The whine of the engines disappeared. The voices that had once been hushed out of respect for the paying customers now rose in wails of fear. The dishes that had already fallen crackled further as feet trod upon them.
Janice heard all this as she turned. Turned because she was terrified. Because she knew something horrible was happening and knew there was nowhere to run from it–not here, not in a steel tube passing through Heaven–and so knowledge would be infinitely preferable to ignorance. Perhaps a matter of survival.
She turned. She heard the sounds.
The screaming continued.
She realized the coughing had stopped.
A man stumbled up from his seat. He was bleeding. Not like he had been punched or kicked or even shot. More like he had somehow exploded. His skin hung in ragged strips from his body, and bone showed through in random places.
Some of the bone looked wrong. The wrong shape, the wrong size. Small spines seemed to have emerged from them.
One of the manʹs hands was gone. In its place, a blistering globule that seemed almost like a bubble of pus. Like he had rotted from within and now the rot was too great for his skin to contain.
ʺWhash…whash happening…?ʺ he managed.
Then he slumped. His one hand and the ball of rot that had replaced the other flung forward. Another passenger in the middle aisle hadnʹt managed to get up. He looked like a businessman, middle-aged with CEO hair and a strong chin. He was pushing himself back as the dead man–
(Is he dead? He has to be!)
–fell forward and then managed to roll over the side of the luxury chair. Only his foot remained on the leather as he plummeted into the far aisle, colliding with the legs of one of the female flight attendants.
The dead manʹs hand touched the businessmanʹs foot.
The businessman, who had looked strong and healthy only a moment before, immediately vomited up so much blood Janice wondered how he could still be alive.
The flight attendant against whom the businessman had fallen did the same a moment later.
More screams.
So much blood.
Janice had been wrong. There were worse things than ignorance. This was worse. So much worse.
People were coughing. Gagging. Blood everywhere.
Janice looked away.
She hadnʹt looked away when Frank died. Hadnʹt looked away when the doctors told her how bad her hips were going to be for the rest of her life.
Now she looked away.
Back out the window.
Back to the clouds
Back to Heaven.
She tried not to think about the obvious. Couldn‘t help it.
Disease. Has to be a disease.
And if itʹs this bad, then weʹre all dead. All dead before we even land.
As if to answer her thought with a worse one, the plane suddenly tilted wildly. The whine of the engines grew to a fever pitch, a scream that momentarily overshadowed the other screams in the plane.
She wondered what was happening in the locked cockpit. If there were men or women up there who were covered in blood and pus.
She kept looking out the window.
Please save us, Jesus.
The clouds were placid. They did not seem to notice the blood among them.
Then one of them did take notice. It moved. Just a puff, then it suddenly tore itself apart. It exploded upward and Janice wondered if this was an answer to her prayer.
Then she saw the cloud hadnʹt torn itself. It had been torn.
The missile struck the side of the plane and both exploded in a fireball that incinerated everything. Oddly, the only thing bigger than a basketball that made it to earth was a charred walker.
And Janice, in her last instant, chose to focus on the clouds that were once again constant and quiet.
Her hips did not hurt.
She smiled.
one:
AWAKENING
THINGS LOST AND UNREMEMBERED
From: POTUS
To: 'X'
Sent: Friday, May 30 9:49 PM
Subject: Operation Falling Stars
Status report, please.
From: X
To: Dicky
Sent: Friday, May 30 9:49 PM
Subject: RE: Operation Falling Stars
Why ask for things you already know? Your people are doing the best they can. But as you know, the ones theyʹre after arenʹt the easiest to hunt. Or kill.
You should get some sleep. Running the world demands a well-rested soul.
***
He woke up and knew almost everything. But nothing important. Nothing that made him who he was.
A muffled beep bounced down a hallway and into his room, low but still loud enough to pound into his aching head. It slammed through his skull, then rattled around like a low-caliber bullet shot at long range, pulping his brain and making it hard to think. Still, he knew the sound instantly: a cardiac monitor. A moment later he could tell that it was beeping in time with his pulse.
He hadnʹt opened his eyes yet. Awake, but still in the dark.
He still didnʹt open them. Sometimes it was safer to pretend unconsciousness.
He didnʹt know how he knew that. But it was true. It was something he felt in every part of his body.
He sensed something taped to his right arm. Intravenous tubing, certainly. That and the cardiac monitor meant he was in a hospital. Not a question.
But why? And are the people caring for me friend or foe?
Again, a strange set of questions. Hospitals were not famous for being full of dangerous people. They were places of help and healing.
But again, he felt danger nearby. Like he had some kind of primal sensor embedded in his thoroughly aching head, a detector that was pinging louder and more painfully than the beep…beep…beep of the heart monitor.
Time to open his eyes.
He did, and saw nothing but light for a moment. Just a brilliant haze that burned through his eyes, through his brain, felt like it must be setting his body on fire. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he squinted until his eyelids were open to slits so slim that surely only single photons would be allowed through, one particle at a time like entrants to the most exclusive club.
