Arcturus, Mark, Konrad, Reel

Arcturus was still working on the lander when the first explosion went off.

He didn’t notice the light through the welding goggles at first, so his first clue that something had happened was the roar of noise, followed by the shockwave that shook the trees, showering Lander Two with pine needles. Arcturus spun away from his welding to look for the source. Even through the darkened welding goggles he wore, he could see the predawn sky brighten momentarily to the west where the camp lay. A moment later, another flash of light split the horizon, followed by a second rumbling roar. He lifted his goggles and stared out towards it, a hollow pit in his stomach.

Liliane popped out of the ship’s hatch, gaping. Francois followed her out, swearing under his breath. “Mark,” he spat, making the name a curse. “I don’t know what we expected. Of course his solution would be to blow the whole damn place up! We didn’t even send him with explosives!”

A third explosion washed the low clouds overhead in red and orange. “Those aren’t big enough to be the whole camp,” Liliane said. “Maybe he’s just trying to create a distraction? Or perhaps trying to signal us?” She didn’t even try to debate the suggestion that the source of the chaos was Mark, which Arcuturus found a bit odd…but there wasn’t time to think on it.

He pulled the goggles up to his forehead and pushed past the two humans into the ship. The weld would have to hold. “Get in,” he ordered, tossing the welder onto a shelf. “We’re going.”

They stared at him, nonplussed, neither of them moving. “What, straight in with the ship?” Francois asked incredulously. “Didn’t we decide that was a bad idea?”

“It was,” Arcturus agreed, but otherwise ignored the man as he took his seat in the pilot’s chair and spun up the engines. They rattled and shook, and he scowled. Hadn’t he fixed that already? “But the situation has changed, and now it’s our best shot. Do you trust whatever is going on in there–” he waved in the general direction of the camp–”to be good if we just let it go on?”

Francois shook his head, his long black hair falling across his face. “This is insane.”

That was probably true, but then again, everything that Arcturus had done since arriving in this accursed system seemed insane in hindsight. “I’m going; you can come with me or you can stay. But choose quickly,” he said.

Liliane followed him into the ship, taking the co-pilot’s seat, and Arcturus felt a rush of gratitude for the petite alien. The straps dangled loose around her, far too large for her frame, so she settled for wrapping them twice around her torso and tying them off. Francois hesitated, but loyalty won over good sense and he followed her a moment later, cursing under his breath. Arcturus waited for him to settle into a seat in the back, as the engines built to a thrum, then pulled the sticks up

The ship shuddered, wobbled a few feet into the air…and with a sudden, loud crack suddenly sank, as though a tremendous weight had fallen on the back left corner. The same corner he’d just welded minutes before. “No, no no! Blast it!” he cursed, fighting to keep the ship upright. The back corner hit the dirt with a resounding thud, jarring all of them in their seats.

Growling, he shut down the remaining engines, tore the restraints off his chest and charged out the door to look. Francois was right behind him, leaving Liliane to fight with her tied-off straps. Sure enough, the makeshift mount had torn loose under the strain of the takeoff, cracking right under the weld. The engine lay in the dirt behind them, torn loose from its moorings. “No! Crack shelled, rotted, miserable, damned Efreet spawned thing!” he swore, kicking at the broken strut.

“Well, looks like that option is off the table,” Francois observed, grimly surveying the damage. “Nothing we can do now but wait-”

Arcturus whirled on him, and the human took a quick step back, eyes going wide at the look on the Captain’s face. “Decouple the power to the other back engine,” he snarled. “We’re going, one way or another.”

…

Reel’s cell shook, dust cascading down from the ceiling.

She wasn’t sure what was going on, but the sound of an explosion had woken her, startling her right out of her fitful sleep. The next two had brought her to her feet, and cleared the bleary torpor from her thoughts. It had a similar effect on her two guards. Both were looking around the room nervously, trying to figure out where the explosion had come from, but unwilling to leave their posts.

“Do you think we should go check it out?” the first one asked. His hand drifted to the small weapon at his waist–The “pistol,” Reel reminded herself–as though he thought he might need it.

“And leave her?” The second one threw a quick look back at Reel, reassuring himself that she was still in her cell and not causing any mischief. “Lusser would skin us alive.”

