Darkness Follows

by L. A. Weatherly

The pain was fire-bright with black teeth. We hurtled down the runway, the Merlin shuddering. My skin was clammy. I struggled to focus, sweat stinging my eyes.

  I pulled back on the stick. The rugged horizon slanted as we took off. The massive complex drifted past our port wing, growing smaller as we left it behind.

  “Just a little bit longer! You’re doing fine,” Ingo kept saying. I knew he must be desperate to take over the controls, but the pressure of his hands on my wound didn’t falter. “Hang on! Just level it out, Amity; then I’ll take over. You can do it.”

  I did, though I don’t know how. I kept hold of his voice like a lifeline. I got us to five thousand feet, above the clouds, and then levelled it out and put it on autopilot. My fingers slipped from the controls.

  “Please – take over—” I gasped.

  An arm around my shoulders. I heard Ingo’s own grunt of pain as he hauled me from the pilot’s side. Somehow we changed places. I slumped back in the passenger seat, half-sobbing.

  Ingo quickly checked the controls, then pulled his scarf off and leaned over me. I felt him fumble at my leg, then yelped as sudden pressure cinched. I gazed down in a daze. My left thigh was a darkly mangled mess; Ingo’s scarf was tied tightly just above the worst of it.

  He tugged my own scarf from my neck and lashed it snugly around the wound itself. “I don’t know a damn thing about first aid,” he muttered. His hands had my blood on them – his face shone with sweat. “But if we’re lucky maybe you won’t bleed to death now.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled. “Ingo…thanks.” I was so tired; pain throbbed through me. I closed my eyes.

  I felt him touch my shoulder. “That was some amazing flying, my friend,” he said softly. “It would have been a good take-off even if you hadn’t just been shot.”

  I tried to answer, but darkness was claiming me. The last thing I was aware of was the plane turning smoothly on its starboard wing as Ingo took over the controls and steered us away from this place.

  My father stood in a doorway, dressed in his old flying gear. My heart skipped. He wasn’t dead after all. Yet the knowledge I could never bear to face – what his thrown fight had led to – brought waves of despair.

  “Dad?” I whispered. “Please…tell me why. I need to understand.”

  “This is for the best, Amity,” he said. He levelled a pistol at me and shot.

  I jerked awake, breathing hard. The roar of a Merlin engine surrounded me; I was in the vibrating cocoon of a cockpit. Pain pulsed. For a confused moment I thought it hadn’t been a dream: that my father had shot me and was now flying me somewhere.

  Then it all came back. I looked over at Ingo in the pilot’s seat. The normal side of his face was to me – the same face I’d occasionally glimpsed during Peacefights. “How…how long was I out?” I said.

  He glanced at me, and I saw his tension. “A few hours,” he said shortly. “How are you?”

  The words seemed to swim past with little meaning. “Are we near Calgary?” I had a dim memory that it was where we were heading.

  “Not near enough.”

  “Ingo, what’s…”

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  I struggled to sit up a little, gritting my teeth. My leg was a useless, throbbing weight.

  “Tell me,” I snapped. “Total trust, remember?”

  Ingo’s fingers on the stick stayed light; his voice sharpened. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, I’m trying to spare you! Fine. We’re almost out of fuel.”

  My gaze flew to the fuel gauge. The needle hovered just above the “E”. Maybe another twenty minutes, if we were lucky. Then I remembered that the Merlin was bigger than a Firedove. We had even less time than that.

  “We’ll have to bail—” I started.

  “No parachutes. Total trust, or else I’d be making reassuring noises.”

  No parachutes? “But—” I gasped, then fell silent at a terrible memory: when Kay Pierce and her pilot had gotten out, the workers had helped them take off their parachutes. Apparently the workers had kept them, to help the esteemed guests back into their chutes when they left.

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  “Exactly. If you want to pass out again, I won’t blame you.”

  I tried to heft myself still further to look out the window; pain gripped me and I fell back in my seat. “What’s…what’s the terrain like?”

  Ingo shook his head. “Rocks and trees, mostly. At least there are some roads below now.”

  “Think you can get it down?”

