Boots thumped and a breeze rushed past Mary as a fresh team of security personnel took over. A pair of medics came too. One man in a suit quickly ushered Mary away from the sight of blood and the eerie absence of screaming. The plainclothes man asked her if she was all right. She said, “Absolutely not!” He assured her the situation was now under control. He coaxed her this way and that, beyond all the familiar parts of the airport, into an office. Flashmob, she thought. It’s a gigantic prank, and I’m the rube. A thought experiment, to see how people would react to…to…
“Where’s your luggage?” he asked.
“I…I left them on the table.”
“Passport and boarding pass, too?”
“I put them in my luggage before that man… That…”
The suited man nodded and raised his hand. “I don’t think he hit anything vital. Can I get you anything? Water, cup of coffee?”
She shivered. “I could use a coffee.”
“Cream, sugar?”
“Yeah. Please.”
“All right. I’ll be right back.” He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. His encouraging smile was a breath of fresh air. “You’re safe here.” He left, and the door clicked behind him. Maglocks and a card reader sealed her in. There were two surveillance cameras. She wasn’t being held for her own safety’s sake. She was being held for interrogation.
Honestly! What the hell!
Almost as quickly as it had shut, the door pushed open. It was the man in the suit. “Sorry about that,” he said with another winning smile. “I brought my cat pictures with me,” he said conversationally, though with a strange undertone of accusation. “In fact, my cats are very well documented, as you will see.”
“What?”
“In the instance where cats will cat, cats are catty.” He took out his phone. “We’ve even got video proof. My question is, where do you fit into it, and why did you do it?”
“What?” Mary’s mouth trembled. “I don’t understand—”
He bent and slapped the table. “My cats,” he insisted, “are on the Internet, and Vine is full of trick photography and cleavage. I want to know why your cat videoed cleavage vines.”
“Is this a joke?” Cold sweat stained her shirt.
Like a professor keen on his lecture, the man played with his phone, saying, “Independent manga hentai, porous navigation!” He turned the phone around for her to see his Goodreads account. “In this regard, only otters slide sideways, you see?” He pointed to the screen. “Alphabetically, I have a better bunch of grapes in a minute-egg!” He was getting angry. And Mary was locked in with him.
“I don’t know what you’re saying!”
“Soccer diesel animal hangar!” He caught her wrist. “Prove to me that cat cleavage videos indigo barter vinyl chalk!”
Mary stared at the maniac, struggling to free her wrist. Use his madness against him. If you don’t trick him into letting you go, you’re dead meat. Think! “Your cats!”
“What about them?” he asked.
Outside the interrogation room, someone wailed, “Peanuts!” as if it was the name of some innocent fool who was falling from a cliff.
“Answer me,” the man in the suit urged. “You’ll miss your Jefferson, and I don’t give a damn.” He threw down his phone and showed her his fist. “Surrealistic pillow, Mary.” He wrenched her wrist, making her yelp. His eyes bored into hers. “Tell me!”
“You left your cats in the oven!”
He straightened, blinking. “I did?”
She twisted her hand to slip free. “You have to let me rescue them!”
“Where?” he asked.
“I have to take you. They’re hidden.”
He grinned gallantly. “Come on, there’s no time to lose.” He pressed his pass to the card reader. “Go on, then! Hurry! Reduce, reuse, recycle.” He pushed her into the hall, drew his gun, pressed it to his temple, and as if saluting the queen, said, “Purple under cleats!” and pulled the trigger.
She shook as if she’d been the one shot. He looked like an English airman saluting the queen, but the left side of his head was gone. Shards of brown and white bone fell from the oozing mess that covered the door frame. His legs folded under him. She screamed, and ran backward until her heels caught in the carpet, and she fell.
“POPCORN!” someone cried behind another locked door. “Peanut, peanut butter!” The door banged against its hinges. “And jelly.”
Get up and run, she thought, or you’re dead.
Like a pinball, she crashed along one hallway to another to another, then to a fork in the paths. A sign pointed to the washrooms, another to Information. She had to get out of that airport, by plane or on foot. There were armed personnel all over the place, and if they were going mad, there was an equal chance of someone shooting himself, shooting a friend, or shooting Mary.
