The World's Last Breaths: Final Winter, Animal Kingdom, and The Peeling

by Iain Rob Wright

  Quinton nodded his agreement and continued to examine his controls. The autopilot navigation system was displaying random error codes in sequence, as if it could not decide what its problem was. The dials continued to spin and the altitude indicator seemed to think that the plane had banked to the left 90-degrees. In twenty years of flying, Quinton had not witnessed such a catastrophic failure of instrumentation.

  “I can’t reach anyone,” said James without any sign of exaggeration.

  Quinton looked at him. “What?”

  James thumbed at buttons and switches on the console but gave up with a concerned sigh. “I’m getting nothing but static.”

  “That’s nonsense. De Gaulle is only thirty-miles away.

  “They’re not responding. I’m not even sure they’re reading us.”

  Quinton did not like this at all. “Okay, we’ll hold position in the area for thirty minutes. Keep trying to reach someone. Try Heathrow.”

  James nodded uncertainly and went back to twisting dials and flicking switches. Quinton would have liked to have inputted some commands into the guidance system and gone and stretched his legs, but the way things were, meant that he had to remain at the plane’s manual controls. He steered in a steady curve, planning to circle until they spoke to someone on the ground.

  As was natural to an airline pilot in the 21st Century, Quinton began to worry about the bogeyman of all frequent flyers. He wondered whether his aircraft had been the target of terrorists. Had the on-board systems been tampered with in the effort to bring the plane down? Was this just step one of 9/11 part two?

  No. Something told Quinton that his concerns were misplaced. For all the effort and planning it would take to disable a plane’s systems so entirely, it would be just as easy to plant a bomb on board or hijack the cockpit. Whatever was going on here had to be down to some other cause. Quinton couldn’t understand why, but he felt that it had something to do with the weather.

  A knock at the cockpit’s door startled Quinton and he spun around on his cabin chair. After a hostess identified herself, he pressed the lock release and a red light above the door turned green. Samantha entered with a mug of coffee for both him and James. Coffee was as necessary to a pilot’s job as aircraft fuel and he couldn’t have welcomed anything more at that moment. He took one of the steaming mugs from the hostess and thanked her. She looked back at him with a scrunched up expression that he supposed meant she had an issue to raise with him.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  She took in a breath as though she had many words to get out. “It’s really bizarre. I don’t even know how to explain it really. At first it was just one or two passengers but then more and more people started to complain, and now I think it’s everyone.”

  “Spit it out,” Quinton told her.

  “Okay, okay. Well, it would appear that anything electrical has gone a bit haywire. The passenger’s phones, ipads, mp3 players, et cetera have all gone a bit…funny.”

  Quinton raised an eyebrow. “Funny?”

  Samantha nodded. “All the displays have gone squiggly as if something is interfering with them.”

  Quinton turned around and looked at his own malfunctioning gadgets. Something wasn’t adding up here, and anything unknown aboard a plane could be extremely dangerous. He leant forward and pressed the intercom button. The normal ding! sound did not occur. In fact nothing happened at all.

  “Damn it! The intercom is down. Samantha could you inform the passengers to turn off all electrical devices. Tell them that…we’re passing through an electrical storm and leaving them on could permanently damage them. Also, please inform them that we will be performing an unscheduled landing due to adverse weather conditions.”

  Samantha nodded, but didn’t seem comforted by his suggestions. Quinton couldn’t blame her, he wasn’t either. He turned to his co-pilot. “You got anything, James?”

  James’ bleak expression told him the answer was no.

  Quinton bit at his lip. There were no protocols for this. In the event of system failure, the plane needed to land, without question, but the danger of coming down unguided in the thick snow blizzard that hid beneath the cloud cover would be a near suicide-mission. The situation was dire, and as Captain it was his responsibility to decide what to do next.

  “Okay, James, enough. We’re going to bring her down.”

  The co-pilot’s eyes went wide. “We’re going to land blind?”

