More Stories from the Twilight Zone

by Carol Serling

  “I’m surprised we lost as many as five. Didn’t take into account the flight crew. Flying with God as their copilot, I guess.”

  “Then how do we land this plane?”

  That was the question. Then again, with the world falling to hell below us, I was quite tempted to let the whole thing just continue on until we ran out of fuel, wasabi nuts, or Bloody Marys. Cleaner. Quicker. And with some luck we’d bypass that whole trials and tribulations thing.

  “I said you’re under arrest,” the air marshal tried again. There was a quality in his voice. A new confidence I didn’t like. When people took safety in something they believed in, they often got confident. And dangerous.

  So when the little girl whispered, “He’s coming,” I naturally assumed she was talking about the smoldering marshal.

  She could have been. As I stood back above my work and turned, I caught the marshal just as he moved for me down the aisle. Like some perpetual motion engine of law enforcement, he was determined to remain in motion along the path he’d chosen earlier. Maybe he was taking the bloody nose a bit too personally. Or his lack of selection for the Rapture. As snubs went, the former was more immediate and the latter far more severe. Of course, most people had trouble with the long view. Hence, only five.

  My earlier neighbor, the industry pro, had risen from her seat to stand in the aisle behind the advancing air marshal. She still held the clip-less Glock in her hand, as if unsure what exactly to do with it. Under better circumstances she would certainly have handed the man back his gun. Law and order was also about belief as much as it was about the strength to enforce it. In most cases, the air marshal would have been invested in the highest authority. But anyone willing to do what she had been flying to Washington for, all in the name of personal interest, had to be considering the implications of the last ten minutes, and what that might mean to her future.

  Basically, she seemed to be giving me the benefit of her doubt.

  Too bad that just wasn’t going to be enough.

  With a snarl of rage, the air marshal leaped forward, hands outstretched. I believe he might have been thinking to strangle me. In the back of my head, I felt the probability stretch out along long lines of chance. The foundation of creation, of weight of original sin, and the power of personal choice, all coalescing into a new moment where I’d have an equal chance of surviving (or, at least, of remaining free to act) or falling. The same choice and chance that had once been faced (and lost) by the Morningstar himself.

  Fortunately for me, the senator had not yet chosen to abandon my side. He stepped into the narrow aisle with me, grappling with the frenzied marshal. My tax dollars at work. Finally.

  Together we threw the crazed man back. And, really, that should have been the end of it. Except that he stumbled right back into the Halliburton Blonde, who tangled up with him in a quick flurry of arms and legs. Then she sat back hard, and he spun around with his gun pointed out at arm’s length in a classic shooting stance.

  It caught me halfway down the aisle, thinking to secure the man before he caused more trouble. I pulled up short, staring into the dark tunnel of the Glock’s barrel, never once doubting that there was a bullet in the gun. No clip, true, but I hadn’t thought about the very real (and still painful) fact that his gun had been cocked before. And why cock a gun over an empty chamber? The simple answer: You didn’t.

  There had been one bullet already in the pipe. Of course there had.

  I was reasonably sure that the marshal now meant to kill me. It wasn’t anything personal. Like I said before, there were certain probabilities that would likely play out once someone drew a gun aboard an airplane.

  “Mister!” The little girl, breaking away from her mother’s hold as she half-stood in her chair. “Mister, he’s here!”

  He certainly was. I felt the stench of warm, sulfurous breath on the back of my neck, and the entire forward cabin filled with a reddish-golden glow. Like a small, cramped room bathed in firelight. It played in the eyes of the air marshal, dancing with terrifying fear. It reflected painfully off the diamonds worn around the throat of the military-industrial merger waiting to happen.

  It touched everyone but the clear green eyes of the ten-year-old who had frozen in place. I felt her terror as it turned me around, but saw that she, at least, had been untouched by corruption. It made me wonder (albeit briefly) how such a strong, pure soul had not been called.

