The woman's eyes were darting from side to side. After a minute or two, she slowly moved her head to look at the bandaged bundle lying alongside her. Virgil thought he heard a muffled word – "Hoozahnnah?" it sounded like – and the woman nudged the bundle a couple times. But there was no response. That's when the woman turned her head back to look at Virgil, the eyes cold and accepting, knowing that there was no way this man was now going to be able to let her live (and that was assuming there had ever been a time when that had been a serious viable option). She blinked a couple of times and looked around. Maybe this woman was not Suze's mother after all. Virgil frowned and watched her. The woman was altogether too calm and calculating, looking around like she was Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise, scanning the place for a means of escape or of overpowering Virgil.
Virgil didn't like that. He didn't like that at all.
He got to his feet and walked across to the doorway and flicked the light switch, flooding the room. "And Virgil said, 'Let there be light,'" he said. "'And lo,'" he added, waving his arms majestically, "'there was light.'" He nodded, looking around the kitchen and the living area. "'And it was good.'"
When he looked down at the old woman again, Virgil thought he could see the makings of a tear, or perhaps just a tiny streak of moisture down the side of the woman's face, like a slug trail. That was better. Some emotion.
Virgil hunkered down beside her and smiled. "This isn't going to have a good ending, you know," he said, his voice matter-offact and sounding for all the world like he was going to try to help her, like–
So I tell you what I'm gonna do for you here today… I'm gonna forget you came in here and I'm gonna forget you ever seen me…. hell, I'm even gonna forget you know this woman over here–
–a sharp market salesman peddling his wares from door to door.
"You know that, don't you?"
The woman looked from one of Virgil's eyes and across to the other. She didn't respond.
"You hear me? You hearing what I'm saying to you here?"
Nothing.
"Nod your head if you can hear me."
No nodding of head. And then, barely distinguishable from an everyday movement of the head, there it was. It could, of course, have been a tic, an involuntary twitch, a spasm of muscle and cartilage. But it wasn't.
"You hear me?"
This time she nodded almost enthusiastically.
"OK, here's what we're gonna do, me and you." He got to his feet. "I'm gonna go sit down a while and think things over. And then we're gonna…" He looked over at Suze and then back at her, waving his hands and shrugging his shoulders. "…and then, why, we're gonna finish up is what we're gonna do."
The woman didn't move, just watched him.
"How's that sound to you? That sound OK?"
Nothing.
Virgil walked into the lounge and flopped down onto the sofa. He reached for the TV remote and flicked the button. But he was asleep before a channel came on.
Virgil dreamed strange dreams on regular days but on irregular ones, those days when he went out and did some of his special work, his dreams were downright bizarre. Even by those already impressive standards, this one was a classic.
Virgil's mother was there, which wasn't unusual in itself but she was sitting with a woman who Virgil did not immediately recognize, though she did seem familiar. It was only when the two women commenced to removing their clothes that Virgil saw that the second woman was the one he had recently bound on the floor of Suze Neihardt's house, Suze still lying there on the floor, all wrapped up but now with her head exposed. And now, not exposed, because Virgil's mom had thrown her brassiere over the poor girl's face, and Virgil must have said something to her because his mom looked hurt, halfway into rolling down her hose – Virgil saw that his mom's voluminous pants had a pot of honey drawn on the front, like one of those pots that Winnie the Pooh always had a paw into. And now the second woman, she turned to Virgil, scowling at him as she patted Virgil's mom's head, stroking it as it rested on the woman's shoulder.
And then the woman held up a finger as though for Virgil to watch what happened now.
Virgil's mom lifted her head from the woman's shoulder and the pair exchanged what appeared to be a knowing glance before craning their necks and looking up. In the dream, Virgil duplicated the action and suddenly found that he was staring into a night sky.
And then – pow! – everything dissolved into a blinding flash.
(3)
At later times, when reflecting, and when things got even stranger and the knot in his stomach made him wonder if his time was almost up, Ronnie Mortenson would think back to that moment as the cusp of his two lives. The then and the now, a knife-edge precipice between everything that had gone before and which had prepared him, and the time to put such preparedness into action. And even when things seemed to be at their most bleak – most notably in the troubles still to come in New York and the fraught time in Central Park in a strange and deserted Big Apple overshadowed by an alien edifice that rivaled even the muchmissed World Trade Center – Ronnie thought that, perhaps, just perhaps, mind you, the now far outweighed the then. For it was at that moment, when he turned to the empty seat that had, until moments – moments? What were moments? Nanoseconds, more like – ago, been occupied by his wife, that Ronnie Mortenson finally came of age.
"Martha?" Even as he said it, Ronnie knew that it was a ridiculous thing to do. And even as he bent forward to look beneath her seat, he knew that that was an equally ridiculous thing to do. The next thing would be to lean over and stare out of the window, see if she was sitting on the goddam wing like that gremlin thing on the old Twilight Zone episode.
