Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  I pan left, searching for the nose section of the plane through the dense forest, but something else swims into view through the lenses first: three long tents, plastic stretched over arched metal supports, like round greenhouses. What is it? Shelter for the survivors? A field hospital? Beside the tents, white body bags are stacked in neat pyramids like firewood. There must be fifty of them. My mouth goes dry, and I scan more quickly, searching for a clue about what’s going on.

  The door to the nose section is open, and there’s no movement inside.

  I pan out farther, searching. The airship I saw at Stonehenge—no, two of them—sit in a clearing. They’re huge, three times the size of the plane’s nose section. The ships’ outer doors are closed, and there’s no sign of movement around either vessel.

  I run the binoculars over every inch of the forest, but I can’t see any movement. Whatever’s happening is hidden by the trees or the long plastic tents. We’ll have to get closer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nick

  ABOUT A HUNDRED YARDS OUT FROM THE THREE clear plastic tents, I draw the binoculars again and focus them, trying to make out the blurry objects inside. They’re narrow beds, evenly spaced, some empty, some occupied by bodies. Beyond the tents the forest suddenly erupts in a burst of heavy footsteps and cracking branches.

  I scan with the binoculars, quickly spotting the source: figures in what look like bulky space suits, barreling through the dense brush. The suits’ large helmets indicate that they’re built for total containment. Strange. From here the suits’ inhabitants appear taller than normal humans. Or are they human at all? They could be machines, or . . . who knows. It’s obvious why I didn’t spot the figures before: as they move through the woods, their suits briefly take on the browns and greens of the trees and fallen leaves. Adaptive camouflage. They flicker as they move, the suits struggling to keep up with the colors and patterns around them. No rescue team needs suits like that. It’s equipment for the military, or for those who need to operate in secret. If they’re here to help us, why would they need to hide from us?

  What happens next confirms my worst fear. The figure leading the charge raises an arm, there’s a popping sound, and I hear a crash, something large falling to the ground somewhere in the forest. I scan feverishly through the binoculars, trying to identify who or what they’re shooting at. Finally I see a man, middle-aged, slightly overweight, writhing on the ground as if he’s being shocked with a Taser. The last time I saw his face was yesterday morning—when I sent his team northwest to search for help. That team must have been returning this morning as well. One by one the suited figures hunt down the three of them, shooting each with some weapon I can’t make out. The invaders hoist the limp bodies on their shoulders and turn, making their way to the domed plastic tents—and directly toward us.

  In unison, Mike and I sink to the ground behind a rocky outcrop. A few minutes later, I risk a glance.

  The figures carry the three search-team members into the nearest tent and emerge a minute later, carrying a stretcher with an unconscious passenger: Sabrina. They take her to the middle tent, then bring out another passenger: Yul Tan. And a third: Harper. A white cylinder encloses Harper’s right leg from her knee to her ankle, and a bag hangs above the stretcher. She’s the last one.

  I take the handgun from my jacket, prepared for anything.

  Mike’s eyes lock on the gun, then drift up to me. “What’s the plan?” he whispers.

  I’m about to tell him that I don’t know when I hear a rapid pop behind us, like an air gun.

  Mike’s eyes go wide as he seizes, and I dive for him. The rock where I was just crouched echoes as the shot meant for me slams into it.

  I hold the gun out and fire blind, in the direction I think the shot came from. Then I scurry around to the other side of the rock, scanning the woods all the way to the plastic tents. Yes, the figure’s on the other side of the rocks. I peek above the rock and spot it, staggering through the woods toward me. It’s hit.

  I raise my gun to fire again, but I never get a chance. The ground behind the figure explodes, and the blast sends it flying through the air and knocks me to the ground. I roll through the woods, finally slamming into a large oak tree. My ears ring and nausea sweeps over me. Pain starts in my ribs and surges through my body, causing me to convulse. For a moment, I think I’ll throw up, but it passes as pieces of dirt and splinters shower me.

