“Jesus, we’re digressing way off course.” The pilot put her hands out, palms down, and pressed on the air. Like Okay, let’s get grounded here. She’s succeeded, though, in letting Lyle know his place on this doomed ship. “Would you mind checking for the medical stuff above the coats? I think that dimwit flight attendant from Montana left it there last time?”
Lyle wondered if Eleanor was toying with Jerry, creating another common enemy in some dimwit flight attendant from the past, pushing her agenda, using humor and authority, flirtation and fear. Or was Lyle misinterpreting? It filled him with dread. Human beings could be so manipulative, he thought. I have to get out of here. Lyle had an insatiable urge to find the drink cart and down two small plastic bottles —of anything, hell, even gin—and escape. He wasn’t going to die on this airplane, asphyxiate, victimized at last by a syndrome he couldn’t see, or, worse, hit by an errant bullet that Jerry fired at the captain to keep her from going down the hatch; or in a final dying cry of unrequited love.
Eleanor brought her hands to her head and rubbed her temples. “Jerry, is there an internal ladder—beneath the wheel bay?”
“Eleanor, please!”
“Check for an immune response,” Lyle said suddenly.
He looked out the window, let all their eyes come to him.
“What are you talking about?”
“When you go out there,” he said, “you’re going to want to look for an immune system response. Even if they’re dead, check for a mucogenic response, a pretty good indicator that T-cells have kicked in. If it’s nerve gas, or something like that, you’re likely to see…”
“What kind of doctor are you again?” Jerry asked.
“I.D.—infectious disease.” Deliberate with the jargon. “Subspecialty in immunology.”
“Where?”
“UCSF.” There was an empty office there now where he used to hang his shingle. Lyle reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet and, from it, an old business card he’d stuffed into his wallet for the conference he was attending.
Jerry glanced at it. “Clinical professor,” he said. “Is that a real kind of professor?”
“Jerry, stop it,” Eleanor said. Like What’s your deal?
“In any case, look for tachycardia…” Lyle said.
“What?”
“Accelerated heart rate. Sorry, pardon the terminology.” He wasn’t sorry at all. It was part of his plan to sound complicated. “That could be a sign of any number of things. Should you start feeling faint, strange, any symptoms, try like hell to—”
“Hold on,” Jerry said.
“I’ll slow it down,” Lyle said. “The point is, I think you’ll be okay. Jerry, I’m sure, will have things under control in here.”
Eleanor’s eyes bored a hole in him and Lyle tried to remain placid and not show that he’d overplayed his hand. Then Eleanor and Jerry exchanged a look, like parents silently communicating about a child, in this case, the unruly Lyle. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, teeth clenched. She could see where this was going, didn’t like it one bit, but was running out of ideas herself. And she couldn’t risk leaving the plane herself and putting Jerry in charge.
“Captain,” Jerry said, “maybe he’s got a point.”
“How’s that?”
“Dr. Martin,” Jerry said. “Would you be able to… could you diagnose the guy on the ground—could you tell us something about him?”
Lyle let the moment wash over him, a feeling of euphoria, trying to hold a poker face so as not to let them know he wanted off the plane, away from these people, all of it.
“Give us a minute,” Eleanor said.
“Perfect.”
“Perfect?”
“Sorry, I’ll just…” Rather than finish the sentence, he moved a step backward while the pilot and first officer put their heads together and whispered. Alex, the fourth wheel, shuffled with him. They glanced at each other, a silent moment of recognition that they’d been sitting in the same row, now fellow travelers in a wholly different journey.
“Do you…” Dr. Martin said. “You have a limp.”
She looked down.
“Are you hurt?” he followed up.
“No. No. It’s nothing. When I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis and it’s really under control.”
She said this like she wanted to move on; her clunky right knee embarrassed her. Dr. Martin honored her sensitivity but took the detail deeply inside. That was an autoimmune condition; did that have anything to do with the fact she was standing here and everyone else in the airplane was dead or sick? Might she have some internal protection?
“What do you do?” Dr. Martin said.
“Do?”
“For work.”
“Technology. Engineer, on the sales side.”
“Oh yeah?” He studied her. The hard eyes she tried to soften. Deferential but not really. He tried to place her demographic. Her bleach-blond hair suggested she might be part of the punk technology crowd. They could be a logical group, all about looking ahead.
“Good job these days. Was,” Lyle said.
“Sorry?”
“Before the apocalypse. Was a good job.” He tried to ignore the heated whispers coming from the first officer. “Please, Eleanor. Just listen…”
“You’re a doctor?” Alex asked.
Lyle nodded.
“Are we sick?” She had her arms crossed.
“I don’t… I don’t know. Do you feel anything?”
She gritted her teeth. “I was supposed to go on a hike,” she said, shaking her head. “Sponsored by the company. Get out into the air, spend some quiet time. Part of this new Stay Focused regime at work. We’ve got this new manager who…” Bitterness in her voice. Lyle stopped listening and experienced a sensation that never ceased to surprise or bother him. It was a feeling that often left him bewildered and yet he couldn’t ignore. It was an awareness that he’d noticed a clue. The moment would leave him paused. From the outside, he looked stunned, like a fish that took a blow to the head. Melanie thought it a kind of mutated version of pattern recognition: he’d hear a sound or see a seemingly random piece of evidence—anything from a medical symptom to the weather at an outbreak site to the presence of a particular government official—and he’d sense it belonged to a relevant pattern. He just didn’t know which pattern. Like seeing a crucial puzzle piece without knowing what picture it fit into. It would send his brain into a cascade, a kind of free-association free flow, often leaving him so inwardly focused that whomever he was talking to would wonder if he’d gone mute.
He looked outside, then at Eleanor and Jerry, back to the tech engineer, down at the door to the hold, slightly ajar, letting in air. What was it about her? Or was it this situation? Something was ringing too familiar.
He thought back to those last days, searching for some connection: the ill-fated trip to Tanzania, the whimper of an end with Melanie, ignominiously sleeping on his couch at the university, the mounting skepticism about humanity. There was a connection there somewhere, a puzzle piece that fit and he couldn’t grasp it.