by Matt Richtel
“Jerry . . .” said Eleanor.
“C’mon, we can play doctor later. We need to make a decision.”
It was obvious what he meant. Stay or go.
Eleanor stood and walked to the door and stared out through the pinhole. “What about the cabin camera?” she said, sounding almost revelatory.
She’d completely forgotten. They had a hidden camera in the cabin that they rarely used; it felt gross, was how she put it. All the airlines had followed suit after JetBlue set the post-9/11 trend. Eleanor turned to Jerry, who fiddled with buttons in the middle instrument panel. The screen in front of him flickered. It was a scene from a horror movie. A bird’s-eye view of motionless passengers. They looked very much like soldiers felled midstep. Lyle took a step in the direction of the screen, not that there was much room to maneuver. He focused at random on one passenger, a man wearing a wool hat, form-fitting his skull, earphones protruding from the sides. His angular face tilted to the right, head almost on his shoulder. Lyle homed in further on the shoulders, pulled slightly back, not totally in repose. What was it? Lyle thought. He took a step closer, leaned in. What is it about the guy?
Then the image flickered. It went in and out. Jerry slapped the screen, willing it to life. But it flickered again, then went out.
“Does it record? Can you go back in time?” Alex asked. It was the first indication she wasn’t too terrified to speak.
Jerry shook his head.
“Is this airtight? The cockpit?” asked Lyle.
“Flight deck,” Jerry corrected him.
“Not the same thing?” Lyle regretted saying it immediately. Of course it was the same. This guy had to mark his territory.
Jerry continued. “And the answer is: the flight deck is more or less airtight. But it doesn’t matter because we already opened the door, so whatever is out there is in here.”
“Not necessarily,” Lyle said, but it came across more as an internal monologue than dialogue.
“Please, I want to hear what the doctor has to say,” Eleanor said, “and then I’ll make a decision.” Nothing subtle about her language; she, and she alone, called the shots.
Jerry tightened his hand on the gun.
“Did you notice if anyone was moving at all?” Lyle asked Alex.
She didn’t answer right away.
“I didn’t see anyone move,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear anything. I thought maybe everyone was asleep. After I saw the first guy, the one fallen over in the aisle, I saw another person folded forward, kind of, like how they tell you to put your face on your lap when you land. I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it but earlier this woman who was sitting in the middle of the plane had been saying she’d seen bodies—on the ground. She said she’d seen something . . .” Alex looked up and she was searching for a handrail. Lyle didn’t want to fashion one yet; he wanted the information as undiluted as possible. “This woman said something about this country being out of control with guns and rage, and then someone else mentioned Wo Hop To, that gang that shot at the mayor’s office, and an Asian man got really angry.”
“Get to the point,” Jerry said.
“Hold on,” Lyle said. “Everyone was getting anxious?”
She nodded.
“We were scared.”
On one level, of course, it was natural that people would speculate about armed attack or terrorism, especially if someone had seen a body. It was everywhere now, the violence, hardening people and accelerating a non-virtuous cycle: people wanted more police power, then feared government power and purchased more guns. Frustrated citizens hewed more tightly to views that, perversely, accelerated the trend further. More cops, more guns, more guns, more cops.
Everywhere now, in the news, the narrative had become the unzipping of civility, the hint of lawlessness, or a skepticism of the law, those who said it had become politicized. People had to prepare to defend themselves and their values. In the latest news, a group of heavily armed separatists in Oregon was daring law enforcement to come in and toss them off their compound on federal land. They’d taken a federal marshal hostage claiming him a spy and enemy combatant.
“I didn’t hear any shots out there,” Jerry said. “Did anyone have a gun?”
Alex shook her head in a way that said two things: I don’t think so and I don’t know.
“Maybe it’s multipronged,” Jerry said. He directed his comment only to Eleanor. “Guns and gas. Outside and in here.”
