ALL HALLOWED
CHAPTER TEN
Ridin' The Storm Out
Maru knew something was wrong the second he heard Dusty approaching the Base.
For one thing, Nick had been making the loop alongside the kid, every damned time, and there was no low beat of rotor blades under the sharper pitch of Dusty's engine. For another, that 'sharper pitch' was a lot higher up the scale than it usually was - the kid was making his approach with his engine at max, which... well, it sure as Pits wasn't anything good.
Maru rolled out onto the taxiway, praying to forces he'd stopped believing in too many years ago to count that they weren't gonna be adding another picture to The Wall before the day was done.
The kid hit the runway hard, bounced twice, and must've sat on his brakes the third time, if the overheated smell that wafted up on the blueish rubber smoke was any indication, but he'd come in so fast that he was still rolling just from momentum when he got to where Maru waited. Rather than halting at the workshop, though, the kid swung himself around to the tanks, waiting impatiently as Maru crossed the concrete to reload him. Maybe the fire had just gotten worse?
"One of the Smokejumpers is trapped, Blade's trying to rescue him but the ghost said he'd hurt himself, and the radios aren't working at all," Dusty rattled off as soon as Maru got within earshot, which... yeah. Bad.
"Who and how bad?" Maru demanded, tines working on autopilot as he attached the hose. The radios being down was the worst part of that equation, because if Windlifter couldn't be alerted to medevac -
"Don't know, he didn't say." Dusty was twitching on his wheels, searching the sky above the Base as though he was expecting someone to appear and enlighten him at any moment. "Nick sent him to get Windlifter and told me to tell you, reload, and back him up."
The retardant flow shut off with a soft 'thunk' that was barely audible under the low roar of Dusty's engine, and Maru scrambled to get the hose off before Dusty rolled away with it still attached. "Which ghost?"
"The Orion," Dusty answered, waggling a wing flap in the general direction of The Wall. He was already pointing his nose back to the runway, which was the only reason he missed the incredulous look that flickered over Maru's face.
Richter had never been the friendliest of guys, or the most concerned with the wellbeing of his teammates. If he was suddenly offering his help, unasked-for, the situation was probably worse than bad.
Shoving the hose nozzle back into its holding bracket, Maru headed full-tilt for the workshop to start assembling his supplies.
He was halfway through staging fluids when he realized his tines were shaking.
Sitting back on his wheels, Maru exhaled a slow breath. Thirty-one years. Decades with the steadiest tines in the business, and now he couldn't stop them shaking. Three decades he'd been trailing Blade around, waiting for that last straw to snap. Three decades he'd been ignoring or drowning his own issues at every opportunity, pretending that he wasn't seeing the ghosts of his failures lurking behind the guy he'd dedicated the better part of his life to saving.
"Maru?"
Well, he didn't drop anything that time, so that was good. Setting the length of hydraulic tubing carefully on a clean strip of workbench, Maru turned to face Cabbie, who was peering through the door of the workshop, concern and pain battling for dominance on his face. Big guy's migraine must have been downright agonizing for it to be showing up that clearly. Beside him, still transparent but now unquestionably visible, Wally peered in as well, hovering enough to sit over Cabbie's wing.
"Yeah?"
"Somethin' wrong on the line? Dusty came in pretty hot." Cabbie's eyes flicked over the staging Maru was doing, and he bit back a visible grimace. "Forget I asked. How bad?"
"Pits if I know. All I've got is that it involves a Jumper and Blade. Apparently Richter corralled Nick in midair to give him that information, Dusty got sent back to Base to play relay, and with the radios not working, I have no clue how bad this is getting!" He was yelling by the last words, he realized, and took a couple of deep breaths as he set about collecting the rest of his equipment. If the exhales came out sounding like a combine about to charge, so be it.
"A Smokejumper?" Wally echoed, leaning a little further into the shop, his starboard wing halfway through the wall and his port one halfway through Cabbie. Cabbie didn't bat an eye - maybe icepacks would help with his headache? He could lay tines on some isopropyl alcohol and water easily enough for makeshift cold packs...
