When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [16]
Close your eyes, Frannie.
Now open them again, slowly…
She was still there! No more than twenty yards away. The girl was watching me, too.
Don’t faint, Frannie. DON’T YOU DARE, I told myself.
Go slow. Go really slow here. Don’t make any sudden noise or movement to scare her off.
I watched as the girl awkwardly found her feet. One wing was folded neatly behind her. The other wing dragged a little. Was she hurt?
“Hey,” I called again, softly. “It’s all right.”
The young blond girl turned toward me. I guess she was close to five feet tall. She gave me a fierce look with her large, wide-spaced eyes. I stood in the ferny glade in the milky moonlight. Everything around me was shifting shadows. I watched, dizzy and panting, not knowing who was more frightened, her or me.
She shot me a grim look of horror and ran away again, into the night, farther into the woods surrounding Fourth of July Road until she was just a blur.
I followed until it was too dark to see in the dense woods. I finally leaned against a tree and tried to review the last few minutes. I couldn’t do it. My head was spinning too fast.
Somehow I managed to get back to the Suburban. I climbed inside and sat there in the dark.
“I did not just see a young girl with wings,” I whispered out loud.
I couldn’t have.
But I was sure that I had.
When I could manage to drive, I went to the police station in nearby Clayton, a burg of about three thousand. Actually, the station is an outpost for the main office in Nederland. I stopped the Suburban on Miller Street, less than a block from the station house.
I desperately wanted to continue down the peaceful village street, but I couldn’t do it, couldn’t make myself.
I had been drinking… and driving. It was already past two in the morning, way past the witching hour in Clayton.
Now that I wasn’t actually looking at the girl… I wasn’t completely sure what I had seen. I just couldn’t tell my story to the local cops. Not that night, anyway. Maybe tomorrow.
I went home to sleep on it—or more likely, to sleep it off.
Chapter 16
KIT WAS SWEATING, just like he had on the American Airlines flight from Boston. Damn it, he still couldn’t fly very well. But he had to.
The pilot of the Bell helicopter shot a look across the cockpit at him. He didn’t bother to conceal a smirk. “You okay? Never been up in one of these eggbeaters, huh? You don’t look so good, Mr. Harrison. Maybe we should head back?”
Kit almost lost his cool with the guy. The pilot was an asshole of the first order. Actually, he’d flown in plenty of helicopters before, flown in snow-blind blizzards, bad rainstorms, and on dangerous raids. There had never been a problem until August of ’94.
He’d been a good agent until then, one of the best. Resourceful, bright, hardworking, tough enough. It was a matter of record in his personnel file. So what the hell had happened to him?
“The natural color of my gills is green. I’m just fine. I’m all right.” He tried a little self-deprecating humor.
“Whatever you say, Kermit. It’s your dime.”
Yes, it sure was his dime, and he didn’t have a lot of them to blow on costly surveillance junkets like this. But he felt he needed an overview; he had to see the big picture; take in the lay of the land. And the real big picture here had to do with subjects as lofty and important as the survival of the human race. He believed that, or he wouldn’t be out here on his own.
Kit tried looking down at the treetops again. Acres of ponderosa pines with aspen groves nestled in. Occasional “blowouts”—stacks of trees blown down in winter. And, of course, the snowy peaks of the Continental Divide.
There was a lab out here somewhere near the Divide. Kit knew that much. Where the hell could it be?
The helicopter passed over Gross Reservoir. Then he could see the Eldora ski area, and the small town of Nederland. Then another picturesque reservoir—probably Barker, if he was reading the maps correctly. Off in the distance, he spotted Flagstaff Mountain. Closer in was Magnolia Road, Sunshine Canyon.
He knew what he