Loss Of Reason, Miles A. Maxwell [electronic reader txt] 📗

Franklin took one of the heavy cable eyelets in his right hand, gripped the overhead hoist bracket tubes with his left and lowered his weight onto the hoist cable. He hadn’t known what to expect until he swung through the open door. Freezing rotor wind blasted his hair.

“Okay!” he yelled.

Chuck held the hoist’s DOWN button until he was two feet below the Pelican’s body. Water ran from Franklin’s eyes. He could barely see.

With the bulk of the heavy cable harness still inside the door, Franklin pulled himself underneath, around the right streamlined wheel pontoon.

“More slack!” he waved.

Chuck dropped him down another two feet.

Mounted to the underside of the Pelican’s airframe were four metal hooks, arranged in a rectangle. Using his legs he pushed himself into a position nearly horizontal, and reached out for the closest hook with a cable eyelet.

Chuck’s head appeared over the door edge.

“A little more!” Franklin yelled.

The cable dropped him another foot. He pushed with his legs and the first eyelet clipped into place. Chuck lay on his stomach and handed him another. The next two snapped easily into their hooks. The last one would be a stretch, way out to the helicopter’s far corner.

He strained against the hoist cable, swinging his arm and missed. His feet slipped off the sponson and his weight fell straight down jerking him onto the cable.

He got hold of the fourth eyelet, scrambled using his legs to push himself back up into position. He pointed his toes. Hand reaching out, lunging away from the wheel sponson, the eyelet scraped next to the hook. He fell away swinging back and forth in the violent wind again, not knowing if he had the strength to try again.

But the cable was gone. It was hanging from the fourth hook.

He wiped the back of a gloved hand against his forehead, as Chuck shoved the rest of the heavy harness over the door edge and its cables untangled. The big hook squared into position, dangling twenty feet below.

Franklin nodded. Chuck disappeared.

The helicopter began moving sideways to a spot above the rear of the cab-less orange semi-trailer that took up most of the four inbound lanes.

Inside, Everon yelled to Chuck, “How’s that?”

“Five feet to the rear. Okay — perfect! Hold it.”

Franklin saw Chuck reappear at the doorway edge. Franklin gave him a downward point. A moment later, Franklin felt himself descend.

His feet contacted the top of the orange container with a clang. Below him on the crowded bridge deck, rotor-blade blast was whipping people’s hair, their clothes. Faces screamed up at him, people shaking fists in the air, flipping the middle finger. He had to focus.

More hoist cable came down, giving him room to maneuver.

Chuck’s head appeared. Franklin waved the hook lower. Closer! Chuck vanished in the doorway.

The helicopter descended — until Franklin was able to grab the big hook and guide it sideways. At shipyards, cranes lifted these containers off their chassis and moved them directly onto ships for transport overseas. An eye was welded at each corner. It was one of these Franklin wanted.

“Lower!” Everon heard Chuck call out. “Looks like we’re still a couple feet high.”

They were very close to the minimum altitude Everon could risk. A long row of street lights ran along the sides of the bridge. He calculated the distance: four lanes, each twelve feet wide — forty-eight feet to a side. Two sides: inbound and outbound, a little extra for the center divider — four feet maybe.

A hundred feet.

In the operating manual tucked behind the seat, the Pelican’s blades had been listed at sixty-two. Blade tips to light poles, less than twenty feet to spare on a side. Any lower, he’d be down inside them. One bad gust of wind and —

More people were being forced over the rails. His left hand made the tiniest dip in the collective.

With a CLANG! that vibrated upward, the hook went into the corner eye. Franklin clung to one of the cables.

“He’s got it!” Chuck yelled in Everon’s ear.

Okay! Everon thought. Now if we can — Gently he pulled. The whine of the turbines increased, the blade noise rising with the engine’s RPMs. He pulled the collective all the way up. The Pelican strained to rise several feet, then stopped. He waited. The effort was for nothing.

Just the rear of this trailer is too much, he thought. The Pelican can’t lift it!

“It must be full of something really heavy,” Chuck yelled.

“Stop! Stop!” Kone yelled. “You’ll kill us all!”

Down below, Franklin shook his head and waved Everon back down.

“Okay,” Everon admitted, “maybe this was a bad idea. Tell my brother to cut us loose.”

The helicopter descended enough to slack the cables. Franklin pushed the big harness hook from the trailer eye.

The helicopter rose, Franklin’s hoist cable retracting with it. It seemed people down there were giving up too. Instead of being crushed to death against the guardrails, they were deliberately jumping off the sides!