“We’ve got no evidence anyone is atta—”
“Respectfully, Captain, let’s not be naive here. This world has gone to absolute shit. It’s a narco war zone south of the border, Arab teenagers run down innocent pedestrians in Jerusalem to say nothing of the rest of the Middle East, and it’s bleeding onto our soil. You can’t count on the cops. Hell, some are just hired guns of the government. Look at Oregon.”
“Why here, Jerry, in Steamboat?”
“Why anywhere?” Jerry answered.
“Alex,” Lyle said, “may I ask you a question?” He was looking at her square, very intensely.
She nodded.
“Is there anything you might be leaving out?” The way he said it was so graceful that only the most astute listener would hear the surgical challenge in it. Was she, he was in effect asking, telling the whole truth?
Eleanor picked up the subtlety and she blanched. This guy was good.
“Like what?” Alex asked, holding Lyle’s gaze. “Help me remember. I want to help. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
Lyle seemed satisfied.
“So speak, Doctor,” Jerry said. “Give us your opinion so we can make a decision. Are these people sick or dead or what?” In the military, Jerry had admired this medic who made a decision and went with it, making decisiveness the highest priority.
Fair enough, Lyle thought, and he flashed briefly on an experience he’d had while doing his CDC work when he had visited the Jewish Quarter in Barcelona, where there had been a small outbreak of SARS. One of the patients was the young daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. She wasn’t responding to any treatment. She was in agony, barely hanging on, having spent more than a week on the brink. Lyle recommended a new course of action. The rabbi called Lyle aside and, quietly, asked if he expected the treatment to do any good. “I can’t be sure, Rabbi. We should try everything.”
“Dr. Martin, may I ask you a question?”
Of course, Lyle had nodded.
“Do you know when to let go? When to stop fighting?”
Lyle had no ready answer to the questions or the rabbi’s soft but probing brown eyes.
“When you start to pray,” the rabbi said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an agnostic or an atheist or a man of faith. You know, deep inside, when the better part of your treatment is hope rather than science.”
Lyle had attempted, without success, to hold the rabbi’s gaze.
As he stood now in the airplane, he tried to figure out if he was hoping or praying, applying science or faith. The answer rocked him: he wasn’t sure where he stood on any of it anymore. He couldn’t find his own center, let alone an answer for these people. All he could think was, I want out. Out of here, this situation, this flight deck.
“I’ll need to examine them.”
Eleanor made a clicking sound with her mouth, considering this.
“Do you want to turn the lights on again?” Lyle said, peering out the window.
Click went the lights.
“We’ve seen this,” said Jerry.
“Like I said, the only way for me to know for sure is if I can examine them,” Lyle interrupted. “Stating the obvious—repeating the obvious.” He noticed his phone on the instrument panel and snagged it. He felt an urge to say, I’ll just take my phone and be on my way. Maybe head back into the airplane and plop down and feel at home among people who were brain-dead or paralyzed or whatever they were. Is that what he was or was he just as terrified as everyone else and unable to tap into it because of
the protective coating that had enveloped him since Africa and everything that had happened with Melanie?
He looked out through the right side of the window. Where he thought he’d seen something. And, again, he imagined he saw movement in the pitch black with snow collecting on the window. Impossible, right? Or, maybe, that’s why he looked in that direction in the first place—because he’d picked up motion of some kind.
“What?” Eleanor asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Yeah, we get that.” She waved him off—suddenly mistrusting everything, Lyle too. “Is it colder in here?” She studied the cabin, like a dog sensing something in the air. Then she realized what nagged at her. The first observer’s seat, the one behind the first officer’s chair, was folded up. It had been folded down earlier. On the floor below the chair, a compartment door was ajar. She looked at her copilot. “You didn’t shut the door.”
“What door?” asked Lyle. This piqued his interest.
“Earlier. Before you came in here, Jerry checked the main battery and the oxygen.”
“Was there anything . . .” Lyle looked for a word.
“Nothing strange,” Jerry said.
Lyle nodded. Could the fact that they were getting some air seepage from the belly of the plane have spared them the syndrome?
