Wounded Earth (37 page)

Cynthia heard the name “Babykiller” and remembered J.D.'s feverish ramblings. So this man beside her was the instigator of this mess. She wished somebody would take her aside and explain to her what was going on. It was taxing, trying to figure it out all by herself.

* * *

Every muscle in Larabeth's body was contracted, waiting for the moment. And there was only one moment—when the helicopter touched the landing pad, while Babykiller's hands were still busy guiding the chopper safely to rest. She shifted the pocketknife in her hand and felt the helicopter lower itself. When it touched the tarmac, she sprang forward.

She screamed, “Cynthia, open your door,” planted her foot in her daughter's side, and kicked her onto the pavement. Babykiller's head was turned slightly toward Cynthia and the cords in his neck stood out. Larabeth picked her spot, the hollow just beneath the jawbone where the pulse is so close to the skin, and she struck. She raised the knife high, seeking leverage and power for her quick overhand thrust. Her aim was true.

She yanked her daughter's little knife from his throat. Then she reached in his shirt pocket, grabbed the cell phone and threw it toward Cynthia. She would have had time to jump out after it before Babykiller reacted, had the phone cleared the doorway.

The cell phone clattered to the floorboard and slid under the passenger seat, and she paused to retrieve it. She had no choice. It represented rescue for her and Cynthia, and for the thousands of souls the General held hostage. As she bent to snatch it, Babykiller drew his scalpel from its sheath.

He raised the weapon and she remembered the taste of unreasoning fear. One night in the neurology ward, a scalpel very like that one had nearly ended her life. She reflexively curled her head toward her lap, shielding her vulnerable abdomen.

Babykiller's initial slash opened her up from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. The pain was a visible thing, bright as lightning.

“I thought of bringing tear gas or a stun gun to control you, dear, but I knew this little implement would do the trick with so much more elegance.” He grabbed her hair and threw her across his lap where she lay, still clutching Cynthia's pocketknife in one hand, while he lifted the helicopter off the ground.

Larabeth looked up at Babykiller's throat. It was bleeding, but not enough. She had apparently missed his trachea and all the major blood vessels. She hadn't killed him; therefore, he was going to kill her. But not before she told the FBI where the General's arsenal was. To do that, she had to be away from Babykiller, on the ground with the cell phone.

Kicking the phone toward the open passenger door, she grabbed his wrist with one hand and used the other hand to stab his arm with Cynthia's knife. She kept stabbing at him, but he refused to drop the scalpel.

Larabeth, like any Vietnam veteran, had ridden in her share of helicopters, and she knew that a pilot needed both hands during take-off and landing. She grabbed at Babykiller's bleeding arm and held on tight.

Babykiller was a good pilot. With one hand—the hand she hadn't stabbed, the hand she wasn't gripping with both her own hands—he struggled to regain control of his craft. He jerked against her grip, time and again, as the chopper tilted crazily to the right. Holding his arm with everything she had, she kicked at the phone until it cleared the open door and dropped to the ground. It was time to follow it, but she had a question.

“Why? Why did you choose me to torture?”

He said it between clenched teeth, with blood dripping from his jaw. “Because, darling, you are the nexus of everything I love and hate.” He pulled hard, again, trying to shake her grip on his arm, but he kept talking. “Your success reflects the life I could have had, if Vietnam hadn't destroyed me. Your tenderness, so long ago, gave me the will to live, but I hate my life. I need you, Larabeth. I need to destroy you.”

She had her answer.

The chopper tipped even farther. Gravity was calling her. She let go of Babykiller's hand.

The helicopter pitched further to the right. Every instinct told her to fight her slide toward the door yawning below her, but she resisted until gravity reached up and took her and she fell free. She had no idea how far it was to the ground.

Babykiller
was a good pilot. It was the best part of him, and he knew it. He let his Larabeth slip away from him, because he wasn't ready to die quite yet. And if he hoped to survive the next five minutes, he needed to gain control of his craft. He needed altitude, because his chopper was damn close to dragging its blades across the ground. It was time to let this whirly-bird know who was boss. Then he could land it right beside Dr. Larabeth McLeod and her precious daughter. If they were still alive, he would make them very, very sorry for rejecting his devotion.

* * *

Cynthia crouched, as if being a foot shorter would protect her from the flames and far-slung metal of a helicopter crash. She rushed toward the crumpled form on the ground and was relieved to hear the straining motor rise above her.

The moon was up and, praise God, nearly full. She could almost see. Cynthia was glad to hear her mother groan. She parted the heavy grass and started checking for broken bones. She drew back a wet and sticky hand.

When Cynthia identified the source of the blood, she paused to curse Babykiller, then set to work trying to stanch the bleeding from an open wound running the length of Larabeth's back while trying to keep that same back immobile. Larabeth was stirring—Cynthia had seen her move both legs—but who knew the condition of her spine?

One bone chip in the wrong place could mean life in a wheelchair, and Cynthia had harbored some fantasies for a long time. She wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail with her mother. She wanted to stalk through shopping malls with her mother in search of the perfect pair of shoes. She wanted all the scary people with their guns to go away.

Larabeth said something and Cynthia leaned closer. It sounded like “phone.”

“Yeah,” Cynthia said softly as she tried to get a look at Larabeth's eyes, “when we get to a phone, I'm going to call in an order for some kung pao chicken.”

She quickly gave up trying to check her mother's pupils. It was too dark to see them and, since it was dark, they would have been dilated anyway.

“No,” Larabeth's voice was quite clear for someone descending quickly into shock. Cynthia held her down, but she couldn't keep her quiet. “’Phone. I. . .threw phone. Down.”

