Mass Hysteria

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  There was a large bundle of writhing fur and flailing limbs, screaming and hissing, and…it took a moment for his brain to process it, but he was almost sure he saw blood.

  He darted forward, his heart racing.

  “Oh fuck,” he screamed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. No, no, Hector, get out of there!”

  His hands were on the cat’s backside a heartbeat later, but crossing the room had seemed like an eternity. Sarah’s screaming was ear piercing as he hauled the cat away.

  Hector’s hind claws immediately found his arms and tore grooves up and down his wrists and forearms, the cat’s limbs pinwheeling and grasping for purchase. He briefly thanked the stars that she was front-declawed as her forelimbs smacked at his face and she hissed and spit at him.

  He turned and threw her down, back into the dining room, and screamed, “Get!”

  Sarah was crying, her face a bright strawberry red, and puncture marks from where the cat had bit her marked her arms and legs and chest. The little girl was only wearing a diaper, and Hector had clearly been in a careless frenzy.

  What the fuck happened? he wondered. Declan’s head was spinning.

  Hector darted past his feet, on a path for Sarah again.

  “No!” he yelled, his reflexes astoundingly fast. He snatched her tail and dragged her back toward him, her claws making a clear trail in the carpet.

  Hector let out a loud hiss, her ears pinned back tightly against her scalp, biting at him. She had strong jaws and razor-sharp teeth. It stung when she nipped at him, but this was far worse. This was no playful nip. The fucking cat was in full-on attack mode.

  “What the fuck’s gotten into you?” he shouted, but the cat replied only with shrill hisses.

  Two strides to the backdoor. Declan flung it open angrily, holding the squirming cat to his chest while he worked the screen door lock, her nails digging into his chest and the cat biting at his face and neck. He threw open the door, then threw the cat outside, hauling the screen door shut again.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, exhausted.

  A thud landed against the glass behind him, and he turned to see Hector making a second pass, throwing herself at the door and smacking at it. She went up and down the porch steps, tail slunk low, eyes narrowed.

  Declan shut the backdoor and bolted it, more out of habit than any particular worry toward the cat getting back inside.

  “Oh, sweetie,” he said, taking his screaming baby in his own bleeding arms, rocking her gently.

  He needed to get these wounds clean, both hers and his. Kirsti was going to freak out, he knew.

  How the fuck am I going to explain this her?

  The only thing he knew for certain was, Hector was a goner for sure. No way could he keep the cat after this.

  Fuck.

  The Delta Boeing 757 cut through the clear, blue skies over Falls Breath, Michigan, still gaining altitude following its departure from the Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City, en route to Detroit.

  The captain of the narrow-body, single aisle, twin-engine airliner was unable to see the unusually large flock of seagulls lifting off from the beaches of Grand Traverse Bay until it was too late. As the white gulls massed around the plane, he and the one hundred passengers quickly began to take notice.

  Bird strikes were a common, and mostly insignificant, occurrence in air travel. Most involved the bird striking the edges of a wing, or the front of the nose cone, and caused little damage to the aircraft.

  Flocks of birds, though…that could do some real damage.

  In all his twenty-seven years of piloting, Captain Lucas Robertson had experienced plenty of bird strikes, but nothing like this. He squinted his eyes, unable to believe what he was seeing.

  A flurry of small bodies—hundreds of them!—darkened the cabin in seconds and he could feel their assault on the Boeing.

  Passengers began screaming as the gulls struck the windows, small bodies breaking against the glass.

  The engines’ intake sucked the gulls in, like a vacuum. Compressor blades broke apart under the assault of so many bodies and were turned into shrapnel.

  Engine two failed first, and then engine one, both bursting into flames and trailing sooty black smoke.

  The plane pushed through the dense flock, but there seemed to be no end in sight. Bodies slammed into the cabin windows, cracking the glass and then shattering it. A hail of broken glass rained down upon Robertson and his flight crew, the cabin depressurizing.

  And the gulls kept coming, into the plane now, slamming into Robertson and his copilot, hundreds of flapping wings blinding him. The flying glass had cut him good and nicked the carotid artery in his neck. He tried to stop the bleeding with one hand, fighting off the birds with the other, but there were just too damn many of them for the two of them to ward off.