  When my head finally clears, I hear more blasts in the distance, a relentless barrage. Through the canopy I see an airship hovering over the crash site, firing into the woods surrounding it, in the direction of the clearing and the two other ships.

  I spot their targets a second later: four suited figures running toward their ships, zigzagging wildly as they try to dodge the fire from the airship above.

  I make my way back to the other side of the rocks and roll Mike’s limp body over. He’s alive, his breathing shallow but steady. A spidery metallic burr is dug into his back. I try to pry it off, but I can’t get a grip on it.

  In the distance the cadence of the firefight changes. Earlier the firing was targeted, like laser blasts, but now it rolls over the treetops like thunder. The explosions shake my chest and deafen me. The sensory overload is disorienting, and I fight to focus.

  The fire from the incoming airship is now being returned. Two ships hover in the air for a long moment, neither budging, drilling each other with shot after shot. A column of smoke rises from the field, almost hiding the far ship. I bet one of the ships on the ground was destroyed.

  Focus.

  I attempt to rise, but collapse again. The ground shakes. Around me the forest rains limbs, twigs, and shattered trunks.

  I finally stand, staggering on wobbling limbs, my equilibrium gone.

  The camp. The tents. They’re open. The arched metal frame has retracted into a series of small boxes on the ground. The plastic sheets that were stretched over the frame blow through the disintegrating forest, bunching, turning cartwheels like milky plastic tumbleweeds. They collect bits of falling wood and leaves as they go, taking on the colors of the forest, slowly camouflaging themselves, making their escape.

  Escape.

  Rows of hospital beds lie open to the elements and falling debris. The passengers are waking up.

  The retreating invaders . . . they set the passengers free. Why? I bet it’s so that we wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. It has to be. We’re the prize here. Bob was right. The . . . things in the bulky suits brought us here, and they seem to be at war with someone.

  In the air the tide is turning. The incoming aircraft is beating the defender back, out of the black cloud of smoke, but it keeps firing. How long do we have?

  How long does Harper have?

  Through the trees and slowly falling debris, I see her sit up in her bed and look around, confused. I race to the tent, falling three times as I go, but I feel no pain. Adrenaline carries me on.

  When I reach Harper, her eyes go wide. I can’t imagine what I must look like. I grab her by the shoulders. “We have to go!” I shout, but I can’t hear my own voice. I can’t even hear the exchange of fire above anymore, only feel the rumble. My hearing might be permanently damaged.

  Harper shakes her head and mouths, “My leg,” but then suddenly looks down at it, shocked. She whispers a phrase I can’t make out, then swings her legs over the side, planting her feet on the ground, smiling.

  I start toward the woods, but she catches my arm, her grip strong. It’s a good sign.

  She points to Sabrina and Yul, who are just getting up. Slowly, so I can read her lips, she forms words: “They. Know. Something.”

  We rush toward them, waving at them to come with us. When I turn around, about half the survivors are converging on us, shouting, staring.

  “Run!” I yell, flinging my arms out. “Spread out. Go, you hear me? Go!” I grab Harper’s hand and sprint through the woods. She’s right behind me. In fact, I think I’m slowing her down. Incredib
le. They healed her. Or maybe Sabrina did—but that’s not possible; she’s in better shape than when we crashed. Even her skin glows.

  I glance back. Yul’s gone.

  I stop and grab Sabrina’s arm. “Where’s Yul?”

  Thankfully my hearing’s returning some, but I still have to strain to hear Sabrina say, “He had to go back for his computer.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “He needs it,” Sabrina says.

  “He needs it, or they need it?” Harper’s voice is hard, surprising both Sabrina and me.

  Sabrina looks down. “I don’t know. . . . I think . . . I think they both need it.”

  I take the gun out, slip my watch off, and hand it to Harper. A smile curls at the corners of her mouth, and I can tell she’s trying with everything she has to suppress it. She turns the watch over, reading the inscription: For a lifetime of service. —United States Department of State.

  Her eyebrows lift. “You . . . worked for the State Department?”

  “My dad did. Listen to me, Harper. If I’m not back in ten minutes, keep going. Promise me.”

