curses at him and then kicked him in the side and then screamed at him again. Then she turned her attention to me as she nonchalantly tossed the empty pistol to the ground.
Tabitha unzipped my flight suit and pulled it down to my waist. I was still dazed, nearly catatonic, and my chest was a wet blood-soaked deep red. Tabitha looked at both my chest and my back, then she unzipped her flight suit.
I noticed that in the clothes that Tabitha had been given there must have been a T-shirt. Why didn't I get a T- shirt, I thought? My mind could only seem to focus on unimportant and trivial things. Then she took off her T-shirt and was standing topless in front of me and I tried to focus on that. She ripped the shirt into two halves and rolled one of the halves into a tight wad. She poked her finger into the half of the T-shirt she had rolled up and then into the hole in my chest. The pain snapped me out of my catatonia for just a second or two.
'Ouch! Shit, that hurts,' I cursed.
'Hold still, damnit. You're bleeding like a stuck pig and I think one of your lungs is punctured.' She placed my hand on the bandage, causing a squishing sound, and my hand began to feel even wetter than when I coughed. 'Hold this and press down hard.'
She scrambled over to the now defunct generator and rummaged around for the duct tape. She wiggled and pulled her flight suit back over her shoulders, her breasts jiggling lightly in the sunlight as she zipped it most of the way up. I'll always remember that sight for the rest of my life, but at the time in my weakened state I was nearly numb to it, nearly.
Tabitha made a cross of duct tape over the makeshift bandage, then stepped behind me.
'Eyow shit! That hurts,' I cursed in a loud gurgling whisper and cursed again as she repeated the process to the exit wound on my back, the pain bringing me a little closer to normal consciousness.
'Hold your arms up.'
I did. She wrapped the duct tape over the bandages and around my torso several times. Then she wrapped my right shoulder with it. When she was done with my shoulder she taped the knife wound across my right oblique abdominal muscles together. Then she wrapped several times around her right thigh where Johnny had shot her earlier.
'Sorry I couldn't stop him earlier, Tabitha. But aren't you glad I asked for the duct tape? I told you that you could never have too much of it.' I gurgled again and looked at her leg.
'Stow it! We have to get out of here now!' Colonel Ames ordered.
We helped each other down the hill and to the Jump Jet. Once we fell flat on our faces and I was thrown into some sort of wheezing frenzy. I gurgled a few times and felt like I was going to drown. Tabitha dragged me to my feet and forced me to keep moving.
'You better not die on me you son of a bitch! You still owe me a wedding.' She was trying to keep my adrenaline flowing.
'Yeah, well you . . .
'You make it out of this alive and you'll get it. Whatever you want, hot shot!' She laughed. I tried to.
'Well maybe I have something to live for after all!' I said faintly.
After what seemed like fifty miles and three years, we finally covered the hundred yards or so to the airplane. We scrambled in it as best we could, which wasn't very good. Tabitha fired up the engines and we were gone.
'We have to find that helicopter Tabitha!' I wheezed and coughed blood from my mouth and nose.
'I'm already on it. Radar shows nothing,' she responded. 'Maybe I hit it when I shot at it. I don't know? Look on the ground.'
For the first time I paid attention to the area around the crash site. There were three other tornado tracks in the area. All of them stretched radially outward from the probe. One track about a quarter of a mile wide stretched southeastward, one was due east, and the third zig zagged to the north and a little northeast. Something flashed from the northeast track.
'There, northeast, Tabitha!'
Alarms sounded in the cockpit of the jet. I knew that couldn't be good. I was slammed into my seat hard.
'Hold on, Anson!' Tabitha banked the jet sideways and fired the jets full throttle, pushing us into a down and outward dive. 'Aaarrrgghh!' she grunted as we pulled straight up. The g-forces were more than I could handle in my condition. I started to tunnel out. I tried squeezing my abs and thigh muscles. I even tried grunting. It didn't help.
The stinger missile that had been fired at us from the downed helicopter zipped by the canopy not twenty feet away. Tabitha pulled us over and straight back down hard toward the ground. The missile exploded behind us. My head slammed into the left wall of the canopy. The blow brought me to more than it dazed me.
'Forget them, Tabitha! They're stranded and will go with the probe! Get out of range before they can shoot at us again.' I screamed.
'I'm trying, Anson!'
'We have to get away from the probe!' I reminded her.
'I'm trying, Anson!'
She pulled the jet nose up and climbed, then angled it over some. I was being pushed hard into my seat by the aircraft's acceleration. I could see the ground beneath us in the rearview mirror mounted in front and to the left of Tabitha. Then the mirror turned white with light.
We couldn't have been more than three miles along the surface from ground zero. Maybe we were five or six miles above it. One thing for certain is that we were too damn close.
'We're too close, Tabitha, move!'
'Hold on, Anson! If I tell you to eject, you eject!' She continued forcing the jet upward as hard as it would
