Forty Leap (28 page)

So help me, they cheered. They
were
his flock. And would I have been any different if I had been inside
the cage instead of out?

Two doctors came rushing around the corner
and into the area. One of the doctors was a pale lady with big
bright eyes and the other was a man in his early forties with thin
lips and shaking hands.

“Dr. Weaver,” Neville greeted, but I didn’t
know which one of them he meant. They both stared at him with the
same fear as he gestured to a particularly jagged scar running
across his left nipple. “I have you to thank for this.” And then he
shot them both dead on the spot.

The room fell into stunned silence.

Then everyone cheered again.

Neville pocketed his pistol again and took a
rifle from someone. He announced that there should be no limit to
the destruction we should cause.

In the next few minutes, I witnessed horrors
that will stay with me for all of my life, which I would have sworn
was about to end right then and there. The facility was alerted to
our escape. Neville kept us together as a group and moved us from
lab to lab. He wasn’t so foolish as to waste more ammunition on
machinery which could not shoot back. Instead, he threw things to
the floor and stomped on them with his feet. He snapped plastic
pieces in half, destroying whatever he could in any way he could
conceive.

There were few who stood in our way. Clearly,
the people who worked the facility were having difficulty
organizing. Or, someone suggested, they may have just been
mobilizing by the exits. Neville was clear in his plan for us,
though. Obviously, he had given it much thought despite the long
odds of this opportunity every coming along. He took great pains to
keep them together and rallied. His movements were calculated. He
did not seek to engage anyone in combat, but was merciless toward
those he did encounter. Neville’s rule was shoot to kill and the
others adopted it without a second thought. He was so different
from the jovial man I had met on the way out to this installation,
so embittered. Whatever he had learned as a soldier himself or as
whatever he had been that had resulted in his pilot training, came
to the fore with a rushing intensity, sweeping aside all other
aspects of his personality.

The soldiers we encountered were hesitant at
first. I suppose they had been drilled on the possibility of leaper
escapes, but we were clearly valued too highly to be simply shot.
They tried to wound as they had done in the first ward, but were
ineffective. The leapers were not so kind, aiming for chests and
heads. They slaughtered close to ten people in the space of a few
minutes, arming themselves off of the dead bodies. Though I marched
along with Neville, I could not think of myself as part of the
group. I was offered a weapon and refused it. I was caught in the
middle. I did not believe the violence was necessary, but I
couldn’t see any other way around it. Among all things, I would
have assuredly wound up as a prisoner in a plexiglass cage. Was my
freedom worth all of these lives?

Once all of the labs were demolished, and I
do mean demolished, Neville took us on to the staff quarters. This
was a calculated move to damage the morale of those working at the
facility, to break down their spirits. Using stolen ID badges, he
was able to gain access to most of the rooms. Soldiers’ badges
could open any room so our access was virtually unlimited. The
thirty nine leapers scattered themselves throughout the staff’s
quarters, destroying personal items, rending sheets and mattresses,
tearing up books, smashing computers, shredding clothing, hammering
holes into the walls. It was an ugly, devastating sight, and I
stood by and watched in disgust, knowing that I was the catalyst
and knowing still that I could never have left them caged. Even had
I known what I was about to witness, I would have made the same
decision.

Neville returned to me every few seconds to
make sure that I was all right. He took charge of me as a guardian
over a child and I was both thankful for it and resentful of it. As
I stood alone in the corridor I tried to make some sense of the
images. The faces of the people blended into one. I couldn’t tell
one person from another and lost all track of time. My mind began
to wander, I suppose as a defense mechanism. I thought of Jennie.
Was she married? How old was she? I thought of Livvie and of my
brothers. I wondered what had become of Igor and GEI after this
installation was discovered by the government. I felt small and
vulnerable. When I was young and things were bad, I would always
tell myself that it would be over soon enough and I would be able
to sit and look back on it. I couldn’t tell myself that now. I was
in a situation whose ending was not foreseeable. What was worse was
that time for me was in such a state of flux that I couldn’t know
minute to minute what the state of my life would be. I felt myself
begin to come apart.