It would serve you right, too, Reel thought. She hoped they did go. If even just one of them left, she might be able to overpower the other one... Panicked shouting rose outside, loud enough to hear even through the walls. Maybe she could slip away in the confusion…But her guards didn’t move.

A few minutes later, the door at the end of the hall opened and the two guards snapped to attention. Reel’s breath caught in her throat; it was Konrad, his arms wrapped around a gravity plate from her ship as wide as he was. He struggled under its weight, sweating and puffing as he staggered in, and Reel realized that he had two plates, bolted together and facing each other. Her eyes went wide. What in the black was he playing at?

He flicked a nervous glance in her direction and then away again. “I need to talk to the prisoner,” he said to the first of the guards. The soldiers had gone from attention to a contemptuous sort of ease as soon as they saw him. “Lusser’s orders. Can you open the cell, please?”

The first guard frowned. “You need to talk to her? I thought you tried that already, and couldn’t manage it.”

“Oh, uh…yes, but this time I…” Konrad faltered. “I think I can make it work this time?” Even to Reel’s ears, it sounded weak and unconvincing.

The soldier grinned cruely at him. “Nice try, lab rat. Lusser told us to keep you, specifically, away. So scurry on home, you pissant, before I shoot you.”

Konrad sagged. “Ah, hell,” he sighed, bracing his back against the wall. Fumbling, he reached up and twisted the control knob on the side of the gravity plates.

The guard couldn’t have had any idea what Konrad was planning, but he made a lunge for him anyway as the plates started to vibrate and shake. He didn’t make it more than half a step before an invisible force caught him and knocked him off his feet, throwing him backwards. Konrad grunted, trapped against the wall, and Reel blinked in shock. He’d reversed the plate somehow, made it push objects away instead of drawing them to itself. How had he managed that? Konrad tipped the plate down with an effort and knocked the guard away, sending him skittering along the floor to crash in a heap at the other end of the hall.

Reel ran at the door of her cell and grabbed hold of the bars that she’d weakened, pulling against them, her feet braced against the stone frame. Her tendons creaked, and the scales on her neck stood straight up with the effort. The metal ground and whined under her claws, but held steady.

The second guard drew his weapon and fired, squeezing off three quick shots. The rounds twanged off the metal plate and buzzed away with malignant whines as Konrad ducked behind it, crushed against the wall by the force. All the breath in him whooshed out as the bullets hit, driving the plates against his chest even harder, and he lost his grip on the thing.

The guard rushed him then, managing to avoid the beam of anti-gravity and winding around the plates to reach Konrad. He tackled him, bearing the smaller man to the ground in a tangle of dirty lab coat and angry snarls. The guard gripped Konrad by the collar and smashed him in the face with his other hand, his fist rising and falling like a hammer.

Reel backed up and rushed at the door, slamming into it with all her weight, screaming through the bars.

…

Konrad struggled feebly under the mountain of guard on top of him, but it was a pitiful defense. He had no air in him, the plates had crushed it all out, and even on his best day he’d never have been a match for this soldier. He wasn’t a fighter, for God’s sake! What had he been thinking? His head rang against the stone floor as the man struck him. He tried to cover his face with his arms, but the man ripped them aside with casual strength and punched him square in the nose. Konrad’s vision faded, going black around the edges as the knuckles hammered down, sending flashes of stars across his vision.

Dimly, he saw a hulking shape rise up behind the man. The figure wound up like an Olympic baseball batter and swung something long and thick at the guard, screaming in an inhuman voice. The man started halfway around at the sound, his fist hovering over Konrad’s head.

There was a horrible wet crunching sound, akin to a watermelon falling onto paving stones, and something hot and wet showered across Konrad’s face. The weight of the guard vanished, leaving Konrad blinking up at Reel’s panting face. She had one of the bars of her cell gripped in her clawed hand, the last foot of it dripping with gore.

“Are you hurt?” she asked in her own tongue, reaching down to help him up. At least, he thought that was what she said. He understood the word hurt, and it sounded like a question. His lungs heaved, and he drew his first breath in what seemed an age, the air as sweet as wine, in spite of the heavy tang of blood and…other things. He pawed at Reel’s proffered hand, more for the comfort of the touch than for the help up. He didn’t think he was ready to stand.

