by Chuck Wendig
The plane judders and shudders. Like it’s all going to come apart.
Mookie imagines that. Bolts spinning loose from the vibrations. A turbine dropping off. The plane going into a wild spin—
Man wasn’t meant to do this. To fly. Mookie gets that now. He understands that he’s in a winged metal tube defying the physical laws man is supposed to follow—laws set by some divine operator at the dawn of man.
This plane is just a really big fucking casket.
Goddamn goddamn goddamn. He grabs the armrest hard enough to wrench it off its mooring. He tosses it into the seat next to him.
His bowels feel like they’re hanging from the bottom of the plane.
The plane climbs, clawing its way through the clouds.
Through the blizzard.
Jesus shit fuck he’s going to die everything was for naught his blood feels like a 7-11 Slurpee and he hears it rushing behind his eardrum and—
Then the plane levels out.
The intercom clicks on.
Alfie’s voice comes over the speakers.“You fill your diaper yet, you big baby?”
Mookie thrusts up a middle finger, which nobody can see.
Then he reclines and tries to sleep.
*
The plane, flying smooth for a while, suddenly rumbles. Like a shiver. A small tremor. Enough to jostle Mookie awake from an ill-fated nap with dreams—of what, he could not say—that leave him with a feeling of septic unease settling in the lowest part of his gut.
He stretches. Bones pop. Teeth grind.
He listens.
Just the engine noise. Humming along.
Once more, smooth sailing.
But then—
The plane jostles. Like it shoulders into a pocket of hard air. Mookie goes to grip the armrests but remembers one is sitting next to him because he ripped it off.
He starts to feel dizzy. The anxiety clawing its way through him—like rats clambering through the walls of a house, tearing down insulation, eating up the wires—is burning through the furnace that is his heart. He feels it there: his chest hot like he’s got a scoopful of hot coals nesting above his stomach.
Mookie reaches, grabs the tin—
Scoops one of the last little hills of Viridian into his chest-hole.
Everything stabilizes.
His breathing returns to normal. He feels like a pregnant woman—like, when Jess was pregnant with Nora, she had to do this special breathing. Hoo hoo hee hee hoo hoo hee hee. Shallow breaths, then one deep one, then shallow breaths again.
He tries to tell himself, You’re gonna see Nora soon.
That helps. It really helps.
The plane shudders again. Harder this time.
“Goddamn.” He stiffens. Presses his right foot down hard, like he’s driving a car and all he has to do is apply the brakes to make it stop.
He lifts the window cover, half-expecting to see the wing hanging off by a couple cables and wires, sparking and snapping. But he can barely see the wing at all. Just a gray shape lit up by a blinking red light—blink, blink, blink.
Then, one time it blinks—
And he sees something out on the wing.
Human-sized. Maybe bigger. With wings. Big, dark wings—
But then the light goes out and blinks again and—
Nothing. Nada. Nichts.
It’s like that scene from that movie. The Twilight Zone movie. Who was the actor? Shatner did the original but the remake was—who? Lithgow. John Lithgow.
He’s just imagining things. Gremlins on the wing.
“Get it together, Pearl,” he tells himself.
Then turbulence. No longer just a bounce or a bop, now it’s full-bore bumpy air. Like a car driving over a pocked and pitted gravel driveway. Mookie goes to tighten the seatbelt, then yells out, “Hey, what the fuck, Komarski?” But of course Alfie can’t hear him because the cockpit door is closed.
Mookie suddenly wishes for Hell. At least down there, everything is stable. Rock-solid. Up here everything is as firm and true as a gust of wind caught in a closing fist.
Growling, Mookie unsnaps the seatbelt. Which scares him. Not that a seatbelt would do much for him—it’s an illusion, he thinks, like the oxygen masks or flotation devices because your plane crashes, that’s it, game over, fuck you, enjoy turning to blood vapor or char-bones as the plane becomes a rocket crashing into the side of a mountain. Still, even the illusion of safety is something to cling to—
But he’s gotta talk to Alfie. Alfie will reassure him. Tell him that this is all situation normal, quit being a big baby.
