Twelve years later, over a U.S. Army airfield in New Jersey, a squadron of planes sand in unison through the sky. Rick was in the lead plane, and Daryl flew the plane just off his right wing. They were fighter planes, but America was not at war. It was January 1941.
The world had changed a great deal in those twelve years, though most of those changes seemed to have taken place across the seas. A man named Adolf Hitler had taken control of Germany, and many people around the world, including the great American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, looked across the Atlantic and saw the changes as good. Hitler reorganized his country after the chaos of the Great War, the War to End All Wars as the newspaper had called it, and now Germany was full of energy and motivation. Some people—a majority in non-German Europe, a minority in America—found themselves troubled about where those motivations were aimed, especially as Hitler raised great armies, and launched the production of massive supplies of new weapons.
Hitler was not the only one to do so. Across the Pacific, as far from America as it was possible to get on the surface of the planet Earth, the Japanese had begun building their own empire, encroaching on their neighbors.
Instead of opposing the efforts of these nations to build up their ability to make war, America had, in general, assisted them. Japan could not function without oil, and the Unites States remained its prime supplier. For years, Japan had bought every piece of scrap metal it could find, and again America, hungry for cash in the years of the Great Depression, had been its best source. In rural communities, one of the simplest methods of raising spending money was to collect the discarded pieces of broken equipment that seemed to be lying around every farm and haul them to scrap yards in town, where somebody was always ready to buy.
Rick and Daryl had even gone into that business themselves for a while. They had stopped it after the day they'd returned to Rick's family's farm, where Daryl now lived too, and had shown Rick's grandfather, rocking on the front porch, the hard money they'd just received. His grandfather had sat in silence, listening to them exult with the success of their private enterprise and the plans of what they might buy, having the first discretionary money of their lives; finally Grandpa Grimes spit a long stream of tobacco juice and said, "Boys, when they start turning that metal into shrapnel and them plow tips start whistlin' by your ears, you ain't gonna be so happy you made that money."
Daryl's father, dead now, had lost his arm to shrapnel, and after Grandpa Grimes's comments, the boys knew they'd either have to find another way to make spending money or do without it, and since there was no other way, they did without it.
But only for a while. They found something else that paid them, something they loved so much, they would have paid to do it: crop-dusting. With the help of Rick's father, they scavenged an entire set of parts and built a second plane for the family business, and the only fights they ever had were over whose turn it was to fly.
Then they discovered the United States Army Air Corps, and life took on a new significance. Now it was Lieutenant Rick Grimes and Lieutenant Daryl Dixon in the cockpits of two planes at the head of a squadron cutting through the sky over the New Jersey airbase, as the Training Captain radioed instructions from the ground: "Grimes, Dixon, loosen up that formation!"
"You said tighten up," Grimes's voice came back to him, and even over the tinniness of the radio, it had its distinctive quality; when Grimes was in the air, he always sounded like he was laughing. "Didn't he say tighten up, Daryl?"
"He said tighten up," Dixon's voice, and the Training Captain would've sworn the tips of their two planes, already a yard apart, moved to within a foot of each other.
"Not that tight!" the Training Captain barked. He loved those two guys; there was nothing like the brimming confidence in a pilot, as long as he could back it up with skill, and these two Georgia boys had shown up on the first day of Cadet School with as much flying skill and far more natural potential than any of the instructors who were supposed to be teaching them. If the Army Air Corps had been training more young pilots, and there weren't too many older ones with nothing else to do, the runny nosed hotshots would've been instructors themselves. The Training Captain had rank, but on an air base for fighter pilots, nothing gives a man more power than his courage and skill, especially if it's a base run by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. Still, the T.C. liked the two young bucks. Cocky as they were, they retained the inherent politeness of Georgia boys.
Grimes, in the point plane, led the squadron in a fast turn, and the T.C. watched the maneuver in admiration, the eight other pilots in the group following with more skill and assurance than ever. It was as if Grimes and Dixon cut grooves through the air for them, trailing excitement in their wake, and the other guys sucked it into their intakes and poured it out through their own exhaust manifolds. "That'll do," the Training Captain radioed, "let's bring 'em in."
The P-40's, the Army Air Corps' best fighters, began landing in tight order. They taxied off the runway right beside where the Training Captain stood, shut down their engines, slid back their canopies with flourish, and hopped out, full of life and adrenaline. If I had half their energy, the T.S. thought, I'd own half the world. Then he noticed the planes had stopped landing, but they were two P-40's short. He didn't have to check off faces to know which two they were. "Where are Grimes and Dixon?" he asked.
