Rooms - James L. Rubart [69]
“Hello!” he hollered into the shadows. No response.
He crawled forward. The instant Micah’s head popped through the door, he found himself staring at the interior of a small plane with no seats. A large, dark-haired man, who looked to be in his early sixties, bellowed at him over the roar of the screaming plane engine. “Ready?”
The man had a massive grin and amber eyes that bored into Micah’s head. A harness dug into his shoulders, and he reached up to feel goggles on his head.
Skydiving.
Micah glanced around at the other faces staring at him. No question. They expected him to jump. He scooted backward into the hallway of his house, but his heel smacked into something hard. He turned and stared at the cold gray steel kissing his Nikes. The door he’d come through had vanished.
“What’re you looking at, mate?” the big man roared, his Australian accent thick.
“The door where I came in! Where is it?”
The Aussie laughed and pointed to the open door across from them. “That’s the door we all came in, and that’s the door we’re all going out!”
Micah pressed himself into the steel of the plane, and his body went numb. Heights and he refused to dance. He’d fallen out of a tree at eleven and been in the hospital for five weeks. To imagine jumping out of this airplane was to contemplate the impossible.
“No way. Indulge your lunacy if you want to. I’m staying here.”
“Suit yourself, mate. But paying $325, then backing out at the last second, that’s what I call crazy.”
A crystal blue sky framed Mount Rainier shimmering in the distance. Ten thousand feet below cars moved like ants in slow motion along pencil-thin roads. No way. If he jumped, there would be no control, no influence on whether the chute opened or not. But a protest started deep down inside.
Do it.
“Well, mate? Ya coming?”
This wasn’t happening. He was still in his house in Cannon Beach. But his head lost out to his heart, which screamed it was most assuredly real. The plane, the sky, the danger, the fear—all sickeningly genuine. Then another impression fluttered up from his heart.
Let’s do it. Risk it.
His legs ached above his knees, and he looked down. His fingers were white where they dug into his thighs like iron claws.
The big man watched him intently. “Hey, get some blood back into those hands of yours and give your legs a break. No pun intended; you’ll need them when we land.” The Aussie looked at him with a kind, knowing expression.
Micah loosened his grip as he watched the other obvious first-timer get ready to jump. The man turned to Micah. “Why are you jumping?”
“I have no idea.”
“Exactly!” The other jumper laughed. “Seriously, I just think it’s something I gotta do. My heart’s pounding like a jackhammer, but it’s one of those life things. Big risk, big reward, you know?”
Micah knew.
The man and his tandem-jump instructor scraped along the bottom of the Cessna, then eased up to the edge of the door.
“Ready?” his tandem partner said.
The man nodded, a wild look in his eyes. “Tell me it’s going to be okay!”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“No! Tell me over and over again!”
His tandem instructor laughed. An instant later they plummeted toward Earth. Despite his fear, Micah’s morbid fascination compelled him to look, and he watched the pair shrink from life size to a small dot, like an old TV being shut off, faster than he’d thought possible.
“All right, mate, we’ve rumbled up to the crossroads. Gotta jump within the next fifteen seconds or it’s too late. We going?”
Micah closed his eyes and pressed himself for a decision. Every fiber shrieked no. Why risk something that wasn’t even real? What would he prove? He would tell the man no, hope that ended this nightmare, and be out of this “room” and be back in the more normal places of the house.
“Ten seconds. We going?”
He turned to say no but the words stuck. And his head nodded yes.
“You’re gonna love it.” The big man slapped him on the back.
Micah eased