by Dan Simmons
“Goddamn you, woman!” exploded Fortuna. “Of course we will not fucking let you go! Nor the fucking priest! Even if he leaves this mountain, we will find him, return him, and drink his fucking blood! Now give me the child!”
Kate held Joshua out over the abyss with straight arms. The pain tore at her muscles and shoulder sockets, but the movement froze Fortuna in his tirade.
She could see her watch. 12:25. She closed her eyes.
The white light, when it came, was a surprise. The noise was very loud.
The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter just cleared the west tower and seemed to skim the east tower, its searchlight was on and flashing across the crowd, blinding the strigoi and Kate as well. The helicopter slewed sideways, seemed to be about to land in the middle of the strigoi throng, and sent the crowd shoving back toward the far wall, the wind of the machine’s rotors pelting them with dust, gravel, and grit thrown up from the terrace. The chalices on the long table were blown off as red and white vestments fluttered and linens lifted into the sky like streams of toilet paper in a high wind.
Radu Fortuna screamed a curse that was lost in the incredible rotor noise. Guards tried to press forward and left their weapons in the crush of the retreating strigoi mob.
Kate caught the briefest glimpse of O’Rourke on the left side of the helicopter’s steel and Plexiglas bubble, his face intent as he obviously wrestled with the controls, and then she was holding on to the baby with one arm and flailing to keep her balance with her right arm as the rotor wind threatened to tumble her off the wall into the canyon.
Radu Fortuna lunged forward and seized her ankle. Joshua screamed at the avalanche of light and noise.
The helicopter pivoted, its skids six feet above Kate, and the entire machine moved sideways out over the canyon as if sliding on an invisible layer of ice. The rotor blast almost threw Kate back onto Radu Fortuna. The strigoi shielded his eyes with one hand and pulled at her ankle with the other. Several guards pushed through the mob.
The helicopter slid back toward Kate, the machine rocking like a rowboat in rough waves. Kate ducked as the slick’s right skid bobbed where her head had been a second before. She started to rise and then ducked again as the door that O’Rourke had left open on the right side of the machine swung wider and almost took her head off. The rotor noise and gale was beyond belief.
Radu Fortuna snarled and grabbed the collar of her sweater. Kate did not look back as she swung her right elbow back, hard, into his teeth. His hand released her collar.
Kate stood up quickly while the door was open, leaned out over the emptiness, and set her baby in the right seat. O’Rourke shouted something she could not hear, lifted his right hand from the stick to reach across and keep Joshua from sliding out, had to return his hand to the controls, and bobbed the helicopter down and to the left to keep the baby from rolling out.
Kate pinwheeled her arms, could not catch her balance, and leaped as hard and as far as she could out into the abyss.
Chapter Forty-one
THE helicopter was already sliding back toward the castle and Kate hit the right skid hard, her arms going over it, her chin snapping down, her breasts feeling as if she had been slammed by a baseball bat, and the wind going out of her in a rush. She hung on.
The door on the right side was still swinging open and shut, and O’Rourke was working the controls, trying to hover without allowing Joshua to tumble out. The helicopter wheeled right. Kate glanced over her shoulder and saw strigoi guards raise their machine guns in the hailstorm of grit and dust.
“Nu!” screamed Radu Fortuna. He stepped up onto the wall.
Kate tried to scream at O’Rourke to move left, but the ex-priest was obviously too busy trying to control the machine and keep the rotor from slamming into the tower or battlements. The helicopter slid another eight feet to the right as if on invisible rails, Radu Fortuna reached up, grabbed the open door, and stepped easily onto the skid.
O’Rourke glanced left, saw the shadow of the man leaning in, and banked the helicopter steeply to the left. Kate’s fingers slid off the fuselage but she clung to the skid and the metal strut holding the skid in place. Under her shoes, the vertical face of the castle wall suddenly upended and seemed to swing sideways as the chopper first dove, then rose again, always tilting a bit to the left so that Joshua would not tumble out.
