Pop. It slides out of the dirt and rises. Judd holds the rope, keeps his foot on the weapon and takes the ride. He turns and checks the 737’s position.
Christ!
It’s shockingly close, less than a football field away and dropping straight towards him. He’s rising directly into the path of the jet.
*
The little chopper climbs, but it’s slow.
Too slow.
‘Come-on-baby-baby-please!’ Corey’s eyes flick to the side-view mirror.
The airliner is right there!
*
The 737 sweeps past and Judd’s eyes momentarily find the cockpit.
Time slows.
He looks inside and sees Rhonda at the controls, mouth frozen in a stunned ‘O’ shape as her eyes move from her boyfriend to what-the-hell-is-he-standing-on-it-sure-as-hell-looks-like-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction!
Beside her Severson has the same ‘O’ expression going on, but he’s waving, which leads Judd to believe Rhonda’s the one doing the flying - definitely the correct choice. He wonders if Severson told her about the bomb or if this is the first she’s hearing about it.
Time speeds up.
The wing slices under the weapon with about half a metre to spare, but the tailfin is a different matter. The wake turbulence sends the bomb, and Judd, straight into it. It hits flush on and sets the giant weapon spinning wildly. Judd holds on to the rope for dear life as he whips around and around and around.
*
The 737’s rear landing gear slaps the centre of the walkway then its front wheels touch down.
‘Flaps up! Brakes on full!’ Rhonda works the controls. She’s really pissed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me there was a bomb?’
‘Because I wanted you to stay focused on this!’ He points at the end of the walkway. Through the haze they can see the grassy parkland and the stand of trees beyond. It’s close.
Rhonda grits her teeth. ‘Hold on!’
Severson grips the edge of the copilot’s seat. ‘I’m holding!’
The jet spears off the end of the walkway.
The wheels touch the grass and instantly dig into the moist surface.
Crack. They snap off and the jet belly flops onto the ground and skids. They no longer have control of the aircraft.
The fuselage convulses as Severson unhappily takes in the fast approaching trees. ‘We’re heading straight to the scene of the accident.’
Rhonda knows it. ‘We need reverse thrust. I’m going to restart the engine.’
‘What?’
‘You wanted improvising, well, this is improvising!’
‘It’ll explode.’
‘Which will also happen when we hit those trees.’ She pushes the throttle lever for the starboard side jet full forward, hears the engine run up behind her, then triggers the thrust reversers.
With a jolt the aircraft instantly decelerates and Rhonda is hopeful. She lets the engine run and run, then she hears that terrible sound, like gravel inside a cement mixer, and pulls the throttle lever back to shut it down -
Too late.
The engine detonates.
Ka-boom. The explosion is massive. The jet violently twists and metal rips and the world turns over. For a moment Rhonda’s vertical, then she’s on the cockpit’s roof with a terrified Severson right beside her -
The bad news is that the explosion rolled the jet and now it slides along the parkway upside down. The really bad news is that she hears metal tear again -
Riiip. Rhonda is flung sideways and suddenly grass rushes past her face. She looks up and sees the rear half of the jet’s fuselage slide away to the left as the cockpit arcs to the right.
Her only consolation is that she told Judd she loved him.
*
The spinning bomb slows enough for Judd to see the 737, now in two pieces, slide across the parkland. ‘No!’ Horrified, he loses sight of it in the smoke haze.
He wishes he’d told Rhonda he loved her.
*
The little Loach surges towards the smog ceiling.
Corey’s motivation is simple: get the weapon and its blast zone as far from the city - and Lola and Spike - as quickly as possible. The best way to do that is by taking it straight up. Once he has enough height he will fly it to the coast and release it over the ocean. If it detonates before then, at least it’ll be far enough above the population so no one will be affected - except for Judd and his good self, of course.
*
Lola furiously pedals the pink dragster along the sidewalk, Spike right beside her. Through the haze she catches sight of the yellow chopper as it climbs, then sees that someone is surfing what appears to be a giant bomb attached to a rope below it.
