novelraw Chapter 197: On To The Next -
Chapter 197: On To The Next -
The leader jerked his chin. Agreement.
They lifted Zubair first.
Two at the shoulders. One at the legs.
Weight turned into geometry and moved through the door.
The man had arranged rooms for siege. Wide paths. Clear lines. He had not arranged them to fight his own floors.
Elias was next. He was the lightest. Head angled so the hood would not catch on the door frame. Hands tucked in. Feet cleared. Down the hall. Down the stairs. Soft boots on wood. No talk.
Lachlan followed with a grunt from the soldier at his feet. Strength clings even when a body is empty of command. They moved him with care like men who respected mass because they had had it hit them before.
Alexei was the last of the four. A laugh escaped the soldier at his shoulders when the dead weight fooled him with a quick drop. He caught it and swore once under his breath. Noah didn’t smile.
The floor shook again. Stronger this time. The sound arrived. A low thrum that built inside the walls and then pressed down on the air like a hand.
More helicopters.
Noah untied the blanket under Luci’s jaw and lifted the wolf with both arms the way a man lifts a child who weighed as much as a man.
The wolf’s tongue had slipped out a fraction. Noah eased it back inside with the side of his thumb so it wouldn’t dry and crack. He laid the wolf across the rolled tarps by the door.
Sera still watched nothing.
He stood in front of her and measured the knots in his head again.
He cinched the wrist tie a half-inch tighter and checked the blood return to make sure fingers would not numb before the birds found altitude.
He tied the ankles with the same double-cross he used on the others. He slid the hood down.
Fabric shadowed her features and took the light.
He left her mouth free.
"Lift," the leader told the two nearest.
They took Sera at shoulders and knees. She weighed next to nothing and it was easy to carry her between the two of them. The hood turned her into cargo the way hoods always do.
Noah picked up Luci and followed.
The corridor’s cold bit the sweat he hadn’t made.
Boots rang once on a metal landing and then went quiet on rubber mat.
The stairwell breathed its own air, wet and iron and old. A door opened to the service roof and the world pushed in. Wind knifed, then flattened against parkas and gear.
Both helicopters crouched like insects on the metal skin of the building.
Rotors blurred the snow into a fine mist that turned the air white. Men jogged low between the skids with stretchers. Straps flapped like tongues. One crewman pointed at the belly bay and another at the tail as if anyone needed to be told where to go.
They laid Zubair into the nearest stretcher and pulled straps across chest and legs.
Elias was next. Lachlan required two extra hands, not because he fought but because he weighed that much. Alexei went in with a small correction at the shoulder from a medic who had learned the hard way how not to pinch nerves.
Hoods stayed on.
The hands remained bound.
"Two per bird," a crewman barked through his mask. "We’re heavy with fuel."
"Wolf," Noah told him. He laid Luci across the floor space at the rear bulkhead and ran a strap over the ribcage and behind the forelegs. He tucked a folded tarp under the jaw again to keep it still.
Sera was brought in last.
The crew took her without question now that the line had been spoken and the room had accepted it. They placed her across the second stretcher and buckled four points down.
Noah bent to check the strap at her hip, more habit than care. The hood did its work. She looked small.
"Go," the leader signaled.
The engines climbed. Skids lifted an inch, then three, then nothing touched. The first helicopter eased up and over the lip of the roof and vanished into white like a fish sliding into deep water. Snow chased its belly and then forgot it.
Noah climbed into the second and sat on the jump seat with one hand on the strap that crossed Luci. The leader took the space opposite and checked his men with two quick glances.
No one spoke.
Voices turn into work when engines howl like this and orders have already been given.
The tower fell away in the side window. Floors turned into stripes. Windows into stacked coins of dull light. The roof slid out from under them. The city tilted, then straightened. The pilot dipped the nose and found clean air below the worst of the wind.
Noah took the sat phone out once more and pressed the single number. The line connected under the noise.
"Package is airborne," he reported.
"On approach vector," the voice returned. "ETA to handoff, twenty-two."
"Alive," Noah confirmed.
"Good."
The word landed like a stamp.
He turned the phone off again and tucked it away.
He watched Sera’s chest rise and fall under the straps.
He watched the muscles in Lachlan’s jaw shift once in a dream he would not remember.
He watched Zubair’s fingers flex against plastic and go still. Elias’s mouth moved as though a sentence had found him across a wall. Alexei smiled again, a flash and gone.
The helicopter hit a vein of rough air and kicked. The men braced without thought.
The medic leaned over Elias to tighten a strap one notch and patted it once as if the strap could feel.
Noah looked past them to the white line of the horizon where the world had ended last year and stayed ended.
He pictured the island city at the top of the map, the ring of buildings that held the people who still used titles, the clean rooms where Dr. Orhan stood and did the work that made her visible to them.
He pictured her eyes when he walked in.
The bird banked left.
The rotor wash picked up and the storm flattened beneath them like fabric smoothed under a palm. The pilot’s visor tilted to the instruments. The leader checked the bay door latches with a quick tug.
Noah kept one hand on the wolf’s strap and the other on the jump seat. The sedative did its work. The engines did theirs. The tower turned into a gray tooth behind them and then into nothing at all.
They climbed into the weather and did not come out.
Now it was time to move on to the next Chapter of his life.
A life with Dr. Orhan.