  “What choice do we have? I would rather that then run the risk of falling out of the sky if the engines fail.”

  James nodded. Quinton knew the other man thought he was right. It just didn’t make the decision any easier.

  “Okay,” said James. “Reducing speed. Descending to 20,000 feet.”

  Quinton prayed that the plane’s landing gear would deploy when approaching the runway. Being mechanical, he hoped they would. After all, the flaps and rudders were all responding.

  Many tense minutes of ensuing silence were eventually broken when James spoke again. “Cruising at 20,000 feet. Runway is approximately twenty miles out.”

  “Reduce altitude to 10,000 feet.”

  James did as he was instructed and Quinton looked at his dials out of habit despite the fact they were currently useless. Once he reminded himself of this, he instead chose to look out of the cockpit’s wide, glass window. Now that the plane was descending, he could see the bulbous clouds below more clearly. They seemed unending, letting no light from below make it through. Which was why Quinton thought it inordinately strange when he saw several bright lights coming from above the plane.

  He craned his neck to get a better viewing angle and saw that more than a dozen glowing spheres had appeared in the sky. They seemed to be falling, like meteorites, but Quinton knew that wasn’t what they were. He knew that, because they were falling too slowly, not free-plummeting the way a lump of space debris would.

  “What the hell is that,” asked James, suddenly noticing.

  Quinton stared out at the descending lights and wondered that himself. The way they moved was almost gentle, as if they had some great purpose that could not be rushed. It was then that a blinding light also filled the cabin.

  The two pilots cried out and shielded their eyes, holding onto their chairs as they fought to stay seated. Mere seconds later, the light had gone again, and Quinton opened his eyes. The lights outside were still falling, but something inside the cabin had been altered. Something unexplainable.

  Quinton looked down at his instruments with horror as he realised that they were no longer there. All that remained was a blackened husk of metal where dials and equipment used to be. The smell of ash lingered in the air, and Quinton felt dizzy as he realised something else.

  His dizziness turned to panic.

  The engines had stopped. They were going down.

  Outside, the bright lights continued falling like stars, Angels from heaven. The plane fell faster.

  Jack

  It was funny how people found religion in times of crisis. People that hadn’t seen the insides of a church for years would suddenly get down on their knees and pray, whenever they were out of any other options. As much as Father Pitt enjoyed seeing his pews full of parishioners, he knew they were all hypocrites.

  He considered giving another sermon, but then decided against it. Nobody was listening. His parishioners were huddled together in small groups and families, seeking only the shelter and community that the church provided, nothing else. They were not looking for tales of morality. As soon as the snow cleared, they would be gone again, returning to their mundane and selfish lives. In many ways the drastic snowfall was a blessing. Perhaps it was God’s way to send these lambs to Father Pitt, so that he may attempt to capture their spirits and return them to the Lord’s path. But he could no longer be bothered.

  The church had been full for almost twelve hours now as the snow outside continued to fall so deeply that people had started turning up for fear that the world was endi
ng. No one stated such absurdities, but their presence at the church spoke of a collective fear unspoken. At first, Father Pitt had served his calling well; had sought to help them with their anxieties and teach them about God’s plan for them. Within a few hours, however, he saw the futility of such pursuits.

  Then they found the first body.

  Mary found the body in the church’s sole toilet. It was a small, recently-built cubicle set inside the entrance corridor that led inside the church. Mary had been fighting the urge to urinate for a while, too chilly to unwrap herself from her seat, but she could hold it no longer.

  The toilet’s door had been unlocked when she tried it and she hurriedly stepped inside without thinking about it.

  The dead man staring back at her made her yelp.

  She had noticed the overweight man earlier in the evening, alone and praying. Now he was sat upright on the toilet with his pants around his ankles, guts spilling from his bulbous stomach which peeked out beneath his ill-fitting sweater.

  Mary slipped on the bloody tiles and fell against the wall.