She didn’t know that of course, and she hauled him to his feet as easily as he might have a child. He wobbled, squeezing her scaly hand hard. “Yes,” He croaked back in German through shuddering gasps. His face felt like mincemeat, and every breath tore another whimper of pain out of him. The cracked ribs screamed agony—god, what if he’d punctured a lung? “But I’ll live.”

She cocked her head at him and asked another question, and he caught the word “understand”. He shrugged at her, and that hurt too. “Some of it. Wait, do you understand my German?” She nodded in response. Apparently, the implant had left her with bits and pieces of knowledge too. Weird.

Think about it later, Konrad told himself. “Come on,” he rasped, staggering over to the plates again. They’d gone still, the battery run down again–his method of modifying them was imperfect, and drained power quickly from the little packs. That had been his last one. The body of the guard lay right next to the plates, but it wasn’t still; a few spasmodic twitches were still running down his limbs. Konrad swallowed hard and kept his eyes on the plates, forcing his battered body to bend and pick them back up. “I’m getting you out of here, like I promised.”

…

“Over there! Go, go, get some shovels, get that fire out!” Mark yelled in German, pushing the men rushing past him out of the barracks towards the blazes. It was pointless, of course; the men had as much hope of putting out the ammo dump as Arcturus did of dancing ballet. Mark’s shouts only added to the contradictory orders ringing across the field, and in their rush and panic, none of the men looked further than his coat. Soldiers, scientists, and staff of all persuasions ran back and forth across the yard, half-dressed men trying to figure out what to do, and generally tripping over each other. Some did the smart thing, trying to get away from the source of the explosions, while others rushed towards it at Mark’s direction.

As soon as the last man spilled out of the barracks, Mark pulled another pilfered grenade out from under his coat and pulled the starter strip. Weird trigger system, he mused idly, turning it in his hand. They’d do better with a concussion cap, rather than a friction strip. He gave it a count of two, and hefted it into the barracks behind him and closed the door.

He waited for the muffled whump of the grenade and then screamed, “Saboteurs! Saboteurs have laid mines all through the camp! Run for your lives!”

That triggered another wave of panic, as men who had been running for the fires turned and broke for cover, while others froze where they stood for fear of triggering a nonexistent mine. Well-meaning soldiers took up the cry, spreading the panic as they tried to save their comrades. Mark grinned, but didn’t find the laughter he expected. He couldn’t keep this camp in chaos much longer. Among other problems, that had been his last grenade.

“Come on guys, where the hell are you?” he muttered to himself.

As if on cue, an unholy crashing sound tore through the woods from beyond the fence, in the forest where they’d hidden the ship. “Finally,” he muttered to himself, turning around to watch for the ship. The sound of splintering wood and scraping metal grew louder, and Mark could have sworn he saw the outline of small trees going down in the gloom. He frowned–what were they doing flying so low?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The lander burst out of the tree line, throwing fragments of wood in front of it. A sapling dangled from the front engine mount. It half flew, half dragged its way along, the front half in the air and the back half plowing a furrow through the earth behind it. Mark watched it, open-mouthed, as it smashed through the fence surrounding the base and demolished an outbuilding in a spray of bricks and timbers, like the boot of a drunken god, staggering through the camp.

The screams and panicked yells had died off, a little; now they picked up again in earnest, as the men around Mark scattered in complete disorder.

…

“This is insane!” Francois screamed. “Insane!”

Arcturus barely heard him. Blood thundered in his ears, drowning out all else, as he hauled madly on the control sticks, trying to keep the ship under control. The way the ship was tipped up, he couldn’t see anything beneath the tops of the buildings.

“Go left!” Liliane screamed at him from the hatch. She clung to a rail, leaning half out of the open door down the hall, trying to help guide him around the worst of the obstacles. He tried to swerve as she’d directed.

“Your other left!” Liliane yelled again. Something crunched under the belly of the ship, and he winced at the scream of stone tearing along metal. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s fine!”

With only the front two engines working, the back of the ship was dragging along the ground. Every rock, tree, and other obstacle threw them to one side or the other, and he had to rely completely on the front engines and sheer determination to keep them from pitching over. He wrestled with the controls, and they fought him like a living thing.

“I see Mark!” Liliane yelled, her voice going up an octave in her excitement. Leaves and branches littered the floor around her feet, torn off the trees by their desperate push through them.

