Straying From the Path

by Carrie Vaughn

  On the last two flights, the pilots hadn’t checked out. They might have been under orders for security reasons, to cover up what they’d been doing. But then why log in? Or why not log false information? Avery hadn’t given us any instructions about altering the log. Nothing gave any clue as to why this bomber shone like a carnival midway.

  “So what have you found out?” I asked. “Does flying attract a certain type of person? Are certain types more likely to become pilots than others?”

  “Well, men who become pilots tend to be risk takers. They tend to have a greater sense of adventure. They also tend to be dreamers. Less practical than the average individual. They have a greater sense of, oh, I don’t know. Aesthetics. They’re more sublime, if you will. Army pilots write more poetry than officers in other branches.”

  “I could have told you that without the Ph.D.” Just about every pilot I knew started out as a kid who looked skyward when the drone of an aircraft engine sounded overhead. “So how about women?”

  He shrugged, wedging himself more firmly into his nook. “I haven’t studied the psychology of female pilots.”

  “Figures.”

  I didn’t think they’d ever be able to quantify the old dream of flight that had once sent people jumping off hillsides in paper wings. It wasn’t about numbers or types, but about becoming part of the sky, becoming free of gravity. Some people said an airplane was a crutch, substitute, not like being a bird at all because of the steel and engines and fuel. But there was something about the airplane, too—all that power, responsive to the touch of a finger. All that power at my command. I was in control of the height of modern technology, the pinnacle of what civilization had produced: a 35,000 pound machine that could fly.

  It was about being part of the machine. Learning every nuance, reacting in the blink of an eye. The machine did the flying, yes, but it couldn’t fly without the pilot, without me or Evie or any of the guys in the logbook. So it wasn’t the plane flying at all, it was us.

  According to the logbook, the previous pilot had been Captain Elliot Boyd.

  I asked Cook, “Do you know Captain Boyd? Was he part of your study?”

  “Yes,” Cook said without looking up from his notepad.

  “What’s he like?”

  He took a long time to answer, like he was gathering words and trying them out before speaking. “He was a good pilot,” he said finally.

  Was? “What happened to him?”

  “That’s classified.”

  I looked over the logbook again. “And Captain McGlade? Where is he? And their copilots. Olsen? Todd?”

  Cook shifted uncomfortably, pulling his cap over his forehead and lifting it off again. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. That told me all I needed to know—the last two crews of this thing were dead.

  I was about to lay into the good doctor when Evie spoke softly.

  “This is the last plane they ever flew.”

  “What?”

  “I can hear them. Listen.” Her gaze was distant, not on the instruments at all.

  I heard the engines, their power vibrating through the body of the plane. The drone was hypnotic, comforting. Surrounded by the colors dancing outside the canopy, I felt cocooned. Warm and safe, like I was falling asleep in front of a campfire, with the hum of crickets all around.

  “Now that you’re here, things are perfect. I always take girls flying on the first date. They love it.”

  I thought for a moment another plane’s radio signal was bleeding into our channel. But our radio was turned off, not even hissing static. Yet, I heard a voice.

  “Nice night for flying, isn’t it? ‘Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .’ ”

  Someone grabbed my arm.

  “Miss Harris! Miss Bateson! Snap out of it, for God’s sake!”

  Cook, breathing hard, shook my arm in a panic.

  I blinked and rubbed my face. I’d been dozing. I’d never fallen asleep in the cockpit before. Never. That was a fast way to turn yourself into a smoking pile of wreck on the ground. I took a quick scan of the instruments, looked out the canopy—spotted the Mississippi, a glowing ribbon in the moonlight, a distinctive landmark. Everything looked fine. Except for those damn colors, like light through a stained glass window. What did we look like to a kid on the ground? Like a comet? A space ship?

  Evie had her head cocked, like she was concentrating, listening closely.

  “How’d you get in here?” she said softly. She smiled suddenly, like someone had told her a joke. “Oh really?”

  Cook gripped her arm, but she brushed him away. He sat back, stunned, his eyes wide.

  “Do you hear anything?” I asked him.

  “This shouldn’t be happening,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “Evie!”

  She gave me a sideways glance. “Can’t you hear it? They’re talking.”

  I heard—the engines. The wind. A whisper.

  “Come on, Jane. Be a sport and join in.” Male voices, like cocky pilots flirting and teasing. I couldn’t think of where they came from, except my own imagination.

  “This is some plane, huh? Why don’t you see what it can really do?”

  I didn’t hear anything, not a damn thing.

  The lights glowing on the surface of the plane pulsed, throbbing red like a heartbeat. Nothing about the plane’s mechanics had changed—still running at the same speed, altitude, RPMs. Fuel still good, pressure gauges normal. Everything normal, as far as the dials were concerned. But this plane was haunted.

  The skin glowed so brightly now, I couldn’t see anything outside the plane. The world was a circle of light. Beyond that, blackness, emptiness. We had to fly by compass readings.

  “Evie,” I said, quelling the desperation that tinged my voice. “What is going on?”

  She flashed me an achingly familiar look of annoyance. “This plane . . . it’s different. Look.” She wasn’t holding her yoke. I wasn’t holding mine. Yet we were aloft, maintaining speed and altitude. “What if it’s alive, Jane? I can hear it talking to me.”

  Ray guns. Smart machines. Strange ideas, like Avery said.

  “What did you do to this plane?” I said to Cook. “To those pilots?”

  He shook his head continually, a fast, trembling gesture. “This shouldn’t be happening, it can’t be happening.”

  “What can’t be happening?” I had to shout in his ear before he responded.

  “This. The link-up,” he said weakly.

  “Link-up?”

  “She’s not really hearing anything. She’s talking to herself. It’s a hysterical response, women are unstable in stressful situations—”

  “Does she look like she’s under stress?” Evie’s fingers hung loosely on the yoke, her smile was easy. “You’re the one who’s hysterical, Cook.” The psychologist cringed on the floor of the cockpit.

  “Why, thank you,” Evie said—not to either of us, but straight ahead, to the canopy. “I always sing to my planes.”

  A finger of luminescence seeped under the canopy. It had substance, mass, like a pool of honey pushing into the cockpit. Evie unbelted her harness, reached over the yoke and touched the pool of light. Her hand went into the light, through the light, and kept going into the instrument panel. She pushed her arm into the metal of the plane. Her face glowed, her eyes were half-lidded with a look of bliss. “Yes, I can feel it,” she murmured. “Flying, oh yes!”

  I grabbed a fistful of her flight suit and pulled her back. “No, you don’t!” I didn’t know if I yelled at the plane for taking her, or at Evie for letting it take her.

  She cried out. The light flashed to orange, angry as fire as her arm came free and she wrenched away from it. The engines revved—all on their own—like a growl. I grabbed her around the waist and held—she tried to lunge forward to the instrument panel, back to the light.

  “Cook, help me hold her!”

  Cook was pulling on the straps of his parachute. “We’ve got to either land this thing or get ou
t of here. If this goes on, we’ll all die.”

  “We won’t,” said Evie, struggling against my bear-hug. “The other pilots aren’t dead. You don’t understand, they wanted it to happen. They’re still here. They’re flying.” She pulled my fingers, desperate to wrench out of my grasp.

  We fell off balance as the plane pitched into a dive. The lights on the hull were searing, hot like flames. All around the canopy seams, the glow pushed inside the cockpit, oozing like slime.

  “See, Jane? You’re upsetting them.”

  I grabbed the copilot’s yoke and pulled, leaning against the tension, trying to level us off before we plunged into a spin. Altitude dropped, speed increased.

  Evie took the pilot’s yoke and helped. Together, we pulled the bomber back under control.

  She whispered, “It’s okay, baby. You just scared her is all. She doesn’t really want to hurt you.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.

  “Who the hell are you talking to?”

  “Jane, if you’d just listen.”

  “This is crazy,” I murmured.

  A sputter rocked to starboard, followed by an ominous quiet as the usual background roar diminished by half. I looked out the window; the right prop fluttered, stalled.

  “We just lost starboard engine,” I said, leaning back on the yoke and slamming the rudder hard to hold our position. “Evie, tell me what’s wrong? What happened to that engine?”

  Evie scanned the gauges. “Fuel pressure is at zero. There’s nothing mechanically wrong. I think they’re trying to scare you.”

  “That’s right, don’t fight it and no one gets hurt. You want to fly, don’t you? I’ll show you real flying.”

  Our altitude was dropping. We weren’t in a dive anymore, but we didn’t have the thrust to stay airborne. I firewalled the throttle, but I couldn’t get the power to climb. We were still fifty miles from Wright Field.

  Damned fly boys, always think they know best. “We fly on my terms, buster.” Fly—or not. “We’re going to have to land now. We’re going to have to put down in a field somewhere.”

  “There’s no way,” Cook said, a waver in his voice. “Not with this plane, not at this speed. The best pilot in the Army couldn’t do it, and, well, you’re just—”

  “We’re just what?” I said, murder in my voice. He didn’t have to say it, I heard it every time I showed up on an air field in my flight suit. “Can you fly this thing?” I shoved a roll of charts at him. “Here, look at these and tell me there’s a field we can put down in.” He disappeared down the hatch.

  I didn’t lower the landing gear; it would be better to belly in on soft earth. I prayed there was an open field with good, soft earth.

  Desperately, Evie pleaded, “Just let me talk to them, it’ll be okay if you’ll just let me—”

  “Evie, this plane is trying to kill us! Now help me land!”

  “They’re not trying to kill us. They just want to fly and you don’t understand.”

  She put one hand on the yoke and reached the other toward the pool of light. It stretched to meet her, engulfing her arm in its radiance. The light poured into one hand, through her whole body, then out the other hand and into the yoke, completing the circuit. Her face glowed rose. She closed her eyes, and the plane steadied. The intense pressure eased off the yoke.

  Holding the plane level had taken all my strength. I’d been shaking with the effort. But Evie held it with the touch of one hand.

  Cook was wrong, trying to quantify the characteristics of the typical pilot so the Army could make a checklist and screen its candidates more efficiently. Good eyesight and a sense of daring, that was all a person really needed to be a pilot. To be a good pilot? A lot of us did a good job just by following the rules and using common sense. But to be a great pilot? Some pilots knew their plane’s condition without looking at the instruments. They could sense a change in the weather the moment before it happened, they could react before the plane itself did. I’d heard of guys coaxing their fighters out of flat spins just by talking to them, treating the planes like the sexy ladies they painted on the noses. It was instinct, a sixth sense that let a pilot be a part of his plane. You either had it or you didn’t.

  Evie could fly a rock, if she put her mind to it.

  “Evie? Evie, what’s happening?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, looked at me, and smiled. “We’ll make it.”

  “There’s two hundred acres of empty farmland within range, heading north.” Cook climbed back through the hatch, a chart rolled up and tucked under his arm. “We can still bail out,” he added hopefully.

  “I’m not leaving,” Evie said.

  “I’m not leaving Evie,” I said.

  “Aw, Jesus,” Cook said, sitting heavily.

  Evie turned the wheel. The plane banked and hiccupped, dropping ten feet in a second as the remaining engine whined. I braced. Cook grabbed the back of my seat. Evie didn’t flinch. She murmured, words I couldn’t hear.

  They were the most agonizing ten minutes I’d ever spent in a cockpit. I watched the altimeter—it was all I could do. Two thousand. Fifteen hundred. One thousand.

  The glow filled the cockpit, but around Cook and me, it formed a bubble of dark, isolating us. Evie was fading. I could see through her to the side of the cockpit. I could see the instrument panel and the padding of the wheel through her hand. I wanted to stop her. I didn’t want her to go. I was afraid to touch her. She was flying.

  A winter-razed cornfield, covered in the dry stubble of last year’s crop, loomed ahead. It stretched, warping with the oddness of our perspective. I glanced at the airspeed indicator. We were only going a hundred and ten. If we didn’t land going at least a hundred and thirty, we’d stall. One of the quirks of the Army’s most advanced and sensitive bomber.

  “Evie, we’re too slow. We can’t land at that speed.”

  “We only have one engine, Jane.”

  “We’ll stall out.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  Five hundred feet. Four hundred.

  “Cook, get to the radio and belt in,” I said. I secured my own harness. “Evie, flaps aren’t down.”

  “They don’t like you taking control. They don’t want to land,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Would they prefer a nose-dive? We gotta land if we’re going to get out of this.”

  “Come on, baby. Let me put the flaps down.” She shook her head. Nothing.

  Evie had sided with the plane. It had changed her somehow, like it had the other pilots. They didn’t want to touch the ground anymore.

  I grabbed her and pulled her away from the yoke. She grunted, fell out of the light and collapsed into my bubble of darkness. I surprised them both and stole back control from whatever soul inhabited the bomber. I pulled on the yoke, lifting the nose, and lowered the flaps. Fifty, forty. We were still too slow. And for spite, the other engine cut out. We sailed in silence, plunging toward the earth like a bomb. I could only hope that we hit belly first and slid to a halt before we flipped.

  “Hold on!”

  I don’t remember what happened after the first impact. There was a jolt, the world through the canopy lurched, and we skidded. We skimmed on our belly like a rock on water, turning slightly so the port wing led. Must have crossed the whole two hundred acres like that. We didn’t flip. Eventually, we stopped. The monster came to rest at the end of a long furrow.

  Smoke and dust filled the cockpit. I took slow breaths and the world came back into focus as I realized I could feel again. I was sore where the straps had held me. My heart pounded like a piston. But I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t broken. I laughed with relief; the sound made me light-headed.

  “Evie?”

  She lay across the instrument panel. There was a crack in the canopy right above her head. Blood matted her dark hair. The canopy, the glass fronts of the instruments, shone with blood. She hadn’t secured her harness.

  I undid my belt and touched her neck. I didn’t want to turn her
over. I didn’t want to see her face, to see what she looked like with her skull smashed in.

  Cook came up through the hatch. Apart from a cut on his brow, he looked fine. He saw Evie and didn’t say a word. He helped me pick her up and take her to the top hatch. Together we carefully lowered her to the wing, then to the ground, and carried her away from the plane.

  The bomber’s skin was metal, dull gray. It had a faint, lifeless sheen in the predawn light.

  I held Evie on my lap and stared at the bomber.

  “You knew this would happen.”

  “No. No, I—” Cook sat among dead cornstalks and stared at the wreck. He held his notepad, but didn’t write. I think he lost his pencil. He shrugged, and I wanted to hit him. “Sure, we lost Boyd and Olsen, but it shouldn’t have happened to—”

  “To what?”

  “To women.”

  “Why not?”

  “It—it’s classified.”

  “Cook, tell me what that thing was,” I said, my voice tight with anger. “Tell me why it killed Evie.” Never mind that she had known what she was doing and if I hadn’t grabbed her . . . if she had belted in properly. If . . . if . . .

  He shook his head. “I—I can’t. It’s on a need to know basis—”

  I lunged at him and grabbed the collar of his jacket. I twisted the leather in my hands and pulled him so his face was inches from mine.

  “Cook? I need to know.”

  He pushed away, scrambling awkwardly until he collapsed. He rubbed the cut on his forehead.

  He took a breath, then spoke evenly, as if lecturing. “It was an experiment in pilot-aircraft interface. We were examining methods to increase pilot reaction speed—hypnosis, electrodes, pharmaceuticals—and aircraft responsiveness to control. We hit on a method of translating nerve impulses into electrical impulses which could be transmitted directly to the aircraft controls.” The cables, the sockets, yes. “But something happened. On the first flight, the plane landed empty. The crew was just gone, and the plane’s skin started glowing. We didn’t know what happened, except that maybe the experiment worked too well. There are studies being done now by another research group, advanced physics and mathematics describing the conversion of mass into energy—” He waved the explanation away, like he was swatting at a fly. “We sent the plane up again, just a test flight without using the linking apparatus. The same thing happened. Then we thought something about the pilots, their ability and sensitivity to the aircraft, the responsiveness of the B-26, caused a link-up to form without the apparatus. We were at Harlingen because it’s isolated, not as susceptible to security breaches. After the—anomalies—Avery wanted to send the plane to Wright, where the engineers could examine it more closely. We believed—” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “—that female pilots weren’t as sensitive as male pilots and that therefore they would not form a connection with the plane.”