Grief-stricken or not, if the guy didn’t watch his tone, Mason was gonna pop him one. “All I know, Peter, is that this isn’t the same airport we left out of.”
“Surely you’re not subscribing to the theory that we’re victims of the Bermuda Triangle?”
Was the guy blind? Mason counted to three before replying. “At this point, I’m not willing to rule out anything.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m just saying that I can’t begin to imagine.”
Peter snorted. “Well, we certainly weren’t drawn into another dimension.”
“Parallel universe,” Dustin corrected, making his way around the dividing wall in front of the restaurant beside them.
“Whatever. It would have to be in another dimension, right?”
Mason exchanged a look with Dustin: This guy might be a problem.
Whatever, Mason thought, mentally echoing Peter, then put his back to him to address Rocky. “Anything?” Dustin and Rocky had been checking for any edible food.
“A few condiments that might be all right, but that’s about it. Everything else is spoiled or probably stale as all get out.”
“Okay.” Mason inhaled deeply. “Let’s get going. I want to eventually make it to the other side and check the reception there. And look for a working landline.”
“Hang on,” Mason said, and began making his way past the blue que ropes to the Southwest counter where he knew there would be another phone.
There was. And it was as dead as all the others he’d checked. He dropped it into the cradle and walked back to where the boys and Peter waited beneath a suspended metal sculpture of an old-timey plane. In addition to high, floor-to-ceiling windows, skylights, and shimmering floor designs, the airport was chock full of artwork. Paintings, prints, multi-hued glass walls, painted ceramic tiles, and other hanging sculptures like the colorful aircraft poised above them.
All of it rusting and gathering dust. And yet they had only been gone for hours.
“Where to next, bossman?” Dustin asked.
Peter snorted, and Mason shot him a hard look. When he glanced back at Dustin, Mason saw he was staring coldly at Peter. Peter better watch himself. Though big, Dustin seemed easy-going enough, but he thought that could possibly change quickly if circumstances warranted it.
“You ready to head down?” Rocky asked, breaking the tense silence.
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
They descended to the lower level by way of a stationary escalator and proceeded to the carousels waiting for luggage that would never come.
Partway down the line of conveyor belts, Mason came to a stop. The airport was huge and they had a lot of ground to cover. “Give a yell, Peter.”
Peter looked surprised for a second and then tilted his head back and did as bided. “Hello!” He waited until the sound of it died away and then shouted again. “Hello, is anybody here?”
After the reverberations faded, they continued to stand there, listening, but only silence met his cry.
“Come on,” urged Dustin. “There’s nobody here.”
All of them were anxious to cover more distance, and they wasted no time moving out of the building and into the street out front.
The next terminal down wasn’t directly beside them and they had to walk a bit to reach it. All Mason could think about was the people left waiting in the sitting area, wondering and worrying.
There was still no sign of life. Some cars were parked over in the garages across from them, and a few vehicles had been left to the side here and there along the way, including a couple of autonomous cars and a police cruiser at the bottom of the slight hill they were descending, but there were no people to be seen anywhere.
Peter walked over and peered through the windows of the cruiser as they passed by it.
Mason thought he was going to move away, but instead he reached out and opened it. He leaned in for a second, then straightened up and slammed the door shut. It sounded loud as a gunshot in the quiet, instantly setting Mason on edge. The airport appeared deserted, but what if it wasn’t? What if there were unsavory characters lurking about?
“I thought it might have the keys in it,” Peter explained, rejoining them.
“Yeah, well,” Mason said. “How about you cool it with the noise?”
“You just had me yell inside that terminal at the top of my lungs!”
“That might not have been such a good idea, actually,” Mason responded.
Peter opened his mouth to say something else, but Dustin spoke up before he could.
“It wouldn’t have started, anyway.”
“Why,” Peter asked, his voice heavy with disbelief, “because we’re now somewhere else where this airport was evacuated four years ago?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Dustin snapped back.
“And if that is the case,” Rocky interjected, “then the batteries would be dead and the fuel bad.”
Mason nodded his agreement. “I tried to crank one of the truck-mounted passenger stairs, and it wouldn’t even turn over.”
“Fine,” Peter said. “Can we get going?”
Silently they hiked the rest of the way, moving out of the sun into the shade under the overhang, over to the doors.
7
THEY MOVED THROUGH the terminal, clicking on their lights in the darker areas where the sun’s rays didn’t reach, scanning the shelves, displays, and racks of items left to mildew and decay.
In a shop that held gifts and other merchandise, Mason made note of a section featuring both travel blankets and pillows, searched around some more, and found a pair of binoculars. They might be useful when they exited the airport again. He hung them around his neck, then waited for Peter to select a blue-and-orange backpack and Juan to grab a pair of sunglasses, and followed them out.
Rocky was over with Dustin coming out of a lounge to their left, reading over a yellowing newspaper he must have found there.
“I don’t know why we’re even bothering,” Peter murmured at his side. “Obviously no one’s here.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Please.”
How the man could be so certain about anything when their situation was so blatantly uncertain, was beyond him. “Maybe in the next building we’ll find someone.”
