The Soldiers of Halla (12 page)

The dados reacted instantly. They left their individual battles and ran to the pile of soot that was the remains of
their leader. I wasn't sure why. What did they think they were going to do? Put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I didn't feel bad for Saint Dane. He was a spirit from Solara. I may have killed his body, but I knew it wouldn't be for long. As soon as he hit the cosmic reset button, he'd be back. I didn't want to be around when that happened.

“Outta here!” I shouted to Mark and the others.

They immediately ran for the door. Before following them, I looked up to Nevva who hadn't moved from her spot near the throne. She didn't do anything to try and stop me. On the other hand, she didn't try to help Saint Dane, either. It seemed as if she was in shock.

“Is this the way you wanted things to be?” I asked.

“I'm afraid this is the way it must be” was her melancholy answer.

“Don't bet on it,” I said, then turned and ran.

As I sprinted after the fleeing prisoners, my head was already spinning forward to our next move. We were going to get out of the Taj Mahal, but we would still be in the middle of Saint Dane's luxury theme park. How would we get out of there? Run all the way back to the wall? That was a long way, with lots of dados between here and there. Once we got there, would there be any hope of opening those big doors? There would certainly be more Ravinian dado guards there. What chance did the four of us have against them? We needed an advantage, and not the kind that came from being a spirit from Solara. That wouldn't help Mark and the others. Right now, it was all about those guys. I had to keep them safe, but the truth was, I didn't know how.

Fortunately, Mark did. He and the others hit the door before me and blasted outside. We found ourselves in the
wide-open garden that Patrick and I had crossed to get to the building. Mark knew exactly where to go. He sprinted straight for the helicopters that had brought them there. It seemed like the perfect means of escape, except for one thing. Mark wouldn't know how to fly a helicopter. He'd never even gotten his driver's license.

That was the old Mark. The new Mark had learned a few new tricks.

“Keep 'em back!” he shouted to me and the others.

“Keep who back?” I called after him.

He didn't have to answer. From around both corners of the Taj Mahal, Ravinian guards were headed our way. The two helicopters were parked square in the middle of one side of the building, which meant the guards from both sides had about a seventy-yard sprint to get to us. Mark jumped into the pilot's seat of one chopper and started confidently flipping switches. With a tortured whine the overhead rotor began to turn, though painfully slowly. The other two guys stood on either side of the chopper, holding up their stolen electric prods, ready to repel an attack. I didn't think they'd do so well against a swarm of dados, but I wasn't going to point that out.

I jumped into the seat across from Mark. “You can fly this thing?” I shouted above the growing whine.

“We captured one a year go,” he answered. “We taught ourselves.”

“A year go?” I shouted. “How long have you been here?”

“Been here? Or since we got dumped into the flume?”

“Since the flume.”

“Five years. Give or take.”

That news hit me like a punch to the head. It had been five years since Mark and Courtney were herded into the
flume on Second Earth. Five years. That meant Mark was twenty-three years old. The buddy I had grown up with was five years older than I was.

“We've got a lot to catch up on,” Mark said with a smile, which was pretty amazing under the circumstances.

“We'd better get the chance,” I shot back.

The rotor was picking up speed. So were the dados.

“Come on…come on…,” Mark coaxed the machine.

We didn't have much more time.

“Get in!” I shouted to the others.

They didn't listen. They were focused on the incoming dados.

“Uh, Mark,” I said with fake calm. “It would be good to get airborne.”

“Couple of seconds…,” he said, concentrating on the RPM reading on the controls.

I heard a scream. We had less time than I thought. The dados from inside the Taj Mahal had regrouped and descended on the two guys outside the helicopter. Mark's friends both jumped away from the chopper, flailing their weapons at the dados.

“Get in!” I shouted to them.

“They won't,” Mark said, with a calm that I'd never heard from him. Especially given the circumstances.

The helicopter shuddered, the rotor whined. I felt a lurch. We were starting to lift off. I turned to call the others again. It was too late. They fought valiantly, but were quickly overwhelmed. I saw one hit by a silver wand and turned to ash. The other went down seconds later. They had sacrificed themselves so Mark could get away. That is,
if
Mark could get away.

The swarm of dados arrived from both sides. They
jumped at the landing skids of the helicopter. A few caught on and were lifted into the sky along with us.

