Chapter 87

She did nothing as he began to taxi the aircraft toward a long, icy stretch of road she assumed must be the runway. She wanted to turn around and look at her family, to see if she could tell by their expressions whether or not they were cursing her name, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off of the scene in front of her.
The power increased as Ryker barreled down the runway. Jo never paid enough attention when planes were taking off because she’d always trusted the pilot. Until now. It seemed like they should be lifting off of the ground by now. It looked to her like there wasn’t enough runway in front of them for them to clear the tall buildings and trees on the other side. Nervously, she bit into her lip, praying that Ryker really did know what he was doing. The urge to question him was overwhelming, but she couldn’t take the risk of distracting him.
As the runway began to shorten in front of her, she realized that the plane was no longer touching the ground. They began to climb, slowly at first, and then more quickly, and by the time they reached the buildings she’d spotted in the distance, they were soaring high above them. Jo finally let go of the breath she’d been holding.
She realized he was laughing, even though she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the engine, and apparently he hadn’t pressed whatever button a person needed to push in order for her to be able to hear it through her headsets.
Jo narrowed her eyes at him and pushed the button thingy. “What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Your face,” Ryker said, still laughing. “Did you think I’d try to fly a plane if I didn’t know how to? The only person on here capable of dying is me, and I got too much to live for.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she tried saying nothing at all, but now that she could hear him laughing, she felt inclined to say something. “Well, I didn’t think you’d wreck us on purpose, but there was no way to know for sure that your incompetence wouldn’t kill us.”
He stopped laughing. “Now, that was just rude, Jo. I could’ve just let you find your own damn flight back to the US, you know?”
She immediately felt bad for being so mean. They had a back and forth relationship, one that often left her calling him names and him insulting her, but in this case, he was right. He had gone out of his way to be nice to them. “Sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I just… my dad is a pilot, and he always wanted to teach me how, but I always thought it was too difficult to learn.”
“It’s not that hard,” Ryker said with a shrug. “Most of these switches don’t actually do anything. He started absently flipping the switches on the dashboard until Jo put her hand over his, making him stop. Just the idea that he might mess up something important made her stomach coil into a knot.
All it did was make him laugh again. Jo shook her head. “Should I be doing anything?”
“Nope, not right now,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me take off without someone in that seat. I’ll be putting this fucker on autopilot soon enough, and then you can listen for beeps and shit if I have to hit the head, but a copilot doesn’t do much.”
“Good to know,” Jo said, looking out the window. The view was spectacular. Blue sky with patches of white fluffy clouds stretched on for miles. Below them, she could see the occasional river or lake, a patch of green here and there, and the trail of a road or highway. Since the Vampires had taken over, there weren’t as many people around to screw up the natural beauty, and that seemed evident from up here.
A silence settled over them as Ryker put the plane on autopilot and made it obvious that he wasn’t actually doing anything to fly the plane. Jo tried not to let the panic building inside of her bubble to the surface. It was important to keep a cool head in times like this, after all. Besides, if he hadn’t killed them yet, chances were they’d be fine until they had to land to refuel. She wondered when that might be but didn’t ask him. In her experience, the hardest parts of flying were landing and taking off, assuming they were flying high enough to avoid any pesky mountain ranges.
“You done much flying?” Ryker asked a few hours into their flight. It was growing darker outside by the moment, and he’d flipped a bunch of switches earlier that she assumed would make the plane more visible, as well as helping them see any obstructions in their way.
She didn’t expect the question, so it caught her off guard. “Some,” she said. He nodded, but as soon as she’d let the word slip from her lips, she realized she was lying. “A lot, actually. When I was younger. It’s been a while.”
He nodded again. “Commercial? Or did your operation have their own planes?”
He was asking about a time that seemed like a dream to her now, back when LIGHTS had all the money and power to do whatever needed to be done. “We had a few planes,” she said, watching his eyebrows raise. “I mean, the agency. Not my family. Although, my dad did have a nice G5 he liked to fly around.”
“A G5?” Ryker echoed. “Gee, that’s nice.”
“Yeah, it was,” Jo agreed. She couldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what it had been like to fly around with her parents and brother when she was younger. It was a sure fire way to bring back a lot of emotions she’d worked hard to shove deep down inside.
“So your dad was a pilot then?”
“Is a pilot,” she corrected. “My dad’s alive. It’s my mom that’s… missing.” Dead. She’d wanted to say dead, but recently she’d been given some evidence that that might not be the case, so why would she keep saying that?
“Right. Sorry. I forgot,” Ryker said. “He hasn’t been around much, though. Since your mom went missing?”
“Nope,” Jo said, hoping that would be enough to change the subject. “I don’t like to talk about my family any more than you like to talk about yours.’
“Fair enough,” Ryker said. That should be enough to shut him up. She knew the one thing he would never discuss with her was his family.
So she was shocked about a half an hour later when he quietly said, “It happened at an airport.”
Jo wasn’t sure what he was talking about. She turned her head and saw a thoughtful expression on his face which was cast in an eerie blue and green glow from the dashboard. “What’s that?” she asked, keeping her tone light and soft, like she was approaching an injured wild animal.
“My family. What happened to them…. We were at an airport when they… when they… were slaughtered.”
Jo’s mouth hung open for a second as she took in what he was saying. “Oh,” she said, not sure what else to say or do. For once in her life, she was on the other side of this awkward conversation, so she didn’t want to say the same stupid things everyone always said to her. Yet, the words popped out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”