Freefly (23 page)

“Does the cafeteria have another exit?” Sammie shouts as we blast into the sea of dancers.

I point across the room at a series of metal doors that lead outside.  “Who were those guys?”

“Scientists.”

Holding hands, we push through the crowd.  I glance back and see the scientists rush into the room.  I wedge myself closer to Sammie, trying to guard her with my body. 

The metal doors blow open in front of us.  Another dozen men come bolting in.

“Criminals!” Sammie says, yanking me back into the crowd.  “Any other exits?”

“No!” I yell. 

We slither into the middle of the group, then stop and face each other.  The music stops, and the lights blaze on.  Everyone around us begins to mutter.  Sammie and I clutch each other’s hands, hard, as if by holding onto each other we can somehow prevent our imminent capture. 

“I’m so sorry, Damien,” Sammie says.

I glance back and forth.  Both the criminals and the scientists have spotted us now.  They filter into the crowd from all angles, screaming at the kids to get out of the way.  One of them, a scientist, judging by the crisp black suit, glares at Sammie with such cold determination it makes my skin crawl.  I look up at the skylight.  The clouds have cleared, and the moon glows a ghastly white. 

“Sammie,” I say. 

She looks at me, and I nod at the skylight.

“I can’t,” she says.  “There’s no way.”

“Just you, then.  Go.”

She looks at me with disgust.  “
No
, Damien.”

She looks around at the approaching men.  Three of them are moments away, bulldozing through the last stretch of students between us.  The men are close enough that I can see the sweat on their faces, hear the clack of their shoes against the floor.  Sammie throws herself against me and wraps her arms around my back, hugging me one last time.

“Cover your head,” she hisses.

Cold air smashes against the back of my neck with the force of a speeding train, and I let out a gasp as Sammie and I shoot toward the skylight.  The entire cafeteria erupts in shrieks.  I glimpse many students whipping out their cell phones and training the cameras on us.

I throw my arms over my head in time to blast through the skylight.  Glass shatters around me, and the cool night air meets my lungs.  My stomach flutters as we shoot up at an impossibly fast pace, the light from the broken cafeteria skylight becoming a smaller and smaller beneath us.  The wind pushes my hair into my face and roars in my ears.  Soon, we are so high up that I can see my entire town, from the cars streaking down MacRearigan Road to the tiny lights of the houses.

“Holy cow!” I shout.  “You did it!”

I manage to take my eyes off the view to look at Sammie.  Hovering a few feet away, she rubs her temples with her eyes clamped shut.  Her forehead is sheened with sweat.

“Are you okay?” I say. 

She shakes her head without opening her eyes.  “No.”

I glance at the landscape below, dotted with lights.  “Are we in danger of...falling?”

“Yes.”

“
Sammie?
”

“I have no idea how I’m doing this, or how long it’s going to last.  But judging by the crazy amount of pain my head is currently experiencing, I’m thinking not long.”

“Should we...land?”

She slowly opens her eyes.  “I think we should get as far away from those men as we can before we do, don’t you?”  She gazes down at Boorsville with a mixture of sadness and frustration.  “I’ll fly as long as I can.”

She clenches her jaw, and we jerk forward into the night.

CHAPTER 9

Sammie

Even though I was pretty sure I was gonna die if I flew even a mile with Damien in tow, I manage to propel us to Boorsville’s borders and beyond.  We sail east, over the murky water separating Pennsylvania and New Jersey, then glide along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.  At times, the landscape is dark and green, stretches of forest edged with tan strips of seaside sand.  Other times, the coast is crammed with houses, hotels, and boardwalks. 

At the beginning of the journey, it feels like my skull is going to crack open.  Our blast through the cafeteria window sapped more of my power than I knew I had, leaving my temples searing with pain.  I thought I’d killed us both:  taking us up so high when it seemed like I could pass out any second.  But the pain dulled, and by the time we saw the sea, I knew we weren’t going to fall. 

Damien flies beside me, his face thrust into the wind.  His eyes bulge with excitement at everything we pass, and he repeatedly points out stuff
—
a plane taking off from an airport, the shimmery tower of a high-rise hotel.  But I like it better when he talks about the science behind it all.

“We’re flying in the troposphere, which goes up to about 30,000 feet,” he says, getting that stern-browed, intellectual look he sometimes has.  “Then comes the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, and the exosphere.  My guess is that you never leave the troposphere, which stays relatively warm due to its proximity to the earth’s surface.  The stratosphere would be freezing, as in, like, negative 80-degrees.  And the mesosphere:  don’t even think about getting that high.  That’s the layer where meteorites burn up.  I don’t necessarily want you to get roasted.”

He chatters on, never looking for a response from me.  I think he gets that all of my life-juice is pumping into keeping the both of us afloat, which doesn’t leave a lot for small talk.  But I enjoy listening to the intense hum of his voice, and watching the wind toss the white fabric of his shirt against his chest.  His hair is wild, sticking up in whatever direction the wind is blowing, shifting around in a way that makes it look alive. 