  Sparks flew from the control panel as the birds dive-bombed the electronics, impaling themselves on the boards of switches and knobs and the flight sticks. The crew was in a panic, too busy fighting off the attacks to their bodies. Blood and feathers and bird remains—what they called snarge—was everywhere.

  Feeling faint, Robertson caught of a flash of land outside the cabin window, the ground rushing up to meet them.

  As suddenly as they had come, the seagulls vanished. Light flooded the cabin, too late.

  The Boeing 757 crashed into the center of downtown Falls Breath at 2:08 p.m., barely ten minutes after liftoff. All one hundred and four souls aboard were lost, along with many more on the ground.

  2

  LAUREN SCOTT THOUGHT SHE was in love. Not that she knew much about love; even she would have to admit that if push came to shove.

  Jacob Teller, though—he was something special. And he was twenty-one. A college man. And he could buy beer legally, which, at seventeen, Lauren was still far away from doing on her own. Not that her age had kept her away from beer.

  Beer, in fact, had played an integral part in their meeting. Two months ago, Lauren was celebrating her friend’s birthday at the beach and whiling away the night with a few bottles of brew around the bonfire. The turnout had been pretty good, about twenty of their friends and friends of friends, when all was said and done. Jacob, he was a friend of a friend.

  He’d opened a bottle of Labatt for her, and when he passed the bottle over their fingers had brushed against one another. They started talking, and that was pretty much that. He gave her his phone number, and left the ball firmly in her court. She could call, or not. She liked that. So, two days later, during her lunch break, she called.

  They’d seen each other nearly every day since. And last night…well, last night had been something special.

  Driving along US 31, a pleasant ache burning deep in her core, she couldn’t help but smile at the thoughts of the prior night.

  Lying on a large blanket, the two had watched as meteors streaked the sky in the pre-dawn hours. They’d had the beach entirely to themselves, and it had been a clear night. There had been so many meteors it had been impossible to keep count. The sight was amazing, but watching Jacob’s face light up with awe was the best, by far.

  He was an astrophysics major, and an astronomy nut. His enthusiasm had been infectious, and it hadn’t taken much prying to get her to agree to stay up with him on the sandy shore.

  Wearing shorts and a Traverse City hoodie, she’d bundled up in a blanket and cuddled her man, exchanging kisses under the moon’s glow and silvery streaks piercing the sky, a cooler of beer beside him.

  “Look at that!” Jacob had shouted, excited, but too loud into her ear. His arms had been warm and secure, giving her a sense of not only assured security, but pure serenity. She followed the path his finger cut through the air, catching sight of a bright white light trailing down from the sky.

  “Oh my god,” she said, entranced. And a little bit afraid. The meteor was growing brighter as it streaked closer, piercing the night sky with a sudden dawn.

  A loud sonic boom exploded overhead and the darkness returned
, the space rock lost as her eyes readjusted. Momentarily blinded, she could hear the faint splash as the meteor hit the lake, way off in the distance.

  “That was amazing!” She felt exhilarated, a shot of adrenaline lacing her blood. To see a meteor that close, to have it land so near, was both frightening and exciting and her heart shook as if she’d been on the most intense rollercoaster ever.

  “There’s more,” he said. His mouth hung open in a wide, smiling O. She laughed, with him of course, feeling giddy.

  Thin bright contrails scarred the sky, none of them even close, and she followed the trajectory of each, counting more than a dozen of them. More lit up the sky, the rest far up above in the Earth’s orbit.

  They spent the early morning hours with their eyes cast to the heavens, until the meteor shower ended and all that was left was a faint silvery shimmer of stardust falling to the earth, lit aglow by moonlight.

  After getting a few hours’ sleep and a warm shower, she found herself missing him already.

  She couldn’t waste the daylight pining alone in her room, though, waiting to see him again. She pulled on shorts and a tank top over her bikini and hit the road, hoping to get some prime time on the sand. Maybe back at the spot she’d shared with Jacob earlier…

  Her face was sore from the constant grin, but it was a good kind of soreness. She’d thought about taking the soft top off her old Wrangler and letting the warm breeze wash over her, but laziness had gotten the better of her.