  Harper keeps staring at the watch.

  “Promise me, Harper.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  I take off, pushing my still shaky legs as hard as I can toward the nose section. The rows of beds that the tents rested on lie empty now, and so does the camp. The trees are still shedding debris. It drifts down like falling snow, covering the stacks of white body bags with a fine coat of green and brown. It’s quiet, creepy. I can only hear the airships in the distance, their firing now intermittent.

  I don’t see Yul as I approach the camp, but I don’t stop. I bound up the staircase of luggage and plane parts into the nose section and barge through the first-class cabin. He’s pulling bags out of the overhead, ransacking them, searching—

  Behind me I hear footsteps. I turn to see a suited figure, camouflaged even here, bearing down on the two of us. I raise my gun, but I’m too late. His arm is outstretched. I expect to hear the soft pop of air next, but a gunshot rings out, a piercing noise in the small space. The figure topples forward, colliding with a first-class seat and landing hard, his suit shimmering and flashing, crackling with electrical sounds.

  Grayson stands in the first-class galley, a handgun held out.

  I turn to Yul. “You have it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go,” I say, my eyes locking on both of them.

  They follow me out of the plane, and we take off into the woods.

  The suited figures will hunt us down now. They brought us here for a reason, and we have what they need.

  PART TWO

  TITANS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Harper

  I’M A NEW WOMAN. LITERALLY. MY HEAD IS clear, my skin is smooth, and my muscles feel supple and strong. There’s no hint that I was on my deathbed twelve hours ago. (I guess it was technically my death lie-flat seat—in first class, no less—but never mind that.) The bottom line is, those suited things that invaded the crash site healed me. And did a bang-up job. It’s quite a mystery, given how the meet-and-greet started.

  I don’t remember anything after the shimmering monster stormed into the cabin and shot Sabrina, Yul, and me with what must have been a sedating device. I awoke the next morning on a narrow bed. My eyes focused just in time to watch the steel hoops above me retract, letting the plastic roof take flight, drifting into the woods. I thought it was snowing at first, but I soon realized that tiny bits of leaves and limbs were falling, as if a grinder were shredding the treetops. The sound of explosions in the air assaulted me next. Two ships hung unmoving in the sky, firing relentlessly, the booms of their guns like thunder in my chest.

  And then Nick was there, rescuing me once again, though this time I was in far better shape than he was. He looked a fright, his face covered in dirt, grime, and caked blood, his eyes sunken, his cheeks gaunt. Scared me worse than the bombs bursting in the air.

  He and Yul returned from the nose section a few hours ago with Yul’s carry-on and, in my opinion, a far less valuable piece of baggage: Grayson Shaw.

  “He’s coming with us,” Nick said when the three of them rejoined Sabrina and me, and no one’s said a word since. The five of us have simply marched through one forest after another, avoiding the fields, our pace steady but not quite brisk, for Nick’s sake. He’s in the worst shape of all of us. He’s been holding his right side—his ribs, I’d guess—and breathing hard almost the entire way.

  When we finally stop for water, I beg him to rest for a bit, but he insists we go on. Sabrina tries to have a look at his injuries, but Nick won’t hear of it.

  “They’re hunting us.” He motions to Yul’s bag. “And whatever’s in there.”

  Yul stiffens.

  “We’ll talk about it when we get to the farmhouse we saw on our way to the glass structure.”

  “The structure?” Sabrina asks.

  “It was . . . nothing,” Nick says, still trying to catch his breath between sips of water. “We’ll talk about everything at the farmhouse, when we’re not out in the open.”

  A FEW HOURS LATER THE five of us stand at the edge of a forest, eyeing an old stone farmhouse in the middle of a rolling green field. It looks deserted. There are no cars, no road or drive of any kind, for that matter, just three small stone buildings.

  Nick instructs us to stay under the cover of the trees as he and Grayson set out to search the house. I want to ask whether Grayson Shaw, who’s apparently come away from the crash site with a handgun he found in one of the plastic tents, is the ideal partner with whom to storm our only potential place of refuge, but they’re halfway across the field before I can object.

