“It’ll get us away from here.”He gave her a grin.“And we won’t have to use our thumbs.”
She chucked then.“There is that.”
“Well take off as soon as she’s fueled up,” Con promised.
For the first time, Rita felt like her time travel education had been seriously lacking.But then, she probably wasn’t supposed to climb into vintage aircraft, let alone fly off into the horizon in one.
She’d heard the woman say her husband had built theStinksfrom a kit.What the heck?Who does that?Red hadn’t even blinked at this.Okay, different time and hadn’t she been admiring their self-sufficiency?
Definitely less enamored, she took his offered help to get up onto the wing.She started to climb into the rear seat and stopped when she saw the cockpit controls.
She looked down at Con.
“Front seat,” he said.
What the heck?“But how can you see to fly the plane?”
“It will be fine,” he said, but she noticed he didn’t quite meet her gaze.
Her scramble into the front seat was not even close to graceful and she landed on unyielding wood.
She shifted but nothing changed.She added to her mental list of Con and his ilks self-sufficiency: no feeling in their butts.He wasn’t that far in time from people who road in wagons.Maybe feeling in the posterior was an evolutionary trait.
He secured her straps for her, but she took note of how he did it.She’d need to know how to get out when they crashed.
He gave her an encouraging smile, then clambered into place behind her and pulled the bubble top in place.
It immediately took the heat into the stuffy zone.With sweat popping out on her forehead and other places, she took stock of her space.
It was as bare bones as anything she’d ever seen in her travels.At least Henry had sanded the seat, but everything was definitely rustic.
There were a pair of ear muffs hanging on a peg in front of her.She eyed them with foreboding and found her worst fears realized when Red began to spin up the engines.
She grabbed them and slid them on.It helped some but they weren’t noise cancelling.And they’d clearly been designed for winter wear.
It felt like they sat there rattling and shuddering for far too long.Finally, when she wasn’t sure her tush could take much more, the plane gave a jerk and they started forward, the wheels bumping over the uneven ground.
As landing fields went, this one should just go back to being crops.
She wasn’t happy to be at the front of the action, watching the land slide past her on either side with no ability to control anything.
She tried closing her eyes, but that made it worse.
The acceleration pushed her back into her seat and she felt odd in her mid-section as the nose lifted, then the rest of the plane began to lift, too.
Her tush was grateful to be off the ground.
The rest of her wasn’t sure about any of it.Looking ahead was still not optimal, so she craned to look back and thought she saw a black car racing along the road past the farm.She watched it pass out of sight before she noticed that it wasn’t just the heat making the horizon wobbly.Time was fluxing out there, too.
She turned face forward again, considering this.She expected her gut to be seriously unhappy, but it wasn’t, other than a completely normal dislike of the vibrations and rattles.
How long would it take the men in black to find out where they’d been dropped off by the farmer?And that they’d gone airborne?And if they did find out, what could they do about it?
She squirmed, trying to get comfortable, and gave it up as a bad job.Now that they were airborne, the feeling of rushing forward out of control had eased some.
Despite the hard seat, her head began to nod.She had her backpack and tried to use it as a pillow.It wasn’t a great success, but she was so tired, the noise and sky began to fade…
Con’s Pitts was a one-seat, so he took his time getting to know the feel of the stick and how this plane reacted to changes in direction and air currents.He definitely missed the wheel pants, but the drag wasn’t that bad.He could get used to it.
