Flight or Fright

by Stephen King

  “We’re plus thirty-three,” she said. There was no sense talking about what we were all thinking: things were going badly.

  “Back to tourist,” I said. “Be brave, smile at everyone, but make it just a little bit too good, got it?”

  “Check,” Cristabel said.

  We processed the other quickly, with no incident. Then there was no time to talk about anything. In eighty-nine minutes Flight 128 was going to be spread all over a mountain whether we were finished or not.

  Dave went into the cockpit to keep the flight crew out of our hair. Me and Pinky were supposed to take care of first class, then back up Cristabel and Liza in tourist. We used the standard “coffee, tea, or milk” gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia.

  I leaned over the first two seats on the left.

  “Are you enjoying your flight?” Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the heads and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

  “Hi, folks. I’m Mandy. Fly me.” Pop, pop.

  Halfway to the galley, a few people were watching us curiously. But people don’t make a fuss until they have a lot more to go on. One goat in the back row stood up, and I let him have it. By now there were only eight left awake. I abandoned the smile and squeezed off four quick shots. Pinky took care of the rest. We hurried through the curtains, just in time.

  There was an uproar building in the back of tourist, with about sixty percent of the goats already processed. Cristabel glanced at me, and I nodded.

  “Okay, folks,” she bawled. “I want you to be quiet. Calm down and listen up. You, fathead, pipe down before I cram my foot up your ass sideways.”

  The shock of hearing her talk like that was enough to buy us a little time, anyway. We had formed a skirmish line across the width of the plane, guns out, steadied on seat backs, aimed at the milling, befuddled group of thirty goats.

  The guns are enough to awe all but the most foolhardy. In essence, a standard-issue stunner is just a plastic rod with two grids about six inches apart. There’s not enough metal in it to set off a hijack alarm. And to people from the Stone Age to about 2190 it doesn’t look any more like a weapon than a ballpoint pen. So Equipment Section jazzes them up in a plastic shell to real Buck Rogers blasters, with a dozen knobs and lights that flash and a barrel like the snout of a hog. Hardly anyone ever walks into one.

  “We are in great danger, and time is short. You must all do exactly as I tell you, and you will be safe.”

  You can’t give them time to think, you have to rely on your status as the Voice of Authority. The situation is just not going to make sense to them, no matter how you explain it.

  “Just a minute, I think you owe us—”

  An airborne lawyer. I made a snap decision, thumbed the fireworks switch on my gun, and shot him.

  The gun made a sound like a flying saucer with hemorrhoids, spit sparks and little jets of flame, and extended a green laser finger to his forehead. He dropped.

  All pure kark, of course. But it sure is impressive.

  And it’s damn risky, too. I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,” things can get out of hand. It’s infectious.

  It worked. There was a lot of shouting, people ducking behind seats, but no rush. We could have handled it, but we needed some of them conscious if we were ever going to finish the Snatch.

  “Get up. Get up, you slugs!” Cristabel yelled. “He’s stunned, nothing worse. But I’ll kill the next one who gets out of line. Now get to your feet and do what I tell you. Children first! Hurry, as fast as you can, to the front of the plane. Do what the stewardess tells you. Come on, kids, move!”

  I ran back into first class just ahead of the kids, turned at the open restroom door, and got on my knees.

  They were petrified. There were five of them—crying, some of them, which always chokes me up—looking left and right at dead people in the first class seats, stumbling, near panic.

  “Come on, kids,” I called to them, giving my special smile. “Your parents will be along in just a minute. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise you. Come on.”

  I got three of them through. The fourth balked. She was determined not to go through that door. She spread her legs and arms and I couldn’t push her through. I will not hit a child, never. She raked her nails over my face. My wig came off, and she gaped at my bare head. I shoved her through.

  Number five was sitting in the aisle, bawling. He was maybe seven. I ran back and picked him up, hugged him and kissed him, and tossed him through. God, I needed a rest, but I was needed in tourist.

