Dead Harvest (27 page)

  "I told you, I've got no intention of killing you – or anyone else for that matter. Just keep us over the city, and soon enough, we all go our separate ways. Or you could keep on heading east and see what happens when I get angry."

  The pilot hesitated, but only for a moment. Then, without a word, he turned the bird around. He was going easy on the throttle, but whether it was because of the chopper's ever-worsening tremors or to give the authorities on the ground a chance to keep up, I didn't know. Besides, I couldn't exactly tell him to hurry if I had no idea where we were headed, and right now, our speed was the least of my concerns.

  No, what worried me was the radio.

  "Hey," I said, gesturing toward my headphones, "these things got a volume knob?" He looked confused for a moment, and then pointed at the console. I fiddled with the knobs he'd indicated, flinching as I inadvertently changed the frequency, and my headset filled with static. Eventually, though, I found what I was looking for, and the police band rang loud and clear in my ears.

  
"… two suspects – one a teenaged girl, possibly a hostage…"

  
"… chopper headed northeast along Park, approximately forty miles per hour…"

  
"… flight nurses were evacuated – only the pilot remains…"

  I sat lost in the radio transmissions for God knows how long, only snapped back to reality by a tug on my sleeve. It was Kate. Her brow was furrowed with worry, and she tapped at her ear with frustrated urgency as I stared, puzzled, back at her. Finally, she yanked the headset off of my ears, and I heard what it was she wanted me to hear.

  It was a low, rhythmic whumping, out of sync with the thudding of our own blades. I looked from window to window to find the source of the noise, and soon enough, I spotted it: a news chopper, keeping pace with us maybe fifty yards to our left. Mounted on their nose was a camera, on a sort of swivelling rig that allowed it to pan from side to side. Right now, though, it wasn't panning anywhere – it was pointed right toward us.

  It looked like our days of staying off the radar were over.

  All right, I thought. No need to panic. All we needed was a plan, and we'd get out of this just fine.

  And that's when everything went to shit.

  There was a screech of rending metal as our damaged elevator tore free of the chopper's tail, and then a horrible racket like a golf ball caught in a box fan as it got chewed up by the tail rotor. The world outside the cabin lurched sideways and began to spin. Our pilot doubled over, and the cabin filled with the acrid reek of sick. As our pilot slumped across the control panel retching, his task forgotten, the chopper dipped precariously. Kate slammed head-first into the cabin ceiling, collapsing in a heap onto the floor. And then a hand, strong as iron, closed around my neck.

  I struggled against the pilot's grasp, so impossible in its strength, my arms flailing wildly as I struggled for breath. His face split into a grin, and he pulled me close, breathing two words into my ear, somehow audible even over the roar of the chopper: "Hello, Samuel."

  Fuck. Bishop. Apparently the bastard had nothing better to do than sit around and watch the news.

  The world around us continued to spin, and I felt curiously light, as though I were barely even there. I thought then that it was just the lack of oxygen, playing tricks on my brain. It hadn't occurred to me that the chopper was going down.

  I clenched shut my eyes and forced myself to focus. It wasn't easy, what with Bishop squeezing the life out of me while my overwhelming dizziness made my limbs heavy and uncooperative. If I didn't do something fast, I was gonna lose consciousness, and Kate was as good as gone. It was then that I realized I still had the gun.

  I tried to bring the gun to bear on the pilot/Bishop's face, but he just slapped it away with his free hand, cackling with delight. A second try, the same result. I realized that as long as he had my neck in a vise, I was at a disadvantage. That's when I decided to shoot him in the wrist.

  I pressed the barrel to his arm and pulled the trigger. The sound was deafening, and my face was spattered with blood and gunshot residue in equal measure. Still, it did the trick – Bishop's hand withdrew, his borrowed face twisted in pain. Thanks to the lurching of the chopper, the shot had been a graze – a diagonal furrow maybe two inches long, halfway up the forearm. In truth, I was grateful – if I'd shot the pilot's wrist clean through, he'd have bled out in no time flat. Least this way, I had a shot at saving him – but that meant I had to knock him out, and quick.

