Smith swung through to the pilot. “Take off.”
“Sir, I’m not sure if we have enough fuel,” he said. “We’re going to have to leapfrog if you want to make it all the way to Groom Lake.”
“Are you able to get this damned thing in the air or not?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Then do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hayes forced Stealth down onto the bench. It was awkward with her arms twisted behind her, but he pushed her back and strapped the seatbelt across her hips. He reached over her for the flight harness. She glared up at him.
* * *
St. George dragged himself out of his panic and doubt. He could hear the pitch of the engines changing. And below it he could hear shouting.
The exes had expended their meager weapons, but Jefferson had been hit twice in the firefight. He was down, trying to hold up his rifle. The trio of soldiers was pinned down as the exes marched closer. And they were marching in perfect sync.
The Black Hawk lifted off.
He threw himself at the exes. He grabbed one in each hand and used them as flails to knock down a dozen others. Legion glared at him through their eyes and turned to fight.
They grabbed St. George at his wrists and tried to pin his arms. Some wrapped themselves around his legs. None of them wasted time trying to bite. Five bodies had hold of him. By the time he’d crushed three skulls there were ten. He threw off four with a shrug of his shoulders and there were fifteen. They piled on, using sheer numbers to hold him down.
“Gotcha this time, Dragon,” whispered one of them.
“Gotcha good,” said another.
St. George snorted. “You think you can hold me?”
A musty arm wrapped across his throat. A hand slapped over his eyes. Fingers grabbed at his hair and ears and clothes.
“There’s a concrete truck just a little ways from here,” said one of the exes. “What if we dumped the whole thing on us? Bury you under all these corpses. What do you think?”
“I think you’re still an idiot,” said St. George.
He focused between his shoulder blades and shot fifty feet into the air. Over two dozen exes came with him, clutching his body too tight for their own good. Legion had enough time to grunt with surprise and St. George dove back down, flying head-first for the tarmac. At the last second he shifted direction and hurled himself back into the sky.
The exes rushed past him in a flurry of limbs and bodies. They smashed into the helipad. Some plowed through other undead that hadn’t been carried into the air. Skulls shattered, bones snapped, and gore splattered across the blacktop. Close to thirty exes ceased to exist.
St. George hung in the air for a moment over the pile of corpses. A few of them still writhed in the heap. He landed and wrenched their necks the way a regular man would open a twist-off bottle. The last one glowered at him and was taking in a breath to speak when he broke the top of its spine into three pieces.
Monroe and Truman snapped off bursts at the last few exes. “Sir,” shouted Monroe. He pointed down the road where another mob staggered toward them.
“Get your man back to the main gate,” said St. George. “We don’t need to stay here any longer.”
“What about Smith? He’s still got your partner, right?”
He looked up. The Black Hawk was already a quarter mile away and six or seven hundred feet up, climbing fast even as it tilted away to the north. A body flew out of the side and plunged toward the ground.
* * *
“Wait a minute,” shouted Smith. He’d swung himself into one of the chairs and started to struggle with the harness until something caught his attention. He looked across at Stealth. “I thought you handcuffed her arms in front of her.”
Hayes was still leaning over her, adjusting a last strap. He glanced down at his captive and her empty lap.
“We are now on the helicopter,” Stealth said in a loud, clear voice.
Her hands slashed through the air, the left arm still trailing both handcuffs. The open palms slammed against his ears and the super-soldier felt a wave of pain and dizziness as his eardrums ruptured. Her legs whipped up and back as she drove her heels into his kneecaps. As he staggered back she grabbed his jacket and pulled herself up to crack her head into the bridge of his nose. The floor tilted and Hayes was pitched out the Black Hawk’s open door.
Polk tried to shrug off his harness and stand up. She slammed both heels into his chest. Before he recovered she spun on her hands and circled his head with her feet. The chain of her shackles pulled tight on his throat. She jackknifed her body up and drove four punches into his forehead one after the other. He tried to block them but she was too fast and her calves were in the way. By the fourth one Polk was hanging loose in the harness. She swung back down, untwisted the shackle chain, and flipped back to her feet.
She turned to Smith. The combat knife she’d grabbed from Polk’s belt spun in her hand.
Smith yelled something at her. With the engines roaring and the wind coming in through the cabin doors, she couldn’t hear what it was.
He realized she couldn’t hear him and his eyes went wide.
She saw the pilot glance back at her. He reached for his sidearm.
She threw the knife. It sank into Smith’s throat just below his Adam’s apple. The blade missed his carotid artery.
It severed one of his vocal cords.
Smith grabbed at his throat and glared at her. She saw blood bubbling on his lips as he tried to shout commands to the pilot. The deck of the chopper tilted again.
Beneath her featureless mask, Stealth closed her eyes and leaped from the helicopter’s open cabin door. The roar of its rotors faded as she dropped away and the Black Hawk continued north.
She grabbed the edges of her cloak, letting it billow out to catch the wind. She was too high up for it to save her, she knew. Almost nine hundred feet. The cloak would slow her descent, and while she would never reach terminal velocity she would still reach a sufficient speed in the next few seconds for the impact to kill her instantly.
Then a strong arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her close. Her descent slowed and stopped, and she wrapped her own arms around his neck.
“I’ve got you,” said St. George.
“There was never any doubt.”
Chapter 31
NOW
“You are bleeding,” said Stealth.
“I’ll be fine,” said St. George. “I’ve had much worse.”
They sank down through the air. St. George could go faster on his own, but he was trying to make it a smooth ride. They were heading back into a war, but for a minute or so Stealth was pressed up against him. She was very warm, even in the cool air of higher altitudes.
“How were you able to resist the suggestion Smith gave to you?”
“I thought of The Twilight Zone ,” he told her.
“Again, I do not understand.”
“If you watch a lot of Twilight Zone s, there’s a bunch of them that come down to misconceptions and loopholes,” he explained. “People can’t do something because they don’t understand what’s actually going on. I figured Smith’s powers might work something like that.”
“You sought out a loophole in the suggestion he gave you?”
St. George nodded his head. “At first I was terrified, because I knew he was right. I couldn’t beat him. I was sure of it. I knew if I tried anything a lot of people would get killed and I still wouldn’t stop him.”
“Yet you resisted,” she said. “You tried to stop him.”
“Nope. I told you, I knew I couldn’t stop him. It’s like he hardwired it into my brain. I know it was some kind of mind-control and I still can’t make myself believe I could’ve stopped him.”
She hooked one of her legs around his. It took some of the weight off his arm, although it was nothing to him. It also pulled her even tighter against him. “Then how were you able to fight back?”