There are rules to falling.
We learn the rules in junior high physics. We learn that all things, a mouse and an elephant both, will fall at the same acceleration―9.8 meters per second squared―until reaching their separate terminal velocities.
So you might be falling hundreds of feet, maybe down into one of the deepest gorges in the United States for instance, and even though the wind chill of the air skinning by you feels like fire, even if your gut is doing double axels around your heart, all the things you start out with―a cushion, a friend, a coonskin hat―they're all right there with you the whole way down, right where they started. Relatively speaking.
The pre-dawn blackness made spatial sense impossible. The little white ripples on the water below provided no clue of distance, of when impact would come. There were just the G-force spasms in my stomach and the shrill sound of my own long scream, replaced by the howl of air in my ears once I'd run out of breath.
The others' screams trailed off too. I could see no one. Suffocating, I plummeted, frozen in total free-fall somewhere between the front seats, limbs sprawled and reaching. This was it. This was it. This was really, really it. I braced for impact. Waited, waited.
Waited.
Terminal velocity, we're told, is achieved when the downward force of gravity acting on a falling object meets the upward force of drag, or air resistance, at which point the object begins to fall at a steady speed.
What we never stop to think about, though, is all the air creating that drag. We spend our whole lives walking right through air like it's nothing, sucking it in, belching it out, lancing through it with our cars. Air takes a beating, but it's there. It's made up of solid little particles just like everything else, just like you and me.
And when it wants to―when it's willed to―air can and will push you back.
Impact came. And it was painful, a sudden slap to every square inch of my body. Something like the worst belly flop imaginable followed by an awful upward pressure. The pressure increased steadily, scooping under me and pushing until I was no longer falling. Until the dizzying motions in my stomach and the drunken spin of the watery shimmer below were only in my head.
There was a stillness. For the first time in my life, my mind was completely, utterly empty. I grappled again at the upholstery, curling around it with my entire body, sucking in breath after breath before any sense returned to me. A set of arms―one of them half encased in duct tape―hauled me onto the ledge formed by the now horizontal passenger seat. It provided only a few square feet of refuge, upon which Corin and I were both shaking so violently that we could hardly keep from pushing one another off.
I didn't understand. I looked all around, seeing in clear pictures again, not blurred motion. We were not falling. The water still ran beneath us, the bus was still nose-diving, but we were not falling. I looked up, saw what Corin was looking at. Saw what we were all looking at.
"Oh my god! Jesse!"
What I saw was impossible, about as comprehendible as our paused demise or the roaring water below. Yards above us, centered perfectly in the upturned space between the table and the bar area, with his perfect hair rising in every direction and his feet dangling below him, was Jesse Cannon. He held onto nothing; he stood on nothing. He had all the appearance of a person underwater, and for one mind-squeezing second I thought we were underwater, that the silvery surface I saw below might actually be the surface above. Then the incredible truth registered, sudden and hard:
Jesse wasn't floating in the water.
Jesse was floating in the air.
And if you happened to be down on the New River that dark and early November morning, just under the famed bridge, you would have seen the Jesse Cannon tour bus floating in the air, too. Nose down, fifteen feet above the rolling river, as sedentary as a part of the landscape, its bulk supported by the trillions of rebellious air particles under the command of their astonished, air-headed leader.
I wobbled at the edge of the seat, straining to look up without falling. "Jesse?"
"Don't talk to me right now," Jesse snapped, as if I'd interrupted an important phone call or a delicate self-waxing procedure―not the levitation of a five-ton bus using only hitherto untested supernatural abilities.
I repositioned my grip on Corin and counted heads. Jackson was still fastened to the driver's seat. Behind it, Ghi and Khan were propped awkwardly in the small space afforded by the couch alcove, clinging to one another rather immasculinly in order to avoid falling out, both of them carefully watching Jesse. Below us, the black water ran fast but shallow. We were hovering very close to the bank.
Without warning, the bus shifted slightly, just enough to draw a rainbow of exclamations―in Arabic, Korean, and the King's English.
"Please remain calm," Jesse said loudly, about as calm as a stewardess with a burst aneurism. The look of concentration on his face was pricelessly unattractive. "I'm going to put us down."
