The black bird looked massive to Jon. A modified Boeing CH-47 Chinook, it wasn’t an attack model helicopter, or even a rescue model, like those that Jon had ridden in with Revik in the past. The thing stretched over one hundred feet in length, and had specifically been designed for combat cargo drops. Not only would it carry all of the high-ranked infiltrators Revik brought with them out of San Francisco, but also all of their equipment.
Jon had known, even before they’d left San Francisco, that they’d be flying over the OBE walls this time, not going across land or water. But it hadn’t really sunk in what that would mean to all of them, not until that precise moment.
There would be no surprise landings, not in that thing.
Jon saw Revik and the others turn, watching the Chinook approach low over the flat expanse of empty concrete near the terminal buildings. Among all of the seers standing there, only Allie didn’t change the direction of her eyes.
She continued to look out over the wave-crested ocean instead, at those dark, massing clouds hovering on the horizon.
For a bare instant, Jon thought he glimpsed her there again, shining from the depths of her pale green eyes, hiding in that thousand-yard stare.
As soon as Jon saw it, however, that sharper glimmer was gone.
11
CHINOOK
JON’S HEART POUNDED in his throat, deafening him.
He watched the row of steel and glass buildings grow larger as he stared out the nearest window, sitting alone in a two-seat row at the back of the Chinook.
The Chinook must have been used for commercial purposes, once upon a time. Instead of combat-drop benches, it had seats like an airplane, if smaller and narrower than those that came with most commercial jets, and with old-fashioned looking headsets linked to the pilots in the event of announcements. Organic panes had also been fitted to the Chinook’s fuselage, panes that appeared transparent when aligned with the outside feeds, allowing Jon and the rest of the passengers a near-360 degree view as the helicopter rose into the air near the main terminal of LaGuardia.
Jon sat in the back third of seats.
Allie sat in the front, nearest to the pilots. Revik sat near her, with Yumi and Balidor in the two seats across the aisle from them. Wreg sat with Jax up front, too, across from Chinja and Neela. Behind them sat another row of heads, and another.
Jon didn’t bother to try and identify most of them.
The cabin remained silent, but for the beating rotors. Whatever the seating arrangement meant, it clearly didn’t involve a lot of socializing. No one spoke at all as the Chinook rose above the level of the buildings dotting the shores of Queens. The silence remained as the nose of the helicopter tilted forward and they began cruising rapidly south to reach Manhattan from the lower tip, so more or less across from Staten Island. Jon didn’t know the exact reasons for that approach, but he’d overheard Jorag, who was one of their acting pilots, talking about needing room for the climb up over the front of the OBE field that protected Manhattan itself.
The cabin remained silent as they flew over into Brooklyn, apart from the engines thrumming loudly in the background, penetrating Jon’s skin with their rhythmic pulses.
Jon watched birds fly beneath the helicopter’s fuselage, skimming over the surface of the water of Gravesend Bay, right before those waters met with the Upper Bay and then turned back into the Hudson River. Jon saw no boats anywhere...no ferries or freighters or even one-man canoes. Ships rusted here and there, but only by docks along the shores. Jon didn’t see any other planes in the sky, either, not even news helicopters or military jets.
Hell, he didn’t see so much as a kite, or a kid’s lost balloon.
The buildings they’d skimmed past over Brooklyn mostly looked like burned-out husks. A handful remained standing and more or less intact, but fires raged outside their doors, and Jon had seen walls built from broken cars and dumpsters to keep people out, razor wire and glass dotting the edges of those enclaves to reinforce the point.
He could only imagine what must be going on down there, now that enough time had passed for real food shortages to emerge, as well as shortages in a lot of other post-apocalyptic essentials, including power and water and ammunition, to name a few.
