Generation M (19 page)

Maggie called out their altitude in increments of five-hundred feet. “One thousand. Fifteen hundred. Two thousand.”

The plane buffeted when they entered the clouds. “Twenty-five hundred. Three thousand.”

Still in the clouds at four-thousand feet, Abby tightened her seatbelt and cried out from the increase of pressure on her stomach. She unbuckled the belt, fearing she would pass out from the pain.

After climbing another five-hundred feet, they burst into the clear with a starry sky above. From moonlight reflecting off the tops of clouds, a brilliant sea of white stretched out before them in all directions. The ride was so smooth, it felt as if they had stopped and were suspended.

Maggie climbed to ten-thousand feet, and Mark spotted it first. Up ahead, what started as a tiny rip in the clouds spread wider, and in the dark gap, skyscrapers poked up like little matchsticks.

Abby’s optimism shattered into shards of dread as the whistle of wind replaced the growling vibration.

The engine had quit.

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

“We can make it,” Maggie said. “I think.”

“What’s the glide ratio of this plane?” Mark asked in a shaky voice.

“Five to one,” Maggie said.

“So, if our altitude is one mile, we can glide about five miles?” Mark said.

“That’s right,” the pilot replied. “We’re at nine thousand five hundred now. We can go almost ten miles.”

“That might do it,” Mark said.

Abby loosely buckled her seat belt and pressed closer to Toby. His arm was around her shoulder, and he pulled her even closer. She started to speak, but her voice choked.

She took a breath to settle herself and said, “If something happens to me, find Touk and Jordan. Then all of you should go to Mandy’s cabin in Maine. You’ll be safe there.”

Toby leaned back with a scowl. “Are you giving up?”

She was not giving up. She was being realistic. “Please, promise me.”

Toby’s scowl deepened, and he muttered angrily. “Stop it. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

His scowl and angry tone were the result of his fear, Abby realized. Toby was as fearful of losing her as she was of losing him and never seeing Touk and Jordan again.

“Four thousand,” Maggie said.

Abby sat up and saw the skyscrapers had quadrupled in height. The plane was skimming the creamy cloud tops, taking aim for the break in the clouds ahead.

Toby joined Mark in peering out the window, looking for a place to touch down.

“Three thousand five hundred. Three thousand. Two thousand five hundred …”

Abby felt that her heart was going that many beats per minute.

“Emory Campus,” Mark called, pointing to the right. “That’s Atlanta Colony.”

The site glowed with electric lights. Toucan was there, unaware her sister was soaring silently through the night sky right above her.

“Two thousand. Fifteen hundred. A thousand feet.”

With every foot they dropped in altitude, it seemed like time sped up. Moonlight revealed that every major road was clogged with trucks and cars.

“Can you land in water?” Toby asked, nose pressed against the window.

“That’s the Chattahoochee River,” Mark said. “It has rapids and rocks.”

They flew past the inviting, but deadly river.

“Five hundred feet,” Maggie called out in a strained voice.

“Let’s shoot for Olympic Park,” Mark shouted. “It’s near the center of the city. There’s lots of open space. It’s right up ahead.”

“We’re too high,” Maggie said. “Hold on.”

The left wing tip dipped violently, and the plane seemed to drop straight down. Just as suddenly, Maggie leveled the wings, ending the rapid descent.

Ahead, Olympic Park had trees growing on the right and left, and miraculously, the open field before them appeared to be free of kids and obstacles.

“It doesn’t look level,” Maggie said.

“Piece of cake,” Mark said in a shaky voice.

Abby gripped Toby’s hand, and he gripped harder. A blur of buildings out the side window indicated how fast they were going.

Maggie came in for a perfect landing in an open field of tall grass in the middle of Atlanta. What sounded like a cloud of bugs striking the windshield were the wheels grazing the tall grass.

The plane cartwheeled. There was a loud bang and crunch of metal as the nose struck the ground. A flash of pain from the vicious pull of the belt against her lap blinded Abby for a moment.

The ripping of metal and tumbling lessened, and the shouting ended as soon as the plane came to rest. Abby realized that in the stillness, she alone was crying out.

In Unit 2A, Lisette waited in line for Mother to inspect the contents of her backpack. Molly, Lydia, and Zoe were ahead of her in line, holding their packs.