“Okay. Okay. I'll look for a phone if you'll lie still.” Larabeth lay still so abruptly that Cynthia would have laughed under other circumstances.

For lack of a better plan, she felt her way toward a white object draped across the grass. It didn't look like a phone, but it was all she could see. She held it up to the moonlight. It was an airplane navigation map. Then she remembered.

She remembered the helicopter canting to the side until a rain of objects, probably everything that had been lying loose in the cabin, pelted the ground. Then Larabeth had dropped through the air. Finally, the searchlight, swaying wildly, had silhouetted a piece of paper in its light. First driven by the blades and their wind, then drifting slowly from side to side, this map she held had fallen to earth.

Cynthia could hear the whapping helicopter blades as Babykiller returned to kill them. She longed to run into the dark woods, but she couldn't leave her mother, so she groped in widening circles until a cell phone, its digital face gently illuminated, stared up at her through the grass. She dropped cross-legged in the grass and dialed 911.

The sound of a ringing phone was so civilized.

* * *

Babykiller grieved as he circled over the dark trees, heading back to set the chopper down and put an end to his dream of perfect love. His Larabeth was probably dead and she deserved her fate, because she had disappointed him. He had planned to kill her, to take her with him when he went, but not this way.

He hated it when things didn't go according to plan, but he had found it best to be philosophical about such things. He would set the chopper back down on the tarmac, finish Larabeth off, if necessary, and put an end to Cynthia's short life. Then he would be alone in the world once more, but he supposed he was born to be alone. Solitude was the cruel destiny of superior people.

His one great love had wounded him, but not mortally. He was bleeding with a steady ooze, not with the pulsing torrent of a severed artery. Once he had dispatched the two women waiting below, he could get one of his discreet medical friends to stitch him up.

The trees blurred beneath him. He wished he could make the stars move as quickly. The natural world cradled him and he felt safe.

He tried to forget his lost love by glorying in his successes. He had embarrassed the government. The K-Basins were pumping toxics into the Columbia River. The Savannah River was already starting to suffer from the noxious sludge that the Army of the Resurrection had sent its way.

He had thrust a disrespectful rapier into the soft fat flesh of the environmental movement. And when he died, he would leave ticking time bombs capable of wreaking even more damage than he had accomplished while trapped in his earthly body.

This was only the beginning. But his Larabeth was dead—or soon would be—and he was so lonely.

Babykiller's heart began to race when the crisis came, trying to maintain blood pressure while the carotid artery that Larabeth's knife had barely nicked began to leak. The clear vision of the dying seized him and he knew to his core that something was very wrong. The arterial wall ballooned and with the next beat of his heart, ruptured.

He recognized the rhythmic spurts for what they were—death—and let himself loll backward against the headrest. As his hands fell weak from the controls, he knew that this was as it should be.

He should leave this earth in a heap of shrieking metal, not in a hospital bed.

His last breath shouldn't whistle through a machine. It should fan flames.

He rode the chopper down.

* * *

Larabeth lay in the dirt and felt her hand throb. Through it all, through the struggle with Babykiller, through her terrifying fall to earth, she had clutched Cynthia's pocketknife. Its blade had bitten deep into her hand, but she had hung on. How could she let it go? It was the first gift her daughter ever gave her.

Opening her eyes was the hardest thing Larabeth ever had to do. It would have been easier to lie there and die. She was lying on her side and she could feel every inch of the incision Babykiller had slashed into her back. The pain in her legs was agonizing and she hoped that meant that she wasn't paralyzed, because she couldn't move anything below her waist.

She forced her eyes open and made herself speak. She had to tell Cynthia where to find the General's arsenal, so Cynthia could tell the FBI. And it was important for the FBI to find all the nuclear plants that Babykiller had sabotaged. She needed to know that the world wouldn't come to an end if she died.

* * *

Cynthia spoke loudly into the cell phone, because the reception was terrible so far from civilization. The operator told her to stay on the line while she sent in a med-evac helicopter. All she had to do was tell the operator exactly where she was.

Cynthia thought of the helicopter flight and remembered the moon rising ahead of her.

“We took off near the center of the Savannah River Site and flew ten minutes by helicopter nearly due east. Once the med-evac crew reaches that vicinity, tell them to look for us about a hundred yards east of a good-sized fire. It was a helicopter crash.”

Cynthia could hear the operator typing furiously on her keyboard. “Do you have any information on the crash? How many passengers? We'll need to send firefighters and more paramedics.”

Cynthia almost laughed at this woman who wanted to dispatch life-saving aid to the devil himself, but she only said, “That won't be necessary. Just let him burn.”

The operator tried to interrupt, but Cynthia cut her off. “Now, if you could get me in touch with the FBI, I have some information that will put an end to this standoff. I think we need to get those terrorists out of this place so we can all go home. Don't you?”

The
General thought he had taken the news well. Agent-in-Charge Chao had sent him a message that effectively ended his Army's day of glory. The message was short, but the facts were there.

The FBI knew about Babykiller and they knew about the arsenal. They also knew some things he didn't know, like where his truck bombs were. They claimed to know that Babykiller never intended to send him any reinforcements, that the bastard had used the General's Army like a bunch of toy soldiers, to stir up the citizenry and then to die. They said that Babykiller had betrayed them for their armaments. They also said that Babykiller was dead, and he was glad.

He approached the cameras, one more time. “I have spoken with my officers and we agree that the Army of the Resurrection's occupation of the Savannah River Site is over. We have accomplished our goal of informing America of the threats to her sovereignty and we have no desire to harm her citizens. Our forces will lay down their weapons and gather here to submit ourselves to the mock justice of this sham government.”