‘What the hell are they doing?’
The dog barks, like he’s answering her.
Then she knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re being heroes. They’re performing an incredibly dangerous, totally selfless act. She’s read it in screenplays, watched it in movies, seen it on television shows, but she’s never witnessed it in real life before. It’s the strangest combination of breathtaking, inspiring and terrifying, and it strikes her with a feeling of cold dread and giddy euphoria at exactly the same moment.
*
If the bomb detonates now Judd knows he’s toast, but if he can get to the chopper it might offer some protection. Might being the operative word. Either way it’ll be better up there than down here standing on the damn thing.
He scales the rope towards the cockpit, wrenches himself upwards, hand over hand over hand. He doesn’t look down. Not because he’s afraid of heights, but because he doesn’t want to look at that bomb.
*
Corey keeps the throttle at full power as the Loach ascends. In spite of everything that’s going on he’s loving flying again. He looks up, takes in the smog cloud that’s lit orange by the end of day’s sun. The Loach will reach it in a moment, then he’ll head for the coast.
He glances down, sees Judd swiftly climb the rope towards the cockpit. He’s close, only a few metres away. ‘Come on!’ He knows the astronaut can’t hear him, but it feels better to be encouraging.
*
Lola watches the Loach disappear into the smog cloud - then it flashes a vivid purple and illuminates the city like God’s sunlamp.
She recoils. ‘What the hell - ?’ It takes a moment before she processes what just happened.
The bomb detonated.
Ka-boom. The thunderclap echoes across the landscape to confirm it. Its ferocity is overwhelming.
‘No!’ Lola stares up at the glowing cloud, waits, hopes for the little chopper to emerge, unscathed and intact.
It does not.
The bright glow inside the cloud diminishes as the thunderclap fades.
They’re dead.
Lola is stricken. She pulls to a stop and bends at the hips. It feels like she’s been punched in the stomach so hard that she will never catch her breath.
Corey is dead.
Spike howls.
*
47
‘This is not good!’ Corey fights the controls as the Loach convulses.
‘I noticed!’ Judd hangs half in, half out the passenger door, reaches for the seat to grab hold and pull himself inside the cabin -
The chopper tilts to the left and he slides out. ‘Tomato! Tomatooo-!’
Wham. Corey catches his hand, yanks him inside. ‘Thanks!’ Judd slides into his seat - then realises the soles of his shoes are on fire. ‘Oh, shit!’ He stamps them on the floor to put them out - and the floor collapses under him and he falls through the flaming hole -
Corey grabs his arm and pulls him back into his seat, then looks up at the spinning rotor blades. They are ablaze, a pulsating circle of flame against the purple smog cloud that surrounds them. ‘We’re losing lift!’ The Australian wrenches the controls but the expression on his face tells Judd all he needs to know: the giant fireball from the explosion didn’t destroy the chopper but set it alight and that’
s almost as bad.
Judd scans the cabin, searches for a solution.
Parachutes!
Two, pushed under the rear bench seat. He points at them. ‘Are they movie props or are they real?’
Corey has no idea. ‘Check ‘em!’
Judd hauls one from under the seat. ‘It’s heavy!’ That’s a good sign. He slips his hand under the flap, feels the material. Yes! It’s a parachute. He pushes it towards Corey. ‘I think it’s okay.’
Thud, thud, thud. The burning rotor blades disintegrate and flaming chunks of plastic fibre smack into the windscreen.
The Loach stops flying, hangs in the smog for an extended moment - then plummets to earth.
Judd grabs the second parachute from under the rear seat but it’s lighter than the first. Much lighter. Is it a prop or is it real? He pushes his hand under the flap to check -
The Loach tilts hard left.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Judd is ejected from the cabin. He instinctively throws out a hand to grab the doorframe then sees it’s on fire and thinks better of it. As he falls he sees the whole chopper is alight and realises he’s better out than in.
