Blind Panic

by Graham Masterton

  “Will you do us all a favor and shut the fuck up?” Remo told her.

  The helicopter sank lower and lower until Mickey thought that they must be nearly down on the airport runway. Ranger Edison took it down a few feet more, but then there was a loud scraping noise underneath the helicopter’s belly, and they were all thrown violently to the left. With a scream of power, Ranger Edison took them up again.

  “What was that?” said Cayley. “I thought we were going to crash.”

  “Tree,” said Ranger Edison tersely.

  “We can’t be over the airport, then, right?” said Charlie.

  “No, son. We’re not. To be honest with you, I don’t know where the hell we are. But hold on, I’m going to try again.”

  He flew ahead for another hundred-second count, and then he took the helicopter down again, even more cautiously this time. Even though he was blind, Mickey closed his eyes tightly and tried to picture his home and his family and his black Labrador, Jet. For some reason he had believed when they threw themselves off the promontory at Infernal Caverns that some miracle would save them, but now he was totally convinced that they were all going to die.

  Ranger Edison took the helicopter down so gradually that it hardly felt as if they were descending at all. But then they felt a bump as the right-hand skid hit the ground, and Ranger Edison immediately took them back up.

  “That was a slope,” he said. “Felt like a hillside, or maybe a roof.”

  He flew on farther, and tried to land for a third time. This time, with an earsplitting creak and a splintering of branches, the helicopter came down on top of another tree. Cayley was openly crying now, and Remo said, “Come on, man, for Christ’s sake. Just get us down, will you?”

  “We’re still full of fuel,” said Ranger Edison. “If we crashland, then your girlfriend here has every right to be worried that we’re going to burn up. What I suggest is, we keep on flying until we run dry.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Remo retorted. “We don’t even know how high up we are. We could run into a mountain, anything. How far can this thing fly?”

  “About three hundred fifty miles, a little over.”

  “We could end up in the ocean, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Look,” said Ranger Edison. “We’re all blind, so we don’t have very many options open to us, do we? I could keep on trying to land, but it’s way too dangerous with nearly a hundred gallons of fuel on board.”

  “But when all of that fuel runs out, we’ll still crash!”

  “We won’t just drop out of the sky, son. I’ll put the rotors into autorotation and we should be able to glide down.”

  “I think it’s the least dangerous alternative,” put in Ranger Butowski. “If we come down on a tree or a mountainside, and the tanks are still full, we won’t stand a chance.”

  Cayley said, “Please. Let’s do what you said. I don’t want to get burned alive. One of my boyfriends was in a car wreck and he got burned alive.”

  Ranger Edison took the LongRanger up higher and then increased their forward speed. Mickey knew that at any second they could collide with a tree or a hill or an electrical tower, but he took some morbid comfort in thinking that they would all die instantly.

  “Us rotor heads have a formula,” said Ranger Edison. “We call it the pucker factor. The more risky the situation, the more of the seat cushion gets sucked up your ass. The formula is S equals suction, H equals height above ground, I equals interest in staying alive, and T equals technical trouble.”

  “Thanks,” said Remo. “I really needed to hear that.”

  “I’m trying to lighten things up a little,” Ranger Edison replied. “We’re all still alive, aren’t we? We’re all in one piece. Let’s try to stay that way.”

  They kept on flying for nearly three hours. Even though they were aware that they could be unexpectedly killed at any second, the monotonous beating of the LongRanger’s rotors eventually lulled Cayley and Charlie and Mickey into sleep. Remo couldn’t sleep at all. He sat with his head bowed down in case he had to assume the crash position, wishing that this nightmare were all over, one way or another. It was the endless, seamless darkness that depressed him the most—the thought that even if they did survive, he would be totally blind for the rest of his life.

  Without warning, the helicopter’s engine began to stutter and blip. “That’s it!” said Ranger Edison. “We’ve run out of gas! We’re going down!”