“Where?” Arcturus yelled back, frustrated. He couldn’t see a thing. This was no way to fly.

“To your right! Hard right, then land!”

Is it still a landing if you’ve never left the ground? Arcturus wondered. A question for the philosophers. He pulled hard to the right and eased off the throttle, dropping the ship down to the dirt with a jarring thud. Liliane yelped, the impact staggering her and throwing her to the deck. Only her grip on the railing kept her from falling out.

Arcturus turned around in time to see Mark leap up through the hatch, grinning like a lunatic. He was wearing a German soldier’s coat over an absurd black and white striped shirt and pants, his face smudged with soot, dirt, and blood. He was badly bruised, his eyes blackened, and the grin showed a gap where he’d lost a tooth. “Good of you guys to come! I think you broke off another engine there,” he said, offering Liliane a hand up.

“Crack it all!” Arcturus snarled, tearing the chair restraints loose. Couldn’t anything go right? And what was this mad human so happy about? “What about Reel? Have you seen any sign of my daughter?”

Mark pointed out across the field, away from the fires burning in the dawn light. “I think that might be her there, unless you know of any other giant turtles that might be hanging out here.”

Arcturus rushed to the hatch and pushed past Mark. Hurrying across the field towards them was Reel, waving her arms, trailed by a man in a dirty white coat struggling to keep up and carrying some heavy contraption. Who the man might be, Arcturus neither knew nor cared; he had eyes only for Reel. With a cry, he threw himself down from the hatch, landing hard and not even feeling his knees protest. He charged towards his daughter, his claws digging deep into the soft turf and kicking up clumps of sod behind him.

Tears streaking down the scales of her cheeks, she matched his run and practically threw herself into his arms. He caught her up and squeezed her tight, enveloping her in his arms. “Dad, dad,” she sobbed into his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Relief flooded through him, so powerful that it washed away all memory of whatever he’d been mad at her for. What did it matter? What did any of it matter, when he had her back? He hugged her hard, tucking her head under his chin. “It’s alright. I’m here now, I’ve got you. It’s all going to be okay.”

She clung to him for a long moment, swaying from one foot to the other. When she let go, she dashed the tears from her eyes with the back of a hand and smiled up at him. His heart nearly burst at the sight of the back of her head; a wound gaped there, where the implant had been torn away, but she seemed to pay it no mind. “You picked a crazy way to get here. How are we getting out?” The German in the white coat tottered up behind her, huffing under the weight of what looked like a pair of mutilated gravity plate. His face was a mass of mottled purple bruises and blood to rival Mark’s, and he gasped with every step he took.

Mark, Liliane, and Francois arrived then, panting up behind Arcturus. Francois pointed his rifle at the German, face grim. “Do you have anything that flies around here?” He asked the hapless man in German.

“Don’t!” Reel yelled, throwing herself between the two men. “He’s my friend, don’t hurt him.” Arcturus noticed that she stuck to Torellan; of course, without the implant she couldn’t speak anything else.

Francois looked to Arcturus. “What’s she saying?” He pointed the gun away from her, but didn’t lower it.

“She says he’s a friend.” Turning to address the German in his own language, Arcturus went on. “Who are you?”

The man blinked, an owlish, perplexed expression on his face as he took in the scene around him, swollen eyes flicking between the different members of their party. “Konrad. I’m Konrad,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “You’re…even bigger than I expected.”

“He helped me escape.” Reel broke in, still standing protectively in front of him.

“He’s okay, Francois.” Arcturus said, sticking with German. He pushed the Frenchman’s gun down and asked again a friendlier voice. “How about it, Konrad? Is my daughter’s ship here somewhere?”

The man swallowed hard “No, it’s not functional, but there is something else that might work...”

For some inexplicable reason, Mark started laughing again. Arcturus gave him a sidelong glance, and saw that Francois and Liliane were also eyeing him uncomfortably. That human was truly crazy.

…

Konrad led the way to the hangars, still staggering along under the weight of the gravity plates. In the light of the dying fires, everything had gone strangely quiet. He didn’t think that could last though; he caught glimpses of men peeking out of doorways and up from behind cover. Before long, someone would wonder what he was doing leading two aliens and three strangers to the field where Dr. Lusser had parked his pet superweapon. He put his head down and pushed on, fighting for breath, ribs aflame. If they could just make it to the plane…

His new comrades, barring the laughing Englishman, gasped as one at the sight of the modified bomber. “That’s what we’re flying out of here in? You’re kidding me,” Arcturus said.