  Because it wasn’t going to matter much longer. Standing in the aisle, curtains thrust aside, bathed in an infernal aura, was the demon.

  And I’d be damned (possibly very soon, in fact) if he wasn’t also wearing a white Elvis jumpsuit, with dark, jet hair greased back into a proper pompadour, and a rhinestone-studded cape that spread out behind him, furling and unfurling, like jeweled wings.

  Now I can’t say one hundred percent that there hadn’t been a demon flying coach already made up as an Elvis impersonator. As disguises go, in fact, that wouldn’t be half bad. Demons want to be noticed, and yet dismissed. Never taken seriously while being afforded some measure of respect for what they are or what they are about to do. And, after all, didn’t they all want to be the King? That’s where the whole mess had started with them.

  Though while it’s true that His design allows for some of the most unheard-of coincidences, many of which have been accepted as bona fide miracles in the past, I felt the celestial actuarial tables were weighted rather against this. More likely the demon had felt my earlier aversion to Graceland fanatics, and chose that face to reveal based on the belief that I would think far less of its abilities. Maybe it was right. Remember what I said about the power of suggestion and the weapon that may be fashioned by belief? It works both ways.

  Considering all of this (and taking a few extra seconds to wish for a final cocktail before reaching any ultimate destination), it took me a moment to realize that I was, in fact, still breathing, and Elvis had not taken a step forward into the first-class cabin. He was caught behind the line of my making, which glowed about his feet, soft and white and sugar-free. It gave me another moment to breathe, and think. To see a few of the coach-class passengers (newly converted to the call of a false Graceland) spreading out behind him. And to remember the guy with the gun at my back.

  The air marshal’s mouth moved up and down, without sound, like a fish gasping for air. Finally, he managed: “What. The. Hell.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  At some point the brain simply recognized evil no matter what kind of face it wore. The guy had to start coping with that. In the years to come (assuming we had years), this kind of thing would grow more and more common. Creation would be left on its own, running out of control, with no subtle hand or small, quiet voice guiding us forward. There would be a great deal of work to do for people like me. Policies to sign (and enforce) from the only remaining carriers who would matter. Despair and the betrayal of being left behind would test the faith of even the most righteous. Opium would be a more likely opiate of the masses. Elder religions would come back into their magicks. Public television would lose its funding.

  There might be no more wasabi nuts.

  No more Chopin!

  The blanket of anguish and apathy that had settled over me with smothering force was suddenly ripped away, and I saw what Elvis had tried to do. Too bad for him he had pushed it a step too far.

  There were things that needed to be done, and things that needed to be said. Unfortunately I once again wouldn’t be given time to go about this the easy way. Not as the senator had flipped his coin again, then reached out and swiped at the temporary wall I had built.

  Disappointing, sure, but haven’t we all come to expect about as much from our public servants?

  With a howl (and a quick hip gyration), Elvis leaped forward. And as much as He allows me an occasional peek at the gears and underpinnings, the mechanics of His design, I was fairly certain at that moment that I was a dead man. I stumbled back, right into the grasp of the air marshal, who s
eized me by the back of my neck and held me with great (and painful) newfound strength.

  So we both stood there, watching, as it was the ten-year-old who stepped into the aisle, hands on her hips, and shouted at Elvis with that perfect, self-righteous indignation only a ten-year-old flying first class could muster, “You don’t belong here!”

  Elvis pulled up short, and his aura lost a few watts of brightness. He loomed above my little savior with fire and brimstone burning in his black eyes. Maybe he would have rallied quickly with his followers from coach and the senator creeping up in his shadow, but before he could, the girl’s mother had joined her daughter, putting one protective hand over her shoulder.

  “Leave her alone!”

  Now others were moving. Taking some measure of faith in the defiance of others. Not many, but enough. The businessman in the wrinkled suit. An Asian twentysomething with enough electronics hanging on him to open his own tech-support company. They stood, stepped into the aisle, and blocked Elvis from reaching me. Even my Halliburton neighbor strode forward now, and I felt my heart leap with joy (or at least the hope of survival) when she pointed and actually shouted, “Get thee gone!”

