I hit the water feetfirst and just kept sinking, my eyes clinched shut, thinking, This is where Alfred Kropp buys the farm. I flailed my arms and kicked my feet, but I just kept sinking. My lungs began to ache and my movements slowed down, and then a great sense of peace settled over me like a comfortable blanket. This wasn’t so bad. Maybe I’d take a nap. My chin dropped to my chest and I thought of cold winter nights in Ohio where I grew up, snuggling under the warm covers, drifting off to sleep while Mom sat in the kitchen, working her calculator as she balanced some business’s books.
A hand grabbed my collar and I slowly started to rise. Whatever was left in me that still wanted to live took over, and I began to kick my feet again. My head broke the surface and I took a huge gulp of air.
“Shhhh,” Mike Arnold whispered in my ear. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
He gently rolled me onto my back so I was lying on top of him, his arm around my chest as he backstroked toward the south shore. I could hear the thumpa-thumpas of the helicopters as they patrolled the river, swinging the searchlights right to left and back again, looking for us. Just our faces were out of the water, though, and Mike pushed us along slowly, causing barely a ripple.
“Nice night for a swim, huh, Al?” Mike murmured into my ear. “Okay, real quiet now; we’re almost at the shore. I’m gonna set you down easy. About twenty yards south we’ve got some cover, but it’s gonna be a long twenty yards, Al. Easy now. Almost there.”
He took his arm away and I sank about a foot before my butt hit the bottom. I raised my head a little and saw a chopper over the river, so low, the water churned beneath it, the wind of the blades creating little whitecaps in the harsh glare of the searchlights. I didn’t see the other one. We were about five feet from the rocky shore. The ground rose sharply toward a densely wooded hillside directly ahead.
“Okay,” Mike breathed. “On my mark. Three, two, one . . . mark!”
I was a couple of seconds behind Mike. I never was good at races. In PE the whistle would blow and everybody would be six feet in front of me before I took the first step. Mike was already out of the water, running doubled over, his knuckles practically touching the ground, before I even reached the shore. I told myself as I started to run that the roar of the helicopter behind me wasn’t getting louder, but of course it was.
Mike had reached the edge of the trees, waving his arms frantically, as if that’s all I needed to run faster.
About halfway between the water and the trees I froze. The second gunship had risen from behind the trees; I was trapped between them. The air began to whip around me as they bore down, and I stood still, pinned like a bug by the blinding searchlights. I could hear Mike screaming my name.
I don’t know how long I stood there, river water pooling under my wet tennis shoes, waiting for the bullet to rip through my brain. All I know is after a lifetime or two Mike made a decision and came to get me, grabbing me by the shoulder and hurling me toward the safety of the trees.
I stumbled once, tearing the knee in my jeans on the rocky ground. Mike yanked me up and half dragged, half pushed me into the crowded underbrush of the wooded hillside.
He pushed me face-first into the ground and put his hand on the small of my back as he whispered in my ear, “Don’t move!”
The choppers circled slowly overhead. Sometimes they sounded right above us; sometimes the blades’ thumping sounded very far away. The searchlights stabbed through the canopy, and they looked like white columns, the kind you see on Southern mansions, as they illuminated the misty air.
The columns of light kept moving farther and farther away, and after a while I couldn’t hear the helicopters’ engines at all. Finally, I couldn’t take it and told Mike I had to pee.
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Mike said. So I went behind the nearest tree, and when I came back Mike was sitting up. He unwrapped a piece of gum and carefully folded the stick into his mouth. I sat down beside him and examined the tear in my jeans. My knee was bleeding.
“Catch your breath, Al. We got five, maybe ten minutes,” Mike said around his fresh wad of gum. “They’re looking for a place to land.”
“And what happens after they land?”
“They’ll come for us on foot. They’re very determined little suckers.”
“Who are determined little suckers?”
He didn’t answer at first. He picked up a stick and commenced to jabbing it into the rocky ground.
“The Company,” he said.
“OIPEP?”
He nodded. “OIPEP.”
“Why is OIPEP trying to kill us, Mike?”
“I don’t think they’re trying to kill you, Al. It’s me they want.”