After a while the pain and the bright light faded. He opened his eyes a bit more. Then a bit more.
There was a light directly above his head. Four fluorescent bars someone had left on. No wonder he could barely see. He looked away from the light and everything improved. His neck hurt when he looked away, but even that was an improvement and he wondered what idiot had turned a bright light on above a hospital bed.
Beside him was the cardiac monitor that was sending information to the annoying beep-machine down the hall. He recognized it: a Bionix B80 Multi-Parameter Vital Signs Monitor. A good multi-use monitor designed to be easily ported from room to room in a hospital environment.
Am I a doctor?
He tried to think of something else doctory. Drew a blank. And didnʹt know what that meant, if anything.
He didnʹt know a lot of things.
But knew a lot of others. He knew that the television playing a muted show in the corner of his room was a thirty-six-inch Sony flat screen. That the show itself had been running for six years and was due to be cancelled after this season. That the shelving unit was not as crappy as it looked, but was instead far crappier, made of particle board with a cheap laminate cover.
But he had no idea about…about….
Not yet. Focus on what you know. Focus on what you can control.
He was in a hospital. Nothing too nice, which meant he was either here because this was the level his insurance provided for or because he had been injured and taken in because of emergency medical treatment laws. He suspected the latter.
He looked down. His midsection was swathed in bandages. Many of them were stained–some the bright oran
ge of Betadine, a pre-surgical scrub used to kill bacteria and microbes–
(Another thing I know about….)
–and some the dark black/brown of dried blood. The dark patches were centered in three areas. Two just above his diaphragm, one to the left of his sternum.
Knife wounds, he guessed. Maybe gunshots.
He realized that the guesswork had gone about far enough. Time to call someone.
There was a call button beside his head. He reached for it. Doing so hurt, but the hurt was manageable. Almost familiar, in fact. Like an old friend whose visits were never quite convenient. An old teacher come unexpectedly to call.
He was about to thumb the red button when a thought stopped him.
The mission.
The words crashed against him with the strength of a tsunami. He was glad he was laying down, because if he hadnʹt been he suspected he would have keeled right over.
The mission. Have to complete the mission.
He was frozen for a long moment. Maybe a few minutes, which was terribly short when you were doing something fun but when you were laying absolutely still in a hospital bed with your mind a blank it was a near-eternity.
Whatʹs the mission?
He didnʹt know. Just like he didnʹt know how heʹd gotten here. Like he didnʹt know how heʹd been hurt.
Like he didnʹt know his own name.
He moved his thumb away from the red button. Moved the call button back to the bed.
Donʹt call anyone yet. Get more intel.
He looked around for something that would tell him…anything. Not about his surroundings, but about himself.
The hospital bed was a Hill-Tomkin Surge-Assist Full Hospital bed set–another thing he inexplicably knew–and he also knew that this particular model had a sleeve on the foot where charts could be hung. Most hospitals used computers to keep records, but if heʹd shown up on their doorstep bleeding–dying–maybe they wouldnʹt have had a chance to input anything before taking him into surgery. Maybe heʹd have a chart.
He sat up. Expecting it to hurt. And right in his expectation. Still, he was able to push through the pain. A bigger problem was the monitors strapped to his neck and the wires that disappeared under his bandages. He didnʹt want them to pull out–doing so would send flatline signals to the computers at the nurses station down the hall, and he didnʹt want company just yet.
He looked at the cardiac monitor. Because it was a portable unit it had wheels on the base, and by tugging at it–and maybe popping a stitch or two under his bandages–he was able to yank it far enough along that he could lean the rest of the way to the base of the bed.
Fingers reached over the plastic lip. Blindly questing. And they found a bit of metal that didnʹt belong. He closed his grip and drew back a clipboard. His chart.
The first page was intake. The notations and letters all made sense to him, and again he wondered if he was a doctor or a medical professional.
No.
He knew that was wrong. He wasnʹt a doctor. Not a doctor, not an EMT, not a paramedic. Something else.
The first thing he saw was the entry in the name column. At first he thought he would find a clue to his identity, but when he deciphered the Sanskrit-like scrawl of whatever attending doctor had been at the ER he saw it said only ʺJohn Doe.ʺ The fact that he had no name was a strange depressant. Worse even than waking up grievously wounded in a hospital room. Like he could handle anything as long as he knew who was doing the handling.
He only allowed himself a momentʹs wallowing, then braced his mental shoulders.
Fine, Iʹll be John. As good a name as any.
The next letters that arrested his attention stood out large and black: ʺMULTIPPLE GSW.ʺ He wondered who it was that didnʹt know how to spell ʺmultiple,ʺ but more than that was strangely relieved to know he had been shot. Not that he wanted to be shot, but at least he knew. That was something.
He scanned the rest of the chart.
