Falls Like Lightning

by Shawn Grady

  CHAPTER

  25

  He tumbled like a gyroscope. The world spun in stark blues, browns, and greens. An arm flailed out, deploying like a wing that worsened the spinning. The pressure in his head intensified. A crimson veil coated his vision. Silas forced out his other arm to stabilize the spin. Time meant altitude, and he should have already had a chute deployed.

  Wind roared in his ears. The red in his eyes darkened to an encroaching black. The gyrating lessened, and he fought to bring an arm back in. It slammed into his chest. He worked his fingers to the zipper on his jumpsuit and pulled it down just enough to grasp the emergency chute Bo had given him.

  How had he known?

  Air ballooned his jumpsuit. Silas worked his hand inside and grasped the chute straps. He brought his other arm in, tumbling more as he did so. He fought a pressure in his head that morphed into lightness.

  Working his arms into the straps, the chute pouch across his chest, he threaded one of the remaining straps around his leg and fought to clip it in place on the chute pack.

  The red in his vision began to whiten. An airy and ethereal feeling filled his mind. The sound of the rushing air lessened. The whizzing colors of the planet washed into the dusk of his peripheral vision. It all became very comfortable and somnolent and enticing.

  All he had to do was close his eyes.

  Click. The leg strap locked in place. He blinked to focus. The forest flew toward him, flanked by bulbous smoke columns. No time for the other strap.

  He yanked the ripcord handle. A flapping green snake unfurled into the sky. It wagged and whipped like a dragon kite.

  Open.

  Come on . . . Open.

  The ground blurred with scattered views of craggy mountaintops and boulders and jutting treetops.

  Ope—

  Wind billowed the chute, widening like an umbrella. It torqued the flimsy shoulder straps and dug deep into his leg tendons.

  Streaking colors coalesced. The air quieted. Earth approached.

  No creek bed in sight. No meadow. No lake.

  With little to no ability to steer his chute, he’d have to thread between the fast-approaching pines below him, hoping for a clear shot to the forest floor.

  Jumper 41 disappeared behind a distant mountain peak, its wing spewing pitch-colored smoke.

  He turned his attention back below. With his speed of descent it was going to be a hard landing. With a decent buildup of pine-needle duff on the forest floor and a tight tuck and roll, he could do this, God-willing, without impaling himself on the way down.

  The canopy drew near. Silas veered for a spot between a stand of five evergreens.

  There was a showering of needles, the sound of breaking branches, and an abrupt, skull-jerking halt.

  ———

  Elle swallowed a scream at the sight of Silas’s body tumbling through the air. He didn’t have a chute.

  Please, God, no.

  The hull shook and rattled, blurring the flight gauges. Jumper 41 dropped again, increasing speed and elevating the groan of the remaining engine. Elle fought the stick to aim toward Crystal Lake, her faint hope to manage a water landing. She needed every cubic inch of lift, no measure for mistakes.

  She feathered the controls and broadcasted through her headset, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Jumper 41 going down with a critical engine failure. On trajectory toward Crystal Lake. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

  Silence filled her headset. She threw it to the floor.

  The choppy gray of Crystal Lake stretched into view just beyond the next ridgeline. The plane lost lift again, leaving her stomach a hundred feet higher.

  The nose aimed at the ridge. If she tried to pull up farther she’d lose speed and more altitude. If she didn’t change her current course, she’d never clear it. She would smash into the craggy granite before having the chance to put down in the water.

  A scene with her father flashed in her mind—in the cockpit of his Cessna, puttering engine on one wing during their vacation in Canada. She had watched his hands, his face. Seconds before touching down he pushed forward on the stick.

  Forward.

  Gain speed. Draw altitude from the inertia and clear the last treetops.

  Elle focused on the approaching landscape, her fist gripped tight on the yoke. She judged the distance to the mountainside, jammed the throttle forward with one hand, and tipped the nose with the other. The plane dipped like a roller coaster, whining and moaning.

  Wait.

  The ground grew larger. Treetops like spearheads.

