Zone

by Jack Lance

  Aaron had told Pamela’s story to Sharlene, whose self-esteem had also been shattered, first by her father and then by that bastard Todd. The death of her mother had been the seed of her misery.

  How deep did her misery go? What was she still keeping from him? No matter what it was or how complicated it might be, he had resolved to protect her better than he had Pamela.

  It was almost 3:50 in the morning when he followed Sharlene into the cabin.

  Gloria informed him that they had finished their rounds checking for electronic devices. Two laptops and a handful of cell phones had been switched off.

  ‘I’ll go tell the cockpit crew,’ Aaron announced. He could just phone it in, but he was curious about the computer glitches that Jim seemed to be having.

  FIFTEEN

  Anomaly

  Seventy-five minutes had elapsed since the pilots received their last radio contact or navigational signal. During that time they had received no response to their squawking, either. Such universal silence ran contrary to everything Jim Nichols deemed possible.

  When Sharlene had stepped into the cockpit a few minutes earlier, he’d decided not to confide in her. She was just beginning to feel at home as a member of the Oceans Airways family. Although she’d admirably climbed the promotional ladder, he questioned if she was sufficiently experienced to weather a crisis.

  Jim was at his wits’ end as he concentrated on keeping the nose of the plane aimed at the star they’d been flying toward since before the turbulence.

  ‘Another four hours and we’re out of fuel,’ he announced.

  He consulted the totalizer, the gauge indicating how much fuel remained. According to the reading, they had about 122,000 pounds of J4 left to burn.

  ‘We’ll make it to Australia,’ Ben said without a trace of doubt in his voice. Jim nodded and rubbed the weariness from his eyes. If they were at the position of his dead reckoning, they should be able to land safely at an Australian airport.

  But he wasn’t sure about much of anything anymore, including their current position.

  In the last hour he and Ben had desperately tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Ben’s suggestion to have the passengers switch off all electronic devices stemmed from the fact that, a few years earlier, a Qantas plane had deviated from its heading due to the use of laptops in the passenger cabin. Jim didn’t think a simple laptop could interfere with so many onboard systems, but it couldn’t hurt to shut them off.

  ‘I remember hearing something about peculiar trouble on board a Martinair jet,’ Ben had offered during the last hour. ‘It was weird. Really weird.’

  Jim frowned. ‘Which sort of plane? And when was it?’

  ‘A 767 from Amsterdam to Orlando, I think,’ Ben replied. ‘It happened about eight or maybe even ten years ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘As I recall, the plane suddenly had warning lights turning on and off and seat-belt lights blinking. And then the autopilot shut down and a few systems malfunctioned, including navigation.’

  What Ben had described stirred something deep within Jim. ‘Yes, I think I do remember hearing about that,’ he mused. ‘Do you recall how it ended?’

  ‘The pilot had his hands full landing the plane in Boston,’ Ben said. ‘But all’s well that ends well, right?’

  ‘Did they ever find out what caused the problems?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘No, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. I remember reading something about a faulty battery, but that was conjecture. It had all the earmarks of a Bermuda Triangle event.’

  ‘Well, that’s not our problem,’ Jim stated categorically. ‘The Bermuda Triangle is in the Atlantic. We’re over the Pacific.’

  He asked Greg to review the gripe sheet that contained information about earlier defects detected in the aircraft. It was generally used by mechanics when making repairs, and not by pilots trying to make a safe landing.

  ‘Nothing special,’ Greg reported after giving the report a quick once-over. ‘After the previous flight, they changed a navigation light on the right wing. Earlier, one of the wheel brakes was acting up. That’s about it.’

  Jim kept searching for explanations, but none came to light. EICAS was no help; it still reported no malfunctions.

  If EICAS was right, the fact that they had no radio and that no one had yet responded to their squawking meant that they were still too far out of reach of ground control or any other signal of civilization. But that was ridiculous. There were islands down there and there were people living on them. Jim estimated that they had left Polynesia behind and were now approaching the Kiribati Islands, or maybe the Solomons. These places all had airports, some of them large enough to accommodate a 747, so why the hell had no one from air-traffic control responded to their transponder code?

