Red Eye | Season 1 | Episode 1

by Riley, Claire C

  It was still calm. Still peaceful-sounding in the plane. I stood up and pressed my cheek to the door once more. There was an odd, low growling, a snapping sound like a rubber band, but those could just be common flight noises. I repeated that “could be” to myself more than once, working up the courage to leave the bathroom.

  Just go out there, Sam. Don’t be a coward. Travis always said you were scared to do something different, that you hinged your entire life on dance. Prove him wrong and buck the hell up. So I bucked the hell up, after deciding my inner voice was an actual bitch for bringing up Travis.

  Lock was turned fully.

  Door was creaking open.

  Quiet greeted me. Blissful quiet that told my pulse to slow down, relax, this isn’t the end of the world. You’re not going to die today.

  A timid smile of relief pulling at my mouth, I stepped out of the bathroom and turned my body left to face the inside of the first-class cabin. Things were still chaotic-looking. The carpet was still bloodstained, the two men—the doctor and the elderly Charles—were restrained and moving around in seats, trying obviously to gain freedom, but things truly seemed okay. Hell, the flight staff had even pulled the curtain between first class and coach closed, so no more intermingling with those who’d paid far less for their tickets.

  Relief flooded me.

  It really was over.

  Whatever it was.

  I was almost to my seat, side-stepping the drying blood on the carpet and trying not to think about it too much.

  I almost laughed, thinking about how actually impeccable this terrible turn of events was—the perfect ending to the shittiest honeymoon in history.

  My blanket was pooled on the ground, looking like soft, cashmere-y goodness. I was chilled to the bone now, yet the room was still set to mid-seventies. Now, I’d use the blanket and snuggle under it, a shield against the horror I’d just hidden from. Even witnessing the start of it…Charles attacking the doctor, the doctor attacking the wife.

  God, I’d never forget that.

  A thought prickled at the back of my mind and my eyes searched the room curiously.

  I hadn’t seen the wife restrained. If Charles had hurt the doctor, causing the doctor to…act sickly and psychotic, then wouldn’t the wife be ill too now? I hadn’t seen where she was in the plane though—not at eye level. I looked, both upward at the storage cubbies and downward at the carpet.

  And I found her eventually, the sight of her making my thoughts run wild and my heart return to beating horse-racing fast. Her body was a total, unrecognizable wreck, as if she’d been ripped apart, tethered to the towing hitch of two trucks, and then stretched and stretched until her middle burst and her spine severed. Someone, likely the stewardesses, had stuffed her remains behind a row of seats where no one was sitting. It was…beyond words to see her body piled up like that. A grave in the sky, with no marker and no words to say goodbye.

  Sitting down, I focused on the window, at the sky outside that was so, so dark. Yet there was a hint of color now, of the black turning to navy blue. We were on the cusp of sunrise, when the sky would bleed color into the dark and welcome the world with a riot of hues. My favorite mornings were when the sky only chose pinks and reds to shower us with. I knew the old saying was red skies in morning, sailors take warning, but I’d always found the sight absolutely breathtaking. A dance of color.

  A dance. God, I saw motion and music in everything. Even I could admit that was annoying at times. Maybe Travis had been right—both about my cowardice and my inability to try new things. I was used to what I was used to. I liked comfort. I liked things easy. I never wanted to want in life. Both of my parents were dead, I had no real family to speak of, and dammit, I felt I deserved success and loveliness.

  The adrenaline, pumped by my racing heart and pulse, waned. I felt tired, every single bit of me exhausted.

  The instant I closed my eyes, I felt the plane begin to dip. We were descending. A ding-ding, ding-ding sound chimed, a last reminder to obey the seatbelt sign which had been on forever—since right before the carnage had begun. It shone above us, in an orange-crimson hue. I didn’t move to buckle. No one seemed to move. Maybe they had buckled already. I really, really didn’t care.