The sky still looked relatively clear, but Jon couldn’t help wondering how much of the island flooded when the storms rolled back in, given that the outer boroughs weren’t reinforced with dykes and expensive OBE fields, unlike Manhattan. Jon knew a good chunk of the island had likely been made permanently uninhabitable for that very reason already, even apart from the mess of having no law enforcement, no ambulances, no hospitals, no fire trucks, no help...in essence, nothing to keep people from devolving into animals and eating one another, either out of fear, sport or desperation.
Once they’d made a circle around Staten Island, the Chinook began to climb.
The helicopter climbed for what felt like a long time, gradually at first, then more and more dramatically as they got closer to the skyline of the main city.
Within minutes, they reached an area of sky high above the downtown buildings.
Reflected in the VR panels, steel and metal structures loomed up from the earth below Jon’s feet. Jon’s light sparked and reacted to the nearness of the city, touching the bare, coiling edges of the organic binary electric or ‘OBE’ field that surrounded the vast majority of the sky over Manhattan itself. Jon felt himself scanning for signs of life, for any movement at all in the streets and buildings as they passed overhead.
They were too high for him to see anything with much certainty, though.
He strained his eyes by staring down anyway, frustrated by his blindness, by his complete inability to see what might be waiting for them on the other side.
He felt something else down there, too, and realized that he could feel the bare edges of the construct over the city itself. Allie had talked about that, back when they reached New York the last time. No one else besides Revik had even been able to feel it, though, not even Balidor.
Jon had to assume he could only feel it now because of his connection to Revik and Allie. Even so, he couldn’t help wondering if that construct had grown and strengthened in the months since, for him to be able to feel it so clearly.
Revik assured them, of course, albeit in a distracted kind of way, that he and Balidor had mapped every inch of the deadly OBE field itself.
Jon found that only mildly reassuring.
A hell of a lot of specific logistical issues remained murky to Jon, though. He’d seen hints of some of these tactical pieces being worked on, of plans laid within plans, long before they left San Francisco, but Jon honestly wasn’t sure if those glimpses reassured him more than worried him. In any case, he felt quite certain that he hadn’t imagined them.
A few of these stuck in Jon’s mind more clearly than others.
Like when Jon wandered into the medical lab, only to find Revik cut up and covered in his own blood.
Jon himself had gone in there looking for a bandage for a wrist injury he’d sustained while sparring. He’d seen Neela standing a few feet away from the door as he walked up, but hadn’t thought much of that, either. It certainly never occurred to him that she might be guarding that door. In any case, she’d been talking on her headset so he sauntered on past...only to find Revik in said condition and being stitched up by one of the seer medical techs.
Jon just stood there, slack-jawed for a few seconds while the tech worked, seeing Revik wince as the two of them spoke in low voices, blood all over Revik’s arm and part of his bare chest. The medical tech and Revik continued talking as Jon first walked in, the tech saying something about how they would ‘try it again’ the next day...when Revik glanced up sharply and saw Jon standing there.
The female medical tech had openly blanched.
Then Revik barked at Jon, jerking him out of his trance by asking whether or not there had been a guard stationed outside the door, and if so, who the fuck it was.
; When Jon just stood there, stammering, Revik yelled for Neela, probably plucking her image directly from Jon’s mind. When the lithe seer appeared in the doorway, looking flustered and vaguely horrified, Revik ordered her coldly to escort Jon out.
Jon let her, without uttering a word.
He also didn’t tell anyone else what he’d seen that day. Then again, none of them talked about that kind of thing...not if they’d been employed with the team in San Francisco for even a few days. Jon quickly learned that was the first rule, when working for Revik:
Keep your own part of the plan to your damned self.
Keep your thoughts on the plan to your damned self.
Keep anything you overhear, see or suspect might be in other parts of the plan to your damned self.
Of course, Jon had seen that side of Revik before.
Maybe not so extreme, but the basic principle had been intact from day one. Revik, more than Balidor or Wreg or Allie or any of the other military seers, believed in information restriction down to the most micro of levels, particularly in the lead-up to a major op. Breaking that rule was the fastest way to get kicked off the team.