He makes his way down the cabin aisle. Big hands grabbing each seat-back.
He grabs for the cockpit. Swings the door open.
It’s then he knows how truly fucked he is.
Alfie isn’t just dead. He’s been torn apart. An ear is stuck to the inside of the window. A scalp hangs from the flight stick, and a blood-caked baseball bat sits just underneath it. It’s all ribbons of flesh and ropes of viscera.
The only other person on board this plane is dead. The pilot is dead.
Outside, lightning flashes in the clouds.
And when it does, Mookie sees something sitting on the nose of the plane. Crouched there like a gargoyle. Then, in a flutter of shadow, it’s gone.
The plane starts to dip.
Mookie steadies himself on the pilot’s chair, but feels his hands come away slick with the man’s insides. He braces against the door instead.
The nose of the plane drops farther. Mookie’s center is gone. Vertigo lashes him like a choking rope. He turns—not sure what to do, wondering if there’s a parachute onboard this plane somewhere. Gotta be, right? Isn’t that a safety standard? Or is he just making that up? He’s probably just making that up. Fuck!
Soon as he turns to look out over the cabin—
The plane shakes like it was hit with a fist. It drops hard. Mookie doesn’t drop with it—and he slams his head into the top of the plane. He crashes into the seats, seeing stars streaking and smearing across his vision—a supernova of pain blowing up behind his eyes. The cabin lights go off. Then back on: now emergency red. Oxygen masks suddenly pop from their compartments like Jacks-in-the-Boxes.
The jet booms again.
And then—a sound like tearing metal.
Mookie looks up.
Just in time to see the tail of the plane twist and tear free. Taking a handful of seats with it. They spiral off into black night and gray cloud. Another lightning flash and Mookie sees the tail disappearing, that image freeze-framed in his mind’s eye. He cries out but he can’t hear his own voice. Everything is sucking wind and screaming engines. He feels the air grabbing at him. Pulling him toward the hole in the back of the plane. A little voice just tells him to go with it—in that surrender he’ll at least be allowed some small moment of peace as he falls, alone, through the skies.
He’s knocked from that small, peaceful thought by another wrenching sound—
Gung gung gung—
Then a tearing, banging gong.
One of the wings breaks off. Slams into the side of the plane. A rain of glass. The whole thing starts to come apart. Mookie pitches forward, boots over head, end over end. Glass and metal and golden sparks in the dark blue.
A streak of fuel behind the plane—
A bloom of fire as it catches, cascades, bright, scorching—
And then it all stops.
It goes from fast to slow to frozen. Embersparks held fast in air. Glass hanging, as if fixed in amber. The plane, breaking apart all around him—but stopped, as if someone hit the pause button. Mookie hangs, breathing, eyes moving in his skull but otherwise unable to shift his body no matter how hard he tries.
Something moves at the tail-end of the plane. A shape that is human, but with lithe, almost lupine movement. Wings stretch wide, twitch, then fold inward—
It isn’t alone.
Another shape. Coming in behind it.
One leaps u
p on the broken seats to the right. The other winds through the shattered parts on the left. That one has wings like a dragonfly. The other’s wings are black, slick—like a crow’s. Mookie sees a pair of faces that don’t make sense, faces whose flesh shifts as the bones beneath them collapse and reform again and again. He sees insect eyes, chittering mandibles, serpent tongues, holes appearing in leathery flesh and hard spires like the beaks of baby birds thrusting up through those spaces—
The faces change. Wolf muzzles. Fish-egg eyes. Crab pincer tongues. The wings change, too—wings like those of flies, then wings made of flies, then spines and spires strung together with strands of rotten flesh—
He smells ozone and lightning. Hot wet wind and cold air.
Mookie struggles. Tries to scream and all he gets is a high-pitched keening. Like a banshee wailing behind a mouth stuck with duct tape.