He drops into the smog cloud, the parachute he’s not sure is a parachute held tightly in his hand.
*
With a screech of bending metal the little chopper flips over completely and Corey is turfed out as well -
Bam. He’s hit by the wall of air and the parachute is slapped from his grasp.
‘No!’ The word is lost on the wind as he pivots to grab it -
It’s gone, lost in the smog. He didn’t have a chance to put it on before he was ejected from the chopper so he thought he could do it while he was falling. He saw someone do it once and it didn’t seem that hard - then he remembers that someone was James Bond and he saw it in a movie and he realises it’s probably very hard.
There’s only one thing for him to do now. Wait until he clears this smog cloud and hope Judd’s nearby. Then, maybe, he can, somehow, latch on to him before his chute opens.
He’s really glad he asked Lola to look after Spike.
*
Judd tumbles through the smog.
He’s disoriented, doesn’t know which way is up. To make matters worse his parachute is only half on and the air current drags it off -
He twists, jams his left arm through the pack’s loop, grabs both sides of the waist buckle and slams them together. Clack. They lock tight. He’s happy the pack’s on his back but fears it’s full of old copies of the LA Times, not just because he doesn’t want to die, but because he wants to make sure the canister of counteragent isn’t destroyed. If his chute doesn’t open then he hopes the canister survives the landing and that Corey, or anyone, finds and uses it. The virus might not be going global but it’s still in the smog above LA - and has a half-life of fifteen years.
Judd drops out of the cloud and takes in the city beneath him, bathed in a sunset glow that is an eerie combination of orange and purple. Directly below, the giant tar pit rises up to meet him. Stopping that bomb from igniting and infecting the oil lake feels like a real accomplishment - worthy of at least a little of that Atlantis 4 adulation. He turns, looks to the park. He can’t see any sign of Rhonda’s plane through the smoke. He hopes to God she’s all right. He’s going to fly this parachute straight over there - if, in fact, it is a parachute.
Guess there’s only one way to find out.
He reaches up and pulls the ripcord.
Bang. A big jolt. He looks up, sees a drogue release from the pack. It’s the small chute designed to slow him down before the main chute opens. So it is a parachute. ‘Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!’ He waits for the second, bigger jolt as the drogue pulls the main chute out of the pack.
It doesn’t happen. The damn drogue doesn’t catch air. It just snaps and twists in the breeze. Judd wills it to inflate. ‘Open, you bastard!’
It does not.
Then he sees it.
Above and moving fast.
‘Oh, come on!’
Whump, whump, whump. The Loach punches out of the smog cloud and spins directly towards him, the burning nub of its rotor blades leaving a thick black trail of smoke behind it.
If the main chute deploys now it will tangle on the chopper and that’d be all she wrote.
Whump, whump, whump. The spinning Loach moves so fast he can’t avoid it. The left landing skid snags the fluttering drogue -
‘Ohhhhchriiiist!’ Judd is violently swung around and around and around - like he’s on an amusement park ride, except there’s nothing amusing about it at all.
*
Corey tumbles through the smog cloud. They were at over seven thousand feet when they bailed and he’s been falling for what feels like an hour.
He drops through the base of the cloud and spies Judd below and to the right. Jeez. His chute is tangled around the Loach’s skid and spins him around like he’s hanging off the world’s most dangerous Hills Hoist. Corey’s horrified to see his friend in such trouble, wishes he could help him, doesn’t know how he can, realises any hope of sharing his parachute is now gone.
Time slows.
The Australian turns his head and takes in downtown Los Angeles. The distant skyscrapers stand tall. If a giant earthquake had been planned today then it has been averted, or hadn’t been big enough to affect those buildings. So, an excellent result - nobody should have to experience one of those things.
He looks down, sees the tar pits quickly approach. He doesn’t want to die. He really doesn’t, but the possibility that there’s something beyond this physical world and he could see his mother again, speak to her one last time, tell her how much she was loved and missed, well, that makes the thought of what happens when he reaches those tar pits almost bearable.