Kate swung her leg up onto the strut and kicked Radu Fortuna’s ankles out from under him before he could step into the cabin.
Fortuna fell forward and swung out on the door, his legs hanging free. Kate released her secure handhold, balanced forward on the skid as if doing a forward roll on a tubular balance beam, and got her left hand in the open cabin doorway. There was a ridge there and she locked her fingers around it and pulled herself to one knee on the slippery skid.
O’Rourke leveled the helicopter sixty or seventy feet above the castle terrace. A score of muzzles were lifted toward them, but no one fired because of the baby and Radu Fortuna.
With the helicopter level, the door swung inward and Fortuna’s stocky body slammed into Kate, squeezing her against the doorframe but not giving her enough room to pull herself into the cabin. His strong left hand seized her by the throat and began squeezing.
They were both standing on the bobbing skid now. Their weight tipped the machine sickeningly to the right, and Kate felt Joshua’s small form strike her back. If she and Fortuna went off now, the baby would come with them. She tried to twist out of the strigoi’s grasp but the chopper tilted left, his weight fell against her, and he freed his right hand to complete his choking. His thumbs closed over her windpipe and Kate knew that he could break her neck in a second.
The helicopter bobbed slightly, a space opened between their bodies, and Kate pulled the Gypsy’s dagger from her belt and plunged it through Fortuna’s flapping vestments into his stomach.
The blade did not go deep. Kate’s leverage was too restricted and Fortuna’s robes too thick. But the pain and shock stopped Radu Fortuna’s thumbs from closing on her neck. Kate released her grip on the inside of the door and pushed the knife farther in, knowing precisely where the largest bundle of nerve fibers was.
Radu Fortuna roared, pulled his hands from her throat, and wrestled the knife away from her, pulling it from its shallow cut. O’Rourke banked the hovering machine to the left at precisely the right instant, Kate leaned far back onto the seat over Joshua’s wailing form, lifted her legs, and kicked Fortuna off the skid.
She swung her legs in, held the baby tight against the back of the seat, and leaned out the flapping door to watch Fortuna fall. Several hundred white faces stared up from red and black cowls, all of them watching while the short man, arms swinging and legs extended as gracefully as a sky diver’s, did two complete somersaults in the air and then fell, faceup, with all limbs extended for the final sixty feet. Directly onto the metal stake that had been reserved for Kate.
The crowd of strigoi raised their hands as blood spattered their robes and faces. Two of the guards began to fire short bursts.
“Go!” screamed Kate, slamming the banging door shut. “Higher!” Her watch said 12:26 and thirty seconds.
Something banged against the fuselage behind them, but O’Rourke ignored it, twisted something on the stick in his right hand, lifted a lever in his left hand, kicked at rudder pedals, and the Jet Ranger’s engine whined higher. They banked to the left and started climbing away from the citadel and the muzzle flashes.
Kate looked down, realized that the castle was now on the other side, saw something dark far below—like a giant bat—its shadow rippling across the river for the briefest second, and then she raised her wrist again, looked at her watch, and shouted above the engine roar to O’Rourke. “What time is it?”
He glanced toward her incredulously. “You expect me to take my hand off the collective to tell you—”
“What is the fucking time?” she screamed, realizing that she sounded a little hysterical even to herself.
O’Rourke bli
nked, freed his left hand for a second, and said, “My watch says twelve twenty-fi—”
The world exploded beneath them and around them.
Chapter Forty-two
AT the last second O’Rourke swung the helicopter around, still in its climb, to face the shock wave, and that probably saved their lives. Instead of being swatted out of the sky like a fleeing insect, the Bell Jet Ranger rose on the blast like a leaf above a roaring fire. The ride was vertical, faster than any elevator Kate had ever been on, and the view below was not something she would soon forget.
Poenari Citadel—Castle Dracula—exploded in a score of places, gigantic mushrooms of flame rising a thousand feet above the crag the castle was built on. More explosions ripped through the woods, the stairway, the grassy area where the helicopter had been parked, and the stairway to the valley below. An instant later a second series of explosions seemed to erupt from the cliff wall itself.