  Cayley and Charlie and Mickey all woke up. The engine had cut out altogether now, and Ranger Edison disengaged the main rotor so that it would windmill, and start the helicopter on a downward glide. They were jolted and buffeted by the slipstream, and it felt to Mickey as if they were dropping out of the sky like a brick, but Ranger Edison shouted out, “We’re coming down good! Textbook autorotational landing, less’n we hit something untoward!”

  None of them answered him. They were all clutching the edges of their seats, and if they hadn’t been blind, they would have been able to see how white all their faces were. As the helicopter fell out of the sky, the rotors made a sweeping whistling noise, almost melancholy, as if it were singing them a sad song as it carried them down to die.

  “Don’t you worry,” said Ranger Edison. “One French guy came down from forty thousand feet without any power!”

  “Please, God!” said Cayley. “Please, God, help us!”

  They had no idea how high they had been flying, but their descent seemed to take forever, as if they would never reach the ground at all. The sweeping whistling noise went on and on. But then there was a devastating bang, like a giant metal door being slammed in their faces, and they were tossed from one side of the helicopter to the other. Mickey’s shoulder collided with the bulkhead, and then he knocked his head against Remo’s knee, so hard that it stunned him. He felt Cayley seize his shirt, and tear away one of his sleeves, and then Charlie dropped with his full weight onto his spine.

  The LongRanger tipped over onto its starboard side and then rolled over again and again, so that they felt as if they were being tumbled around in the drum of a giant dryer. At last, with a metallic groan, it gave a last rocking motion and came to a stop.

  “We’re down!” shouted Ranger Edison. “Anybody hurt?”

  “I’m okay,” said Remo. “Cayley, how about you?”

  “I hurt my arm again.”

  “But you’re alive—that’s all that matters. Charlie? Mickey?”

  “I’ll be okay, once Charlie gets off of me.”

  “Charlie?”

  “I hit my head. I think I’m bleeding.”

  “Margot? How about you?”

  There was no answer from Ranger Butowski. “Margot!” Ranger Edison repeated. “Margot, are you all right? Margot!”

  He must have been groping to find out what had happened to her, because he suddenly said, “Oh God. Oh, God. Margot.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Remo. “Maybe she just got knocked unconscious.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ranger Edison. “Feels like a piece of the airframe went right through her chest. There’s blood—I can feel it. She doesn’t have a pulse.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Remo said.

  The helicopter was lying on its side, and they were still struggling to find out where the door was when they heard voices and knocking.

  “Are you people all right in there? Hold on—we’ll get you out!”

  There was a lengthy pause, and then they heard people climbing onto the helicopter’s fuselage and trying to open the door. “Michael, hand me that crowbar will you? Dave, give me a hand here!”

  At last the door was pried open, and hands reached down into the cabin to help them climb out.

  “You folks are darned lucky you wasn’t all killed.”

  “My partner,” said Ranger Edison. “I think she’s pretty badly hurt.”

  “Paramedic!” shouted one of the voices. “Paramedic—there’s a woman injured here!”

  Still shaking with
shock, the Emperors of IT sat down on the ground. It felt like neatly mowed grass, and it felt as if the sun was shining. “Here,” said Mickey. “Let’s hold hands." He reached out for Charlie’s hand on his left and Cayley’s on his right. Remo held Charlie’s other hand and almost immediately their eyes were filled with light and color.

  They were sitting in a bright green park, under an intensely blue sky, and they were surrounded by a crowd of twenty or thirty people. An ambulance was already parked on a path nearby, as well as two squad cars from the Marin County Sheriff’s department.

  Two deputies were trying to lever out the LongRanger’s front windshield. One of the helicopter’s main rotors had been torn off and its tail was sticking up like a crushed cricket. It had left a fifty-yard trail of wreckage and torn-up grass behind it, but they could see that it had only just cleared the tops of the tall chestnut trees that bordered three sides of the park.

  “We’ve all been blinded,” said Ranger Edison. “These kids—me and my partner, too. That’s why we crashed.”

