Slugs tore into the siding an instant after he crossed into the house's shadow. Without pausing, Shannon veered to his left and raced for the jungle, keeping the house between himself and the helicopter.