Then he saw the two planes in the air; they'd circled to opposite ends of the airfield and were now headed directly at each other, like two bullets playing chicken.
"Aw no…" the Training Captain muttered, as all the young pilots looked skyward.
From inside the cockpits, where Rick and Daryl steadily pressed the throttles forward and felt the steady surge in speed and watched the two planes closing on each other at double the rate either plane could fly, the rushing excitement was awesome.
The pilots on the ground watched speechlessly as the P-40's hurtled at each other. Glenn William Rhee, nicknamed Billy the Kid because he was the most boyish-faced of the pilots, looked in rising panic at his best friends; as the planes drew so close they couldn't possibly get out of each other's way, Glenn screamed to drown out the sound of the collision.
Twenty feet above their heads, the planes came together, and at the last instant—when it seemed to onlookers that the planes had already hit—the two P-40's each snapped a quarter turn so that their wings were vertical, and shot past each other belly to belly. The wind blasted the clothes of the men on the ground, blew their hats from their heads, as if they stood in the vortex of a passing hurricane.
In the cockpits, Rick and Daryl exploded in laughter, their planes racing away from each other as fast as they'd closed, their hearts sharing the same trill, the timeless pleasure of living totally in the present. Daryl accepted the moment in silent serenity, letting the plane soar on its own, rising like a still hawk on the wind; Rick celebrated his own enjoyment by spinning his plane like a corkscrew before jerking his stick straight up, as if to punch through the gravity of the earth and sail unfettered toward the stars. On the ground, the other pilots laughed and congratulated each other, as if they too were in the cockpits.
The Training Captain let his cap land on the ground near his feet before he said anything. Then all he could mutter was, "Dammit! Those guys are a menace to national security."
Martinez, a slender Mexican from a Brooklynn neighborhood, picked up the Captain's hat and handed it to him, smiling. "You know what they say, Captain. You can take the crop duster out of the country—but don't put him in a P-40.
Daryl landed and taxied his plane over to join the others, shutting down the engine before he'd stopped rolling. He slid back the cockpit cover and raked the leather helmet off his head, his chestnut hair popping up, full and youthful, his teeth movie-star luminous as he grinned at his friends. He'd unbuckled the seatbelt and was halfway out of the cockpit when he looked around and said "Where's Rick?"
Abraham, nicknamed red because of his bright hair, tipped his head toward the sky, where Rick's plane was climbing in a slow, deliberate spiral, up and up.
"I said get down here, Grimes!" the Training Captain barked into the radio. But he was answered by a burst of static and the suspiciously garbled words, "…-Can't hear you. Repeat?"
Daryl swore beneath his breath and bounced back into his seat; he was starting to refasten his harness when the T.C. snapped, "You're down, Dixon! That's an order!"
"What about him?" Daryl asked, climbing out and following the spiral of Rick's plane, up and up.
"He's not taking my orders anymore," the T.C. said, almost to himself.
Daryl was about to ask him what the hell he meant by that, when he noticed Rick leveling off and setting the plane into a firm and engine-steadying speed, like a rider gathering a horse before a dangerous jump. "He's gonna do it," Daryl said.
"Do what?" Glenn wondered.
"It." Rick's plane was a speck above them, and for a moment it seemed to pause in the air.
"What it?" Glenn asked, with Abraham and Martinez frowning the same question at Daryl.
"The outside loop." For years it had been the holy grail of aviation, a stunt attempted by test pilots and barnstormers alike, leaving splattered remains incinerated in burning fuel. It had been first achieved but a few years before—by the very Colonel Jimmy Doolittle who now commanded this airbase. Since then others had tried it. A few had succeeded. The other's had died. In a normal or inside loop, the pilot simply pulled back on the control stick and let the nose of the plane rise until the whole aircraft fell over like a kid doing a backflip off a boat dock. The plane's momentum and inherent aerodynamics made the maneuver feel natural and almost self-correcting; it had been done for decades, and was a commonplace. The outside loop was another story. Once a pilot pushed a plane into its maximum dive and then tried to complete a circle with the cockpit on the outside rather than the inside of the loop, he could not see the ground rushing up and had to trust his life to his instincts and skill at a time when everything worked against him; it was death or glory, with no-in-between.
