In The Falling Light (11 page)

“C’mon, big girl,” he growled, the muscles
in his arms bulging as he hauled back while kicking his throttles
full forward, pushing the four, eighteen-cylinder engines towards
their 2,500 horsepower capacity. The props clawed at the air and
the big plane rose slowly, passing a hundred feet. Jake saw the
blacked-out shape of a Japanese car-carrier suddenly pass close
beneath him, crewless and adrift in the Sound. He hadn’t seen it on
radar. Was the equipment malfunctioning, did he lose it in the
surface clutter, or had he simply not been paying attention? No
answer was a good one, and he shuddered, realizing that if he had
started his loading run five seconds later, he would have flown
broadside into the ghost ship.

Aidan had seen it too. He started praying
out loud.

The Bluetail banked left in a gentle
horseshoe, and Jake lined her nose up with his attack coordinates.
Downtown Seattle approached in his windscreen, a far different
looking target area than he had become accustomed to over the last
seven years in Aerial Fire Attack. It was as blacked-out as the
drifting car-carrier had been, not a single streetlight or highway
stripe with white light coming one way and red going the other, no
glittering skyscrapers, no field lights at the airport or even
avoidance strobes atop the Space Needle. Darkness, lit only by the
night sky. At his eleven o’clock, Jake could see the route Rodeo
King had flown, sporadic pinpoints of fire in the streets and on
rooftops to show where he had dropped.

Jake’s coordinates took him slightly east of
there, north of I-90 and to the right of downtown. Seattle
University. He tipped the heavy bird down to five-hundred feet and
eased back on the throttles, keeping her low and slow, then flexed
his fingers on the yoke. He glanced at Aidan, who had his head down
and his eyes closed, still praying loudly.

“Tacoma Base, this is Bluetail, I am
commencing my attack run.” His voice was the same, bored-sounding
tone familiar to pilots the world over. It was that calm pilot’s
voice he’d used when the Bluetail nearly had to ditch in a Canadian
forest fire the previous year, the same steady tone he used six
years before that, when an Afghani insurgent with a Stinger had
tried to put a missile up his tailpipe. His business voice.

Only this business was far deadlier and with
much higher stakes than anything he had ever done before.

The aircraft roared in over the city as Jake
made his final adjustments, and he glanced down out the left window
as his right thumb snapped up to pause above a red button at the
top of his yoke. Even without light he could see the swiftly
passing streets below, every avenue overrun and filled with
movement. A look out the front showed the sprawling campus before
him as he descended to three hundred feet, and there he saw more of
the same, rooftops and common areas alike, all swarming with
figures. They might have been refugees, panicked survivors trying
to escape the city.

Jake knew they weren’t.

“Releasing,” he said, triggering his
payload.

Thirty tons of Puget Sound – what Father
Aidan’s prayers had since transformed to holy water – erupted from
the belly of the Bluetail as it swept across the campus, covering a
four acre area.

The vampire swarm took the full force of the
hit.

They exploded in flames, hundreds of figures
immolated in seconds, running and burning and collapsing in the
night.

Free of its burden, the Bluetail seemed to
leap into the air, and its powerful engines found altitude as Jake
checked his dials and knee chart and began planning for another
pick-up. Rodeo King could only make a single drop before returning
to base, but Jake’s flying boat could keep this up all night. As
the plane rose, a wash of moonlight across the fuselage showed that
the sexy pin-up painted on the nose was holding a stake and a
mallet.

Jake looked at the priest in the right seat,
Aidan and others like him the Forestry Service’s newest recruits in
a new war. He looked fatigued, drained. “We can make another half
dozen runs on our fuel before we have to head back to base. Think
you can handle it, Father?”

The older man took a deep breath, then
nodded and smiled just a little.

“God willing.”

They sat at the table across from each
other, fraternal twins and physical opposites. He was robust, plump
with rosy cheeks. She was sallow and drawn, cheeks and eyes sunken
in her face, staring down at a doll in her lap. The boy was
shoveling a third plate of meat into his mouth.