A clattering sound from the aisle made him turn around.
A young voice shouted for daddy and then mummy.
Things were falling from trays all around him. Something was happening to the plane.
The owner of the voice – it was a girl's voice, Ronnie realized – was crying now. He unclipped his belt, allowing the Rolling Stone to fall to the floor, and got to his feet.
The Boeing 757-200 series could carry between 178 and 239 people, depending on the individual plane's specification, and not counting cabin crew, in a series of three-seat rows on either side of a central aisle. Up towards the front of the plane, the legroom for the rows improved slightly and, right at the front, in first class, the rows became two-seaters on either side of the aisle. By Ronnie's estimate, the late-running – very late-running – 10pm flight from Denver had been maybe eighty or ninety per cent full when they left the ground. Ronnie checked his watch: it was after five in the morning.
And now the plane was empty.
The entire section of seats – with, as far as he could make out, just two exceptions – were completely empty. The two exceptions were Ronnie himself and the owner of the voice that had cried out. In front of many of the seats, small viewing monitors were showing programs: Ronnie could make out a cartoon – it looked like South Park – and, on another screen, what appeared to be some kind of news or current affairs show, with a man holding a microphone walking to and fro across a stage. There was no sound from the screens – that was piped up through the earphones plugged into the seat consoles. Ronnie could see them all as he looked, could hear them all whispering to themselves, some on the floor, some on the actual seats themselves, some lying on the seat-arms.
Ronnie hardly dared breathe. It all seemed so incredibly wrong that he thought he had to be having some kind of dream. He glanced back at his seat half-expecting to see himself still sitting there, maybe asleep or (even more likely, he thought) sitting staring sightlessly at some indefinable middle distance, a globule of drool hanging from his lower lip, a spreading pee stain around his crotch and a steadily increasing smell of manure drifting up from his Fruit of the Looms. But the seat, now that he was out of it, was empty.
He shouted out what he thought was going to be "Hello?" but it came out more like some kind of bestial howl.
&
nbsp; A young girl got to her feet somewhere near the front of the left-hand section, maybe around Row D or E, and screamed at the top of her voice. Ronnie recognized the scream from somewhere – the scream from before, from just– How long ago? A minute? Two minutes? It was her.
The plane was turning downwards at an increasingly steep angle and Ronnie stumbled forward, partly into the aisle and hitting his right shoulder on the back of the seat in front of him.
"It's OK," Ronnie shouted, trying to regain his balance. He held his hands up, palms turned towards her, to demonstrate just how wonderfully alright it was all going to be.
OK? Yeah, right. Everyone on the plane except for Ronnie and some third- or fourth-grader had disappeared and he was trying to convince the kid that everything was hunky dory. He tried to move fully out into the aisle but he couldn't do it. He was pinned against the seat-back in front of him – the now worryingly empty seat in front of him, the one with the splash of Club Soda pooling on the little blanket that lay crumpled up on the seat – and he twisted away from that to land sprawling in the aisle on his hands and knees, before slumping forward onto his face and starting to slide down the carpet. He collided with the trolley, pushing it partly into the next but one set of seats where it thankfully jammed.
Jesus Christ! What was happening? It could only mean that the plane was in a nosedive. Ronnie turned onto his back and lifted a leg, fully expecting it to continue upwards with little or no involvement from himself, but it just lifted and stopped. Happy that there seemed sufficient gravitational pull on his leg to return it to the carpet – thus implying that their descent was not wholly vertical – he pulled himself upright by the trolley, turned around and took in the emptiness.
Now the engines were roaring.
He held onto the headrest corner and started down towards the flight deck. The plane still had a definite tilt, and the engines now sounded as though they were about to burst free from the plane and go off by themselves, but at least things did seem to be calming. He had no idea why he thought that. Perhaps this was what people who were about to die felt right at the end: a sense of almost religious calm. He thought about the usual safety presentations at the start of any flight, when the cabin crew advised the placing of one's head between one's knees. This was, in the opinion of one of the comedians Ronnie had seen on the TV, in order to kiss your ass goodbye. Ronnie didn't think that was going to be necessary this trip. Which meant one more good thing. Should that be one more, or just one?
There was somebody else still here. Somebody in the flight deck.
Ronnie looked across at the windows but couldn't make out anything but dark sky and occasional cloud. What should it look like out there? He turned around and kept walking.
The girl was in the left section of the plane, way up from where Ronnie and Martha had been sitting. Now she was in the aisle, up ahead of him, falling over, holding her head and screaming at the top of her voice.
"My mommy," she shouted. "My mommy's gone. Where did she go?"
The girl was blonde haired, wearing a blue paisley patterned dress over wrinkled yellow stockings made out of a corduroytype material. She wasn't wearing any shoes.
"Hey, hold on," Ronnie said. "I'm on my way." Huh, big deal! he imagined the girl thinking. But this was all just a dream of some kind, wasn't it? How could a planeload of people just up and disappear in the space of seconds when they were a couple miles up in the air? It was a dream. That was all it was.
