Warp Speed (21 page)

Johnny rolled to his feet. I could see he was pulling something from his left boot so I didn't give him time to finish standing. I tackled him, expecting a full fifteen-yard penalty for clipping. The only whistle that blew was the constant screeching of the soon to explode ECC.

The thing was getting so close to exploding now that the randomly collapsing electromagnetic fields were creating shock waves in the air around the device. The shockwaves in turn were causing luminescence all around the ECC. Micro supernova explosions were taking place every second.

Johnny and I rolled into the ECC as I was grabbing for his hand. We had all four hands on the small handgun and were kneeing each other and I attempted to head butt him twice with very little success. His nose was bleeding profusely where I had just broken it with the palm heel strike; I didn't care for getting his blood all over me, but, it couldn't be helped. We rolled back and forth and the gun went off twice. I managed somehow to roll on top of him and force his hand against the ECC into the region where the sonoluminescence was occurring.

I was lucky. One of the microscopic supernova explosions sparked just inside his hand. It looked as if someone had set off a firecracker underneath his skin and the gun fell into the gaping hole in the ECC. We rolled up staring each other down. Johnny shook his bloody hand and snarled at me.

"That's gotta hurt, Johnny," I taunted him. Then I saw motion out of the corner of my left eye. Johnny made a dash for the motion and I followed.

Tabitha had been playing 'possum. She bear crawled as fast as I had ever seen her move for the first gun that Johnny had dropped. Unfortunately, she didn't make it. Johnny stomped on her hand with his left foot and kicked her hard in the chest with his right. Tabitha's ribs were bruised already and were probably broken now from Johnny's kick. I was on top of Johnny before he could kick at her twice.
He would pay for that!

He turned to me as he swept the gun away from Tabitha with his right foot and turned the momentum of the sweeping motion into a left-leg spinning side kick. I blocked the kick with my stomach. Had I been wearing a mouthpiece I could have spat it on him. I heaved out twice as I backed up, blocking at his follow-up punches. He got me good on the side of the head with one of them and I saw stars for a second.

"Turtle up!" Bob would have yelled at me. Therefore, I did. If you are ever being attacked too quickly to defend against, cover up as best you can and take it. Try to get inside to cut off the full force of the attack. Bruce Lee was always fond of saying that there are three regions of fighting. One is within a few inches where you're grappling with your opponent. The second is at kicking and boxing range from your opponent. Everybody trains for these two distances. The third distance is in between one and two where most people don't know how to attack. This is why Bruce Lee developed the famous Six-Inch Punch.

I realized that I had to get inside region three if I was going to survive. So, I turtled up and crowded him. This cut off his kicks. He countered by throwing hook punches to my ribs and head. I bobbed and weaved, and ducked and covered until I could catch my breath. The spin sidekick to the stomach had taken some of my wind. With all of the astronaut training over the past six months, I hadn't done as many abdominal exercises as I usually do, so my stomach wasn't as hard as it should have been.

Most fights don't last long because they are typically asymmetric--the better fighter usually whups the lesser one quickly--but Johnny and I were very evenly matched, except that I had already had a pretty rough day. I was getting tired and something had to give. So, I shoved Johnny back and pushed him harder by following with a thrust front kick, stomping him in the bladder thus pushing him as far away from me as I could manage. His knees buckled for an instant but I needed to recover for that instant and couldn't continue to press.

"This has been fun, Doc," he said, as he wiped blood from his nose with his sleeve. He held up his wrist. "Will one of you guys get over here and shoot this bastard for me!" he yelled into it.

"What's the matter, Johnny? Can't beat an old man by yourself?" I taunted him while trying not to give away that I was very tired.

Johnny moved around to keep himself between the handgun and Tabitha who was trying to stand, obviously in serious pain. I saw a flicker of motion through the trees at the edge of the clearing and knew I didn't have much time before Johnny's backup would be drawing a bead on me. I circled counterclockwise toward Tabitha, trying to keep Johnny between me and his crew.

"Enough of this!" I screamed at Johnny as I rushed him with a left leg jump bicycle roundhouse kick that caught Johnny square on the jaw turning his head.

"You are going down, Johnny fucking Cache!" I was enraged. Left leg outer crescent kick, right leg round house, spin left outer crescent kick, right leg tornado roundhouse kick, backfist, reverse punch, "Kia!" I yelled.

Johnny dodged and parried, and slipped and blocked. He was on the defensive. I had to keep pressing while the adrenaline was flowing because I knew that when I came down from this rush I would be physically wasted.

I had to use the adrenaline. I had to get angry!
He blew up the Shuttle and killed all those people! Our friends! He shot Tabitha!
I blocked every punch Johnny attempted and I managed to slip by each kick.

Forget that "Luke never succumb to the Dark Side crap," if someone is trying to kill you, get angry, get pissed, get evil. Do whatever you have to do in order to stay alive. You can get philosophical about it afterwards, if you survive that is. The Dark Side was coursing through me like water through a sieve.
Son of a bitch, HE WAS GOING DOWN!

I followed an uppercut with a jab. Johnny ducked the jab so I turned it over into a hook punch and caught him right on the jaw. His eyes rolled white for a split second, which was all I needed. I jumped and switched feet in the air bringing my back leg into a roundhouse kick that landed in his left ribcage solid enough to break bricks. He heaved. I heard a
crack
! Then I heard several
whizzing
sounds whip past me followed by
cracks
. I realized the
cracks
were from a rifle.

Johnny punched at me with his right, so I slipped left and caught his wrist with my right hand and pushed through his elbow with my left palm heel. His elbow snapped into two pieces like a stick. Skin, pulled muscles, and torn cartilage were all that held his ulna and radius forearm bones to his upper arm bone. Johnny let out a scream.

Then a searing hot pain ripped through my right shoulder. I had been shot. I grabbed Johnny by the hair and pulled his body to mine, his back to my chest. Bullets slammed into Johnny forcing us to the ground. One of the bullets pierced his neck and entered my chest just below and to the left of my right nipple and we fell to the ground, Johnny twitching slightly and bleeding profusely on top of me.

I could hear return fire and some scrambling around me, but the firefight lasted only a few seconds. I wheezed and coughed a few times as if I had to clear my throat of mucous drainage from a bad sinus infection. I turned my head toward the probe and could see the pulses of light getting much more frequent and the screeching sound was so high it was almost inaudible and the flashes of light were ranging in color from white hot to near blue. It was actually quite beautiful, in a deadly kind of way.

We had to get out of there soon I knew, but at the moment nothing mattered. I was simply observing everything around me. I was dazed. Seconds passed and a helicopter shadowed the sun briefly. I could see sparks flying from the tail and the fixed wing portion of it. As each shot was fired I could hear Tabitha cursing violently. Then Johnny rolled off me to my left.

Tabitha's silhouette was above me. She helped me up. It was all I could do to rise to my feet. I coughed several violent coughs. I covered my mouth and when I looked back down at my hand it was covered with blood. Johnny jerked twice and rolled over. Tabitha reacted instantly and emptied the rest of the clip into his head.

"That's for Ray." She pulled the trigger. "That's for Terrence." She fired the weapon again. "And that's for Tracy and Malcom you piece of shit!" She fired the last four rounds into his face, or what was left of it. She screamed curses at him and then kicked him in the side and then screamed at him again. Then she turned her attention to me as she nonchalantly tossed the empty pistol to the ground.

Tabitha unzipped my flight suit and pulled it down to my waist. I was still dazed, nearly catatonic, and my chest was a wet blood-soaked deep red. Tabitha looked at both my chest and my back, then she unzipped her flight suit.

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.