  Mechanical reasons might account for the flight-management systems failing, but they would have been duly noted by EICAS. That even the mechanical compass was acting up smacked of something inexplicable.

  Had it been an option, he would have landed at the first airport they encountered. But all airports had disappeared from the computer map. His thoughts raced, seemingly out of control.

  The world has ceased to exist. But that’s impossible, isn’t it?

  At 3:45 Greg transmitted yet another radio blast to any planes or air-traffic control towers within hailing distance. Jim’s sense that the world no longer existed kept nagging at him, no matter how ludicrous such a Doomsday scenario seemed.

  As he had pointed out to Ben, the Atlantic Ocean had the Bermuda Triangle, infamous because of the planes and ships that had mysteriously vanished within its confines. But the Pacific had its Devil’s Sea, not far from Japan, where it was also claimed that ships and aircraft had disappeared without trace.

  It was said by some that in the Bermuda Triangle all radio contact with planes had been normal before they suddenly vanished from the computer screen. Researchers reported strange phenomena in the area: heavy turbulences, magnetic disturbances, and compasses going haywire. Jim saw a disturbing resemblance between such phenomena and their current situation. He looked back at the navigation display, devoid of location points. It made no sense. No sense whatsoever.

  What if we have disappeared from the world? Have we ceased to exist?

  ‘Jim?’ Ben ventured.

  He turned around. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I asked what you’re planning to do.’

  Jim hadn’t heard him. ‘I don’t know …’ he started.

  He would sell his soul to receive confirmation that he was still in the land of the living, in the world he knew. Peering down at the sea, he searched for lights on ships or islands. But he saw nothing in the darkness beneath them – thanks to the heavy cloud cover, he presumed.

  Of course the world was still there. Yet still he prayed for confirmation.

  His only option was to follow the stars – just like some ancient mariner or Peter Pan, he thought bitterly. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. But at the moment a needle in a haystack would be easier to find than Kingsford Smith International Airport in Sydney.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Ben. We can stay up here for a few more hours. We just have to wait until we establish radio contact with someone. We must assume that ground control is trying to find us just as hard as we’re trying to find them.’

  You’ve got that right, especially after what you did yesterday, Jody’s voice whispered in his ear.

  Her voice sounded so clear to him that he dismissed her words as a passing thought. It seemed as if she were standing right there beside him. He even caught a scent of her perfume, or so it seemed.

  Jim Nichols suddenly felt a lot worse.

  Someone rang the cockpit doorbell. He looked at the camera screen and saw Aaron Drake standing there. Jim pressed a button and the door opened.

  Aaron stepped inside the flight deck. ‘I just wanted to let you know that a couple of cell phones and laptops have been switched off
,’ he reported.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jim said. ‘Anything else?’

  Aaron hesitated. ‘Sharlene told me we’re experiencing some problems. Is there …’ He hesitated again. ‘Is there anything the crew should know? Anything we can do?’

  Jim decided to lay it on the line. He could not leave the cabin crew dangling in the dark for much longer. He needed to bring them into his confidence, consequences be damned.

  ‘OK, Aaron,’ he said. ‘As crazy as it sounds, here’s what’s going on, or not.’

  Interlude II

  ‘Good, very good,’ Dr Richardson said, his bald head glistening in the sunlight filtering into his office. He was sitting across from her in a plush chair, and she was lying on the couch. It was December, eighteen months before she applied for her job at Oceans Airways, something that was inconceivable to her at this juncture in her life.

  ‘You’re doing a brave thing,’ he continued in a soothing voice. ‘Not many people in your position seek help.’

  He tried to appear sympathetic, to win her trust, but she didn’t need anyone to tell her: Noel Richardson was the last chance she had of getting her life back on track. She was standing on the brink of the same abyss into which she had once fallen.

  During their first of many sessions, Richardson had asked her to start by telling her story. She had complied and the first thing she told him involved that unforgettable day during the summer a year after her mother’s death.

  It had been a scorching day in mid-July. Sharlene had recently turned sixteen and her life had changed dramatically since that fateful day in March of the previous year. She came home, tanned from the sun, sweating and itching to take a shower. When she stepped into the house and yelled out in greeting, she heard no response from the living room. For a moment she wondered whether her father had gone out. A quick glance at the kitchen counter, however, confirmed what she needed to know.

  She removed her Los Angeles Dodgers cap and tiptoed into the house. No, her father was not in the living room. She walked up the stairs to the hobby room where she found him, as she often did, slouched in a chair. He had one elbow on the table and his hand was clenched into a fist under his right cheek. His other hand was on his legs, below the table top. Beside him was an opened can of beer. She had seen a number of empty ones downstairs on the kitchen counter.

  When he glanced up and noticed her standing there, his eyes appeared red and puffy. He had considerably more gray hair than the year before and he had added a good twenty pounds to his girth. Sharlene could see he was drunk, but she could not determine how drunk.

  ‘I’m not feeling so hot,’ he mumbled. Sharlene understood what he meant: it had turned bad again.

  ‘Why don’t you lie down for a while?’ she suggested, but he waved his hand dismissively.

  After he slept, if only for a few hours, he wouldn’t be so hammered and she might be able to have a conversation with him. In former days her father rarely drank liquor. No more than a few beers a week, and only occasionally. That routine, however, had changed. In the beginning she hadn’t known how to handle his increasing use of alcohol. But gradually she had learned.

  ‘Do you need some help?’

  She bit her tongue as soon as she uttered that inane remark. Her father reacted as if he had been slapped across the face. ‘I don’t need any bloody help,’ he slurred, ‘least of all from my own daughter.’

  Sharlene thought quickly. She needed to get her father into bed so he could sleep it off. He was too stubborn to go by himself even if he had been able to stand. During an earlier such encounter, Dean Thier had barely reached the landing before collapsing in a heap.

  ‘Can I get you some coffee or water?’

  She didn’t have much hope he would accept her offer, but it was worth a shot.

  Her father lifted his beer can. ‘I’d rather you bring me another one of these,’ he slurred.

  That was the answer she had dreaded.

  ‘I think we’re all out.’

  Her father pounded his fist on the table. ‘The hell we are! Make yourself useful and go look in the fridge! There’s plenty more in there.’

  His voice was raw and thick and accusatory. Sharlene could deny it, pretend it wasn’t so, but she knew better. No matter how far gone Dean Thier might be, when it came to his beer supply his memory was as lucid as a crystal-clear mountain lake.

  ‘Come on,’ she insisted. ‘You’re not feeling well. Go lie down.’

  ‘I need a drink first, and you’re going to get it for me,’ Dean said as a matter of fact.

  Sharlene crossed over to him and tried pulling him up by his arm. But then she heard herself say the worst thing she could have said to him at that moment. She wasn’t sure why she said it. Maybe it was her keen frustration over the derelict her father had become, or maybe she was simply desperate. Or maybe it was the result of being exhausted from being outdoors for so long.

  ‘You’ve had quite enough,’ she stated in no uncertain terms.

  His eyes bulging, her father stared at her.

  ‘Where do you come off thinking that’s your call, girl?’ he fumed.

  Instead of keeping her mouth shut, Sharlene took it one step further, realizing all too well that this would end badly. But she could not help herself.

  ‘You have to stop doing this to yourself,’ she screamed at him, a tone of voice she had never used in his presence. ‘It makes no fucking sense.’

  Dean Thier did not immediately respond. For a moment Sharlene thought she might have finally gotten through to him. For that one moment she thought she saw understanding in his eyes. But the moment proved to be fleeting.

  ‘I found this in your room,’ he hissed, his breath reeking of beer and his voice hoarse with rage.

  Sharlene saw her father lift his other hand, the one he had resting in his lap. Dean opened his palm and showed her a toy airplane. A model of a Western Sky Boeing 737, the same type of airplane her mother had flown in. And died in.