"Mommy!" the girl sobbed hoarsely. "Mommy!"
Each row of empty seats that Ronnie passed was littered with magazines, headphones still plugged into the armrests, trays down with packs of candies and chocolates, bottles of mineral water – some with their tops off, on their side, contents spilling out over belongings – paperback books lying on the floor or on suddenly flattened plane blankets that Ronnie was sure had covered legs and stomachs just a minute or two earlier. And there was the proof: not one single book or magazine was tented cover-up. They had fallen either open-pages-up or closing to lie crumpled and creased.
In other words, none of the people reading them had been prepared for what had happened.
And just what had that been? Ronnie thought.
The girl was pulling herself up the opposite aisle, heading for the rear of the plane. Ronnie braced his hands against two opposing headrests and tried to keep from falling forward.
Falling forward? That still didn't sound too good. How long could they continue to dive before they hit the ground? Without asking for it, an image suddenly shot into Ronnie's head: the image was of their plane hammering forward into the ground on a more or less vertical trajectory. Ronnie wondered what that would feel like. What was it going to be like, if you viewed it in slow-mo, to feel your body suddenly crushed between an unforgiving ground and a fairly determined thousand-ton airplane following it at several hundred miles per hour?
That was something the medical authorities always said, and it was something that Ronnie had never been able to sign into. They said, "It would have been fast. He/She/They wouldn't have felt a thing."
Well, that was all fine and dandy, but when you had to move from the one state of living and breathing into the second state – i.e. not living and breathing – there was surely going to be a brief moment or two in which you would experience that cessation of life – or, at least, its imminence. Like the scene in the Armageddon movie when Bruce Willis is sitting on the state-sized asteroid holding the push-button that's going to blow the colossal hunk of real estate (and himself as well) into just so much dust. Pushing that button would take a whole lot of doing, Ronnie had argued with Martha when they left the movie theatre. It's just a movie, Martha had insisted. But Ronnie couldn't get it out of his head. You must be able to feel it when you decimate all the miles of arteries and your lungs and your kidneys, your heart, your eyeballs, your teeth, hands and feet, fingers and toes. Your balls. Your pecker. The way he saw it, death was gonna hurt. And it was gonna hurt big time. The end of all things. Plus a deep dish helping of profound pain.
He tried to put it out of his mind, although his back-of-the-brain comedian wasn't having it. Question: What's the last thing that goes through a man's mind in a nosedive plane crash? Answer: his ass.
No, it didn't sound good at all. More than that, if everyone was gone – everyone apart from him and the girl – if all the passengers had disappeared, then why couldn't the same thing have happened to the pilot?
"Who's flying the plane?" Ronnie asked nobody in particular, trying to keep his voice steady but shouting it out, above the sound of the engines roaring and things still falling behind him. He thought he knew the answer to that one.
All at once, the plane engines seemed to ease up a little.
At the same time, the PA system beeped and a man's voice came on.
"Ladies and gentlemen? As I think you might just have noticed, we had some problems there for a few minutes, so my apologies for any concerns we may have caused," the voice said. It was slightly hesitant but making some effort to be assured and confident. Ronnie had an idea what was causing that hesitancy.
"We're leveling off," the voice continued, "but we're turning around and heading back to Denver International. There are no problems with the plane. I repeat, there are no problems whatsoever with the plane."
The voice paused.
Yeah, what's it like up there where you are, Mr. Pilot? Ronnie thought. He looked across at the girl, who was staring up at one of the PA loudspeakers from which the voice was coming. She had calmed a little, and Ronnie knew how she felt. He was looking at one of the speakers, too. There was something reassuring about the voice, a touch of refreshing normalcy in a bizarre situation. He felt like the people who went to see Jesus must have felt, a kind of serenity, a lifting of the spirits. They were no longer alone – he and the girl. And just for one second, one fleeting wonderful second, Ronnie thought that maybe the pilot would be able to explain what had happened to them. After all, he had already s
aid there was nothing wrong with the aircraft and that they were simply returning to Denver.
Ronnie imagined the airport, a working everyday airport. OK, it was two in the morning, so it would hardly be bustling but there would be people there. Wouldn't there? Perhaps it was just some sort of…
But there nothing he could think of that explained what it had been – except for a passing flying saucer that had beamed some kind of ray on them and picked up everyone on the plane. Everyone except for Ronnie, a kid and at least one pilot. And praise the lord for that last one. Amen, brothers and sisters. And you betcha, we'll all of us gather at the river for that one!
The girl looked across at him and rubbed her arm across her face to wipe her eyes and nose.
"One final thing," the voice said. "Would one of the cabin stewardesses come up to the front of the plane please? Thank you. I'll– We'll be keeping you posted on any other developments but we expect to be landing in Denver in around thirty minutes. Thank you once again."
Darkness Falling Page 4
