Legacy: The Girl in the Box #8 (16 page)

“I thought that was so I could defend myself,” I interjected.

“Dual purpose,” she said. “It did that, which was obviously most important, but it also gave you an outlet for your frustrations and physicality, wore you out so you didn’t have as much energy to expend trying to find ways to escape or subvert me. Same with your studies. Admit it,” she said and smiled a little. “You may have been confined to the house for ten years, but you were never bored.”

“No,” I conceded. “Not when I was in the house at large. I always had studies to work on, or something else.” I glanced down at the bulkhead in front of me. “Still wouldn’t have been the way I’d have chosen to spend my childhood, though.”

There was a quiet from her seat for a long moment. “It wouldn’t have been the way I’d have chosen for you to spend it, either.”

I started to say something else but a hideous, groaning screech came from behind me and I stood. Mom matched my motion and we both looked back to the rear of the plane. The Hercules who had been unconscious was most definitely not unconscious now; he was on his feet, the chair he had been resting in ripped from the floor of the plane.

“Oh, hell,” I breathed, but I was already running down the aisle. I could hear Mother two steps behind me.

Scott was blocking my passage and I hipchecked him out of the way. Breandan was quick enough to move on his own, just behind Scott, tripping onto Reed, who screamed in pain as the Irishman landed on his stomach. The narrow cabin forced me to slow my run so I didn’t bounce up and hit the low ceiling. I didn’t make it back in time to keep the enraged Hercules from doing something stupid.

He was still well secured to the seat, but it was ripped free of the cabin floor, hanging off his back. I saw him stress it, trying to break the handcuffs, but the sound of the seat resisting and the metallic grind from stress in the chair itself were the only noises.

The Hercules viewed my approach with a wild-eyed demeanor. He knew he was stuck: his hands and feet still bound, he was unable to fight me. I saw the options roll through his mind and the desperation set in, eyes darting. Finally, something clicked as he looked back toward the wall of the cabin, and I didn’t even have a chance to scream, “NO!” before he launched himself into it full force, leading with the seat.

The sound of the explosive decompression of the cabin was, in fact, explosive. It felt like my eardrums blew up with the sudden change in air pressure, and I only just got a hand on the chair next to me before the wind ripped me toward the back of the cabin where the Hercules had made a hole in the fuselage. I couldn’t hear the straining of his muscles over the horrendous noise of the wind, but I watched as he broke the seat into three pieces with his strength; one hung by the handcuff chain from each of his massive paws; the last clung to his feet in one great chunk.

I held on as the hole in the cabin widened, the fractures the Hercules had created shearing as the wind tore at them. Someone screamed over the speaker above me about an emergency landing. My total focus was on the Hercules, though, as he stood, unmoved by the wind, his feet planted and one hand on the chair of the telepath who had been chained next to him. He flashed that smug, nasty smile at me as he turned loose his free hand in a long wind up and swipe. I knew what was about to happen but I couldn’t stop it.

The telepath who had been seated next to him got hit by the remnant of the seat chained to his hand; the results were like a watermelon getting splattered by a sledgehammer. I held on, my fingers clutching Foreman’s chair as the Hercules wound up for his next swipe, moving back in the line and taking the head off the next telepath, this one the woman from Orlando. Her scream was lost in the sound of the roaring gusts around me as air rushed out of the plane through the hole.

He got one more swipe in unchecked before the tempest began to die down. I was holding my breath, something we metas could do for longer than a human without passing out, but I reached out and grabbed the nearest oxygen mask and took three hits in rapid succession. Then I tossed aside the mask and launched myself at the Hercules as he took a long step toward the back of the plane and brought down the chair pieces on two more screaming telepaths.

I hit him in the center of his mass as he tried for the last telepath. My shoulder hit his ribs and I couldn’t tell whether I broke something of his or he broke something of mine, or both. It hurt like hell, though, and stunned me long enough to prevent me from following up in a timely manner. It gave him just enough time to throw an arm at the last telepath, though, and he buried the remnants of his seat in the man’s chest, destroying his heart, lungs, and anything else in his upper chest. The man’s head lolled forward, and I knew I’d lost.

