Divisible man the second.., p.15
DIVISIBLE MAN--THE SECOND GHOST, page 15
“Okay, okay,” Suit and Tie said. “Enough. Let me ask you again, who the fuck are you?”
“FBI, special taskforce,” I said. “Lead team surveilling this facility. Now might be a good time to surrender. You’re being watched.”
Suit and Tie stepped directly in front of me and looked at me with narrowed eyes, sending tiny clouds of peppermint into the cold air with each breath. “You’re a bit of a wise ass, aren’t you? I’d threaten yer girl here, if I thought it would settle you down, but honest—she looks like she’s ready to claw me eyes out.” I made the accent. Irish. “I’ve seen her type. Tougher than the lot of us together.”
“You have no idea.”
He smiled. “Justin!”
“Yah?” Justin stood mincing his feet, trying to look important.
“There’s a piece of rope down in the bottom of that barrel. Pull it out for me, willya?”
Justin shot me a smug now-you’re-gonna-get-it look and hopped from the loading dock to the bed of the truck. He stepped up to the empty barrel and squinted down into the black. He leaned over.
“Reach in there and grab it,” Suit and Tie said.
Justin’s belly flesh spilled over the lip of the barrel. Farther and farther in, he reached, straining. Fat pushed on stomach, which pushed on lungs, which squeezed out his breath.
“I’m not feelin—”
The strongman who had carried the barrel moved like a dancer, swift and sure. In one motion he ducked low, clasped his hands around Erickson’s ankles, and heaved his legs up. Erickson flopped over the lip of the barrel and dropped. Something, probably his head, hit the bottom and issued a steel drum note, accented by a girlish shriek.
Erickson tried to kick, but the man on the truck, joined by his companion, punched the back of his knees, causing his legs to fold. Both men put their weight into it and drove Erickson’s feet down. The shriek turned to full-blooded screaming, then choking sounds as the compression emptied Erickson’s lungs. The second man, the one in coveralls, leaned over the barrel, holding the feet down. The other picked up the steel cover and slid it in over the opening, eventually snapping the cover into place while his companion put his weight onto it. He slipped the locking ring around the cover and snapped it shut. I had the chilling feeling these two had done this before.
From inside the steel container, we heard muffled screaming, pleading, coughing. The barrel wiggled a little, and weak knocking sounds came from the sides, but with no room to swing an arm or fist, the knocking turned to scratching.
Suit and Tie turned to us.
“I know what yer thinking. Seems a bit cruel. Put yer mind at ease, because we poked a few holes in that barrel to make sure he has plenty of air. We’re not monsters. If we hadn’t, he might go ten, maybe fifteen minutes. This way, who knows? He could last a good long time.” He smiled. “Of course, all that fat, all that compression, and being upside-down like that. ‘S got to be hell.”
The screaming and scratching continued, making the point.
“Bring out the other two drums, lads.”
Suit and Tie looked at me, then Andy.
“I’ll make you an offer. Tell me everything you think I’d be interested in hearing, and I’ll put a bullet in your head before we shove you down into one of those. I’m a bit claustrophobic myself. The idea of it—I have to say, I’d rather take the bullet.”
The two men ignored the muffled high-pitched noises and clawing-on-steel sounds in the drum. They hopped up on the dock and disappeared inside. A moment later, they each returned with an empty barrel and placed them back of the truck, on either side of Erickson’s. They worked the covers free.
“Why don’t you start with who the fuck you are?” Suit and Tie looked past me at Andy.
“You’re here to clean up after him,” Andy said. “Because of the picture he sent.”
“Aren’t you the sharp one. I never saw it, myself. Sounded a lot like child pornography to me. Makes me feel like we just did a community service, shoving his fat ass in that barrel. You know those sick perverts can’t be cured, doncha?”
“They say,” Andy answered coldly.
“I still want to know what you’re doing up here in fuckin’ frozen-land, askin’ about the lad.”
