Page 27 of Running Scared
“Shut up,” Dean retorted.Unlike Marcus, who was an only child, he’d had brothers growing up.He knew how these fights were won.
“No, seriously, Dean.How could you not think he’d need you to open up?”
Dean scowled and was about to reply that he had too little experience “opening up” to even know what the signs in a relationshipwerefor that sort of thing when the engine noise changed and the plane suddenly went diving for the ground at an anglenotconducive to good health and a long life.
“Bird!”Dean cried.“Birdie, the fuck?”
“We’re taking fire!”Birdie retorted from the cockpit.“Somebody knows my usual spot with the fuel line.Gonna have to go farther south and land, but first….”
Dean could feel the engines screaming and the plane’s structure groaning under his feet as Birdie pulled out of the dive and slid left then right in what had to be an attempt to dodge antiaircraft fire.
“First we have to avoid getting shot out of the sky!”Marcus hollered to him and threw him a parachute while Dean scrambled for his flight suit.
Dean slid the chute over his shoulders and then leaned back as far as the pack would allow and buckled in.“C’mon, Birdie!”he shouted in encouragement.Marcus, in the meantime, had managed his flight suit and was double-checking the cargo chutes on their small motorcycles and the supply trailer, both boxed in a large cargo container that dominated the rest of the hold.
Birdie—small, weathered, and as unaware of gender as a cactus—had flown them on more assignments than they could count.
This wasn’t the first time they’d thought they were going to die, but as the plane started to climb in a way that defied both gravity and engine strength, he met Marcus’s eyes grimly.
Wasn’t the first time, but a little prayer that it wouldn’t be the last time wouldn’t hurt either.
A Horse with No Name
IT WASa near miss, but in the end Bailey didnothave that brush with a cactus that Dean had him worrying about.He did everything Dean told him—ran his legs in place like a cartoon animal, pulled left to go left, right to go right, and in the end he landed cleanly in about an acre’s worth of cleared space, only coming near the giant cacti toward the end of his run.
He released the chute from his back so he could make a hard turn and skidded to a halt about ten feet in front of a surprised rattlesnake, who after curling up, shaking its little rattle, and watching Bailey back away, went off on its original mission.
Bailey managed to gather his chute after that, but he left his flight suit on when he realized that the cold packs in the suit were doing him a real favor.
God, Dean had thought ofeverything.
Bailey tripled down on that thought when he bundled his parachute and shoved it in the space in the wagon, using a fold to cover Mr.Bumble’s crate.
Mr.Bumble was still very out of it, but there was a hamster feeder with water ready to be positioned on the side, and Bailey did that while stroking his cat’s fur.There were also, he realized, a few cold packs along the walls and top of the carrier.The outside temperature in the long-shadowed, westering sun was at least 105, but Mr.Bumble sat in relative 80 degree comfort.
Bailey’s eyes burned as he finished rubbing the sleeping feline’s ears, and then even more as he discovered his old khaki baseball cap wedged between the carrier and the soft side of the wagon, sunglasses tucked inside.
With a determined shove of the hat on his head—and of the sunglasses up the bridge of his nose—he stood and unlatched the plain wooden box so he could grab the wagon handle.He’d seen the road as he’d gotten near the ground and had even spotted what looked like a big rig—all in purple—nearby.
Dean had told him a half hour at the most.
Bailey was very much starting to trust Dean’s estimates in things like that.It seemed like astellarbet.
IT TOOKless than fifteen minutes for him to reach the road.Sand had coated it, but the basic pattern of a throughway still held true amid the encroaching cacti, and the rig didn’t seem to have much problem powering through the desert.
Bailey stood to the side and watched as the driver found a place to turn around that wouldn’t force the local fauna to scratch his paint job, and he was stripping out of his flight suit when the air brakes hissed to a stop about fifteen feet away.
He recognized the rangy cowboy in the passenger seat as Rory McCauley, the man who had offered to keep an eye on Val Royal that day in the hospital, and he gave a tentative smile.
“Fancy meeting you here?”he asked, as McCauley swung the door open.
“Yup.Total fuckin’ coincidence,” McCauley said dryly.Then he stepped out of the cab and adjusted the seat so somebody sitting in the back of a small sleeper cabin could emerge.
Bailey could not have been more surprised to see McCauley hold out his arms to help his father’s dog to the ground.
“Catherine?”he said, remembering suddenly that Dean promised his family would be safe.The big golden retriever gave an even biggerwoof,galloped toward him, and stood on her back legs to lick his face, because she had no manners, and his father never tried to teach her manners, and right now that big doggy hug was one of the most wonderful things Bailey had ever received.
Then his father clambered out with McCauley’s help as well, and with a slightly bemused smile and a squeeze of Bailey’s shoulder, he gathered the stuff in the wagon—the water, the food, and then the cat, and one item at a time, he and McCauley made spare, exact work of packing the things away into a sleeper cabin that was feeling more and more like the Tardis and less and less like a real semi.
