Terminal Island

Chapter Thirty-Two

BIG FISH



And they’re off!

As the horses bolt, Henry hears a distant, answering boom: the Marlin Cannon. Big fish, he thinks.

All his life he has wondered what it’s like to die, evaluating the infinite ways of doing so in much the same way he browsed expensive cars that he didn’t expect to ever be able to afford—This one’s fast, but that one’s a little more elegant. As a young man he wanted to die in battle, fighting for something he believed in. Either that or in bed, at great age, surrounded by flocks of children and grandchildren. Death by drawing and quartering was way down the list.

Henry cries out as the chains jerk taut…

…then snap off.

His arms and legs recoil as the horses stampede away, leaving him in one piece. Unable to comprehend, hyperventilating, Henry lies tensed for death as the loose ends of chain go jingling away behind the horses. Not all of them—one animal wheels around and comes back, its hooves thundering up as if to trample him to death. Henry opens his eyes to see the woman rider reaching down to him and shouting, “Grab on!”

It is the deputy. He takes her hand and she hauls him to his feet. She has removed her mask, her long black hair flailing in the wind.

“Put your foot in the stirrup and swing your leg over behind me,” she says, trying to help him and handle the horse and keep her gun trained on the approaching crowd all at once. “Hurry!”

Henry does so, cringing from the pain of his spear wound. Though he has almost no strength left, she is able to haul him over the horse by brute force, wrapping his arms around her naked waist to keep him in place. Awkwardly clinging to her, his face mashed between her warm shoulder blades, Henry can feel the blood running down his leg and dripping off his toes. Like a stuck pig, he thinks.

She takes off at a gallop, straight at them, and as one of the huntresses rides up raising a spear, the naked deputy fires a running shot that rolls the other woman backward off her saddle. Her gold mask is knocked loose, and Henry can see it is Lisa. But there are too many of them, pouring in from all sides, and now cars and trucks screeching up from the access road. There is no escape except over the side of the cliff, but Henry knows there can be no happy landing this time. In a moment he and the deputy will both be swarmed and taken down. Here come the dogs now.

There is an escalating drone from the sea: a mechanical sound like a sawmill, muted beneath the cliff. All at once it burgeons to deafening proportions, levitating into view over the plateau’s rim and kicking up a furious trash-storm as it comes.

A helicopter!

It is white and orange and coffee-brown, with the words Channel Island Charters stenciled on its side. In his delirium it is the most wondrous sight Henry has ever seen, a heavenly vision every bit as fantastic as the seaplane that first carried him to this island. An angel.

Clearing the ledge, it sideslips low over the field and lightly sets down as plastic bags whip up and around and are shredded by its howling rotors. A wall of flying debris blasts everyone on the ground, causing the mob to huddle behind each other or flee down the hill. The dogs scatter in confusion.

The deputy’s horse rears up in panic, bucking them off, throwing the woman down on top of Henry as it tramples away through the crowd.

Getting to her feet, she shouts, “Come on!” Her nose is broken and streaming blood.

“I don’t know if I can walk!”

“You’ll have to if you want to get out of here! Move!”

She half-drags, half-carries Henry into the face of the gale, fending off foul shrapnel. Then they are there, ducking under the blades and stepping up through the open panel door.

“Go!” she shouts to the pilot. “Go go go!”

They lift off, banking away over the sea.

“What just happened?” Henry calls over the engine noise as she buckles him in.

“They shot the sheriff,” Deputy Myrtessa shouts back. “But they did not kill the deputy.”