  ‘Weren’t you supposed to throw this out?’ he barked.

  Sharlene shook her head, unable to speak.

  Dean took his beer can in hand and crushed it. ‘This is what happens to planes,’ he said, his eyes boring into her. The can slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a muted thud. ‘They go down, baby,’ he added in an icy voice. ‘They go down.’

  Again Sharlene shook her head. ‘No. Why are you doing this? You—’

  She cringed when her father struck her hard on the side of the face.

  ‘That thing should have been in the garbage!’ Dean Thier roared.

  Sharlene did not cry out. She didn’t even get angry. She stood there, her pent-up rage boiling to the surface.

  ‘Go to hell, you bastard!’ she screamed at him. ‘Damn your sorry hide. You’re not my problem anymore. I’ve had enough, do you hear me? I want nothing more to do with you!’

  She ran from her father and locked herself in the one room he had not once entered since his wife had died: her Tupperware room.

  It had become Sharlene’s sanctuary. It was the only room where the pathetic excuse for a father never bothered her. Where Claudia’s Tupperware, in every color imaginable, collected dust on the shelves.

  She sat down on the floor, crossing her legs and folding her hands on top of them, and lowered her head, as if in prayer. She could no longer contain her tears. Her mother’s gold crucifix on its silver chain dangled beneath her chin. She closed her hand around the necklace and brought it to her lips. ‘Mother …’

  That’s when her father started kicking down the door of the Tupperware room.

  ‘Sharlene!’ Dean yelled in a drunken rage. ‘Sharlene, you get out of there!’

  She pursed her lips as he kicked again, harder this time. The door shook. Another fierce thud. And another. The lock broke.

  The rest of it, she didn’t want to remember.

  Sharlene returned to Noel Richardson’s office.

  She glanced furtively at his door, silen
t in its frame.

  No one was kicking it.

  III

  3:52 A.M. – 5:08 A.M.

  SIXTEEN

  Emilio and the Outlaw

  Because Emilio Cabrera was terrified of flying, he had felt unspeakable relief when the turbulence ended. His euphoria, however, was short-lived. When the turbulence ebbed, his fears of the tribunal awaiting him in Sydney mounted. Perhaps, he thought, a movie might provide a welcome diversion. That, and a little liquid refreshment to calm his nerves. As a friendly flight attendant served him a mini-bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, he donned his headset and managed to calm his nerves by watching The Invention of Lying, a romantic comedy about a world in which little white lies were tolerated and even rewarded.

  When the movie ended, he searched for another and found an action movie starring Bruce Willis. Too violent, he decided. Bad for the nerves. He channel-surfed to the next movie. An actress with ample breasts and cherry-red lips was kissing her co-star. That was certainly a reason to keep watching – but, oh dear God, was her co-star Nicolas Cage? Yes, it was. Emilio hated the man with a passion. He couldn’t explain why he hated him. He just did.

  On the next channel was a Western. Obviously an oldie, or what these days would be called a classic. John Wayne, wearing a white wide-brimmed hat on his head and a bandana around his neck, filled the small screen. This could be something worth watching, Emilio suspected. As a little boy, he had always enjoyed Westerns. So he slouched down in his seat, comfortable in his resolve to enjoy himself.

  The storyline didn’t amount to much. Wayne played the sheriff in a hick town of wizened cattle drivers. As with most John Wayne oaters, it would end with the inevitable shoot-out and Wayne emerging, yet again, as a hero of the Old West. He who wanted to pump Wayne full of lead was an outlaw named Phil Clark, a cagey desperado with an unshaven face and a few missing teeth, leading a gang of thugs. Phil swore revenge against Wayne, in his role as sheriff Jeffery Eastman, for icing one of his men. That would surely end badly for Phil, Emilio presumed, involuntarily comparing the movie script with his own unsettling state of affairs. He also noticed that his little bottle of Johnnie Walker was empty. He wanted another one, and he didn’t have to wait long. A flight attendant was coming his way. He raised his hand.