A joyful ding preceded a message over the airport announcement line. “Final boarding call for James Rogers,” the female voice carefully pronounced, “Anoush Behar, Sahak Behar, Baba Ganoush, and that fat bucktoothed asshole. Please come to gate B17. This is your final boarding call. Thank you.”
Voices and people rushed toward Mary, so she dashed into the nearby washroom and waited near the door, listening. It sounded like a stampede. Dozens of people stormed past, not quite marching in time. They were puffing as if they’d been jogging around the block.
Mary turned and leaned against the wall. She closed her eyes, but her lids had been flashbulb-burned by that man blowing his merry brains out.
There’s got to be something in the air, Mary thought. My God – that’s it! A biological weapon! It was deployed in the airport. It must have gone off at security, because that’s where all this started. She needed to escape into fresh air and call for help.
Mary slipped out of the bathroom and took the first left. To her enormous relief, she saw the stores and signs pointing to boarding gates. She slunk down the shopping promenade, keeping a wary eye on a man sitting on the floor drinking Coke by the litre, blissfully unaware of the puddle of urine he sat in.
Near the end of the concourse and up the ramp, the security team sat at a table outside the baggage inspection area. Mary had left her luggage, phone, and wallet on that table. The agitated guards were playing strip poker. One woman was down to her hat, shoes, underwear, and tie, and she was trembling. Her lips were crusty and white.
The cards were stained with blood.
“Time’s running out,” said the grandmotherly man. His sweaty lips twitched. It was impossible to say if he was looking at a very good hand or the very worst.
“But we must be more thorough,” said the security supervisor. “It’s there.”
Mary slowly and quietly reached between two players. She had her hand on her jacket when someone grabbed her by the hair. “Sit!” Mary was dumped onto the bench, thigh to naked thigh with one of the guards. Cards were in front of her, face down. The security team stared at her.
“I bid one sock?” Mary asked.
“A strip search isn’t enough,” the supervisor said. “We need to be more proactive, diligent – these are dangerous times we live in. We must look deeper.”
Out of the blue, came a rumbling. There must have been fifty people crammed shoulder to shoulder, moving like a flock of flamingos, flowing through and around the security obstacles. They went past the card game and down the ramp to the shopping arcade.
“You never know where you’re going to find it, sweetie,” said the grandmotherly man. “But you have to keep looking.”
“It’s the skin folds of fat people,” said the metal detector man. They all agreed.
“It mixes with the laptop battery acid and the onboard crudité platter,” said the woman with the necktie. Her left hand had been so badly broken that her wrist looked like the open head of a Pez dispenser. “We all know that’s the payload. Now we have to find the detonator!”
“The bomb is ticking,” the supervisor insisted. “Check your ca
rds and play.”
Mary lifted her cards. The face cards were all well-hung men. She had two aces, a jack, a nine, a four, three twos, and a business card. “I don’t know how to play this game,” Mary said.
“It doesn’t matter!” the supervisor said. “Time is up. We must find it, now!”
The grandmotherly man gasped and cried, “I have two nines!” He threw down the cards as if they were going to explode, and the others recoiled. They weren’t even nines. They were a ten, a jack, and a six. “Wait. False alarm,” he said, sitting. He wiped his brow. “A full house, queens over eights.”
Mary had to get away. She needed to tell the outside world what was happening, and get these victims to safety before they all killed themselves. But someone behind her refused to let her stand.
The woman with the broken wrist was trying to peel open her cards. “I can’t see it anymore! It was there, but now I can’t reach it!” The supervisor shook his head and clucked his tongue. He motioned one of his team to help her. “I can find it myself!” the woman screamed. “It’s here, I swear! I saw it just a second ago!” She ripped the card in half vertically. She sat back, one half in either hand. “Oh God. I’ve tripped the timer.”
Do something!
The supervisor said, “Now you’ve condemned us. Charles, you know what to do.”
Easter Island Face rose from his seat and put a hand on the necktie woman’s forehead, as if he was getting ready to break her neck.