"They're still on this end of the fire, right?" Wally continued, snapping Maru out of his momentary contemplation. "Closest to the Lodge?"
Maru paused, looking up from his welding cart, where he was checking the cylinder valves of his cutting torch on autopilot. "Last I knew. Why?"
He managed, though barely, not to drop the torch head on the floor as Wally simply vanished from sight without a sound. Cabbie merely blinked, either too accustomed to it to be surprised or in too much pain to react.
"Uhm." Coiling the hose up and slinging the torch head carefully over the handlebar of the cart, Maru rolled the welding rig carefully off to the side before going back to the shelves for his surgical toolkit. "Where did he just go?"
"To check on the Smokejumpers," Cabbie answered levelly, without the sarcasm that the majority of the Base's other inhabitants would have managed to inject in those words. "He'll be back with a status report in -"
"A ponderosa fell on Drip!"
Maru did drop his toolbox at that one, and his surprise at Wally's reappearance was definitely not the major factor. "Drip's -"
"Alive, conscious, semi-coherent, definite concussion, other injuries unknown," Wally rattled off, and Maru abruptly found he could breathe again.
"Wally, lead with that part next time," Cabbie sighed, as Maru gathered his toolbox back up. The latch had held, so hopefully the contents of the box weren't too rattled.
"What about Blade?"
"He's tryin' to lift an end of the tree so that Dynamite can haul the kid clear. He'll stress his systems, but it shouldn't kill 'im."
"You haven't been paying much attention, have you?" Maru muttered, the wry sarcasm shakier than it would have been otherwise.
"Before July, or after?" Wally shot back, earning a faint chuff of laughter from Cabbie and an eyeroll from Maru.
Wally had a point, after all. No way in the Pits was Blade gonna check out now, when he had everything he ever wanted right at his tires. Meaningful job, awesome home, great friends, his partner by his side.
Still, something was telling Maru not to put the toolkits away just yet. Where Windlifter could sense and read the weather and the actions of the fires with an accuracy that had actually made Maru - and, more impressively, Blade - believe in clairvoyance - Maru had a similar, if slightly less spectacular, ability to sense immanent catastrophe.
It had been a dull buzz at the back of his mind the entire time Cad was in charge of the park, but, really, that just proved that it worked.
Right now, that sense was buzzing like a Bug had gotten into his interior, and he had learned better than to ignore it.
Three minutes later, he was proven exactly right, when Richter appeared on the taxiway to announce that Blade was down.
The steady rumble of Windlifter's rotors carried far ahead of the helicopter himself - doubly so when he was accompanied by both Nick and Dusty. The latter was wide-eyed and shaking, landing even harder than he had previously before whipping back to the retardant tanks; Nick, by contrast, seemed entirely composed, until Maru saw the expression in his eyes.
"What happened?" Maru demanded, eyes on the sky and Windlifter's approaching form, rather than Nick's frantic, burning gaze. Behind him, he was only distantly aware of Patch rolling down from the Tower to get Dusty reloaded.
"Million-to-one," Nick answered grimly. His accent rolled heavily over the words, months under the tutelage of a dialect coach swept away by stress and fear. "He got the tree off Drip, an' a second tree came down on his cable. Took him to ground."
That made twice in the last five months that Blade had been reintroduced to the ground the hard way. That about tied the record Nick had set in the earliest days of his trick flying, back before anyone had figured out helicopters could actually go upside-down and survive. Maru had replaced Nick's entire rotor assembly twice during CHoP's second season. Personally, he blamed the Supercopter episode. "How bad?"
Nick's lips thinned. "Bad enough. He hit the burning side of the break, so he's got surface burns, impact damage, sheered rotors, you name it. Missed gettin' impaled on a tree by about six inches."