“There’s a case of champagne down there that looks like baggage handlers commandeered and stowed it for their own use. It’s nicely chilled,” Jerry said, trying for a joke.
“And?” Lyle said.
“And what?”
“Battery and oxygen. How are the levels?”
“Is that relevant?”
“Maybe.”
“Tip-top.”
Lyle now stared at Jerry until he thought it might raise a challenge and dropped his gaze. So this first officer was down in the hold, away from everyone else, and many people were dead? Or poisoned or something? Was that worthy of note?
Lyle wanted to keep the man talking.
“I agree with you,” he said, looking at Jerry, “that we’re running short on time. One question: How long can we keep this plane heated—in your estimation?”
“Like I said before, we’re airtight-ish, which helps. Beyond that, it comes down to how much we want to run the engine, which costs fuel, obviously. What’s your thinking?”
“Just, y’know, how long can these folks last if they’re not dead—whether in here or out there. Snowy day. Night.” He watched as a heavier snow flurry hit the windshield and stuck.
Eleanor shook her head. They were going to have to deal very soon with temperature and food.
“Open the champagne,” Lyle said. “It’d warm everyone up, at least temporarily.”
Eleanor blanched and Lyle tried to cover up his raw admission; he’d do anything for a drink right now.
“Sorry,” Lyle said. “Anyhow, cold has its advantages, on a serious note. It can chill the nervous system, the brain, keep it alive.”
“What’s that have to do—”
“I’m not sure. I’m thinking aloud about the implications for us.” He paused, then added, “And them.”
“So.”
“It slows the metabolic function. That can be useful.”
“Hmph. I thought you just said that we wanted heat . . .” Eleanor’s voice trailed into silence. It was so quiet Lyle could feel the flakes dusting the front window, melting, sticking, melting, sticking. Silence made a sound, that dull buzz you hear at a library that, in this case, no one seemed to want to break. Talk about a situation where there wasn’t much useful to say. Lyle scanned the instrument panel, the gauges he didn’t understand. He was looking for some logic to hold onto, a guidepost. He found only the memory of how he used to love the small-plane landings on makeshift strips in hidden parts of the world where he’d been called in to consult. Physics defying, he always felt it, the engines resisting gravity, commandeering it, that terrible moment before touchdown when it certainly seemed it might go either way. He loved the apparent confidence of the pilot and would try to draft on it. If the pilot can land this metal hunk on this slab of dirt, then I can walk into the village and give death a good licking.
“I’m decided,” Captain Hall interrupted the silence.
“I’m going outside.”
Five
Until eleventh grade in San Francisco, Eleanor had played baseball, not softball with the girls, but hard ball on the high school baseball team. Helluva’n arm, is what people would say about her. She got the nickname Jane Beam for her fastball. Then, her junior year, some jerk from Arvada High, her school’s rival, had made it his personal mission to point out that girls didn’t belong. He plunked her during her first at bat with a heater that would’ve broken a rib had she not turned in time. Furious, she dug in to take the guy’s next pitch into the seats. She struck out.
She rushed the mound. Standing over the asshole pitcher, bat in hand, her teammates making a show of holding her back (but secretly wanting her to take a swing), she paused. She dropped the bat and she walked off the field. It had zero to do with being intimidated. It had to do with the fact that she’d really only liked the throwing part of baseball. She wanted to pitch. But that wasn’t realistic; she lacked the arm to throw even another year. She knew, then and there, as she stomped off the field, that she didn’t ever want to be in the position of defending an activity she didn’t give a damn about. She wanted to do something affirmative.
Right now, she felt like she needed to do something and have it not be stupid or indefensible. Going outside was the least stupid thing she could think of.
“Of the two options, going back there”—she gestured with a jerk of her neck to the passenger area—“or going out there, my gut tells me that I’d rather be in a space that’s not confined.”
“You?”
“I’m the captain. At least we know that it’s safe in here, for the time being.”
“Why not all of us?”
“Because we need to hedge our bets.”
