Dead Harvest

26

"Sam, you can't be serious." Kate stopped dead in the street, looking first at me, and then at the helicopter that sat idling in the center of the intersection — its upper rotor still, but its engines emitting a high, keening whine.

"The way I see it, Kate, we don't have a lot of options."

"But we can't just steal a helicopter."

"We're not stealing a helicopter — we're hijacking one. And of course we can; I'm one of the bad guys, remember?"

"It's not that — it's just, I mean, they're not going to let us get away with it."

"Kate, they're not going to let us get away period, if they have their way. This is the only shot we've got."

From behind us, shouting. Our pursuers had cleared the tent, and it was clear now they weren't the only ones on our tail: two parties of six or so uniformed men had just finished flanking the tent on either side, and onlookers pressed ever tighter to the police barriers that cordoned off the station as officers on all sides of us abandoned their posts to join the chase. Standing in the empty stretch of street between the tent and the makeshift landing pad, Kate and I had nowhere to hide. As the men approached, guns drawn, I grabbed Kate by the arm and together we ran for the chopper. This time, she didn't argue.

The helicopter was facing north-east toward Fortythird, away from us, and the cabin door was open, though we could not see inside. Kate and I approached the door cautiously, creeping toward it along the tail. A glance behind us told me our pursuers weren't so psyched about our exit plan — the whole lot of 'em were sprinting toward us, shouting and waving like madmen in an attempt to alert the flight crew to our presence. Doubtless there were at least that many more approaching from the other side of the chopper, and it was only a matter of time before every cop, National Guardsman, and SWAT unit in the city descended upon our location. The time for caution had passed.

I wheeled toward the door, gun at ready. Inside the cabin were two flight nurses, both lean and efficient and rendered genderless by their flight suits and helmets as they busied themselves stowing gear and inventorying supplies. When they saw me, they froze. With a twitch of my gun barrel, I suggested they vacate the vehicle. They caught my drift just fine, and climbed out of the chopper, hands held high.

I gestured for them to back away, and reluctantly, they complied. One of them spoke, though the words were lost in the wail of the engine. Then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and I realized the words were not for me, but for whoever was on the other end of that helmet mic.

The pilot had climbed from his perch behind the controls and was sneaking through the cabin — toward the open cabin door, and toward me. In his hand, he held a flare gun. I spun, leveling my piece at his face, and he stopped short, my barrel a scant inch from the bridge of his nose. The flare gun clattered to the cabin floor, forgotten, and he, too, raised his hands. I liked this one, I decided. He was brave, but not stupid. He was also the only one of the two of us who could fly this fucking thing, so by my count that was two reasons I was glad he hadn't made me pull the trigger.

My pilot-friend again made for the cabin door, though slowly this time, as though anticipating my demand that he follow his crew. I shook my head and waved him back inside. Though his eyes were hidden behind the reflective visor of his flight helmet, I saw his features slacken as realization dawned. He climbed back into the pilot's seat, while behind him, Kate and I clambered aboard.

"Get this thing in the air!" I shouted, but this time, it was he who shook his head. He tapped the side of his helmet, twice, and gestured toward a headset hanging from the console before him.

I slipped on the headset, which looked to me like an old pair of headphones, and adjusted the microphone before repeating my command. "It'll take a minute," came the crackling reply.

"It takes any longer, and you and I have got a problem — you get me?" I pressed my gun tight to the base of his neck, and he nodded — a jerky, frightened gesture. "Just fly us out of here, and you have my word you won't be harmed." Again, he nodded, though if I were him, I probably wouldn't have believed me.

There was a tap on my shoulder, and I damn near jumped out of my skin. It was Kate, and she looked worried. I lifted one earpiece, and she leaned close, shouting: "Sam, we've got company!"

A glance out the open door proved her right: the cops had set up a perimeter around the chopper, just outside the barriers that marked off the landing area. Two men, crouched behind riot shields, crept across the landing area toward us, buffeted by the breeze kicked up by our rotor, which now swung lazily overhead.

I nodded toward the flare gun that lay on the floor of the cabin. "See if you can't slow 'em down a bit — and get that door closed!"

She nodded, retreating to the back of the cabin. Over the whump, whump of the rotor above, and the chatter of the police in my headset, I didn't even hear the flare go off. But the gray of the afternoon was shattered by a sudden orange-red burst that sent the uniforms surrounding us diving to the pavement, and forced their advance team to scamper backward toward the barriers. The pilot did his damnedest to ignore the spectacle outside, instead focusing his attention on the confusion of dials and switches that comprised the helicopter's control panel. I allowed myself a thin smile as I realized we might actually make it out of there alive.

The chopper rocked on its skids as Kate slid shut the cabin door. Then the rock became a lurch as we leapt skyward. We hovered just a few feet above the street, motionless but for the gentle pitch and yaw of the chopper as she was buffeted by the wind.

"What now?" asked our pilot.

"Just fly."

"Where?"

"Anywhere." He nodded, and we began to climb.

Below us was a flurry of activity as our pursuers swarmed the landing pad. Too late, the order came to take us down — shot after shot rang out, audible even over the racket of the chopper. As we rose, I heard a dull thud, and the helicopter shuddered.

"Are we hit?" I asked, a little more panicked than I would have liked.

The pilot nodded. "Feels like they dinged our elevator. Long as we don't lose it, we'll stay up all right — but it's gonna be a bumpy ride."

We continued upward, the helicopter hitching and shaking like a carnival ride too long past inspection. The pop of gunfire beneath us faded to nothing as we cleared the rooftops, pitching southward in slow, jerky arc that eventually brought our bearing east.

"No," I said, again pressing the gun to his neck, "keep us over the city. You think I'm gonna let you take us out to sea and ditch this thing?"

He maintained his heading. "If you expect to crash us into a populated area, you'd better pull the trigger — alive, I won't let it happen."

"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 facade 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.