  “You, you, you, and you. Okay, you too. Help him, will you?” Pinky had a practiced eye for the ones that wouldn’t be any use to anyone, even themselves. We herded them toward the front of the plane, then deployed ourselves along the left side where we could cover the workers. It didn’t take long to prod them into action. We had them dragging the limp bodies forward as fast as they could go. Me and Cristabel were in tourist, with the others up front.

  Adrenaline was being catabolized in my body now; the rush of action left me and I started to feel very tired. There’s an unavoidable feeling of sympathy for the poor dumb goats that starts to get me about this stage of the game. Sure, they were better off, sure they were going to die if we didn’t get them off the plane. But when they saw the other side they were going to have a hard time believing it.

  The first ones were returning for a second load, stunned at what they’d just seen: dozens of people being put into a cubicle that was crowded when it was empty. One college student looked like he’d been hit in the stomach. He stopped by me and his eyes pleaded.

  “Look, I want to help you people, just … what’s going on? Is this some new kind of rescue? I mean, are we going to crash—”

  I switched my gun to prod and brushed it across his cheek. He gasped, and fell back.

  “Shut your fuggin’ mouth and get moving, or I’ll kill you.” It would be hours before his jaw was in shape to ask any more stupid questions.

  We cleared tourist and moved up. A couple of the work gang were pretty damn pooped by then. Muscles like horses, all of them, but they can hardly run up a flight of stairs. We let some of them go through, including a couple that were at least fifty years old. Je-zuz. Fifty! We got down to a core of four men and two women who seemed strong, and worked them until they nearly dropped. But we processed everyone in twenty-five minutes.

  The portapak came through as we were stripping off our clothes. Cristabel knocked on the door to the cockpit and Dave came out, already naked. A bad sign.

  “I had to cork ’em,” he said. “Bleeding Captain just had to make his Grand March through the plane. I tried everything.”

  Sometimes you have to do it. The plane was on autopilot, as it normally would be at this time. But if any of us did anything detrimental to the craft, changed the fixed course of events in any way, that would be it. All that work for nothing, and Flight 128 inaccessible to us for all Time. I don’t know sludge about time theory, but I know the practical angles. We can do things in the past only at times and in places where it won’t make any difference. We have to cover our tracks. There’s flexibility; once a Snatcher left her gun behind and it went in with the plane. Nobody found it, or if they did, they didn’t have the smoggiest idea of what it was, so we were okay.

  Flight 128 was mechanical failure. That’s the best kind; it means we don’t have to keep the pilot unaware of the situation in the cabin right down to ground level. We can cork him and fly the plane, since there’s nothing he could have done to save the flight anyway. A pilot-error smash is almost impossible to Snatch. We mostly work mid-air, bombs, and structural failures. If there’s even one survivor, we can’t touch it. It would not fit the fabric of space-time, which is immutable (though it can stretch a little), and we’d all just fade away and appear back in the ready-room
.

  My head was hurting. I wanted that portapak very badly.

  “Who has the most hours on a 707?” Pinky did, so I sent her to the cabin, along with Dave, who could do the pilot’s voice for air traffic control. You have to have a believable record in the flight recorder, too. They trailed two long tubes from the portapak, and the rest of us hooked in up close. We stood there, each of us smoking a fistful of cigarettes, wanting to finish them but hoping there wouldn’t be time. The gate had vanished as soon as we tossed our clothes and the flight crew through.

  But we didn’t worry long. There’s other nice things about Snatching, but nothing to compare with the rush of plugging into a portapak. The wake-up transfusion is nothing but fresh blood, rich in oxygen and sugars. What we were getting now was an insane brew of concentrated adrenaline, super-saturated hemoglobin, methedrine, white lightning, TNT, and Kickapoo joyjuice. It was like a firecracker in your heart; a boot in the box that rattled your sox.

  “I’m growing hair on my chest,” Cristabel said solemnly. Everyone giggled.

  “Would someone hand me my eyeballs?”

  “The blue ones, or the red ones?”

