by P A Vasey
“So how do we get there?” said Stillman, looking at Hubert. “We’ll need an icebreaker or a fucking submarine!”
“I know a guy,” Hubert said quietly.
I’d boarded the airplane alone, tickets paid with cash from a wad Stillman produced from her bag.
I didn’t ask.
The desk staff must have thought they were helping some kind of drug dealer or whack-job as I handed over thousands of dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. Stillman and I’d fought over whether we’d attract more attention paying in cash, or whether a credit card booking would just flag us up to any watching Vu-Hak. Were they watching? We had no clue, but ultimately we agreed it’d be safer with non-traceable cash. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to grab a false passport, this being real life and not one of the Bourne movies. However, my passport was Sara Clarke’s and therefore officially was a false document, and it raised no flags at all. Maybe the Vu-Hak hadn’t yet deduced my cover name, despite one of their number dying in my apartment.
Maybe we’d be in luck.
The first leg from New York to LA passed quickly. I was shoehorned in the middle row at the back of the plane, and, despite the noise of the kitchenette and the toilets, I managed a couple of hours of dreamless sleep. The woman in the window seat must have had a bladder the size of a peanut given the number of times she squeezed past me to go to the toilet, and she didn’t stop drinking coffee all the way. I felt like she was a kindred spirit. Luckily she hadn’t been hungry so I’d put aside my prepared uncommunicativeness to beg for what remained of her meals as well as my own. I told her I’d missed breakfast, but as she handed them over she looked at me like I had worms.
At LAX I ran like Usain Bolt across to the Tom Bradley Terminal and made my connection to Brisbane with five minutes to spare before the gate closed. The flight was thankfully quiet, and I was soon getting organized at a window seat in business class on Qantas’s newest acquisition, a 787 Dreamliner. I downed the arrival champagne almost in one go, and sank into the seat, my body feeling battered and bruised and crying out for more sleep. I ordered an ice-cold New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, grabbed six packets of peanuts from the trolley, and stared blankly at the personal TV screen showing a map of the route. It was twelve hours until we landed at Brisbane, a big modern city on the southeast corner of Queensland. The plan was to get a connection from Brisbane to Tasmania, where we would all regroup. Stillman and I had decided to meet up separately in Australia, for safety. Certainly neither of us wanted to travel with Hubert, who would be making his own way to Tasmania in order to arrange for a US Navy submarine to pick us up. It was all on the ‘down low’ as he called it.
The guy in the seat opposite and facing me was young, trim, mid-thirties, and Australian, dressed in an expensive business suit and sporting combed-back reddish hair. In another life I might have started a conversation straight away, but when he caught my eye and crinkled a (not unattractive) smile at me I looked away awkwardly and started fiddling with the screen, pretending to search for a movie. I put the headphones on so he got the message I was not in conversation mode. I found a noise-cancelling switch on the headphones, and the cabin sounds muted away.
We took off smoothly, the big engines whining and then doing that scary drop in power thing as we banked north before rising gracefully over the ocean and settling into our course across the equator and down into the southern hemisphere. I closed my eyes. The low thrum of the engines was soporific and the alcohol was kicking in. I could feel myself starting to drift off, so I put the seat into a semi-recline position and took a couple of deep breaths. I’d always been able to get off to sleep fairly quickly, even after answering my pager and calls in the middle of the night. I’d learned of a technique called “4,7,8” – basically you breathed in for four seconds, held your breath for seven and breathed out slowly for eight. Your heart rate and respiratory rate slowed down and you magically fell asleep. Just like that.
Well, that plus a gallon of wine.
There was a bit of turbulence, a subliminal rumble which made my stomach drop a little and my anxiety levels rise, but we soon smoothed out again and I resumed my count. Sleep came over me like a blanket, but not a blanket of warmth – a blanket of cold and frigidity. My eyes got heavier and heavier and within a minute sleep took over.
TWELVE
The dream started immediately.
It was as if someone had adjusted the colors of the universe, as easy as twisting one of those plastic dials on an old TV set. The sky was brighter than it should be: iridescent hues of turquoise and cobalt. The trees were phosphorescent green and burned onto my retinas, leaving wiggly after-images. Buildings and bridges glowed with an amber hue. Grey roads and highways appeared as sleek rivers of jet-black tarmac painted with perfect electric white lines. Streetlamps and windows glowed blue. Really blue. Electric blue. Front yards of run-down houses that had been disheveled with the decrepitude of late winter were a riot of colorful blooms.
Everything was so right it was wrong – really wrong.
The picture abruptly changed as a grey house shimmered into view. I recognized it as my house in Indian Springs. A house but not a home. I’d moved there from Chicago after Kelly’s death, and it never felt like a home, just a place to throw my weary bones after a twenty-four-hour shift.
The picture changed again to my POV and I was walking up the driveway to the door. The curtain in the front room twitched. Someone was in there. The door was locked and I slapped the wood, the effect sounding like a bell tolling.
A face appeared at the window.
Kelly.
My daughter.
