Remo had kept a close eye on these guys on the airplane and convinced himself even then that none of them were acting like executioners. They were nervous, sure—they were risking their fool necks for a huge cash prize.
But Upstairs was convinced this competition was going to be sabotaged. If Remo didn’t double-check, Upstairs would nag him about it for days, maybe weeks. Upstairs was getting to be a real kink in the keister.
“How ya doin’?” he asked the next skydiver, who went into paroxysms that were quickly halted when Remo grabbed him by the harness. Their brief talk assured Remo this man was just another nonmurderer.
“Dammit!” Remo said. ‘This is a waste of time.”
The skydiver, amazingly enough, saw something so shocking it distracted him from his unexpected visitor.
Many hundreds of feet below them, the first skydiver’s chute deployed. It was way too early. The whole point of this competition was to get to the ground in the least amount of time, so the skydivers waited until the last possible second to release their chutes.
“Hey, you’ve got one smart guy in this bunch,” Remo said, although he was already second-guessing himself. What if that skydiver was deploying early so he could gain altitude over the others and shoot them down?
But that thought vanished when the skydiver’s chute collapsed, becoming a turquoise wad of flapping nylon.
“That can’t be right,” he told his companion, then steered himself away, cutting across a quarter-mile of open air to intercept the victim of the bad parachute. The chute was causing enough drag to lift the man toward him, and Remo snatched the lines in his fist.
Remo didn’t bother asking the man for an explanation. The skydiver was already dead, with his head swollen and his eyes bulging against the transparent face mask. Trickles of steam issued from his mouth.
Another chute deployed below him and melted as Remo watched. Then another. He craned his neck, looking for the cause, but found the skies empty in all directions.
“Son of a bitch!” he told the corpse, turned it and yanked the emergency cord. The melted wad of the nylon emergency chute expanded and created more drag, and Remo allowed the corpse to fly away from him.
He had living people to worry about.
He became a raptor, or a swift, or a kite, whatever kind of bird could dive at unbelievable speeds, and below him he watched the sickly blossoming of melted parachutes one after another. The timing was consistent, exactly ten seconds between them, thanks to Remo Williams’s careful jump coordination. Now his impeccable timing helped him decide what to do.
He knew how fast he could travel, relative to the falling skydivers, and knew exactly where he could intercept them before they were hit by whatever it was that was cooking them and killing them.
He cut through the air like a red-hot knife in cold water. He was in time to save the next man, but he hadn’t been able to account for the nature of the killing weapon. The weapon had begun its work already, and the skydiver was being roasted by his overheated gear. It was the harness frame that was actually getting super hot, melting the nylon and cooking the competitors.
As he flashed by the screaming man, Remo snatched the cord for the emergency chute, which deployed at the same instant the primary chute burst open in a steaming, pungent mass. The two chutes tangled momentarily, then the emergency chute filled with air and carried the man high above Remo. The skydiver would make it to the ground without cracking up, but Remo didn’t kid himself—he’d probably be dead of his burns by then.
Remo wouldn’t allow this to distract him as he banked and steered up on an intercept course to the next skydiver, who was just starting to feel the heat. The man never saw Remo speed by, but he felt the sudden yank of the emergency chute, which carried him out of the hot zone. Remo moved on up the line, snatching rip cords until he was back to the first man in the line and the last one to jump from the aircraft.
“Hi, again,” Remo called.
The skydiver had observed Remo in action and was speechless.
“I’ll take you up on that offer now.” Getting no response, Remo took it upon himself to buckle himself to the back of the skydiver, below the main chute, and reached around, yanking the cord.
He allowed his body to flow with the sudden jolt of deceleration as the canopy billowed above them, then he waited.
The smoking corpses of the first jumpers fluttered farther and farther below them on their ruined chutes.
Minutes later, Remo and his companion descended into the hot zone, but nothing happened. Below them the first jumpers began hitting the grassy plains of Montana with small bursts of dust. Remo was relieved to see that he had saved some lives. The jumpers he got to before they descended into the hot zone looked okay. The skydivers who left the plane first were hitting the ground like sacks of charred potatoes.
“Is extreme competitive HALO skydiving always this extreme?” Remo called up, making conversation.
