Somebody make that brat stop yowling, Ace thought. What’s the matter with her, anyway? I got this under control. They don’t call me the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi for nothing.
But the scream went on, ripping across the air, darkening it as it came, and everything began to break up.
For a moment Albert was nowhere at all — lost in a darkness through which fragments of his dream tumbled and spun in a whirlpool. The only constant was that terrible scream; it sounded like the shriek of an overloaded teakettle.
He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in his seat toward the front of Flight 29’S main cabin. Coming up the aisle from the rear of the plane was a girl of about ten or twelve, wearing a pink dress and a pair of ditty-bop shades.
What is she, a movie star or something? he thought, but he was badly frightened, all the same. It was a bad way to exit his favorite dream.
“Hey!” he cried — but softly, so as not to wake the other passengers. “Hey, kid! What’s the deal?”
The little girl whiplashed her head toward the sound of his voice. Her body turned a moment later, and she collided with one of the seats which ran down the center of the cabin in four-across rows. She struck it with her thighs, rebounded, and tumbled backward over the armrest of a portside seat. She fell into it with her legs up.
“Where is everybody?” she was screaming. “Help me! Help me!”
“Hey, stewardess!” Albert yelled, concerned, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He stood up, slipped out of his seat, turned toward the screaming little girl... and stopped. He was now facing fully toward the back of the plane, and what he saw froze him in place.
The first thought to cross his mind was, I guess I don’t have to worry about waking up the other passengers, after all.
To Albert it looked like the entire main cabin of the 767 was empty.
7
Brian Engle was almost to the partition separating Flight 29’S first-class and business-class sections when he realized that first class was now entirely empty. He stopped for just a moment, then got moving again. The others had left their seats to see what all the screaming was about, perhaps.
Of course he knew this was not the case; he had been flying passengers long enough to know a good bit about their group psychology. When a passenger freaked out, few if any of the others ever moved. Most air travellers meekly surrendered their option to take individual action when they entered the bird, sat down, and buckled their seatbelts around them. Once those few simple things were accomplished, all problem-solving tasks became the crew’s responsibility. Airline personnel called them geese, but they were really sheep... an attitude most flight crews liked just fine. It made the nervous ones easier to handle.
But, since it was the only thing that made even remote sense, Brian ignored what he knew and plunged on. The rags of his own dream were still wrapped around him, and a part of his mind was convinced that it was Anne who was screaming, that he would find her halfway down the main cabin with her hand plastered against a crack in the body of the airliner, a crack located beneath a sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.
There was only one passenger in the business section, an older man in a brown three-piece suit. His bald head gleamed mellowly in the glow thrown by his reading lamp. His arthritis-swollen hands were folded neatly over the buckle of his seatbelt. He was fast asleep and snoring loudly, ignoring the whole ruckus.
Brian burst through into the main cabin and there his forward motion was finally checked by utter stunned disbelief. He saw a teenaged boy standing near a little girl who had fallen into a seat on the port side about a quarter of the way down the cabin. The boy was not looking at her, however; he was staring toward the rear of the plane, with his jaw hanging almost all the way to the round collar of his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt.
Brian’s first reaction was about the same as Albert Kaussner’s: My God, the whole plane is empty!
Then he saw a woman on the starboard side of the airplane stand up and walk into the aisle to see what was happening. She had the dazed, puffy look of someone who has just been jerked out of a sound sleep. Halfway down, in the center aisle, a young man in a crew-necked jersey was craning his neck toward the little girl, and staring with flat, incurious eyes. Another man, this one about sixty, got up from a seat close to Brian and stood there indecisively. He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and he looked utterly bewildered. His hair was fluffed up around his head in untidy mad-scientist corkscrews.
“Who’s screaming?” he asked Brian. “Is the plane in trouble, mister? You don’t think we’re goin down, do you?”
The little girl stopped screaming. She struggled up from the seat she had fallen into, and then almost tumbled forward in the other direction. The kid caught her just in time; he was moving with dazed slowness.
Where have they gone? Brian thought. My dear God, where have they all gone?
But his feet were moving toward the teenager and the little girl now. As he went, he passed another passenger who was still sleeping, this one a girl of about seventeen. Her mouth was open in an unlovely yawp and she was breathing in long, dry inhalations.
He reached the teenager and the girl in the pink dress.
“Where are they, man?” Albert Kaussner asked. He had an arm around the shoulders of the sobbing child, but he wasn’t looking at her; his eyes slipped relentlessly back and forth across the almost deserted main cabin. “Did we land someplace while I was asleep and let them off?”
“My aunt’s gone!” the little girl sobbed. “My Aunt Vicky! I thought the plane was empty! I thought I was the only one! Where’s my aunt, please? I want my aunt!”
Brian knelt beside her for a moment, so they were at approximately the same level. He noticed the sunglasses and remembered seeing her get on with the blonde woman.
“You’re all right,” he said. “You’re all right, young lady. What’s your name?”
“Dinah,” she sobbed. “I can’t find my aunt. I’m blind and I can’t see her. I woke up and the seat was empty—”
“What’s going on?” the young man in the crew-neck jersey asked. He was talking over Brian’s head, ignoring both Brian and Dinah, speaking to the boy in the Hard Rock tee-shirt and the older man in the flannel shirt. “Where’s everybody else?”
“You’re all right, Dinah,” Brian repeated. “There are other people here. Can you hear them?”
“Y-Yes. I can hear them. But where’s Aunt Vicky? And who’s been killed?”
“Killed?” a woman asked sharply. It was the one from the starboard side. Brian glanced up briefly and saw she was young, dark-haired, pretty. “Has someone been killed? Have we been hijacked?”
“No one’s been killed,” Brian said. It was, at least, something to say. His mind felt weird: like a boat which has slipped its moorings. “Calm down, honey.”
“I felt his hair!” Dinah insisted. “Someone cut off his HAIR!”
This was just too odd to deal with on top of everything else, and Brian dismissed it. Dinah’s earlier thought suddenly struck home to him with chilly intensity — who the fuck was flying the plane?
He stood up and turned to the older man in the red shirt. “I have to go forward,” he said. “Stay with the little girl.”
“All right,” the man in the red shirt said. “But what’s happening?”
They were joined by a man of about thirty-five who was wearing pressed blue-jeans and an oxford shirt. Unlike the others, he looked utterly calm. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, shook them out by one bow, and put them on. “We seem a few passengers short, don’t we?” he said. His British accent was almost as crisp as his shirt. “What about crew? Anybody know?”