Page 40 of Touchdown
For me, blindness didn't matter. I couldn't see the knots I was working on anyway. That's the whole point of the hogtie. You've got the guy helpless on his belly, arms and legs pulled together to make a pretty bow for the pictures.
But what about Noah? Didn't those blinding jolts to his vision concern our captor? Were we really in that big of a hurry? The goon had plenty of time to mess with us before. What had changed his mind?
Or did he welcome the storm? Did he think it gave him cover?
Maybe it did.
Had Bill Mitchell mounted a rescue after all? Too late if so.
We were in the air. I closed my eyes but the drop in my belly informed me that we were lifting off from the beach. The engine roar joined the clatter of rain noisy enough to be hail and the occasional nerve-shattering clashes of thunder.
The noise had reached death metal levels of deafening.
I couldn't clap my hands over my ears until I got out of these stupid ropes. A fancy shibari knot meant to look good in bondage photos wasn't necessarily designed to hold a guy captive for any extended period of time. Still, it was taking me longer to pick apart that first knot than I thought it would.
The goon glanced back to see how I was doing. I froze. Not that I was far enough along that he would've seen any loose rope, but I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me belly-flop around like a catfish on a boat deck.
If he'd asked me how I was doing, I wouldn't have heard him. But of course he didn't. He just bared his teeth at me before he turned around again.
My fingers ached from the stretching and twitching. So did the long muscles of my arms and shoulders.
There was another complication. As long as I wasn't fully free, I needed to hold myself in the hogtie position. If the goon glanced back to see me out of my painful hogtie, he'd light me up with that tranquilizer gun. I needed to look all tied up in a pretty bow until the last possible moment before my attack.
The knots unknotted. The rope began to slip.
Crash! Boom!
Lightning struck around us again and again. It circled the island we were leaving.
Lightning likes trees. I knew that because you're not supposed to hide under the trees during a storm. For the first time, I wondered why. Do trees do something to attract it, do they have their own electric fields, or does lightning go after them just for being tall?
A helicopter's taller than the whole forest.
Not a useful line of thought.
Where's the rifle pointed? Not at Noah, not with all this going on. You wouldn't want to accidentally knock out your pilot in the middle of this mess.
The strobe effect of the lightning gave me glimpses of the guy in flashes. I blinked to be sure.
The gun was currently pointed up at the roof of the helicopter.
Crash. Boom. Blinded by the light.
There would never be a better moment to make an offensive play.
Chapter 28
The three of us were blinded by the crash and boom of lightning. Noah too. That was a thought.
He had an automated co-pilot—or at least I hoped he did—but he was still fully focused on the job of getting us into the air and above the storm. He still needed to be able to see.
How high would we have to go to escape the storm? One thing you learn from living in my state. Thunderstorm clouds go all the way to the stratosphere.
Was it even possible for this craft to fly above the storm?
No time to think about it. No time to think about anything but getting the gun away from the goon in front of me. Tense in his seat, he clutched the rifle tight enough for his knuckles to go white.
While I'd been bound on the floor where I was partly shielded from the brilliance of the lightning strikes, he must have received a direct blast to the retina through the wide cockpit windows.