  “With luck. I’m hoping for a field somewhere…” He glanced in one of the mirrors; his eyes widened and he swore.

  “Hang on!” he shouted.

  He pointed the plane’s nose into a screaming climb. The Gs slammed me against the seat as we arrowed upwards; I yelped in pain. The world turned grey as we entered the clouds, then spun as Ingo rolled us and peeled off to the west. The engine roared.

  “How many?” I gasped out.

  Ingo half-stood in his seat, clutching his rib and twisting behind to see. He sank down again. His face was as wild, as borderline violent, as it had been when we discovered Claudia.

  “Three choppers. We’ve gained some distance but they’re still following.” He dipped back into the clouds and opened the throttle. “Those didn’t come from the bomb factory!” he said over the engine. “Their range isn’t far enough.”

  He was right. “How did they find us?” I cried, and then it hit me as the clouds whipped past. “A tracker,” I whispered. “There’s a tracker on this plane.”

  “Yes, and they knew from the pilot exactly how much fuel we had. All they had to do was bide their time and then show up for the kill.” He opened the throttle still more, keeping an eye on the fuel gauge. At this speed it seemed to be plummeting by the second.

  So did the daylight.

  I noticed now what I hadn’t before: it was late sunset. All too soon, the last of the sun’s rays would wink from view and we’d be flying blind. Struggling not to pass out, I twisted in my seat too and gazed behind us. The three choppers were a loose, shifting triangle in the distance, keeping pace with us. Ingo was right: they were waiting for the kill.

  Several times he hurtled us back into the clouds to lose them, choosing different directions; each time he emerged again, they were still there. With each shrieking manoeuvre the red-black pain chewed me harder, until my face was clammy with sweat.

  “Are you all right?” called Ingo.

  “No,” I got out. “But keep going.”

  He shot a glance behind us. “Why the hell doesn’t this thing have a firing button?” he muttered.

  “At least…at least they don’t seem to have one either.”

  Things had started to take on a dreamlike cast. The engine coughed, then sputtered: a rasping, feeble noise. The needle lay far below the “E” now.

  The engine stopped.

  This should have been alarming, yet it just felt peaceful. In the sudden silence, I could hear the choppers in the distance. Slowly, our propeller ceased turning. The four blades stood out starkly against the sky.

  Ingo flipped a few levers. Though I could see the tension in his jaw, his fingers on the stick stayed light and sure. He got us down below the clouds and we glided like a large, ghostly bat.

  “You really are an excellent pilot, you know,” I murmured. “I used to love fighting you.”

  “We’ll see if you’re still saying that in a minute… Amity, there’s nowhere good; I’m going to try it here. Hang on!”

  A chaos of trees rushed up to us. The plane jounced as branches snapped past, whipping at the cockpit – a wing tore off with a wrenching jolt. I screamed. Distantly, I could hear Ingo shouting. The plane slammed to a vicious halt – dark trees lurched sideways—

  Crack.

  Pain.

  A red, velvet darkness…fading away into nothing.

  “Amity! Amity!”

  Someone was jostling my arms. “No, stop,” I murmur
ed.

  “Get up!”

  “Please let me sleep.” My mouth was sore; it was hard to say the words. Then I cried out as fresh, sharp pain burst across my cheek. I opened my eyes.

  The world was sideways. In the moonlit gloom I saw dazedly that I was lying across the starboard cockpit window. The control panel was at my head and the port window above, showing branches and stars. Ingo crouched beside me.

  “You slapped me,” I realized.

  “Amity, get up! The Guns will be here any minute!”

  I tried to shake my head; the motion brought a fresh wave of pain that almost made me vomit. “Ingo, I…”

  His half-burned face was a twisted mask of fury. “Up!”

  He hauled me bodily to a sitting position – held me in place with a trembling, wiry arm as he battled the mangled cockpit hood. I was shuddering. Our plane’s crumpled nose slid in and out of focus. Why were we in the trees?

  “Ingo, no…I can’t go fast enough…”

  He had the hood about halfway open; even the fresh air seemed to hurt, invading the cocoon of the cockpit. “You’ll damn well try,” he said.