Jon found himself glancing at Revik again, seeing the harder look etched into the male seer’s eyes as he looked down over the view of Manhattan. Jon could only see his profile, but it was enough to get him to back off, long before he got close to his light.
He’d noticed all three of them tended to keep their distance since the linking, though. Probably because when they didn’t, the flood of information quickly grew disconcertingly dense and intimate, to the point where even recognizing oneself in the tangled mess of their light grew almost impossible. As it was, more than enough got through.
Jon forced his eyes back down over the view of the buildings.
The last time he’d been here, they’d arrived at Manhattan in the middle of a storm. Visibility had been pretty much shit, even on the island itself, much less during the underwater journey to the docks. Because of that, Jon hadn’t seen much––certainly not outside of Manhattan itself. Most of what Jon saw occurring inside the city, he got via security cameras, along with the few remaining functioning feeds. The storms hadn’t allowed for much of a view through the upper windows of the hotel, and all of the lobby-level glass had been covered in bullet-proof, organic panels, so he couldn’t even see Fifth Avenue except through image captures.
Jon had seen a number of kids running by on those security feeds, and adults, too, most trying to evade vigilante groups or the police, particularly after the curfew sirens went off. Jon watched a few throw pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, but most relied on hand-held weapons of various kinds––tire irons, pipes, bricks, baseball bats, even the occasional cricket bat or golf club. Jon also saw a few actual swords, too, as well as a number of butcher knives and at least one compound bow with metal arrows.
By then, most of those in the civilian population had been stripped of guns, much less anything more sophisticated. Security fliers, the robotic eyes and ears of the police, which could clock in at around 300 mph and were built to be around the size of a softball––although Jon had seen them closer to the size of a soccer ball before, too––came equipped with sensors and inbuilt weaponry and could take image captures from almost anywhere, due to their small size. Fliers could also pick out anything that had complex combustion elements. Since confiscations often included a one-way ticket to Staten Island and thus C2-77 land, most civilians dumped their weapons rather than risk being ID’d with them by SCARB or the NYPD.
By then, a lot of people probably started running out of ammunition anyway, even if they began the quarantine owning a weapon of that kind.
Looking down over the city, Jon felt his heart beating faster again.
He remembered the last time he’d looked down over this city from a helicopter.
He’d been in cuffs that time, collared, shoved in between men and women in NYPD uniforms, watching the water rush in over the rivers and bays and towards the buildings of the southern skyline. He’d watched it coming, knowing Wreg probably wouldn’t be able to get out of the way. Knowing he had no way to contact the other man without his headset and with the collar around his neck. He’d felt Wreg underground, less than an hour before...
Wreg...gods. He’d thought Wreg was going to die.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life. His mind fought to shut down whenever he tried to think about him, the pain so strong he could barely feel...
It had been too late. Too late for all of them.
Jon thought they were all dead. He thought he was dead, Revik was dead. He thought Balidor would die, too, along with Chandre and Jorag, Neela, Chinja, Yumi and Tenzi.
Allie. Allie had been gone.
Wreg. Gods, he’d thought Wreg was dead.
When Jon’s could see again, he found he was gripping the armrests of his seat, staring down at the view below the fuselage without seeing any of it. He fought to focus, to see the view through the transparent hull as the Chinook continuously cycled new images before his eyes. Jon stared at the river and the buildings that abutted it, trying to focus. The sun was out now. The storm was over. It wasn’t that day. That day had ended.
The thought repeated, but still meant nothing.
They’d already lost. They’d lost a whole civilization, a whole way of life. They’d lost most of the people they loved.
They’d lost her.
Out of no where, he found himself back in that sewer tunnel under the ladder, the sound of water rushing in his ears.
