by Ellen Datlow
Kate says, “I’ve never seen a Fred Astaire film. I was always more of a Sly Stallone girl.”
“Serf,” Vorstenbosch says.
“Right to the bone,” Kate agrees, and squeezes his hand. “Don’t try and get up. Not yet.”
Kate springs lightly to her feet and slips into the seat beside Waters. When the missiles launched, the imaging system lit up with bogeys, a hundred red pinpricks and more, but there’s nothing now except the other planes in the immediate vicinity. Most of the other aircraft are behind them, still circling Fargo. Captain Waters turned them to a new heading while Kate tended to Vorstenbosch.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
His face alarms her. He’s so waxy he’s almost colorless. “It’s all happening,” he says. “The president has been moved to a secure location. The cable news says Russia launched.”
“Why?” she asks, as if it matters.
He shrugs helplessly, but then replies, “Russia, or China, or both put defenders in the air to turn back our bombers before they could get to Korea. A sub in the South Pacific responded by striking a Russian aircraft carrier. And then. And then.”
“So,” Kate says.
“No Fargo.”
“Where?” Kate can’t seem to load more than a single word at a time. There is an airless, tight sensation behind her breastbone.
“There must be somewhere north we can land, away from—from what’s coming down behind us. There must be somewhere that isn’t a threat to anyone. Nunavut maybe? They landed a seven-seventy-seven at Iqaluit last year. Short little runway at the end of the world but it’s technically possible and we might have enough fuel to make it.”
“Silly me,” Kate says. “I didn’t think to pack a winter coat.”
He says, “You must be new to long-haul flying. You never know where they’re going to send you, so you always make sure to have a swimsuit and mittens in your bag.”
She is new to long-haul flying—she attained her 777 rating just six months ago—but she doesn’t think Waters’s tip is worth taking to heart. Kate doesn’t think she’ll ever fly another commercial aircraft. Neither will Waters. There won’t be anywhere to fly to.
Kate isn’t going to see her mother, who lives in Pennsyltucky, ever again, but that’s no loss. Her mother will bake, along with the stepfather who tried to put a hand down the front of Kate’s Wranglers when she was fourteen. When Kate told her mom what he had tried to do, her mother said it was her own fault for dressing like a slut.
Kate will also never see her twelve-year-old half-brother again, and that does make her sad. Liam is sweet, peaceful, and autistic. Kate got him a drone for Christmas and his favorite thing in the world is to send it aloft to take aerial photographs. She understands the appeal. It has always been her favorite part of getting airborne, too, that moment when the houses shrink to the size of models on a train set. Trucks the size of ladybugs gleam and flash as they slide, frictionless, along the highways. Altitude reduces lakes to the size of flashing silver hand mirrors. From a mile up, a whole town is small enough to fit in the cup of your palm. Her half-brother Liam says he wants to be little, like the people in the pictures he takes with his drone. He says if he was as small as them, Kate could put him in her pocket, and take him with her.
They soar over the northernmost edge of North Dakota, gliding in the way she once sliced through the bathwater-warm water off Fai Fai Beach, through the glassy bright green of the Pacific. How good that felt, to sail as if weightless above the oceanworld beneath. To be free of gravity is, she thinks, to feel what it must be like to be pure spirit, to escape the flesh itself.
Minneapolis calls out to them. “Delta two-three-six, you are off course. You are about to vacate our airspace, what’s your heading?”
“Minneapolis,” Waters says, “our heading is zero-six-zero, permission to redirect to Yankee Foxtrot Bravo, Iqaluit Airport.”
“Delta two-three-six, why can’t you land at Fargo?”
Waters bends over the controls for a long time. A drop of sweat plinks on the dash. His gaze shifts briefly and Kate sees him looking at the photograph of his wife. “Minneapolis, Fargo is a first-strike location. We’ll have a better chance north. There are two hundred and forty-seven souls onboard.”
The radio crackles. Minneapolis considers.