"Oh no," the T.C. said. "Oh no. Oh no…"
Martinez and Glenn joined in, chanting with him, as they felt their insides congeal like cold piss around their hearts. "Oh no. Oh no. Oh no…"
Rick, in his cockpit, took a deep slow breath and found that place within himself where he had learned to go in times of stress and danger; it was very near that inner place he had always gone to when he felt isolated, scorned for being different, persecuted for his errors in the classroom, the same spot he'd withdrawn to when Shane Walsh had held up his paper for ridicule. This place of calm and commitment had pain nearby, and anger, and determination, as well as a dragon's breath of fear, blasting like a blow torch, and when at the center of his spirit Rick could draw the energy from the emotions, but they did not pollute the purity of his instincts or the clarity of his goals. Do it were the only words involved in the experience, and they were subliminal, like the echo of a dream, rather than a sound in his mind. Once he'd made the choice to do something—and he had envisioned what he was about to do, long before this moment—his body began to move without his mind needing to send it verbal instructions. As now… when his left hand moved to the throttles and pushed them steadily forward, as his right hand shifted the stick toward the nose and the horizon rose and the earth loomed before him.
Power dive.
The P-40 screamed toward the ground, hurtling down under full power, he was going faster than the plane was designed to go, and an orchestra of physical forces began to vibrate and then shake the plane. The buffeting could slow him down, but he needed every shred of speed possible; he backed the throttles just enough to ease the shuddering of his fuselage, and kept dropping, faster and faster.
Down on the ground, Daryl whispered like a prayer, "You can do it, Rick. You can do it."
The P-40, hurtling toward the ground at nauseating speed, snapped into a half roll, streaking upside down over the runway. Rick, experiencing more g-forces than the human body was designed to take, hung inverted in his harness, the asphalt of the runway shooting past, ten feet beyond his head. None of the men on the runway had ever seen any object travel that fast before. Bullets were swifter, but those you couldn't see; the P-4 was a screaming flash of engine and wind.
Rick pushed the plane into a climb, his cockpit on the outside of the circle, and it shot skyward again, propelled by its enormous speed. But it quickly slowed; the propeller-driven planes rapidly lost the battle with gravity when moving vertically. Daryl and his friends watched without breath or noticeable heartbeat as the plane reached the top of its arc and almost stalled; if it lost enough airspeed, all of the mystical lifting power of moving air would be gone and it would drop to the earth without control, like the hunk of lifeless metal it truly was.
Like it truly was… if not in the hands of a pilot. Rick feathered the throttles and nosed the plane over towards the earth again.
Only this time, he had very little altitude. And that was the whole problem with the outside loop. Inside loops, with the pilot pulling the plane's nose up and swinging it naturally back over the tail, were easy and had been done for years; the plane was designed for lift in that direction and the pilot could see where he was going. Thee outside loop seemed against nature; it suggested the Icarus of Greek mythology, so drunk with the thrill of flying that he flew too high and destroyed himself.
To Daryl, to Glenn, Abraham and Martinez, to the Training Captain and the squadron's other pilots on the ground, it seemed Rick didn't have enough altitude to make it. His plane had almost stopped dead at the top of the arc; he'd milked the upward speed to its absolute limit, to get every inch of altitude possible but still, he was so low!
The truth be told, it seemed that way to Rick too. That quiet place within himself, the place of facing danger, was not completely silent now; it vibrated with the sucking feeling of a voice about to scream, and a sudden chill bit his insides.
But he was going. He pushed the throttles to their limit.
He could not just ram forward his other controls, and expect to survive. To live, he had to gather speed and pick exactly the right instant—if such an instant existed in the physics of wind lift and air density on that particular day—to make the planes controls convert velocity into turning power.
The plane raced down, still with its belly on the inside of the curve…
And made it full circle, with barely a foot to spare. Rick's head in the inverted aircraft raced above the asphalt runway so close it seemed as if he could've touched it if he'd opened the canopy.
His friends—all except Daryl and the Training Captain—burst into cheers. Rick, in his cockpit, permitted himself to smile.
The hearts of those on the runway were still thumping in their chests as Rick's P-40 touched down and rolled toward them. The squadron pilots ran out to meet him; the Training Captain just stood there shaking his head.
Daryl got to the plane first, jumping onto the wing as Rick came to a full stop and slid back his canopy. Daryl grabbed him by the harness and shook Rick so hard that his body banged around in the seat.
"You coulda killed yourself, you stupid bastard!" Daryl shouted. Then he dived into the cockpit, hugging Rick, Daryl's feet in the air as the other pilots crowded in yelling congratulations. Daryl said into Rick's ear, "That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw."