UnWholly (46 page)

“I can’t help what I am,” he tells her.

“I know . . . but today you showed me you can help what you do.” And then she leans forward and kisses him on the cheek. He feels it like an electric shock in all the seams of his face. She turns to go, but he can’t let her. Not yet. Not without saying—

“I love you, Risa.”

She glances back at him and offers nothing more than an apologetic smile. “Good-bye, Cam.”

And she’s gone.

It’s only after she leaves that the anger begins to rise in him. Not just a spike, but an eruption, and there’s nowhere for it to go. He takes the chair and hurls it against the vanity mirror, smashing it. He hurls everything that’s breakable against the walls and doesn’t stop until the security guards burst in on him. It takes three guards to restrain him, but still he’s stronger. He has the best of the best in him—every muscle group, every synaptic reflex. He tears free from the guards, bolts down the emergency exit stairs, and meets Roberta in the limo.

“What took you so long?”

“Solitude,” he says. “I needed some time alone.”

“It’s all right, Cam,” she tells him as they drive away. “We’ll get past this.”

“Yes, I know we will.”

But he keeps his true thoughts to himself. Cam will never accept Risa’s good-bye. He will not let her disappear from his life. He will do whatever it takes to have her, to hold her, to keep her. He has all of Roberta’s resources at his fingertips to get what he wants, and he’s going to use them.

Roberta smiles at him reassuringly between phone calls,
and he smiles back. For now Cam will play the game. He’ll be the good rewound boy Roberta wants him to be, but from this moment on, he has a new agenda. He will make Risa’s dream come true and take down Proactive Citizenry piece by bloody piece.

And then she will have no choice but to love him.

Our country is challenged at home and abroad . . . it is our will that is being tried and not our strength.

—P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON
on Vietnam and the school campus war protests, 1968

I have every faith that this devastating national conflict shall be resolved, and that the accord between both sides shall also serve as an ultimate solution to the feral teenage problem. But until that glorious day, I am instituting an eight p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of eighteen.

—P
RESIDENT
M
OSS
on the Heartland War, two weeks prior to his assassination by militant New Jersey separatists

In Southern California, far south of the glitz of Hollywood and far east of the suburban sprawl of San Diego, lies an inland sea as forgotten and as unloved as a state ward AWOL or a harvest camp stork. Hundreds of thousands of years ago it was the northern reach of the Sea of Cortez, before that sea even had a name. But now it’s little more than a giant landlocked salt lake, slowly drying into desert. Too saline for vertebrate life, its fish have all died. Their bones cover the shores like gravel.

At ten minutes to midnight, a plane once heralded as the dream of aviation before it was replaced by newer dreams descends toward the Salton Sea. It is flown by a young military pilot with far more confidence than experience. Barely clearing the mountains around the lake, the jet comes in for what airlines ridiculously call “a water landing.”

It does not go well.

No seatbelts, no seats. No way to brace themselves for a crash landing. “Lock your elbows together! Hook your legs around each other,” Starkey tells them. “We’ll be one another’s seatbelts.”

The storks obey, huddling, locking limbs, turning themselves into a tangled colony of flesh and bone. Sitting on the floorboards, no one can see out the windows to know how close the lake is—but then Trace comes on the intercom. “About
twenty seconds,” he says. Then the angle of their descent changes as he pulls up the nose of the jet.

“See you on the other side,” Starkey says, then realizes once more that it’s something you say when you’re about to die.

Starkey counts down the last twenty seconds in his head, but nothing happens. Was he counting too fast? Did Trace misjudge? If this is twenty seconds, then they’re the longest of his life. Then it finally comes—a jarring jolt, followed by calm.

“Was that it?” someone says. “Is it over?”

There’s another jolt, then another and another, each one coming closer together, and Starkey realizes the plane is skimming like a stone. On the fifth skim, a wing dips, acting like a rudder that pivots the plane to a diagonal, and suddenly it’s the end of the world. The Dreamliner begins to flip end over end, turning cartwheels against the unforgiving surface of the lake.

Inside, the mob of kids is launched from the floorboards and pulled apart by centrifugal force, thrown in two separate clusters to either end of the main cabin. The hooking of arms actually saves many of them, as they’re cushioned by the bodies around them, but those on the outside of the tumbling crush of kids—those acting as the cushions—become the sacrifices. Many of them are killed as they’re slammed against the hard surfaces of the Dreamliner.

The cache of weapons, which had been stowed in the overhead compartments, flies free as well, as those compartments tear loose and burst open. Pistols and rifles and machine guns and grenades become ballistic, creating casualties without ever having to go off.

Wrapped in the forward twist of bodies, Starkey feels his head hit something hard, leaving a gash on his forehead, but that’s nothing compared to the exploding pain in his battered hand.

Finally the tumbling jet comes to rest. The cries and wails
sound like silence compared to the noise of the crash. Then somewhere toward the back of the cabin there’s an explosion: a grenade that lost its pin. It blows a hole in the side of the jet, and water begins to pour in. That’s when the electrical system fails, and they’re plunged into darkness.

“Over here!” Bam calls. She pulls a huge lever and opens the cabin’s front port-side door. A life raft automatically inflates and detaches, then drops to the water, and with a “Sayonara,” Bam leaps right out after it.

Starkey’s instinct is to get out now . . . but if he’s going to be seen as the protector of the storks, then he must be their protector in action, not just words. He waits, shooing kids out the door, making it clear he is not the first one out—but neither does he plan on being the last.

Farther back in the foundering jet, kids pull open wing exits and a midship hatch—but only on the left side. On the right, a slick of jet fuel has ignited in the water and burns beyond the windows.