  Wait.

  Boulders and logs and pine-needle duff.

  Now.

  She jerked backward. The aircraft arced skyward. It climbed the air above the jutting hillside, momentum waning with increasing altitude until it crested and stalled straight above the peak.

  Elle floated in her seat. Thick smoke ribbons waved over the windshield.

  She feathered the stick forward and dropped toward the lake basin. A treetop struck a horizontal stabilizer on the tail section. The plane veered. Elle fought to keep the nose up, seesawing the wings. The lake rushed below. Maddie and Silas flashed through her mind, and she smashed into the surface with windshield-shattering force.

  ———

  Silas opened his eyes, bringing into focus the verdant shadowing of the sun. A mosaic pattern of sunlight painted the forest floor far below. He breathed in scents of pine and woodsmoke and took in his immediate surroundings—the ribbed bark of the tree trunk ten feet from him, the thick evergreen branches his tangled chute dangled him from. Mountain blue jays squawked nearby. A chipmunk skittered headfirst down the tree Silas hung from. His neck ached with whiplash stiffness. He opened and closed his hands and tested his joints, which at his hips and shoulders felt as if they’d been stretched to their limits.

  A limb snapped, jostling Silas lower. The branch fell fifty feet to the ground, frightening a bird from its roost. He didn’t want to hang around to see how long this setup would hold.

  Silas lifted his foot to reach the zipper pouch at his ankle. It bulged with the hundred feet of half-inch letdown rope that every jumper carried for just this predicament. His small movements produced a subtle sway and subsequent sounds of creaking wood above.

  He took a deep breath. This was something he’d trained for. Something he’d been through before, though not so high. Getting stuck in a tree was usually a laughable thing for a jumper. One worthy of buying pie and ice cream for the crew after the mission. But this wasn’t a situation of missing a perfectly good drop zone. And one could survive a two-story drop, but he dangled a good fifty feet off the ground.

  The chute jerked a foot lower. Silas grabbed the straps. There was little chance the Swiss-cheese fabric his chute canvas had become would do much to slow his descent. If the limbs gave way, the best he could hope for was that he would get caught up in another set before smacking into the ground.

  Bright side—if Bo hadn’t given him the backup chute, Silas wouldn’t even have the pleasure of dealing with his present problem.

  He tied his letdown rope to the chute straps and then threaded it through an eight-plate attached to his suit for rappelling. By applying friction through twists in the rope, it would help him perform a controlled descent. He dropped the remainder of rope to the forest floor, watching it unravel like a snake. He slipped his arms from the chute harness and dangled, now suspended by the letdown line alone.

  He loosened the tension on the rope and rappelled downward. At twenty feet he exhaled. At fifteen he grinned. At five feet he laughed.

  Ground.

  Silas knelt down, disconnected the rope from his jumpsuit, and grabbed two heaping fistfuls of pine-needle duff and kissed them.

  ———

  Elle woke underwater, lungs screaming for oxygen. Giant air bubbles like jellyfish ejected out the windshield frames. She unlatched her seat harness, tore off her headset, and pushed off the captain’s chair with her feet, following the air masses
through the windshield and toward a waving band of sunlight.

  She crested the surface and gasped for breath, waves splashing and smacking her in the face. Smoke and fire rolled off the surface of the water.

  The floating fuel spill stretched around her, flames flashing across it. She paddled hard and fast, fueled by adrenaline, away from the fire and the sinking aircraft. She didn’t let herself think about the burning in her lungs, the lightness in her head, and the fatigue in her arms. She strained against the weight of the pond pulling down on her clothing. She focused on one goal. One purpose. Escape the fire. Make the shore. Live.

  Flames burst across her path, encircling her. She dropped beneath the surface, swimming down and forward, feeling the heat in the water as she submarined beneath the burning barrier.

  Elle surfaced again, drawing air into her lungs. Beyond the reach of the fuel, she shifted to her back, stroking along. Just like learning to swim with her dad. Monkey, Tree, Rocket ship.

