by Martin, Indi
Tiny babbling sounds caught Gina's attention and she glanced over at her partner. Snyder was mumbling in his sleep, wordlessly conversing with something or someone. She smiled at how human he looked when he was asleep; not like the mindless automaton that seemed to strive for maximum irritation. The cheap, plastic clock on the wall indicated that her long wait was nearly over; their last flight would start boarding in five minutes or so. She looked back at Snyder and sighed; he was much more pleasant company unconscious.
“Snyder,” she called, leaning down toward the table and peering at him.
No response.
“SNYDER,” she yelled, leaning closer to his ear.
He jerked up, eyes flying open. “Wha?” He blinked his reddened eyes and looked at her woefully. “Zzit time?”
Gina didn't feel the least bit bad about waking him; after all, at least he'd managed to get some more shut-eye. “Yeah, it is. Let's go.” She packed up her purse and slid out of the booth, pausing as he slumped sluggishly over and propelled himself slowly to a standing position.
Walking briskly to the gate, waiting occasionally for Snyder to shuffle up behind her, Gina considered the day's agenda in her head, rehearsing the actions to keep her tired mind alert. She was in the middle of considering the rental car situation when she heard a strangled yelp come from behind her. She spun to see the source of the noise, and saw her partner staring out the window toward their plane.
“What?” she said, not bothering to hide her annoyance at the disruption.
“Is that... is that our plane?” He had turned an ashy gray color.
Gina followed his gaze to the small propeller-plane waiting on the tarmac, a portable staircase rolled up to the porthole. It was too small to accommodate the jetbridge, so their gate opened to a series of ramps down to the tarmac, where they would walk to the plane. “Ye-es,” she said, slowly, turning back to him.
Snyder's mouth flapped, and his head snapped from side to side. He was swaying a little on his feet. “Ah, no, I can't... I can't...” he gibbered.
Grimacing, she grabbed his arm and started dragging him toward the gate, plucking the ticket out of his hand and passing it to the checkpoint steward, who gave them a questioning look but didn't comment. She managed to drag him down the ramps and onto the tarmac, but he froze again at the base of the staircase and wouldn't budge. “Come on,” she spat, exasperated and a little embarrassed.
His nostrils flared and the whites of his eyes were showing. Gina wondered for a moment if he was going to pass out on the concrete.
“Excuse me, miss, is there a problem?”
The flight attendant had descended the staircase and had grabbed hold of Snyder's left elbow, to steady him. She was looking at Gina expectantly.
“Is your husband okay?” she asked with a worried look.
Gina barked a short laugh. “He's not my husband. He's...got a fear of flying in small planes. I think.” She saw his breath coming in short little spurts and his eyes roll back and close, but he didn't fall over. 'I think he's having a panic attack,' she considered to herself, a wave of shame filling her. He looked deathly ill. She searched her limited knowledge of phobias for something she could do and came up short.
Snyder's ashen pallor was being slowly replaced by two high, bright red spots of color on his cheeks, but he looked no more healthy. He nodded, but kept his lips tightly pressed together.
The stewardess nodded knowingly. “Will you be able to fly, sir?”
Gina looked away and waited for Snyder's answer.
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
His first view of the plane through the window was terrifying; Morgan felt himself lock up, heard words spilling randomly out of his mouth, then was being pulled forward in an iron grip by Harwood. His mind was a blank white sheet of panic. Closing his eyes was the only way he kept his feet moving.
When he looked again, he was standing at the base of awful metal steps ending in a black hole, a too-small hole into a too-small aircraft. The propellers ('propellers!' he thought wildly) looked sharp and evil, and flimsy, so flimsy. He saw Harwood's severely disapproving face, but his eyes were drawn back up to the deathtrap he was meant to enter, and he had to set his jaw and force his tongue up to keep from vomiting on the airstrip. Dark pinpricks obscured the edges of his vision, which swam unnervingly, and his ears roared with every heartbeat. 'I'm going to die if I get on that thing,' his mind advised him with supernatural clarity.
