The sound of the explosive decompression of the cabin was, in fact, explosive. It felt like my eardrums blew up with the sudden change in air pressure, and I only just got a hand on the chair next to me before the wind ripped me toward the back of the cabin where the Hercules had made a hole in the fuselage. I couldn’t hear the straining of his muscles over the horrendous noise of the wind, but I watched as he broke the seat into three pieces with his strength; one hung by the handcuff chain from each of his massive paws; the last clung to his feet in one great chunk.
I held on as the hole in the cabin widened, the fractures the Hercules had created shearing as the wind tore at them. Someone screamed over the speaker above me about an emergency landing. My total focus was on the Hercules, though, as he stood, unmoved by the wind, his feet planted and one hand on the chair of the telepath who had been chained next to him. He flashed that smug, nasty smile at me as he turned loose his free hand in a long wind up and swipe. I knew what was about to happen but I couldn’t stop it.
The telepath who had been seated next to him got hit by the remnant of the seat chained to his hand; the results were like a watermelon getting splattered by a sledgehammer. I held on, my fingers clutching Foreman’s chair as the Hercules wound up for his next swipe, moving back in the line and taking the head off the next telepath, this one the woman from Orlando. Her scream was lost in the sound of the roaring gusts around me as air rushed out of the plane through the hole.
He got one more swipe in unchecked before the tempest began to die down. I was holding my breath, something we metas could do for longer than a human without passing out, but I reached out and grabbed the nearest oxygen mask and took three hits in rapid succession. Then I tossed aside the mask and launched myself at the Hercules as he took a long step toward the back of the plane and brought down the chair pieces on two more screaming telepaths.
I hit him in the center of his mass as he tried for the last telepath. My shoulder hit his ribs and I couldn’t tell whether I broke something of his or he broke something of mine, or both. It hurt like hell, though, and stunned me long enough to prevent me from following up in a timely manner. It gave him just enough time to throw an arm at the last telepath, though, and he buried the remnants of his seat in the man’s chest, destroying his heart, lungs, and anything else in his upper chest. The man’s head lolled forward, and I knew I’d lost.
“You failed!” the Hercules said with a wide grin. “You won’t learn anything from them,” he said over the howling of the wind.
“They’re not the only ones I can learn from,” I said, matching his grin with one of my own, one I didn’t remotely feel. I threw my ungloved hands at him and he tried to bring his hands together, to catch my head between the two chair pieces. It would likely have killed me if I hadn’t dragged him down before he could complete the maneuver.
I saw his eyes widen as my power began to work, the cumulative drain restarting at virtually the same point I’d left off. I could hear his howls over those of the wind, and he fell atop me, jerking with great muscle spasms as I started to pull the last of him free of his body. He screamed in my head and through his mouth and I heard both, combining with the blast of air that thundered around me, and the sound of blood rushing and pounding in my head from my exertion and what I was about to get, to reach—the climax.
He swung his arm wildly one last time as I felt the finale build. It was so close, within the touch of my fingers. It was almost mine, that sweet release, when something exploded and he flew from my grasp. It took the split second before I flew out of the plane to realize that he’d struck the hole in the side of the cabin with one of his cudgels and broken it wide, wide open. The wind reached out and plucked him from atop me, ripping him from my grasp before I could take the last of his soul. I had not even a moment to think about it before I felt the deck of the cabin that had been so tight on my back disappear from beneath me as I, too, went flying out of the side of the plane and found myself falling, freely, my jacket whipping as I saw the ground, tens of thousands of feet below, but rushing up so very, very fast.
Chapter 20
Free-falling without a parachute was without a doubt the most frightening sensation I had ever felt. The wind blasted at my face, drying my eyes even as I tried to keep them open. Why? I don’t know. It was like I wanted to look death in the face or something as I plummeted through the rapidly diminishing space between me and the ground. The chill wind caused my jacket to flap wildly around me. I wasn’t screaming, but it was only because I was still too stunned to realize that I’d fallen out of a plane. I quelled my panic with a thought, reaching inside for desperate answers. My skin had gone numb from the cold, and I couldn’t force my brain to think, no matter how much I wanted it to. I could see the Hercules a few hundred feet below me, his hands pinwheeling wildly, and I wondered if I was doing the same.