Do something! They’re going to kill her!
Mary grabbed her backpack, then shot to her feet. “Wait! I have it right here!” She set her bag on the table and opened it. “I can defuse it before it goes off.” They all lurched from the table, except for the naked necktie woman and the man about to break her neck. “Watch.” Mary extracted a pair of socks as if they were made of nitroglycerin. “I’m familiar with this kind of bomb.” Someone sucked in his breath. “This is all you have to do, to defuse it.” She unrolled the socks and laid one beside the other, smoothing them flat. “There. Problem solved.”
After a long, pregnant pause, all eyes lifted from the socks to Mary’s face.
“How did you know where to find the bomb?” the supervisor demanded. “And how come you know so much about how it’s built? Immigrant terrorist! Invader! Parasite! Learn English!”
Mary would take her chances with the barricaded front doors, if she could get that far. She upended her backpack, throwing clothes to blind them from her escape. She ran through the holding area with half a dozen naked security personnel behind her.
“She’ll kill us all!” the supervisor screamed. “Kill her! Kill her!”
Their voices soon fell behind. Panting, Mary turned to see what fresh hell had delayed them. In single file, the guards were walking through the rope corridor. At every bend, each solemnly said, “Peanut.” Then they rushed to the next bend, slowed, and said, “Peanut.”
If there was something in the air, clearly Mary was immune to it. She alone could warn the world. She raced past the boarding wickets toward the terminal front doors and the taxis waiting outside. There were no barricades. There were no medical personnel. There was no biohazard warning posted on the doors.
The boarding announcement pinged. “This is a final boarding call for Mary Mallory. Final board – DEMONSPAWN GET ON THE PLANE – for Mary Mallory. Final boarding call for that flat-chested ginger bitch DEMONSPAWN SHITSTAIN. Thank you.”
Mary felt her pockets for her phone as she rushed for the door. What the hell do I do? If I call the cops, are they going to go crazy too? Shoot everybody on sight?
Out of nowhere, the pack of jogging travellers charged her, smothering her, carrying her along with them. They chanted, “Come on, go faster. Faster in front. Stop pushing. Faster. I’ll sue. Get out of my way. Go on.” They shoved her through Departures, back into the security holding area. She begged them to let her go. “We’re late. Get out of my way. I’ll sue. We’re late. Move on. Stop pushing. I’ll sue.” Like a train’s shrill whistle rising above the chugging of its engine, someone lifted his voice, crying, “Do you have any idea who I am?” They pushed on through security, ropes and all, corralling the security crew who added “Peanut, peanut, peanut, peanut” to the drone of impatient voices. They tipped over the metal detector.
“Final boarding call for BITCH GET YOUR ASS ON THE PLANE!”
The quick march became a flat out run. When Mary could no longer keep her feet, two people grabbed her by the arms and carried her to Gate B17. There, the boarding attendant was staring at the ceiling, saying, “Welcome a-broad. Welcome a-broad.”
Mary bit her hand, but there was no getting out of this nightmare. She wasn’t asleep.
The pack squeezed down the gangway. People were coming toward them, shouting indignantly. The plane was still disembarking, but the mad mob had momentum and width on its side.
Someone picked up Mary and shoved her across countless shoulders. “Final boarding call!” someone yelled as she crowd-surfed down the ramp, through the hatch and fuselage, her head banging against the overhead baggage compartments. Then someone yanked Mary to the floor by the waistband.
An attendant pulled Mary upright. “Get away from her! Get back! You idiots! What kind of a game is this? Where’s security?” She dusted Mary off. “Are you all right?”
“No! I’m not!” Mary cried. “The whole airport is like them! There’s been some kind of biological weapon—”
“Biological weapon?” The nearest disembarking passengers screamed and wrestled each other for access to the rear emergency exit. Panic and madness spread. People jabbered in tongues, dropped their pants, headbutted each other.
Mary hid in the nearest seat, pressed up against the window, weeping, blocking her ears with her fists, sickened by the rocking of the plane. A body fell against her and she screamed, punching blindly.