He remembered being pulled up, hanging from that crane, feeling like he was already dead. Flashes hit him, images from that dark, running with the light held behind Maygar’s back, watching it bob in front of him as he fought not to trip in the water and debris in the bottom of the pipe. He remembered the ground rumbling under his feet, being thrown into the pipe walls, Revik shouting for them to hurry.
He could feel Maygar, Revik... Allie.
Shit, he was scared.
He was shaking, he was so scared.
Not only because he could feel the OBE. He could feel Cass down there, waiting for them. Through Cass, he felt Shadow, too... even Feigran. He remembered how crazy things had felt in those sewer tunnels. Even before that, watching Ditrini’s men beat Revik up in that cell, not long after Jon realized what he’d done, that he’d led Allie up to the roof to where Cass was waiting for her. The blank look in Cass’ eyes, that cruel smile as she thanked Jon for delivering her.
The images toyed with him, teasing his mind in spirals, but they didn’t remain.
Instead all that seemed to want to flash behind his eyes was the jerk and jump of that yisso torch in the crumbling sewer tunnels, gripped in Maygar’s muscular hands. Fighting not to trip in the water, the rumbling of the earth and the sound of the rivers and ocean filling his ears. Watching bodies get slammed into buildings. Seeing cars spin into one another and street lamps, slamming through glass lobbies as the waves hit.
Jon’s mind kept going on that loop, cycling endlessly back...to Maygar and Revik in the sewer tunnels. Feeling sick as he realized what he’d done, feeling hands grip him by a metal collar, the ground moving beneath his feet. Revik on his knees, staring up at Ditrini as if he already knew Allie was dead, as if he was ready to join her there...
A heavy hand rested on Jon’s shoulder.
Jon jumped violently.
His mind fought with the face in front of him now. He’d been sitting alone in his two-seat row, in the window seat, but someone sat next to him now. That person fought to come into focus, to force Jon back to the present. When they finally did, Jon found himself looking at Wreg’s black eyes, from too close... way too close, for how he was feeling right then.
“Breathe, brother,” the muscular seer said softly. “Breathe.”
Wreg spoke in a low, cajoling voice, too low for anyone sitting in one of the nearby rows to hear. He massaged Jon’s shoulder with gentle but insistent fingers, pushing warmth t
hrough his hands, and into his voice when he next spoke.
“...Breathe, little brother,” Wreg said. “Just breathe. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“I’m all right––” Jon began.
“You’re not,” Wreg countered, sharp. “Look at me, brother. Right now.”
Until then, Jon had barely realized that he’d looked away.
Reluctantly, he turned.
He met Wreg’s gaze. Once he had, he found that something in his chest started to loosen. He continued to look into the seer’s dark eyes, forcing himself to breathe as the other seer breathed, as Wreg talked him through breathing, reminding his body how it worked, how things were supposed to function. As he did, Jon fought to let go of the tension that had turned all of his muscles to a single clenched fist, seemingly up and down the length of his body. He didn’t know which part to try and relax first.
“Don’t try,” Wreg advised him. “Just breathe. It will let go.”
Jon nodded, doing what the other said, not questioning it that time.
After a few more seconds, Jon felt almost normal again.
Well, not normal. But normal enough to be embarrassed.
“I’m okay,” Jon said again.
His voice came out calmer that time, but still with a tremble. Somehow, hearing the near-frailty of the person behind that voice, Jon could only wince, feeling a shame beyond what he could express. He didn’t try to push the seer away, even then. His words sounded almost apologetic when he spoke them aloud to the other man.
“Really, Wreg... I’m okay now. Thanks.”
“Just give it a few more minutes,” Wreg said.
His voice had gotten gruff though, and he wasn’t looking at Jon directly anymore, either. He spoke almost like one would to calm an animal, his voice holding a distant kind of compassion. He didn’t remove his hand from Jon’s shoulder, though, or stop sending the warmth of his light through his massaging fingers.
“You’ve been traumatized...” Wreg began.
Jon opened his mouth, but Wreg spoke before he could.
Allie's War Season Four Page 23