  She screamed.

  Dr Wallace came out of the toilet wiping his bloody hands on his shirt. In all his years of being a Doctor he had not seen such a grotesque wound. The man’s stomach had been torn in two, his large intestine severed and leaking out onto the floor. The smell was overpowering and would soon invade the interior of the church and make them all gag.

  “What happened to him?” asked the woman who had found him.

  “Mary, is it?” he asked. She nodded. “Well, my answer is that I have no idea, except to say that he was clearly murdered.”

  Everyone in the church gasped. Some of the women began to cry. The church’s priest stepped forward, a look of utter despair on his face. “I don’t understand. How could he have been murdered with all of us here?”

  “Yeah,” said a ginger-headed man wearing a green cardigan. “He was sat in the corner praying only twenty minutes ago. I saw him.”

  Wallace shrugged. “All I’m telling you is that he didn’t die of natural causes. He was gutted like an animal. Also, I found this…” He offered out his hand so that everyone could see. It was a playing card: the Jack of Hearts. “It was forced into his mouth,” Wallace explained.

  “Oh God,” said a young blonde of perhaps twenty. She had her hand to her mouth.

  “What is it?” Father Pitt asked her.

  “It’s Jack the Raper.”

  Wallace huffed. “You mean that killer in the papers?”

  The girl nodded. She wore a supermarket uniform and a name tag that read: Kelly. “That’s his thing,” she said. “His calling card or whatever.”

  “How do you know that?” someone asked.

  “Because I like reading about serial killers and stuff. I’ve googled this guy like a hundred times.”

  “That’s sick.”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “Whatever! Doesn’t change the fact that this is him. He’s already killed seven people, and every time he leaves a playing card stuffed in their mouths – always the Jack of Hearts. The papers say it represents sin because of its link to gambling and the heart is supposed to show lust. There was a whole article on it from some professor guy.”

  “Are you serious?” Wallace asked.

  “Yes. The guy breaks into people’s homes, kills any husbands or men in the house, and then rapes and kills the wife. That’s why the papers have called him Jack the Raper.”

  “I feel sick,” said a woman in the back of the assembled group.”

  Wallace shook his head. He was feeling rather nauseous himself. “I have to report this,” he said.

  “Well, no one has a mobile that works,” Kelly said. “I think the snow is interfering or something.”

  “I’ll have to go find someone, then,” said Wallace.

  “You can’t go out there,” said the man in the green cardigan. “The snow is three feet deep. We’re all stuck here. With a goddamn killer in the room no less. Jesus Christ.” Father Pitt cringed at the blasphemy and the man seemed embarrassed. “Sorry,” he quickly added.

  Wallace wasn’t in the mood for a debate, so he headed towards the church’s exit corridor. He tried to ignore the fecal scent of the dead man in the toilet as he passed. Up ahead was the old, wooden door of the church. He grasped the large brass hoop that constituted the handle and turned and pulled. The door fell open with force, knocking Wallace back onto his ass. Snow flooded in from outside, piling up on the ancient carpet.

  “I can’t believe it,” Wallace said as he scurried back to his feet. “The snow must be six feet now. How long have we been in here?”

  “Last time we checked outside was about six hours ago,” said the ginger man in the cardigan. “It was nowhere near that high then.”

  “It’s the end of the world,” said a woman in the crowd. She was the first one to finally say it. The first one to say what they were all thinking.

  “We have to get out of here,” Bradley whimpered, reaching into the pocket of his cardigan and pulling out his phone. The LCD display still read NO SIGNAL and he sighed as he put it back away.

  “Calm down,” Dr Wallace told him. “The more we panic, the less rational we will be, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”

  “So what do we do?” Mary asked. “Are we in danger?”

  “I’m sure we’re fine,” said Father Pitt. “We just need to stay calm.”

  Kelly began flapping her arms. “Calm? Calm? How the heck can we stay calm with Jack the Raper around?”