And then the shooting started in earnest.

It amazes me that science fiction television
shows and movies always have futuristic soldiers firing lasers or
phasers or some other type of asers. And yet, as I stood in the
year 2037, sixty four years after my birth with only thirty four of
them lived, what whizzed over my head and around me were bullets.
They were metal bullets with hollow points. They bit into walls and
the debris that the leapers had made. They cut through human flesh
and caused the loss of blood and dignity. I was in the firefight,
but I wasn’t part of it. I guess the soldiers realized that their
former captives were shooting to kill so why shouldn’t they? To me,
the whole thing was a blur. I couldn’t put to writing who died and
who was wounded. I couldn’t report the numbers. I don’t even know
when I was pulled from the hallway and into a room. I guess it was
Neville who saved me, but that point was academic. Before I knew
it, he was shouting, calling for a cease fire.

That sounded reasonable.

The gunfire gradually died, but that only
made the moaning more audible. I was in a person’s quarters, hiding
behind a bed. Neville was there with me and there were a couple of
others as well. Out the door we could see the mangled leg of a man
and nothing else. Neville shouted out our surrender.

But there was to be no surrender. Even I
could see it. The look in the eyes of every man and woman who had
spent any time behind plexiglass “bars” was the same. They would
not be caged again. Death was not the final option.

Neville stepped into the corridor and stood
looking down toward the soldiers, out of sight from my perspective.
Whatever his ploy was, I couldn’t figure it out. He had not lost
his nerve. I wonder if it was as plain to everyone else as it was
to me. He meant to see this through to the end.

There was the soft sound of approaching
footsteps. I couldn’t tell how many pairs. Someone was shouting at
Neville.
Drop your weapon. Drop your weapon!
Neville stood
his ground. Then the shooting began anew. Neville wasn’t the only
one firing. His rifle came up after the first shots. He fired his
weapon until it was empty. A split second later he was thrown
backward and all I saw was a blood spray. One moment he was there
and the next moment he wasn’t.

I screamed.

What else could I do? He was the leader of
the leapers and he was my one connection to the group. Without him,
I was truly on my own. The soldiers moved up to our door but the
people with me opened fire and held them off. I huddled behind the
bed, wishing still that I could just be somewhere else. I don’t
know how long I sat there, the people with me popping up and down,
taking shots at the invading soldiers. I think someone went down
next to me but I just don’t remember. I did nothing but sit and
stare and wait. And, eventually, it all did come to an end.

“Mathew?”

I peeked out from behind the bed and saw
Neville standing in the doorway. There was something tied around
his left bicep and shoulder. It had been wintergreen in color, but
now it was soaked with blood. It looked heavy and brown.

“All right, then?” he asked.

I was.

Everyone else was not. Everyone who had been
in the room with me was dead. The seat of my pants was wet with
blood. The soles of my shoes were sticky with it. The smell was
awful. At least I was coming to my senses.

“Time to go,” Neville said. “There’s not much
time.”

I stood and followed him out of the room. The
corridor and the surrounding rooms were charnel houses. Bodies were
contorted on the floor and up against walls. There wasn’t a living
soldier in sight. Of the forty leapers, myself included, only six
remained. Neville’s shoulder was badly torn up and I wasn’t sure he
would make it too far. Many were dead. Others had leaped through
time.

“They’ll have a hell of time putting this
mess back together,” Neville said, leading us away from the scene.
As we walked, we left a trail of bloody footprints behind us. No
one else challenged us as we went. I’m not sure we could have
withstood another fight. Those of us who remained were worn and
haggard, the adrenaline rush wearing off. There was a woman walking
next to me. I glanced at her and she at me. Then she disappeared. I
let out a short yelp, but the others pushed me on. It occurs to me
now that they probably saw people wink in and out of time often.
The empty cells I had seen must have held people at one time or
another. I wondered about the others I had been with before my last
leap. Rogers Clinton and Awen Mohammed and Samantha Radish. Were
there cells for each of them as well?