  I don’t think Elvis expected that. I know I hadn’t.

  Salvation. Redemption. Mysterious ways. All that jazz.

  Which put me in the very advantageous position of having the air marshal’s ear right when the demon’s power was at an ebb, confronted by the strength some of my traveling companions had managed to muster. Young indignation. Protective motherhood. First-class righteousness.

  Law and order?

  He had the shot, right over the small stature of the golden-haired girl. “He’s trying for the cockpit,” I warned the air marshal, and hoped that it would be enough.

  It was. A gun, pulled on an airplane, wants to go off.

  The report was deafening, much louder than it should have been, even in the tight confines of a 737. It seemed very familiar. Thunderous, even.

  Elvis screamed, belting out from the diaphragm. His aura flared bright and brilliant and burning, folded back in on itself, and with a final hip-bump he disappeared in a flash of the whitest light. Purple spots swam in front of my eyes. When I blinked them clear, I saw that the demon had also taken with him his coach-class followers and the senator, too. How the mighty had fallen.

  And in the distance, did I hear the dying, plaintive note of a trumpet?

  Something we still had to take on faith, I suppose. Even now.

  When the world as we know it ends, what does come after? A question left for the remaining passengers of Flight 1602, who have yet to reach their final destination. Who are learning that faith, like so many things, is not an absolute. And while it may remain true that what goes up must certainly come down, there is no guarantee that, when it happens, you will not find yourself . . . in the Twilight Zone.

  THE IDES

  OF TEXAS

  Douglas Brode

  Since the dawn of civilization, when the first men crawled out from their caves and attempted to make some sense of the universe around them, the human race has chosen to believe that all is not chance and chaos; that there is a meaning to the world as well as our lives in it; that each of us, however humble or great, has his destiny. But what happens when what appears precisely that is interrupted? Does this create anarchy, or is there a remote possibility that what seems some cosmic mistake may actually provide the means to fulfilling one’s fate? Join us now as a living legend leaves history behind to take a sudden, if surprisingly temporary, side trip into . . . the Twilight Zone.

  As the first light of dawn broke over San Antonio on that nasty morning of March 6, 1836, the foreboding sky above appeared to mirror events taking place below. The last of the Alamo’s 186 defenders, struggling in the semidarkness to offer the beau geste of a final stand, died on the sharp bayonets of Santa Anna’s troops.

  The finishing attack, a culmination of thirteen days of brutal siege, lasted less than an hour. After the first wave of General Martin de Cos’s advance force slipped close to the undermanned fortress under cover of the starless night, they breached the Alamo’s north wall, the Texicans’ most vulnerable spot. Once General Castrillón’s volunteers reinforced Cos, whose men had suffered a terrible toll from Kentucky long rifles above, the outcome became frightfully obvious to all.

  Travis, the Alamo’s young commander, died early on. Bowie, the pioneer who had led so many of these rough-hewn types to the Texas plains from Creole Louisiana years earlier, was discovered weak and ill on his cot. Even so, the bear-sized co-commander, his reddish hair marbled with silver, employed his signature blade to take down three of the enemy before dying.

  Now, scattered Mexican patrols sought out any member of the defending force still hiding in the shadows. Their stark and simple orders: Take no prisoners!

  So much blackpowder smoke filled the old mission that the advancing lancers could not discern anything clearly. While scouting the chapel area, one group, under Lt. Jesus Ramirez, noticed a tall, rangy figure standing stock still, patiently awaiting them. Something about his stature frightened the men as they inched close. Juarez noticed his buckskin garb, as well as what everyone in the Americas knew to be his “curious” fur cap. “Cwocky, Cwocky!” they screamed. For this was the famed David Crockett: Indian fighter, bear hunter, former U.S. Congressman.

  The Mexicans advanced with caution: How many would die trying to take down this tallest Texican? Before they could rush him, a cold, bitter wind swept a smoke cloud between the last defender, ready to use his spent rifle as a club, and themselves.