“What are you snickering at?” Damien says, pausing one of his science rants.

I’m slow to open my dry mouth.  “Your hair.”

He ruffles it with both his hands, making it even crazier.  “Better?”

“Much.”

He turns his face forward again, then shuts his eyes and does a few corkscrews, whooping the whole time.  He seems to like flying.  To me, it’s nothing unusual.  I guess it’s a little like when I was enamored with his high school, which was normal to him but new and exciting to me.  He’s getting a taste of my world now, for better or worse.

Definitely for worse. 

I thought I’d ruined his life before, but that doesn’t even compare to how much I’ve ruined it now.  With the criminals after him, he can never go back to Boorsville.  He probably can never even be Damien Savage again, at least not officially.  He’ll need a name change, a new look, and a lot of moving around for a long, long time. 

On top of that, I’m not happy about the room full of people seeing us fly.  When the boss finds out, he’s going to be livid.  Number one rule for me is to not get seen flying, and I’ve broken it about 400 times in one day.  I can only hope the story stays in Boorsville.  Last thing I need is a whole country’s worth of people scanning the skies for Damien and me.  We’ve got enough people hunting us.

With that thought, my eyelids droop.  Between going to Damien’s high school, ransoming myself for him, downing an airplane (I cringe), and launching through a skylight at a school dance, I’ve had enough action to last me a year.  A lifetime. 

“I need to land,” I say.

Damien turns to me and nods, then scans the ground below.  We are gliding over one of the touristy parts of the coast.  A boardwalk, with its bright lights and delicious smells, crawls with people, flanked by a coastal highway and many hotels.  But the shore itself is dark, quiet.  The waves crash on the sand in bursts of white foam.  I grit my teeth and begin to lower us.  As we get closer to the sea, the smells of salt and fish fill the air. 

We crash-land at the edge of the water, because I lose control of us at the last second.  The landing knocks us both to our hands and knees, and we stagger to our feet, dripping wet.  Damien shakes the water off his hands and rolls the bottom of his khakis up past his ankles.  I kick off his mom’s shoes and let them wash into the water, feeling extremely guilty.  I’ve taken her son away from her, probably for good.

We trudge toward the sand, the ocean floor mushy against my bare feet.  The water is loud.  It bangs against the shore, then hisses back in.  The half-full moon hovers above us.  About a quarter of a mile inland, the boardwalk rides are flashing their lights.  

When we reach the dry sand, my temples begin to hum oddly, as if there are flies in my head.  Then there’s skull-splitting pain. 

“Are you okay?” Damien yelps, as the soft ground suddenly meets the side of my face.  His voice is barely audible beneath the hum, which has become a roar.  It feels like a metal rod has been slammed through my temples.  Damien grasps my shoulder and shakes me, but the pain is too great to do anything but moan. 

“What can I do?” he says, followed by, “We need to go to a hospital!” 

I force my eyes open and try to focus on the fuzzy shadow that must be him.  “No.”

“What if the double-fly was too much for you?  What if...I don’t know what to do, Sammie!”

“No hospitals,” I murmur, then let my eyelids fall shut. 

Damien continues to talk, but the humming gets even louder, and I can no longer understand him.  After a while, the sound of his voice fades, though the pain remains.  My body contorts against the sand as I ride it out.  Eventually, the pain dulls, and I feel a hand stroking my forehead.  I drift off to sleep. 

I open my eyes to the orange sun twinkling over the horizon, casting sparkles on the water.  I blink a few times, then swallow.  My tongue is dry as the sand I’m lying in.  My head feels weirdly hollow, the pain of last night echoing sharply with each move I make.  I lift myself into a sitting position, and a white piece of cloth falls off of me.  I pick it up and unfurl it.  Damien’s shirt.

He lies beside me, flat on his back, his hands resting on his bare stomach.  Scrape marks stretch from beneath his hands all the way up his chest.  I noticed them the other day, though I didn’t know how they got there.  I clench my fists at the realization that it was probably that red-haired kid, the one who kept bothering Damien at school. 
If I could beat that kid up again, I would. 
The thought scares me.  Am I becoming like the criminals I work for?  The memory of the pilot sprawled on floor, blood pooling around his head, makes me shudder. 

Damien takes a sharp breath and opens his eyes.  Instantly, he lifts his head and turns to me. 

“You’re okay.”  He brushes the sand off of his arms and grins, his whole face lighting up. 

I give him a small smile back, pushing the memory of the pilot away.  “Yeah.  My head’s a little on the throbby side, but other than that.”

“You scared the crap out of me.  What the heck was that?”

“I have no idea.  Obviously it had something to do with double-fly.  To bring back the muscle metaphor, I think I lifted too much weight too fast and got sore.”

His eyes probe my face.  “But you’re feeling better now?”

“I’m not moaning, right?”

He smiles.  “Good point.”

We both turn toward the sea.  The waves are small, striking the sand in little crashes and then washing up to within a few feet of us.  In the distance, white sails jut from the horizon.