  “Well, the Lord was sure taking care of you today, my friend,” said a gray-haired man in a white Giants jersey. “It’s happened here, too. Over a hundred local people gone blind.”

  “Where are we?” asked Remo, looking around. “We’ve been flying forever, trying to use up all of our gas.”

  “Dan Johnson Memorial Gardens, in Memory Valley." Then, “Are you sure you kids can’t see?”

  “Memory Valley? I don’t believe it! We flew that far? And that’s almost due south!”

  With a grinding crack, three men lifted out the Long-Ranger’s front windshield and laid it on the grass. The Perspex was spattered with blood. A blue-uniformed paramedic leaned inside the cockpit, and they could just see Ranger Butowski’s head tilted back. After a short while the paramedic stood back and helplessly raised both hands.

  “That’s just terrible,” said Charlie. “That could have been any one of us.”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Remo, “but I could sure use a drink. Then we can find our way back home. I sure hope my parents are okay.”

  Ranger Edison was sitting a few feet away. The paramedic came over and hunkered down beside him and spoke to him, and they saw him nodding his head and wiping his eyes. Cayley said, “Let’s go hold his hand. Maybe he’ll be able to see, too.”

  They walked over, in a human daisy-chain. Several onlookers turned around and gave them a curious look, but they ignored them. They were too pleased that they were able to see.

  “Ranger Edison, sir?” said Mickey. Ranger Edison lifted his head and stared blindly in his direction. “We’re holding hands again. We have our sight back.”

  Ranger Edison slowly climbed to his feet. “You can see? Did you see Margot?”

  “Yes, sir. I guess she must have been killed outright. But here—why don’t you hold hands with us, too?”

  Ranger Edison hesitated for a moment, and then held out his hand. Remo took hold of it, and almost immediately Ranger Edison blinked at them, and turned his head around, left and right. “I can see again! What about that? That’s amazing!”

  He looked over at the wreckage of the LongRanger. The deputies were covering one side of the cockpit with a blue blanket. “Margot,” he said. “Why did it have to be Margot? She was such a terrific girl, you know? Smart, funny. And she really cared about the park service. Not like some of those horses’ asses that call themselves rangers.”

  Two of the deputies came over and said, “You folks should really get yourselves checked out. Only trouble is, with so many people going blind, and so many accidents, the hospitals are all full to busting.”

  “I think we’re okay, Deputy,” said Ranger Edison. He patted his chest with his left hand. “I don’t feel like there’s nothing broken.”

  “We really need to get home to Palo Alto,” said Mickey. “We could see our own doctor, couldn’t we?”

  “I guess,” said the deputy. “Don’t know how you’re going to get there, though. There’s no bus service, no taxis, and the trains aren’t running, neither.”

  A black Labrador just like Jet came running across the grass toward them. “See that dog?” said Mickey. “I got one at home, exactly the same. Could be the same darn dog.”

  One of the deputies frowned behind his sunglasses and said, “Thought you people were blind.”

  “It comes and it goes,” said Remo. “One minute we can see, and the next we can’t. Don’t askus. We don’t understand it, either.”

  The deputy looked as if he were on the verge of asking them why they were holding hands, but then another deputy whistled to them and beckoned them back to the helicopter wreck. “We’ll talk to you later, okay? Why don’t you go over to the main square—it’s right over thataway. The power’s all out, but the cafe’s open, and you can get yourselves a drink and clean yourselves up.”

  They left the wreck of the LongRanger and walked hand in hand across the park. They had nearly reached the gate that led out onto the main square when Remo stopped and said, “Look.”

  Standing deep in the shadow of the chestnut trees on the other side of the park they saw more than two dozen men, at least six of whom were sitting on horses. Some of them wore wide-brimmed hats and ankle-length coats. The horsemen wore dark blue jackets and blue pants with a single stripe down the side, and pale yellow gauntlets. They weren’t moving, any of them, but the horses were restless, and they could hear the harnesses jingling.