That didn’t surprise me. Mike had betrayed the knights and OIPEP, but I still didn’t understand why he had kidnapped me. Did he think I still had Excalibur?
He stood up and brushed the leaves and dirt from his butt. “Look at this! I just bought these,” he said, referring to his Dockers. “Stain-defenders!”
He turned to me. “Sorry for snatching you like that, Al, but I’m in a bad way now and like it or not, you’re the only port in this particular storm.”
“What storm? What are you talking about, Mike?”
“Well, you could say it’s all a big misunderstanding. But it’s more a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing. You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
He walked past me, deeper into the woods, without looking back.
“It’s your call, kid. Stick with me and you got a fifty-fifty chance of seeing your sixteenth birthday. Hang here and you got a hundred percent chance of having your head snatched straight through your backside.”
I followed him up the slope, and to me it sounded like we were making enough noise to wake the dead. We reached the top of the hill and now I could see the lights of the interstate about a mile to our left. To our right was the Knoxville airport. And, directly below us, the parking lot to an air freight company.
“Right where I left it,” Mike breathed. “Okay, let’s go.”
I crouched in the trees just at the edge of the little lawn that surrounded the parking lot as Mike jogged to a silver 380Z parked at the far corner of the lot. I didn’t know what the heck was going on and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know, but there was no turning back now, and I figured eventually Mike would fill me in on the details.
The Z roared to life and Mike zipped over, waving to me through the open window. I jogged out of the trees and into the lot as Mike slowed to a stop. He floored the gas as soon as my butt touched the seat.
Mike headed into the mountains, taking the Z up to eighty on the straightaways, maybe a little bit slower—but not much—on the curves.
We went through a couple of small towns in the foothills; then, right before the entrance to the national park, Mike turned onto a gravel road that seemed to wind straight up the side of a mountain. The little access road hugged the mountain on one side and a deep ravine dropped off the other. I happened to be seated on the ravine side. I closed my eyes and willed my heart not to leap out of my mouth.
Finally the car rolled to a gravel-crunching stop and I opened my eyes. We were parked in front of a log cabin sitting by itself in a clearing hacked out of the mature trees covering the mountaintop.
“Home sweet home,” Mike sang out and stepped out of the car. “We’re perfectly secure here. Nobody knows about this place, Al. Not even the Company, and the Company knows practically everything.”
He came around to my side of the car and stood there, like he was expecting me to get out. I didn’t.
“Get out of the car, Al,” he said.
“I’m not getting out of the car, Mike,” I said, “until you tell me what’s going on.”
“I think I told you. You’ve been extracted.”
“Why?”
He smiled. “Get out and I’ll tell you.”
I thought about it. The leaves were gray in the dark, and the cold wind made a rattling sound as it moved through them.
The lights were on inside the cabin, and the light looked inviting and warm.
“Why can’t you tell me now, Mike?”
“Well, basically because of the car.”
“The car?”
“It’s brand-new.” He pulled the gun from his belt and pointed it at my forehead.
“Out. Now.”
I got out. Mike took a couple of steps back and gestured toward the cabin with the Glock.
“After you, Al. March.”
As I trudged up the hill toward the bright, warm lights, the hair on the back of my neck stuck up and I realized then what a terrible mistake I had made getting out of the car. It’s brand-new, Mike had said. Why did that matter? Because he didn’t want to mess it up when he shot me.
From behind me he said, “Okay, that’s good.” We were about ten feet from the front porch. I stopped. He stopped. I shivered in the cold air.
“Don’t turn around, Al,” Mike said softly. “It’s better if you don’t turn around. Maybe you should kneel.”
To my left was the ravine, the deep gash in the side of the mountain. To the right the ground dropped off into a dense thicket of wild blackberry bushes and scrub pine.
“You know what the Company calls this, Al?”
“An extraction?”
“Right. But extraction comes in many varieties. This one we call an ‘extreme extraction.’ ”
“Can I at least know why you’re going to extremely extract me?”
“For the world, Al. The welfare of humankind.”
I heard him slide the bullet into the chamber. The wind sighed in the trees. I could see my own breath.
“I should tell you that I hate doing this, Al—you know, how I always liked you and respected you and all that, but that just isn’t true. To be frank, you’ve always annoyed the heck out of me.”