“You failed!” the Hercules said with a wide grin. “You won’t learn anything from them,” he said over the howling of the wind.

“They’re not the only ones I can learn from,” I said, matching his grin with one of my own, one I didn’t remotely feel. I threw my ungloved hands at him and he tried to bring his hands together, to catch my head between the two chair pieces. It would likely have killed me if I hadn’t dragged him down before he could complete the maneuver.

I saw his eyes widen as my power began to work, the cumulative drain restarting at virtually the same point I’d left off. I could hear his howls over those of the wind, and he fell atop me, jerking with great muscle spasms as I started to pull the last of him free of his body. He screamed in my head and through his mouth and I heard both, combining with the blast of air that thundered around me, and the sound of blood rushing and pounding in my head from my exertion and what I was about to get, to reach—the climax.

He swung his arm wildly one last time as I felt the finale build. It was so close, within the touch of my fingers. It was almost mine, that sweet release, when something exploded and he flew from my grasp. It took the split second before I flew out of the plane to realize that he’d struck the hole in the side of the cabin with one of his cudgels and broken it wide, wide open. The wind reached out and plucked him from atop me, ripping him from my grasp before I could take the last of his soul. I had not even a moment to think about it before I felt the deck of the cabin that had been so tight on my back disappear from beneath me as I, too, went flying out of the side of the plane and found myself falling, freely, my jacket whipping as I saw the ground, tens of thousands of feet below, but rushing up so very, very fast.

Free-falling without a parachute was without a doubt the most frightening sensation I had ever felt. The wind blasted at my face, drying my eyes even as I tried to keep them open. Why? I don’t know. It was like I wanted to look death in the face or something as I plummeted through the rapidly diminishing space between me and the ground. The chill wind caused my jacket to flap wildly around me. I wasn’t screaming, but it was only because I was still too stunned to realize that I’d fallen out of a plane. I quelled my panic with a thought, reaching inside for desperate answers. My skin had gone numb from the cold, and I couldn’t force my brain to think, no matter how much I wanted it to. I could see the Hercules a few hundred feet below me, his hands pinwheeling wildly, and I wondered if I was doing the same.

I hoped in flash for Reed to come save me. Then I remembered his stomach wound, how he coughed and blood came out, his semi-conscious state, and knew that if he came after me, we would both die instead of just me. My breathing was wild, my lungs trying to sift oxygen out of the thin air so high up. I tried to remember a lesson, long ago, from Glen Parks about combat drops. I moved my body into a more wind-resistant position, my arms and legs extended, my body flat against the upward pressure of the wind. I had no idea why I bothered, but I was desperate enough to try anything to prolong my life by even a few seconds.

My metahuman abilities wouldn’t solve this problem, and I doubted there’d be enough left of me to heal after impact. I remembered reading something once about how someone had survived a skydive gone wrong, landing in a swamp after a parachute failure, but that had to be a one in a million shot. There was no hope of that for me; I saw nothing but flat green fields in every direction.

I was about to reach in and beg for help, for anything, when something hit me in the back, hard, and I felt arms wrap around my midsection. The little oxygen in my lungs was knocked out, and I gasped for breath even harder. I threw up my head to look at who had struck me, hoping against all hope and logic that it was Reed.

It wasn’t.

“You idiot!” I gasped between frantic breaths. “You’ve killed yourself, too!”

Scott Byerly’s face was redder than normal, and I could tell he was trying hard not to pass out. He was holding his breath, and a quick look down confirmed that we were not going to be in the air much longer. “Hold on to me!” he shouted, then took another long breath, a look of deep concentration on his face.

What else could I do? I turned in his grasp, pushing around so that my chest was against his, my arms wrapped around his neck. Once I had a good hold, he unlocked his hands from around my midsection and extended them. His eyes closed and his face got deep with concentration. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not, and I waited, in silence, for what felt like minutes before I finally spoke. “What are you doing?”