There is a snap of intense brightness, almost blinding, as if a flashbulb the size of the sun has gone off somewhere in the sky, behind the plane. Kate turns her head away from the windows and shuts her eyes. There is a deep muffled whump, felt more than heard, a kind of existential shudder in the frame of the aircraft. When Kate looks up again, there are green blotchy afterimages drifting in front of her eyeballs. It’s like diving Fai Fai again; she is surrounded by neon fronds and squirming fluorescent jellyfish.
Kate leans forward and cranes her neck. Something is glowing under the cloud cover, possibly as much as a hundred miles away behind them. The cloud itself is beginning to deform and expand, bulging upward.
As she settles back into her seat, there is another deep, jarring, muffled crunch, another burst of light. The inside of the cockpit momentarily becomes a negative image of itself. This time she feels a flash of heat against the right side of her face, as if someone switched a sunlamp on and off.
Minneapolis says, “Copy, Delta two-three-six. Contact Winnipeg Center one-two-seven-point-three.” The air traffic controller speaks with an almost casual indifference.
Vorstenbosch sits up. “I’m seeing flashes.”
“Us too,” Kate says.
“Oh my God,” Waters says. His voice cracks. “I should’ve tried to call my wife. Why didn’t I try to call my wife? She’s five months pregnant and she’s all alone.”
“You can’t,” Kate says. “You couldn’t.”
“Why didn’t I call and tell her?” Waters says, as if he hasn’t heard.
“She knows,” Kate tells him. “She already knows.” Whether they are talking about love or the apocalypse, Kate couldn’t say.
Another flash. Another deep, resonant, meaningful thump.
“Call now Winnipeg FIR,” says Minneapolis. “Call now Nav Canada. Delta two-three-six, you are released.”
“Copy, Minneapolis,” Kate says, because Waters has his face in his hands and is making tiny anguished sounds and can’t speak. “Thank you. Take care of yourselves, boys. This is Delta two-three-six. We’re gone.”
Author’s note: my thanks to retired airline pilot Bruce Black for talking me through proper procedure in the cockpit. Any technical errors are mine and mine alone.
RED RAIN
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Have you ever found yourself on a midtown sidewalk on some warm July day when a plummeting body splattered on the pavement, directly in front of you? Close enough to feel the explosive shockwave of hot liquid air, pelting your trousers with meat pellets the size of quarters? Have you ever staggered backward, sodden with gore and spitting out substances you could not stand to identify, half-blinded because some of it got in your eyes, the screams of other pedestrians rising all around you, the smell of blood and shit hitting like a second assault almost as bad as the first, followed by the third that arrives in the form of an epiphany: somebody’s just jumped, yes, somebody’s just jumped, from the roof or some shattered window in the mirrored glass edifice high above you; and that’s a human life on the ground before you, and on you, and if the taste is any indication, in you? Has that ever happened?
Have you ever felt an invisible fist tighten around your diaphragm, your stomach rebelling, the sick awareness that you were about to vomit racing the gray awareness that you might faint? Has this ever made your knees go weak and have you ever felt gravity lurch as the gore-sodden ground called to you? Have you had a fraction of a second to register something odd about the corpse, not what little remains of its humanoid form, but the cut of its clothing, which seem odd somehow, in ways you can’t quite catalogue before the next body lands?
Did the n
ext one burst open the same way the first one did, prompting everybody around you to a fresh round of gasps and screams and the sensible reaction, among the many hundreds also traversing this avenue on this fine morning, to look up?
Have you ever also surrendered to this wholly reasonable impulse and searched the sky for explanation, only to see that it was peppered with dozens of other flailing forms, black as pepper against a sky as blue as any Pacific lagoon?
Before you look away, do you have a moment to focus on the one or two of them falling your way and see the terror-struck eyes, their gaping mouths, their flailing limbs? Do you recognize that they are not the corpses they will shortly become, but living people who know what’s happening to them?
Does one crumple the hood of a nearby taxi? Does one strike the wire bearing a traffic light, rebound, and hit the ground spinning, shedding parts of itself as it goes? Does a third flatten a woman near you, whose last sight as she peered upward must have been another woman, not unlike herself, whose outstretched arms must have looked like an offer to embrace?