  So this, Crockett thought, is the land of the stranger, where I rise or I fall. Always did wonder when and where the final reckoning would occur. Now, I know.

  When the smoke dissipated a few seconds later, the seven lancers gasped. No one stood before them. Could they, in their trepidation, have only imagined Crockett? Was he already among the dead, what they’d perceived merely an apparition, the product of their collective fear? That, Lieutenant Ramirez guessed, was one of those things he’d never know, not for certain. Yet one fact could not be disputed—how glad each man was to remain alive at the end of the battle.

  It would be a story each soldier in the unit would tell his children, a tale that they would conclude with the fearful words: May I never again encounter that indomitable presence!

  “Welcome to the city of brotherly love.”

  Crockett stirred, head pounding, body aching. Never had he experienced such a profound sense of disorientation. He tried to sit up, managing to do so only with great difficulty. Dizzy, he glanced up at the fellow who’d spoken, his tone combining sincere concern with puckish humor. A little chap, he stood beside the couch where Crockett found himself lying.

  Am I dead? Them Mexicans was a-closin’ in, but I don’t recall feeling their lances penetrate my hide. Still, I reckon that’s what happened. This fella must be the gate-keeper. Wonder if I made it On High? Or mebbe this—

  “My name is Angus McCracken,” the bespectacled soul, whom Crockett guessed to be around thirty-five years old, continued with a smile. “It’s an honor to meet you, Colonel.” Crockett took the fellow’s hand, which he’d extended for shaking.

  “My pleasure, or at least I hope so. You ain’t planning on escorting me Down Below, I hope ’n’ pray?”

  “No, no,” McCracken laughed. “Nor are you dead, sir.”

  “Huh! Been in an’ outta b’ar traps all m’ life, but I sure can’t figger how I twisted away from that un.”

  “I’ll show you,” McCracken replied, placing an arm around Crockett’s waist for support. Once the hero known as the Lion of the West had risen, his new companion helped him cross to the small room’s far side. Lining the wall was a glass booth covered with meters, bulbs, levers, every sort of technical apparatus and scientific equipment known to man. Smoke billowed out of the side outlets as well as a release gauge up on top of this mechanical contraption.

  “What, in the na
me of all that’s holy, is that?”

  “My latest invention. I call it a time machine.”

  Several hours later, Crockett sipped a cup of black coffee as he sat across a small dining table from his host. While David, who had not enjoyed a full meal during his period of near-starvation inside the Alamo, consumed a large dinner, McCracken rambled on about what he referred to as his “experiment.” An amateur scientist, he had devoted most of his life to building weird devices that might lead to progress for mankind. He’d tried to create a boat that could travel underwater, a wagon that might fly into the sky. And what he’d just recently completed: a machine able to move people forward or backward in time.

  “Why me?” Crockett bellowed. “If ya wanted to make this here monstrous piece o’ work, what’d ya pick on me ter do it?”

  McCracken looked as if he might break into tears. “Colonel, you’ve always been my hero. When I was a child I read stories about your courage on the battlefield.”

  “Well, there’s ‘stories,’ an’ there’s history. My first engagement with the Creeks? I got sick to m’ stomach. When it was over, fell down on m’ knees, lost m’ lunch. Admitted as much in that autobiography I published.”

  “That may be the fact, Colonel. But time has turned you into a legend. In truth, not many people read your book anymore. But they devour the monthly Crockett Almanacs, all about your adventures in the Rocky Mountains—”

  “Why, I never stepped foot in the Rockies!”

  McCracken grinned. “See what I mean? There hasn’t been a man to compare with you since the fall of the Alamo. That’s why you’re here. Colonel, I believe we need you. Now more than ever.”

  “Hold on a minute, bub. Since the fall of—?”

  “Nine years ago today. Though I’m sure it only seems like a few minutes to you, I employed my device to draw you out of that battle at the last possible moment.”