Chris Holm - Dead Harvest

"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.