CHAPTER 13


   “It felt like a crash,” Danni said as she sat in the open chopper door. She also pulled her jacket a little tighter and then shivered. She never thought she would miss the Arch this much. She certainly never missed sweating and humidity but, right now, she did.
Tony climbed down from the open engine cover and then picked up a rag that he proceeded to wipe his hands with. He also noted, “it was just a hard landing. I had some harder ones in the military when I was flying medivac. We still had power when we hit, you know?”
If that was a ‘not so hard’ landing then Danni really did not want to experience a hard one. She gave a heavy sigh and then glumly stated, “well we don’t have power now.” She looked at Tony and with a great deal of frustration and a little bit of fear, “Are we screwed? I mean is the… you can fix it right?”
Tony shrugged, “it’s not that bad. Enough water must have gotten into the lines and past the filters. I was afraid of something like this. We got lucky.”
“You call this lucky,” Danni was horrified.
“Yeah,” at least Tony seemed upbeat. “We could have been in the middle of the ocean, on the way back home.” Tony let that sink in and then he gestured to where they were, “we might not have found a field to set down in. If we’d come down in the trees then we’d have lost the rotors and the bird. All kinds of other things could have gone wrong. That’s what usually gets you killed when you’re flying. One problem and you can handle it, usually. Get a lot of things going against you and, well, you’re…”
Danni held her hand up and nodded, “I get it already. So, what you’re saying here is, you can fix this, right?”
“Sure,” Tony tossed the rag aside and sounded up beat. Then he was a bit more pissed when he continued, “if Chuck hadn’t dumped most of the onboard took kit to make room for Maxine.”
Danni jumped down out of the door and complained, “why would he do that? I’ve seen that little space, you couldn’t fit any of those crates in there.”
Tony held his hands up for her to stop ranting and then he tried to calmly explain, “it’s not his fault, ok? It wasn’t a matter of space, it was a matter of weight. I knew about it and approved it.”
Danni threw her arms in the air and twirled, “oh fucking great Tony. Fat lot of good it’s going to do us with all our tools sitting back in Chuck’s bunker, buried in empty beer cans.”
“It’s not that…” Tony snorted, then he laughed. Danni was not amused so he told her, “it’s just that image is kind of, well, it’s pretty dead on actually.” Danni still had a sneer on her face when she squared off with him. Then, finally, she broke down laughing too. Tony slapped her shoulder and tried to cheer her up, “don‘t sweat it, kiddo. Barbara’s got a full tool kit in her bird. We’ll just call her and get her out here. I’m pretty sure she can land over there. I’ll pull and clean the filters, and we should be back in the air in no time.”
“Oh don’t worry,” Danni told him, “I’m pretty sure that sweating is the one thing I will not be doing out here.”
Tony even smiled now, “that’s a good point. OK, tell you what, you go call Barbara and give her a sit rep. I’ll go down the hill over there and see if I can scrounge up some firewood. That should keep us pretty comfortable until Barbara gets here.”
Danni felt like smiling this time, “thanks.” She had a thought before she went to the chopper, “um, why don’t you go call Barbara and let me go get something to burn? After all, this is kind of your fault and I really don’t want to get yelled at again.”
Tony snickered and said, “sure, do you know what kind of wood you need to find?”
“Um,” Danni thought about it and then meekly replied, “the kind that grows on trees?”
“Exactly my point,” Tony said as he started walking for the nearby tree line. He called back to her, “trust me. I come from a long line of firemen.”
Danni grunted than yelled out, “yeah well that means you’ll be pretty handy putting it out! Till then!” If Tony had heard the last feeble protest he did not show it. Danni groaned and then walked back to the chopper. She slid in her seat and put the headset on. She punched the exit button on the application she had up and running.
The meter bar, that she had been looking at most of the morning, was still as dead as it had been since they tested it back at Valley Point. It was also not going away. Danni got frustrated with it and kept thumping the exit button harder and harder. When it would not go away she tried to just minimize it on the screen. It still did nothing. Danni yelled at it.
The meter bar rolled across the screen like it was a wave. Danni blinked and jerked. She even heard the static filled rumbling noise in the headset. Then it came again, and again. Danni’s eyes got big, “whoa.” She checked the signal strength and realized that whatever was pinging away out there was pretty damn close. Then it stopped just as quickly as it had started.
“Screw it,” was all that Danni could think to mumble under her breath. She had bigger problems right now. She now knew that their first contact with the beacon was no phantom. That was good enough for the time being. Once the chopper was fixed they would have plenty of time to look. Right now, she had to get Barbara on the radio and that was not going to happen as long as this stupid app was hogging the screen!
Nothing that Danni could do would make the app go away so, finally, she did the only thing that you could do in such circumstances. She reached down behind the instrument panel and pulled the hardwire connection for it’s power source. The screen went blank and Danni sighed in relief, “bout damn time.” She plugged the power cable back in and the screen came back to life. It began to boot up and she waited for it to finish. She waited some more. She waited even more. Finally she got tired of waiting. The screen was hung up in it’s cycle.
It was probably nothing. Danni figured that if Tony could pull fuel filters from a chopper engine she was sure that he could get the computer to reboot. All that she had to do was just wait for him to get back. Danni decided to do that in the chopper since the one thing that it was really good at was deflecting the breeze. Despite that advantage, she could see her breath and too Danni, who had grown up in the Arch, that just seemed plain wrong. She was wearing two layers of clothing and a flight suit over that. How could she be cold?
The more uncomfortable she got, the more Danni’s eyes kept drifting down to the vest pocket that was just inside her flight suit. Finally, the waiting was a little too much. Danni shut her eyes and shook her head. She told herself quietly, “I deserve it this time.” She really did not feel any pain at the moment but, wasn’t being cold a kind of pain? Danni pulled the zipper down just a little and reached in the pocket of her vest. She pulled out the little bottle, took out a pill, and then swallowed it without any water.
After a few minutes she felt a bit more eased. She laid her head back and tried to rest. The cold did not go away but, Danni simply found she no longer cared or thought that much about it. She didn’t really think much about anything, at all, for a little while until a stray thought ran through her mind. Where the hell was Tony?
Danni climbed down out of the chopper and looked around her immediate environs. Everything looked pretty much like it had when they had first landed. After walking around the chopper a few times she finally realized that Tony was not there. Danni scanned the field as she began to feel panic welling up insider her. She began yelling for Tony after that and, now, she was definitely panicking.
A tear ran down her cheek and Danni discovered that she had lost her breath while screaming. She could barley speak when she grumbled, “oh shit.”