“The weapons!” Starkey shouts. “Take the weapons! We still have to defend ourselves!” And so kids pick up any and all weapons they can find, throwing them out onto the rafts before jumping out themselves.

The fire outside provides enough light for Starkey to see to the far recesses of the main cabin, and he wishes he hadn’t looked. The dead are everywhere. Blood is smeared on every surface, sticky and thick. But there are more living than dead, and more kids running than crawling. Starkey determines right then and there to save only those who can make it out on their own. The critically injured are just liabilities.

The angle of the floor has quickly changed as the jet begins to sink tail-first. The rear cabin is already flooded, and the water level rises in a steady, relentless surge past the central bulkhead. Then Starkey hears a muffled voice from the front of the jet.

“I need help here!”

Starkey makes his way to the cockpit door and pulls it open. The windshield is shattered, and the entire cockpit is a mess of smashed gauges, open panels, and exposed wires. The pilot’s chair has jammed forward, and Trace is pinned.

Which leaves Starkey in an interesting position.

“Starkey!” says Trace, relieved. “I need you to pull me out of here. I can’t do it by myself.”

“Yes, that’s a problem,” Starkey says. But is it
his
problem? They needed Trace to get them this far, but they don’t need a pilot anymore—and didn’t Trace already threaten to kill him? If Trace survives, from this moment on he’ll be nothing but a threat—and a dangerous one, at that.

“I never had the guts to try the great water escape,” says Starkey. “It killed Houdini, but I’m sure it’ll be easy for a big boeuf like you.” Then he backs out of the cockpit and closes the door.

“Starkey!” Trace yells. “Starkey, you son of a bitch!”

But Starkey’s decision is final, and as he returns to the main hatch, Trace’s muffled voice is drowned out by the sounds of panicking storks. There are about a dozen kids left—the slow ones, the injured ones, the ones afraid to jump because they can’t swim.

“What’s that awful smell?” one of them whines. “What
is
that out there?”

He’s right—there’s a stench to this lake like a fish tank left to putrify, but it’s the least of their problems. Water’s already pooling at their feet, and the floor is at a thirty-degree tilt.

Starkey pushes past the lingering kids. “Jump or drown, you’ve got no other choice, and I’m not waiting for stragglers.” Then he hurls himself out the door and into the foul-smelling brine of the Salton Sea.

Trace’s calls for help go unanswered, and in furious frustration he pounds the console and bucks in the chair, but it doesn’t give. He’s so tightly wedged in by the accordioned cockpit, not even a boeuf of his strength can get out. He forces himself to calm down and review his options. All he can hear now are the diminishing moans and wails of kids too injured to escape, and of course the relentless rush of water. That’s when he realizes there are no options left to him anymore. Starkey made certain of that.

The lake begins to pour in through the broken cockpit window so quickly there’s no time to prepare himself. Trace cranes his neck, trying to keep his head above water as long as he can. Then he takes one deep gulp of air, holds it, and he’s underwater. Suddenly there’s silence all around him except for the metallic complaints of the sinking jet.

His body burns through the last of its oxygen; then, resigned to his fate, Trace releases his final breath. It bubbles away from him in the darkness, and his body gets to the business of drowning. It’s as awful as he ever imagined it might be, but he knows it won’t last long. Five seconds. Ten. Then the injustice of it all doesn’t seem to matter anymore. As the last of his consciousness filters away, Trace holds on to the hope that his choice to fight on the side of the AWOLs instead of the Juvenile Authority will be enough to pay his passage to a truly better place.

The water tastes like rubber and rot and is neither warm nor cold, but tepid, like tea left to steep an hour too long. The last
of the plane disappears beneath the surface, leaving nothing but white water bubbling up through the brine and the fuel slick, which has almost burned itself out. Starkey looks around to see kids in the water, kids on rafts, and kids who’ve drifted too far away to see at all, calling out for help.

There’s a deserted shore just a few hundred yards way. Trace, rest his soul, knew enough to bring them down near the unpopulated side of the huge lake. Even so, people will have seen the crash and will come to investigate. They have to get away from the scene as quickly as possible—the attention of the locals is the last thing they need.

“This way!” Starkey tells them, and starts swimming, pulling himself forward with his good hand. The kids in rafts paddle, the kids in the water swim, and in a few minutes they’re pulling themselves out of the fetid water onto a spongy shore of pulverized fish bones.

Starkey sets Bam to do a head count, and she comes back with 128. They lost forty-one in the crash. Around him the survivors try to tally exactly who is missing, which just makes Starkey angry. Sitting here will do nothing but get them captured. He knows he’s cunning enough to make it on his own; somehow he’s got to extend his survival smarts to all of them.

“Everybody up! We can’t waste our time licking our wounds and mourning the dead. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where do you suggest we go?” asks Bam.

“Right now, anywhere but here.”

Starkey knows he needs to give these kids direction and purpose. Now that they’re free from the holding pen of the Graveyard, their priorities need to change. Connor might have been happy to just keep kids alive, but Starkey has to make this about more than just survival. Under his leadership, his storks can be a force to be reckoned with.

He goes to the nearest kids nursing their exhaustion and
lifts them to their feet by their collars. “Let’s move! We’ll rest when we’re safe.”

“When will we ever be safe?” someone asks. Starkey doesn’t answer, because he knows they’ll probably never be. But that’s all right. They’ve been complacent for too long. Being on the edge will keep them sharp and focused.

As the storks all gather their strength for an uncertain journey on foot, Starkey searches through them until he finds Jeevan, relieved that he’s one of the survivors.