Page 163 of The Most Dangerous Games

He remembers the sound more than anything—metal tearing, the engine screaming, the pitch of human voices when panic turns them into something raw and animal.

Now he’s securely strapped into a chair in a room that looks too clean, too modern, too controlled. A huge wall-screen in front of him, one big as life.

Or death.

He’s back in that small plane, just looking out from the cockpit this time as the plane dips and rolls and barely pulls out of one dive after another.

Tipton’s riding a roller coaster through the sky, gripping the sides of his chair so hard he’s afraid they might break apart.

If he doesn’t break first.

And in the next second, the room disappears.

He’s back in the plane.

Not as a passenger this time—front row, looking out through the windshield as the horizon tilts, rolls, dives. The sound is so loud it vibrates his bones. His hands clamp the chair arms so hard his knuckles ache.

The plane drops.

It yanks up.

It drops again.

The screen in front of him abruptly changes again.

Now he sees other planes, all around him, falling out of the sky, before crashing and burning.

He tries to tell himself that it’s all just a movie, that he hasn’t left this room, or this chair—he’d been in simulators plenty of times.

Tipton tells himself that it’s all just a bad dream.

Only it doesn’t feel like a dream.

Or a simulator.

It won’t stop.

And he can’t turn away.

His nervous system doesn’t know pixels. His nervous system knows that day in Cornwall.

Tipton, strapped in, can only sit and watch the plane crashes happen, and keep happening.

In the next moment, he’s back in the cockpit, in even more of a death dive, the sound of the plane making his head feel it’s about to explode before the plane does the same, and this time he’ll be the one engulfed by flames.

Just the way it all happened when he was twelve.

The volume surges until it’s not just loud—it’s inside his skull. He hears screams, which sound exactly like the screams of his parents and his brother in the last few seconds before their plane crashed that day, before they perished, even if he miraculously did not.

Ant Tipton bites down so hard on his lower lip that he can taste blood, to keep from screaming himself.

He’s not going to give them the satisfaction of that.

Or hearing him beg them to make it stop.

He squeezes his eyes shut.

The sound doesn’t stop.