She gave a huge welcoming smile and I could feel my head melting and caving in. She had a little smudge of something on her forehead, a fleck of blood I remembered from when I identified her at the morgue. She held up her hand and pressed it against the glass and my own hand reached out and matched her gesture like one of those soppy chick flicks. We touched fingertips, a couple of millimeters of glass separating us. I imagined my molecules diffusing through the solid glass, mixing with hers, connecting.
“Can I come in?” I heard myself saying in a shaky voice, my breath coming in ragged gulps.
She continued smiling and nodded slowly, moving her hand down to the doorknob on the side. The door opened in slow motion and she was there facing me. Her skin was blue-grey, a pallor I associated with death, but her eyes glowed with a green shining light that fitted the palette of the world we were in. She moved out of the way and I walked past her into my house, through the kitchen and into the living room. The sofas and coffee table were exactly as I’d left them. My bag was on the chair, upturned, its contents spilled over onto the floor. Lipstick, compact, pens, hankies, scraps of paper … and a photograph of Kelly.
She appeared soundlessly by my side and picked up the photo, turning it in her little hands so I could see it as well. I remembered the photo. It had been her birthday, a couple of weeks before she died. She was wearing pajamas because we’d just had a sleepover with four of her friends and she was still high with the excitement and joy of just being a little girl on her special day surrounded by love …
Grief bit me with such ferocity I thought it was going to suck every emotion out of me and leave me an empty shell.
But then Kelly took hold of my hand. She spoke to me, but her voice was adult, measured, unrecognizable.
“Emotions. The very thing that makes you human. Happiness, pride, excitement, satisfaction, contentment. Every emotion that you consider good. But what would you be if you didn’t also feel hurt or pain or despair? You can’t have good without bad. There is no light without darkness. Does that sound right?”
This wasn’t my daughter.
I let go of her hand and took a step back. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
She smiled again and jumped up on the sofa to sit facing me. She swung her feet back and forward and interlaced her fingers on her lap.
“Them?” she said, inn
ocently.
“Aliens. Vu-Hak.” I ground out the word.
Her lip twitched and her eyes glowed a little greener. The effect was to make her skin greyer in such a way that it looked thicker, more leathery, as if all the blood had leached into her core or drained into her feet. Her blonde hair hung on her face like pastry draped over cut apple. Dirty, straggly and corn-like.
It was as if she was decaying in front of me.
Another chill came over me but I willed my subconscious to fall in line. I wasn’t going to retreat or act scared. I wasn’t going to give them a show of weakness. I would show defiance and surety, even in my dream.
“Where’s Adam?” I said.
The alien imitating my dead daughter shrugged, looking blankly at me. I folded my arms and returned her stare, daring her to look away first. She did, but not before breaking into another chilling smile.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she said. “I think you know where he is. You will tell me.”
I desperately tried to hide how fearful I was. I knew now they were inside my mind, though they weren’t yet controlling me. Was this something Cain had given me as well? The ability to erect some sort of barrier to their psychic infiltration?
“Humanity’s time is up,” the simulacrum intoned. “You are already well along the path of self-destruction. You play with technologies you do not understand and cannot control. Your distrust of your own species and access to world-destroying technology leads to only one conclusion. The end of humanity. Our presence has just brought the deadline forward.”
The alien jumped off the sofa and wandered over to the front window, pulling itself up on tippy toes to look out. This action was so incongruous that I stifled a laugh. It heard me and turned sharply.
“Where is Adam?” she insisted.
“He’s dead, didn’t you know?” The lie slipped out, smooth and easy, like grease running down a pole.
Anger flashed in her eyes and I tried to remain composed.
“Tell me about Cain,” I said.
“Who?” she replied, innocently. Or was it truthfully?
The conversation was over and the alien looked into my eyes. There was a pressure in my head that hadn’t been there before. Icy fingers were infiltrating my mind. My thoughts were slowing down, my neural pathways, and connections becoming clogged and blocked.
This had all been smoke and mirrors.
A distraction.
She was trying to take over my mind.
If she did, it was all over.
I screamed as loud as I could, the sort of scream that would curdle your blood. It flowed through my brain and kickstarted some primeval pathway. Adrenaline ripped through my body.
I woke up.
THIRTEEN
I opened my eyes to find the world had gone to shit.
Vibrating. Blurring at the edges.
Shaking and rattling like a subway line.
Oxygen masks bouncing everywhere.
People screaming.
The atmosphere felt stretched and gossamer thin. My stomach lurched and acid burned the back of my tongue. I swallowed it, grimacing, feeling the heat behind my sternum. Magazines and glasses and plates were flying around as the airplane lurched violently up and down. One of the stewardesses who had served me earlier was hanging on to the armrest of a seat; a passenger had his arms around her waist as she was thrown every which way. Her head was bleeding, a crimson river running down the side of her face. She caught my eye and her mouth opened soundlessly as we lurched again and she was thrown up in the air, slamming her head into the overhead bin.
The locked steel door to the flight deck was about ten yards away, a few rows forward. I waited for the aircraft to stabilize for a second and snapped my seatbelt off and threw myself forward out of the seat. I noticed that the Australian was missing but didn’t have time to process this as I pulled myself around his seat and out into the aisle. The aircraft dropped again like a stone, bouncing me about as gravity came and went. I held tightly to the seat and my feet planted once again on the deck as the plane pulled up. I caught a glimpse of the sea out of the window as we banked over at a severe angle.
