The Survivalist (National Treasure)

by Arthur T. Bradley

Tanner ignored her, instead leaning back and closing his eyes.

  As the helicopter lifted off, she reached over and grabbed his hand.

  “Tell me we’re not going to crash.”

  “We’re not going to crash,” he said, without opening his eyes.

  “You’re not very convincing.”

  “We’re most certainly not going to crash.” He opened his eyes and looked over at her. “Better?”

  “Not really.”

  Together, they stared out the open door, watching as the ground slowly fell away.

  Samantha whispered, “God, please don’t let us crash. But if we must crash, please don’t make it scary.”

  The helicopter started forward and banked right, giving them a clear view of the entire operations center. A large convoy of vehicles was pulling out of the south gate, no doubt Korn and his army on their way to settle matters with those Mother called the “butchers of Smithfield.”

  Samantha scanned the compound, locating what she believed to be the hangar in which they had spent the night. She imagined Issa looking out one of its windows, waving goodbye.

  She raised a hand and returned the gesture.

  “Don’t worry, Issa. We’ll come back for you.” Samantha knew her words to be true. Tanner had many faults, but abandoning those he cared about was not one of them.

  Growing up, she had always felt detached from the world, as if slightly out of phase with the rest of the universe. Colors had been a bit muted, sounds out of tune, and human touch a bit cold. Somehow, a big brute of a man with questionable views on what was right and wrong had changed all that. Not fully perhaps, but enough that she now felt the living pulse of everything around her. That, she thought, might have been the most important thing he had ever done for her, and he didn’t even know it.

  She thought that maybe one day she would tell him. He would hate it of course. Tanner wasn’t someone who liked sentimental chatter. Still, she might tell him anyway. Just for fun, if nothing else. And when she did, she’d really gussy it up, maybe tearing up a little in the process.

  She grinned, imagining his discomfort.

  “What are you smiling at?” he said. “You swallow a bug?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  They watched as the UH-60 rose higher and higher, finally reaching an altitude of five hundred feet before turning west. Cool wind rushed in, causing Samantha’s hair to whip from side to side, lashing Tanner’s face like a cat o’ nine tails.

  He leaned away. “Do something with that mop, will ya?”

  Samantha quickly stroked her hair back into a tight ponytail, securing it with the rubber band she kept in her pocket for just such occasions.

  “You’re lucky to have such short hair,” she said in a half holler. “Mine has a mind of its own.”

  “I can remedy that with a few quick snips,” he said, scissoring his fingers in front of him.

  “Don’t you dare! I love my hair.” She ran her fingers through the ends to untangle them. “My mom used to say my hair was as thick as my head, whatever that meant.”

  Tanner chuckled. “Your mother sounds like a sage.”

  “I still miss her sometimes. That’s okay, right?”

  “Of course it is. We only get one mom and dad. Everyone else is just filling in.”

  With that, they fell silent, content to settle in and watch the trees and open fields pass beneath their feet. Another adventure was beginning, and both sat ready to embrace it.

  It didn’t take long for Samantha to remember that flying in a helicopter was much like riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle—that is to say, absolutely mind numbing. The novelty of the land passing below quickly wore off, and the deafening sound of the engine made her brain feel like it was slowly turning to oatmeal.

  Before long, Tanner’s head flopped back, eyes closed, mouth hanging open. Fortunately, the incessant drone of the helicopter covered his snores, a sound that could send squirrels scrambling for cover.

  Samantha did her best to stay awake, telling herself that at least one person needed to be on the lookout for trouble. As time passed, however, she too succumbed to the engine’s lullaby.

  Sleep for Samantha had always acted as a dirty window into her subconscious. Many times she dreamed of altered versions of her and Tanner’s adventures, the dream outcomes not always matching those of the real world.

  Her dream this day was of them sitting in the old fortune teller’s home, Malina huddled over her mystical Tarot cards. The final flip of the cards revealed a skeleton in black armor riding atop a white horse, the word “Death” carefully penned beneath them. Samantha argued with Malina, telling her to shuffle the deck and start over. When that resulted in the same outcome, she reached out and scattered the cards across the table. But that, too, failed as the cards magically realigned themselves to once again foretell Tanner’s impending doom.

  In the dream, Samantha turned to warn Tanner, only to find the skeleton slowly approach from behind him with its blade drawn and glowing green embers for eyes. She lunged forward to stop him, but an invisible force held her back. Desperate to alert Tanner, she tried to scream his name, but the only sound that came out was the chirp of a bird.

  The blade rose high above Tanner’s head, ready to sever him in two.

  “No!” she shrieked. “No!”

  Samantha’s eyes opened with a start, her heart racing and her breath caught in her throat. She lay dangling forward from the four-point harness, the Black Hawk’s open door directly beneath her. Confused, she tried to sit back but found it impossible. It was as if gravity had suddenly chosen a new direction in which to exert its mysterious force.

  She twisted and looked over at Tanner. Despite dangling forward like a tuna caught in a fisherman’s net, he remained sound asleep.