Great. July, all over again. Except hopefully Blade had escaped this one cooked medium-rare instead of well-done. Maru still wasn't sure he'd managed to scrub all the soot out of Blade's innards from his last round of barbecuing. On the up side, the worst part of July had been the heat damage, not the crash damage - although Blade's rotor hub was not going to hold up if he insisted on smashing his rotor blades into the ground - so Ford willing, he wouldn't have to fight Blade back from the edge of death this afternoon.
It wasn't the most enjoyable way to pass the time.
The roar of an engine marked Dusty's departure again, and Patch rolled back from the tanks to sit off Maru's flank, the picture of patient calm. With the radios down, she'd be an extra pair of tines where Maru needed them.
At the corner of the building, Cabbie loomed forward, Wally's transparent form over his wing making him unnecessarily taller. There were still pain lines at the corners of his eyes, but the gaze he fixed on Nick was as clear as ever.
"How's Drip?"
"Concussed," Nick answered tersely, his eyes still on the approaching Windlifter and Blade's motionless form hanging beneath him. "He's lucky his canopy's reinforced. Dynamite's gettin' him to their fallback zone, and Blackout's holdin' the line with the other two. Windlifter'll get him once Blade's set."
Speak of the devil, Windlifter was clearing the edge of the cliff now. No matter how many times he saw it - nine times in the last twenty-five years, which was about ten times more than Maru would have liked - it didn't get easier to see his best friend dangling unconscious in Windlifter's sling.
Windlifter was an old pro at this, but it didn't stop Maru from guiding him down every inch of the way until Blade's tires were settled on the concrete - so sue him, he was a bit of a control freak. It came with the job. Although his job was a lot easier when he had a bunch of burly earthmovers to help with the grunt work. There was only one of him, which was a matter he might have to address if this level of chaos was going to be par for the course from now on.
Maru rolled around Blade's nose to unhook the tow straps, wincing as he caught sight of Blade's starboard side. The hoist itself had been ruinously twisted, the cable snapped and frayed, and the mounting plate had been ripped half out of Blade's interior. The metal had torn in jagged edges before the bolts had finally sheered, which had to be hellaciously painful in and of itself. Never mind the snapped rotors, the crumple damage that ran from his nose to his rear landing gear, or the heat-bubbled paint on top of that.
None of it was gonna kill him, just hurt like slag for a while. The rotors would be the biggest problem, though...
"Why's that?"
"Huh?" Maru blinked, tearing his eyes away from Blade's interior to look at Nick, but the other helicopter was on Blade's opposite side; from the position of his skids, he was by Blade's rear hatch, probably doing a rapid check of the components Maru had replaced only a few months ago.
"He's only got a couple 'a leaks here, they're minor. Why're his rotors gonna be a problem?"
He'd been saying all that out loud? Well, slag... "I'm guessing you remember July?"
Nick hopped sideways to look at him from underneath Blade's tail boom, his expression eloquent enough to spell out any number of words. Most of them had four letters.
Patch, ignoring them both, scooted around Blade's nose to free up the straps, waving to Windlifter as soon as they were clear, and the big chopper winched his lines up and swung away, heading back towards the fire lines to retrieve Maru's other patient.
Maru blinked a bit of grit out of his eye that had been thrown up by Windlifter's wash, making a mental note to clean his drop-off area a bit better. He preferred his patients to be sanded after the damage had been repaired, not before. "Well, when Blade busted his rotors, I replaced them. Which was good because it meant those RVs didn't become permanent residents of Augerin Canyon, but it's now bad because they were the only ones that fit him I had in stock. They're on backorder from our usual supplier, and I can't fabricate the style he uses."
"Oh, great. Make sure you got a camera rolling when you tell him, huh?" Nick chuckled, the sound weak and the accompanying grin clearly forced. "If you gotta find a new supplier, delivery'll take, what, a week?"
"I'll have Liz find them," Maru sighed, nodding a thanks to Patch as she came back with the tow hook. "But a few days, at least. Which means you and Windlifter are gonna be running things in the air until he's back on duty or ranking mutual aid arrives."
Nick's startled, indignant squawk sounded like a slipping tensioner belt, and Maru had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing, even as he threw his weight against the tow hook to haul Blade into the workshop. Damn helicopter had been eating better over the last four months, and it felt like he'd put on a hundred pounds!