“And if not?”
Mason made no reply, his attention now focused on Rocky approaching with the newspaper held out.
“What you got?” he asked as Rocky stopped in front of him with a puzzled expression.
Still holding onto the paper, he shook his head in bewilderment.
“What? Here, let me see.”
Rocky held it out wordlessly.
Mason took the paper, turned it so the light was hitting it better, and raised his eyes to the date at the top of the page. Friday, January 15, 2016.
“Near the bottom,” Rocky said.
Mason shifted his eyes down and began scanning.
“That last paragraph,” Rocky clarified, pointing.
Mason—ignoring a heavy sigh from Peter, who was now sitting in one of the nearby seats, fidgeting and acting irritated—began reading over the paragraph near the bottom.
Man Killed by Robot
Thirty-one-year-old Ken Sanford was killed after first being electrocuted and then impaled by an android co-worker while manning a manufacturing production line in Jacksonville. With this coming right on the heels of the accidental suffocation of an Ohio woman after being forcibly held down by a clerk bot who claimed she’d been shoplifting, an allegation that was later disproved, the HJC, one of the more vocal coalitions for the support of human jobs, led a second march on Washington in protest of the accident, calling it another reason to keep corporeal workers who don’t make these kind of “errors.” One of the billion-dollar industry’s most strident defenders, iBot, in response, countered that the HJC or someone like them could easily be behind the incident by tampering with the code of the rampant robot. The authorit
ies who first thought the occurrence to be a random malfunction in the machine’s programming, are now looking into the possibility that this might not have been an accident….
“What does it say?” Dustin asked.
“Read for yourself.” He handed over the paper and turned to Rocky as Juan leaned in to scan it as well.
“Does that sound right to you?” Rocky asked.
“I know robots are getting pretty sophisticated.”
“To this extent? Integrated into society, which is what it sounds like, and killing people?”
“Are you kidding?” Peter said from where he was now standing with his hands on his hips. “Robots?”
Mason ignored him. “No, it doesn’t sound right. It sounds like science fiction.”
“Maybe not fiction in this world,” Dustin commented.
“Let’s go, people,” Peter said in a tone Mason could imagine him using on the underlings he was probably in charge of in his previous life. On their previous Earth.
Morgan waited a moment, just to spite Peter, who was sure as hell not in charge of him, before getting moving again.
The terminal they were in was slightly smaller than the rest, and they had finished walking enough of it to ascertain that no people were present and no power or phones working there fairly quickly.
Back outside, the sun had traveled across the sky to the midpoint and now glared down on them mercilessly. Summer hadn’t even begun, but apparently Mother Nature hadn’t gotten the memo. But they only had one other building after this next one and then they could go back to the others and decide what to do next.
As they were coming up on some dead palm trees just before the entrance to the third terminal, Mason caught a flicker of movement above him and jerked his head up, thinking it was a jet high in the sky, which at least would be some evidence that there were people out there somewhere—but it was only a bird.
“Look,” he said to Dustin, who had moved up alongside of him. “I think it’s a hawk.”
“You got your gun on you, right?”
“Why?”
“’Cause I’m starving.”
Mason laughed. “We’ll look for something inside.”
“What stays good after four years?”
“That’s assuming it’s been four years,” Peter butted in. “Which I am not entirely convinced of.”
“Oatmeal,” Rocky said, paying him no mind.
“I like oatmeal,” Dustin said. “What else?”
“Rice and instant coffee, dried beans, canned beans, some pasta, maybe dried fruit, and certain peanut butter. Things like that.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Dustin asked.
“I spent some time up in Arkansas with a prepper slash survivalist.”
“How’d you like that?” Mason asked him.
“Ah… it was a little too much for me. He was a bit too obsessive.”
There were more vehicles over here. In addition to a green-and-white sheriff’s car, there was another autonomous car they had to make their way around to get over to the first doors. Both vehicles were empty.
“If we come back out this way,” Peter remarked as they moved past, “I’m going to try one of these.”
More power to you, Mason thought. But he didn’t think it was going to work.
This time they passed through what had once been Security into the right concourse first. Mason was pretty sure the entire airport was deserted, and inexplicably had been for a long while, but he needed to be sure, and he wanted to give the boys a chance to find something to eat.
In a little travel mart, Dustin ripped open and tried several different kinds of snack mixes until he finally found one he could tolerate that was mostly fruit.
“Here, try this,” he said, and poured some into Juan’s hand. “The banana chips are awful but most of the rest seems okay.”
Dustin held the bag out to Mason next, but he declined. “I’ll have some later. I’m more interested in us finding water.”
“There’s bottled water,” said Peter, standing over by a cooler.
“What kind is it?” Rocky asked him.
“What do you mean, what kind? It’s water. Plain bottled water.”
Rocky sighed. “I mean,” he said in exaggerated slowness. “Is it distilled? Because bacteria and algae may be growing in the other kind.”
“Uhhhh… both.”