Did they all break open on impact, each like a water balloon filled with blood? Did some shatter glass windows at ground level? Have you ever heard the screams of horror coming from every direction, that of people reacting to carnage that did not involve them, suddenly changing character as the people in the street understood that this was not some tragedy they were witnessing but one they were part of?
Have you ever staggered through this madness, too stunned to formulate a practical plan for finding shelter from this storm, and felt yourself step into something hot and steaming that swallowed your right shoe as you stepped out, leaving you soaked to the lower calves with blood?
Did you feel the world around you shudder as some other falling body struck a protrusion of some sort, maybe a flagpole, somewhere above your head, and you became the eye of a storm within the storm as the scarlet fragments rained in a perfect circle around you?
Were you then knocked down by some young man fleeing for shelter? Did you mistake the impact for one of the bodies striking you dead center? As you toppled face-first, landing on a street already well-greased with human juice, did you think that this was the last moment of your life?
Did you see the young man in question—a skinny guy with a scraggly black beard and sweat-stained t-shirt, likely homeless if the filth was any indication, though everybody in sight was filthy now—struck in the shoulders by a body tumbling with such force that the impact bent him in half?
Did you see beyond him other people crawling through the abattoir, their groping hands sweeping whorls on sidewalks turned to bloody finger-painting canvases?
Were you trampled again? Did a young woman’s stiletto heel pierce the small of your back as she stumbled over you? Was she then bowled off her feet by another small mob of panicked people with no plan other than getting out of the open? Did the mob crush her against a glass storefront that first wobbled and then shattered, the glittering cascade slicing into all those unlucky enough to be forced into the store window as it went? Did you see the people in the rear of that mob thrashing and clawing and biting those ahead of them in their desperation to get past the dead and crushed and wounded?
Did the storm of falling bodies intensify? Did the points of impact take down the members of that mob in groups of three and four at a time, panicking the mob even more, so that the piled humanity at the shattered window was high enough to slide back downward, burying some of the still-living behind them whose only sin was seeking purchase?
Was that when the tattoo of bodies striking down grew even louder, like a rainfall that has intensified from drizzle to shower to torrent?
Was it now hundreds? Did you now hear a wet thumping drumbeat in every direction? Were you surrounded by breaking glass, rending metal, screams cut off in mid-breath, the shrieks of men and women losing their sanity from the ongoing deluge, and the even more evocative wet sounds that these bags of flesh made as they broke open, splashing every nearby surface?
Did you somehow rise, the blood of your wounded back now mingling with the spatter of so many, the agony elevating our tortured, staggering walk into the most difficult effort of your entire life? Did you not know which direction to flee? Did your traumatized gaze find a chubby-faced man in a gray jacket gesturing at you from the doorway of a nearby office building? Did you make your way toward him in most direct route you could manage, even as the intensifying storm dropped more bodies in your path? Did you step on necks, on faces? Did you stumble over boneless legs bent in more ways than legs should be able to bend? Were the bodies piling up into higher ridges and did you sometimes sink into them, not into the spaces between the bodies but into the bodies themselves, the strained skin and flesh giving way like thin ice beneath your weight, to plunge you knee-deep into the already shattered organs beneath? Did your one bare foot go molten with agony the time what shattered beneath your weight was a splintered ribcage, slicing to the bone? And throughout all of this, were you hearing the screams of all the other people caught outside being cut off, being smothered, being hammered to silence, by the screaming holocaust from above?
Were you almost blind from the blood stinging your eyes by the time you made it to the door that chubby-faced man had been holding open for you? Did you still feel his hand grab you by the wrist and pull you into a narrow lobby crowded with other refugees moaning and retching and weeping? Did you hear him tell you that you were okay now and think that you had never heard anything so fatuous? Was his face so dotted with red specks that he looked like a victim of pox? Did you take in his greenish pallor and shiny forehead and air of imminent panic and despite his efforts to save you did you hate him a little, for having been lucky enough to be inside during the storm? Did you murmur something incoherent as you pushed your way past him into a lobby greasy with blood, either that tracked-in or that oozing in through the passages to the outside? Did you see men and women and children huddled against the walls, some of them panting, some of them openly sobbing, a few finding solace in one another’s arms, most of them looking like they’d just gone swimming through viscera?