“So you’ll take one for the team,” Jerry said. It was hard to tell if he was being generous or confrontational or maybe neither, just thinking aloud. “I don’t think so. You’re just going to slide down the window? I don’t think so.”
Eleanor clenched her jaw. Without her quite realizing it, Jerry’s attitude reminded her why she was single. Men had no idea how to talk to her, not since Frank had died. Frank, the love of her life, his body never returned from a crevasse on Annapurna. That was years ago and Eleanor recovered and kept looking. But, in addition to Frank’s memory, the challenges were manifest. She’d inherited a gorgeous house from her parents in a gorgeous San Francisco neighborhood and had self-sufficiency oozing from her pores and most men couldn’t figure out their play, what they could give her. The harder they tried, the more she turned off.
Jerry embodied the worst of it. Internet dating had been a boon for him. The virtual medium paved over the nuances such that what translated to potential bedmates was: pilot and tall. He’d never had it so good. Eleanor privately named him the “Résumé Cowboy.” He laid plenty of waitresses and aging midlevel marketing executives and started to believe his own profile hype. But they all caught on after a few dates, often the morning after. On some level, he understood that Eleanor’s outright lack of romantic interest in him was telling him a truth about himself he hated. On the other hand, Eleanor did have a soft spot for Jerry, maybe the kind of affection she’d have had for a neighbor’s dog. He was reliable, reliably Jerry.
“Through the cargo hold. I’ll be able to get a radio, cell phone, get to the communications network. We need help.”
“You have no idea what’s out there—or who.”
She chewed on this and he poured it on. “If it’s terrorists or crazy people, they may just be waiting in the weeds. It’d be a suicide mission.”
“We don’t know there’s anyone there. It seems . . . It seems like, I don’t know, a syndrome, to borrow Dr. Martin’s word.”
&nb
sp; She stood, turned left, facing away from Lyle and Jerry and opened the door to a head-high cabinet mounted beside the flight deck door. She pushed aside coordinate books, logs, thick books of technical jargon, looking for something behind them. One of the tomes fell out and hit her toe. “Shit!”
Lyle tensed. He recognized what was happening: Captain Hall was unreeling. In her shoes, who wouldn’t? If he hadn’t abandoned everything in the world he once cared about, he might be freaking, too.
He almost leaned over to pick up the book and realized it would be deeply patronizing. She yanked another couple of books onto the floor, her intensity laid bare.
“Eleanor . . .” Jerry said. He walked to the flight deck door. “Be practical. We’re thirteen feet off the ground, even from the hold.”
“Where’s the medical kit—not the first aid kit, the one with more stuff?”
“Now you’re planning to do field surgery?”
“Jerry, I don’t like your tone.”
“I’m not letting you go out there.”
Eleanor turned. Instinctively, Lyle stepped backward. Eleanor looked like a Spanish bull turning on a circus clown. Fury. Then, just before she was about to say something, she zipped it up. Controlled again.
Alex gripped the wall of the door with a prurient fascination and horror. The tension on this flight deck threatened to blow these last survivors apart.
“Can anybody offer me better logic?” Eleanor asked.
She stood and looked at Lyle. He was a touch over six feet, just shy of tall, and she was only a few inches shorter and the quarters were so tight that he could smell the residue of mint on her breath.
“I think I should go,” Lyle said.
Eleanor studied him for the briefest moment.
“An even worse idea,” Jerry said.
“I have some experience—”
“In the apocalypse?”
Eleanor looked at Lyle, really studied him.
“What’s your game, Dr. Martin?”
He shook his head, like What do you mean? But he sensed that she, rightly, understood he wanted off this boat.
As the pilot talked, Lyle noticed for the first time the way the first officer looked at his boss. It wasn’t quite adoring but not far from it. He was absolutely letting her know that he was really listening, the way a man might on an early date. And Eleanor was using that by questioning the other man; smart, thought Lyle. She’s trying to keep together her alliances before this place turns into Lord of the Flies, or Lord of the Fliers.