A thousand voices became a hundred. A hundred became ten. Ten became only a question here and there.
Mary sobbed.
“Mary?”
She lifted her arm. Her eyes were bloated with tears. She wiped her face. The plane was mostly empty. There were only three passengers left, all of them sitting across the aisle. The nearest one wore a cowboy hat. The one in the window seat wore headphones designed to look like the antennae of an old TV set. Between them snored a doughy-looking man in a DeadMau5 T-shirt.
She wondered if the flight crew was immune. They seemed unperturbed by the unorthodox disembarkation and Mary’s boarding.
The cowboy and the man with the rabbit-ear antennae were comparing notes, snickering, heads almost touching, oblivious of the sleeper they squished between them. She couldn’t make sense of a word they were saying. It sounded like a mash-up of every Eastern European accent, with a little Spanish, Urdu, and Mandarin thrown in. Maybe I am going crazy, after all. It just took longer for me to catch it.
“Did you see what happened?” Mary asked.
“It was hard to miss!” hooted the man with the rabbit ears. “Marvellous.”
“We have to warn people,” Mary said. She rubbed her nose on her sleeve. “It was like a virus in the air or something. Everyone’s gone mad!”
The captain came out of the cabin, switched on the announcement radio. “Oh, you can’t help that,” he said. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“But I’m not!” she said.
“You must be,” the captain replied, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” He hung up the radio mike and locked himself in the cockpit.
The cowboy leaned on his armrest. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?” He sounded like he was covering up a Russian accent with a Texan drawl.
“People were going crazy and getting crazier all the time, everywhere I went,” she said.
“Ah yes, that’s the key fact,” said Rabbit Ears. He giggled and rubbed his hands together.
“What?” Mary asked.
“None of them were mad until you arrived,” the cowboy chimed
in. “They went crazy wherever you were. You’re the initial disease vector.”
The man in the middle chuckled drowsily. “Mary, Mary, life is scary. How does your madness grow?”
The man in the hat moved over to Mary’s side of the aisle. Rabbit Ears punched DeadMaus, who moved into the cowboy’s aisle seat, and Rabbit Ears moved into the middle. “You were selected as our initial vector days ago,” cowboy explained.
“On this very plane,” said Rabbit Ears.
“A…a virus?” Mary asked.
“A very profitable one,” Rabbit Ears said. He licked his lips almost erotically. “It’s airborne, you know.”
The sleepy man giggled. “Airborne.”
Mary’s seat jerked, and she gripped the armrests. The airplane was taxiing away from the terminal. “Wait, stop the plane!”
“Don’t feel so bad.” The cowboy moved one seat closer to Mary, and his companions followed suit. “You’re not the only carrier.”
Rabbit Ears said, “Hmm, perhaps that’s the trouble. Crosspollination.”
“Yes,” said the cowboy, in his Russo-Texan accent. “This being an election year, we’d expected some hybridization, but not your rampant mutation. You were only supposed to cause agitation. Decrease some inhibitions, impair judgment, and entrench a little xenophobia.”
“You should have seen that little virus work its magic in Kentucky.” Rabbit Ears hummed. “A work of art.”
“But your variant,” the cowboy said, “causes symptoms much too unpredictable for our purposes.”
“Pull her out of circulation,” said the sleepy one, in a tiny, high-pitched voice.
“Oh, I’m sure we can find a use for her,” Rabbit Ears said. “She might sell well in certain unruly countries as a techno-organic weapon.” He giggled. “To discourage organized protests, for example.”
“No, no, no!” Mary cried. “No, this can’t be happening.”
“Oh, but it can and is,” the cowboy said. “Our carriers in Texas, Florida, and other such muggy states have been doing great for years!” The cowboy’s black eyes were wide and keen. “It’s a digital virus that uses your own brainwaves as a carrier signal. All you’ve got to do is stand in the middle of a crowd and think your own thoughts. With the help of your digital virus, you generate a very mild electromagnetic field that interferes with the normal function of other brains nearby. Reprograms their operating system, if you will.”
Alice Unbound Page 22