We looked to be pretty low.
I pulled myself along toward the flight deck, past the toilets and kitchenette, which was littered with cutlery, metal pots and pans, and swimming with liquid and food debris. After what seemed like a lifetime of reaching and pulling I finally got there. It was a solid grey metal barrier, cross-hatched with rivets like an industrial plate. The handle was locked solid. I banged on the door but couldn’t hear the noise of the impacts, such was the screaming of the engines and the rattling as every loose object in the cabin ricocheted off every surface. Back down the aisle, past the forest of masks, no one was coming to help me.
Cain’s voice blew through my mind like a hurricane, sweeping everything aside. I have given you what you need. You will know when to use it.
Well, I thought, now’s the fucking time.
I grabbed the flight deck door’s handle and pulled.
Nothing happened.
I put both hands together and pulled it towards me, waiting for the surge of superhero strength to pull the door off its hinges.
Still nothing happened.
My fingers were red with welts and wet with perspiration. I gave them a death stare, willing them to transform into hands of steel. Anything to get the door open.
Then, a presence at my shoulder.
The Australian.
His hair was disheveled, his tie was askew, and his jacket was missing. His shirt was soaking and there was blood coming from his left ear and a swelling under his eye the size of a golf ball. He reached out a hand just as the aircraft lurched forward again and I flinched, batting it away. He careened into me, our bodies becoming tangled and crushed into the corner of the doorframe. I panicked and went to push him away again, but he grabbed hold of my wrists.
“It’s okay,” he shouted in my ear. “Let me help you.”
I wasn’t convinced.
“Where were you?” I shouted back.
He glanced over his shoulder and nodded down the cabin. “In the john. Didn’t want that on my obituary! Matt Hamilton: Died taking a shit.”
The airplane banked again, this time steeply to the right. I wondered how much longer we had before we hit the ocean.
“Let’s get this door open,” he yelled.
We grabbed the handle, his hands on top of mine, and pulled with all our might. It was bending but it wasn’t going to be enough. It was futile. Matt’s veins were bulging in his temples as he continued to strain, but I’d already relaxed my grip and slid my hands away.
“Come on! We can do it!” he said.
We were moments away from death, and there was nothing we could do.
I have given you what you need. You will know when to use it
I shook my head and clenched my fists, knuckles whitening and nails digging into my already red raw palms. I hunched down, curling my head into my chest, my face reddening as frustration swept off me like waves of molten lava.
Then it happened.
I knew what to do.
I pushed Matt to the side and identified a panel on the wall, hidden behind a notice with various instructions and warnings for the cabin crew to give during announcements. It was flush to the wall but there was a recessed button, not clearly marked. I stabbed it and the panel sprung open. Inside was a simple red handle, a door release.
I closed my eyes and pulled the handle. There was a click and the door popped opened an inch and then blew open as if a bomb had gone off in the cockpit. Matt and I pressed ourselves against the side as the door slammed into the wall. A glance into the cockpit showed that the window in front of the pilot was smashed, every warning light seemed to be on red and sirens were howling. The sea was visible, sun glistening on white-topped waves, maybe a few thousand feet below.
I forced my way into the cockpit, the gale force winds making me lean forward at an
acute angle. The pilot turned and his eyes were blank and emotionless. He pushed the yoke left and the plane surged and tipped and Matt and I were thrown sideways. I crashed into one of the empty jump seats and Matt vanished out of sight, tumbling into the space behind the door. The other pilot, belted into the left-hand seat, flopped side to side like he was boneless, unconscious, or dead – I couldn’t tell. His head impacted the window, leaving a smear of blood on the glass.
I knew I had to get to the controls, but I had no idea how to fly an airplane. The flight deck was all multifunction lights and electronic switches and there were two head-up displays, like in fighter jets.
Then, as if I’d requested it online, the information was there in my head. The controls of the 787 were tagged and familiar to me, as if I’d flown it all my life. I knew where everything was. I understood aviation lingo. The autopilot controls, primary flight display, navigation display, engine identification, crew alerting system and flight management system control unit.
I just had to get the no-longer-human pilot out of the way.
As I weighed up my options, Matt pushed past me and launched himself at the pilot, fists swinging and pummeling. The pilot started to fight back, his face still unnervingly devoid of emotion. I ducked under the swinging arms and leaned over the co-pilot to release his seat belt. I grabbed him under the arms, heaved him out of his seat and pulled him over the long central pillar onto the floor. I was about to jump into his seat when Matt was thrown onto me as the airplane jerked to starboard and the nose pulled up. We both tumbled and crashed into the wall, the back of my head hitting a bank of switches. Matt’s face was even more battered and bloody and he now had long scratches down his cheek. He wiped his face with his sleeve and attempted to get up but the pilot was already starting to push the yoke forward: the computer was screaming “PULL UP, PULL UP.”
Matt stared at me with eyes like saucers, and I could sense the terror radiating from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, tears welling up.