  My mouth tasted salty, too warm. “We have a pact. Remember? If one of us can’t go on—”

  “To hell with that! Shut up and move!”

  He dragged me from the cockpit. We dropped to the ground in a tangled heap; I sobbed in pain and almost blacked out again. The plane hung sideways in the trees above us. I stared at it, half-stunned.

  “Come on. We have to hurry.” Ingo’s voice was surprisingly gentle now. He helped me up and put his arm around me, supporting me as we staggered away through the trees.

  “Faster,” he whispered. “Come on. Faster.”

  Darkness – our panting breaths – our stumbling footsteps. I couldn’t put my injured leg to the ground; each hop brought fresh waves of pain. Dimly, I took in that Ingo was injured too. He was limping badly, his breathing even rougher than mine.

  “Do you have the photos?” I gasped out.

  “In my coat pocket.”

  The world was swaying around me. “Then, Ingo, please! Take the photos from my pocket too and go on without me. You have to get them to the…to the…”

  I couldn’t think of the word and almost wept in frustration; my knees buckled and Ingo pulled me upright again.

  We froze at the sound of choppers thundering overhead. A streak of light raced towards us through the trees. Ingo swore and lunged into the undergrowth; he tugged us both to the ground.

  We crouched in bushes until the lights had passed. I felt sleepy again, detached. Ingo’s arm was still around me. I rested my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes, letting the world drift away.

  “They’ll see where we crashed in the trees…it must look like a strip taken out by a lawnmower…” He lapsed into Germanic, beating a fist against his thigh.

  “What did you just say?” I murmured drowsily.

  “I said they’ll find a place to land soon, and start combing the woods. Come on!”

  “Where though? Ingo…”

  “Get up!”

  He hauled me for what felt like miles, though was probably less, given the state we were both in. One of the giros kept cruising overhead, back and forth; we hid from its lights a dozen times. Yet by the time I heard shouts behind us, they seemed far away.

  Finally we skidded down a small hill to a dirt road. There was a sort of overhang between road and woods: a carved-out half-tunnel of roots and dirt. Ingo sank to the ground and pulled us into it, clutching at his side. In the faint twilight I saw the sheen of sweat on his face. His dark eyes scanned the road feverishly.

  “This…this isn’t a bad place to hide,” he murmured. “Maybe…maybe we can flag down a passing auto.”

  It felt so good to stop moving that I wanted to weep. I slumped against Ingo’s side, struggling to focus. The rough dirt road curved beside us. It didn’t look very used.

  “Will one pass by?” I whispered, and then added, “Sorry. I know you hate that kind of question.”

  “It’s your first one in over two weeks,” said Ingo. “I think you should get a medal for that.” He shifted and put his arm around me. I didn’t like the sound of his breathing. It was so uneven, as if every intake hurt him.

  “You wouldn’t have made it much further even without me,” I realized.

  “No. Probably not.”

  I swallowed hard, suspecting that he’d stopped because he couldn’t go on. Nothing hurt any more. The velvety blackness kept tugging at me. I wanted to sink into it, but I was so afraid. What if I didn’t die? I could hear faint shouts behind us, through the trees.

  “Ingo…they’re going to find us…” I got out. “Our other pact…please…”

  His arm tightened around my shoulders. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Please. You have to. I don’t want them to find us… I can’t go back there…”

  “Listen to me,” he whispered. He touched my face. “Amity. Open your eyes and listen.”

  I struggled to focus. Ingo’s face was half-ruined but at the sight of it I relaxed a little: his dark eyes were so direct.

  “It’s not time yet,” he said softly. “I have my knife right here. If it’s time, I’ll do it. I promise. They won’t take either of us.” He let his hand fall from my face. “All right?”

  I sagged. It felt as if a weight had tumbled from me. I nodded blearily and he drew me against him. I could trust Ingo; I knew that. He always meant exactly what he said.

  I closed my eyes, feeling strangely at peace. The shouts grew closer. Very distantly, I felt Ingo’s heartbeat against my cheek.

  Still alive…and so was I.