  Bradley was getting annoyed at the girl’s wild assertions of a serial killer being amongst them. Life was a pretty shitty place, for sure, but he wasn’t about to believe that this ‘Jack the Rapist’ was currently standing in the same church that he was. “Stop making assumptions,” he said. “We don’t know what happened to that man in the toilet.”

  “We know he was murdered,” said Wallace. “And with the snow the way it is outside, we know that it was one of us that did it. No one else could have gotten in.”

  “We know no such thing,” said Father Pitt. “Anything could have happened.”

  Bradley had heard enough. He just wanted to sit down and wait for things to blow over. He went over to one of the pews and sat down. As soon as he did, the church’s lighting went out.

  Kelly shook her head. This was bad. Snowed-in inside a church with Jack the Raper, and the lights had just gone out.

  “Everybody hold on a minute and I’ll get some candles,” said Father Pitt. “It’s not a problem.”

  Everyone mumbled anxiously in the dark and all Kelly could see was the soft, flickering shadows of their movement.

  “This is so screwed up,” said a voice. Kelly thought it was the man in the cardigan, sitting on one of the pews.

  Maybe he’s the killer. He is a bit of an oddball.

  Jeez, I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m freezing my tits off and I don’t want to get raped and butchered.

  Now that the quiet buzz of electricity had halted, the whistle and howl of the wind outside was the only sound.

  When Father Pitt returned with an arm full of candles, which they lit one by one, they all found another body.

  It was the cardigan man.

  “We were just talking to the guy,” Kelly shouted. “Like two minutes ago. What happened?”

  Dr Wallace leant over the man’s body, pulling up his ripped and bloody cardigan that was no longer green but red. Then he opened the dead man’s mouth. He pulled out another playing card and held it to the group. “It’s another Jack of Hearts.”

  “I want to get out of here. Somebody get me out of here.” It was Mary. Apparently two dead bodies in one night was too much for her. She began fluttering about, shoving people at random and begging for their help. Her panic was infecting the other half-dozen people in the group. They were all starting to lose it.

  “Should we slap her or something?” Kelly asked.

  “No,” said the Doctor, who quic
kly grabbed the woman in a calm embrace. “Calm down, dear. We’re all here with you. Nothing bad will happen to you.”

  Yeah, right, thought Kelly. Two down already.

  “This is the Devil’s work,” said Father Pitt. “Someone capable of such deeds has no place in my church.”

  “We need to find out who it is,” said Kelly. “We need to check for…I don’t know; clues or something.”

  “The playing cards,” said a nearby woman. “We should check everyone to see if they have any of those cards on them.”

  “Good idea,” said Wallace, “But without resorting to a strip search, it would be very easy to hide such a thing.”

  “No one is looking in my knickers,” said Kelly.

  “Maybe that’s because you have something to hide,” said Mary, suddenly back in control of herself.

  “Yeah, right,” said Kelly. “Little old me has been travelling around England raping and killing people. Are you on drugs, you daft cow?”

  “How dare you call me that.”

  “Ladies, ladies,” said the Doctor. “We can’t assume anything right now.”

  “It’s probably you,” said Kelly. “There are lots of killers that worked in the medical profession. It’s even thought that Jack the Ripper was a surgeon. Then there’s Harold Shipman, the Angel of Death killings, and Marcel Petiot in France.”

  “It’s you,” said Mary again, pointing her finger at Kelly. “You’re a freak. Who knows all that stuff you’re talking about?”

  “It’s just an interest,” said Kelly. “It doesn’t make me a freak. I just like to read. You should try it sometime, you dumb bitch.”

  Mary lunged through the candle-lit shadows and went for Kelly’s throat. Kelly jumped aside, up the steps that housed the church’s altar and lectern. Her foot struck something and she went hurtling to the floor.

  “What the fuck is that?” she cried out as she fumbled about on her hands and knees. When she felt the soft, slick flesh of another dead body, she screamed.