  Her foot struck a stone. Her other met the pond bottom. She turned to see the shore a dozen feet away.

  She slogged forward, trudging through the shallows, and collapsed on a pebble-covered beach. Through the smoke, in the middle of the pond, the red aircraft tail with its white 41 sank out of view.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Bo spat dirt and pine needles.

  The sharp needles dug a mosaic into his palms. He lifted his hands, trembling, and turned with caution, evaluating his physiological status. Searing pain shot through his side. His hand met the hot ooze of blood soaking through his jumpsuit where a branch impaled him. He winced and ran his tongue across his salty lower lip. He touched the back of his hand to his mouth and inspected the spotted blood it came away with.

  By God’s grace he was alive. He could only pray that Silas Kent and the pilot found the same fortune. Bo had managed to find and disable one of the engine explosives before takeoff. It at least gave the pilot a fighting chance. If he’d just had time to get to the other . . .

  Bo twisted to check his landing path. The view behind was nothing but trees, save for a ten-foot-wide lane—a smooth Slip ’N Slide of dirt. His torso was still tethered to the lengthened parachute cords, and the torn mess of a chute was caught on the lower branches of the trees at the beginning of the slide.

  He replayed the moments before touchdown in his mind. He’d come in hot and fast, hoping to be able to slow up once he was positioned over an opening in the forest, but he was too low. Just as all seemed lost, a forceful wind directed him to the best clearing available.

  His chute had caught the moment before he would have struck a sequoia, and it seemed an invisible hand had directed him to the optimal landing spot.

  The smell of smoke snapped his focus back. Fire wasn’t far. A spider crept over the tree trunk in front of him. A light breeze cooled the sweat on his brow. He made out the subtle rippling of a nearby creek.

  Disconnecting his harness, he worked out of his jumpsuit. Every movement exacerbated the pain in his flank, each vibration causing him to shudder with a stabbing sensation. He felt like pulling out the protruding branch, but his fundamental first-aid training told him not to, to stabilize a penetrating object in place.

  He slid his Pulaski axe from his pack. Bo typically jumped with his tool rather than wait for the paracargo drop. Given the situation, it could become more of a weapon than a firefighting tool.

  He sucked a pained breath through his teeth. The canopy was too thick and high to see beyond. Hard to know how far the fire was from him. The creek could provide shelter if it made a run. Keeping a hand on his side, he slumped to the ground and leaned back against a tree.

  If only he could have undone the sabotage. He lacked both time and full knowledge. And a part of him hadn’t been ready to believe they’d go through with their plan to blow the engines.

  He believed now.

  Caleb clearly wanted no survivors who weren’t in on the plan. Cleese was a thorough saboteur, even cutting Silas’s chutes in case he didn’t go down with the plane.

  Caleb had made his intentions clear, and his not-so-subtle hints drove deep. “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to the twin sisters back home. Would you, Bo?”

  Bo wasn’t a man who needed things spelled out. It had taken everything in him not to grab Caleb by the throat.

  “It’s a dangerous job out there. I wonder how much it would take to make a guy like you never, ever, have to worry about his safety again.”

  A threat and a bribe. All behind a smiling veil.

  Bo shook the memory from his head. He gritted his teeth and stood. The pain in his side wasn’t going to get any better sitting there. With the emergency chute Bo had given Kent, there was still a chance he had survived.

  If that was the case, Bo needed to rejoin the group before Kent did, for both their sakes.

  CHAPTER

  27

  God wrote His law on every man’s heart. Caleb had slogged through catechism. Whether resulting from indoctrination or genuine personal conviction, he didn’t dispute the fact. He knelt in the small meadow by the creek bed, gathering his chute from the water, tracing with his eyes the smoke trail across the sky.

  Caleb knew he was accountable for his actions. That truth wasn’t relative. And while he could not presume to see the world as others did, he found it hard to believe that Cleese, who now stood in the stream working his arms out of his chute pack, possessed the same level of conviction. To him it seemed that Cleese’s heart was so calloused and scarred that it lay immune to the twinge of guilt and the scraping pain of sin.

