John Adams - Wastelands 2

We were all still standing around and grinning like idiots before we noticed that Hambone was running across the airfield.

He was already halfway to a jet. We caught up with him as he was vaulting the extruded ladder. An armored cart that had been attached to the fuselage reeled in its umbilicus and rolled away.

Hambone was already seated in the pilot’s chair, punching at the buttons. A cable snaked from the back of his seat into the plugs on his neck. I had time to think, That’s weird , and then the plane lurched forward. The cockpit had seats for a copilot and a bombardier, and we all crammed in like sardines, Jenna on my lap, and we crushed together when the plane jolted.

“Holy shit!” Jenna shouted.

Hambone drummed his fingers against an instrument panel while he pulled back on a joystick. “Strap in!” Timson shouted.

I did, pulling crash webbing across us.

“Hambone, what the hell are you doing?” Jenna shouted.

He grinned affably, and the plane lifted off.

Hambone flew the plane confidently, with small, precise movements. Jenna, Timson and I stared at each other helplessly. The jet had taken off at a screaming climb that flattened us back against our seats—I noted with curious detachment that Hambone’s seat had a recessed niche so that the cables depending from his skull weren’t compressed.

In an instant, we were above the clouds, with only tiny patches of scorched earth visible.

The silence inside the cockpit rang inside my ears. For the first time in seven years, I couldn’t hear jets crashing overhead.

“Hey, Hambone?” I said, cautiously.

Jenna shushed me. “Don’t distract him,” she whispered.

It was good advice. Timson stared at the instrument panels.

“I think,” he whispered, “that we’re headed out to sea.”

Jenna and I groaned. Hambone reached out with one hand and unlatched a compartment that spilled out freeze-dried rations.

“At least we won’t starve to death,” Timson whispered.

“Why are we whispering?” I said.

“So Hambone doesn’t get panicked,” Jenna said.

“He never gets panicked,” I said in a normal tone. Hambone unwrapped a bar of fruit leather and munched thoughtfully at it, while his fingers danced over the controls.

“He never flies planes, either,” she hissed.

“We’re over the ocean now. Pacific, I think,” Timson said. He’d done something with the seat that caused it to slide back into a crawlspace, and we were still cramped, but at least we weren’t in each other’s laps. I looked out the window. Yup, ocean.

I started shivering.

“We’re going to die,” I said.

“Probably,” Jenna said. She giggled.

I punched her playfully and my panic receded.

Timson started playing with one of the panels.

“What are you doing?” I said, alarmed.

“Trying to figure out where we’re going. Don’t worry, this is the copilot’s seat. I don’t think I can screw up the navigation from here unless he turns it over to me.” Ragged and filthy, he looked like a caveman next to the sleek controls.

“You don’t think?” I said.

He waved impatiently at me, poked some more. “OK,” he said. “Hambone’s taking us to Australia.”

I always knew that Hambone had heard the things we’d said. Still, it was easy to forget. We took turns trying to convince him to head back. After a few hours, we gave up. Timson said that we’d crossed the halfway mark, anyway. We were closer to Australia than home.

Then there was nothing to do but eat and wait.

Eventually, some of the instruments lit and I thought, This is it, we’re dead . Curiously, I wasn’t scared. I’d been scared so long, and now I was bored, almost glad that it was ending.

“Bogeys,” Timson said, staring out the window.

I looked up. Two sleek new fighters were paralleling us. Inside their cockpits, I could see pilots in what looked like space suits. I waved to one. He tapped his headset.

Jenna said, “They’re trying to radio us.”

Timson picked up a lightweight headset from a niche above his seat. He screwed it into his ear and held up a finger.

“Hello?” he said. We held our breath.

“Yes, that’s us,” he said.

“What?” I said. He shushed me.

“All right,” he said.

“ What ?” I shouted, startling Hambone. Jenna clapped a hand over my mouth.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know how. Do you know which button I push? I see. All right, I think this is it. I’m going to push it. Is that all right? OK, thanks. Bye.”

I peeled Jenna’s hand off my mouth. “What?” I demanded.

“That’s the Panoceanic Air Force. They’re landing us at Sydney. We’ll be quarantined when we get there, but I think it’s just a formality.”

The lights in the cockpit dimmed and the cable zipped out of Hambone’s neck. Absently, he reached back and smoothed the dustcover over the plugs. “They’re landing us,” Timson said.

I leaned back and sighed. I like Hambone a lot, but I’d rather not have an autistic flying my plane, thank you very much.

I was reaching for another bar of fruit leather when the plane took a tremendous lurch that pressed Jenna and me against the crash webbing hard enough to draw blood on our exposed skin. I heard a sickening crack and looked around wildly, terrified that it was someone’s skull. In the juddering chaos, I saw Timson, face white, arm hanging at a nauseating, twisted angle.

We jolted again, and I realized that I was screaming. I closed my mouth, but the screaming continued. Out of the bombardier’s porthole, I saw the air convecting across the shuddering wings, and realized that the screaming was the air whistling over the fuselage. The ground rushed towards us.

Jenna’s head snapped back into my nose, blinding me with pain, and then we were tumbling through the cockpit. Jenna had released the crash webbing altogether and was ping-ponging around Hambone. I saw her claw at the dustcover on his neck before she was tossed to the floor.

I pried my fingers loose from the armrests on my chair and came forward to Hambone. I straddled him, legs around his waist, and suppressed my gorge as I scrabbled at what I still thought of as his “scar” until it peeled back. My fingertips skated over the plugs and the knots of skin around them, and then I did toss up, spraying vomit and losing my grip on Hambone.

I ended up atop Jenna. The plane screamed down and down and I locked eyes with Hambone, silently begging him to do something. His gaze wandered, and my eyes stopped watering long enough to see Hambone do something to his armrest which caused the cabling on his seat to snake out and mate with his brainstem. The plane leveled off and he smiled at us.

It couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, but it seemed like a lifetime. Timson cursed blue at his arm, which was swollen and purple, and Jenna cradled her bumped head in arms that streamed blood from dozens of crisscrossed webbing cuts. I got us strapped in as we touched down.

We got escorted off the ship by a bunch of spacemen with funny accents. They didn’t take us to the hospital until they’d scrubbed us and taken blood. They wanted to take Hambone away, but we were very insistent. The spacemen told us that he was very “high functioning,” and that the plugs in the back of his neck were only rated for about five years.

“They’ll have to come out,” one of them explained to us. “Otherwise, he’ll only get worse.”

Jenna said, “If you take them out, will he get better?”

The spaceman shrugged. “Maybe. It’s a miracle that he’s still bloody alive, frankly. Bad technology.”

They de-quarantined us a month later. I’d never been cleaner. Those Aussies are pretty worried about disease.