“We've got hitchhikers,” I announced.

“Not for long.”

Mark lifted the chopper straight up, then quickly shifted the joystick. The helicopter made a sudden counterclockwise turn, flinging off the dangling guards. They fell to the ground, landing on their pals.

“Outta here,” Mark said, and accelerated our ascent.

My stomach hit the seat, not only because of the sudden acceleration, but because of something I saw. Standing on the first level of the Taj Mahal, watching us, was Nevva Winter. Standing next to her was Saint Dane. He was already back, no worse for wear. It didn't surprise me, though it made me wonder again where he was drawing his own power from.

What really made me sick was something else I saw on the ground.

The rotor of the second helicopter was starting to turn. We weren't going to be the only chopper in the sky.

W
e accelerated quickly and flew high over Saint Dane's mini-kingdom. Seeing it from the sky gave me an even better idea of how huge the place was. It was a sprawling green oasis surrounded by that gigantic wall…in the middle of a dead, gray city.

“They're coming after us,” I said to Mark.

“I hope they do. Maybe we'll snag another one of these babies,” he answered while staying focused on flying.

Unbelievable. It was Mark, but it wasn't. I was thrilled to see him, though totally thrown by how much he had changed. Up until that moment, Mark and I had been aging at the same rate. It didn't matter that we were on different territories. For whatever reason, our time lines had been the same. Not anymore. Did that mean I had spent five years on Solara? Or floating in space? Or was that the wrong way to look at it? Maybe when I left for Third Earth, the spirits of Solara put me here, five years past the time when Patrick was killed. If that was the case, did that mean that the turning point of Third Earth had shifted? I was always sent where I needed to be, when I needed to be there. Thinking
this way actually gave me hope. Third Earth was definitely still in play.

All my confused questioning ended abruptly when our helicopter was rocked by an explosion.

“Whoa,” I exclaimed. “What was that?”

“They're shooting from the ground,” Mark said calmly. “It won't last. As soon as we get past the wall, we'll be out of range.”

I looked down out of the window to see that we were about to cross out of the green and into the gray. Two more explosions rocked us. The helicopter shuddered but we weren't hit. A moment later I looked down to see the wall passing underneath us. We were back over the dead city of New York.

Whoosh!
Something flew by to my right, barely missing us. It left a smoke trail in its wake.

“I thought you said we'd be out of range?”

“Yeah, of their ground guns,” Mark replied. “That came from the chopper that's chasing us.”

Oh. Swell.

“I saw what those rockets can do,” I said nervously. “I was at the zoo when you helped those people out.”

Mark gave me a quick glance.

“Where have you been for five years?” he asked.

“That is a very long story.”

Whoosh. Whoosh.
Two more rockets passed by, one on each side.

“I gotta concentrate,” Mark said, and pushed the joystick forward. We immediately went nose down, headed for the ground. I put my foot out to brace myself. It wasn't that I didn't trust Mark's flying, it was just that, well, okay, I didn't trust Mark's flying. But then again, I trusted the
guys behind us even less, so whatever Mark did was okay with me.

“We'll lose them in the haze,” Mark announced.

The air was once again filled with the same brown, dusty clouds that swirled through the zoo, which meant that the visibility quickly dropped back to near zero. Mark pushed the helicopter down toward the river. After a nauseating plunge, he leveled us out and sped southward. We couldn't have been more than ten feet above the water, skimming the surface.

“This is, uh, dangerous,” I said, trying not to show how terrified I was. At the speed we were going, we wouldn't see anything solid in front of us until a second before the crunch.

“Yeah, it is,” he said with no trace of fear. Or stutter. That was good. If Mark didn't stutter, it meant he wasn't nervous. That made one of us.

“You, uh, you've done this before?” I asked, hoping that my skepticism didn't bleed through.

“Couple times,” he answered. “The bad visibility will make us tough to hit.”

He seemed confident at the controls. I mean, he wasn't like a fighter-jock or anything, but on the other hand, he wasn't looking around with a “What's this button do?” attitude. I figured that as long as we didn't hit anything, we'd have a chance at getting away. The helicopter behind us stopped shooting. I guessed it couldn't see us anymore. Mark knew what he was doing. I watched him for a few seconds, amazed at the transformation that had happened over the past five years. It kind of made me sad, because the time had been rough on him. You don't become toughened like that by hanging around reading books and eating carrots. Mark had definitely been through some stuff.