The west tower of the citadel became a billion fragments of shrapnel flying ahead of the blossoming orange ball of flame, but the east tower seemed to rise like some medieval space shuttle, much of the upper battlements seemingly intact and balancing on a tail of pure flame. Then the illusion dissolved as the tower flew apart in ten-ton fragments and fell onto the screaming strigoi crowded on the terrace. The terrace itself was rocked with explosions that sent flame a hundred yards out over the river valley.
If there were any human forms left on the east and north sections of the crag that held the citadel, they were not visible as more explosions opened cracks in what little brick and stone that remained. The terrace section of the castle separated itself from the rubble of the main keep and tumbled a thousand feet into the valley, its cloud of dust adding to the pall of smoke and haze that filled the entire width of the canyon.
The trees within a hundred yards of the former citadel had burst into flame, the fire jumping to their crowns in seconds, and a great wind seemed to be whipping thick trunks back and forth like reeds.
Kate saw all this in the few seconds of their vertical elevator ride. She cradled the screaming Joshua tighter as the helicopter reached the top of its arc and prepared to drop straight down into that conflagration. She had no seat belt on and she and the baby rose six inches off the seat as the helicopter reached its apogee.
“Hang on!” O’Rourke yelled uselessly, and then he threw the stick in his right hand hard to the left, kicked his right rudder pedal, and squeezed the throttle wide open. The roar of the jet turbine became louder than the explosions and landslides two thousand feet below them.
They could not recover in the fifteen hundred feet of altitude they had above the blazing ruins of the citadel. O’Rourke obviously did not try to. He put the helicopter’s nose down and dove it into the canyon. The turbine screamed louder, alarms went off on the console in front of both him and Kate, and the wind slammed at the not-quite-latched door inches from Joshua’s face. Kate held the baby tight and watched the river rise toward them at a terrifying rate.
O’Rourke set both his good leg and artificial one hard against the pedals, gripped the stick in both hands, and began easing the machine out of its bucking, screaming dive. Kate felt the heat of the burning mountain as they hurtled past it, and then the canyon walls were whipping by on both sides, the river rising to fill the soot-streaked windscreen in front of them. Kate closed her eyes for a second.
When she opened them, they were hurtling along in level flight thirty feet above the Argeş, heading south. Kate saw trucks and lights on the riverbank to her left and realized that it was the spot where the Dacia had crashed. The spot where she had left Lucian. She closed her eyes again. Good-bye, my friend. There will be no more orphans used to feed the strigois’ thirst. Joshua stirred in her arms and she patted the baby’s back. With luck…just a little luck…there will be no more AIDS babies.
O’Rourke was clicking off alarms, snapping toggles on a panel between them. He glanced to his right. “Are you all right?”
Kate started to answer but began laughing instead. She put her free hand up to stop the giggles but ended up just snuffling and giggling into her wrist. O’Rourke frowned for a second, but then began laughing himself.
When they could stop, Kate shifted the baby to her right arm and touched his shoulder with her left hand. “Are they going to shoot us down now? The air force or something?”
O’Rourke let go of the stick for a moment to take a headset from a bracket and slip it over his head. He tapped the microphone and then lifted the right earphone. “Nope. I don’t think so. Romania has one of those air forces that doesn’t like to fly at night.” He threw toggles on the console and she could hear a beeping from the earphones near her head. O’Rourke gestured and she set them on.
“Hear me better now?” he asked. The engine roar and rotor noise was a distant thing, his voice clear in her headphones.
She nodded.
He banked to the right and gained altitude over the foothills. Kate realized that they had already covered all the ground that it had taken Lucian and her hours to drive through the Transylvanian hills between Rîmnícu Vîlcea and Curtea de Argeş. She settled back in the seat, found a shoulder harness, and buckled herself in. Joshua was breathing easily, dozing off. Kate shook her head.