I sure hope I’m not, Konrad thought to himself hurrying up to the door. He didn’t have any other way out. His heart sank as he drew close to the hatch. The staircase was still in place up to the cockpit, but the massive padlock sealed the door shut. He didn’t have the key.

Arcturus strode past him up to the door and seized the lock, twisting hard. It tore loose with a snap and a screech of metal. Konrad’s eyes widened in shock; the alien hadn’t broken the lock; the latch had given first, ripping out of the door. It shouldn’t have surprised him; the massive alien overtopped Reel by a good two feet, and Konrad had seen what she could do, but still…their physical strength was incredible. Arcturus struggled through the door, scraping his shell on the frame, and the rest of the group tumbled in after him.

Konrad was the last through, dropping the plates with a thump and a grateful sigh. The inside of the fuselage was festooned with power packs taken from Reel’s ship, twice as large as the ones he’d used with the gravity plates, wired in series to power the engine. He turned to find Arcturus surveying the controls with disgust.

“I have no idea how I would even begin to fly this,” he grumbled, his huge clawed hands hesitating over the comparatively tiny controls. “I can’t even fit into the seat...Reel?”

She shook her head, shrugging and saying something in her own language.

Konrad hadn’t even thought about who would fly the thing, or how. He stared at the controls, too exhausted to even try to guess how the thing worked.

The grinning Englishman in the mismatched clothes pushed the Frenchwoman forward. “Lucky for us we brought a pilot. Liliane can fly.”

Liliane stared at the controls, wide eyed. “You’re insane, Mark,” she protested. “I never flew anything this large, and these controls have been modified…we aren’t even on a runway.”

Konrad nodded. “Yes, to accommodate the new engines, taken from Reel’s ship. It can take off vertically, just like one of those. The lack of a runway shouldn’t matter.”

“It’s true Liliane,” Mark said, grinning. “I’ve seen it. And if anyone can do it, it’s you.”

Still, she hesitated before sinking into the pilot’s seat. “I’ll see if I can figure it out, then,” she mumbled, reaching out to touch the controls.

“You had better,” the dour Frenchman called grimly from the hatch, where he stood watch. He hefted his rifle to his shoulder and sighted down it. “We have company.”

Konrad rushed to the hatch and peeked out of it. Dr. Lusser strode across the field towards them, flanked by a dozen armed men. His glasses were askew, his hair a mess, and he wore an expression of crazed fury. Konrad’s heart sank; some of the men following Lusser were wheeling a flak cannon up, wrestling the weapon into position.

“Get out of that machine!” Lusser bellowed, spitting fury.

The Frenchman squeezed off a shot, and a soldier to Lusser’s left crumpled to the ground with a scream. “Missed him,” he growled, working the bolt of his rifle. The remaining men scattered for cover, pointing their own weapons at the hatch. Konrad ducked back out of sight, his heart pounding. Damn that man, why couldn’t he have just fled like everyone else?

“Okay, no time to study I guess,” Liliane said. She started hitting switches, hesitating and cursing under her breath, but it seemed to be working. Konrad could hear the engines spinning up.

“Don’t you dare!” Lusser screamed again. “I will blow you out of the sky, do you hear me? Konrad, I know you’re in there, you buffoon, you mongrel!”

Konrad knew the man meant it. And with that flak gun, he could do it. There had to be some way to stop it…His eyes lit on the power packs on the wall, and he scrambled over, tearing at the connections for one of them as the ship shuddered and started to rise. It dipped and wobbled precipitously, leaning like a drunken man as Liliane struggled with the unfamiliar controls.

“Fire!” Lusser screamed from outside, and a ragged volley of shots rang out. Some of the small arms fire careened off the plane’s struts, but holes appeared here and there in the aluminum skin. Francois yelped and ducked away from the hatch, trying to squeeze behind a beam for cover. The flak gun stayed silent, but that was only because it couldn’t aim so low. As soon as it got an angle on them, Konrad knew it would open them up like a tin can. He finally succeeded in yanking the power pack free from the wall, unplugging it, and scrambled back towards the gravity plates.