  “I think my ass just fell off.”

  We’d heard them all before, but we howled anyway. We were strong, strong, and for one golden moment we had no worries. Everything was hilarious. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyelashes.

  But you get hyper on that mix. When the gage didn’t show, and didn’t show, and didn’t sweetjeez show we all started milling. This bird wasn’t going to fly all that much longer.

  Then it did show, and we turned on. The first of the wimps came through, dressed in the clothes taken from a passenger it had been picked to resemble.

  “Two thirty-five elapsed upside time,” Cristabel announced.

  “Je-zuz.”

  It is a deadening routine. You grab the harness around the wimp’s shoulders and drag it along the aisle, after consulting the seat number painted on its forehead. The paint would last three minutes. You seat it, strap it in, break open the harness and carry it back to toss through the gate as you grab the next one. You have to take it for granted they’ve done the work right on the other side: fillings in the teeth, fingerprints, the right match in height and weight and hair color. Most of those things don’t matter much, especially on Flight 128, which was a crash-and-burn. There would be bits and pieces, and burned to a crisp at that. But you can’t take chances. Those rescue workers are pretty thorough on the parts they do find; the dental work and fingerprints especially are important.

  I hate wimps. I really hate ’em. Every time I grab the harness of one of them, if it’s a child, I wonder if it’s Alice. Are you my kid, you vegetable, you slug, you slimy worm? I joined the Snatchers right after the brain bugs ate the life out of my baby’s head. I couldn’t stand to think she was the last generation, that the last humans there would ever be would live with nothing in their heads, medically dead by standards that prevailed even in 1979, with computers working their muscles to keep them in tone. You grow up, reach puberty still fertile—one in a thousand—rush to get pregnant in your first heat. Then you find out your mom or pop passed on a chronic disease bound right into the genes, and none of your kids will be immune. I knew about the para-leprosy; I grew up with my toes rotting away. But this was too much. What do you do?

  Only one in ten of the wimps had a customized face. It takes time and a lot of skill to build a new face that will stand up to a doctor’s autopsy. The rest came pre-mutilated. We’ve got millions of them; it’s not hard to find a good match in the body. Most of them would stay breathing, too dumb to stop, until they went in with the plane.

  The plane jerked hard. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to impact. We should have time. I was on my last wimp. I could hear Dave frantically calling the ground. A bomb came through the gate, and I tossed it into the cockpit. Pinky turned on the pressure sensor on the bomb and came running out, followed by Dave. Liza was already through. I grabbed the limp dolls in stewardess costume and tossed them to the floor. The engine fell off and a piece of it came through the cabin. We started to depressurize. The bomb blew away part of the cockpit (the ground crash crew would read it—we hoped—that part of the engine came through and killed the crew: no more words from the pilot on the flight recorder) and we turned, slowly, left and down. I was lifted toward the hole in the side of the plane, but I managed to hold onto a seat. Cristabel wasn’t so lucky. She was blown backwards.

  We started to rise slightly, losing speed. Suddenly it was uphill from where Cristabel was lying in the aisle. Blood oozed from her temple. I glanced back; everyone was gone, and three pink-suited wimps were piled on the floor. The plane began to stall, to nose down, and my feet left the floor.

  “Come on, Bel!” I screamed. The gate was only three feet away from me, but I began pulling myself along to where she floated. The plane bumped, and she hit the floor. Incredibly, it seemed to wake her up. She started to swim toward me, and I grabbed her hand as the floor came up to slam us again. We crawled as the plane went through its final death agony, and we came to the door. The gate was gone.

  There wasn’t anything to say. We were going in. It’s hard enough to keep the gate in place on a plane that’s moving in a straight line. When a bird gets to corkscrewing and coming apart, the math is fearsome. So I’ve been told.

  I embraced Cristabel and held her bloodied head. She was groggy, but managed to smile and shrug. You take what you get. I hurried into the restroom and got both of us down on the floor. Back to the forward bulkhead, Cristabel between my legs, back to front. Just like in training. We pressed our feet against the other wall. I hugged her tightly and cried on her shoulder.

