‘You’re the one who jumped from a fucking chopper!’
Twenty—
Eddie let go. Even with his legs bent to absorb the impact, he hit hard, rolling uncontrollably before bouncing to a stop in a cloud of dust.
Nina whisked past overhead, wailing ‘Oh shiiiiiit!’ as she was carried helplessly down. At the last moment, she remembered what Eddie had said and twisted sideways. Her feet scraped through the sand – then she slammed down like a toppling tree. The parachute flopped on top of her like a shroud.
Groaning, Eddie slowly tried to get up, discovering numerous new sources of pain throughout his body. No bones seemed to be broken, to his relief, although his already injured leg now hurt worse than ever. Wobbling, he stood and dizzily surveyed his surroundings. The black plume from the volcano rose into the sky on the northwestern horizon; much closer was another, smaller column of smoke.
He knew what it marked, resolving to investigate, but completed his turn. The helicopter was about half a mile away to the west, slowly heading towards him. On the ground, the parachute wobbled in the wind like a beached jellyfish. He limped towards it. ‘Nina? Nina! Are you okay?’
‘No, I’m dead,’ came the weak reply. He pulled the entangling sheet and cords aside to find Nina sprawled face-down in the sand. ‘I must be dead. We couldn’t have survived that. Could we?’
‘Well, I’m alive, more or less – and like you said, we stay together, so you must be too.’ He quickly checked her for obvious signs of injury, finding nothing beyond plentiful cuts and grazes.
She sat up and blew sand off her face, giving him a pained smile. ‘Wow. So we actually made it.’
‘Yeah, we did.’ He kissed her – then they both recoiled.
‘Ow,’ said Nina, putting a hand to her face and finding it bruised and swollen. ‘My lips hurt.’
‘My everything hurts,’ Eddie complained. ‘Think you can stand?’
‘I’ll try.’ Grunting, he helped her up. Nina winced at a sharp pain in her ankles; her touchdown had been far from soft. ‘Oh, crap.’
‘What?’
‘I just realised, we’re still sixty miles from town in the middle of a desert. And I’m really not up to walking all that way.’
Eddie jerked a thumb towards the approaching helicopter. ‘We’ve still got a ride.’
Nina regarded it in relief. ‘I guess Larry’s okay, then – shit!’ She looked round in alarm. ‘What about Sophia?’
He indicated the nearby smoke. ‘I know where she is. Let’s take a gander.’ Supporting each other as best they could, they hobbled towards it.
A little impact crater came into view, the smouldering line rising from the charred remains of a parachute backpack atop a broken, huddled shape within. Jagged spikes of broken bone jutted out from ruptured flesh. Splashed across the surrounding sand was an oozing starburst of dark red. ‘Well,’ said Nina after a long silence. ‘I guess she’s finally dead.’
Eddie had been through the experience of believing his ex-wife to be deceased twice before; this time, he was almost out of sympathy. Almost. He moved closer, pulling what remained of the parachute over the mangled body. ‘Goodbye, Soph,’ he said, then paused for a moment before reaching down.
Nina cringed in revulsion as he picked something up from amongst the viscera. ‘Eddie, what the hell?’
‘Thought we should take care of this,’ he said, limping back to her. In his hand was the piece of meteorite Sophia had taken from the Temple of the Gods. ‘What do you want to do with it?’
Nina considered the question. The chunk of purple stone contained within it the secrets of earth energy, the untold history of all life on the planet, and potentially more besides. But . . .
She still didn’t believe that there were things man was not meant to know. But there were things man was not meant to have. This was one of them. ‘Get rid of it,’ she finally said.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah.’ She watched as he turned and threw the stone with all his remaining strength into the empty wilderness. It landed with a puff of dust amongst other nondescript rocks, half buried already; in time, it would be completely lost.
‘So that’s it?’ Eddie asked.
She nodded. ‘Earth energy, the meteorite, the Group, Stikes, Sophia . . . they’re all gone. Finished.’
‘Thank fuck for that. Now we can take a break.’ He gave her an exhausted smile and put his arms round her.