More gunfire rattled from below, the volley devolving into independent shots that rang against and through the plane. Holes appeared in the floor as they rose, miraculously missing the plane’s occupants. The plane gained altitude, but slowly, the engines sluggish in their makeshift configuration. Working feverishly, Konrad plugged the new power pack into the gravity plates.

Liliane and Mark were screaming at each other in French, arguing over what to do. Mark appeared to be trying to fly the ship by telling Liliane what to do, to little effect. Arcturus had wrapped his arms around Reel and turned his shell to the gunfire, shielding her with his body. Francois huddled against a strut for cover, hugging his rifle to his chest. None of them paid the slightest attention to Konrad.

He staggered under the weight of the gravity plates and the wild motion of the rocking plane. Reaching the hatch, he looked down to where Lusser stood, glaring hatred up at them. Konrad watched the barrel of the flak cannon turning, the man in the seat behind it drawing a bead on the plane.

I sure hope this works, he thought, and then he twisted both dials on the plates to their maximum and threw the contraption out the door. In the same instant, Lusser screamed for the men to fire, pointing up at them, his face contorted with rage.

The plates tumbled through the air, and Konrad could see them start to shake and vibrate as the rotors began to whirl in their housing, whipping the dark liquid in the tanks to a frenzy. Please work, Konrad begged silently as it fell, his knuckles white on the edge of the open hatch.

When he had put the plates together, he’d combined them so that the reservoirs faced each other. He’d had an idea, that he hadn’t been able to test, that combining the vortexes of the gravity fields would create a bubble of anti-gravity, pushing outward in all directions. It might be enough to protect them from bullets, pushing everything away from the ship.

He was half-right, as it turned out. Pulled this way and that by the opposing rotors, the ball bearings in the dark liquid whipped their tanks of dark liquid to a boil, rather than the neat vortexes their designers had intended, fingers of gravity and anti-gravity stabbing out in all directions. Rather than a bubble, he got something more akin to several thousand probing fingers, all pushing–and sometimes pulling–with different forces.

The flak cannon roared just as the first blast of gravity from the plates caught the plane in its grip and yanked it down, its occupants screaming at the sudden drop. The cannon tore fist sized holes through the thin aluminum, inches above Konrad’s head, stitching a line up through the top of the fuselage.

The ship bounced wildly as the sudden pull ceased and Liliane fought to level them out, but Konrad had eyes only for what he had wrought. He clung to the open hatch as the plates spun in the air, pushed and pulled by their own mad gravity projections, and hit the ground. The next spike threw the antiaircraft gun and the men manning it thirty feet through the air, screaming.

“Yes!” the madman laughed from the cockpit. “Yes! That’s brilliant!” The men below scrambled to grab the plates while Lusser screamed his fury at them, but it bounced along the ground like a fish out of water, flopping unpredictably. A hundred-pound fish, made of metal. It flew into a man’s chest, pulverizing him, before flipping into the air and dragging a half dozen other soldiers and their equipment behind it, tossing them flailing in an arc through the sky.

The plane picked up speed, Liliane yelling something in French he couldn’t understand, and the scene below devolved into complete chaos. Konrad caught a final glimpse of Lusser, jumping up and down and shaking a gun that he’d snatched in the air, before an errant blast of anti-gravity threw him into the mud. The whole scene slipped out of sight behind a hill as the plane slid away, towards the dunes and the breaking waves of the ocean.

Konrad slid down the wall next to the hatch as Francois heaved the door shut and latched it with a clang, utterly spent. Liliane and Arcturus were talking with each other in French, arguing over which way they should fly, he thought. The woman kept pointing one way, and the alien another, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. So long as they flew away from Peenemunde, that would be enough for him.

Reel came and knelt next to him. She took his hand in her own, the scales rough against his palm.

“Thank you,” she said in her own tongue, when he looked up to meet her eyes, and then something else he couldn’t quite follow. He smiled and squeezed her hand in return, trying to find the words for “you’re welcome” in the Torellan language.

They didn’t come to him, so he gave up and stuck to German. “I promised I would.”

She seemed to understand that, and gave his hand another firm squeeze, and he found that was enough. He’d done what he’d promised to do. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and let his head tip back against the wall.