Page 49 of Touchdown
This is a dream. No reason to be afraid. We'll fly.
We jumped.
Of course, we didn't fly. We simply dropped.
Chapter 34
Flying or falling, dreaming or doing, hand in hand Noah and I went together into the water and then up again. Noah was laughing. Was I?
I was. And louder, less in control of the laughter, once I realized it.
There was a tab you pulled, and your life preserver inflated. I had a fuzzy impression of pulling Noah's tab while he pulled mine. And now we were bobbing together, two heads and shoulders out of the sea.
We were blind, eyes closed tight against salt water and the wild wind of the chopper. From the sound and spin of things, the helicopter was already lifting up to fly away somewhere in response to its new program. But what if it wobbled with its door hanging open, what if it was somehow off-balance now, what if it fell out of the sky on top of us, those blades whirling like blender steel, and...
I finally had a long empty moment of pure terror. The vague dream was real and present nightmare.
Our laughter had a hysterical edge.
But Noah's programming held. If that bird ever wobbled in its flight, we never heard it. All we heard was the beautiful sound of its roar going up and onward to leave us behind. It was miles away by the time we dared to open our eyes.
We were two dots on the sea, holding each other's hand underwater as we tilted our heads back to watch it disappear.
“You did it,” I said.
“We did it.” His eyes sparkled with glee.
Then, off in the distance, we saw a second helicopter coming from the direction of the ship to give chase.
I don't know why I expected anything else, but I'd hope they'd go after us with boats, not choppers. Didn't we have their chopper?
“I should have known real bad guys would have an entire air force,” I said. “This isn't good, is it?”
Noah said nothing. His eyes followed the chase. Two spinning dots in the distance and then they were out of sight.
Achievement unlocked. We'd sent them running off in the wrong direction.
For how long?
We drifted in silence. With the storm gone, and the sea quiet, drifting was the one thing we could do with ease.
At this stage of exhaustion, falling asleep wasn't a risk. It was a certainty. We'd have to trust the life preservers. The sky was blue and cloudless, but the bright sparkle of sunlight on water wasn't enough to keep us awake and alert forever. Quite the reverse. The bright day prompted us to close our eyes, which tempted us to slide into sleep.
“Remind me how this was a good idea again?” My mouth was already dry, my voice raspy.
“Where's a rain cloud when you need them?” Noah was raspy too. “I don't miss the waves and the thunder, but a little drizzle would feel nice right about now.”
“I pictured something else,” I said. “Boats. They'd spread out to search, and we'd only be fighting one boat—maybe only one guy—when they found us. We knock him out, and we sail away with the help of my amazing boating skills. But now...”
“I should have known they'd have air cover. But I wanted to believe...”
“If we end up on that cruise ship, we'll be in trouble. There'll be dozens of guys. Maybe hundreds to overcome. We couldn't just slide off the side and escape, because the whole ocean would be our prison.”
“Not a cruise ship. A floating criminal enterprise.”
“It used to be a cruise ship, though,” I said. “I can tell.”
“Well, yeah. Cruise ship companies go bankrupt all the time,” Noah said. They'd turned out to be floating incubators for a lot more than norovirus. A crime lord looking to launder a few billion could easily pick up a surplus cruise liner at auction or even the famous cruise ship scrapyard to renovate it for their own purposes.