  Mickey said to Charlie, “They look exactly like those guys we saw before we got on the helicopter. Like old-style seventh cavalry.”

  “Maybe this is some kind of an anniversary,” Charlie suggested.

  “Maybe they’re reenacting some famous battle or other.”

  “You think?” said Remo. “The whole country’s going blind and they’re all messing around in fancy dress?”

  They stood and stared for more than a minute, and as they did so the shadow under the trees seemed to grow darker and darker, and the men and their horses became more difficult to see. Eventually it was so impenetrably dark that they couldn’t make them out at all.

  “Well, what the Sam Hill do you make of that?” asked Ranger Edison. “I wouldn’t like to say that they were ghosts, but they sure looked like ghosts.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Mickey asked him.

  Ranger Edison emphatically shook his head. “No, absolutely not. But if they weren’t ghosts, then what the hell were they?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Washington, DC

  Sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, the president said, “There are times when a leader has to lead from the front, regardless of the risks, and this is one of those times.”

  “I don’t exactly understand what you’re proposing, sir," said General McNamara.

  “I’m proposing to go to Memory Valley myself. If that’s where the first attack on our society is going to be, then I believe that I should be there in person to defend it.”

  “With every respect, Mr. President,” put in John Rostoff, the secretary for homeland security, “your information that Memory Valley is going to be targeted first by this terrorist faction—well, you said yourself that it came to you in a vision of sorts. If you fly out to Memory Valley you’ll be putting yourself in considerable jeopardy, if only through the risk of your helicopter crew losing their sight en route. And even if your information does prove to be correct, the Lord alone knows what acts of terror these people have in mind.”

  The president stood up and walked over to the window. In spite of his recent ordeal, Marian Perry thought that he had regained almost all of his previous energy. He was standing straighter, and his eyes were bright, and his jaw was set aggressively. This was the old “Pug Dog” Perry, who always relished a fight, especially if the odds were stacked against him.

  “These ‘terrorists,’ John, are Native Americans, or the spirits of Native Americans, and they want their country back. I don’t know how they think
they’re going to achieve it, but I’ve seen some of their supernatural power for myself, firsthand, and I think that if we dismiss it as hocus-pocus, or some kind of conjuring trick, we’ll be making a very grave mistake.”

  “You realize, Mr. President, that this is all extremely difficult for us to believe,” put in General McNamara. “Whatever their ethnic origins happen to be, these people are either terrorists or a hostile invasion force, and we have to treat them as such.”

  “General,” said the president, “you have to fight fire with fire. From what I’ve seen, they can vanish and reappear at will. They can take on different identities. Christ Almighty, General, they physically welded two of my Secret Service agents together, right in front of my eyes, and in front of plenty of other witnesses, too.”

  “So what do you propose?” asked the general, wearily.

  “We have no radio or other communications, so I want you to send aircraft out to the Presidio at San Francisco and mobilize the Sixth Army, and also the Ninth Infantry Division from Fort Lewis in Washington. Send backup messengers by road, too, in the event that the aircraft don’t make it. But that will take care of our conventional response. Leila—what about the supernatural aspects?”

  Leila Whitefeather was the assistant secretary for Indian affairs. She was a full-blooded Navajo—a handsome, forty-five-year-old woman with long, dark gray hair pinned up in a pleat, and a gray business suit. The only concessions in her dress to being a Native American were her turquoise-and-silver earrings, and her turquoise-and-silver brooch in the shape of a turtle.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” she said, “but Native American magic is not what it was—even if it ever was. Each tribe has a rich and complicated belief system that includes so-called magical healing and the power to change the weather or strike down one’s enemies. But these days, to be perfectly frank with you, these belief systems do very little more than preserve a tribe’s history and identity. They’re very valuable in that respect. But I don’t think we’re talking about real magic here. When people die, they’re dead, whatever their religion. They don’t come back and try to reclaim the land they lost, no matter how romantic that may sound.”