  “Tanner!” she yelled, slapping his chest with the back of her hand. “Wake up!”

  His eyes fluttered open, and he looked left and right.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’re sideways!” Samantha leaned to one side in an effort to see the pilot, but the angle made it impossible. “Something’s wrong!”

  Tanner also tried to sit up but had no more success than Samantha.

  The helicopter suddenly lurched to the other side, slamming both of them back into their jump seats.

  Samantha screamed, and as it left her mouth, a loud pulsing alarm began to sound in the cabin.

  “Hold tight!” Tanner shouted, reaching down and unbuckling his seatbelt.

  Hanging onto the webbing with one hand, he twisted around and wedged his feet beneath the jump seat. With his new position, he was able to lean around and catch a quick glimpse of the cockpit. The pilot lay slumped forward, his head wobbling from side to side. His hands still clutched the cyclic and collective, but he was clearly losing consciousness.

  “What do you see?” hollered Samantha.

  “Pilot’s out!”

  “Out! What do you mean out!”

  Instead of answering, Tanner did a quick assessment of their situation. Getting into the cockpit would be darned near impossible with them wobbling from side to side, and even if he did, he had absolutely no chance of landing a helicopter as anything other than a glorious fireball.

  The way he saw it, there were only two options. The first was to buckle up and hope they survived the landing. Given the less than graceful way that helicopters tended to fall from the sky, however, that didn’t seem like a winner.

  The other option was better in only one way. It put their survival in his hands, and Tanner had always believed that it would be better to die because of something he did, than because of something someone else did.

  Stuffing one arm through the webbing, he leaned closer to the open door to get a better look outside. As he did, the helicopter suddenly tipped back to the port side, sending his feet slipping out from under the seat to leave him dangling in the air.

  In that brief instant of terror, Tanner managed to see two things
that were critically important. The first was that the helicopter was no longer moving forward. They were managing a wobbly hover, at best. The second thing he noticed was a turquoise-colored body of water directly beneath them–not a river or lake, but something wet nonetheless.

  They appeared to be about fifty feet above the surface of the water. That was forty-nine more than Tanner wanted to fall. Anyone who had ever filled their summers jumping into swimming holes knew that water tended to feel an awful lot like concrete when falling from higher than about twenty feet.

  Reaching up with his other arm, he grabbed a hold of the jump seat. Once he had a good grip, Tanner swung his legs up and did his best to mimic a spider clinging to its web. When he looked over at Samantha, he found her staring at him with wide eyes.

  “What now?” she mouthed.

  Tanner crawled toward her. “Sorry, kiddo, we gotta jump.”

  “What!” She put both hands protectively over her buckle. “No way!”

  “Have to,” he said, working his hand under hers.

  “Please, no!”

  His eyes met hers, and she quieted.

  “Hold on tight.”

  She wrapped both arms around his thick neck.

  “Don’t you dare drop me.”

  “Never.” Tanner released the buckle, pulling Samantha to him as they fell backward through the open door.

  Falling fifty feet from rest takes all of one and three-quarter seconds, hardly enough time to take a calming breath, let alone prepare for the powerful impact that he knew was coming. Even so, Tanner did the best he could, holding Samantha against his chest, closing his eyes, and tightening his body.

  He tried to hit feet first with a slight tilt back to his body, the way that he had always heard was best. Whether or not that advice was true didn’t really matter. What did matter was that it gave him something to think about for those heart-stopping, one and three-quarter seconds.

  The impact felt like a car crash, his legs buckling beneath him as they drove deep into the water. He briefly blacked out—a second, no more—and when he came to, Samantha was tugging on his neck as she frantically kicked for the surface.

  Tanner used his free arm and both feet to pump them up through the water. As they broke the surface, a terrifying sight awaited them.

  The helicopter had tipped almost completely upside down, its rotor whirling toward them like enormous black Popsicle sticks. Even if the blades didn’t get them, the twelve thousand pounds of steel and carbon fiber most certainly would.

  Tanner yanked Samantha back underwater, lying back and flipper-kicking with all his strength. She lay atop his belly as they propelled through the water, like a baby Beluga riding her mother.

  The rotor hit directly behind them, the blades breaking off to send huge shards flying through the air. Even from their position underwater, they heard the ominous woop, woop, woop, as what was left of the blades spun down. Though they had escaped being pulverized, both knew that the worst was still to come.

  The Black Hawk hit the water with a thunderous crash. Tanner and Samantha were far enough away not to be drawn into the vortex it created, but were instead propelled outward, bubbling back to the surface before being hurled onto a rocky bank.

  They lay there for a moment, water slowly draining away. Samantha had yet to release Tanner’s neck, and her eyes were pinched shut.

  “You okay?” When he spoke, there was a croakiness to his voice from having sucked in a little water.

  Her eyes slowly opened, and when they did, he saw the fire within.

  “No, I’m not okay! You just threw me out of a helicopter!”

  “Correction: we jumped.”

  She let go of him and sat up.