  And it was there. A green glow to my left. I threw myself toward it, dragging Cristabel, keeping low as two wimps were thrown headfirst through the gate above our heads. Hands grabbed and pulled us through. I clawed my way a good five yards along the floor. You can leave a leg on the other side and I didn’t have one to spare.

  I sat up as they were carrying Cristabel to Medical. I patted her arm as she went by on the stretcher, but she was passed out. I wouldn’t have minded passing out myself.

  For a while, you can’t believe it all really happened. Sometimes it turns out it didn’t happen. You come back and find out all the goats in the holding pen have softly and suddenly vanished away because the continuum won’t tolerate the changes and paradoxes you’ve put into it. The people you’ve worked so hard to rescue are spread like tomato surprise all over some goddam hillside in Carolina and all you’ve got left is a bunch of ruined wimps and an exhausted Snatch Team. But not this time. I could see the goats milling around in the holding pen, naked and more bewildered than ever. And just starting to be really afraid.

  Elfreda touched me as I passed her. She nodded, which meant well-done in her limited repertoire of gestures. I shrugged, wondering if I cared, but the surplus adrenaline was still in my veins and I found myself grinning at her. I nodded back.

  Gene was standing by the holding pen. I went to him, hugged him. I felt the juices start to flow. Damn it, let’s squander a little ration and have us a good time.

  Someone was beating on the sterile glass wall of the pen. She shouted, mouthing angry words at us. Why? What have you done to us? It was Mary Sondergard. She implored her bald, one-legged twin to make her understand. She thought she had problems. God, was she pretty. I hated her guts.

  Gene pulled me away from the wall. My hands hurt, and I’d broken off all my fake nails without scratching the glass. She was sitting on the floor now, sobbing. I heard the voice of the briefing officer on the outside speaker.

  “… Centauri 3 is hospitable, with an Earth-like climate. By that, I mean your Earth, not what it has become. You’ll see more of that later. The trip will take five years, shiptime. Upon landfall, you will be entitled to one horse, a plow, three axes, two hundred kilos of seed grain …”

  I leaned against Gene’s shoulder. At th
eir lowest ebb, this very moment, they were so much better than us. I had maybe ten years, half of that as a basketcase. They are our best, our very brightest hope. Everything is up to them.

  “… that no one will be forced to go. We wish to point out again, not for the last time, that you would all be dead without our intervention. There are things you should know, however. You cannot breathe our air. If you remain on Earth, you can never leave this building. We are not like you. We are the result of a genetic winnowing, a mutation process. We are the survivors, but our enemies have evolved along with us. They are winning. You, however, are immune to the diseases that afflict us …”

  I winced, and turned away.

  “… the other hand, if you emigrate you will be given a chance at a new life. It won’t be easy, but as Americans you should be proud of your pioneer heritage. Your ancestors survived, and so will you. It can be a rewarding experience, and I urge you …”

  Sure. Gene and I looked at each other and laughed. Listen to this, folks. Five percent of you will suffer nervous breakdowns in the next few days, and never leave. About the same number will commit suicide, here and on the way. When you get there, sixty to seventy percent will die in the first three years. You will die in childbirth, be eaten by animals, bury two out of three of your babies, starve slowly when the rains don’t come. If you live, it will be to break your back behind a plow, sunup to dusk. New Earth is Heaven, folks!

  God, how I wish I could go with them.

  YOU ARE RELEASED

  JOE HILL

  Joe Hill began his career with a short story called “Better Than Home,” almost twenty years ago, and published his first novel—the bestselling Heart-Shaped Box—in 2007. He’s written three more highly regarded novels, a book of novellas (Strange Weather), dozens of short stories (many published in 20th Century Ghosts), and the award-winning graphic novel series, Locke & Key. He is the son of your humble editor, who could not be more proud of the relationship. Here, written especially for this collection, is one of his scariest stories. May we all pray it never comes true.