Three A.M. by Steven John

Author:Steven John [John, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Dystopia, noir, dystopian
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

10

Gasoline—its odor curling around me. All was silent save for an occasional drip. I was in no pain. I could see nothing. The fetid smell grew ever stronger. Liquid dripped onto my forehead. Slowly the world went from black to dull red. Rust colored. Then a bit of pain. Just in two places, really: both wrists. Then I snapped awake.

I was hanging by my wrists, the cuffs still wrapped around Callahan’s lifeless neck. My feet hung past the back bench. I stepped onto the backrest to ease the pressure on my wrists and then gingerly raised the handcuffs off Callahan’s corpse and over his seat. Slumping down onto the back of the bench seat, I was very near Kirk. His body was bent double at the waist, neck twisted, and one leg stuck out at a horrible angle. Not that it mattered. He looked good and dead.

The skin of my forearms was ragged and bloody. Everything worked, though; I made fists and wriggled my fingers. The helicopter must have rolled at least twice—the tail section was gone entirely and the cabin was resting with its windshield pointed directly up at the sky. The glass on the right half of the cockpit was all missing, as was the soldier who had presumably been thrown clear.

I was still in a daze, my thinking cloudy, but the gasoline worried me. I had to get out. Again my eyes fell upon the man in the dark suit. “Are you dead, Kirk? Huh?” I kicked at his torso, my toe connecting roughly with his ribs. It felt divine. I kicked him again. And again. Ribs cracked. “Are you dead, asshole?” He was. Very much so. I dropped back down onto the seatback, coughing and sucking in ragged breaths.

I tried the cabin door but the latch was bent and it wouldn’t budge. After a few solid kicks, I got the door open and crawled outside, lowering myself gingerly onto the grass. New pain seeped in. Both legs, the left side of my chest and my neck. I had a dozen little cuts where shattering glass must have caught me. But I was alive. I walked in a circle around the destroyed chopper and was amazed to be so.

The rotors were gone. The tail lay a good fifty feet away. The skids were bent, the engine nearly ripped off the top. It was bent, cracked, and dented all over. I found the soldier lying facedown about thirty feet away. The massive patches of crimson on his gray fatigues left little doubt that he was dead, but I turned him over anyway. He still bore the shocked expression of his last living moment; his eyes were wide open, mouth agape. Poor son of a bitch. It could just as well have been me if things had been different. He was just doing what he was told.

I could see Callahan’s round, dead face through the glass on the side of the craft. His eyes bulged out and his yellow teeth were bared beneath curled lips.

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