Jumping to her feet, Vic screams, “Wait!” and the convoy stops inches before smashing Raymond’s skull into the grate. “Just don’t hurt anyone else and I’ll—”
“You’ll what, sweetheart?”
The tunnel stinks of cologne again, and Rina scrambles away as the source approaches Vic from behind. The corpse of Harlan Fell hobbles to her side and lays a warm hand atop hers, then lifts it to his moldering lips for a kiss.
She grits her teeth as she finally gazes into his pale eyes. “Why are you doing this to us?”
His brow creases and he caresses her cheek with a chapped hand. “Because there is nothing else. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We can’t wish ourselves away, or we would’ve done it by now, and our powers can only be directed outward. So we do our best to remain… entertained… until our rescue arrives. Your family’s been quite helpful, thank you.” Harlan grabs her chin and pulls her closer with a hiss. “Now, what are you going to do for us?”
Vic pushes away and sucks on her top lip. Looking to Rina, she sighs. “You have to be the one. You have to make the wish. I’ll be the sacrifice.”
“I can’t—”
“I’m okay with it, I promise. It won’t be bad. It’s just falling.”
Raymond stirs when the hyperia begin towing him back to the women, but they aren’t returning him — they’re getting ready to use him as a battering ram. He shrieks and thrashes, and Vic screams for Rina to make a wish.
“I can’t kill someone!”
“They’re going to kill us all if you don’t!”
Rina shrinks against the wall, her mind a whirlpool of life’s biggest and smallest wishes. Which one would make it easier to murder a human being? Would a clean slate or a gold medal really absolve her guilt over killing someone who took a chance on her when no one else would? Even if she wished herself into the perfect life, how could she sleep at night with such an atrocious experience infesting her brain?
Vic grabs Rina’s hands and says shakily, “I forgive you, okay? It needs to end. Raymond will back you up about what happened, and you’ll go on with your life in a way I never could. Okay? Please, Rina. Make a wish.”
The chanting begins again, and the hyperia carrying Raymond begin thrusting him toward the grate. As a ferocious clap of thunder judders the people in the tunnel off their feet, Rina Bestler makes a wish.
“HEY, ARE YOU with us?”
“Pull her away from the edge, will you?”
“No, don’t touch her. Look, she’s waking up.”
Rina moans as she sits up, shivering and aching from head to toe, with a bevy of people in helmets and orange vests staring at her. Once she realizes they’ve come to rescue her, she gasps and throws herself into an older man’s arms.
“Careful, girlie. You’re real close to the edge.”
It’s an understatement. One sneeze in Rina’s sleep might’ve sent her right over, out the hatch in the cliff face and into the Chesapeake. It’s calm now, and the wind has died to a cologne-scented kiss. But the beach is littered with bodies.
Not Vic’s though. As Rina stands at the edge, she doesn’t see her boss’ body, nor does she remember sacrificing Vic Fell to the hyperia — which means her wish came true. Terrified of the guilt, Rina wished to skip forward in time to her rescue, which is precisely where she wakes up. But she also doesn’t remember what happened to Raymond until she spots his corpse broken on the shore, his arm hooked inside the grate.
“What happened here, miss?” one of the EMTs asks.
Her heart races. Raymond can’t vouch for her story now. They’ll think she’s just as crazy as the people who found Vic alone after the slaughter in ‘91.
“Wait, are you Rina Bestler?”
“Holy shit, it is Rina Bestler! The ex-figure skater!”
She wilts to the floor as her rescuers close around her, shouting in her face and raving about the discovery. The noise nauseates her, and her head pounds like a bass drum. Rina Bestler, the former Olympian. Rina Bestler, the sole survivor of the second Ghost Hurricane. Rina Bestler, alone and crazy as hell.
She made the wrong wish. She wasted it, threw it away on fear.
But then the crowd parts, and a familiar face appears between the invasive strangers. Pushing through, Victoria Fell extends her hand to Rina and pulls her free.
“Ms. Fell, you’re alive!” one of the rescuers exclaims. “The police need to speak to you immediately.”
“Of course,” she says. “But first, let me get Rina out of here.”
“They need to speak to her, too.”
“Later.”
“No. Now, Ms. Fell.”
Vic bats her eyes in shock and wraps her arm around Rina’s shoulders. “Well, how about we let the girl decide for herself? What do you say, Rina? Do you wish to be left alone?”
The garden is overrun now, and the strongest part of her withers to dust. Scanning the group of rescuers, she doesn’t see salvation anymore. She sees a gold medal. A college degree. And when she turns to behold the source of the hyperia at the bottom of the Chesapeake, a flashing mass larger than the Fairy Funland grounds itself, she sees the beginning of her first friendship.
HE WHO FIGHTS…
Sean Ellis
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
WHEN VIEWED THROUGH the multiple eighteen-millimeter intensifier tubes of a state of the art GPNVG-18 panoramic night vision device, the stars were so bright it was impossible to see the infinite void surrounding them. Even without artificial enhancement, the altitude and complete absence of any artificial light on this moonless night made for a spectacular visual display, but Major Jeff Hood left his NVGs on. There were things other than stars in the sky tonight, things that were not visible to the naked eye. Somewhere up there, a mile or two closer to the edge of space, men were falling through the sky like wicked angels cast from heaven. Angels who wore infrared strobes which flashed brighter than the surrounding stars and allowed Hood to follow their descent.
“Got them,” he said into his lip mic, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Looks like four… Scratch that, five.”
“I see ‘em,” came the answering voice in his radio earpiece. It belonged to Dale “Mad Dog” Maddox, the sergeant major of Hood’s Delta Force troop and Hood’s oldest and closest friend.
Mad Dog was a fixture in the Unit, a veritable living legend. No one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, though of course, he hadn’t always been the troop sergeant major. Like Hood, he had paid his dues, worked his way up the leadership ladder. The nickname, like most Delta nicknames, was ironic — a play on his name which was completely at odds with his laid-back persona.
Mad Dog was currently positioned on the opposite side of the DZ, which consisted of a ring of IR glowsticks, defining an area about fifty meters in diameter. At its exact center, like the bullseye on a target, a flashing IR strobe, similar to those worn by the incoming jumpers, served as a beacon to guide them in. The area within the circle was relatively level and had been cleared of large rocks and other hazards, giving the men a reasonably good chance of landing without serious injury, but there were no guarantees when it came to jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. The inherent risks were even greater with a HALO jump.