  The bay was calm and a vibrant green that turned a rich, deep blue out a ways, the sun glinting off the water and making it look almost like glass.

  And then she saw the plane overhead, and the amorphous, shifting web of white and black that surrounded it, a tail of smoke belching from its dead engines as it went into a dive.

  What the fuck? she thought, her mind struggling to make sense of what she was seeing.

  She turned her attention back to the road in time to see the cars in front of her slowing. She slammed on the brake, the car behind her sounding its horn.

  Everyone had stopped, it seemed, to look at the sight overhead.

  Long black scabs marred the clear, blue sky.

  “Oh my god,” she said breathlessly.

  The plane streaked down, lower and lower, and then—

  An explosion erupted from the outskirts of downtown, across the bay, as fire bloomed across the skyline.

  Jacob!

  Jacob was downtown, working at one of the coffee shops that lined Michigan Avenue. A coffee shop on the bay.

  “Oh my god,” she said again.

  She had to get down there, had to get out of this traffic snarl. None of the cars were moving in either the northbound or southbound lanes, and all the drivers were on their cell phones. A few had even gotten out of their cars and were standing in the middle of the street, eyes wide and turned toward the center of Falls Breath.

  Without even thinking, she turned the wheel hard to the right and nudged the gas pedal, putting the Jeep on the shoulder and half-bumping onto the grassy incline beyond. She didn’t care, though, and gunned it down to the stoplight, where she hoped the traffic was thinner and she could get back over.

  She stayed on the shoulder, running the red light, and cut off a van making a left across the intersection and into the lane she barged her way into.

  US 31 was lined here with houses and businesses on opposite sides, trees and hotels, obstructing the view of the water and downtown. Traffic was moving now that the distraction was largely hidden, save for the rising columns of smoke.

  She pressed forward, weaving in between slower vehicles, her heart racing at her own recklessness. In her rearview she saw flashing lights, the noise of roaring sirens piercing her worry.

  Fuck!

  She slowed and pulled to the shoulder again, but the police cruiser shot on by. And then another, and a third. Behind the sheriff department’s units was a massive fire truck, and it rumbled past, shaking the frame of her Jeep. Wasting no time, she darted back onto the road and into the wake of the fast-moving authorities. More angry horns sounded at her brash driving, but she didn’t care in the least.

  She had to get downtown.

  She had to.

  The trees grew thicker as the highway twisted through the woods, a metal crossing bridging the nature trail cut across the stretch of road. She caught a flash of movement and turned her head, surprised to see a woman running up the steps, her boyfriend following and casting fearful looks over his shoulder.

  Lauren slowed, even more surprised to see deer chasing the couple. A large buck plowed forward, head down, his antlers pointing forward as he charged the fleeing man. The man twisted around once more, stumbling, right as the eight-point buck ran him through.

  Foot off the pedal, she gasped, unable to believe what she was seeing.

  The buck reared back, pulling gory antlers loose, and the man dropped to the ground, bleeding profusely. Two other smaller bucks charged over him, pursuing the woman up the steps to the bridge. The large one danced around the fallen man, raining a flurry of blows upon him and biting at his face. The man tried to get an arm up between him and the deer, but the buck knocked it aside, going for the man’s head and throat again.

  This is insane, she thought, the Jeep rolling slowly. She had to pull the wheel to keep from going off the road, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the weirdness playing out before her. She looked from the road, back to the woods, and—

  The buck was watching her. Intently. Staring her down.

  And then it charged.

  Lauren didn’t need to think this time. She mashed the gas pedal to the floor and the Wrangler jolted forward, its engine roaring with the sudden burst of RPMs.

  The buck gave chase, but the Jeep was moving too fast for it to keep up. She let out of a long, deep breath.

  A doe darted out from the woods, right in front of her. Impossible to avoid.

  Lauren screamed as the front end of her vehicle crumpled and the doe slammed into the windshield, its head crashing through the glass beside her as the airbag exploded in her face.

  The Wrangler veered sharply off the road, colliding with a thick tree, and stilled. The engine ticked a final time, steam pouring out from beneath the crumpled hood.