  All I cared about was that we were almost landed, almost on solid ground.

  I wanted off this horror ride.

  I wanted to go home to succumb to the depression which was waiting for me along with the empty home and the empty wardrobe. Travis was gone. Everything was changed, forever. I wanted to wallow in my own misery, not be here on this horrific plane ride with bloodthirsty murderers.

  I settled into my seat, fighting against the tears behind my eyes.

  I was not weak.

  I’d survived total humiliation.

  I’d survived a honeymoon on my own.

  And I’d just survived the plane journey from hell.

  Everything was going to be okay.

  I was going to be okay.

  And then came another scream. Like acid poured onto fragile material, it ripped through the hard-won quietude that had fallen over the passengers. It felt like it broke the sound barrier, the one that separated our delicate emotions from a cliff that would send us all spiraling totally, irrevocably apart.

  I stood, whirling around, finding the young boy with crow hair and lashes for days. He had his mother lifted in the air, her body sideways, his mouth against her side. Blood flowered from the wound he was creating and widening, flowered and darkened until her suit was no longer cardinal red, but deepening to burgundy.

  A stewardess rushed to the boy, screaming at him to stop. She had her hands out. With an unceremonious, unfeeling gesture, the boy threw his mother against the back of their passenger seats. The crack of her spine breaking was like a gunshot in the enclosed space.

  I screamed and shot away from my seat, running to the opposite aisle of the plane, stretching my long legs over seats and around others, desperate to further myself. This put me closer to the doctor and to Charles, though, and that sent me rushing toward the second curtain into coach.

  The boy and the now-bloody stewardess were heading that way too, toward coach. They beat me to the opposite curtain, the one stained with the doctor’s blood. I hesitated as they pushed into the other area of the plane. Hesitated until the doctor and Charles began to snap and gnash their teeth behind me. That moved me forward.

  When I came into coach, I froze. It was no better there. The boy and the flight attendant were already attacking a passenger—a tall man, brutishly handsome. I choked on a sob.

  Desperate, I looked around for help from someone—anyone. But everyone was as panicked as I was. More so, it seemed. They rushed around frantically, pushing and shoving to get away from the carnage. With every person that went down, another two seemed to stand up, equally bloody and ready to kill.

  I was stationary, trapped in the horror with nowhere to go, until another woman barged into me.

  “Oh god, I’m sorry,” she cried out, her arms raised to protect herself.

  I winced from the impact of her body charging into mine, the air leaving my lungs in a gust. I held my own hands up to protect myself.

  Her eyes widened. “Oh god, I won’t hurt you,” she said, patting my arm as she started to move away. We locked eyes and there was something there. Not just panic, but hope. Hope in another human being that looked just as scared and just as desperate to fucking live. The girl couldn’t have been much younger than me, but she was younger. I could see that in her face and the way she was dressed—like a backpacker headed on some great adventure, avoiding mature responsibilities. She was a head shorter than me, her eyes framed by cocoa-brown bangs. “Come on,” she yelled to me, heading toward first class.

  “Don’t go in there!” I yelled at her, my voice more panicked than I wanted it to be, but I guess if there was ever a time to panic, it was now. “It’s…they’re…” I tried to find the words, tried to express how fucking bad it was in th
ere. But there were no words in my vocabulary for such unimaginable nightmares. There was blood and guts and death. So much death! But most of the danger, I quickly realized as I glanced behind us, had now traveled into coach.

  The plane shuddered again and we both grabbed hold of the plane seats in front of us as the wheels touched sharply down, hopping a bit into the air and then once more slamming into the hard ground.

  The ground.

  Only a short while ago, I’d held onto the hope of that safety. Now, something was telling me that this wasn’t it…This plane, these sick people. What was happening? The lights flashed on and off before blinking out completely, and the screams grew louder until they were almost deafening.