He opened one eye and grinned. “Just enjoying the feel of a woman pressed against me before I die.”

“You ass!” I screamed, and looked down again. It wasn’t far now, a thousand feet at most, and it was coming up ridiculously fast.

“HOLD ON!” he shouted and I felt something rush past my legs, something strong and powerful, something that stirred the air around us. Scott’s face went red again in spite of the fact that we were now low enough to breathe without difficulty. I clenched my arms around his neck as if he were a life vest and I was a drowning woman. I thought about kissing him on the lips for the hell of it and decided against it, but only because his face was veiled in utter and complete concentration.

The jets of water coming out of his hands were so intense that I could feel the power of them. My arms snugged tight around him, I could feel us start to fight back against gravity’s pull, a little at a time. We began to slow and I held on, the centrifugal force on my brain causing me to see spots. Just when I thought I couldn’t handle another moment of the force, my feet hit the ground, hard enough that I knew I’d dropped but not hard enough to break anything. I didn’t let go of him, though, and we ended up in a tangle in the middle of a cornfield, the foot-high stalks and a puddle of mud cushioning my landing. Scott’s chest thudded against mine, knocking the wind out of me. I felt his arms take up his weight for only a second before he collapsed on me, his head buried on my breastbone, the smell of wet dirt filling my nose. It was warm against my back, oozing into my clothing, seeping down my neck.

I looked left, then right, and all I saw was spring corn, barely out of the ground. I was breathing slowly but steadily, long breaths reassuring me that I hadn’t died and entered some afterlife that began with endless fields.

“Are we dead?” Scott asked, his voice muffled from where his head lay buried in my chest. “Is this Elysium or something?”

“I think it’s Iowa,” I said, “which means we’re probably closer to hell.” I glanced down and realized his head was pretty much right between my breasts. “You ... uh ... you can get up anytime now.”

“Huh?” His head came up and his chin rested right on my sternum, his face completely drained of color. His brow was coated in sweat, his eyes almost closed, and he looked like he’d just run a five-hundred mile race.

I felt a little stiff, my back feeling the corn stalks underneath it. It was a little awkward because he was right between my legs, too. I had a very embarrassed flash as I remembered the last time I’d been in this position. It had been about six months. “You should probably get up,” I said, feeling the flush of red on my cheeks.

“I don’t know if I can move right now,” he said, and his head bobbed to the side, his blond, curly head lying against my chest. “I may actually fall asleep like this.”

“Um.” I clumsily rolled him to the side, as gently as I could, pitching him off me. “Sorry,” I said when he looked at me reproachfully. “I don’t like to feel trapped.”

“How about splattered?” he said as his head lolled back into the muddy field. “How does squished work for you?”

I pulled myself to my feet and looked around us. Warm mud rolled down my hands in beads and dripped to the puddle beneath me with a plop. The field was a wide expanse of open ground. The only thing disturbing the perfect flatness of the scene before me was a road in the distance, at least a mile away, and, a couple hundred feet away, an impact crater caused by something hitting the ground. “Hercules,” I said. “Guess you weren’t so damned invincible after all.” I twitched my fingers, one after another, as though I could somehow compel the last of his soul to come to me, to finish what we had started.

I looked over the fields, found the road again in the distance. It was getting close to summer and the days were longer, but I could see the sun hanging low in the sky. We could be at the road in a few minutes at normal speed. I looked back down at Scott lying in the mud and knew we’d be going far slower than normal speed. I took a deep breath, sighing once more. Scott was spent, I was sure of that. I lifted him up onto my back with as much gentleness as I could manage and started carrying him, fireman-style, across the field toward the distant road. Every pain and ache from my fights and the landing seemed to shout at me every step of the way, but that was all right. I was alive. And in Iowa. That part of creation where even God got bored enough to nod off for a while.

I surveyed the flat ground around me, judged the distance to the road, and wondered how long I’d have to walk down it before I found any sign of civilization. I sighed. Could be a while.

“Iowa,” I said, breathing the word like a curse. Because it kind of was.