“This kind of aircraft carries a transponder,” O’Rourke said through the intercom. “I suspect that no one in Romania would mess with this particular helicopter even if we buzzed the capital.” They continued to climb. High peaks were ahead but they were already flying higher than the snowcapped summits.
“Do we have enough gas to get out of here?” she asked into the little microphone. O’Rourke would know that “here” meant Romania.
He smiled at her. His eye was still swollen almost shut and his lips were a mess from the beating they had given him, but he looked happy. “If I find even the slightest tail wind, we’ll have enough gas to land in downtown Budapest,” he said. “Which side of the river would you prefer, Buda or Pest?”
“You choose,” Kate whispered into the microphone. “I’ve made enough decisions for one day.”
O’Rourke nodded and concentrated on the controls.
“Mike,” she said a minute later. She was gently rocking Joshua, feeling the baby’s warm breath on her cheek. “Lucian is dead.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want to tell me about it? And how you managed all this?”
“In a while,” said Kate. “But tell me something first…do you know anything about Lucian’s mentor?”
“Mentor? No.” His voice was puzzled.
“It wasn’t you?”
“No, Kate.”
She rubbed her hand across her baby’s head. His hair had grown. He was blowing bubbles in his sleep. New cure for colic, she thought irrelevantly. Take the baby for a helicopter ride. “Could it have been the Church…sponsoring Lucian in his fight against the strigoi, I mean?”
O’Rourke thought a minute. “No, I don’t think so. I think I would have heard about it if the Church had been actively involved like that. The best the Church could do was tend to the victims all these years. I’m sorry, Kate…is this mentor thing important?”
“Perhaps not,” said Kate. They were flying through scattered clouds now, still climbing. The instrument lights were red. O’Rourke fiddled with something and a heater came on. The sound and feel of the warm air was soothing to Kate, like being a child again, out on a ride in her parents’ car at night with the heater fan blowing gently. Despite the adrenaline still surging through her body, Kate actually felt sleepy.
“There is something important we have to talk about, though,” she said. She did not add the “us.”
O’Rourke nodded. She looked his way and saw him smiling at her. “I look forward to talking about that,” he said softly.
Joshua made the kind of vaguely troubled noise that babies make while dreaming, and Kate rocked him gently. Suddenly they came out of the cloud layer and it seemed to her that the tops of the clouds were
like a sea and they were a submarine rising to the surface…and above it. The cloud tops gleamed beneath them as far as she could see in each direction. There was no sense now of national boundaries, or of nations, of the darkness that lay below those clouds. Kate would not mind staying above these clouds for a while. She rocked the baby, crooning very softly, and watched out the window as they leveled off and flew northwest.
“I’ve got the tail wind we needed,” said O’Rourke. “And I’m pretty sure the NavStar system is working right. We’ll be following the Danube for part of the way.”
Kate nodded in a distracted way. She had just realized how bright the stars were up here in this moonless sky, so bright that they turned the cloud tops into a milky ocean of subtle white hues.
O’Rourke was holding the stick with his left hand now, turning a radio dial with his right. When he had found the channel he wanted, Kate reached over and gently took his hand.
Not speaking, still holding hands, they flew west under the canopy of stars.
Epilogue
When they opened my grave on Şnagov Island, they found it empty. That was in 1932. In the winter of 1476, I had briefly regained the throne of Transylvania, but my enemies were legion and they would not cease their attempts until I was dead.
That winter, surrounded and outnumbered by foes, I was driven into the swamps near Şnagov by those who would have my head. Instead, they found my headless and mangled body in the marshes there. They identified me by my royal clothes and by the signet ring bearing the sign of the Order of the Dragon on my finger.
I had taken only one loyal boyar ally in my flight to the marshes. He was loyal, but not terribly smart. He was my general size and build.
It was to be the first time I left Transylvania with one of my sons. It was not the last.
I admit that I was not sure whether I would stay at the citadel for the denouement. That morning, being outfitted in my clumsy robes and flown south in the machine, I decided that I would. I was very tired. If my body would not die of its own accord, I would give it peace by other means.