We braced as the bus swayed and halted, rocking back a few degrees toward its normal orientation. Whatever Jesse was doing, it was working. At his direction, the bus lowered a foot or so more toward the river, tilting until it was nearly right-side-up again. Not bad at all. A thrilled expression crossed Jesse's face, an overjoyed, cocky look.
"Yes! Look at this! Can you believe this?" he shouted triumphantly. "Criss Angel can suck my―"
WHAM!!
All the invisible arms of air at our defense were not prepared for a third poorly-aimed bazooka shot. Nor was Jesse's frail concentration, which snapped like a thread when the water beneath us exploded into a column of white spray. Everything slammed sideways with jarring, breakneck suddenness and the bus dropped the remaining few feet into the riverbed.
The emergency lights kicked on. Gravity had us all scrambling to stand on the walls instead of the floors as water began rushing in through broken windows. It took only a moment to assess that the bus had landed on its side, in the rocky shallows of the bank, and that there was no danger of sinking. Not quite solid ground, but at least the normal rules of physics seemed to have reinstated themselves.
Except for one rule, that is. Most of the incoming water, rather than taking the course naturally suggested by gravity, rushed to Corin instead. It surged up to his waist like an eager pack of dogs, and he shrugged at us helplessly. Either I had seen enough at that point, or I was in actual shock, because that was the first of the Vessel phenomena which failed to amaze me.
Corin quelled the geyser with a glance, much to his own brief amazement, and then hurried past me with Ghi close behind. I turned to follow and understood their urgency immediately. It wasn't for fear that another blast might strike us at any moment. It was Jackson.
He was still alive. He made that clear with a groan as he undid his seatbelt―an ill-planned action, considering he was still dangling several feet off the ground. No one was close enough to stop him. He dropped through the width of the cab, landing beyond the dashboard with an ominous, pitiful thud.
Then he popped up onto his feet.
"Is everyone okay?" He bounded over the passenger seat, looking to each of us. "Everyone? Any compound fractures? Does anyone need CPR?"
"Jackson," Corin attempted to halt him, loud but calm.
"Seriously? No one?" Jackson frowned, apparently disappointed that part of his emergency training was going unused. He quickly moved on to other protocol, instructing us to exit the bus in an orderly manner, which we did not do.
We did nothing but stare, because Jackson was covered in blood.
His own blood. It streamed down from gashes in his square forehead, criss-crossed down his bare arms. It darkened his cotton shirt, drenching it in outward circles from the holes gouged by bullets. Lots of bullets.
"Alright, let's all stay calm and exit through the windshield."
"Jackson." Corin reached out an unsteady, beseeching hand. "Sit down."
"No time, England!" Jackson dismissed him and continued to make sweeping, shepherding motions toward the fro
nt of the bus. "Get going, people. Stay low. Move it."
Ghi stepped forward carefully. "Jackson, please," he said, trying to sound calm so as not to breed his own panic. "You've been shot. Multiple times. And cut up with glass. Look at yourself."
"What, you think I'm blind?" Jackson hardly glanced down. He jerked a thumb towards Khan. "And this guy stabbed me in the face last week. I'm fine. Trust me."
Unremarkably, no one did. As Jackson gestured once more toward what he had deemed the safest exit, we continued to stare at him in horror.
"Okay, look." Jackson dropped the fireman routine for a second and crossed his thick arms impatiently, rubbing one finger across a streak of drying blood as an afterthought. "Knife? Steel. Bullets? Metal. Glass? Sand."
Where he'd smudged the blood away, only a fading streak remained, barely a scratch. "And what am I?"
Earth.
All of those things. Technically speaking.
Jackson lifted his T-shirt.
"Oh...," Corin and I both said, as comprehension sank in. Jesse made a similar noise, but for entirely different reasons.
Jackson's body had absorbed every bullet and every shard of glass, closing itself back up wherever they had pierced him. No wounds or deep gashes remained. Just a lot of drying blood and some distinct reddened areas, the beginnings of bruises. He looked as though he'd just finished a round of paintball.
"Jackson, that's incredible," Ghi blurted. "If bullets can't hurt you, or knives or―"
"Can't hurt me?" Jackson frowned his wide frown. "Son, that hurt like hell. You've been shot before, you ought to know."
Ghi let every last wrong thing about that statement go with a benevolent sigh.
"Now." Jackson pulled his shirt back down and straightened up with authority. "I am the safety expert here, and I want everyone off this thing."
