When the Wind Blows - James Patterson [52]
I found my sleeping bag in a heap where I’d left it a few hours before and dragged it to the far side of the fire. How could I have been feeling so good, and now suddenly feel so unbearably bad?
“Frannie,” Kit said.
“Yuh?” I whispered. My voice sounded thick. Yuh?
“Bring your sleeping bag over here next to me.”
I hesitated. Shook my head in silence. I think that maybe my pride demanded a little distance. Stop? Wait?
“Do it,” he said. Then more gently, “Please. I’m the G-man, remember? You’re the civilian. I’ve got the gun. You’ll be safer where I can see you.”
Ah. He did have the gun.
To hell with my doctorate in veterinary medicine. Forget that I could outrun him, outclimb him, and that I’d slept in these mountains gunless and manless other times before. I picked up my sleeping bag and unrolled it next to him. I did what Kit asked me to do.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered before I fell asleep. “I’m really sorry.”
Very noble of you, Kit.
Chapter 51
KIT COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS EYES. The children were flying. The two of them looked so fine and free, like a pair of angels.
They did a graceful loop together and he had the sudden, terrible feeling that they might fall from grace. They were hundreds of feet in the air, easily as high as some small planes fly.
He looked around for Frannie, but she wasn’t there. He didn’t know where she might have gone.
He began to yell, and only hoped that the children could hear him.
“Little Mike, Tom! Come down here. Please come down before you fall. This is Daddy. Daddy wants you to come down.”
They couldn’t hear him from so high, so far away.
Then suddenly both of his boys began to fall, to plummet, to drop like stones.
Neither of them had wings. They were in free fall.
He wanted to rescue both his sons, but he could only catch one of them. He had to choose, but it was impossible. He had to choose one son.
He watched as Little Mike and Tom both crashed horribly to the ground. He hadn’t been able to save either of them. Out of nowhere, there were EMS ambulances, Rhode Island police cars, the wreckage of a small plane.
He was there at the nightmarish crash scene. Inside the smoking plane, looking through the twisted, crumpled seats and the dead passengers.
He found his two little boys and his wife in the terrible wreckage. He gently touched them and couldn’t believe that they were dead.
And then Kit woke. It was early morning, a hint of salmon pink tinted the blue of the sky. He was in Colorado. In the mountains.
Frannie O’Neill was bent over him. “Shhhh,” she whispered. “She’s up there. I can see her.”
Chapter 52
MAX WOKE with a terrible start.
She didn’t know how much time had passed, but she’d obviously fallen asleep. It was morning again. She was wet-cheeked and shivering from the cold that had swept across the mountain between sundown and sunrise.
She felt small and alone and utterly abandoned on the mountainside. She missed Matthew and she even missed the awful, despicable School a little bit.
No!Ican’t think like that.Imustn’t start acting likealoser. Losers lose! she told herself. I’m notaloser.
Max lifted her hand to wipe her cheeks and, as she did, felt something like spiderwebs all over her. Ugh! She pushed at the irritating, clingy stuff and it shifted but didn’t melt away from her face.
What was this? What was happening? She opened her eyes wide. Oh God!
She saw shapes bending over her. People! She couldn’t tell how many!
They were standing between her and the sun, and it took a moment for her to understand what was happening to her. When she did, she filled her lungs with air and screamed.
She screamed bloody murder! That scared them. The shapes backed off, then crystallized as the woman doctor and the man. They’d snuck up on her in her sleep. Bastards! Creeps!
Max screamed again, louder than she’d ever screamed in her entire life. The inside of her head was white with fear. She couldn’t think straight, could only flail wildly