The irony is that it took the threat of the quake for him to actually speak about the death of his mother, even if it was for a fleeting moment. He knew it would be terrible, and it was, but it wasn’t as terrible as he thought it would be and now it feels like a weight has been lifted, if only a little. So he spent almost half his life, fifteen years, not dealing with something that took fifteen seconds to feel better about once he decided to open up. Way to go, Corey, great time-management. Of course, he knows it only happened because he was speaking with the two people he liked most in the world, the kind of friends he’d never had before.
That’s the one thing that really pisses him off about this whole situation. Lola said she’d look after Spike and it now occurs to Corey that the bloody mutt will get to know her much better than he ever did.
Whack, Corey is hit across the back.
Time speeds up.
He turns and sees his parachute tumble end over end as it ricochets away from him. He’s astonished, didn’t think he’d see it again. He looks down. The tar pits come up fast, but there’s still time before touchdown.
The pack is only three metres away and he needs to fly over to it. He’s jumped out of planes twice before so he knows the basics of skydiving. Forward motion is generated by - he can’t remember!
Extend the legs! That’s right! If you straighten them against the airflow and keep your arms back it propels your body forward. He straightens his legs, jams his arms by his side, points himself at the pack - and flies backwards.
*
Lola looks up at the sky and watches it all unfold, open-mouthed.
The relief she felt at seeing two moving human figures drop through the smog cloud, having not been vaporised in the explosion, quickly disappeared as one of them opened his parachute only to have it snag on the remains of the burning chopper while the other frantically tries to grab something which, she can only presume, is a parachute.
A few moments ago she felt both dread and giddy euphoria. Now it’s just dread.
*
Corey flies forward.
He has it down now, realises he needs to keep his arms right back if he doesn’t want to go backwards. This time he veers to the left and is as far from the p
ack as when he started.
How does he steer?
Elbows!
Right elbow down, turn right, left elbow down, turn left.
‘Come on!’ He does it, pushes his arms and legs to the side of his body, drops his right elbow and curves towards the pack.
*
‘Whoa!’ Judd swings around and around, feels dizzy and sick.
He pushes his left hand across his chest, releases the drogue. Twang. Its suspension lines fly free and instantly slap against the Loach’s underside.
Whump, whump, whump. The chopper spins towards him. Judd tries to get out of its way so he can open his main chute in clear air -
Bang. The Loach slams into him.
Flat on his back, Judd is pinned to the bottom of the chopper’s fuselage by air pressure and centrifugal force. Together, Loach and astronaut spiral to earth in a crazy aeronautic dance.
Time slows.
Judd watches that smoking, oozing expanse of La Brea approach. He’s not scared - yet. If a pilot has time, he has hope. He needs to get away from this chopper and open the damn chute. With all his energy he attempts to overcome the forces at play and roll towards the edge of the fuselage.
He can’t do it, can barely move. The air pressure is too great.
Time speeds up.
He has seconds until impact. If he can’t move his whole body then maybe he can move part of it. With all his strength he pushes his right arm past the edge of the fuselage, jams it into the blasting stream of air -
‘Goddamn!’ His arm is wrenched back at the elbow, feels like it’s going to snap off. He grits his teeth, ignores the pain, holds his arm within the airflow, tries to alter the aerodynamic balance just a little. Buffeted by the wind he pulls it forward. His shoulder screams in protest.
Absolutely nothing happens.
‘Come on!’ He jams his right foot sideways, pushes it into the airflow too. The chopper tips to the right slightly - and releases the air pressure. He pushes off the fuselage and flips away.
Freedom. He looks down. The tar pit is right there. He yanks on the ripcord. The chute zips out of his pack - and doesn’t open. It just licks at the air behind him. After everything that’s happened today his goddamn chute won’t open.
Combustion Page 25