A lovely young stewardess was at his side, and he felt her more-gentle hand at his elbow; Morgan felt a little more steady on his feet, but kept his mouth pressed shut. Bile rose in his throat, burning his esophagus, and threatening to spill over. Dimly, he heard her ask if he was okay, if he could fly. He closed his eyes and tried to piece together where he was and why he was in this situation. Harwood's face drifted to the forefront of his mind and he frowned further.
The hand at his arm squeezed once, and he heard her melodious voice ask again. It filled him with sadness, knowing that this kind stranger was definitely going to be on that flight, which meant that she was done for, too. He sighed through his nose, still unwilling to loose the pressure on his jaw. If he didn't get on, he could maybe drive. Maybe he'd get there in time to help with whatever trouble his partner was bound to get herself into, maybe not. If he did get on, and he died in a fiery crash, maybe there would be an afterlife, maybe it would be nice. Maybe he'd have the chance to utter a final “I told you so” to Harwood as the craft plunged into its killer nosedive, before hitting the ground with unimaginable velocity. He almost smiled, and found himself nodding his acquiescence. Yes, he could fly. Sure, why not? He didn't need to breathe to fly, right?
“Okay,” he heard her say. “If you're sure.” Suddenly there was another hand on his arm, tighter and stronger – Harwood's, he guessed. He opened his eyes, and forced himself to focus only on his feet ascending the stairs, not on their destination. Slowly, he climbed, and he felt the blood flow back into his extremities. His vision cleared enough for him to duck through the entryway and collapse into the first seat he saw.
He was vaguely aware of a continuing conversation between Harwood and the woman, with Gina assuring her that he would be fine. He sniffed. 'If I survive this, I'll never hear the end of it,' he thought, feeling entirely pitiable. Death in one corner and Harwood's grinning face telling the whole department what a pussy he'd been in the other; he wasn't sure which was worse.
Experimentally, he loosed his jaw and tried to take a deep breath through his mouth. That was a mistake. Clamping his hand over his mouth, he waved at the stewardess, who ran over with a bag. Replacing his hand with the bag, he let loose, heaving his late-night dinner out of his body. With it went some of his panic, as his chest felt a little less tight, and the panic a little less sharp. His ears cleared a bit, and he nodded at the attendant that he was okay. Then, he strapped himself in and prepared for the longest hour-long flight of his life.
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
Every time Marcus woke up from his near-constant drifts in and out of consciousness, the scenery had changed dramatically. First, the greens became deeper and more plentiful, as dead trees gave way to evergreens. Cities looked older and more rustic; rural towns dotted the landscape and farmland stretched for what looked like forever. He saw his first touch of snow in West Virginia, shortly after handing the reins to Jake, who was driving like a robot – staring straight ahead and only occasionally responding to chatter. They'd stopped for gas twice more since then, and Marcus was shocked his friend was still awake enough to focus on the road. The car was silent most of the time; previous road-trips had always been punctuated by random singing, raucous laughter and bawdy jokes. Those were always fun, and Marcus remembered them wistfully. This trip hadn't been much fun at all.
At least his hands were warm. He'd picked up a whole stack of hand-warming pouches at the last station, the kind that activated after he cracked them in half, and became searing hot within a few minutes. He had cracked f
ive or six of them, and had them tucked into various parts of the blanket. Marcus had offered some to Jake, but he didn't seem to want them. Of course, Marcus couldn't be sure his friend had even heard the question. He seemed remote, like he was being beamed in by satellite; sometimes Marcus thought that if he reached out to touch him, his hand would pass right through, and he'd find that his friend was just a virtual hologram. Maybe there would be a fuzz of static before he rematerialized. Maybe he wouldn't re-materialize at all, and the car would go careening into a ditch.
All attempts at conversation fell short of what Marcus would consider successful. His last attempt, a few hours ago, had gone as follows:
“Hey, Jake?”