“Did he swear to you that he only sent one picture?”
“He did, and I believed him, and you won’t convince me otherwise. He confessed all his sins. Felt bloody awful about the whole affair, but we forgave him, didn’t we boys.”
The boys grinned in the affirmative.
“We patted him on the back and made him feel much better for being honest with us. What with him being indispensable like he is.”
This brought a laugh.
“Did I mention she’s my wife?” I stepped closer to Andy.
“Kudos to fuckin’ you, but I don’t give a shit,” Suit and Tie snapped at me. “And I’m not interested in standin’ around out here in this cold all night.”
“I mention it because she’s hot. Look at her. Mikey here, dipshit that he is, couldn’t keep his hands off her. She’s voracious, too.” I reached a hand toward. She met it with her own but kept her eyes on Suit and Tie. Mikey had stepped back to let his boss have center stage. During his search of Andy, he had stuffed his weapon into his pants. Suit and Tie still held his gun in his hand, but let it hang low, casual, aimed at the concrete—confident that nobody was going anywhere.
“Know what I mean?” I winked at a face growing harder and colder with each word I spoke. “She can’t get enough of it.”
I pulled Andy close, turned and put my lips to hers. Her eyes went wide, but I played out the act of kissing her. Parting, I muttered, “Bend your knees, dear.”
“Get the fuck away from her!”
Too late. I dropped. Andy dropped with me.
FWOOOMP! I pushed hard. The cool snapped over us. To the eye, we dipped downward, then vanished. A split second into the cool sensation, even before full weightlessness overtook us, I kicked hard with both legs.
We shot upward.
Suit and Tie fired his weapon. I heard the shot and waited to feel searing pain. The muzzle-flash lit up the side of the building and I realized I was seeing it from above. Too late. He missed. The loading dock fell away rapidly.
“WHERE THE FUCK—?” Suit and Tie shouted. “FIND THEM!”
“Look under the dock!” one of the men on the truck shouted. “They dropped under the dock!”
We rocketed away. Below, figures scrambled off the flatbed, dropped to the snow and disappeared under the truck thinking we had slipped through the gap between the flatbed and the loading dock. Mikey lit his big flashlight. The beam swept back and forth over the snow beneath the truck.
The shouting ended. Serious searching continued. We climbed higher and higher. The scene below became small and remote. Tiny figures fanned out in the yard. I realized I’d been holding my breath. I tried to pull in air. I had trouble.
“Dee,” I squeezed out the word. “Ease up a little. You’re not going to fall. I gotcha.”
She let out a full breath. Her grip loosened—just a little.
“Will,” she said, “that’s enough.”
The landscape spread around us, falling. The Escanaba city lights spread on the horizon, defining the limits of civilization. Beyond the lights, the black expanse of Lake Michigan reached for infinity.
“Please, that’s enough! That’s high enough!” Andy said urgently.
“I know. But we have a problem. Just—just hang on for a sec—”
I needed to think.
“What?”
“Just give me a second, please.”
I patted my jacket, feeling for a SCRAM unit. I patted it again. Like someone looking for their keys and reaching in the same empty pocket over and over. They weren’t there. They were on the snow-covered loading dock.
Five hundred feet. Easy to estimate. I’d seen it ten thousand times, turning base to final on a landing approach. Five hundred and climbing. I felt wind, but it was vertical, the relative wind generated by the speed of our ascent.
The hypoxia will knock you out before the lack of atmospheric pressure boils your blood.
Andy figured it out. “Can you stop us?”
“I don’t know.” It felt like a lie.
“What about that thing? That thing you did in Montana? That Up! thing you did?”
Seven hundred—eight hundred feet. The Reichenbach Builders property and the men searching for us had become tiny. I noticed something else. Wind drift. We angled east, over the city.
“I haven’t been able to do it again. I’ve tried.”