A huge shadow passed overhead. Or should I say, we passed under something huge. I ducked. I know, dumb. It was an involuntary reaction. I saw through the bubble roof that it was one of the wrecked bridges that had connected Manhattan to the rest of the world.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Home” was his answer. “But not until we shake this guy. We don't need to show him the way.”

Another shadow flew overhead. I ducked again. This time it wasn't a bridge. It was the other helicopter.

“Did he see us?” I asked.

“Let's find out.”

Mark pulled back the joystick. We immediately shot skyward. I was pressed back into my seat, fighting nausea all the way. It was like being on a ride at Playland. A really sickening ride that could end in certain death at any second. Knowing that didn't help the nausea. It was a reminder that as much as I was a spirit from Solara, I was still very much a human being. At the moment I was kind of wishing that I was a little less human. The wrecked tower of another bridge appeared out of the haze. Mark veered us to the left. We would pass by safely, but too close for my taste.

“So? Did we lose—”

Two rockets hit the top of the bridge's tower. It exploded, sending off a cloud of smoke and a shower of metal shrapnel. Mark banked hard to the left and flew down. Chunks of metal hit the chopper, pinging the surface, rocking us.

“No,” Mark said.

“‘No' what?”

“No, we didn't lose him.”

Mark dropped us down to the river again. We leveled off and flew over the choppy, dark water.

“Why don't we go over land?” I asked.

“Because I don't want anything falling on anybody.”

Good answer. I hoped we wouldn't be the ones doing the falling.

“So we just try to lose him in the haze?” I asked.

“That. Or I'll drop him in the harbor.”

Mark said that so matter-of-factly I actually believed he could do it.

“You have a plan for this or are you just winging it?”

He didn't answer. Not good. We were approaching another bridge. The roadway loomed overhead. No sooner did we pass under it, than the roadbed exploded. The chasing helicopter was above us. Still shooting.

“You ever play chicken as a kid?” he asked.

“No, and neither did you.”

Mark laughed, as if remembering the geeky kid he used to be. That kid was long gone. “He's not giving up. We're going to have to play.”

There was a reason I never played chicken. It was dumb. It was a test of wills. There was no point to it other than to prove who was the bigger idiot. But this was Mark's show. I wasn't going to argue. We flew under another bridge. It could have been the Brooklyn Bridge. It was hard to tell. We were going too fast and I didn't care anyway. Mark accelerated and drove us skyward again.

“We've got to get far enough ahead of him to make this work,” he explained.

The haze cleared a bit once we were over New York Harbor. It was still pretty thick, but visibility had increased slightly.

“He can see us now,” I cautioned.

“Good. I want him to.”

Up ahead I saw the last bridge before open ocean. It was the long Verrazano Narrows Bridge that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island. Its two towers still stood tall.

Mark explained, “For whatever reason, this bridge is still pretty much intact.”

I twisted and looked back to see that the chasing helicopter had fallen far behind us. I caught glimpses of it through the haze to see it was just clearing the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Maybe we can lose it now,” I offered hopefully.

“No way. We're in the open now. It's going to have to end here. One way or the other.”

We flashed over the bridge, directly between the two towers. Mark pressed the chopper on, headed for open ocean.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we play.”

Mark banked the chopper hard, doing a one-eighty. In seconds we were on our way back toward the bridge, and directly for the other helicopter. We drifted to the left, headed toward the south tower.

“If we're lucky, he won't know this bridge is still in such good shape,” Mark growled. His calm was gone. He was now focused and intent.

“What if we're not lucky?” I asked.

“Then we'll see who's chicken.”

I couldn't see the other helicopter through the haze. But at the speed we were traveling, it couldn't be more than thirty seconds before we'd cross paths. Or collide head-on. Mark gripped the joystick and fired a rocket. It sailed straight ahead, hitting nothing.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“I want him to know where we are.”

Our helicopter continued to drift to the left until we were lined up directly on the south tower of the bridge. It looked as if we were flying at an altitude just above the roadbed.

“Look out!” I shouted.

A rocket was incoming, shooting out of the mist. Mark easily dodged it.

