Page 19 of Badd B*tch

"Don't…fucking…move,” she muttered, her eyes darting around, taking in our situation.

I stopped breathing. Turned my head cautiously to look out the right window—we were suspended fifty feet above the ground, wedged between the trunks of a massive pair of pines.

Chapter 4

Tea

A loud creak of metal on wood told me that we were not wedged in very tightly at all, and that we would be falling the rest of the way to earth very shortly indeed.

"What the fuck do we do now, Tea?" Jax asked, murmuring quietly, as if we were in a cathedral.

I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure yet. I closed my eyes and focused on keeping my pulse steady and my breathing slow. Jax was admirably calm, and I had to stay calm so he would. I was the professional here, after all, the one who'd been through shit like this before.

Moving slowly and carefully, I looked around and assessed our situation. The only way out was through the opening where the windscreen had been, but that left us clinging to tree trunks fifty feet up. These were mammoth old-growth pines, and the branches stopped not far below us. That meant if we tried to climb out, we’d still be stranded a few dozen feet above the ground, with a multi-ton aircraft suspended above us.

"Tea?" Jax kept his voice low, as if being too loud would dislodge us. "Plan?"

CREEEEEAAAAAAKKKK…

“Hold the fuck on," I snapped. "There is no plan. We can't climb out without dislodging it. We're being held in place by a couple of toothpicks, and they’re about to break.”

Another loud creak of tortured metal—silence—a louder creak; this one was accompanied by a sickening downward lurch.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuck." Jax was white-knuckling the straps of his harness. "Don't like don't like don't like."

"Yeah, because I'm having the time of my fucking life here," I snarled. I heard myself, but had no control over what was coming out of my mouth; I let out a sharp breath and tried to contain my panic-induced bad attitude. "It's a relatively short drop. Just…just hold on. If you're a praying man, now would be the time."

"Ah yes, thoughts and prayers. How helpful."

Whatever snarky, bitchy comment I may have considered making in response was snatched right off my tongue when the tree on my left side snapped sideways with a concussion like a salvo from a Mark 45 on an Arleigh-Burke, and then the one on the right followed suit a split second later, the trunks no longer able to hold our weight. When the trunks snapped, we plummeted. They bellied outward, snapping away from the helicopter, the upper halves crossing like scissor blades inches from the nose of the helo, the bottom halves tilting away from the body. This was the best-case scenario, as far as I could discern in the split seconds I had to assess it—we dropped straight down, my heart hurtling up to a knot in my throat. I braced hard, feet pressing into the floor and my hands pushing the controls forward, chin to my chest; out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jax doing the same.

And then we hit.

White light shattered through me as we crashed the forest floor with an impact that shook the trees around us and set them swaying, jarring us with shocking violence.

Dizzy, I blinked hard a few times, but my vision was occluded by something wet and sticky and hot. I heard a groan beside me.

"Jax?" It came out hoarse and weak.

"Fuck." He didn't sound much better.

"Status report." Old habits die hard, especially in shit like this.

“Ow."

"Are you injured?" I wiped at my eyes, and my hand came away red; my skull throbbed, the pulsing pain focused on my forehead near my left temple; I was a little dizzy but didn't think I was too badly concussed.

“Head hurts,” he answered, “but if I have a concussion, it’s mild and nothing to worry about. You?"

"Same."

"Nothing broken?" he asked.

"Not that I can tell. You?"

I glanced at him and watched him twist and stretch, testing himself. "Nah, just bruised and sore." A pause. "This isn't gonna spontaneously explode or anything?"

"Shouldn't. Nothing smoking or sparking." I keyed the PTT button on the cyclic. "Mayday, mayday, mayday—" I stopped there, though, because it was obvious we weren’t transmitting. "Shit. Radio's dead."