  The plane was still moving forward; the screeching of metal upon metal, like perhaps the wheels hadn’t descended in time, echoed all around us. The emergency lights shone a red path toward the exits. The stewardess and the boy were leaving behind the large man’s body and were coming toward us, the girl and I—unlucky companions on a doomed flight. They fell forwards, though, as the plane slowed faster than it should have, as if the captain were as full of fear as his passengers and had applied the brakes too fast, too hard.

  The noise of people screaming, and the plane engines screeching assaulted my ears so much that I wanted to reach up and cover them, but instead all I could do was grip harder onto the seatbacks and try not to fall over.

  The plane jerked, its tail rising unexpectedly back up, like the brakes applying were too much for it to stay perfectly grounded. The stewardess and boy slid away from us, in the opposite direction, and into a group of people huddled near the doors that led to the back of the plane and baggage. And then the boy and the flight attendant became distracted once again, reaching for the nearest passengers that clung to one another and were trying to stay upright.

  Screams.

  More and more screams.

  And so damn loud as the two abhorrent monsters tore into innocent people with teeth and hands, sending blood gushing from wounds.

  The plane finally came to an abrupt stop, the sound like the moan of a door that was desperately in need of oiling. I looked at the other woman and she looked at me. I could see by her face that we were thinking the same thing.

  “We have to get off this plane,” she said firmly, in an accent I had only just recently heard on my travels. “No matter what!” She was firm in her resolve, and relief flooded me at the word we. All of this shit was made less terrifying by the fact that I wasn’t in it alone. Because alone…shit, I knew I was dead.

  I nodded, my head moving a little too fast, a little too erratically. “No matter what,” I replied.

  Chapter Five.

  Rose

  B urning.

  The smell was the first thing to reach me, quickly followed by the smoke.

  Thick gray smoke that began filtering past the window. I looked outside and saw not only fires in the airport, but fires in the distance too. But this smoke was coming from somewhere much, much closer, and I let my gaze wander out the window and across the plane wing until it reached one of the engines.

  A small fire had started inside it, but it was quickly growing larger and would undoubtedly grow out of control soon enough.

  “Bloody hell!” I said, because seriously, could my luck get any worse? “It’s Night of the Living Dead and we’re trapped on a plane which is on fire!” I sounded hysterical, my voice hoarse from screaming. My trembling hands were still gripping on to the seat in front of me and I tried to loosen my grip and let go.

  “We need to go,” the other woman said, and I turned to look at her. I nodded and she started to back away from the window.

  The plane was dark, barring the red glow of the emergency lights, but the air was quickly filling with smoke, meaning that there was likely another fire somewhere else. Not surprising, given the way we had just crash-landed, I guess.

  I followed the woman, hoping that she knew how to get off, because despite what the captain had said about staying on board, I was most definitely getting the fuck off.

  “I think…there was an exit around here…” She coughed against the smoke and I followed her closely as we headed back into first class.

  There were people asleep still buckled into their seats, but as I looked closer, their eyes opened and they began to writhe against their restraints. It was only then that I realized that they were just like the man that had started all of this…sick, ill, dead? I just didn’t know. But what was obvious was that, whatever he had, he’d passed on to them, and perhaps me too.

  Terror squeezed my heart at the prospect of becoming one of those things.

  We were past the seats, the bathrooms on one side, a drawn curtain and smoke on the other. We moved slowly, shuffling our feet like naughty children trying to sneak looks at Santa. It was slow, terrifying. But we moved. All around us people were crying, the sound only broken up by the odd scream.

  “It’s here!” the other woman called, and I moved quickly to catch up to her. She was stood by the stewardesses’ station, pressing her shoulder against one of the doors. “I can’t get the handle to move,” she said as I reached her.

  “Does the captain need to unlock it?” I asked, panicking.

  “I don’t know, maybe?” She shrugged, like she was trying to appear braver than she actually was, and we both looked towards the cockpit door. “Let’s find out, shall we?” she said, and walked to the door with a forced confidence that made me like her. Her hand flew up to bang furiously on it while I kept watch in case another one of those…things saw us.