  Bishop struggled to climb from his seat, his wounded arm clutched to his chest, but he was just as offbalance as I was, and he staggered backward into the chopper's control panel. I braced myself against my seat and kicked him in the face. His head snapped backward, his nose spouting blood. I kicked him again for good measure, and he tumbled to the cabin floor.

  It was only then that I turned my attention outside. The horizon wobbled wildly, the Manhattan skyline racing by. I kicked Bishop aside, as much out of anger as necessity, and then climbed into the pilot's seat. Before me was a whole mess of stuff I didn't have the first idea how to use. I started with the joystick-looking thingy between my knees, yanking it upward in an attempt to halt our descent – after all, it always worked in the movies.

  In real life, not so much. The helicopter skittered backward, still plummeting, and the cant of the cabin was so bad that if the door had been open, Kate would've rolled clean out. Sheer instinct made me slam on the left-hand pedal at my feet, but this was a chopper, not a Buick, and the spinning worsened. I tried the other pedal, and our rotation slowed – not much, but it was encouraging nonetheless. Not so encouraging were the rooftops we were fast approaching.

  The only option left was the emergency brake – at least, that's what it looked like to me. We were maybe twenty feet above the high-rises of Midtown when I closed my eyes and yanked the lever. I waited for our imminent collision, and when it didn't come, I cautiously opened one eye. The bird was still spinning like a top, and she shook like she was six shots into an espresso binge, but I'll be damned if we weren't holding altitude. For the first time since we'd started falling, I had the feeling we might just get out of this alive.

  That's when Bishop hit me.

  I later realized that it had been a fire extinguisher. At the time, I thought it was a freight train. Whatever it was, it bounced off the crown of my skull and knocked me out of my seat. The chopper jerked, and once more began to descend. I shook the cobwebs from my head and made for the up-lever. Bishop leapt atop me, hands scrabbling to find purchase around my neck. His hand pressed against my face, and I shook free, biting down hard on the meat of his thumb. Then I dug my nails into the furrowed flesh of his forearm, and he shrieked in pain and rage.

  I tossed him off of me, and scrambled to the lever. Buildings whooshed past us just inches from our blades as we descended below the skyline, Sixth Avenue sixty yards beneath us. I felt a hand on my leg, pulling me backward – away from the lever. I held fast for a moment, but it slipped from my grasp, and I tumbled backward.

  Bishop, surprised by the sudden lack of resistance, released my leg and slid backward toward the rear of the cabin. For a moment, he eyed Kate's unconscious form, and then I was on him, grabbing his helmet by the sides and slamming it into the cabin floor, again and again until he moved no more. I hoped that this time, he'd stay down – I'd had quite enough of killing innocent vessels. Their lives were a mighty steep price, no matter the stakes.

  Of course, if I couldn't stop us from crashing, any debate over killing the pilot was gonna be kind of moot.

  I scampered back to the pilot's seat while the street rushed upward to meet us. Forty yards, thirty. The chopper spun still, and I watched horrified as, beneath us, Sixth Avenue erupted into chaos: cars were abandoned as their drivers fled, pedestrians trampled one another in a desperate attempt to get away; a cab leapt the curb and launched headlong into a sausage cart. Twenty yards, ten. Behind me, Kate raised her head, her mutter of confusion becoming a frightened wail as she realized we were going down. I gripped the up-lever with all I had and yanked it backward, just moments from impact.

  The chopper began to rise.

  The street receded beneath us, but we weren't out of the woods yet. Still we hurtled forward, the helicopter spinning wildly, and no amount of my slamming on the pedals at my feet seemed to change that. Sixth Avenue, so broad and impressive in my youth, was suddenly the eye of a needle – it was all I could do not to slam into the massive buildings that jutted skyward to either side. To make matters worse, thick black smoke billowed from our tail, blanketing the street, while on the control panel, a dozen alarms flashed and chimed. I didn't know exactly what they meant, but I was pretty sure I caught the gist: no matter what I did, we weren't long for the sky.

  One of our skids caught on a street light, and the helicopter shuddered. I jerked the joystick aside, nearly careening into one of the buildings that whizzed past on my right. The skid clattered, useless, to the street below. A moment later, the street light followed, slamming down atop an abandoned Lincoln Town Car in a flurry of sparks and broken glass.