Excitement crackled in the air as all the girls were scrambling to collect their belongings. This morning, they were going on a trip to the CDC bunker. Mother had said that Generation M would stay there for a while. More exciting to Lisette, she would get to ride on a bus.

“On the double, ladies,” Murph barked. The Petty Officer stood by the monitoring station with hands on hips. “Remember, just two uniforms. If I find anyone has three, I will be very distressed. That is the word of the day. D-I-S-T-R-E-S-S-E-D. Does anyone know what it means?”

Zoe raised her hand. “You’ll wear a dress?”

“Nope. Anyone else?”

“You will be unhappy,” Lisette shouted.

“Very good,” Murph said. “I will be quite unhappy if you pack more than two uniforms. Thank you, Miss Leigh.”

Lisette grinned.

Ahead of her in line, Mother inspected Molly’s pack, removing the items one by one. A toothbrush, a hairbrush, underwear, iPod, and two uniforms.

“What’s this?” Mother asked, crinkling her forehead. She held up a crumpled piece of paper.

Molly looked down. “The duck.”

“I’m sorry, Molly, but Captain Mathews said everyone must bring essential items only. Then Mother cracked a small smile. “I know how fun the Duck Game is. I’ll bring it in my pack.”

Mother repacked the bag and sent Molly to the other line of girls eagerly waiting to go out to the bus.

Mother peered into Lisette’s pack and took out a hairbrush. “Do you need a brush?” she asked.

Lisette ran her hand over the stubble on her scalp. “All the girls are bringing brushes.”

Mother smiled with sad eyes and returned the brush to her pack. “You can keep it. Hurry up and get in line.”

In the new line, Lisette received five offers from girls wanting to sit with her on the bus, but she felt sorry for Tabby, one of the girls who had just arrived from Colony East. Tabby didn’t have any good friends yet.

Lisette walked up to her. “Can I sit with you?”

Tabby’s face lit up.

When the line moved, Lisette took Tabby’s hand, and they stepped outside together. The boys from Unit 2B were already climbing into their blue bus.

Black material covered the bus’s windows and half the windshield. When the girls around Lisette started complaining that they wouldn’t be able to look out the windows, she announced loudly, “I bet the bunker has a big play area. The scientists want it to be a surprise.”

Grumbles turned into giggles.

The plane was upside down, and Abby was stuck, unable to unbuckle her seatbelt. She had to pull herself up to lessen the pressure on the strap, but she was too weak and had given up after several futile attempts.

Only she and Maggie were conscious. Maggie had managed to unbuckle her belt, but she couldn’t move from the pilot’s seat; she was pinned in place by the crumpled instrument panel.

“Toby,” Abby called and squeezed his hand.

Even though Toby was unconscious, she prayed he could hear her voice. Earlier, he had lightly squeezed her hand, though Abby wondered if she had imagined it.

The warmth of his hand and the steadiness of his pulse, which she felt by pressing her fingertips against his neck, kept her hope alive.

“How’s Mark?” Abby asked.

Since Maggie had regained consciousness, the two of them kept speaking to each other, mostly about the condition of Mark and Toby.

Maggie’s voice came out of the darkness. “His skin is cold.”

“Can you hear him breathing?”

A long pause. “No.”

Abby shuddered from a frigid ache in her chest. Her heart already fluttered from fighting gravity, as it struggled to pump the blood pooling in her head, and Mark’s death was a crushing blow. He had found his daughter, Sarah, saving her from the Pig, and now she would be twice orphaned. Abby also wondered how she, Maggie, and Toby, should he recover, would find Atlanta Colony or the pill plant. How would they even get out of the plane? Abby swallowed a sob. There would time for crying later. Still, tears blurred her vision and dribbled through her eyebrows and down her forehead.

Mark grunted.

Abby lurched in shock and then flushed with relief.

“Mark,” Maggie cried. “Mark.”

He didn’t respond.

“I can hear him breathing.”

“Keep talking to him,” Abby said and did the same for Toby. She had to let him know she was there for him.

As the sky lightened, Abby saw they were upside down in a forest of grass. Enough light filtered through the grassy curtain to inspect the injured.

“Is there any blood on Mark?” Abby asked.

From her position in the backseat of the plane, she could not see any open wounds or blood on him.