“...”
“Jake? Jake, man, you there?”
“...Oh, hey.” Like Jake had just realized someone else was in the car with him.
“So, you hungry?”
“...”
“Jake! Are You Hungry?”
“What? No, no, I'm good, thanks.”
“Huh. Okay. Soooo, what are we going to do when we get there?”
“What?”
“When we get to this place your dad told us about. What are we gonna do? What's the plan?” Here, Marcus threw a secret-agent, gun-in-air pose, as best he could in the cramped seat and without dislodging too much of the blanket and the hand-warmers that were keeping him from freezing.
Jake didn't even look at him. “Oh. Not sure.”
“Hm.” Marcus had considered this. “Not sure. Well, maybe we should talk about it, kind of get a plan together, you know? Be prepared and all that?”
“...”
And that was the end of the conversation. Marcus had tried a few more times to resuscitate it, but it continued to die a slow, quiet death. Eventually, it would end up with Marcus monologuing for a few minutes, but Jake didn't seem like he really processed any of it, so Marcus always gave up and allowed himself to drift back off to sleep, staring out the window at the passing scenery.
Now, the sky was beginning to lighten again in the east, outside Marcus' window. This surprised him both because he hadn't been aware that they were now heading north or that it had been nearly 24 hours since they'd begun their journey. Their escape. This highway was an old two-lane beast, and it hadn't been recently paved; the old car jumped and jostled on worn-out shocks, transmitting each bump in the road into the two bodies inside. It didn't seem to bother Jake, but Marcus wasn't sure he'd be able to stand up straight for a week once he got out.
The farmhouses were small and quaint, little resembling the sprawling ranches of the mid-west. Trees grew up impossibly tall, taller than Marcus had ever seen; in addition to the evergreen pines he recognized, there were lots of white trees with peeling bark, thin and looking too fragile to be so tall. The cold air smelled almost minty.
Marcus considered commenting on this to Jake, but decided against it. Instead, he shrank back under the blanket as far as he could, and grabbed his last few hand-warmers, cracking them against each other, and waiting for the blissful warmth to spread.
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
“Hey, Snyder, listen to this.”
Morgan lolled his head to the side to look at Harwood, who was holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and, unsurprisingly, twisting a pen in her teeth with the other. “What you got?” he murmured, glad for the distraction from the unnerving up-and-down bounces of the plane.
“Oh, I just printed out some stuff on the area, you know, research.” Crackle pop went the pen-cap, causing Morgan to shudder. “The Pocomoke river is unusual. It's water is black, stained by some trees along the river banks. Even the tourist site calls it an eerie river. Weird, huh?” She didn't wait for any response before continuing. “Plus, it's the world's second deepest river, after the Nile in Egypt. AND,” she looked at him meaningfully. “...it's the site of the first recorded murder in the 1600's.”
“Other than all the natives, you mean,” he muttered in a low voice, groaning a bit as the plane dipped again.
She waved him off. “Well, yeah, but they didn't record those as homicides, I guess. Anyway, it was just before some big battle, which was also a first, between Brits. Some property dispute, it looks like. They hanged the perp for the crime, and in the morning, his body had been mangled by birds and animals.”
“Nice,” replied Morgan, closing his eyes and lolling his head back to the other side.
“No, wait, it gets weirder. Apparently there's something in the river that makes people really sick. Every few decades there's some outbreak, that kills all the fish, and makes the residents and fisherman who live near the river have lesions and memory loss.” Another plastic-ripping sound as her teeth found a target. “The last outbreak was in the 90's. They closed off the river.”
“How do you close off a river?” Morgan chanced a look outside, but his imagination rewarded him with a vision of the propeller suddenly catching on fire, and he lolled his head back toward his partner instead.
“It doesn't say. I guess you close all the roads to it or something.” She shrugged, and thankfully he could hear her take the pen out of her mouth. “That's not the point. The point is there's a history of strangeness surrounding this river.”
