FEAR THICKENS TIME, TURNS IT slow and viscous. One second of deeply felt terror lasts longer than ten regular seconds. Aubrey fell for only a moment, but it was an instant that lasted longer than the whole long, circling climb into the sky on board the Cessna.
As they went through the door, Aubrey tried to turn, to stay in the plane, just as Axe was pulling them out. He plunged backward, looking up at the aircraft, with the jumpmaster beneath him. Aubrey dropped with a great tingling thrill of emotion that ran from balls to throat, a single thought beating in his mind as he fell:
STILL ALIVE STILL ALIVE STILL ALIVE STILL—
—and then they hit.
What they struck didn’t feel at all like earth but much closer to raw bread dough. It was thick and rubbery and cold, and if they had dropped only ten or even fifteen feet into it, it might’ve been a soft, springy landing. In fact, though, they had fallen thirty-nine feet, and Axe absorbed the full brunt of the impact. The fragile hoops of his pelvis snapped in three places. The upper part of his right femur broke with a pop. Aubrey’s helmet snapped back into Axe’s face and smashed his nose, which shattered with a glassy crack.
Aubrey himself was not entirely unhurt. Axe kneed him in the hip hard enough to make a gruesome bruise. He also banged his funny bone so sharply he lost all the sensation in his right hand.
Dry, cold smoke erupted around them in a great puff. It had a sharp odor, like pencil shavings, like the wheels of a train, like lightning.
“Hey,” Aubrey said, in a thin, shaking voice. “Hey, what happened?”
“Aaa!” Axe cried. “Aaa!”
“Are you all right?”
“Aaaa! Oh, Jesus. Oh, cocksucker.”
All that high, singing emotion had been slammed out of Aubrey on impact. All the thought had been slammed out of him, too. He waved his arms and legs in the helpless, struggling motion of a beetle turned over on its back. He stared up into the clear blue. He could still see the plane, the size of a toy, above them but tilting away to the east. It was funny how far away it was already.
Axe sobbed.
The sound was so unexpected, so dreadful, it shocked Aubrey out of his stunned, blank, amazed state. He made a fist with his right hand, trying to work the feeling back into it.
“Can you unbuckle me?” he asked.
“I don’t know!” Axe said. “Oh, man. I think I’m really fucked up.”
“What did we hit?” Aubrey asked. It looked like a cloud, which didn’t make any sense. “What are we on?”
Axe panted in a horrible, frantic sort of way. Aubrey thought he was working up to another sob.
“You have to unclip me,” Aubrey said.
Axe groped up and down Aubrey’s sides. One carabiner snapped loose, then another, then a third, and finally the fourth, and Aubrey rolled off him, wrestled his way up into a sitting position, and looked around.
He sat on the cloud, an island of churned white cream, adrift in a vastness of serene blue. They were at one tip of a mass almost a mile long, with a great central bulge in the shape of a dome. It reminded Aubrey of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
A sense of nausea tickled the inside of his throat. His head swam.
He pressed his tingling right hand into the cloud. At first he was pushing his palm down into cool, drifting vapor. But as he sank his weight into it, the fog stiffened into a solid, with the consistency of cream cheese or maybe mashed potatoes or, really, Play-Doh. When Aubrey lifted his hand, the cloud melted back into mist.
“Fuck,” he said. For the moment it was the most sophisticated response he could manage.
“Oh, dude. Oh, God. Something is really broken inside me.”
Aubrey turned a stunned stare upon the other man, who was writhing and twisting weakly in the unsettled smoke. His heels kicked at the mist, drawing furrows in that weird, semi-solid cream. Axe’s sporty goggles—the lenses were the coppery red of a Cape Cod sunset—were smashed. He probably couldn’t see, was feeling around blindly with one hand. The GoPro camera mounted on his helmet gazed blankly and stupidly at Aubrey.
“Did I pull the chute?” Axe asked. “I musta, huh, if we’re on the ground. What happened? Did I bang my head on the side of the door going out the plane?” His voice was strained and feeble with pain. He didn’t know where they were. He didn’t understand what had happened to them.
Aubrey didn’t understand what had happened either. It was hard to think. Too much had occurred too quickly, and none of it made sense or seemed real.
Axe had not opened their chute—although the drogue chute had deployed automatically. This was a very small secondary chute, a little bucket of red-and-yellow silk, just big enough to wrap a Thanksgiving turkey. The wind pulled it out and straight back, and now it fluttered kitelike over the edge of the cloud, swerving this way and that. Aubrey wasn’t sure what a drogue chute did. Axe had tried to explain, but at the time Aubrey had been too nervous to retain any information.
It came to Aubrey that Axe wasn’t writhing and twisting after all. He wasn’t kicking his feet either. He was lying perfectly still, one arm curled over his torso, the other hand clapped to his hip. His heels were making shallow indentations in the milky paste of the cloud because the drogue chute was slowly but steadily hauling him away.
“Hey,” Aubrey said. “Hey, man, watch out.”
He grabbed the harness around Axe’s chest and tugged, and Axe shrieked in pain, a sound so piercing that Aubrey immediately recoiled and let go.
“My chest!” Axe screamed. “My fucking chest! What are you doing?”
“I just want to pull you back from the edge,” Aubrey said. He reached for the harness again, and Axe elbowed his hand aside.
“You don’t move someone who’s been in an accident, you neurotic asshole!” Axe cried. “Don’t you know anything?”
“I’m sorry.”
Axe panted for breath. His cheeks were smeared with tears.
“Edge of what?” Axe asked at last, in a miserable, almost childish voice.
At that moment the breeze rose, churning the cloud milk around them. The drogue chute swelled, lifted, and suddenly snapped straight back, jerking upward into the bright blue sky. The wind yanked all the parachute cords taut and half lifted Axe into a sitting position. The jumpmaster screamed again. His boots dragged through the rubbery, puffy cloud stuff, making trenches six inches deep. Aubrey thought again of uncooked bread, of someone sinking fingers into raw, elastic dough.
Aubrey grabbed for one of those trailing boots, caught it with his still-numb right hand. But there was no feeling in his fingers, and he held it for only a moment before it was yanked right out of his grasp.
“Edge of what?” Axe screamed as he was carried away.
The wind sucked the drogue chute up and back and took him off the edge of the cloud with a sudden whisking motion, like a maid yanking a sheet off a hotel-room bed. Axe yelped, grabbed the parachute cords rising around him. He was pulled up into the sky, about six or seven feet. Then the wind flagged, and he promptly dropped, past the cloud and out of sight.
4
THE WIND SANG, A SHRILL jeering tone, barely audible.