He studied the hair—still from the beachhead of wakefulness.
“Melanie?” he whispered. The question was hardly out of his mouth before he knew the answer: no, not Melanie. Just someone with hair like hers, angry red. This woman was older than Melanie, not much of a resemblance at all. She blinked quickly. The clench of her jaw awoke Lyle.
Something was wrong.
“Are you Dr. Martin?”
He focused on the name tag on the woman’s blue uniform. Stella. She leaned in, near his left ear. A flight attendant; he started to make sense of it. Full face, freckles, an animal smell—fear.
“May I have water?”
“They need a doctor,” said the woman. She lowered her voice further. “In the flight deck. Dr. Martin. Lyle Martin?”
“How do you…”
“The manifest has all the names. Please, are you a medical doctor?”
He glanced around, saw eyes turned his direction. “Flight deck?”
“You were sleeping. On the way to Steamboat. I’m sorry to have awakened you.”
Lyle unclasped his hands. He stretched his arms so that his fingers rested on his knees. He pressed fingertips into jeans, creating sensation. He needed to get his bearings. But, really, he could see this woman’s desperation and it annoyed him. He sensed this infinitesimal delay in recognition would send a laser shot of annoyance, establish a pecking order. It was cruel and he didn’t like that he was doing it and he couldn’t help himself.
“Are you listening? Please.”
“Yes, a doctor.” More or less. Licensed, not practicing.
“Is someone sick?” asked the woman sitting next to Lyle. “Is that the problem?” She was slight, didn’t take up the full width of even these tight quarters, with a mouth that looked to open little when she spoke.
“The pilot asked for a doctor,” the flight attendant addressed the woman. “You know as much as I do from the announcement. I think everything is fine. Please keep the shades down.
“Can you join me, Dr. Martin?”
“Yes, right.”
He stood, bumped his head on the overhead compartment, felt the eyes on him again, looked down. Focused on his right foot, the aged gray-and-maroon running shoe, and understood what it was that had caught his attention. His foot was stable. Not gently rocking as it would be in flight. No engine noise. Hadn’t she said they were on the way to Steamboat? They’d landed?
He followed the flight attendant down the aisle. Around row 12, on the right, a woman with a shaking hand reached to open the shade.
“Please keep it down,” the flight attendant chirped, her voice strained to the point of cracking.
“Why?” asked the woman. “Give me a break,” someone else moaned.
“The pilot said it’s to keep the temperature down. It’s cold on the tarmac.”
“So.”
Tarmac, Lyle thought to himself. Maybe the pilot got sick and there was an emergency landing. Maybe they never took off. The woman in row 12, with thick arms—probably diabetic, Lyle thought—closed her shade. It set off another little annoyance. People are pliant on planes. Powerless, Lyle thought, flying chattel. He kept walking forward. The plane was neither full nor particularly big. One of the midsize deals, smaller even, less than three-dozen people. Cloth seats, a worn plane, but with those little screens mounted behind each one.
Lyle felt the eyes on him. Who, they must be wondering, was this man with the slight hitch in his gait, and light brown hair pasted to the side of his head from sleep? Still, even now, Lyle had the look of someone sturdy, even important, which he once had been.
“Please take your seat,” the flight attendant urged a tall man as they threaded through four rows of first class.
“I need to get something from the overhead,” the man protested. He wore noise-canceling headphones on his ears, and spoke a decibel too loudly.
“Take your seat. Just give us a few minutes.” The flight attendant paused at the flight deck door and waited until Lyle caught up.
“I’m Stella. You’re a doctor, doctor, right? Not a Ph.D. doctor.”
“Both. Infectious disease, immunology. I’m not sure I can be of much help. We’re on the ground?”
The woman nodded.
“In Steamboat?”
“Yes.” But she half shrugged, noncommittal.
“Hang on.” The flight attendant knocked on the flight deck door. A small slider window opened, giving way to an eye. The flight attendant explained she had the doctor, and the eye blinked. Lyle heard a woman’s voice, faintly, say, “Step aside and let him in.”
Lyle looked back at the planeload of passengers to see many of them craning into the aisle to glean his purpose.
He walked into the flight deck.
It was dark—outside, at least. Inside, the controls remained lit up, somewhat, a handful of red lights. The air hung, stale. Seated to his left in a tan chair, a woman, he thought, though her back was to him. She must be the pilot. To his right, facing him, sat the navigator or copilot or whatever. Between them, and overhead, a dense instrument panel that looked like the electrical version of wall-to-ceiling carpeting. In front of each pilot, two screens, each black. Between them, a big handle, which Lyle presumed to be the throttle. Other than that, it was Greek to him.
“I’m Lyle Martin.”
“Eleanor Hall; the first officer is Jerry Weathers. You’re a doctor.”
“Yes.” Thought: Doctor-ish. Enough of one. Used to be. Maybe that’s why they kept asking him. To see if it was still true. “Is someone sick?”
Eleanor reached down to her right to the control panel and flipped a white switch.
Outside, there was an explosion of bright, the airplane’s headlights. They illuminated a swath of pavement, the tarmac. A second later, she turned off the light. But the images were burned into Lyle’s drug-tinged brain: a man in an orange jumpsuit, lying on the ground beside a luggage transporter; two other workers toppled upon each other; a desolate hangar to the right; and the clincher—inside the window of a small airport, a half-dozen would-be passengers or staff. Motionless.
“As near as we can tell,” Eleanor said. “Everyone out there is dead.”
Two
Lyle hated stability and disruption in equal measure. When Melanie started putting sex appointments on their shared Google calendar, he skipped town for three days. And stayed awake for most of it. Niceties give him Olympic-caliber insomnia. He twice turned down speaking gigs that offered fifteen thousand dollars because the anticipation of the event left him ghost-walking until dawn. It wasn’t the public-speaking part so much as the small talk afterward. It left him bobbing on the waves of inauthenticity, agitated, suffering fools, even ones not so foolish.
The vision outside the flight deck reminded him of one of the worst sleepless fits. The waking nightmares. A hole remained in his bedroom wall made with a broom handle attacking a waffle-size tarantula that wasn’t there. Were these dead bodies for real? Were they dead?
“Was that…” Long pause.
“What it looks like,” Eleanor said. “Bodies. Nothing moving out there.”
“Jesus.”
“No one answering distress calls. Nobody responding at all,” the first officer chimed in.
“I didn’t hear any shots,” Lyle said. He figured he must’ve slept through it. Naturally, his mind would go to armed attack—terror or some heavily armed, local madman. Even Lyle, as isolated as he’d made himself the last few years, overheard or read the drumbeat of periodic, indiscriminate mass killings. Just days ago, a guy at the mall in Corpus Christi had mowed down shoppers and left a manifesto about how these “materialists” didn’t understand the true spirit of Christmas.