"You can't - I'm not - I been certified for two days, I can't take command!"
"You've been as good as certified for twenty-five years, you idiot. Now reload and go make sure Dusty's got that end of the line under control, Blade's not going to recover any faster with you hanging over him like a vulture!"
Maru's Spanish had gotten rusty enough that he wasn't entirely sure what Nick called him, but he probably didn't want to know anyway.
He was already up to his eyeballs in patching Blade back together by the time Windlifter returned with Drip, who smiled fuzzily in his direction and couldn't get his eyes to focus, but answered Cabbie's worried questions about his name, his teammates' names, the date, ('I think it's a Tuesday?'), how many of Cabbie did he see, ('Two, but I think the other one is Wally...') and did he remember what happened, ('A tree fell over and I was under it. Is the Chief okay?') coherently enough that when Cabbie volunteered to look after him, Maru didn't argue. He had his tines full enough with Blade, and Cabbie had both field-triage training and more practical experience than he probably wanted in dealing with concussed Smokejumpers.
"Just check in with me hourly," Maru ordered around the clamp in his teeth, and went back to replacing leaking lines.
Twenty minutes after the fourth check-in, Maru still had his tines in Blade, smoothing down the welds on Blade's interior plating, when the chopper drifted back to consciousness. The hoist would need to be completely rebuilt, if not replaced, but he also didn't want the Chief rolling around with a gaping hole in his interior until he got it sorted. The fact that he'd be sporting an empty rotor hub for the next week was going to be bad enough.
The faintest breath of a groan was his only indication that his friend was awake. Blade had an innate stillness to him, something Windlifter had long ago mastered but seemed beyond the comprehension of the rest of the team, Maru included. Blade didn't twitch or jerk or wiggle his way back to awareness, which almost every other slagging member of the team did - Maru was still debating the virtue of getting his own canopy reinforced for working with the Smokejumpers, all of whom tended to wake up swinging. Blade, by contrast, woke up with barely a change in the rhythm of his breathing - just a low, almost sub-vocal groan escaped him as the pain from his injuries reached his awareness.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Maru said dryly, rolling back to set the grinder aside, not taking much note of the thin, pained sound that escaped Blade. Crash damage hurt, and having parts of yourself beaten into submission and welded back together to fix said crash damage tended to be uncomfortable at best.
And then he turned around and saw Blade's face.
He'd seen Blade in every kind of pain before - physical, emotional, you name it, and it was nothing to the agony on the chopper's face right now.
"Blade?! Chrysler, what -"
"I dreamed," Blade answered, his voice barely more than a choked whisper, a ragged sob catching at the back of his throat. "Maru, I dreamed - Nick -" The word vanished into a wordless keen, a high, tortured noise that sounded like it was being ripped from Blade's very core.
It took a second of processing for the forklift. Screaming emotional agony. Crash damage, including burns.
Blade thought it was still July. Thought he'd dreamed everything after he'd gone down in that ash-choked field outside a burned mine shaft. Thought he'd dreamed the last four months and all the happiness he'd found in them.
Oh, for the love of Chrysler. Maru whipped back around and slammed his tine into Blade's side, just in front of the hoist hatch, as hard as he possibly could.
It was one more dent he'd have to hammer out of the damn chopper's hide, but it snapped Blade out of his spiral, at least, back into gasping quiet. "You did not - wait a second. WALLY!"
Almost instantly, the C-119's transparent form snapped into existence in front of them, concern spread across his features. Across the runway, Cabbie's hanger door had already shifted open, Drip and Cabbie poking their noses out with nearly identical expressions of worry.
"Y'need me?" Wally asked, eyeing Blade with clear alarm. The chopper had started shaking, trembling hard enough under Maru's tine that he resigned himself to having to check every hose connection he'd just redone yet again.
"Go pull Nick off the line, tell him Blade's awake," Maru ordered, keeping his voice low. "And... tell him to hurry back, wouldya?"