  Red light pulsed above us and I could see my companion clearly as she banged and then stopped to listen. Banged and then stopped to listen. After several minutes with no reply, she pressed her back against the door and sighed.

  Her face was splattered with blood and her skin was pale. Her eyes were wide and frightened. She looked like hell, and I knew I must look the same.

  “What now?” she asked.

  *

  Sam

  My desire was to bang and bang on the door to the cockpit forever. Slam my fists against it like a relentless wrestler until the captain answered. I knew, though, in the pit of my stomach, that it was useless. He was either in there scared shitless, refusing to break the seal on his hiding spot, or he was dead already. I thought I’d prefer that he was dead, rather than choosing to leave us all to rot and burn.

  The world outside the windows of the plane was a riot of disturbing red, like there was war in heaven and the angels themselves had injuries and were bleeding down upon us, turning the world crimson.

  And the fires. Flame and smoke everywhere, it seemed. Outside. Discoloring the world. Inside. Permeating my senses until I thought I might pass out. But I couldn’t. We had to get out of there. We had to.

  The red glow of the emergency lights went out and we froze completely, not breathing, hoping they would come back on. They did, but that moment of darkness—only punctuated by the bit of sunrise seeping through the windows—left us both more nervous than before. I could see it in her face; I knew I was a mirror to her.

  I felt so hot, like my insides were burning. Sweat poured down my face and a headache was starting. I rarely got headaches, and the building, thumping situation inside my brain was fucking awful.

  “A stewardess might have it. Like the head stewardess. Is that a thing? If the captain is incapacitated, they have to have a way to launch the emergency exits,” she rambled off, picking at thin, transparent hope.

  I nodded at her, covering my mouth as a coughing fit wracked my body. “Maybe.” The word sounded choked-out. “Keep your face covered,” I mumbled as the smoke inside the aircraft intensified. The small fire was indeed spreading. Or maybe there was more than one now.

  We fumbled back away from the door and she nearly tripped over a person’s outstretched legs coming from beneath the closed curtain across from the bathrooms. The legs were clad in white semi-opaque hosiery, a few splatters of blood to
ruin the virgin-looking cloth. I reached out with shaking fingers and threw open the curtain. The other woman and I gasped in unison.

  The owner of the legs was engulfed in flame, the fire burning up her polyester uniform. I couldn’t even make out her face, as if the hair spray she’d used to keep the perfectly coifed strands in place was so highly flammable that it had caused the fire to consume her head in seconds.

  “God. Oh, god,” I sobbed out. “Was she here before? Why didn’t we see her before?” But there was so much blinding smoke and it had been so dim with only the emergency lights on. The abyss of shadows across from the bathrooms. It was the first-class kitchen area; another curtain separated that area. We were only seeing her clearly now because the flame was burning her up. I couldn’t see where this new fire originated…Perhaps the microwave, which was situated near where she was sitting, strapped into one of the staff chairs in the small kitchen area of the plane.

  “How did we not see her?” my companion moaned out, fear a seed in her voice.

  “How did we not smell her?” I countered, slapping my hand over my nose, still choking on sobs and smoke, but now also the smell of overdone meat on the grill.

  “We should have seen her and helped.” Her words were barely a whisper, as if she knew we couldn’t have helped the woman, even if we’d seen her before she’d burned.

  “She must’ve not had her legs out. It’s dark. The curtain was closed. And…she wasn’t on fire or I’m sure we’d have seen her.” My last sentence sounded so weak. I leaned forward just as the woman came to life again, launching her blackened, crispy upper body toward me. Her teeth opened, guttural sounds escaping her mouth. They looked so white, her teeth, against the charred surface of her burned skin. Her hair was nearly gone now, her scalp an expanse of fleshy, still-burning skin. “Shit!” I fell backwards, the other woman catching me.