  I wait anxiously as they slip through the wooden door, guns drawn, crouched like the Metropolitan Police raiding a terror suspect’s apartment block.

  Beside me Sabrina and Yul stand in tense, awkward silence.

  No one says a word about what I heard back at the plane. The two of them know what’s going on here. They’re part of it—they’ve known since the beginning. I wonder if they’re dangerous. What a fix to be in: Grayson on one side, Sabrina and Yul on the other, and some mysterious army hunting us.

  Nick and Grayson trudge back through the green field, handguns stowed.

  “It’s empty,” Nick calls. “Come on, quick.” The second the wood door closes behind us, he says, “Stay inside and away from the windows.”

  He lays the last bits of his food on a simple wooden table. “We split it five ways.”

  Nick doesn’t eat his share, though. He just staggers away, exhaustion finally overtaking him. I follow him into the bedroom, where he climbs into the narrow bed and lies facedown, not bothering to remove any of his soiled clothes.

  I close the door, walk around the bed, and squat down, facing him.

  “Where are we?”

  “Future,” he murmurs, eyes closed.

  The future. How? It’s a shock, but it explains the suited figures, why rescue didn’t come.

  “What year?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What was in the glass structure?”

  “Stonehenge.”

  “Stonehenge?” I whisper, half to myself. So we are in England.

  Nick’s drifting off. I touch his shoulder. “Sabrina and Yul—I think they may be involved in whatever happened to the plane.”

  “Yeah. Gotta rest, Harper. Rough night. Don’t let them leave. Get me up at sunset.”

  “Okay.”

  His breathing slows, and just when I think he’s gone to sleep, he whispers, “Harper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Glad you’re okay.”

  Before I can answer, he’s gone, out cold.

  I settle onto the floor, looking at him, thinking. Then I rise, roll him onto his back on the bed, and take his shoes off. His socks are soaked through. I peel them off, freeing his waterlogged, swollen, blistered feet. I almost gasp as I unbutton his shirt, revealin
g more of his injuries. Dark bruises cover his arms, chest, and ribs, as if he rolled down a mountain. What happened to him?

  We need real help. Rescue. But for now, I’ll do what I can for him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Harper

  I PULLED THE CURTAINS CLOSED RIGHT AFTER I got Nick settled, and now through the thin white fabric I watch the sun setting over the green fields, the serenity a sharp contrast to the turmoil inside me.

  Nick hasn’t moved a muscle for hours. The blankets covering him are yellowed with age—who knows how old they are—and his wet clothes hang over the edge of the white tub in the bathroom. I sit in the corner, on a wooden rocking chair that creaks loudly if I make the slightest movement. It’s been a kind of concentration test—move and the alarm goes off, and Nick wakes up. I’ve passed so far.

  These silent hours in the small farmhouse bedroom have given me time to think, to wrap my head around everything that’s happened since Flight 305 crashed in the English countryside. Since then it’s been nonstop, with people’s lives—including my own, or at the very least a limb—on the line. Now, as Nick sleeps, I can’t stop thinking about the passengers who perished in the crash, as well as the people who died in the days after, seemingly of old age, and those who fled the crash site earlier today, who I imagine aren’t as warm and comfortable as I am right now. I wonder what happened to Nate, the kid from Brooklyn who will never see his mother again; about Jillian, the flight attendant who became so much more in the chaotic aftermath of the crash; about the girl in the Disney World shirt. I wonder where they are right now, if they’re safe and happy.

  I am. Despite my fears about what might come next, I’m sublimely happy. I’m happy that Sabrina didn’t have to take part of my leg off to beat the infection. I’m happy that I can walk on my own two legs. And more: I’m happy that I survived the crash, and that Nick did, too, and that he’s here, alive and relatively healthy. I feel . . . extraordinarily lucky just to be alive and well. I’ve taken that for granted, just being alive and healthy. It wasn’t until I was at risk of losing my life or my leg that I fully appreciated how lucky I’ve been.