4 Real Dangerous Place
Page 21
Clinging tight to my brother, my heartbeat pounding into his, I felt an enternity pass above us, the plane’s underbelly only a couple of feet above my spine. If it came down any lower, Donnie and I would be bloodied pulp inside the car wreckage.
It ended. Suddenly. One moment, the convertible was shaking, caught between the roar of the jet engines on either side, then everything went a lot quieter. I could still hear the engines, but they were somewhere far from us and fading with distance. I looked up over my shoulder and saw the night sky, unobstructed now that the plane’s tail had swooped over the interchange’s remains.
“You okay?” I looked down at Donnie beneath me. I didn’t know if he could hear me or not, but he nodded after a moment, his eyes wide.
I climbed up onto the car seat. Then immediately flattened myself again upon it, as a huge crashing noise came from somewhere beyond the edge of the interchange. As low as the plane had been coming in, I figured it had just hit the surface streets below.
As though to confirm that guess, a fireball mushroomed up as I raised my head. By its fiery glare, I saw a human figure lying face-down on the concrete. The line from the tower was tangled over him, with bits and pieces of the demolished construction scattered about. I knew it had to be Richter.
I climbed out of the car and stumbled over to him. I wasn’t in great shape myself – there was blood trickling down my leg from where my knee had been scraped raw, plus I just felt pretty beat up from everything else that had happened – but I was still in way better shape than he was. When the plane hit the tower rig, he had been standing right next to it. A couple of inches either way, and any of the pieces lying nearby might have taken his head off, rather than crushing his chest.
He was still alive, though. That black fluid, whatever the hell it was, bubbled at his nostrils as I kicked him in the side, hard enough to turn him over onto his back.
There might’ve been something he wanted to say – his hard gaze focused on my face above him, then narrowed into slits – but I didn’t want to hear it. I wasn’t in the mood.
Richter managed to push himself partway up with one bloodied hand. There was all kinds of commotion going on down below, with smoke and flames churning up from the plane wreckage. But I wasn’t paying any attention to it. I brought another kick straight into Richter’s face. He toppled backward, over the broken edge of the interchange. I watched him fall, arms splayed out, but the smoke was already too thick to see him hit the ground. I heard it, though.
† † †
Somebody else saw it.
That was Colonel MacAvoy, over at the police command post. He had been there with Glover, watching the SWAT teams mop up what was left of the freeway bottle. Even before Richter had ducked out on his crew, shooting up to the pickup point on the interchange, and blowing up the empty lanes behind him, the whole operation had been quickly collapsing. Those guys knew when they’d been screwed by their boss – they weren’t going to make it worse for themselves by popping off any more hostages, or doing anything other than throw down their guns when the LAPD’s finest told them to. Or else.
But however pleasant it is to see a bunch of bad-asses with their hands up in the air, and watch the guy who’d been telling them what to do tumble off the edge of some huge concrete pillar rearing in the sky, then land on the asphalt below like a sack of wet laundry – there really wasn’t much time to enjoy it. All that had been happening while the cargo jet had been screaming in overhead, so loud and fast that it just about blotted out everything else in people’s heads. When I saw the news footage the broadcast crews got from the ground, it looked like the end of the world, with that big winged shape filling the sky above. That was what they all swung their cameras around and focused on, naturally enough, so it was little wonder that nobody except MacAvoy got an eyeful of what went down between Richter and me, up on top of what was left of the interchange. But then, Richter was always kind of a big deal for the colonel, on a personal level.
If there had been time, MacAvoy might’ve stalked over to where his old enemy’s corpse lay motionless. Who knows – maybe there was enough grudging respect left, that a small part of him would’ve been glad, looking down at Richter’s black-smeared face, that the man had died before that HoBo crap had finished dissolving him into some oozing horror.
But there wasn’t. The cargo jet kept coming in. From where I was, up on the interchange remains, I could see the top of the plane as it crashed belly-first into the surface streets. If it’d struck the freeway lanes where the SWAT teams were still sorting things out, everybody left in the bottle would’ve died – same if it’d come down on the side below the freeway where the police had set up their command post and all the news teams had stationed their cameras. They all caught a lucky break when the cargo jet crashed on the other side of the freeway, taking out nothing but a bunch of inner-city shops and apartment buildings the police had evacuated hours ago.
From the police command post, MacAvoy could see through the underpass to where flames were already billowing from the crumpled wreckage of the jet. One of its wings had sheared off and lay propped up against the side of the freeway like a blackened warning sign.
In a couple more minutes, the area would be swarmed with fire trucks, their crews working on putting out the fires in the shattered buildings surrounding the plane. But MacAvoy was already heading to the spot.
“Hey!” Glover ran to catch up, grabbing the colonel’s arm. “What the hell are you doing?”