“Take all the distilled you can fit in the pack,” Mason told him. “But only if it’s in a glass bottle.” He looked at Rocky. “There can be leaching of the chemicals in the plastic ones, right?”
Rocky nodded. “But if we get desperate, we can use any of the glass bottled ones because we can boil it if we have to.”
“Right.”
“And put these in,” Dustin said, grabbing every bag of the dried-fruit mix there was. He thrust them into Peter’s hands, then turned toward some tins of rum-soaked cake, probably left over from that long-ago holiday. “We’ll take these, too.” He grabbed up four of them. “Maybe the alcohol kept them preserved.”
“Bossman,” said Dustin, appearing at his side. “I think you need to see this.”
What is it? Mason went to ask and then closed his mouth and just followed him away from the windows he’d been peering through with the binoculars.
They hadn’t gone that far when Dustin halted in front of him, throwing up his arm, and held a finger up to his lips.
Mason got the message, kept silent, and listened—and heard something making noise just ahead. It was a person, he saw as he homed in on a form moving around behind a counter where the sounds were coming from.
Mason had become so convinced they wouldn’t find anyone that at first all he could do was stand and stare. What was this person doing, anyway, all by themselves in a dark and clearly abandoned airport?
“Finally,” cried Peter. “Come on.” He took off before Mason could stop him and ran ahead of Juan and Dustin.
Mason and Rocky warily followed. The whole point of them searching the airport was to get help and find out what was going on, but something about this didn’t feel right. Mason could see more the closer they got and he could tell this wasn’t a member of airport personnel or a guard of some sort; this was a young woman wearing the hat and apron for the candy shop she was standing in, which was little more than an alcove and a long counter, looking for all the world as if she were on the job and ready for customers. In near darkness, with no power and the airport closed.
“Would you like to try one of our gourmet truffles?” Mason heard the female ask as Peter reached the counter. If Peter made a reply, Mason didn’t catch it, and shortly Juan, Dustin, Rocky, and he were moving hesitantly up to stand alongside him.
Mason glanced from the young lady to Peter and then froze at the startled, almost frightened expression on his face. He jerked his eyes back over to the woman, who was now adding more truffles to the tarnished silver tray she had placed on the counter—truffles that had melted at some point in the heat and were now flattened down and leaking whitish chocolate out of the foil wrappers.
“Try one,” she said, then looked over at Mason and he finally realized why Peter was tripping as Rocky stiffened beside him.
Her eyes weren’t normal eyes. They were the same shape but colored a golden amber that had never been born on a human. The pupils, instead of being black, were orangish, and the colored part around them made up of sections of yellow in a circular pattern like a camera lens.
“What can I get for you, sir?” the woman asked, as if it were just another day at the airport and the candy filling the pullout trays, canisters, and bins weren’t dried-up, stuck-together, crumbling lumps growing mold and turning chalky with age.
“No!” Dustin barked, and Mason whipped his head around in time to see Peter actually reaching for one of the half-melted, stale candies. Peter snatched his hand back at Dustin’s command. “I wasn’t going to eat it,” he protested.
“But you must try one, sir.” The woman swi
veled away from Mason and switched her attention to Peter again. “They’re actually quite good.”
Peter arched an eyebrow, staring wide-eyed at her. “Uh… no thanks.”
“I insist,” she said, and slid the tray closer to him.
Peter moved his head from side to side in an exaggerated “no.”
“Please,” she said, picking up one of the less flattened-down ones. “Have a sample. They are very goo… g-g-goo… good.”
Peter looked sideways at them and gave a befuddled shake of his head.
“They are free. Take one.” Her stutter had disappeared but all warmth had evaporated also, and her voice was now chillingly cold and impersonal.
Peter took a step back as the woman Mason was starting to think was not a woman at all, stopped speaking but continued to drill him with her unnatural eyes.
Dustin pushed by Juan, snapping him out of it, and Mason followed to stand directly in front of the young lady, if that’s what she was. She was trembling ever so slightly, he saw. No, not trembling, vibrating. Though still gazing fixedly at Peter, all emotion had dropped from her face as she seemed to buzz in place, the hand holding the truffle still outstretched.
“Ma’am,” asked Dustin in a loud voice, “do you know what has happened here?”
No response from the woman. She had ceased vibrating and stood strangely frozen.
“MA’AM?” Dustin basically yelled at her.
She gazed through him, expressionless, her eyes dull now.
Mason nudged his way closer and then waved a hand in front of her face.
They stared across at the inanimate figure in front of them.
Except for the eyes, it looked so real. Mason slowly reached out and circled his fingers around her wrist to pull her arm down, then recoiled at the sensation. What looked exactly like a normal arm felt more like a cold, rubber-coated metal bar.
“What?” cried Peter, flinching.
Morgan backed away. “That’s not… That doesn’t feel like…”
Dustin, who had stayed where he was, leaned over the counter, grasped hold of her upper arm, and as Mason watched in open-mouthed astonishment, gave a good hard shove. And like a petrified tree, she tipped over and crashed down onto the floor without ever bending or moving a muscle.
Flight 3108 Page 6
