“Sit down, Miss Jilly, let me take care of finding the bears. We got heat sensors, you know, we got movement sensors, and if all else fails, which it might, we also got them getting to the extraction point on their own, a little bit behind schedule.” Behind the ancient, gold-rimmed aviators that were from some point in the early 90s Jill could see the vague twinkle of those ghostly-blue eyes. One corner of his mouth turned up in a grin.
“Ain’t the first time Rogue’s been late,” he added after a moment of silence, when he felt her tension begin to mount again.
Jill let out a puff of laughter. “No it most certainly is not,” she said with a smile. “Not at all. But it isn’t like him to do anything that would worry me. And this is certainly worrying me.”
Something in the pit of her stomach gnawed at her insides – but it wasn’t just nerves or anxiety. It felt like something real was eating her up from the inside out. “Hey Jacques?”
“Mon ami?” he broke out his smooth, swamp-borne patois.
“Something’s,” she trailed off, laying her hand on her gurgling stomach. “You ever get motion sick up here? All the lurching and the swinging and swaying?”
“I got some diazepam, but I’d not use that unless you were gettin’ the shakes. If you’re getting to where you feel all dizzy, put your head between your knees and hug ‘em.”
She tried it, and like he said, the sensation of the world spinning out of control stopped for a moment. “That’s so strange,” she said as she slowly lifted off her knees. “After all these years, why the hell would I just now start to get motion sick? I never even had a problem with those janky old rides at Disney World. You know, the ones with the chairs that jolt you all the hell over the place while you stare at a huge movie screen?”
Jacques sighed unhappily, and patted his own stomach. “Ce qui est celui-la?”
Jill stared at him for a second. “Too much French. I got ‘what is’ but after that Mrs. Grubble’s junior year French has exited my brain.”
“Too many bears to keep straight, I’m guessin’,” Jacques smiled. “Means ‘what is that one?’ I’m trying to think of the ride. Awful, horrible damn ol’ thing, the one where you’re in somebody’s, er, body, and—”
“Body Wars!” Jill shouted. “We must’a gone to the Mouse around the same time.”
With a mysterious look on his face, the pilot’s eyebrows lifted. “What if we was in the same room, rumblin’ around, everyone under the age of thirty screaming and lovin’ every second and—”
“Everyone over trying to keep themselves from heaving their Mickey-shaped ice cream treats?”
Jacques shook his head, smiling fondly. “Them were the days, mon ami, good days. Good days full of... okay, can I admit something to you? Somethin’ deep and personal?”
“This isn’t going to be one of those weird Taxicab Confessions kind of admissions is it?” Jill took on a deep voice and feigned a drunk slur. “One time, I tell you what I did. You wanna know? One time I found a hobo in the alley behind my house and paid him to do it with me.”
She was fairly proud of her imitation of a wildly drunk New Yorker on the old HBO series.
“Nothing so fun as that,” Jacques said. “No, I was the one yurking my little kid guts on them rides.” Somehow, his pleasant accent made his use of the world ‘yurk’ even sound a little sexy. “It’s why I became a pilot in the first place, to get over my fear of heights.”
“Is that them?” Jill arched her neck again to look at one of the ten screens above her head. “You became a pilot to get over heights? Seems extreme.”
He turned hard on the yoke, bringing the huge chopper in a slow, patient circle to see if, in fact, the five blips on the heat sensor were their quarry. “Well, that was one of the reasons. Money ain’t none too bad, either,” he said with a glitter in his eye.
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be covered in... what’d you call it? Yurk? That’s them, isn’t it?”
“Thinkin’ it must be, unless there’s some other group of four giants with enough body heat to make them look like white splotches, and one littler one that seems to be either sleeping or unconscious.”
“Same thing, right?” Even as she spoke, a little surge crept through Jill. She shuddered silently thinking about their raw, animalistic heat that warmed her every night.
“Just depends on how it is you got there, I s’pose. Hold onto somethin’, we’re going down.”