The Impaler

DEFLECTOR SHIELDS DOWN—COME ON, BALBOA!

“I’m going to burn up on entry!” he says as the theme from Rocky comes over the loudspeaker. The cabin is on fire and a heavy sinking feeling overpowers him as the flames lick up at his elbows. “Mayday! Mayday!” he wants to say, but the com-link is gone and the controls come off in his hands. I’m not going to make it, he thinks, and all at once his burning spaceship brightens … into the light of his bedside lamp—the theme from Rocky blaring away from his BlackBerry on the nightstand.

He’d fallen asleep while working.

Groggily, Markham reached for his BlackBerry, but his fingers weren’t awake yet and he knocked it to the floor. He lay there for a moment, unsure of where he was until the missed-call ding brought him back to life—pissed him off and rolled him over. He found his laptop on the bed beside him; wiped off the screen saver and saw the time in the lower right hand corner: 7:15 a.m.

The ding of a voice mail came from somewhere on the floor to his left, and suddenly he realized he couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about. Only a vague sense of anxiety and bright yellow helplessness.

Then the ring of the landline startled him. He answered it.

“Hello?”

“It’s Schaap.”

“Jesus, what—”

“I’m on my way to your apartment now. Get dressed and meet me out front as soon as you can.”

“What’s going on?”

“They found another body. Out in the boonies about fifty miles northeast of Raleigh. Bird’s already being puddle-jumped from Fort Bragg as we speak. We go airborne in twenty minutes.”