“I guess he knows where we are,” he said.

“This is crazy!” I shouted. “Let's just try to lose him.”

“We won't, Bobby. He'll keep coming. Then other choppers will join him. We've got to end it here.”

That's when I saw it. Maybe a half mile ahead, directly in front of us. We were on a collision course with the other helicopter. Chicken time. I figured the odds were fifty-fifty.

“Shoot it!” I screamed.

Mark fired off a shot, then another. The oncoming chopper dodged them easily and fired back. Mark dipped our chopper and veered left, ducking both missiles. He then brought us back up to the same level as the enemy helicopter. On this course we would fly just over the roadbed of the bridge, inside the south tower…and crash head-on with the other chopper.

“Keep shooting!” I shouted.

“Don't need to,” Mark said calmly.

The chopper fired another rocket. It missed us, and didn't let off another shot. It was starting to look as if our hunter didn't care about shooting us down anymore.

“He wants to kamikaze into us,” Mark said, reading my mind.

“That's not how you play chicken!” I screamed.

“He doesn't know the rules.”

The oncoming chopper was about to reach the bridge.

“Mark, I can't let you die.”

Mark smiled. “I won't. We've got him.”

Huh?

I looked ahead. We were a couple of seconds away from flying head-on into this guy. In seconds we'd be wreckage. I squinted. It was going to hurt.

Suddenly the oncoming helicopter exploded in midair. One second it was bearing down on us, the next there were chunks of wreckage scattering every which way.

“Gotcha!” Mark shouted.

The doomed chopper's rotor spun wildly off on its own. The skids flew in opposite directions. The remainder of the rockets exploded, followed by a violent eruption that had to have been the fuel tank.

Mark pulled back on the joystick, and we sailed up and over the carnage.

“Whooooo!” he yelled, totally psyched.

“What the heck happened?” I shouted.

“I told you, that bridge is pretty much intact. It's a suspension bridge. All of the cables are still there that connect the two towers. Trouble is, you can't see them through the haze.”

I looked back over my shoulder in time to see the shattered helicopter hit the bridge roadbed, bounce off, and plummet toward the ocean below.

“So you lured him into a spiderweb,” I said. “That's why you were flying so close to the tower.” I punched him in the shoulder. “You could have told me, you know.”

“I could have, but I didn't want to look bad if it didn't work.”

“If it didn't work, looking bad would have been the least
of your worries. That was awesome, Mark.”

“Thank you. Now we gotta get down before they send more choppers after us.”

I sat back in my seat and tried to catch my breath. I don't know what was more shocking: The fact that we had nearly been killed by that chopper, or that Mark Dimond was the cool pilot who set the trap and calmly sprang it, saving our lives. We flew back toward Manhattan, staying low to the water in case any other dado pilots came looking for us. I remembered the tip of Manhattan as being a place that was loaded with tall buildings. It was like a whole separate city. Not anymore. It looked as if the buildings had all been sheared off around the tenth story. It wasn't like Rubic City on Veelox, where the city was simply crumbling from age and neglect. No, something had happened here. Something bad.

“What's the story here?” I asked Mark, gesturing to the sad remains of a once-great city.

Mark nodded. “They didn't officially give it a name, but they should have called it World War Three,” he said. “Except that it wasn't about countries. It was Ravinia against the rest of the world.”

“Who won?”

“Nobody. Though I guess you could say it was Ravinia. Once it came to power, Ravinia thought it had crushed all of its opposition. But a revolt was brewing. It took centuries to grow strong enough to challenge the Ravinian authority. Up until then, if you weren't a Ravinian, you lived in squalor. The people finally grew strong enough to fight back in numbers large enough that it scared the Ravinians. So this is how they dealt with the revolt.”

“By destroying the city?” I asked.

“Many cities. But not before moving the most valued
possessions of the world to their various conclaves.”

“So that really was Big Ben back there? And the Taj Mahal and the
Mona Lisa
?”

“Yup. They have hundreds of those garden spots all over. Once they looted the world of its treasures, they unleashed Armageddon. Basically, the entire arsenal of mankind was ignited. I think in some places they even used nukes. Like in Washington DC. From what I heard, it only took a few days, and the entire non-Ravinian world was laid to waste…along with most everyone in it.”