  Maybe that made Caleb the worse of the two.

  This was supposed to be about the money. About finders keepers and thumbing his nose at his father’s suit-and-tie hedge-fund enterprises. But the blood of two men had been spilled. Add to that the likely deaths of a female pilot and their new spotter. How had he become responsible for four deaths in half as many days? Remarkable how the course of one’s life could change in an instant.

  He cleared his throat and spat. End result—what was done was done. He couldn’t change that.

  Caleb finished gathering his chute. He stored it with his jumpsuit at the base of a tree along the edge of the clearing. A wave of thin smoke crept through the air overhead.

  Cleese sloshed across the creek toward him. “I seen Sippi aiming to touch down ’bout a quarter mile ahead.”

  “All right. Let’s grab what we need and tie in with him.”

  “What about the spotter?” Igneous eyes sat in the deep recess of his brow.

  “If he did jump, it will have been soon after us.”

  Cleese grinned. “Must’ve been quite a surprise for him to find his chutes less than intact.”

  Caleb exhaled. “We’ll tie in with the others and then split off in teams. Monte, Mansfield, and you will start a sweep for Kent’s body. I, Sippi, and Rapunzel will collect the cache and start positioning it for the helicopter rendezvous. Meet up with us as soon as you can.”

  “You sure your pilot is good for it?”

  “He can fly a Huey in heavy smoke like no one I’ve seen. He also happens to be drowning in debt. He has access to a bird and he needs the money.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “Not a thing. Just that he’s getting a fat chunk of change to pick up an undisclosed cargo and to keep his mouth shut about it. He won’t talk.”

  Cleese cracked his neck. “Hopefully not. For his own good.”

  “You’d just love for him to give you a reason, wouldn’t you?”

  Cleese’s cheeks lifted, revealing a grin accentuated by widely spaced teeth. “You know me well, good Parson.”

  ———

  Caleb found Sippi and Rapunzel about a quarter mile away, gathering up their chutes along the creek bed. They tied their jump gear to a nearby tree and fell in next to Cleese.

  The smell of smoke grew stronger. Faint sounds of popping and crackling present in the near distance.

>   The sound of branches snapping came from behind a row of trees to the side of the creek. Bo Mansfield emerged, hand pressed against a branch protruding from his side.

  Caleb walked up to him. “Canopy landing?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Caleb looked close. “How bad is it?”

  “You the medic.”

  “Let me see.”

  Bo pulled up his blood-soaked shirt. Caleb examined the entry wound. A half-inch diameter branch protruded about six inches from his flank. “How far in do you think it is?”

  Bo gritted his teeth and felt around the side of his abdomen. “Three or four inches, maybe.”

  With only one engine explosion, they had been thrown off course—that left them miles to walk and less time to work with. Caleb needed Bo’s manpower. He exhaled. “In the city I’d just stabilize it and the hospital would run an abdominal CT before attempting to pull it.”

  Bo stared, his face expressionless.

  “Right,” Caleb said. “But we’re not in the city now, are we?” He looked again at the wound. “You may have lacerated your liver, perforated a bowel . . . There’s really no way to know.”

  A hand stretched around Caleb and grabbed the branch.

  Bo brought up his arm and shouted.

  Cleese lifted a bloody stick in the air, smiling his gap-riddled grin. “Problem solved.”

  Bo pressed his fingers over the hole in his side. Blood oozed between them.

  Caleb fished a bandana from his shirt pocket and pushed it firmly on the wound. “Keep pressure on that. I’m going to need you upright to accomplish our mission.”

  Bo grimaced and fixed his eyes on Cleese.

  Cleese put his hands up and back-stepped. “Whoa, hey. Easy there, Bo. Just taking care of business. The good Parson here likes to deliberate a little long for my taste. Time’s a wasting, and we still got another guy to find.” He sidestepped, extending a hand toward the forest. “So if y’all don’t mind, let’s finish dressing our boo-boos and tie in with Monte so we can get us some gold.”