The one comes up overtop him—arms and legs bending the wrong way, clinging to the broken baggage compartments. The other slithers up underneath him, cradling him.
Still, he can’t move.
The one’s face becomes that of a praying mantis, but with human eyes.
The other is a shifting carousel of eyes, mouths, holes, winding around and around as it comes up alongside him.
Breath of fog. And a mix of smells that don’t add up: roadkill, metal, bug spray, rose petals, wet paper, hot coffee. He tries not to throw up.
They do not speak, not exactly—he hears them in his mind. Two voices joined as one, separate but together.
WE ARE AERIE. WE ARE SKYBORN.
The sound of them in his ears, in his mind, is a clamor of noise: breaking windows and shrieking kettles and the winds of an F5 tornado ripping apart a trailer park. A cloud of locusts, a spider chewing a fly, a tree falling and splintering—
“Please...” he grunts. “My daughter...”
YOU HAVE THE STINK OF THE UNDERNEATH UPON YOU. YOU ARE INVADER. YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED. PREPARE FOR EVISCERATION.
Mookie feels his heart churning through the Viridian—the Green Grave fueling him, scouring his insides. He winces, pushes with everything he has—
The thing above him twists its arm downward, bones ratcheting. Its hand becomes a hundred bone spires, each as big and long as a carpentry nail—
But Mookie’s hand moves, too. Like he just popped it free of a set of handcuffs. He moves fast, unclips the snap holding the cleaver in its sheath—
The creature beneath him catches his hand as it closes on the cleaver. He roars, tries to wrench his hand away—
The winged thing twists his arm. His wrist snaps. Bones through flesh in a compound break—like the metal skeleton of an umbrella tearing through its fabric.
The cleaver drops from a hand that no longer feels anything.
WAIT.
THINGS HINGE.
IS HE A PIVOT? THE PENDULUM SWINGS—
Through the white fire lancing up from his broken wrist to his shoulder and into his heart, he hears their shared voices... arguing?
HE IS COMPROMISED.
YES BUT SALVATION RESTS UPON HIM.
CHAOS HAS CHOSEN?
CHAOS HAS CHOSEN.
BEDLAM’S CHAMPION. BURNS FROM THE SKIES OF FIRE.
One of them reaches out with a broad-fingered hand, a human hand—
TO REMIND YOU.
HEAVEN’S TOUCH IS HOTTER THAN THAT OF HELL’S.
The hand catches aflame.
It grabs Mookie’s skull—
He smells his own scalp cooking.
*
The world bounces—wheels skid on tarmac and Mookie screams himself awake, kicking out with both knees hard enough to break the back of the seat in front of him. He pats at his arm and feels for his cleaver—arm, unbroken. Cleaver still at his hip. Though the smell of charred flesh still clings to the inside of his nose like a greasy film, the scent of his own meat roasted by a nightmare’s hand...
Over the intercom, Alfie’s voice.
“Touchdown.”
He stands up. Mookie grips the now-broken seat in front of him as the jet slows. Outside the window is the faintest glimmer of sunrise glowing at the edges.
The plane taxis. Brakes hiss, and the whole thing hitches to a stop.
The cockpit opens and Alfie looks out. “Rough flight, eh? You asked for it.” He starts walking down the row between the seats. “Nice out there, though. Sixty-five degrees already and gonna be sunny as a cup of—” He stops and stares.
“What?” Mookie asks. “Fuckin’ what?”
“Your head.”
Mookie reaches up, feels at his scalp—it’s burned. Scarred. Not fresh. Not a new burn. But old. Like it’s been there his whole damn life.
It wasn’t a dream. It happened.
“Get me off this plane,” Mookie says, breathless.
Alfie shrugs. “Welcome to Los Angeles, young man.”
