I watch the field fly past my feet as I overshoot it.
Instead of a nice grassy plot, I'm heading for a very rundown block filled with demolished buildings and the largest garbage pile I've ever seen.
Huh, I thought they took care of that problem?
I'll take it up with the mayor later. I need to make sure I don't get impaled onto some metal rebar as I…
17
Impact
SLAM INTO THE DAMN GROUND! Oomph! I hit a mountain of trash and go face first into a pile of broken bottles, beer cans and please, God, not dirty diapers.
A cliff of garbage collapses over me. Something scratches my ear inside the helmet, but I'm too winded to move. I just need a second…
The harness pulls at me. Crap. The parachute. There's not much point to making a discreet landing if you've got a massive white billowing flag catching the wind, telling the world where you are.
I claw myself free. I'm thankful that I have a suit on and don't have to smell this place — well at least not until my onboard air supply quits in about three minutes.
I make my way through garbage bags, newspapers, and a goddamn broken sink until I see daylight. In digging myself free I manage to get the parachute cords all twisted around me.
I make it to my feet and unravel them, then start pulling the chute in to hide it before helicopters fly by or whatever they do in Brazil when they see a man in a spacesuit leap from his spaceship.
Spaceship….
I look up and see an arc of white smoke stretching across the sky like a rainbow made of dirty cotton.
In the distance, way over the mountain top, I can see the Unicorn at the end of the smoke, its thrusters still burning, followed by the echo of a dull roar. What's the count now? 227 seconds?
And it stops. There's one final puff of smoke as the last of the fuel spurts out. It's tiny from here, but I can make out the details well enough.
Three… two… please let the main chute deploy… one…
There it is, a bright orange canopy blossoming from the nose of the ship. It begins a slow descent to the earth and vanishes out of view behind the large green mountain standing between us.
Please don't land on an orphanage.
With any luck, it'll fall in a hard-to-get-to remote area and my pursuers, either real or imagined, will find the empty craft with its popped hatch and deduce I made a run for it — and I'm now totally living off the land in the monkey-infested jungle with my awesome survival skills.
In a spacesuit.
Right.
I'm the guy that can't eat a chalupa if there's no verde sauce.
The alternative to the chute opening is they find a wreck on the ground with no busted-up David Dixon and deduce right away that I bailed out somewhere between there and the bay.
Nothing I can do about that now. If I can avoid being seen, and find something less conspicuous than a quarter-million dollar spacesuit to wear, I can try to get to the football stadium and unload the McGuffin on someone more responsible.
No problem, I'm only in a foreign country surrounded by people who speak a language I don't understand.
Stealth is going to be my only way to survive.
I reel in the parachute as it balloons in the wind and get a quick glimpse beneath the canopy of a pair of legs.
There goes being unseen.
When I grasp the fabric and start packing the chute into a small package, I find myself staring at three pairs of eyes watching me in rapt fascination.
A little girl in a dirty dress, maybe eight years old, is standing next to two smaller boys wearing equally dirty pairs of shorts and nothing else. They're all staring at me.
She points to the trail of smoke in the sky.
I nod to her. I don't know what good lying to her will do.
They watch as I finish shoving the parachute into the pack. I flip up my visor and give them a smile, so they don't report me or whatever.
The oldest of the two boys points to me and says, "Homem de Ferro?" Which sounds kind of rude.
"Watch it pal," I reply, then look for some place less conspicuous to stand than on top of the tallest garbage heap in the middle of an apocalyptic urban renewal project.
"Americano?" asks the little girl as she follows me.
I say, "Si," because I have no idea how to say "yes" in Portuguese.
"Homem de Ferro!" shouts the littlest boy as he leaps in my path with his palms facing me.
He's got a big grin on his face. So I can't tell if he's trying to block me or tell me to go another way.
"Yeah, yeah, gigante homo de fairy-o. Now out of my way."
The kid's eyes go so super-wide at my admission and the cracks of dirt on his face begin to flake off. "Uhul! Homem de Ferro!"
"Wait?" I roll the words around in my head. Homem… like man? Ferro… as in ferrous or iron?
… Man of iron
Idiot, the punk didn't call you gay. He asked if you were Iron Man.
I guess the spacesuit does look a lot like Iron Man, I mean I wouldn't take it trick-or-treating and expect people to make the connection. But to this poor kid out in the middle of whatever this part of Rio is called, yeah, I guess that works.
Hell, David, they just watched you jump from a spaceship. Of course it makes sense.
I slap the hard plastic chest. "Yo soy Homem de Ferro."
The little girl looks to the street and says, "Polícia!"
She breaks into a run like a skittish cat and the others follow.
I hear the siren too.
The kids definitely seem to be running from it, not towards the sound. I've heard that street kids here don't exactly have the best relations with the local police, so I can't blame them.
They scurry down the hill and race towards some collapsed shanties.
The littlest one stops to look back and sees that I'm following them. It only takes him a second to realize that Iron Man doesn't want to get caught by the polícia either.
He waves me on and shouts, "Por aqui! Por aqui!"
I stomp along as fast as I can in a suit that was made for zero-gravity and not exploring planet garbage.
As the sirens — lots of them — grow louder, the other two children stop at a wooden fence and pull the slats open for me.
"Ir por este caminho, o homem de ferro!"
"Thanks!"
Let's hope the rest of the locals are just as helpful.
18
Crawlspace
I slide into the small gap between the wooden slats and knock one of the boards loose. The littlest one picks the plank up and starts to carry it through until the girl (his sister?) makes him put it back. I think she called him Luca.
Once I'm on the other side she leans the board back over the gap, kind of hiding our tracks.
I glance around at the trash-filled alley. It's a narrow passage, four feet wide with concrete walls on either side. To the left is an unfinished house with no side wall and bare wooden struts supporting the upper floor.
Rotten plywood and dirty plastic tarps litter the interior.
I unscrew my helmet for the first time since I landed. Something hits my shoulder and falls to the dirt.
The sat phone.
I kneel down to pick it up. The screen is bashed in and non-functioning.
So much for hearing from Capricorn. Although he made it sound like his part of the mission was over.
I realize what the sharp pain was I felt on my ear when I landed. My fingers reach up and touch the blood and broken shards stuck into my lobe.
"Você está machucado?" asks tiny little Luca with a sad look on his face.
"I'll be fine." I hand him the helmet — which is half the size he is.
"Quieto!" says the girl as she peers through the gap in the fence.
Two police officers, wearing bullet proof vests, are walking to the top of the trash heap. One of them uses his hand to shield his eyes as he studies the fading contrail of my spaceship.