The Last Star (22 page)

53

WE’RE HEADING BACK
to the hole when Cassie and the kids emerge from the basement of the demolished safe house, loaded down with blankets.

“Zombie,” Nugget calls out. He races over, the stack of blankets in his arms bopping up and down as he runs. He pulls up when he gets a close look at Ringer’s face. Right away he knows something’s wrong; only dogs read faces better than little kids.

“What is it, Private?” I ask.

“Cassie won’t let me have a gun.”

“I’m working on that.”

His face screws up. He’s dubious.

I poke him in the arm with a loose fist and add, “Lemme bury Ringer first. Then we’ll talk about weapons.”

Cassie comes up, half leading, half dragging Megan by the wrist. I hope she hangs on tight. I have a feeling if she lets go, that girl’s taking off. Ringer jerks her head toward the garage,
in there,
and says, “Ten minutes till the chopper.”

“How do you know?” Sullivan asks.

“I can hear it.”

Cassie shoots me a look accompanied by a raised eyebrow.
Get
that? She says she can hear it.
While all anyone else can hear is the wind driving over the barren fields.

“What’s the hose for?” she asks me.

“So I don’t black out or suffocate,” Ringer answers.

“I thought you were—what did you call it?—enhanced.”

“I am. But I still need oxygen.”

“Like a shark,” Cassie says.

Ringer nods. “Like that.”

Sullivan leads the kids into the garage. Ringer drops into the hole and lies flat on her back in the dirt. I pick up the rifle where she dropped it and lower it toward her. She shakes her head. “Leave it up there.”

“You sure?”

She nods. Her face is bathed in starlight. I catch my breath.

“What?” she asks.

I look away. “Nothing.”

“Zombie.”

I clear my throat. “It’s not important. I just thought—for a minute there—flashed across my mind . . .”

“Zombie.”

“Okay. You’re beautiful. That’s all. I mean—you wanted to know . . .”

“You get sentimental at the weirdest times. Hose.”

I drop one end down. She closes her mouth over the opening and gives me the thumbs-up.

I can hear the chopper now, faint but growing louder. I shovel the dirt over her, sweeping it into the hole with my right hand while I hang on to the hose with my left. She doesn’t need to say the words; I can read them in her eyes.
Hurry, Zombie.

The sickening sound of the dirt hitting her body. I decide not
to look. I watch the sky as I bury her, gripping the end of the hose so hard, my knuckles turn white. The nearly endless number of ways this can go wrong races through my mind. What if there’s a full squad on board that chopper? What if it isn’t just one Black Hawk but two? Or three, or four? What if, what if, what if, what if,
whatever.

I’m not going to make it back to the garage in time. Ringer is completely covered now, but I’m out in the open with a shot-up leg and a hundred yards to cross before the chopper—which I can see silhouetted against the backdrop of stars, a black naught against the glittering white—is in range. Never tried to run with a bullet in my leg. Never had to. Guess there’s a first time for everything.

I don’t make it very far. Maybe forty-five, fifty yards. I pitch forward, landing face-first in the dirt. Why the hell didn’t
Cassie
bury Ringer? Would make more sense for me to hunker down with the kids, and besides, Sullivan would probably leap at the chance.

I heave myself upright. I’m vertical maybe five seconds, and then I’m down again. It’s too late. I have to be within range of their infrared by now.

A pair of boots pounds toward me. A pair of hands haul me up. Cassie throws my arm around her neck and pulls me forward as I swing my bad leg around, hop with my good one, swing the bad one, but she bears most of the load. Who needs a 12th System when you have a heart like Cassie Sullivan’s?

We fall into the bay of the garage and Cassie hurls a blanket at me. The kids are already covered, and I shout “Not yet!” Their body heat will gather beneath the material, defeating the purpose.

“Wait for my go,” I tell them. Then, to Cassie: “You’ve got this.”

Incredibly, she smiles at me and nods. “I know.”

54

CASSIE

“NOW!” BEN SHOUTS,
probably too late: The chopper thunders over us. We dive under the blankets, and I begin the countdown.

How will I know when it’s time?
I asked Ringer.

After two minutes.

Why two?

If we can’t do it in two minutes, it can’t be done.

What did that mean? I didn’t ask, but now I suspect that two is just a random number she pulled out of her ass.

I count it out anyway.

. . . 58 one thousand, 59 one thousand, 60 one thousand . . .

The old blanket stinks of mildew and rat piss. I can’t see a damn thing. What I hear—all I hear—is the helicopter, which sounds like it’s two feet away. Has it landed? Has the recovery team been deployed to check out the mysterious mound of dirt that looks suspiciously like a grave? The questions roll across the landscape of my mind like a slow-crawling fog; it’s hard to think when you’re counting—maybe that’s why it’s a recommended sleeping aid.

. . . 92 one thousand, 93 one thousand, 94 one thousand . . .

I’m having trouble breathing. This may have something to do with the fact that I’m slowly suffocating.

Somewhere around 75 one thousand, the chopper’s engines had revved down. Not stopped, just the pitch and volume dipped. Landed? At 95 one thousand, the engines pick up again. Do I stay
here until Ringer’s arbitrary two minutes are up or do I listen to that wise little voice screeching in my ear,
Go, go, go, go
now
!

At 97 one thousand, I go.

And damn does the world seem blindingly bright after bursting from my woolen cocoon.

Clear the bay doors, sharp right, then fields, trees, stars, road, and
chopper,
six feet off the ground.

And rising.

Crap.

Beside the Ringer-hole, a whirling shadow by the broken earth and another shadow that moves so slow in comparison, it seems as if it isn’t moving at all. Ringer’s sprung her trap on the search party.
Sayonara, search party!

I’m running full out toward the Black Hawk, and the supplies in my uniform make me feel like I’m weighed down with bricks, the rifle bouncing against my back, and, shit, it’s too far away and rising too fast,
pull up, Cassie, pull
up,
you’re not going to make it,
time for Plan B only we don’t have a Plan B,
and two minutes, what was that, Ringer? If you’re the tactical genius in this operation, then we’re so totally screwed,
and the space shrinks between me and the chopper while its nose dips slightly, and
how good’s your vertical, Sullivan?

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.