We filed through the warped windshield frame and continued around the overturned bus, staying as close to the roof as possible. Slabs of rock afforded everyone a semi-dry foothold, except for Corin, who was experiencing another watery revival at his feet. I sidled away from him to avoid any splashing, and turned to Ghi, who was leaning around the bus's far end, watching the mountainside where it connected to the bridge.
"Are they gone?" I asked, picturing what would come next. A chase through the pitch-black woods, jarring camera angles and guttural screams. A scene from every B horror movie, and then cut to black.
Ghi shook his head. "They're driving down."
Everyone's guts sank collectively. I testify that it made a sound.
"How long before they're here?" Corin asked.
"Another minute, maybe." Ghi swung back around and leaned against the roof. He looked over my head at Corin. "How deep is this river?"
Corin seemed to understand where this was going. The water at his feet settled and he paused for a few seconds, his face reaching the kind of focus one assumes for reading very precise instruments, even though he wasn't looking at anything in particular. He was reading something beyond himself.
"Little over a meter," he reported. "Crossing's a bad idea, though. Too rough, and too cold. I could try freezing it? Or moving it out of our way, maybe ...."
"I could just fly us across," Jesse offered, having appointed himself an expert levitator already.
"Why are we talking about running?" Jackson demanded. "We're supposed to fight, aren't we? Come on. We can handle them."
"Easy for you to say," Corin balked. "We're not all bullet-proof, you know."
"Fine. Part the water, Moses. We're all waiting."
Ghi ignored them, leaning around the rear of the bus again. Three more sets of headlights were coming down the mountain, not far behind the initial two.
He turned back to us. The whites of his eyes were the very shape of fear.
"Khan," he said.
Like a statue brought to life, Khan swiveled in the direction his name had been spoken. Ghi scrambled over to him, hissing when he stepped into an ankle-deep curl of running water. He slapped the roof of the bus.
"How fast can you burn this thing to the ground?"
Khan positively beamed.
"Excuse me?" Jesse cut between them. "My alligator Berlutis are in there!"
Ghi did not have the fashion caliber to understand what Berlutis were. He turned to the rest of us imploringly. "If they think we're dead, then maybe they'll leave."
"And if they don't?" I asked.
"Then we run," said Corin.
"Or fight," Jackson added.
No more time. Everyone moved.
Jesse's lip quivered. I grabbed his hand and started stepping over stones behind Ghi and Corin, staying low. Jackson followed. Khan stayed behind, slinking around the underbelly of the bus to start the fireworks.
"I never even got to wear them ...," Jesse whispered.
Not far up the bank, a cluster of steep rock formations jutted from the shallows, forming what looked like the closest and most sensible place to hide. We were almost halfway there, maybe thirty yards from the bus, when we began to feel the rising heat at our backs. Khan was already outdoing himself. Jesse stiffened, and I gripped his hand a little tighter.
"Just don't look back," I suggested.
That was when Corin stopped suddenly and looked to Jackson, wide-eyed.
"You did cut the engine off?" he asked. His face was so white it somehow rejected the orange glow from behind us.
"Of course I did." Jackson smirked. "Come on, man. Buses only explode in movies anyway."
And he may have been right. But do you know what else explodes in movies?
Bazookas.
That sound. We were running before we'd consciously processed it―the whistling whine of air like the scream before fireworks, the kind of noise that is always followed by something much louder. We darted over slippery stones and smashed into one another in the knee-deep currents of frigid water, racing to be as far away as possible when the fuel tank of the Jesse Cannon tour bus exploded. Which it did, about two seconds later.
A solid wave of heat radiated through the gorge, tailed by its own thunderous sound. I remember the next couple of seconds as clearly as if they'd happened this morning. I remember the incredible noise and the hot force hitting me like a wall. I remember being launched forward by the blast as if I were no more than a wet leaf, and then slamming into Ghi midair.
And I remember that it was simply a natural reflex, what he did then. That he was just trying to brace us both before we hit the ground. I know that now, and I knew it then, but this is what happened anyway:
Ghi swung out with both hands and clamped them around my upper left arm. There was a pop, a brief sizzle, and an ugly scream. I didn't realize, not until after my body struck a rock and stopped rolling, that the last sound had been me.
The first two sounds had been a couple hundred volts of electricity going through one side of my arm and out the other.
Vessel, Book I: The Advent Page 44
