Chapter 28

The three of us were blinded by the crash and boom of lightning. Noah too. That was a thought.

He had an automated co-pilot—or at least I hoped he did—but he was still fully focused on the job of getting us into the air and above the storm. He still needed to be able to see.

How high would we have to go to escape the storm? One thing you learn from living in my state. Thunderstorm clouds go all the way to the stratosphere.

Was it even possible for this craft to fly above the storm?

No time to think about it. No time to think about anything but getting the gun away from the goon in front of me. Tense in his seat, he clutched the rifle tight enough for his knuckles to go white.

While I"d been bound on the floor where I was partly shielded from the brilliance of the lightning strikes, he must have received a direct blast to the retina through the wide cockpit windows.

He"s gotta be blind. Incapable of seeing anything in front of him except dancing white spots.

(Noah had to be the same way, but I had to keep pushing away the thought to push away the panic. Noah would keep us in the sky if anybody could. I had to leave that part of the job to him.)

Can"t hear me coming either.

If the goon"s ear protection drowned out chopper noise, pounding rain, and the crash of thunder, they"d drown out the soft creeping approach of a barefoot man.

There"s another sense I don"t know the name of. The prickly one you feel in your shoulders and the back of your neck. The sense of being watched. The sense of someone sneaking up from behind.

Under normal circumstances, he might have felt me coming. Smelled it, even.

Half blind myself, crampy from my uncomfortable stay in the hogtie position, I wasn"t at my best and my fastest. If he took one glance back at the wrong time...

Another crash of lightning. When Mother Nature herself is throwing zots at your flying bucket of bolts, a man doesn"t have the cognitive space to focus on the prisoner in the back. You just have to hope those ropes will hold.

Ha. You have to get up early in the day to keep this quarterback in bondage.

Go time.

With a grunt of fury, I pushed myself up and out and hard. Like I was propelling myself for a catch barely within reach of the stretchiest fingertips.

I didn"t catch a football.

I caught a beefy neck. A two-handed catch. A grasp and a squeeze. This wasn"t the time for mercy. This was a fight for survival. We had to get down and out of this storm. Whatever this guy thought he was running from, we"d have to run from it later.

Noah turned to look directly at us. If he said anything, I couldn"t hear it.

Another crash and boom, and his attention was back on his controls. The chopper was yawing crazily like it wanted to fly sideways but wasn"t sure whether it wanted to go left or right.

A man could get airsick, but who had the time?

Thanks to the seatback between me and the goon, I felt more than saw the thick, heavily corded neck I was squeezing. The man felt like he making noises that would"ve sounded awful if I could have heard them over the noise of the storm. It was just as well that I couldn"t.

I got the speech about the choking game like everybody else who went to high school. I"m well aware there"s a thin line between choking somebody to unconsciousness and choking them to death. They say you don"t always know where the line is until it"s too late.

I didn"t want to kill the guy, but I didn"t have the luxury of holding back. I had to give it my everything to knock him out.

It was him or us.

Him or Noah.

For more than one reason, it would have been safer to use the trank gun to put him under. But I couldn"t get control of the gun until I already had him knocked out. A nasty paradox.

If he turned that gun around in time...

If he knocked me out...

His mouth stretched into the roundness of shrieks or gasps. Either way, the sound was inaudible beneath the larger sounds of the storm and the chopper. With a final shriek/gasp that stretched his face out like the guy in that scream painting, he suddenly slumped.

As he sagged, the hand clutching the rifle uncurled. And the rifle slumped too.

He was out.

Crash. Boom. Blind. The thunderbolt was so loud that my sense of hearing felt muffled in the aftermath. I couldn"t see anything but the dancing spots in front of my eyes, but I was halfway over his seat to scramble for the rifle.

How long would he be out?

Was he still out? That crash of thunder was enough to wake the dead.