At the very moment his feet left the box’s roof, he felt hands grip his right leg. A slim woman in her thirties with wavy light hair had somehow gotten to the trailer’s top.

Cynthia!

But as the woman struggled to hold on, she looked directly into Franklin’s eyes. There was only a vague resemblance. The forehead, the nose. But not the eyes.

Franklin reached to grab her beneath an armpit. But the woman slipped, falling toward the crowd, as if diving backward onto fans in a rock concert. Her soul, Franklin thought, into those thousands of the screaming damned.

Out Of Control

“What’s he doing?” Bonnie Fisk screamed. She watched the woman fall as the air was forced from Bonnie’s chest, crushed against a thousand others. She was being slowly pushed toward the bridge’s side.

Bonnie wrenched her neck back to look at the man with long dark hair rising toward the helicopter, away from the long orange truck-trailer — as she slid another two feet toward the hole.

“Ahhhheee!” she screamed. Someone’s elbow felt like it was going right through her bladder — which reacted, unfortunately, by letting loose, wetting her size-fourteen peach knit slacks. As co-owners of Fiskmart, the sixth largest national chain of retail big box shopping marts, Bonnie and her sister Barbara were worth billions. On the GW’s upper deck today, she was no different than anyone else. Mauled and sliding, bumping, moving inexorably toward that goddamn hole.

The dark-haired man was leaving them. He was giving up. The helicopter couldn’t lift the orange trailer.

Today Bonnie had clung to only one possession. Her keys. And when the dark-haired man beneath the helicopter glanced her way, she put every bit of her considerable strength into throwing them.

They sailed in an arc. Hit him right on the neck.

He stared at her. She pointed.

At the silver container box on the other side of the bridge.

Chuck had Franklin halfway up to the Pelican when he saw Franklin wave his right hand and point. He stopped the hoist. Franklin was pointing across the bridge at another 18-wheeler that lay across the outbound lanes. The FedEx and the dumper wedged at its tail against the north bridge railing.

Chuck ducked back to Everon. “He doesn’t want to come up! He’s pointing to the rear of the silver one!”

“They’re too heavy! And that one’s got a cab on it too. Reel him in! We have to go back and tell somebody else. Maybe the military can do it.”

Chuck hesitated. “Okay.”

As Chuck Farndike went for the hoist controls, he felt a tug on his sleeve. Walter van Patter. He leaned his head in close to the billionaire’s mouth.

“What color was the first truck?”

“Orange,” Chuck answered.

“The orange ones are ocean going,” van Patter said. “They’re made of steel. The silver ones will be lighter. They’re aluminum.”

Chuck went forward and told Everon.

Everon doubted they could lift it either.

“Unless it’s empty,” Chuck said.

Manhattan, Everon knew, was mostly a consumer. Coming out of the city after a delivery somewhere like the Garment District maybe? He was sure what Franklin would say. Look at how many people are down there! Cyn could be one of them — Steve and Melissa, they could all be!

“There’s no refrigeration unit either!” Chuck told him. “It’s not a meat or fish packer. Might be coming out empty, right?”

“We tried!” Kone complained. “Now let’s get out of here!”

“Shut up!” a half dozen voices yelled back.

Everon hovered them directly over the back end of the long silver truck, keeping his blade-to-streetlight distance firmly in mind.

Dangling below the helicopter, Franklin glanced at the sky. Far to the east it looked like the dark cloud had bunched up, upper winds pushing it back into a ball. It’s reversing!

And then realized suddenly, I’m descending. They’re lowering me back down.

The soles of his shoes contacted the silver 18-wheeler’s top and registered the shaking pressure of the crowd pushing against it.

This time Everon seemed to know how long the cables were below him.

As the helicopter hovered over to the big rig’s corner, Franklin quickly pulled the hook with him, slid it into the corner eye farthest from the crowd.

He leaned into one of the lift cables to steady himself. Far east, high in the sky, the cloud vied for his attention.

It’s no longer moving away from us! It’s coming!

The mob seemed to sense it too. People pushing harder, faster. He could feel it in his feet. Pressure. The force on each person must be tremendous. No oversold sporting event has ever seen anything like this. All along the middle of the bridge people were pouring over the sides.

The Pelican began to climb. Everon could feel it in the controls. He was at the top of the lift harness now. Slowly, slowly up the long box came.

“Feels like this one’s empty!” he muttered.

A fuel feed light blinked on, glowing above his head. Power on the right turbine gauge