Abby was checking Toby’s legs for wounds when Maggie reported that she didn’t see or feel any blood on Mark.

A face appeared in the window. Abby had expected kids to be curious about a flipped-over airplane in Olympic Park, but the hollow-cheeked boy startled her nevertheless. He was on his hands and knees, looking at her sideways.

“One of them is dead,” the boy said.

“No,” Abby croaked. “Everyone is alive. We need help.”

She heard other voices nearby.

“Do you have food?” the boy asked.

Loud banging startled her. It sounded like a rock striking metal. The fuselage shifted slightly with each bang, and she realized the kids were breaking into the cargo area.

“Yes, we have food. We’ll give you some. Open the door and help us out.”

The banging stopped, and the boy stood. Abby saw his knobby knees in the tall grass for only a second before he walked out of sight. After a period of silence, she knew the kids had taken their food and left.

She and Maggie resumed their efforts to resuscitate Toby and Mark with words and hand squeezes.

A thought crawled into Abby’s mind, which she brushed aside, but it popped back, sharper and more detailed, and she forcefully expelled it again with a jagged grunt, but it quickly consumed her, filling her head the way the rising sun was flooding the interior of the plane with light. Abby would outlive Toby and Mark and then die from the Pig, the three of them hanging upside down, leaving Maggie as the sole survivor, pinned in her pilot’s seat.

The persistent image spread throughout Abby like poison, withering her vocal cords, but she kept squeezing Toby’s hand.

Sometime later, he groaned and shook violently. The spasm passed quickly, and he blinked and groaned more.

Abby mumbled, “Toby.”

He opened his eyes. “Where are we? What happened?” His brow crinkled. “Oh. We’re in Atlanta. We crashed.”

Maggie explained that she and Abby were stuck, and Mark was seriously injured.

“My head is pounding,” Toby said with confusion in his eyes. “I got to get out. I’ll get all of us out.”

He unbuckled his belt and fell from his seat.

“My head!” he cried.

When he couldn’t open the door, he elbowed the window until the plastic popped out. Then, grunting and groaning, he wriggled his body inch by inch through the opening. He stood, and Abby saw him immediately topple into the tall grass.

A moment later, he opened the door on Abby’s side, undid her buckle, and tried his best to cushion her fall.

Abby had entered a new realm of pain. It was a constant. Breathing hurt. Doing nothing hurt. Toby dragging her from the plane hurt. The blades of grass where she lay hurt her skin. Her body was nothing but pain.

She slowly got to her feet. Toby stared into the distance.

“Open your eyes and look at me,” she told him, gripping his arm to remain upright. One of Toby’s pupils was a black pinpoint, the other a saucer with a larger diameter. “You have a concussion.”

She looked around. They were in the middle of the park with a cluster of tall buildings, many of them burned-out shells, on the right. No one was around to help them.

“We have to get Maggie out,” she said.

Toby managed to yank the pilot’s door open, and Abby stepped in to help him, but he waved her off, so she went to Mark’s side of the plane. That door opened easily. Mark’s head lolled to one side, and his forehead felt cold, but Abby figured she couldn’t correctly gauge his temperature because of her own fever. She pried open an eyelid and saw only the white of his eye.

Toby had pulled Maggie out of the cockpit, and the two of them joined Abby. They discussed the risk of moving Mark. If he had a spinal cord injury, they might paralyze him, but they quickly agreed that not moving him would result in his eventual death anyway.

Mark weighed a ton, and they pulled and tugged him as gently as they could until he was mostly on the ground. They grabbed his wrist and pulled him away from the plane.

“There’s an adult over there,” someone shouted.

Kids appeared from around the perimeter of the park, leading Abby to believe they had been watching them all this time. About thirty feet away, a small group swelled into a crowd, with more approaching as word of the adult sighting spread.

Toby removed Mark’s pack from the cockpit and then retrieved the gun that William had given him.

Abby gasped. “What are you doing?”

“We need a car,” Toby said.

She watched in dread as he stumbled dizzily toward the crowd.

“Abby, help me.” Maggie held Mark’s head up. “He needs something under his head.”

Right after she had positioned the pouch as a pillow, Abby jumped from the loud crack of a gun ripping through the air. She turned just as Toby fired a second shot at the sky.