  Lauren twisted her face and saw a still black eye. She slumped forward against the airbag, the darkness surrounding her, swallowing her as her eyes pinched shut.

  3

  DEPUTY MATTHEW SCOTT RECOGNIZED the Wrangler that blew through the red light and nearly crashed into a minivan as the one belonging to his daughter, Lauren.

  “What the fuck is she doing, Hex?” he asked his partner, a black and tan German shepherd sitting in the back of the Grand Traverse County Sheriff Department’s Ford Interceptor SUV.

  Hex, of course, had no answers but whined an awful lot, which was unusual for the sixty-pound import from Poland with Czech bloodlines.

  Scott would need to have a stern talking to with Lauren later. Another one. She was driving like a complete maniac, but there wasn’t time to deal with her right now. If a Boeing hadn’t just crashed into the middle of downtown, he’d have pulled her ass over and thrown her in lockup overnight for this stupid stunt. He just had to hope she wasn’t stupid, or reckless enough to get herself killed.

  With lights and sirens going, traffic parted. There were a few stragglers, and some who outright ignored the warning of this train of emergency vehicles, but the sensible ones that pulled off to the shoulder created a large enough path that the going wasn’t too rough.

  Hex’s nails grated against the wire mesh installed across the driver’s side rear window. The Havis canine transport system installed in place of the SUV’s back seats did not provide much room for pacing, but Hex made do. His nostrils occasionally flared as he pressed his snout against the diamond-pattern grid of air holes and sniffed at Scott in the driver’s seat.

  “Calm down, buddy, we’ll be there soon. You’ll be able to get out and stretch
in a minute.”

  Hex was normally very calm and placid, unless called into action to run down a fleeing perp or focused on searching for a missing person. Although the sudden anxiety was odd, Scott wasn’t worried.

  US 31 cut through the sparsely populated commercial area, where Walgreens and a Speedway sat aside a mini-golf course, and wended away from the bay through the preserved wetlands. A few walkers were taking advantage of the sun and cutting their way along the nature trail, and Hex caught sight of them. He began barking, the wire mesh practically denting his snout.

  “Hex! Platz!”

  The command, German for “sit” went unheeded. The dog continued barking until he lost sight of the walkers, and then he went back to pressing his face against the air holes between him and Scott.

  “Pfui!” Bad dog!

  Normally, Hex looked sheepish when he was called a bad dog, but it had no effect on him this time. Scott shook his head and tried to ignore the anxious behavior. Whatever was wrong with him, Scott understood that Hex at least had no other way of communicating it, and he knew that Hex wasn’t deliberately trying to be provocative. Maybe he just had to go to the bathroom something awful and this was his way of letting Scott know.

  He took a deep breath and assured his dog again. “We’ll be there in a minute, buddy. Just hang tight and try to relax, okay?”

  The woods on either side fell away to small cabin lots and a resurgence of hotels and motels with neon vacancy lights lit up. The highway bent back toward the bay and civilization, the train of emergency vehicles slowing to a halt.

  “Jesus,” Scott said, his eyes wide to absorb the madness before him.

  Downtown was covered in smoke and ash, fires raging across the storefronts, motionless, smoldering bodies everywhere. Sitting in the midst of devastated buildings was the airplane, its nose cone buried in the collapsed remains of what had, only moments earlier, been an Italian restaurant, a litter of bricks and burning furniture from the store opposite surrounding the tubular body. Dense black roiling coils of smoke blotted out so much of the strip that it was hard to tell exactly how bad the damage was, but he could easily make out the burning buildings closer to the intersection. The firemen were working fast to get their hoses rigged up to the hydrants, and EMTs were rushing in to collect the closest of the wounded, but already he could tell there were more bodies than emergency workers. More survivors were coming out of the pitch, faces covered with filthy, ashy shirts, looking like they’d just been freed from a coal mine, smoke curling off their bodies. Suddenly, another body jolted out of the blackness, a human torch covered in flames head to toe and swerving drunkenly across the street, colliding with another survivor and taking them both to the ground, the fire spreading to consume that hapless soul.