Neville urged us on, five haggard and
distraught people. I thought about the lives that had changed and
ended right there. Not just in the last few minutes, but over the
course of the years I had missed. The world had always been a cruel
place. It treated people with indifference. But it was worse to
some than to others. A twist of fate or a wrong turn and you
incurred its wrath. Then you could be dead or worse. I regarded
Neville. The gleam was fading from his eyes. He moved more slowly
than before. He was losing a lot of blood and I guessed he was
waging his own battle with death right then and there. He needed
medical attention, but I said nothing. There wasn’t a doctor on the
premises that would help him.

We ascended a staircase and then another and
we were on the roof. The night closed in about us. There were no
lights lit on the facility. We had the moon and the stars and the
faint glow from the open door. We were alone.

Sitting unused were two helicopters. They
looked a bit different from the helicopters I was used to seeing.
They were sleeker, for one. It seems that the future always holds a
sexier look for our machines. But the general design was the same.
I wondered if Neville had planned this from the start. There were
only five of us and we fit into one helicopter with no problem.
Neville eased himself in with difficulty, wincing as he moved the
left side of his body. But he remained silent and began to operate
the controls. I kept looking at the door, expecting it to burst
open at any minute. Surely they couldn’t have killed
everyone.
Above our heads, the main rotor began to spin, the
tail rotor following suit. Neville cursed slightly about
reconfigured controls and one useless arm. I sat next to him,
watching his movements.

“Are you watching this, Mathew?” he
asked.

I nodded.

“If I pass out, you’ll have to take
over.”

“What?” I said. “What?”

“Just push me out the door and slide into the
seat. Once we’re in the air, it’s mostly just the stick. Try to
land her in an open area and then run like hell.”

I looked back at the three faces behind us.
They seemed too tired to care about what he was saying. Having to
fly a helicopter would be bad enough. There was no way I would be
able to push him out the door. Maybe he saw this because he looked
me dead in the eye and a shadow of that old smile returned. “There
are no innocents.”

Then we took off into the night air, Neville
struggling to control it with one hand, the color draining steadily
from his face. Again he began to grumble, this time about the type
of fuel the copter used. The ride was much different than the ride
that had carried us there so many years before. For one, as adept
as Neville was at his craft, he struggled against the wind and had
difficulty keeping things steady. He kept the running lights doused
so there was nothing but blackness below us. The people in the back
remained silent, faceless entities. I never learned their
names.

Neville nodded off a couple of times and I
had to take the stick from him, reaching over and doing my best to
keep the helicopter steady while the others worked to shake him
awake. Both times, he came out of it as if out of a dream and
smiled knowingly at me. It was both and approving and reproachful
smile. I was doing a good job keeping the chopper up. Why wouldn’t
I just let him go?

When we cleared the mountain range, the
lights of civilization came into view. The change in the view
seemed to give Neville a tiny jolt of energy. He sat up a little
straighter and took hold of the stick. His eyes were alert, but I
didn’t know what he was looking for. He banked low over the ground,
skirting over a major city that could have been Denver or Boulder
or some city that had been built up within the last fifteen years.
He picked up speed and went out over the stretching highways of the
Midwest. I stared down at the lights of the traffic as they moved.
They winked in and out of sight so quickly that I could hardly
follow them. Were cars moving faster or was it just an illusion
caused by our own speed? In the darkness, I could barely get a
glimpse of the box and egglike forms.

Once we were away from the city, Neville
began to lose focus again. He brought us very low and just over a
main road, setting the helicopter down in with a jerk. The clock on
the dashboard, or whatever you call it in a helicopter, read just
before two in the morning.