Ghost Dancer by John Case

Prologue

September, 2003

Liberia

There was this...ping.

A single, solitary noise that announced itself in the key of C---Ping!---and that was that. The noise came from somewhere in the back, at the rear of the fuselage, and for a moment, it reminded Mike Burke of his brother's wedding. Which was funny, if you thought about it.

It was the sound his father made at the rehearsal dinner, announcing a toast by tapping his glass with a spoon. Ping! "Everyone?" Ping ping ping! "If I could have your attention, just for a second..." Heads turned, and his dad covered the glass with his hand, killing the resonance. "It's a grand day," he began.

And so it was.

But that wasn't it. Though the helicopter was French (in fact, a single-rotor Ecureuil B2), it was not equipped with champagne flutes. So the sound was something else. Like...well, like the noise a tail-rotor makes when one of its blades is struck with a 9mm round---and snaps in half and flies away. Or so Burke imagined. Ping!

Frowning, he turned with an inquiring look to the pilot, a Kiwi named Rubini. "Did you---"

The handsome New Zealander grinned. "No worries, bugalugs!" Suddenly, the chopper yawed violently to starboard, roaring into a slide, twisting down. Rubini's face went white and he lunged at the controls. Burke gasped, and grabbed the armrests on his seat.

In an instant, his life---his whole life---passed before his eyes against a veering background of forest and sky. One by one, a thousand scenes played out as the helicopter tobogganed down an invisible staircase toward a wall of trees.

In the five or ten seconds it took to fall 500 feet, Burke remembered every pet he'd ever had (including the goldfish), every girl he'd ever kissed, every house apartment teacher friend and landscape he'd ever seen. Candyland and Monopoly. Christmas lights and incense, Chet Baker and the stalls along the Seine. His past washed over him in a wave, and kept on coming. As the helicopter sawed through the air, he watched the dawn come up over Adam's Peak, and saw the sun set a moment later off the coast of Northern California. He remembered the willow oaks he'd planted with his father, the fashion-shoot in Pozos, and the three-point shot he'd taken against Park High, the way it rattled the rim with two seconds left on the clock---and the celebration that followed. A shit-shot, yes, but...thank you, Jesus!

His mother's face appeared like a curtain of rain between his seat and the altimeter, while lines of long-forgotten poetry ran through his head and the smell of gardenias---gardenias?!---filled the cockpit.

Bascom Hill, Bascom Hall---Madison! the brats, the beer---

The pilot yelling. Or not quite yelling...screaming. The pilot is screaming, Burke thought.

Not that there was anything that Burke could do about it. They were going down fast, plummeting, really---and only a miracle could save them. Burke didn't believe in miracles, so he sat where he was, listening spellbound as a voice in the back of his head recited notes for an obituary:

Michael Lee Burke...

27-year--old Virginia native...

award-winning photographer...

crashed and burned...

50 miles form the border with Sierra Leone...

will be much missed...

survived by

Just about everybody (except Rubini).

As the helicopter's undercarriage scraped the tops of the trees, Burke saw his future telescope from 50 years to 5 seconds. And still, the memories came---only now, he was almost up to date.

Last night (a sinister phrase, when you thought about it), he'd gone out drinking with Rubini. And they'd ended up singing karaoke at the Mamba Point Hotel. Burke sang "California Stars" to the hoots of some UNMIL types, but he must have done alright because he went home with a Slav agronomist named Ursula who was reliably said to be the last natural blonde in Monrovia. She was probably still sleeping in his room, just as he'd left her, with her arm crooked above her head on the pillow, like an moviestar swooning for the cameras.

A blizzard of vegetation slammed into the windshield and when it did, he had an epiphany. It wasn't a 9mm round that was going to kill him. It was a tidal wave of bad karma brought on by years of photographing people in extremis. Whatever his intentions, however they benign might have been---to expose, to explain---the reality was that he'd made his life contingent on other people's despair. He'd depended on it.

The more painful the image, the better it sold. That was a fact, and it did something to you. The favelas in Rio, the orphanage in Bucharest, the red-light district in Calcutta---he thought he'd been doing a public service when, in reality, it had all been a kind of well-intended voyeurism.

And today, barely a week before his 28th birthday, here he was, on his way to take pictures at a refugee camp for children who'd suffered amputations in the diamond-wars.

Except...he wasn't. He wasn't on his way anywhere. he was just going down.

As the helicopter dug deeper into the canopy of the forest, Burke wordlessly realized that he'd never again take another picture. One way or another, he was done with that.

Jesus!

Something came through the windshield with a crash and Rubini's forehead exploded, sending a spray of blood and brains through the cockpit. Burke caught a mouthful as the chopper meteored through the trees, bucking and plunging, falling like a box of tools, slamming finally into the water-logged earth of a swamp.

Where it lay, creaking.

So this, Burke thought, is what it's like to be dead... But that didn't make sense. If you were dead, you didn't feel dead. You just...were dead. So, maybe he was dying. That made sense because he felt as if every bone in his body was broken. He could taste the blood in his mouth. He was shaking. And the world was turning, slowly, round and round.

His eyes flew open and he realized what was happening. The helicopter was revolving on its axis like a blue-bottle fly in its death-throes. The overhead rotor slashed at the water, the earth and the trees, then flew apart like a grenade, sending shrapnel in every direction.

The engine coughed, spluttered and whined, throwing a shower of sparks through the cockpit.

Burke fumbled with his seatbelt, but it was difficult. Even the smallest movement was painful. His body was a bag of broken glass and thorns. And he was covered with blood. He could feel it. It was running down the side of his face, and his shoulders were soaked.

But that wasn't right. It wasn't just blood. He took a deep breath, and choked on it.

Aviation fuel.

His fingers tore at the seatbelt, but even as it popped open, he realized it was too late. A soft whump announced the fuel's ignition and, in an instant, the cockpit was engulfed. His shirt went off like a flare and, for a moment, it seemed as if the side of his head was on fire. Stumbling and falling, he erupted out of the cockpit, tearing the shirt off his chest, staggering blindly until a fallen log caught his foot and spilled him into a pool of shallow water.

Where he lay for hours or days, delirious and suppurating. Incredibly, his burns attracted the attention of bees, who fed on the clear liquid oozing from his skin. Occasionally, he rose to consciousness, only to faint dead-away. It was the pain, of course. That and the sight of the apiary embedded in his chest.

Bad karma? Oh, yeah...