Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

Chase stared at it in horror. “Buggeration and fuckery!”

“Oh, that’s never good to hear,” Nina said, wincing.

Chase spun the useless control back and forth to no effect, then angrily set it whirling like a roulette wheel. “Okay, so no brakes and no steering. I’m open to any ideas.”

“Could we jump off?”

“We’re going too fast. I might be able to land okay, I’ve had training, but you haven’t.”

“Well, I’m going to have to chance it, aren’t I?” Nina opened the cab door and went onto the walkway, looking over the flapping banner still caught there at the stairs below. “Or maybe not!”

“What is it?”

“No stairs! They must have gotten wrecked when you drove into that helicopter!”

“Oh, right, it’s all my fault!”

Nina ignored him, an idea coming to her. She looked back at the raised tipper, then returned to the cab and worked the hydraulic controls. The huge load bed began to descend. “Give me a hand!” she called.

“Doing what?”

“Help me with this!” She pointed at the banner.

Chase hesitated, then decided that since he had no control over the truck there was little point staying in the driver’s seat, and joined her.

“It’s catching the wind, look,” Nina explained, putting a hand against the banner where it bulged between the railings. She quickly pulled it over the guardrail, bundling it up.

“Yeah? So? Are you going to just float off the side of the truck with it? I don’t care what Dan Brown says in Angels & Demons , you can’t use a tarpaulin as a parachute!”

“I know,” she replied, a flare of anger in her eyes. “But I wasn’t thinking of using it to fly-all it has to do is slow us down!”

Chase made a sarcastic snort. “Hate to tell you, but this thing’s not going to slow down a two-hundred-ton truck!”

“I didn’t mean the truck!” The flat front end of the tipper banged down into place above them to form a roof over the walkway, warped steel claws twisted around the hole made by the tank shell. “I just meant us! Although I’m tempted to leave you behind,” she added, scowling.

He suddenly realized what she intended. “You mean, use it like a drogue to pull us off the back of the truck?”

“Yes, exactly! It won’t stop us-but it might slow us enough to survive the landing.” Nina pulled the end of the banner onto the walkway and checked the lines from which it had been suspended. Nylon with a core of steel wire, strong enough to withstand the winds that blew across the mine.

“Not from the back of the truck, we won’t-it’s over twenty feet high.” Chase looked ahead-then stiffened. “Although I think we should give it a try, right now!”

“Why?” Nina saw what he had just seen. “Oh!”

Ahead of them, a line bisected the landscape: before it the dirt and stone of the edge of the Kalahari, beyond, the verdant sweep of the Okavango. It only took a moment for her to see a definite parallax shift, the desert seeming to move faster than the delta… because there was a height difference between the two sides.

They were heading straight for the edge of a cliff.

“Get up there, now!” Chase shouted, lifting Nina onto the railing and cupping his hands to give her a leg up onto the top of the dumper. She scrambled over the metal edge, then turned and peered back down at him, holding out her hands. Chase picked up the banner and hurriedly fed it up to her. “Open it out a bit, but for Christ’s sake don’t let it blow away!”

Nina looked ahead. The cliff edge was approaching fast, the truck speeding uncontrollably towards destruction. “What about you?”

“I’ll be up in a second! Put your legs over the edge, and hang on!”

She hooked the backs of her knees against the forward edge of the dumper and did the best she could to unfurl the banner. The wind immediately snatched at it, trying to pull it from her grip.

Chase rushed into the cab and slammed down the lever controlling the hydraulic lifter, then ran back out and scaled the railing to climb onto the dumper about eight feet from Nina. “Give me one of the ends!” he called, putting his legs over the edge as the dumper began to rise.

She tossed a section of banner to him. He quickly wrapped the end of the line a few times around one wrist before grasping it in that hand, then used the other to drag more of the material to him.

Nina saw what he was doing and copied him. The pressure on her legs increased as the dumper tilted backwards, gravity pulling her down. She looked back over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t. The ground was now at least thirty feet below her, and she was still rising.

Wind swirled over the front-now the top-of the dumper, catching the banner and inflating it. The sudden jolt almost pulled her from her perch.

“Not yet!” Chase yelled, leaning forward as far as he could. The cliff was coming up far too fast, but if they let go before the dumper reached a steep enough angle, they’d end up trapped inside it.

His leg muscles strained to hold him in place, the edge of the tipper digging painfully into his tendons. Just another few seconds…

The cliff passed out of sight behind the metal as the tipper kept rising, now at nearly a forty-five-degree angle-

“Now!”

Chase flung the flapping banner up into the air behind him, simultaneously straightening his legs and falling backwards. Nina did the same. The banner snapped open between them, the racing wind catching it and yanking them both back off the top of the dumper.

But it wasn’t large enough to support their weight. They immediately fell, landing painfully on the steepening metal slope of the tipper and skidding helplessly down it.

The banner held taut-

Nina and Chase shot off the back of the speeding truck, the swath of material acting as a makeshift air brake to cancel out some of their forward momentum.

But not all.

“Roll!” Chase screamed to Nina, more as a plea than as an order as they hit the ground at twenty miles per hour.

She managed to tuck up her legs, free arm raised to protect her head as the other kept hold of the banner. Chase bounced alongside her, rolling like a log. They tumbled along, stones pounding them mercilessly at every impact before they finally came to a battered, dusty halt.

Head spinning, Chase looked up-just in time to see the truck shoot over the edge of the cliff and plunge out of sight. A couple of seconds later, there was a colossal crash that they felt through the ground, followed by more heavy booms and crunches as pieces of the shattered vehicle came to rest.

“Ow,” Nina said, shaking the line loose from her arm and making a feeble attempt to sit up. Chase fought past the pain he was feeling in seemingly every single part of his body to roll over and look at her. Her clothes were ripped, crimson stains visible through the dirt around several of the ragged holes, and an especially nasty-looking cut across her forehead just below the hairline was already leaking blood down her face.

“You’re bleeding,” he grunted.

She looked at him, eyes widening in shock. “So are you!”

He raised a hand to a particularly painful spot on his cheek, fingers coming away smeared with blood. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. Probing with his tongue, he realized that one of his back teeth had been jarred loose, held in place only by a few strands of tissue and rasping against its neighbors as he touched it.

“Shit,” Chase muttered, spitting out blood. “I hate going to the dentist.” Nina tried to stand, holding in a gasp of pain as she put weight on her left foot. “Are you okay? Is it broken?”

“No,” she said between her teeth, “I just think it’s-aah!-twisted. Ow, crap, oh.” She hesitantly lowered her foot again, wincing. “I can walk. Or hop, anyway. What about you?”