“You need to eat something,” he said between
mouthfuls.

She didn’t reply.

He looked at her as he chewed on a rib. Four
weeks of near-starvation had left his sister a skin-wrapped
skeleton in a baggy gray dress. He shrugged. She would eat when she
was ready.

After a few minutes, the girl spoke without
looking up. “Father left us in the woods to die.”

The boy chewed and swallowed, nodding.
“Because of the famine. Mother told him we were too many mouths to
feed.” My goodness, he was hungry. Living on nothing but sweets had
created a serious protein deficiency in him, as well as doing
unpleasant things to his teeth. He looked around the delicious
cottage as the old woman’s raspy song played again in his head.

“
Nibble, nibble, little mouse. Who’s that
nibbling at my house?”

He remembered the way she had pinched his
cheek and said, “That will make for a nice bite.” The boy went back
to forking meat into his mouth.

“I hate them,” his sister said, looking up.
Her eyes were flat and dull. Gone was all trace of childhood, and
her brother saw that although the old woman had failed to kill her,
something inside his sister had died nonetheless. It made him
sad.

“You were very brave,” he said. “A hero. You
saved me from the cage, saved our lives.”

She looked at him without expression. “I
don’t feel bad about doing it.”

The boy nodded again, his teeth crunching
down hard on something. He picked it out of his mouth and examined
the object. A button. Then he remembered the witch had been fully
dressed when his sister pushed her into the oven. He flicked it
away.

“Children!” called a voice from outside.
“Children?”

The girl walked to a window and peered out,
seeing the woodcutter making his way up the forest path, heading
for the gingerbread house. “It’s father,” she said. “He’s sorry for
what he did, and came looking for us, just like you said he
would.”

The boy tossed a rib onto his plate and
burped.

“It’s mother’s fault, too,” she said,
walking to the wood pile beside the oven and picking up a hatchet,
then returning to stand beside the door. “I want to push
her
into an oven.”

The boy sucked grease off his fingers and
hopped down from his chair, bringing a butcher knife with him as he
moved to flank the other side of the door. “She’s quite skinny,” he
said, looking at the reflection of his eyes in the blade. “We’ll
have to fatten her up a bit.”

Then he smiled. “But father first.”

The Lincoln Navigator left Ashville behind
as it chased the setting sun on Interstate 40. Twilight had come to
western North Carolina, and Thomas Kirkland switched from his
daytime running lights to full headlights.

Traffic was sparse along this section of
highway, but still the Navigator stayed at a cruise-controlled
sixty-four miles per hour. A big Freightliner with Piggly Wiggly
emblazoned on the side rocketed past doing eighty plus, and once it
moved out of sight the road was empty save for the big Lincoln.

Within the air conditioned comfort of the
luxury SUV, Thomas tapped his fingers lightly on the steering
wheel, keeping time with a Kenny Chesney song playing softly on a
classic country station. Beside him, Bianca appeared engrossed in
an old Nicholas Sparks novel, but he knew she was dividing her
attention between the book and the back seat, listening to the
bickering. Angela and Carl, sixteen and fourteen respectively, were
debating the rightful ownership of a Spin magazine. Their
Generation XII iTablets were drained and dead, and they were
already bored with both the games and movies available for the rear
seat video screens. Had to have something to argue about, Thomas
thought. But they were smart enough to keep their voices low,
knowing that if they
really
fought about
it, one or both of their parents would get involved, and the
magazine was likely to get tossed in a trash can at the next rest
stop.

Thomas lifted his gaze to the rear view
mirror and let it drift past his two oldest children to come to
rest on Edwin, his nine-year-old. The boy was in the third row
seat, nestled amid suitcases and propping his back against a duffel
bag. Edwin had inherited his mother’s love of reading, but not her
taste. At the moment he was intently absorbing the contents of a
thirty-one page pamphlet entitled
Summaries of Chinese Civil
Defense Research Reports.
It was a booklet put out by the U.S.
Office of Home Affairs, presumably so Americans could learn what
the bogeymen on the other side of the world thought about
preparedness, and apply some of those organizational skills to
their own lives. Edwin had picked it up at the Georgia State Fair
last week. Thomas shook his head, amazed for the umpteenth time
that the boy was interested in – much less capable of understanding
– such an obscure and no doubt abysmally dry topic. But then with
two of his children running the emotional gauntlet of teenagerhood,
he often felt he was long past trying to understand his kids.