I had. I went to the barn several times and tried to replicate what had happened twice. When emergency situations caused me to simply think a direction—pure, non-verbal messaging between my consciousness and the other thing—it resulted in a pull, or push, or something that changed my direction. In a room filling with toxic smoke and heat, it pulled Lane Franklin and me out the only escape route possible. In a motel room in Montana, it shot Andy and me to the ceiling half a second before someone filled our bed with automatic gunfire.
A thousand feet and rising. Light relative wind flapped our clothing, and I hoped it would slow our ascent, but knew it would not be enough. The air would grow thinner eventually, reducing its drag on us.
Focus. I concentrated on the idea of Stop!
Nothing.
“Will…”
“Hush.”
I tried again.
STOP!
Nothing.
“I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “I don’t know how to do it!”
She pulled me closer.
“What if we just—reappear?” she asked.
“We’ll drop like two people without parachutes. It will not end well.”
“What if we reappear, then disappear again?”
“We still drop. I don’t think I can do it fast enough. Not before we build up speed at thirty-two feet per second per second. Even if I can disappear us again quickly, we’ll be coming down hard. Too hard.”
Falling.
We had substance. We took up space. If someone walked into us, they would feel us. But to gravity, we were nothing. I once compared it to a dandelion fluff, but a dandelion fluff has weight and gravity pulls it to the earth just like anything else. We didn’t. Falling in a vacuum, a dandelion fluff will accelerate at the same speed as a bowling ball. The only reason it doesn’t fall when you blow it off the stem in summer is wind resistance. And we didn’t have anything to create enough wind resistance to stop us from falling. That’s what parachutes are for.
Two thousand feet.
“Andy.” My voice against the silence of the empty sky around us sounded terribly alone. “I’m going to try something. Hang on to me.”
She pulled me close and held on tight. I caught the scent of her hair. If my heart hadn’t been hammering a new hole in my chest wall, I might have found the moment intoxicating. Andy. The starlight. The earth below. Our bodies locked together.
It might have been beautiful if it wasn’t scaring the shit out of me.
“I’m going to ease up my hold on you.”
“WHAT?”
“You’ll be fine. Relax.” I lightened my hands on her back, on her waist. She tightened her embrace.
“Don’t you have to maintain a grip on me? What if I suddenly fall out of this?”
I’ll admit, the idea horrified me. But I had confidence in what I was doing. On a few of my flights with Lane Franklin, taking her on excursions through the barn, I had released my hold on her, letting her maintain the contact. I wasn’t entirely comfortable hugging a fourteen-year-old girl who had a crush on me. I found that she could hold on without me putting my hands on her.
“You won’t. I’ve tested this.” Still, I remained vigilant. At the first hint that she might reappear or fall, I was prepared to grab and push the levers in my head to full power.
Andy adjusted herself. She wrapped her legs around my hips and locked them behind me.
My hands eased away from her body.
“I’ve got an idea.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the folded cash I carried. Behind Andy’s back, I unfolded it and felt for a bill. Extracting one, I clamped it between two fingers, then closed the rest and put them back in my pocket.
Three thousand feet. The wind pushed us over the city. Lights spread beneath us like embers from a finished fire. Christmas lights decorated what must have been the main street, spreading additional glow on the snow. Individual homes blazed with bright colored lights and strings adorning rooftops.
With both hands behind Andy’s back, I folded the still-vanished bill into smaller and smaller squares. After turning it into a tiny, firm rectangle, I pinched it between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. I cupped my left hand somewhere directly under the bill.
“What are you doing?” Andy wanted to know.
“A trick I learned when I was still on crutches.”
I felt her twist her head around.
“Don’t do that. I need both hands close together.” She returned to a firm embrace, facing me, her body pressed against mine. “Okay, here goes.”
In movies, the first attempt fails, just to build tension. I frankly didn’t need any more tension. My nerves screamed. My muscles had drawn tight throughout my body, down to my fingers.
I tried hard not to think about the drop below us.
Hand cupped below the folded bill, I released.