Morgan considered this. “What about Snow Hill? Anything off about it?”
Paper rustling. “Not really. It's pretty far upriver. Looks like a normal, little, northeast town. Says it was almost entirely destroyed by a fire in 1893. The city has a website to court people to visit or move there. It's tiny. Two thousand people.”
“That's pretty small,” he agreed, keeping his eyes shut, but listening closely for any mechanical harbingers of a malfunction in the aircraft.
“Really small,” she said. “Aw, they still have town meetings! Can you imagine? Living in such a small community like that? I bet it's quaint.”
Quaint. Morgan hated that word. “I hate that word,” he informed her.
“Quaint? Why?” she sounded affronted.
He shrugged. “It sounds fake. It's just a fake word. Nobody really uses the word quaint unless they're making fun of something.”
“I'm not making fun. It sounds like a lovely town.”
He groaned. “Lovely, see? Same thing. Fake.”
She remained quiet, and he scowled. He wanted her to continue talking, in order to distract him from probable and imminent doom. “Anything else?” he asked, hopeful.
“No,” she sighed. “I have a map I printed out, but it's not really helpful. I see Highway 113, but it runs right along the river. There's miles and miles of it where the land could back up to the river, like Jake described. All of the state park is between the river and 113.”
“Hm,” he said, unable to think of anything more communicative.
“I don't know how we're going to find it. If it exists. Or if it's still there. It's a needle in a haystack.”
Again with her cliches. Morgan cracked his eyes open and squinted at her. “Hopefully not. It's farmland. There's bound to be thousands of haystacks.”
“Exactly,” she replied, still studying her printouts.
“We're beginning our descent,” announced a crackling voice over the speaker. Morgan wondered why a speaker was even necessary – they were the only two on this flight, and there was barely enough room to stand in the aisle. The pilot could have just cracked the door and announced it in his normal voice, and everyone would have heard just fine. He checked his seat belt, tightened it a bit further, and squished his eyes shut; if he had been a praying man, he'd have been going into overdrive. As it was, he merely affirmed over and over in his head that the wheels were going to hit the ground with no problems, no problems at all. He continued to repeat his hopeful mantra until the plane hit the runway in an only-slightly bumpy landing and slowed to taxing speed.
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
“Well, that's over,” Gina said cheerfully, throwing a sideways glance at Snyder as he stumbled down the last steps.
“I vote for driving home,” he
answered glumly.
Wanting to get on with their mission, but not content to let such a moment pass, Gina turned to walk backwards in front of him, pointing at his chest. “You... are not ever allowed to give me shit about my issues with cadavers again. At least I can fly without throwing up all over the staff.” That done, she spun back around and headed into the small building to inquire about rental cars.
She heard him mutter an undignified assent and he quickened his pace to match hers.
None of the rental counters opened until 7am, and as it was only 6:15, Gina resolved herself to the fact that she would have to wait – again – before she could continue on. “I hate all this waiting,” she seethed.
“Well, we can't walk,” snapped Snyder, before excusing himself (thankfully) to the bathroom to wash up and, Gina hoped, brush his teeth.
“Ah, the adventure of detective work,” she complained to no one in particular. There was, after all, no one else visible except a member of the janitorial staff listlessly changing trash can liners down the hall.
Most of the rental counter agents arrived sharply at seven, except the company through which she had all of her reward points, of course. She walked up to the National counter. “Excuse me,” she asked sweetly. “Do you know when they're coming in?” She pointed at the blue and yellow-striped counter at the end of the row.
A slickly-dressed, middle-aged man with thick black hair looked at her from across the counter; she was internally commenting on how attractive he was until he opened his mouth and began to talk. His teeth were in atrocious shape and Gina fought the urge to look away, pasting her sweetest smile on her lips and fighting to keep it there. “Nah, ma'am. I know Bethel's kid is sick, so I'm not sure what time she'll be in, if at all.”