14
Sabrina marches past me like nothing’s amiss, heading down the aisle to the right, where she begins to work feverishly, treating the injured passengers coming in.
I stand there, frozen to the spot. Yul—that must be the trim Asian guy’s name—moves out cautiously and faces me, as if he’s waiting for me to comment.
My first instinct is to say, “I didn’t hear anything,” but I bite off the words in time, thank God. Nothing says “I heard every word” more loud and clear—I might as well say “Hey, so I hear you might be connected to whatever caused the crash, and part of an ongoing conspiracy. Care to comment?”
I settle for looking guilty and a barely audible “Hiya.”
Yul walks away without a word down the left-hand aisle. When he gets to his row in business, he glances back at me for just a little too long before sliding into his seat.
I slump against the cockpit wall, taking the weight off my right leg, and press my burning forehead against the cool surface. It feels good. So does the cold wind blowing in through the door. For the last few days I’ve swung between chills and fever, but now it’s only fever, burning relentlessly inside me. I know what my decision has to be, if I want to live. And I do want to live.
When I glance up, the shock of what I see consumes me. Am I hallucinating? Sabrina’s gotten the first few incoming patients cleaned off. They’re . . . old. I recognize some of these people, from the lakeside, but they seem to have aged decades in a single day. Their faces are wrinkled and hollow, but it’s more than that. These people are really old, all over, not just starved and exhausted.
I’m not the only one unnerved by this. Sabrina’s losing control. Her eyes are wild, her motions quick and sloppy. Something very, very strange is happening here. Does she know what it is? Or is she finally losing it? Either way, it’s not good news for any of us.
Pushing away from the wall, I step forward into the first-class galley, ready to lunge into my seat in the first row. There’s a brief flash in my peripheral vision to the right—a man running through the door, carrying a woman. They collide with me before I can turn, the woman landing on my right leg.
Awareness. Pain. I’m in my seat again, my legs outstretched. It’s pitch-black outside now, night for sure. Still raining.
A woman I don’t know sits on the floor in front of me, her back flat against the wall. She rises and holds out her open hand, on which rests a large white pill. “Sabrina said to take this.”
I take the pill and toss it back. My throat’s so dry it takes half a bottle of water to get it down.
I let my drenched head fall back to the headrest and watch as passengers drag three limp bodies past me toward the exit. All dead.
I focus on the faces. Nate isn’t among them. Neither is the Indian girl in the Disney World shirt. It’s the new arrivals, the people that just came in from the lake. Two more go by. How many have died? Another body passes. The faces are even older than when they arrived. What’s happening here?
Behind me I hear Sabrina’s voice. Her droning monotone has turned to a sharp bark, harsh and urgent. She’s interrogating passengers, barely waiting for their responses: “Where do you reside? Have you visited any of these clinics: King Street Medical in New York City, Bayside Primary Care in San Francisco, or Victoria Station Clinic in London? Did you get a flu shot at any of these locations? Do you take a multivitamin? What brand? Do you use an air freshener at home? Do you have any chronic medical conditions?”
Then she’s at my side, no preamble, hammering me with the same list of questions, barely waiting for answers. The only doctor I’ve seen in years is my gynecologist, I tell her. I didn’t get a flu shot this year, and I take a women’s multivitamin. When I fumble for the brand name, she leans in and grills me like a murder suspect at Scotland Yard. I finally come up with the brand, and she scribbles it down, nodding, like it’s the clue that will nab Jack the Ripper. Then she’s gone.
I sit up, glance out of the pod. They’re hauling two more people out.
The pain moves down a notch, mellows. I know this feeling, know what she gave me: a pain pill.
Sleep comes in seconds.
I awake to darkness and silence. The pain is back. I turn, looking back down the aisle, but I can’t make anything out. There’s almost no moonlight filtering through the small windows. It’s still raining, but not as hard, just a steady pitter-patter now.
I lie there, letting my eyes adjust.
On my right, a slim figure slips by. Yul.
Faint footsteps behind me. A woman, black hair, about my height. Mechanical walk. Sabrina.
Three seconds later I hear the click of a thick metal door closing.
I stretch my good leg out into the aisle, test the other. Not good. I limp, hop, and drag myself through the galley, keeping as quiet as I can.
They’re being more careful this time, and I have to stand close to the door to hear anything.
“We did this,” Sabrina insists.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“Correlation is not causation, Sabrina. You ask every passenger the right questions, and eventually you’ll discover that they all know somebody who knows Kevin Bacon.”
“Who’s Kevin Bacon?” Sabrina asks urgently. “Another agent? A passenger?”
“No—”
“How does Bacon figure into this?”
“Christ, Sabrina. Forget Kevin Bacon.”
“I want to know everything they had you do, every move you made before we boarded the flight.”
“All right.” Yul sounds exasperated. “What are they dying of?”
“Old age.”
“What?”
“They’re dying from different diseases, conditions that I assume would have developed in time as they aged,” Sabrina says. “But it’s happening to them all at once.”
“Why aren’t we affected?”
“I don’t know. Only half the passengers seem to have the condition.”
The voices begin to fade, and I lean closer, trying to hear them. A sound, a low rumble, is blotting them out. It’s not coming from the cockpit. It’s outside.
As I step back from the door, a bright spotlight breaks through the small oval windows, running quickly along the length of the plane. Through the rain, the roar grows louder. Then the light blinks off, and the sound recedes.
The cockpit door flies open, and Yul and Sabrina rush out. They don’t stop to interrogate me with their eyes this time. Yul jerks the exit door open and peers into the dark, dense forest, where rain drips unevenly down through the trees.
He glances back at me.
I nod. “I saw it too: a beam of light ran over the plane.”
Yul looks at Sabrina, opening his mouth to say something, but a crunching sound outside the plane stops him. Boots, grinding the fallen underbrush into the forest floor. Someone is running straight toward us, though I can’t make out who.
Someone from the lake? A rescue team? Or . . .
Yul jerks a phone from his pocket, activates the flashlight app, and holds it out. The light is weak, but it’s just enough to reveal shapes moving out there. At first it looks like rain catching on invisible, maybe human forms—three of them, barreling toward the plane.
Before we can react, the first form charges up the rickety stairs and stops on the landing. It stands over six feet, glittering in the cold glow of Yul’s phone, like a glass figurine.
It raises its right arm toward Yul, then Sabrina, then me, firing three rapid shots, almost silent pops of air with no flash of light. My chest explodes in pain.