Free Dead Again by George Magnum Page B

rebounded, determined to make it to the cockpit, to stop Spooky from attacking again, to help stabilize the bird. But he couldn’t risk firing in this situation; he reached down and extracted his knife, knowing that would be the safest way to kill the thing that Spooky had become.
    The chopper stabilized just for a second, just long enough for Peterson to launch into action. But as he was preparing to attack, suddenly, Ishmael appeared, his pistol already drawn, and aiming right for Spooky’s face.
    “NO!” Peterson yelled.
    But it was too late. Ishmael fired.
    The bullet went right through Spooky’s temple, and chips of skull and blood splattered on the windshield. Ishmael, in his nervousness, didn’t just fire once—but kept on firing.
    Exactly what Peterson was afraid of. The bullets went right through Spooky and pierced the dash-board in several places. Within moments, the chopper reacted, jerking even more wildly than before. The controls had been hit. Alarms sounded, lights flashed, and the chopper began to spin wildly in circles and plummeted.
    Peterson turned around and grabbed Ishmael’s pistol, long and hard enough to get him to snap out of it and stop firing. As his vision spun with the choppers whirling descent, he managed to squeeze into the co-pilot seat himself, sit on top of Spooky’s dead body, and grab the controls, fighting to stabilize the bird.
    It helped. The spinning slowed. But still, there was not much he could do. They were going down. And fast.
    At least it could be a somewhat controlled crash. Peterson was able to stabilize it just enough to slow the descent speed, to make sure they didn’t land upside down.
    As he looked down, he saw the ground approaching fast. He saw a field, and leaned into the controls, aiming for it. Too fast. This wouldn’t be good. He hoped that maybe, just maybe, he could slow the bird just enough so that it wouldn’t kill all of them on impact. Death flashed before his eyes.

 
     
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
     
    Peterson braced himself, protecting his head, instinctually putting himself into crash-landing position as the ground came forward.
    It did little good. They hit with a tremendous crash, and he felt himself flip, and his back slam into the windshield. The chopper spun again and again, and his world turned upside down.
    It was complete mayhem—and the spinning never seemed to end. As Peterson’s world finally slowed just enough for him to get a glimpse, a flash, of what was happening, he saw they were on the ground, that the chopper was breaking apart, and that what was left of it was skidding on the ground.
    The chopper kept sliding, at a speed faster than any car he’d ever been in, and it didn’t seem to want to slow down. The rotors were still spinning like crazy, cutting into the ground. Peterson managed to look up, through the broken windshield, and saw what they were sliding towards. They were about to smash head-on into a   large marble statue of what looked like a Civil War general. It was absurd. At the last second, he crouched down and braced himself again.
    There was a stomach-turning crack as they slammed into it, and Peterson found himself again flying forward, and felt his head cut into a metal casing, as the wind was completely knocked out of him. He heard the screams of his fellow passengers, as bodies went flying everywhere, some on top of each other, and someone seemed to disappear out of the chopper. He heard the rotors snap, the nauseating noise of metal on metal, and the sound of the blades breaking apart and flying in every direction.
    And then, after about 30 seconds of hell on earth, all seemed to, finally, die down.
    All that was left was quiet. Deathly, unreal quiet. Peterson felt his world go black.
    *
    Peterson saw his hands bleeding as he picked berries under his father’s cruel eyes. The images flashing through his mind were dream-like, surreal. There was a scream. Just thirteen years old now, Peterson was kneeling besides