  At the far end of the cabin, Bishop or our pilot stirred. Kate didn't wait to find out which of them was driving – she clocked him full-swing with the same fire extinguisher he'd used to hit me. He went down in a tangle of limbs, out this time for sure.

  The chopper swung wildly now from right to left, and there was only so much I could do to correct. We were maybe twenty feet above the street, but we were barreling along too fast to simply jump – and besides, if we abandoned the bird now, she was gonna wind up rearranging some real estate, not to mention killing dozens. But as the familiar Art Deco façade of the RitzCarlton loomed large over us and I caught a glimpse of the sea of greenery beyond, I had me an idea.

  We were gonna land in the park.

  OK,
land
might've been too generous a term, what with a non-pilot at the stick and one of our skids a few hundred yards behind us, but still, if I could slow her down enough and drop her somewhere soft, maybe we could walk away from this OK. At least, that's what I
would
have been thinking had my thoughts not been preoccupied by a silent mantra of
oh shit oh shit oh shit.
With the chopper threatening to shake itself apart, and the joystick unresponsive, that last block and a half was one tough needle to thread.

  Without warning, we kicked sideways. Behind us, a latticework of scaffolding buckled where our blades had torn through it, and collapsed to the pavement beneath. The helicopter pitched and tumbled like a rowboat in a hurricane, and there was nothing left for me to do.

  One way or another, this bird was going down.

 
 

The chopper shook so badly that my vision blurred and the horizon was rendered indistinct, but still I gripped the joystick between my knees, struggling with all I had to keep the chopper on course. Even in the best of circumstances, there was no way in hell I was gonna land this thing smoothly, but minus one skid, and with the controls unresponsive, I figured my only shot was to drop us in some water. Even then, I didn't know if we'd survive.

  We rocketed over the intersection of Sixth and Central Park South, and the buildings of Midtown dropped away. The treetops of the park scraped against the underside of the helicopter like the scrabbling of some unholy scavengers, eager to partake of the tasty morsels within. I tried my damnedest to gain a little altitude, but the scrabbling continued. It looked like we were out of up.

  I considered my options. The reservoir was damn near two miles away – no way were we gonna stay up that long. Besides, the reservoir is
huge
– even if I brought her down OK, we'd likely drown before we reached the shore. The lake was a better bet – a little closer, a little shallower – but still, I didn't see this bucket getting that far. That left the pond. Plenty close, if a bit shallow for my liking. Would a few feet of water be enough to cushion our impact? I suddenly found myself wishing I'd done a little better in physics as a kid – or, failing that, that I'd taken it more recently than seventy-odd years ago.

  Oh, well, I thought – only one way to find out.

  I yanked the joystick to the right. The chopper banked. She lost a little altitude as well, and a maelstrom of leaves and branches raged around us. I caught a glimpse of shimmering water just ahead before the chopper plunged entirely below the tree line, and then I saw nothing but green.

  There was nothing left to do but pray.

  We emerged from the canopy like a slug from a barrel, our rotor twisted and unmoving above us, our landing skids both certainly gone. The cabin tilted, and I fell from the pilot's seat, slamming hard into the window beside me. Through it, I saw the water rise to meet us, and then a murky nothing as it engulfed us in a roar of surf and a screech of rending metal. And then my forehead met the windshield, and the world went dark.

 

The gun was a dull, ugly affair, all scuffed and gray and worn. A tiny little revolver with a nasty snub nose and a peeling leather grip, it had the look of a featherweight boxer gone to seed. I hefted it in my hand, marveling at its weight. Then I extended my arm outward, lining the sight up with the clock that sat behind a wire cage just a few feet above the countertop.

  
"Whoa, pal, that iron's hot! Do me favor and maybe don't go ventilating my shop, huh?"

  
I looked at him and set the gun down on the counter. He was a wiry guy of maybe forty, with beady close-set eyes and nervous hands, which at the moment were tapping out a jaunty number on the countertop. He wore a pair of baggy wool trousers, held up by a set of suspenders over a greasestained T-shirt. Except for me and him, the hock shop was empty. I looked him up and down, and wondered was he always this nervous, or was it my sparkling personality that had him on edge. Then again, I guess it coulda been the gun.