Flight 19

by Grant Finnegan

Michael E. Darcy had offered these poor people a way out.

  Hope. A road back to where everything was normal—something most of us, sadly, take for granted.

  “You haven’t been through what I’ve been through,” Tammy said, through short and shallow breaths. A second later, the tears flowed.

  Before Lee had a chance to speak, Tammy said, “I want to get back on that plane. Just for the sake of it. What’s the harm?”

  Lee collected her thoughts as they continued down Gravois Road, heading for central St. Louis. She’d turned the radio off, and the silence was welcome.

  Tammy’s mind was a whirlwind of thoughts, centered on two things.

  One: she would be on that plane when it took off again.

  And two: this time, she would not be alone.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Newsfeeds around the world seemed to dedicate more time to the saga of Darcy’s quest to take the A380 back into the air than they had to the plane’s return from 2019, if that were possible.

  People all around the world were debating if Darcy’s idea was worth the massive amount of money he (and Melanie—not that Melanie’s contribution was public knowledge) had put on the table to secure ownership of the “ghost ship.”

  Of the 210 passengers and crew who had left Vandenberg AFB in such extraordinary circumstances, only 169 remained alive. Nearly one in five of them had died.

  Considering that the plane hadn’t even been close to full to begin with, that left a lot of empty seats.

  And that was where Michael E. Darcy’s headaches began.

  He was inundated with tens of thousands of messages from people all around the globe, desperate to board the next flight of the ghost ship and get in on the chance to be somewhere else.

  Well, sometime else.

  To want that meant believing the A380 would be able to achieve it in the first place.

  And as the world regularly shows us, having plenty of money does not exclude you from being a ten-foot-tall idiot. If Darcy had bothered reading some of the emails, he would have noted that hundreds of people wanting to get on his plane were prepared to pay ridiculous sums of money.

  A guy from England offered him $100,000 cash.

  Maybe he would have been better off spending the money on getting his head checked.

  Darcy grew tired of the avalanche of non-passengers pleading with him to let them come on the flight. One guy fell to his knees in front of Darcy on the sidewalk, begging him for a seat on the plane.

  It wasn’t part of his plan, and he’d had enough. He spoke on NBC the next day and in his kindest tones told these people trying for whatever reason to get on-board his plane to stop asking.

  Darcy told the reporter succinctly that only the passengers and crew from the original journey of Flight 19 would have the chance to board the A380 again.

  Kylie had not invited the elephant in the room over for dinner. That was for sure. Dave and Emily Collins had certainly not brought the big creature, metaphorically speaking, over for dinner either.

  Todd? Nope—he hadn’t brought it.

  He was in another world, picturing lost opportunities for revenge around the dark side of a dimly lit shed over in Westmont, a little over a week ago.

  All he could see was his designated target’s middle finger, wagging at him from the rear window of the beat-up Dodge, and the smug, smart-ass grin etched on his thin little fuckface.

  Dinner was served: another perfect meal by Kylie, this time roast chicken. But the conversation was unusually infrequent.

  Dave decided to end the impasse there and then.

  “So,” he said quietly, before wiping his mouth with a napkin, “I think we all need to put what’s on our minds to bed.”

  The silence made Dave’s little speech all the more awkward.

  Dave took a drink of his wine, rallying himself to get the discussion going.

  He wanted to put the issue on the table, between the condiments and all the empty plates, in the hope he might be able to change the decision at the center of the awkwardness.

  Emily reached over and placed her hand on Todd’s lap.

  She’d told her father earlier in the day that she was accepting Darcy’s invitation to reboard the A380. He was not happy.

  But she hadn’t told Todd—yet.

  He’d been too busy focusing on his obsession with avenging his late father’s murder, and seeing him preoccupied, Emily hadn’t bothered discussing her thoughts on the matter with him.

  Not that she was ready to admit it, but she’d started to have second thoughts about her relationship with the police officer.

  He’d changed lately, and it was starting to worry her. He’d grown distant and distracted, the complete opposite of the guy she’d fallen for during those tumultuous days at Vandenberg after they’d come back from never-never land. Dave leaned forward and looked at Emily.

  “You want to go back onto the plane,” he said, looking almost pale with the thought, “don’t you?”

  Emily studied the lines of gravy smeared around the outer edge of her near-empty dinner plate before eventually looking up and into her father’s eyes.

  “I can’t explain it.” As the words left her mouth, Dave’s heart sunk into the pit of his stomach.

  Todd looked like he’d copped a slap in the face. “What?” he said.

  He looked over to his mother, who’d looked like she’d seen a ghost.

  “But, Emily—” Kylie coughed before reaching for her glass of water and hastily taking a drink. She took a few deep breaths and then said, “But what if—” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

  Dave reached to Kylie and placed his hand firmly on hers. The room fell into silence again as all four of them avoided eye contact with each other.

  Todd looked incredulously at Emily; it was if he’d just woken from a coma.

  “You want to get back on-board the plane?” He gritted his teeth. “The very one which caused us so much grief?”

