The next flight to the UK was in three hours, and she bought one of the last places on it. She used her disabled card to get a comfortable seat, then used it again to be fast-tracked through to the departures lounge. And the whole experience was dreamlike. There were a couple of people crying, and a few who were huddling around the TV in one of the bars, but generally people seemed either unsure of what was happening or appeared not to care.
Jayne spent a few minutes watching the TV, nursing a Jack Daniel’s, more because it had been Tommy’s favourite drink than because she actually wanted it, and she realised then why everything seemed so unreal. Part of it was the fragmentary nature of the reports – there were clips of distant fires, unfocused telephone-camera imagery of shapes rushing through darkness, and helicopter shots of people moving across hillsides. And part of it was the bizarre nature of what they were seeing. Most of the news broadcasts were confused and unclear: unscripted stories, rushed interviews with traumatised and hysterical members of the public, and a few straight-faced officials denying that the emergency services weren’t coping, and assuring viewers that all calls would be dealt with ‘within two minutes’.
But scattered among the confused live broadcasts was more telling footage. One brief clip, expertly and probably secretly shot, showed corpses being unloaded from the back of an ambulance. There were so many that they must have been stacked in layers inside, and when Jayne saw the paramedics’ face masks she gave another harsh laugh, followed by a sob. But no one looked her way. All gazes in the bar were focused on the screen at that point, as the cameraman panned along the row of corpses. Terrible wounds were revealed, injuries that belonged in a war. And every one of the bodies had head trauma.
‘At least someone knows what they’re doing,’ Jayne said, and two young guys on the table next to her glanced her way with shock written all over their faces. She finished her Jack Daniel’s and closed her eyes, feeling the burn.
Human nature meant that it would take a while for all this to sink in.
But it wouldn’t take that long.
Jayne spent two hours in the departures lounge willing the minutes until take-off away, because once they closed the airport that would be it. She’d be stuck here while they – the famous They, the faceless They – tried to take control of things, and reality would surround her. Once in the air and heading for the UK, the sense of the unreality of everything that had happened would increase. There, for a while, perhaps she would find respite.
Her flight was called and she boarded. She was sitting next to a middle-aged businessman whose constant chatter marked him as a nervous flyer. Her monosyllabic responses soon persuaded him to keep his nervousness to himself, and as they went through the pre-flight checks and safety demonstrations Jayne closed her eyes and could almost believe that none of this had happened. But her arm still throbbed, and Tommy stared at her behind her closed eyes, the expression on his face one of surprise as Spartacus’s bullet blew his life away.
They took off, and in the distance Jayne saw a fire blazing somewhere to the north. Fifteen minutes into the flight, an attendant told someone in the seat in front of Jayne that they were the last flight out of Knoxville. From elsewhere she heard someone whisper, ‘Morris says they’re bombing Atlanta.’
3
They drove through the day, hoping to reach Cincinnati by sunset.