Side doors were opened for liftoff at Maury’s insistence in case something went wrong and they had to get out quickly. The twin turbine engines above and behind John were whining up, rotor picking up speed, icy-cold air whipping in around him. He looked over at Forrest and Malady, sitting opposite him. John had of course endured many a chopper flight while in the army and never liked them; more often than not he had his puke bag out within minutes. Those two, though, were grinning, Malady shouting it felt like old times; Forrest, M4 slung across his chest, raising his one hand in a thumbs-up.
They are actually enjoying this, John thought, struggling to maintain a calm outward appearance. Several hundred from the town had turned out to see them off, for this, after all, was a major event for the community, with their police chief, Ed, struggling to keep the crowd back a hundred yards. Maury might have some idea about flying, but John knew that getting a helicopter up and away safely was a hell of a lot more difficult than taking off in the L-3.
They lifted off, nose pitching high, rolling as well to starboard. He could see Danny frantically pointing at something on the dash. The chopper then lurched forward, almost nosing in, Danny cursing so loudly that John could hear it even over the roar of the engines. And throughout it all, Forrest and Malady seemed unfazed. Lee Robinson, for whom this was the very first flight, had a nervous deathlike grip on John’s shoulder and was cursing as well. Glancing out the open side door, John could see the horizon tilting at what must have been a thirty-degree angle. In a light plane at takeoff, it would surely be a stall, but Maury nosed back over and gradually like a yo-yo, going up and down, they started to gain altitude, lose it, pitch back up again, and finally, nose tilted down slightly, began to move forward, still rising up, clearing the Ingrams’ parking lot.
Maury finally managed to gain some directional control, nose pitched forward a bit more, speed relative to the ground picking up, and he spared a quick glance over his shoulder, motioning for the side doors to be closed, blocking out the frigid blast.
The flight path was shaky at first, nose oscillating back and forth as Maury gingerly worked the controls but at least was putting more distance between them and the ground.
He nudged the chopper into a northeasterly direction, dipping the nose a bit more to gain bite with the rotors and forward speed. They crossed over the Swannanoa Gap, now up five hundred feet above ground level. It was the place where the great battle with the Posse had been fought out. Looking out the portside window in the door, John could see the steep slopes around what had been the Ridgecrest Conference Center, the woods still evidently flame-scorched from the battle. They hit a burble of turbulence as they cleared the gap, while still picking up speed. Down below were the twisting turns and tunnels of the Norfolk Southern railroad, an engineering marvel of the nineteenth century, the longest and toughest mountain grade east of the Rockies that had taken half a decade of labor by thousands to traverse those eleven miles to the top of the pass. He caught a glimpse of the Meltons’ sawmill, in spite of the cold the water still flowing with enough energy to turn the wheel and the saws within, while a mile farther down was the clearing where the power dam for Old Fort and beyond was being installed, work stopped for now.
They continued to climb. Danny had handed him an old FAA aviation sectional map of their route. It would skirt along the northeast flank of the Appalachian Mountains to just south of Roanoke and then cross over the range to sweep down on the Virginia city located in the southwestern corner of the state.
With a stiff northwesterly wind still coming down into the South in the wake of the blizzard, both Maury and Billy had warned them it would be a bumpy ride, but at least on the way up, by gaining altitude up to eight thousand feet or so, the wind quartering on their tail would help whisk them to their goal and save on fuel. For the return flight, if they did not land, the flight plan was to get down low into the valley to avoid the stiff upper winds.
As they reached their cruising speed of 140 miles an hour, a mile and a half up, they were soon sweeping past the majestic sight of Linville Gorge, formerly known as “the Grand Canyon of North Carolina.” It was a flash of memory for John, who had taken Jennifer and Elizabeth on a hike all the way up to the top of Table Rock. It had been an exhausting trek, made even more memorable because of the fright all of them had due to an encounter with a rattlesnake on the way back down. Jennifer had been terrified to the point where John had to carry her the last half mile down to the car, while more adventuresome Elizabeth wanted to go poking around in the brush with a long stick to find another one.
Snakes were definitely one of the major negatives in his life, and during the previous summer, perhaps because of the radical decline in human population and snakes’ natural predators—such as possums, which some residents trapped as food—they had become a plague in the Montreat Valley. Regardless of his city-bred fears, some of the kids at the college had taken to eating them, a thought that turned John’s stomach.
As they soared over the gorge and Table Rock, he hoped all the snakes down there would freeze to death with this early winter.
They shot over Brown Mountain, that mysterious place with strange glowing lights that locals claimed were lanterns carried by long-departed native spirits, and then past the once popular tourist attraction of Grandfather Mountain, abandoned, carpeted in a deep blanket of snow.
More turbulence and then the stomach-churning scent and sound of Lee getting sick, heaving into a plastic bag, spilling some as he cursed and fumbled to try to seal it shut. Forrest and Malady, sitting across from them, chuckled at Lee’s distress, Forrest fishing into the pocket of his winter fatigue jacket, pulling out some salted beef jerky and offering it over, shouting for him to chew on it. John could not help but smile at Lee’s scatological response even though he was fighting down nausea himself. In spite of their disagreement, Makala had set out some ginger tea for John to drink before leaving, a tonic she claimed actually did work with motion sickness, and perhaps it did so at this moment.
They soon crossed over Interstate 77 up near Mount Airy, the highway twin ribbons of white, the snow-covered humps of long-abandoned cars still cluttering the road. As they passed over villages and small towns, here and there he could see a plume of smoke from a chimney. Mount Airy, which had claimed to be the role model for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, actually showed signs of life; a cluster of homes in the center of town had smoke pouring from chimneys, and a few farmhouses on the outskirts of town showed signs of life as well, with even what looked to be several horses out in a snow-covered field.
But so much of the landscape was empty, barren, devoid of life. No roads were cleared, of course, the landscape below, once teeming with life, now a vast dead world that was once bustling with the activities of man. Near the interstate, except for Mount Airy, village after village appeared to have been burned out and abandoned.
John unbuckled from his seat and, crouching low, went up forward to squat between Maury and Danny.