My fingers felt a cool, electric sensation. In the glow of the city lights below us, the tiny square of folded currency reappeared as it dropped away from my touch. It fell, but only for an instant. It landed in my cupped hand. Resting there, the folded bill remained visible, and now it had weight.
I have seventeen years of watching the world rise and fall around me as I navigated the sky. With a student pilot in an airplane, I can tell from the tiniest shift in the horizon whether we’re holding altitude, climbing, or descending.
The instant the paper landed in my cupped hand, I sensed that our climb diminished, then arrested. The wind marking our ascent stopped. A moment later, the wind reversed. The paper lay in my hand, easily seen, catching the light from below. And it was now falling. And we with it. I felt the shift in the air around us. In a few seconds we would accelerate to terminal velocity. Killing velocity.
I flipped the bill out of my hand as if it would have burned me. For a shaved second, I feared it would hang with us, telling me that I had waited too long, that I had allowed us to accelerate downward to a velocity far greater than we could survive. But the paper square tumbled away, racing below us toward the city lights.
“I feel it! Will! I feel it!”
“Yup.”
We descended. I couldn’t guess how fast. I had a feeling the landing was going to be ugly. But maybe it wouldn’t kill us.
She pulled me tight and kissed my cheek. I squeezed back. We held on for the ride, feeling relief and reaffirmation in the body we each held close.
We weren’t going to die in the stratosphere.
I looked down.
No, we were going to die of hypothermia in Lake Michigan.
30
“Will, are you seeing this?”
Escanaba lies not on Lake Michigan, but on a bay formed by a finger of land extending from the north into Lake Michigan. Descending now and driven by winds aloft running out of the northwest, a quick estimate of trajectory, rate of descent, and wind drift told me we were not going to land on solid ground. It would be close, but that meant little. My estimate of survival time in the water at this time of year, and this temperature, came to less than three minutes.
“Yeah.”
We dropped. We tracked over the center of town. The evening remained young, but the streets appeared deserted. I thought perhaps, as we got lower, we could start yelling for help. Get someone to launch a boat. A fine plan, except the slips along the waterfront were all empty. Maybe Escanaba had a Coast Guard station, or the fire department had a boat.
“Can we increase our rate of descent?”
Death by drowning or death by impact.
“I’m thinking,” I said. Of what, I had no idea. “There are two reasons I wish I had Lane with me instead of you.”
“Lane?”
“Yeah. First, I think she might come up with something, because she’s smart as hell, and I’m coming up with jack.”
“Second?”
“Second, I just wish you weren’t here.”
She gave me a squeeze.
“Aw, you say the nicest things.”
I kept thinking. It didn’t help.
We dropped below one thousand feet. The shoreline approached.
What would Lane tell you? About inertia. About weightlessness.
We reached five hundred feet. A road, a parking lot, some waterfront walkways and piers lay between us and the water.
“We’ll drop as soon as its safe. As close to the shore as we can. As soon as we hit the water, kick off your shoes and jacket and swim like hell. DO NOT look for me, because I won’t be looking for you. I need you to swim like there’s a goddamned shark on your ass.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You can’t save me, and I can’t save you. We save ourselves, or we both die. Don’t worry about me. All you’ll see of me is my cute butt. Follow it.”
“That’s what got me in this mess.”
Two hundred feet. We passed over the parking lot.
Over the walkway.
Over water.
A hundred feet. Still too high. We’d die hitting the water.
“Get as much air in you as you can on the way down,” I told her.
Seventy feet. We continued drifting over the bay. Ten yards. Twenty. Thirty yards from shore. Too far.
How high was that pool platform? The one I thought I’d never dive from?
We were at twice that height.
“We’re getting too far out, Will. We need to drop!”
Too soon.
“Will!”
We drifted and continued the slow descent. City lights reflected on the surface of the water, but now we were fifty yards out. In warm water, the swim would have been easy. I’m a good swimmer. Andy’s better. But the cold would kill us.