  “Correction: you jumped. I was thrown out. What kind of father does something like that?”

  “One who wants his daughter to live to see another day.” He sat up and pointed toward the helicopter. The splintering rotor blades had torn through the cockpit and hold, leaving jagged gashes through the fuselage. Even if they had survived the hard landing, odds were pretty good that the blades would have made blood pudding out of their battered bodies.

  “Still,” Samantha said, unwilling to let it go, “we could have at least talked about it first.”

  “No time. Besides, things like that are best done quickly, like a bandage being ripped off.”

  She squinted. “You are the kind of person who would rip off a bandage, aren’t you?”

  The helicopter let out a loud burp as water flooded the final compartment, and they turned to see it sink until only the tail rotor poked up through the turquoise water.

  Tanner looked over at her, waiting for the apology he knew would never come.

  “Fine,” she breathed, “but I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “I’ll never get in another helicopter as long as I live. So help me.”

  Tanner nodded. “Probably better that way.”

  His reply surprised her. “Why do you say that?”

  He stood up, pulled his shirt off, and began wringing out the water.

  “You’re obviously cursed.”

  “What?”

  “Cursed, as in bringing about bad mojo.”

  “I am not!”

  “You must be, at least when it comes to helicopters. What other explanation could there be? You’ve flown twice, and both times you brought the bird down. Gotta be some kind of curse.”

  “It was just bad luck, that’s all.”

  Tanner pulled his boots off one at a time and dumped the water out.

  “If you say so.”

  “I’m not cursed,” she repeated. “Not even with helicopters. I bet I could get in one right now and it wouldn’t crash.”

  He turned away so that she couldn’t see him smile. Sometimes it was too easy.

  “Ew,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  “What?”

  She pointed to his back. “It’s all purple and splotchy.”

  “Just a little bruising, that’s all.”

  She came closer and gently placed the tips of her fingers against his skin.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Can’t even feel it.” Tanner slipped his damp shirt back on, and when he turned, he found Samantha staring at him with a look halfway between concern and regret.

  “Thanks,” she said softly. “Not for throwing me out of the helicopter,” she quickly added. “But for, you know, being the one to take all the pain.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  They looked at one another for a moment, and then Samantha turned to study their surroundings. “What is this place anyway? Some kind of lake?”

  “It’s a quarry.” He pointed to the steep ledges surrounding several sides of the man-made lake. “Basically, they cut a big hole to mine rock or gravel. Once they’re done, they let it fill with water.”

  “Like a giant swimming pool.”

  “A very dangerous swimming pool.”

  “Dangerous, how?” Her eyes grew wide. “Are there piranha?”

  “No, but there are plenty of jagged rocks, deep drop-offs, and abandoned equipment.”

  “Don’t forget crashed helicopters.”

  “That too.”

  “So, I guess we shouldn’t try to swim out and get our stuff…”

  He shook his head. “Not worth the risk.”

  “But our packs. The food, the water—it’s all gone.” She reached for the Bond Arm’s Patriot that hung at her side. Thankfully, it was still there. Her hand swung around to the small of her back. The knife was there too. Small miracles.

  “We’ll find more food, more water, more of everything.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. We push on, same as every other day.” Tanner turned and started hiking up the closest mound of dirt.

  “Yeah,” she said, following after him, “but I liked that rifle.”

  “I know you did. But all things are eventually lost.”
<
br />   Her dream about Malina suddenly came to mind, and she reached out and grabbed his arm.

  “Wait a minute. Are you talking about you?”

  “I’m just stating a fact.”

  “So you aren’t talking about you?”

  “Kiddo, there are no guarantees of anything.”

  She growled. “So you are talking about you!”

  “You truly are mindboggling.”

  She squinted and waited for him to answer the question.

  Tanner sighed. “Of course, one day you’ll have to go on without me.”

  “But I don’t want to go on without you.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you want. No one’s around forever, and you’re, what, twenty years younger than me?”

  She made a face. “Math is clearly not your strong suit.”

  “Point is, we have the time that we have. All we can do is make the best of it.”

  “If something were to happen to you, do you think I’d be okay?”

  “You’d manage.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I do.”

  “You didn’t used to think so.”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “What’s changed?”

  He thought about running down the long list of things she had learned the past year, including how to fight, forage for food, build a campfire, hotwire a car, and drive nearly anything that crossed land or water.

  Instead, he settled for saying, “You have.”

  As he turned around and continued up the hill, she said, “It doesn’t matter anyway. You’re almost certain to get us both killed, and not in a good way either. Not that there really is a good way. Unless you count being eaten by a giant marshmallow man, that is.”

  “A what?”

  “A giant marshmallow man. You know, like in Ghostbusters.” She stuck her arms out to the side and wobbled forward, like a clumsy giant.

  “How do you figure that that would be a good way to go?”

  “Think about it. He’d be eating us while we were eating him. It’s about as perfect as you can get.”

  He tried to shake the image from his head.

  “Even if something worse than a marshmallow monster kills us, it’ll be okay. Want to know why?”

  “Not really.”