I noticed that in the clothes that Tabitha had been given there must have been a T-shirt. Why didn't I get a T-shirt, I thought? My mind could only seem to focus on unimportant and trivial things. Then she took off her T-shirt and was standing topless in front of me and I tried to focus on that. She ripped the shirt into two halves and rolled one of the halves into a tight wad. She poked her finger into the half of the T-shirt she had rolled up and then into the hole in my chest. The pain snapped me out of my catatonia for just a second or two.
"Ouch! Shit, that hurts," I cursed.
"Hold still, damnit. You're bleeding like a stuck pig and I think one of your lungs is punctured." She placed my hand on the bandage, causing a squishing sound, and my hand began to feel even wetter than when I coughed. "Hold this and press down hard."
She scrambled over to the now defunct generator and rummaged around for the duct tape. She wiggled and pulled her flight suit back over her shoulders, her breasts jiggling lightly in the sunlight as she zipped it most of the way up. I'll always remember that sight for the rest of my life, but at the time in my weakened state I was nearly numb to it, nearly.
Tabitha made a cross of duct tape over the makeshift bandage, then stepped behind me.
"Eyow shit! That hurts," I cursed in a loud gurgling whisper and cursed again as she repeated the process to the exit wound on my back, the pain bringing me a little closer to normal consciousness.
"Hold your arms up."
I did. She wrapped the duct tape over the bandages and around my torso several times. Then she wrapped my right shoulder with it. When she was done with my shoulder she taped the knife wound across my right oblique abdominal muscles together. Then she wrapped several times around her right thigh where Johnny had shot her earlier.
"Sorry I couldn't stop him earlier, Tabitha. But aren't you glad I asked for the duct tape? I told you that you could never have too much of it." I gurgled again and looked at her leg.
"Stow it! We have to get out of here now!" Colonel Ames ordered.
We helped each other down the hill and to the Jump Jet. Once we fell flat on our faces and I was thrown into some sort of wheezing frenzy. I gurgled a few times and felt like I was going to drown. Tabitha dragged me to my feet and forced me to keep moving.
"You better not die on me you son of a bitch! You still owe me a wedding." She was trying to keep my adrenaline flowing.
"Yeah, well you . . . cough cough wheeze . . . owe me a honeymoon!"
"You make it out of this alive and you'll get it. Whatever you want, hot shot!" She laughed. I tried to.
"Well maybe I have something to live for after all!" I said faintly.
After what seemed like fifty miles and three years, we finally covered the hundred yards or so to the airplane. We scrambled in it as best we could, which wasn't very good. Tabitha fired up the engines and we were gone.
"We have to find that helicopter Tabitha!" I wheezed and coughed blood from my mouth and nose.
"I'm already on it. Radar shows nothing," she responded. "Maybe I hit it when I shot at it. I don't know? Look on the ground."
For the first time I paid attention to the area around the crash site. There were three other tornado tracks in the area. All of them stretched radially outward from the probe. One track about a quarter of a mile wide stretched southeastward, one was due east, and the third zig zagged to the north and a little northeast. Something flashed from the northeast track.
"There, northeast, Tabitha!"
Alarms sounded in the cockpit of the jet. I knew that couldn't be good. I was slammed into my seat hard.
"Hold on, Anson!" Tabitha banked the jet sideways and fired the jets full throttle, pushing us into a down and outward dive. "Aaarrrgghh!" she grunted as we pulled straight up. The g-forces were more than I could handle in my condition. I started to tunnel out. I tried squeezing my abs and thigh muscles. I even tried grunting. It didn't help.
The stinger missile that had been fired at us from the downed helicopter zipped by the canopy not twenty feet away. Tabitha pulled us over and straight back down hard toward the ground. The missile exploded behind us. My head slammed into the left wall of the canopy. The blow brought me to more than it dazed me.
"Forget them, Tabitha! They're stranded and will go with the probe! Get out of range before they can shoot at us again." I screamed.
"I'm trying, Anson!"
"We have to get away from the probe!" I reminded her.
"I'm trying, Anson!"
She pulled the jet nose up and climbed, then angled it over some. I was being pushed hard into my seat by the aircraft's acceleration. I could see the ground beneath us in the rearview mirror mounted in front and to the left of Tabitha. Then the mirror turned white with light.
We couldn't have been more than three miles along the surface from ground zero. Maybe we were five or six miles above it. One thing for certain is that we were too damn close.
"We're too close, Tabitha, move!"
"Hold on, Anson! If I tell you to eject, you eject!" She continued forcing the jet upward as hard as it would go.
At max velocity the Harrier pushes Mach one. The blast wave approached us hard at about Mach three. Tabitha pulled off some magical flying that allowed us to surf the edge of the shock wave for a split second. Then the aircraft tumbled tail over nose and was thrown into a spin that ripped the wings right off.
"Eject Anson! Eject, Eject, Eject!" she screamed as the canopy flew off the aircraft. I ejected. I felt something hit me. Hard!
CHAPTER 13
Anson, wake up!" Tabitha slapped me across the face. My head was pounding and I couldn't breathe. I heaved. Tabi--tha rolled me over onto all fours as I heaved again. I -vomited mostly blood and very few other fluids. I held myself steady on all fours for a moment longer and heaved once more.
"Anson, are you okay?"
"I think so." I made it to my feet, shook my head lightly, and looked at Tabitha. Her face was scratched up badly and her left eye was swollen shut with a big bloody gash just above it. Her flight suit was torn and bloody across her chest and left side. A slight trickle of blood was noticeable on her left earlobe.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"I'll live. It's superficial stuff. The worst part is that I think my left wrist is broken. Mostly, I just have a lot of pain. I can deal with that." She grimaced, "We have to get some help soon. You've lost a lot of blood. I'm getting concerned about you."
"Hell I can't believe we're still alive. How'd we survive that blast?"
"Simple shock wave aerodynamics," she replied. "I maxed our velocity to get us as high as fast as we could get. The air pressure is lower as you get higher of course. I managed to surf the wave as long as the aircraft would take it, which wasn't that long. When the aircraft came apart, the blast wave overtook us. Then we were on the inside of the wave. What is the air pressure behind a shock wave?" she quizzed me.
"Of course. The pressure behind a shock is at stagnation pressure of that gas. In Earth's atmosphere, that is one atmospheric pressure of air, mostly harmless. Genius! You knew we weren't going to make it. That is why you told me to wait on ejecting until you ordered me to. And you didn't order us to eject until we were inside the shock wave letting the plane take the force of the blast wave." That was more than I felt like saying at the time, but it was so brilliant I had to say something.
"That's it. You win the prize."
"God I love you," I gurgled. "Let's find a way to civilization. What do you think?" I scanned the area. "Where the heck are we?"
"I think we're about three miles north of the crash site. Airman Jason said that his Aunt Rosie lives near here. There might be civilization there." Tabitha paused and gazed at the total destruction around us, "Or at least what is left of it. Can you walk?"
"I guess I'd better." I coughed up more blood and gurgled a little as I inhaled. I felt weaker and more tired than I ever had in my life. It had been a long day. Thanks to the ECC explosion the terrain was a one big pile of rubble and smashed pine trees after another—it wasn't easy going. Jesus, the destruction!