  Dave couldn’t have nodded any more vigorously—his head might have fallen off.

  “Surely you haven’t thought this through,” Kylie said, doing her best not to sound disrespectful. She loved Emily as if she were her daughter, but still struggled to understand what she must be thinking.

  Emily looked around the table, feeling the pressure of three sets of eyes all looking at her at once. She would never successfully argue her case to any of them. Dave wouldn’t understand, and nor would Kylie.

  She turned and looked deep into Todd’s eyes. She smiled faintly and knew that when the time came, he would be the only one at the dinner table who would get why she had to be on the plane.

  To make sure he made it on-board, too.

  Chapter Fifty

  Eighty-seven names.

  Eighty-seven passengers from Flight 19 had done what millions of people around the world agreed they wouldn’t do for all the tea in China. Online surveys had shown percentages in the mid to high 90s voting in favor of statements like, “You’d have to be out of your fucking mind to get back on Flight 19.”

  Of the dozen crew members from the original flight, only ten were still alive. One, a week or so after leaving Vandenberg, had calmly walked to the train line that ran across the road from what was once his family home, and as the train approached, waved to the driver from the side of the tracks as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  The train driver waved back, a sense of dread rising in his throat. A few seconds later the poor guy, now on stress leave for post-traumatic stress disorder, grabbed for the train’s brake lever, pulling it harder than he’d ever done.

  The guy was now lying on the ground, his neck resting on the left train track.

  There was nothing the driver could do. He would have had to pull on the brakes 300 meters earlier to stop in time. It would be another death attributed to the curse of Flight 19.

  The other missing crew member had taken to the bottle, and the bottle had then taken her into the aft
erlife.

  Of the remaining ten crew members, only Captain Ross Moore, and his copilot, Tony Papas, would agree to get back on the A380.

  Darcy scanned the list of passengers: the 87 people who, like him, wanted to fly back into the atmosphere and make a miracle come true.

  Of the 11 new names added, only a couple of them aroused any memory of the actual people themselves:

  # 47 Walton, Rose

  # 46 Anderson, Will

  # 45 Kennedy, Jane

  # 44 Molloy, Michael

  # 43 Clapham, Carley

  # 42 Clapham, Gui

  # 41 Collins, Emily

  # 40 Erwin, Tim

  # 39 Hourigan, Tammy

  # 38 Leonards, Andrew

  # 37 Frankston, Andrew

  He’d enlisted the help of a couple of his former staff from one of the businesses he owned in LA before the A380 disappeared. These two of a small handful of people he still trusted from the old days would help him coordinate the mission to pull off what many observers had called “the Darcy flight of fancy.”

  Others had not been anywhere near as kind, and called it “the Darcy flight of madness.”

  He’d given the surviving passengers and crew of Flight 19 to the end of the week to decide if they’d jump back on along with him. The ten names added to the manifest overnight would be the last to go on the list.

  The flight would then take place within 14 days from that Sunday, on July 20th, 2024.

  Tim directed Sean to sit on one of the stools to one side of his large workbench. He had made the rustic stools many eons ago, recycling them, of all things, from an old television stand a neighbor left on his lawn.

  Sean sat quietly, watching Tim, who had pulled one of the other homemade stools around to the front of the bench.

  Tim looked around his workshop, wondering how many more times he would get the chance.

  The workshop was his sanctuary, where he had tinkered away during his retirement, filling the gaps in his weeks when he was stuck at home. But without the sounds of his wife’s footsteps making the floorboards above him creak, as she baked another delightful cake, or a roast for dinner, the workshop felt empty.

  His eyes finally came to rest on Sean, who was doing his best to stay patient, even though inside he was champing at the bit to find out if his theories held weight. Tim knew he would have to give Sean something to appease him, but he wouldn’t give him everything tonight. In time.

  After what seemed like nearly a full minute of eerie silence, the old man finally spoke.

  “Yes,” he whispered, closing his eyes as if the word had caused him physical pain. “You are correct.”

  Sean felt as if he’d been hit hard by an invisible force.

  Tim looked out through the open garage doorway, and without turning around, said, “When he was drunk, my father used to tell me stories.”

  Tim kept looking out the door, and almost flinched at the vision of his asshole father standing there on the driveway in front of him. He blinked, and the image was gone.

  He turned to Sean and said, “His father, my grandfather, was flying his plane out in Humboldt County late one afternoon in 1925. As dusk began to fall on the horizon, his father—his copilot—saw something strange on the ground a few miles from Vernon, Nevada.”

  Sean sat forward; he could feel the sweat from his armpits seeping into his T-shirt, and his forehead flushing.

  “What was it?” he said.

  Tim stared at him for a while before wondering if it was worth letting the words out. He knew he could never take them back.

  “I think you know what it was, Sean,” Tim said sardonically.

  His son-in-law moved off the stool and stood only a meter away from Tim, as if wanting to make the conversation even more secret.

  “Are you talking something like Roswell?”

  Tim burst into a fit of laughter, and for a moment reveled in the feeling. It had been a while since he’d laughed enough to make his belly twitch.