  I let the darkness carry me away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  December, 1941

  Joe’s Place again. There was no boxing match on this time; the telio showed the last of the World for Peace trials. Sandford Cain was sentencing the final few “traitors” to death. Mac kept his eyes fixed avidly on the screen, forcing himself to look gratified.

  Collis slipped into the booth across from him.

  “Cheer me up and tell me how it went,” said Mac.

  Collis had returned from the Western Quarter that morning; he was almost visibly fizzing with excitement. He shrugged out of his jacket. “Great,” he said. “Mac, it all went perfectly.”

  Mac glanced at him. He had news of Vancour but couldn’t bring himself to say it yet, with Collis looking so jubilant.

  “They’re all right?” he asked instead. “How’s the kid?”

  “They’re both fine.” Collis hesitated; he took a gulp of his beer. “Listen, Mac, I know this is a little out of the blue, but…he and I were talking on the way back, and…well, what would you say to letting him join us?” Collie’s smile was rueful. “I’m assuming you don’t beat up everyone who does.”

  Mac smiled slightly, too. “No, you were a pretty special case, buddy.” He looked back at the screen. “Bitch deserved it,” he said raising his voice as a murmur went through the bar at Cain’s announced sentence.

  “Got what was coming to her, all right,” said Collis clearly.

  A few beats later, Mac looked at him. “Where is he now?”

  “I’ve got him at a safe house not far from here. Sephy and I have got it all worked out. But if—”

  “Wait, whoa, back up.” Mac raised an eyebrow and surveyed Collis with faint amusement. “You’ve been colluding with my girlfriend?”

  “It’s in a good cause, pal. Sephy said we use kids not much older than him as messengers sometimes. But if you don’t agree, that’s that.”

  Mac considered. “How old is he?”

  “Almost fifteen.”

  “That’s young. We’re not babysitters, Reed.”

  “He’s damn competent, or I wouldn’t ask. And he wants to help. He’s desperate to, in fact.”

  “Dangerous business for a kid.” On the screen the gallows was showing. Mac’s mouth hardened. “You’d be better o
ff telling him to get the hell out to Nova Scotia while he can.”

  “He says it’s his fight too. I can’t really argue with him.”

  Mac forced himself to watch the execution. A halfhearted cheer went through the bar as the woman dropped. The black-and-white swirl of the Harmony symbol appeared on the screen and music started: one of Van Wheeler’s ditties praising Gunnison.

  Mac had preferred the inanity of “For Ever and a Day”.

  He turned to Collis. “All right, let me meet him later. We might be able to use him, at that.”

  Collis’s fist had tightened as he’d watched the screen. Now he turned to Mac and his eyebrows rose. “Really?”

  “Sure. I trust your judgement, Collis. But you know, if he’s ever captured, he’ll suffer the same fate as the rest of us.”

  Collis gave a troubled smile and gazed down at his beer. “I think I was hoping you’d say no.”

  “I can’t turn away warm bodies who want to help. We’re past that now.”

  Collis looked up. His eyes were dark blue in this light – steady and concerned. “That bad?”

  “That bad. But also that close, if we’re lucky.”

  The Day of Three Suns was still going ahead at the end of February, somewhere in Appalachia. Beyond that, Madeline Bark’s plans remained secret.

  Yet fear of Sephy’s comet might even now persuade Gunnison to delay the treaty signing and relocate it here.

  Sephy had made progress these past ten days…of a sort. Johnny Gun had declined to discuss her “serious concern” privately. But he’d scheduled a meeting with both Sephy and his Chief Astrologer. Pierce returned this evening: the meeting was tomorrow afternoon.

  Tomorrow Sephy, too, might be sentenced to death, if she played this wrong.

  Mac shoved the thought violently away. He studied Collis. He didn’t relish what he was about to say.

  “Listen, pal,” he said finally. “I’ve got some news for you. I’m afraid it’s not good.”

  Collis froze. “Amity?” he whispered.

  Mac glanced around them at the bar. “I need you to stay relaxed, buddy. Should we leave?”

  “Just tell me,” Collis said tautly.

  “Pierce called me this morning. Vancour and her accomplice have been recaptured.”