PART SIX
NORA
34
The god-worms sang me into almost-death, a song I still hear now, filling my lungs and heart chambers and other human spaces. They sang to me as cankerpedes cut free my skin. The feeling of the Death’s Head, pulverized in my gut and forced through my arteries, felt less like a drug and more like a frequency. The ancient worms promised me that they would take care of me as long as I helped them accomplish the one thing they could not accomplish for themselves: they wanted to be free, and that was a gift I hoped so dearly to give them.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
It’s a black dog following after her, these doubts. Nora comes away from her latest meeting with Ernesto and Owen—the older daemon with some small smile said, “I think I’ve found a new source of Viridian,” and left it at that and of course she didn’t ask any more questions because really, does she want to know?—and now she wanders back through the sewers and buried culverts underneath Los Angeles, winding her way toward the old Prohibition tunnels where she still makes her bed.
Above her, sometimes, she hears the living world. Cars, mostly. At one point she must be under a highway, the 405 or something, because it’s a steady thrum of traffic—like being inside a vein as blood rushes to the human heart, through all the meat and the bone and the pockets of fluid.
She knows she’s close to the surface because of the headache. It pushes at the center of her head, above her eyes. Sometimes it feels like a finger pushing. When she gets too close, it starts to feel like a knife instead.
That’s when she remembers how badly she wants to be up there. Away from this place. Shut of these damned—damned—headaches. She would kill right now just to be smelling all that exhaust from all that traffic. Feeling the meager grass from beyond the highway’s shoulder underneath her feet. Feeling wind and air. Visiting the cenote was nice at first, but now it’s just a reminder of what she can’t have—the margins of her cage seen and felt oh so clearly.
I want to see a sunset again.
Sometimes it’s big things like that. Mostly it’s little things. McDonald’s food. Kids playing at a playground. Dogs barking. A whiff of flowers somewhere. Music booming in a car as it drives past. Wind in trees. Planes overhead.
She remembers that in Brooklyn, in Dumbo, there was this little coffee house—not some hoity-toity little baristaville like most of the places, but a dingy black-box hole in the wall where it was less about the coffee and more about the shitty-but-occasionally-genius art on the walls, or the shitty-but-rarely-genius poets who always seemed to be reading on stage through a little Fender amplifier. Everything hand-painted and hand-made and all so totally amateur. She loved it. You weren’t allowed to smoke in there but everyone smoked out back on the patio and the smoke blew inside. Smells of coffee and patchouli and hipster douches who use natural deodorant.
It was so not her jam.
And yet here, right now, she misses the hell out of that place.
Over the last couple days, these memories have been coming to her—n
o, not coming to her, but rolling over her, the way the high tide crashes over a jetty.
And these memories hit her and they’re always followed up by a final bitter wave, a crushing fist of debris and poison:
What if it all goes away?
That’s what Burnsy said would happen. That’s what Hrothk apparently said—before he bailed on her. Her anger at the two of them shocks her. She’s angry because how dare they. She’s angry because fuck them for leaving. She’s angry because... because they might be right.
What if it all goes away?
And it’s then she knows.
She can’t go through with it.
Oh, god, she really can’t, can she?
Nora slumps back against a crooked, shattered wall of granite, and she feels like the air has been sucked out of her lungs. Tears threaten to break the seawall of her eyelids, and she tries furiously to blink them back. She cries out in sudden, unexpected anger and almost punches the hard rock. Instead all she can do is stomp her foot down in a toddler’s manifestation of rage.
“Damnit damnit shit,” she says.
When did this happen? This conscience? For so long she prided herself on being a monster: like a Snakeface. Cold, unyielding, driven by a merciless and ruthless need to put herself first, forward, always. But that was bullshit, wasn’t it? Just teenage pissed-offedness over the death of her mother and her negligent father.
An illusion. A luxury of being younger.
A luxury of being who she was then, and not who she is now:
The living dead girl.
She thought she could do better. Be harder. Meaner. Being trapped down here, feeling like she’s giving parts of herself up to this place just as it is giving up parts of itself for her, she expected to truly become more monstrous. More self-serving. And that idea thrilled her. Fuck the rest of the world, she said. And she still says that.