Page 47 of Bred

Suddenly, I’m tired of being a good patient. Well, a bad one, but still. I’m tired of being a patient, and I’m definitely out of patience with this system.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“Out?” His milky blue eyes fix on me with hope and confusion. “There’s an out?”

“Hell, yes, there’s an out. Come on.”

I grab his wheelchair and we head out of the compound. There are no guards or security. This isn’t a prison for anything besides our minds. We head out into the city, where people don’t give either of us a second look.

Major Tom swears at passing people. I don’t know if he doesn’t like them, or if he just likes expressing himself colorfully now. We get a few odd looks, the girl in the institutional clothes and the old man in a bathrobe and slippers, but people are too busy to stop and pay proper attention.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you to see what you made!”

We’re going back to launch central. We’re going back to where I worked that my memory left me and I turned into a nobody. A bus goes right there, and there are tours that go through the outer, non-secure parts of the facility, so we slip in with one of those.

Major Tom quietens down once we get inside and see the display rocket. I think we’re both feeling the same thing: loss.

“You know how to fly them things?”

“Yes,” I say. “Flew them all the time.”

“You should get out of here,” he says. “You should go get one of them flybirds and go back to the stars.”

“I can’t...”

He reaches out and pulls me down toward him, and I look into the aging eyes of the man who made all this possible and is now treated like nothing more than a tourist in his own creation.

“It doesn’t end well down here,” he says. “You gotta get back up there. Go. I’ll distract them.”

“Major...”

“I’ve pissed myself!” he declares, taking hold of the wheels and zooming through the crowd of very concerned citizens.

This is my moment. I know how to get to a shuttle. I know the necessary codes. He’s right. There’s nothing left for me down here. He’s giving me one chance at what might be an escape, and if I don’t take it, I’m a traitor to myself, and to him.

I try to keep things low key, skirting around people and the monitoring stations until I board a stationary shuttle that is ready in the launch bay, but not actually scheduled to go out for several days. They always hold some in ready reserve state. Hah. Brain damaged? I’ll show them.

I punch in the launch sequence faster than I ever have. That’s one thing I haven’t forgotten. My fingers fly over the instruments, setting course, overriding safeties, turning this government-controlled piece of kit into my own personal joy ride.

I hit the big red button, the launch ignites, and I am thrown into the sky, my stomach somewhere near my knees as the G-forces bear down on me. I might pass out. It doesn’t matter. I don’t feel truly conscious anyway.

Right on cue, mission control gets on the line.

“Pilot, return to surface now or you will be shot down. I repeat. Youwill be shot down.”

The voice over the radio sounds really tense. That can’t be good for them. They should do some yoga or something. I keep going, of course, and about thirty seconds later, a missile whizzes by the shuttle. Did they miss, or was that a warning shot? Who knows. Who cares. I’m riding the planet’s gravitational field right now, working up to the right angle to hurl myself into space like a pebble out of a slingshot.

Another missile slams past me. This time it’s closer, maybe only a few hundred feet. The burn from the tail blinds me as it sweeps past, out to attack space. Maybe it will find something worth fighting out there.

“Wheee!” I shout into the radio as the ship rockets out past the orbital atmosphere and into space. Real space. The kind that swallows you up. I used to be so afraid of accidentally leaving orbit in the wrong direction and ending up adrift forever, but right now I just don’t care.

The shuttle isn’t made for this. It’s made for low Earth orbit. It’s made for being tugged back down to Earth, falling at the rate of the curve of the planet before decaying into slow acceptance of the inevitable. But now it, and I, are flying free.

I’m going to die out here. It’s inevitable. But I was going to die down there too, it just would have taken longer and probably been more painful. This will be peaceful.

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