MacAvoy shook himself free from the other man. “Didn’t you see?” He pointed up toward the pillar-like remains of the interchange, where the spindly metal tower had been. “They made the pickup. It’s in there. In the plane –”
“That HoBo stuff? Yeah, but . . .” Glover looked at the fire beginning to engulf the cargo jet, then back to MacAvoy. “You can’t go in there and get it! There’s no way –”
“Maybe not.” MacAvoy’s voice was all grim determination. “But it’s not going off on my watch. Not if I can help it.” He turned away and started walking into the underpass again, with long, deliberate strides.
Glover stood and watched him go, his silhouette outlined by the flames.
Thick black smoke was billowing from the open hatchway when MacAvoy reached it. Covering his face with a raised forearm, he ducked his head to peer inside – and spotted what he was looking for.
The igloo device built by Cray had split open from the crash’s impact, revealing the wired-up packets of explosives inside. The red digits on the timer outside the igloo ticked down the last minute to zero – starting that countdown was probably one of the last things Cray had done before collapsing at the plane’s controls.
There wasn’t time to try to do anything about the bomb. With the smoke pouring around him, MacAvoy clambered up into the hatchway, toward the other thing he’d spotted. The HoBo cylinder was tucked hard against the front of the igloo, where the spring-loaded metal arm had snagged it into the plane. MacAvoy grabbed the cylinder and pulled, falling backward to the street outside when he finally managed to free it.
He looked up and saw the timer’s red numbers, blurred but legible through the smoke. Seconds now – he scrambled to his feet and ran for the freeway underpass, holding the cylinder tight against his chest.
Here’s another movie thing that doesn’t happen in the real world – you can’t outrun an explosion. If you’re close enough to feel it, it’s not going to just flip you in the air like you’re a lady gymnast, then you catch yourself on your hands somewhere safe. It’s going to mess you up – and mess up whatever you might be carrying.
That’s why MacAvoy, as soon as he was a couple yards into the underpass, turned and pressed himself as flat as he could against the concrete wall, shielding his face and the HoBo cylinder in his arms. When the explosion went off, the force of its shock wave was enough to peel him away from the wall and send him tumbling out to the street beyond.
He came to on his back, his colonel’s uni
form smoking beneath him where he lay on the asphalt. Some broken bones, plus second- and third-degree burns, didn’t matter that much to him now.
“Here . . .” He dimly made out Glover standing above him. He held up the metal cylinder in bloodied hands. “Why don’t you . . . put this somewhere safe . . .”
That was the shot that the photographer for the L.A Times got, with MacAvoy nicely silhouetted by the burning wreckage, but his grizzled face lit well enough to be recognizable. When the pic went national, the colonel’s publicity agent Myers was one happy little flack.
Of course, a couple of seconds later, MacAvoy passed out cold. But everybody figured he’d earned it by then.
† † †
Actually, I didn’t find out about any of that stuff, the whole bit about MacAvoy retrieving the HoBo cylinder out of the plane, until a lot later. When it all happened, I was mainly concerned about the way the last explosion shook the crumbling concrete pillar that my brother Donnie and I were trapped on top of.
I sat with him inside the convertible. I was so bruised and beat up that any padding at all was welcome, even if it didn’t help much. If I’d had any energy left at all, I might have been worrying about how Elton was doing. Since I owed him a big one and all. But I figured he could probably look after himself a little longer – at least the plane hadn’t come down on top of him. With any luck, the paramedics would get to him pretty soon, along with anybody else who’d gotten banged up on the freeway.
Our situation didn’t seem much better. Donnie looked past me to where little bits were falling away from the interchange’s edges. “What do we do now, Kimmie?”
“How should I know?” I had an arm around his shoulders, holding him against me. “Give me a break – I got us this far.”
“Hey –” He looked annoyed. “It wasn’t just you!”
“Okay, fine.” Flames and smoke were billowing up from the plane wreckage. “You’re super bad.”
Looking over my shoulder, I could see past the edge behind us. A fire engine, one of the big ones, was extending a ladder toward us. If it got there before the wobbly pillar collapsed, we’d be fine. If not . . .
I wasn’t going to worry about it.
“That was kinda cool, though.” My little brother looked up at me. “I mean, when you were on that motorcycle, and there were all those explosions and stuff behind you. I dug that.”
Great. I was dirty and bleeding, and there was motor oil – and worse – in my hair. Right now, all I really wanted in this world was a shower.
“Yeah, well . . . hope you enjoyed it.” I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Because I’m not planning on doing it again soon.”
Copyright © 2012 by K. W. Jeter.
This ebook edition first published July 2012.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including digital reproduction, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the express written permission of the Author & Copyright Holder.
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