Wally, for his part, glanced from Maru back to Blade, nodded in what looked like complete understanding, and vanished again.
"I thought -"
Maru, sighing softly, patted Blade's trembling side with his tine, gently as he could in front of the large dent he'd created. "Same damage, I know. Minus about five levels of done-ness, thank Ford. But it's okay, Blade. You didn't dream it. Nick really is back, you are not living in a television trope, I did fix Dusty, you can see ghosts, and your life is completely insane."
That earned him a thick, ragged cough, Blade's grief slowly ebbing into embarrassment. "Maru, make me a promise."
Well, this couldn't be anything good. "What's that?"
"If Nick goes down before me..." Blade let the sentence trail off, but Maru could finish it easily enough. It was a request that went against every medical instinct Maru had, every day, every minute of effort over the last thirty years he'd fought to keep Blade alive. Countless days of cajoling, arguing, or verbally bulldozing him into taking care of himself. Countless nights where he'd stayed awake on coffee and desperation, hunkered in the corner of wherever Blade was staying just to make sure the chopper woke up again.
And then he thought of the last few days again, how he got to wake up in the morning knowing he would see his best friend's smile, hear laughter ringing across the Base as Nick told off-color jokes to the team over breakfast. Blade had been his best friend since the day Nick went down, and the past week was the happiest Maru had ever seen him.
Sometimes, friendship meant doing what you knew was best, even if you knew it wasn't right. "Okay, Blade. I promise."
[END CHAPTER 10]
Chapter 10 Notes:
1) One part isopropyl alcohol to three parts water in a resealable bag makes super-cheap, convenient ice packs that stay soft even when cold - great for icing sports injuries! And yes, Maru would likely have it around, since it's very useful for auto detailing (it cuts pine sap, which probably comes in handy for Windlifter and the Jump crew) as well as being an effective, and much cheaper, substitute for DriGas.
2) Season Two of CHiPs saw a distinct escalation in the number and level of stunts shown, both by 'crash victims' and by the boys themselves. The Supercopter episode, mentioned in the movie, is a joke on S2E10 of CHiPs, Supercycle, in which the CHiPs chase, but cannot catch, an extremely souped-up stunt bike that can outperform their patrol motorcycles. Ponch (the best motorcyclist in the department) is then cleared to ride an experimental high-performance police bike that can match the Supercycle, which seems mostly an excuse for Ponch to have fun doing jumps with it. (During testing of the bike, Jon lays it down in a fairly spectacular fashion, leading to Ponch's funny aneurysm line 'I've never really watched you crash before. You do it very well.')
3) A "Funny Aneurysm" is when a scene, joke, or offhand line that was originally meant to be funny or light-hearted makes the viewer cringe when it is seen in reruns due to the traumatic events in future episodes of a show or in real life. - TV Tropes.
4) Despite not knowing how to ride a motorcycle when he was cast for CHiPs, Erik Estrada became an extremely proficient rider, and did a number of his own stunts on the show. However, Nick's crash is actually based on fact. When filming of a stunt went drastically wrong, Estrada first landed facedown on the hood of a car before his motorcycle flipped over on top him, resulting in fractured ribs and sternum, punctured lungs, a broken wrist, and a cracked jaw. He spent several days in intensive care with a 50/50 chance of survival, and remained confined to the hospital for some time afterwards. He filmed two episodes from his hospital bed, and the remainder of the season was partially rewritten to include his accident. The episode from which the rewrite began was Season 3's - take a guess - Return of the Supercycle! (Yes. Seriously.)
5) Yes, Maru really does always aim for that same spot in front of Blade's hoist hatch, and has since Saving Tomorrow. And yes, he promised exactly what you think he did, which is inexpressibly cruel of Blade to ask, but Maru completely understands.
6) 'You are not living in a television trope' - the 'it was all just a dream' ending. If you have a few days of your life to waste on being very entertained, check out the TV Tropes site.
7) Chapter title from the REO Speedwagon song of the same name.