“I’m coming out, I’d appreciate your—”
“They’re all dead,” the passenger said.
“What?”
The passenger, a short woman with short, bleach-blond hair beneath a gray-and-gold-colored knit hat, wobbled on her feet. She looked stunned and grabbed the side of the door. Eleanor glanced at Lyle, pursed her lips, and said to the passenger, “That’s not at all clear. I’ve got a doctor here and there is evidence that people in the terminal may be ill or have some syndrome. I’m coming out to address that, and it’s very important that we not spread rumors.”
“What? Outside the plane?” the woman said. “No, I’m talking about… I’m saying that—”
It dawned on Eleanor and Lyle at the same time. They jointly pushed open the cockpit door all the way. They saw what she meant.
Row after row of passengers just like the man on the tarmac. Collapsed, tilted, crumpled, absent any signs of life.
“No, no,” Eleanor said.
Lyle pulled on the arm of the passenger and yanked her inside the flight deck. He slammed shut the door.
“What the hell is going on?” Jerry said.
“It’s in here.”
Four
“Cover your nose and mouth,” Jerry said.
They all did it—Jerry, Eleanor, and the passenger—well, not Lyle. It wouldn’t matter. Microbacteria or viruses would easily sneak through fabric or hands. He steadied himself against the wall and he whisked down a catalog of deadly invaders carried by air—the hantavirus and its many species: Puumala, Muleshoe, Black Creek Canal. Carried by rodents, defecated, dried and baked into dust, inhaled by humans. Inhaled. Delivered through the air. There are horses up here, cows, presumably, lots of dry air. Dried.
Where, he thought, was Melanie? And the baby. Got to be, what, three years old now and change? Safe, surely. Wherever they were.
“We have to get out of here,” Jerry said.
“A spore, maybe, something that comes and goes,” Lyle said, shrugging off the idea as quickly as it came, thinking aloud. Then he looked at the passenger. “What happened out there?”
“I…” Tears filled her eyes. “I came out of the bathroom.”
“Where?”
“The back. Stop, stop, just tell me what’s going on!” Freaked out, yes, but not entirely plaintive. Wavering between shock and what Lyle surmised as a basic inner strength. She looked distantly familiar and then he placed her; she’d been sitting next to him, sharing his aisle.
Eleanor stood and Lyle, without being aware of it, put out a gentle hand, trying to calm everyone. He made an equally subconscious decision to deliberately ask the passenger the most basic questions to steady her, so he could get as much information as possible before she imploded.
“We’re trying to figure that out. You can help us. What’s your name?”
She took a second to process it. “Alex.”
“Alex?”
“Jenkins. It’s a dream…”
“Alex, was there a noise? Before people got… sick. Was there a noise?”
“What kind of noise?”
“A scream,” Eleanor said. “Was anyone in pain? I thought I heard voices.”
“I was just going to the bathroom,” she said. She brought a petite hand to the side of her face. Clear-painted fingernails had been gnawed. A nervous person, Lyle thought. Now trying to hold it together.
“And then you came out of the bathroom, and—”
“And I started to walk up the aisle and I noticed this guy was falling out of his seat—”
“Was in the process of falling, or had already fallen?”
“Cut this bullshit out!” Jerry said through the jacket he held to his mouth.
“Jerry…” said Eleanor.
“C’mon, we can play doctor later. We need to make a decision.”
It was obvious what he meant. Stay or go.
Eleanor stood and walked to the door and stared out through the pinhole. “What about the cabin camera?” she said, sounding almost revelatory.
She’d completely forgotten. They had a hidden camera in the cabin that they rarely used; it felt gross, was how she put it. All the airlines had followed suit after JetBlue set the post-9/11 trend. Eleanor turned to Jerry, who fiddled with buttons in the middle instrument panel. The screen in front of him flickered. It was a scene from a horror movie. A bird’s-eye view of motionless passengers. They looked very much like soldiers felled midstep. Lyle took a step in the direction of the screen, not that there was much room to maneuver. He focused at random on one passenger, a man wearing a wool hat, form-fitting his skull, earphones protruding from the sides. His angular face tilted to the right, head almost on his shoulder. Lyle homed in further on the shoulders, pulled slightly back, not totally in repose. What was it? Lyle thought. He took a step closer, leaned in. What is it about the guy?
Then the image flickered. It went in and out. Jerry slapped the screen, willing it to life. But it flickered again, then went out.
“Does it record? Can you go back in time?” Alex asked. It was the first indication she wasn’t too terrified to speak.
Jerry shook his head.
“Is this airtight? The cockpit?” asked Lyle.
“Flight deck,” Jerry corrected him.
“Not the same thing?” Lyle regretted saying it immediately. Of course it was the same. This guy had to mark his territory.
Jerry continued. “And the answer is: the flight deck is more or less airtight. But it doesn’t matter because we already opened the door, so whatever is out there is in here.”
“Not necessarily,” Lyle said, but it came across more as an internal monologue than dialogue.
“Please, I want to hear what the doctor has to say,” Eleanor said, “and then I’ll make a decision.” Nothing subtle about her language; she, and she alone, called the shots.
Jerry tightened his hand on the gun.
“Did you notice if anyone was moving at all?” Lyle asked Alex.
She didn’t answer right away.
“I didn’t see anyone move,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear anything. I thought maybe everyone was asleep. After I saw the first guy, the one fallen over in the aisle, I saw another person folded forward, kind of, like how they tell you to put your face on your lap when you land. I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it but earlier this woman who was sitting in the middle of the plane had been saying she’d seen bodies—on the ground. She said she’d seen something…” Alex looked up and she was searching for a handrail. Lyle didn’t want to fashion one yet; he wanted the information as undiluted as possible. “This woman said something about this country being out of control with guns and rage, and then someone else mentioned Wo Hop To, that gang that shot at the mayor’s office, and an Asian man got really angry.”
“Get to the point,” Jerry said.
“Hold on,” Lyle said. “Everyone was getting anxious?”
She nodded.
“We were scared.”
On one level, of course, it was natural that people would speculate about armed attack or terrorism, especially if someone had seen a body. It was everywhere now, the violence, hardening people and accelerating a non-virtuous cycle: people wanted more police power, then feared government power and purchased more guns. Frustrated citizens hewed more tightly to views that, perversely, accelerated the trend further. More cops, more guns, more guns, more cops.
Everywhere now, in the news, the narrative had become the unzipping of civility, the hint of lawlessness, or a skepticism of the law, those who said it had become politicized. People had to prepare to defend themselves and their values. In the latest news, a group of heavily armed separatists in Oregon was daring law enforcement to come in and toss them off their compound on federal land. They’d taken a federal marshal hostage claiming him a spy and enemy combatant.