The headlights reflected off a green highway
sign, informing Thomas that he would soon be making the turn onto
Route 215. Thank God, he thought, this had been a hell of a drive.
They had a late start yesterday, and made little more than a
hundred miles from their Atlanta home before stopping for the
night. Today had been devoted to driving, and Thomas was sick of
it. The fact that Bianca was intimidated by and refused to captain
the big SUV kept him behind the wheel for the entire trip. But he
admitted to himself that it was better to face a sore back and
exhaustion than the tension which went with sitting in the
passenger seat and watching his wife try to handle the
Navigator.

Thomas watched the darkening woods slide
past, trying unsuccessfully not to think about business, but as the
owner of Kirkland Insurance this was a nearly impossible feat. It
wasn’t the actual details of the insurance business that captured
his thoughts, however. It was Howard MacDonald, his former top
sales agent.
There
was some unpleasant
business.

He couldn’t say he was really surprised when
Howard was arrested in Los Angeles while attempting to board a
flight to Venezuela. Nor was he surprised that Howard was tried,
convicted and subsequently executed three days later on the gallows
in front of the state courthouse, an event which was both televised
and blasted over the internet. What surprised Thomas was that
Howard had embezzled the money from the firm in the first place.
All fear of punishment aside, Howard just shouldn’t have done it.
He and Thomas were friends, for Chrissake! And Howard was no moron,
either. That was one of the things which was most puzzling, that
Howard would even think he could get away with it, especially these
days.

The volume of the bickering in the back
increased, pulling Thomas back to the present.

“I said hand ‘em up, you little creep!”

Bianca twisted around, slipping out from
under the shoulder belt. “What’s going on?”

“Mom, Edwin’s hogging the pretzels, and he
won’t give us any,” Angela said.

“Yeah,” seconded Carl.

Bianca sighed. “Well, do you think you could
ask nicely for things, young lady?”

Angela put on a look of astonishment. “I
didn’t do anything!”

“Yeah,” mumbled Carl.

“Stay out of it, Carl.” Thomas looked at his
older son in the rear view.

“Edwin, give your sister the pretzels.”

The boy peered over the pamphlet and
shrugged, tossing the bag to Angela. “It’s okay with me if she
wants to turn into a blimp.” His face sank behind the pages.

“You little geek,” hissed Angela.

“Pizza face.”

“That’s enough, both of you.” Bianca raised
her voice just enough to show she meant it, turning back and
ducking under the shoulder belt once again.

“Yeah,” grinned Carl, as he snatched the
magazine from his sister’s hands.

The squabbling returned to a low roar, and
while Bianca went back to Mr. Sparks, Thomas turned the radio up a
little and kept his eyes on the darkening road. The Lincoln was in
hill country now, indicating the turn-off was getting nearer. On
the radio the station was between songs, and the drawling DJ cut to
an affiliate’s live news report from Toronto, for an update on the
hostage drama being played out there.

Thomas listened as a reporter recapped the
story. A TWA 787 had lifted off from O’Hare International this
morning, bound for Pittsburgh. Shortly after it was airborne, two
men claiming to be soldiers in the service of Allah took control of
the plane, shooting one crew member and forcing the pilot to detour
to Toronto. Thomas didn’t envy the folks who would have to explain
how someone managed to get firearms on an aircraft, and he was
amazed that the Air Force hadn’t simply shot it down. As soon as
the aircraft landed, a Canadian-American counter terrorist team
disabled the landing gear, immobilizing it. The terrorists demanded
the release of political prisoners held in Guantanamo, along with
the usual demands of troop withdrawal, safe passage, blah, blah,
blah.