  “Roswell?” Tim continued to smile, though he composed himself eventually.

  “That was a weather balloon, son.” He smiled.

  Sean looked shocked.

  Tim shook his head, raised his arm, and rested his hand on Sean’s shoulder.

  “They meant people to think it was a UFO,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was part of a much bigger plan, my boy. Roswell was the United States’ greatest setup.”

  Sean felt the overwhelming feeling of disappointment wash over him. Tim grunted which regained Sean’s complete attention.

  Tim leaned forward and whispered.

  “But Vernon was not.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Ross could feel the morning sun against his skin. To him it was a perfect way to start the day. It was another beautiful Beverly Hills morning: the air was crisp, the sky an Instagram-perfect shade of light blue. Sitting with Melanie and Tony, enjoying another perfect breakfast, Ross for the odd moment could almost forget the circumstances that had brought him there.

  He stole a glance at Melanie, who was sitting next to him at the small outdoor table, busily stabbing her cell phone with her index finger, apparently sending someone a message. Like Melanie, Ross also lacked the ability to compose messages with two thumbs as the younger generation did.

  The pilot grinned; Melanie’s face was a picture of calm, happiness, and contentment. She’d checked out of her bungalow some time ago; she didn’t see the point of it. Ross could not have been more thrilled. He couldn’t remember ever being so happy to share a bed with someone and wake up to her every morning.

  Tony, sitting on the opposite side of the table, was reading what by the end of the decade would become a novelty—a hard-copy version of the Los Angeles Times. It had become a daily ritual to sip an espresso and read the morning paper on the bungalow patio, or at the Polo Lounge at the hotel. They would decide on a day-to-day basis whether it to breakfast at the bungalow or the lounge.

  Today, it was the lounge.

  Melanie leaned forward and stole a piece of Ross’s sourdough bread. Ross smiled; if anyone could take part of his breakfast, anytime, it was her.

  She leaned forward a few moments later, and this time Ross reached over to give her the lightest of pokes with his fork. As they both began to laugh, Tony leaned forward and said, “You can’t be serious.” He was looking over Ross’s shoulder to the entrance.

  A woman was standing there, the happiness on her face evident even from this distance.

  It was his ex-wife.

  No, it wasn’t.

  It was Tammy Hourigan, staring directly at him and smiling.

  “Ellen?”

  Tammy nodded.

  “As in the Ellen—DeGeneres?”

  Tammy smiled again, and Tony felt a flutter in his stomach. He instinctively smiled back, though his mind was on those full lips, those sparkling, hazel eyes, the cute chin, and her many other inspiring qualities.

  Tony had met Tammy ever so briefly at Vandenberg, in those hazy minutes after the announcement about what had happened.

  At the time, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, heavily pregnant as she was, and with what seemed like the whole world’s attention focused on her bulging belly.

  He’d acknowledged her beauty even then, to himself, but felt nothing else. He’d had other things on his mind.

  But that was then.

  And now, he was single, and he was starting to hope she was, too.

  The American news channels had paid particular attention to her, and anyone who watched television regularly could not have missed the stories about what had happened to her since leaving Vandenberg.

  “Wow,” Tony said.

  “It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “She’s America’s biggest daytime chat show.”

  Tammy smiled again, and Tony this time could feel the attraction pulsating through his body.

  Tammy had come to LA as a guest of Ellen, who would interview her in two days’
time on her ratings juggernaut of a talk show, now in its twenty-first year.

  It would be Tammy’s last public appearance before she slipped away from the public eye.

  Not that she would tell Tony today, but as her plane leveled out from the airport in St. Louis earlier that morning, she knew she would be coming to the Beverly Hills Hotel to hunt Tony down.

  She’d remembered his real and heartfelt, albeit brief, words of support during the terrifying moments after she found out what had happened to them all.

  Reflecting on his words, and on the genuine and compassionate expression on his face—which she could now think of as good-looking without any sense of guilt—she decided a surprise visit, in the hope of a possible dinner date, would be worth rolling the dice on.

  If Tammy had been playing the craps tables at a Vegas casino, she would have rolled the boxcars—two sixes.

  Her bet would pay off handsomely.

  For both of them.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Annie snarled at her husband, then leaned forward and stuck her index finger deep into his chest. “If you think for a second that those children are getting on that plane, you’re more screwed in the head than my sister!”

  Brandon nearly fell backward, trying as best as he could to back away from the torrent of abuse.

  He righted himself, grabbing hold of the couch he’d nearly fallen on, and prepared for more of the verbal lashing. He’d realized this had become almost a weekly event. He swallowed, and could taste what he thought could only be adrenaline. The heightened beating in his chest only exacerbating the feeling coursing through his veins.

  What had he done?

  It had started with a kiss one drunken Friday night back in 2018.

  And as the memory of it had come flooding back the next morning, as if God had opened the floodgates on Noah. His mind, now mostly recovered from the seven beers he’d drunk the night before, had occupied itself with one simple question, much the same as he was asking now.