Did you hear that crack behind you? Did you whirl at the sound? Did you see a jagged lightning-bolt fissure spreading across the glass of the window, as some body part—not a complete body, but a limb—crashed into it at high speed? Did you realize that the lobby was not a safe haven after all, that what was happening outside would impinge on this space soon enough, and that you needed to penetrate deeper into the building for the protection of its walls to do you any good? Did you shuffle past those who had collapsed immediately upon entry? Did you have to step over a slender stringy-haired girl whose age and features were impossible to discern beneath glistening veneer of blood, who lay on her side between you and the elevator bank, trembling? Were you aware that only a few minutes ago you would have been shocked by her appearance? Or that, seeing how broken she appeared to be, you would have reached out a hand and offered whatever was in your power to help? Were you no longer capable of that instinctive response?
Did you hear a thumping drumbeat coming from the elevator bank, a group of six? Did you see that in each case the narrow line between left door and right doors was oozing gore and that puddles were beginning to form outside a couple of them? How long did it take for the epiphany to form, that the storm had penetrated past the roof and invaded the shafts? Did you picture the plummeting bodies landing atop each elevator car, wherever it had last come to rest? Did you picture the cars catching some of what fell, the rest toppling over their sides and plummeting the rest of the way to the bottom of the shaft? Did you do the necessary math and figure how long it would take the bodies to start accumulating at the bottom, like bloody snowfall? Did you consider those that still piled atop each elevator and figure that it would still be no time at all before the cables were all supporting more weight than they’d been designed for? Did you even have any idea what modern elevators did when overloaded, whether those cables would snap, wh
ether the emergency brakes would come into play, or whether the cars would plunge like missiles, smashing into the stacked corpses that had preceded them? Did you turn away, find the nearest stairwell, and start to climb, following the shining and bloody trail of at least one other refugee from the street who had come this way before you?
What was it like to climb that stairwell, a towering vertical space whose structural integrity still held for now? Did you enjoy the relative silence, not total, but still a shock of a sort after all the screaming and dying from outside and downstairs? Did you find your tears mingling with the patina of blood on your cheeks? Did you smell everything that had landed on you, the gore, the bile, the shit, the puke? Did you feel your stomach clench again, once again urging the eruption that it had been forced to put off earlier? Did you feel a fresh stabbing pain in your injured foot, with every step? Did the one shoe you’d kept squish with every step, from all the substances it had splashed in? Did you just kick it away after a flight or so, feeling relief, taking odd pleasure in the feel of the cold feel of that staircase, a surface that felt real on a day when nothing did?
Did you encounter two women, one a tear-streaked redhead not far into her twenties, the other a gray matron in a pantsuit, supporting each other as they made their way down the stairs? Did they stop, gasping, when they saw you climbing toward them? Did it occur to you that they may have seen in you some version of the horror-movie cliché of some bloody zombie, rising from the depths to eat their brains? Did you see them realize that you were just someone from deeper in the catastrophe that had engulfed you all? Did the young woman stagger in mid-step? Did the older one hold her upright with what seemed a hideous expenditure of will, and did you shake your head, not speaking, but indicating with that gesture that there was no point in descending any farther? Did she glance upward and shake her head, too, establishing that there was also no real point in ascending? Was that when the central well between each half-flight of stairs began to drip scarlet rain, establishing that at some level higher above, the stairwell had also been breached? Did you register the drumbeat echoing downward and understand that you had minutes at most before the stairwells would become cascades, river rapids so powerful that any attempt to ascend to higher floors would be an exercise in wading against a current too powerful to permit any progress in that direction?
