Stein stood at the base of the stairs, peering into the dim, cavernous cabin. He’d felt the aircraft tilt and thought it would crash. Then it leveled off. Berry was flying it. He relaxed a bit and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darker shadows around him.
In the center of the first-class cabin, a few feet from the stairs, was the enclosed area that held the two lavatories. He stepped to the side of the wall and looked back into the tourist section. With the section dividers gone, he could see how huge the Straton was. Row upon row of seats, like a movie theater. Shafts of sunlight cut though the windows, and he could see dust motes in them. A larger shaft of sunlight lay across the wide body from hole to hole, and the air rushing past the holes created an odd noise. He noticed a mild and pleasant breeze in the cabin that helped to dissipate the smell of sick people and sewage. The pressure and airflow had leveled out into a state of near equilibrium.
As if they had also reached an internal equilibrium, most of the passengers sat motionless. Their initial bursts of energy had been spent, and they sat with their eyes shut and their faces slack and pasty white, many of them smeared with blood and vomit. A dozen or so people were still making noises, and from the back of the aircraft somewhere came a terrible laugh. A few men and women continued to move aimlessly up and down the aisles, in a sort of trance. It was a cross between an insane asylum and a slaughterhouse. How, thought Stein, who was a religious man, could God permit this to happen? Why did God give man the ability to reach this high into the heavens and then desert them all like this? And why was he spared? Was he spared?
He searched the faces of the people closest to him. None of them offered even the slightest promise of normality. He took a breath and stepped a few feet up the aisle. He forced himself to look at the four center-row seats where his family sat. The two girls, Debbie and Susan, were smiling at him with blood-covered mouths. His wife seemed not to notice him at all. He called her name. “Miriam. Miriam!” She didn’t look up, but a lot of other people did.
Stein realized that the noise had made them active. He remained motionless, then glanced back at his wife and daughters. Tears came to his eyes. He stepped back and leaned against the bulkhead of the lavatory. He thought he was going to pass out, and he took several deep breaths. His mind cleared and he stood up straight. He knew there was no way he would walk the length of the aircraft. He’d just wait five minutes and go back. He’d lead his family up the stairs, too.
A peculiar sensation, a mild vibration, began to inch into his awareness. He turned and laid a hand against the bulkhead. The vibration was coming from inside the enclosure, and it was getting stronger. It was the rhythmic hum of a slow-turning electric motor. He remembered that there was a galley elevator adjacent to the lavatories. He quickly went around to the galley opening on the other side of the enclosure. He looked in at a small metal door. The motor stopped. He took a step back as the handle rotated. The door opened.
Stein stood face-to-face with two women. Flight attendants. One tall brunette, the other Oriental. They were huddled close together in the small elevator. He could see pure terror on their faces. Their eyes were red and watery, and traces of smeared vomit clung to their blue jackets? “Are you all right?” Stein asked. “Can you… understand me?”
“Who are you?” asked the brunette flight attendant. “What happened? Is everything okay?”
Stein took a deep breath to get his voice under control and replied, “There’s been an accident. Holes in the airplane. We lost pressure. A few of us were trapped in the lavatories. The lavatory doors held the air pressure,” Stein said, remembering Berry’s words. “I guess where you were held its air pressure, too.”
The brunette flight attendant said, “We were in the lower galley.”
The Oriental girl asked, “Did a door open?”
“No. A bomb.”
“Oh, God!”
Sharon Crandall stepped out of the elevator and brushed by Stein. She turned and looked down the length of the cabins. “Oh my God, oh no! Barbara! Barbara!”
Barbara Yoshiro came quickly out of the elevator and stood behind Crandall. She screamed, a long primal scream that died in her throat as she blacked out and collapsed into Stein’s arms.
Sharon Crandall put her hands over her face and took a series of short breaths. She turned quickly toward Stein. “The pilots. The pilots! ”
“Dead. Well… unconscious. But there’s a passenger who’s a pilot. Come on. We have to get out of here.”
“What’s happened to these people? ”
“Brain damage… Oxygen loss. They might get violent. Come on!”
A dozen passengers began walking up the aisles toward them. A few more passengers near them tried to stand, but their seat belts held them down. But through trial and error, or because of some vague recollection, some people were beginning to unfasten their belts and stand up. A few of them moved into the aisles. A tall man stood up right next to Stein.
Stein was becoming frightened. “Go ahead! Go first!”
Sharon Crandall nodded and moved quickly up the stairway. Stein dragged Barbara Yoshiro toward the stairway. A male passenger suddenly stood in his seat and stepped into the open area in front of the staircase. With his free hand, Stein straight-armed him and the man spun away, wobbling like a malfunctioning gyroscope.
Stein, dragging the unconscious flight attendant, took the stairs slowly. Someone was behind him. A hand grabbed his ankle. He kicked loose and moved faster up the spiral stairs, almost knocking Crandall over as he reached the top. He laid Barbara Yoshiro on the carpet and slumped over the rail. A half-dozen grotesque faces stared up at him. He thought he saw the top of his wife’s head, but he couldn’t be sure. His breathing was heavy and his heart raced wildly in his chest. “Get away. Go away!”
Sharon Crandall looked around the lounge. “Oh my God!”
Stein stood by the staircase and wrapped the belt around his hand. “I’ll stay here. Go into the cockpit.”
Berry looked over his shoulder into the lounge. “Come in here!”
But Sharon Crandall’s attention was focused on the flight attendant sitting on the carpet with her legs spread out. “Terri!” She ran over to the girl and knelt beside her. “Are you okay? Terri?”
Terri O’Neil opened her eyes wide and looked toward where the sound had come from. It was an involuntary response to the auditory stimulus. Her rational mind had been erased by the thin air at 62,000 feet. The sight of Sharon Crandall’s face meant nothing to her. The memory of the hundreds of hours they had flown together had evaporated from her brain like water from a boiling kettle.
“Terri!” Sharon shook her friend’s arm.
“Forget it!” yelled Berry. “Come in here!”
Sharon glanced into the cockpit and saw a man sitting in the captain’s seat. His voice was vaguely familiar. But she was too shocked to think clearly. She ignored Berry and moved back past the stairwell over to the sprawled bodies of Stuart and McVary beside the piano. She shook the pilot’s shoulders. “Captain Stuart!”
Stein watched as a man in the main cabin mounted the spiral staircase. Another man, then a woman, followed. Soon a line of people were walking clumsily up the circular steps. “Go down! Down!”
“Aaahh!”
Stein braced himself on the rail and brought his foot down on the head of the first man.
The man fell to his knees and toppled back, sending the whole line stumbling and falling backward.
Linda Farley knelt beside Sharon Crandall. “They’re very sick. I tried to help them.”
Sharon glanced at the girl blankly, then looked at Harold Stein by the rail and the unconscious body of Barbara Yoshiro. She walked to the bar and recovered a first-aid box. She carried a vial of ammonium carbonate to Barbara Yoshiro, broke it, and held it under the girl’s nose. “Easy, now.”