Three gunshot wounds. Two above the diaphragm, one more to the left of his chest. Apparently heʹd come to the hospital under his own locomotion, dragging himself into the ER before collapsing.
So Iʹm a fairly tough s.o.b.
He felt oddly proud of that fact.
He looked a bit further into the chart, past the original and hurried intake information. Surgical reports.
The bullets had not been recovered. Through-and-through shots that exited his back through large and ragged holes that required a tremendous amount of work to close. His blood type unknown, he had been supplied with four 500ml units of blood, type O negative.
The first part of that sentence chilled him. Another fun fact his brain supplied: four units of blood–about four pints–was the outside amount a human could lose and still survive.
What happened to me?
But the next thing he read not only chilled him, but made him feel like the world was playing a joke.
The bullets had passed through right lung and heart. The two that went through his lung had gone through at an angle that basically pulverized the oblique fissure and inferior lobe. The one that went through his heart cut a neat line through the inferior vena cava and right atrium.
Any one of those should have stopped him in his tracks. There was no way he could have gone anywhere, let alone walk into an ER.
No, donʹt play it down.
And he couldnʹt. It wasnʹt a fact of whether he could walk or not. Any of those wounds was not something that simply ʺlaid a man low.ʺ He knew this the same way he knew the small details of his surroundings. He knew it the way he knew he had a mission to perform–even if he didnʹt know what that mission was.
No, these wounds were deadly. The shot through the heart, particularly. He should have died. Not slowly, either. Not after hours on an operating table. He should have died instantly. The heart should have just sputtered to a halt during the short time between upright and flat on his face.
But here he was.
So what was wrong?
Maybe it was Mr. Multipple. Perhaps the same person who had somehow gotten through four years of med school with a critical spelling deficiency had also faked his test results and didnʹt know one part of the heart from the other.
But no. In the first place, it was unlikely that the doctor who admitted him would have been the one to do the surgery and write up the post-op report. And in the second, anyone that incompetent would have killed John on the table.
If I hadnʹt already been dead, that is.
John couldnʹt feel his legs. And it had nothing to do with his injuries. Just a cold that was spreading from his extremities to his core. Like the death that had apparently already come for him once was now returning to finish the job.
He was so engaged in his thoughts that he failed to focus on the outside world. Didnʹt recognize the fact that the muffled sounds of life outside his room grew even more muffled. Almost still.
There are always sounds in a hospital. Not just the beeps and clicks of machines recording and in some cases regulating existence. No, there are laughs and cries, the whispered gossip and angry snips of any other place of business. Water cooler chit-chat exists independent of the water cooler.
The beeps and clicks were still there.
Everything else had quieted.
John noticed it, but only peripherally. The great majority of his mind bent to the task of unbending itself. Of straightening the maze that it had become.
Who am I?
How am I alive?
What is the mission the mission the mission the mission THE MISSION?
So much noise in his mind, a cacophonic counterpoint to the symphonic stop outside his room.
It was only when the door clicked that he jerked out of himself. He looked over, expecting to see a nurse enter. But his body tensed at the same time. The silence outside the room finally penetrated the wall between Johnʹs subconscious and conscious.
He wondered how much more was beyond that wall. Suspected that it was a
great deal.
Then he didnʹt have time to think about that.
The man who stepped in was dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt. He had a brown canvas jacket on, the kind of thing you might see worn by high school students, vacationing professionals, or geriatrics on their way to a bingo tournament.
The effect of the outfit was so nondescript that it sent John into an even higher state of alert. This was the outfit of someone who was trying very hard to fit in.
He wore a baseball cap. Gray, unmarked by team logos or the silly sayings that most people favored. Another sign that he didnʹt want to be seen or remembered. The bill would hide his face from security cameras, the rest of the bland outfit would hide his memory from any who happened to see him.
John saw him, though. Saw the eyes and knew they were the eyes of someone dangerous. Someone evil. They were so dark brown they were almost black. Even in the permanent shadow of the baseball cap they glittered as though lit from within.
The man took in the room in an instant. His eyes fell on John, and they widened so far John could see white all around the irises. The other man fell back a step, and John realized he was holding a gun.
The gun was a Russian MSS VUL. Just under two pounds, a seven-inch barrel. Not the most accurate gun in the world–only good to about twenty-five meters–and it only carried six rounds at a time. But it had a huge advantage: it was almost completely silent. The gun essentially sealed itself after every shot, preventing noise and smoke from escaping. The only sound it made was the hammer clicking.
It was a gun designed for assassination.
Now the man raised the gun and pointed it at John. The gun shook a bit, just a tremor. Not enough to stop the bullet from finding its mark, but enough to further betray the manʹs strong emotion.
Fear?
The manʹs voice quavered as he spoke. Definitely fear. But the gun still held true. Aimed at Johnʹs face.
ʺI donʹt understand,ʺ said the man. ʺI already killed you.ʺ
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