The attendant had climbed out of his seat and come up behind Metz. “Here. Take these. Tranquilizers. Take the edge off. Make you feel good. Here.”
Metz swallowed the two pills whole. “Oh… get me out of here…”
“Sit down.”
Wayne pounded on the doors of the ambulance. “Stop!”
One of the patients shouted, “Stob!”
The attendant said to Metz, “Sit down, pal, before you fall down.”
Suddenly, Metz felt light-headed and his knees felt rubbery. “Oh… what… what was…?”
The attendant said, “Did I say tranquilizers? I meant sedative. I always get them confused.”
“But… I…”
“You cause trouble, you get a Mickey Finn. Lie down.” The attendant helped him to the floor.
“But… I’m not… a… I wasn’t… I’m not… a passenger.”
“I don’t care who you are. You’re in my ambulance, and you’re causing trouble. Now you’re out like a light.”
Metz felt his bladder release, and everything went dark.
Ed Johnson surveyed the scene at the port side of the Straton. The fire chief had declared the aircraft safe from combustion, and rescue workers wearing fire suits and oxygen masks were being lifted on hydraulic platforms into the body of the dead beast.
Johnson saw the main guy with the gold trim and went up to him. “Chief, I’m Ed Johnson, VP of Trans-United. This is my plane.”
“Oh, hey, sorry.”
“Yeah.” He asked, “Anyone alive in there?”
The chief nodded. “Yeah. The rescue workers are reporting on their radios that they have dozens-maybe hundreds in there.” He added, “We’re strapping them into scoop stretchers-immobilizing them-you know? Then we’ll begin to start taking them out.”
Johnson nodded. His mind was working on his own problem.
The chief thought a moment, then said, “These people… They don’t seem right, according to what I’m hearing on the radio… I mean, nobody tried to get out…”
“They’re brain damaged.”
“Jeez.”
“Right. Hey, can you get me in there?”
“Well…”
“It’s my aircraft, Chief. I have to be on it.”
“It could still catch fire,” said the chief, though the possibility had greatly diminished. He added, “Toxic smoke and fumes.”
“I don’t care. I have to be in there with my passengers and crew.” Ed Johnson gave the chief a man-to-man stare, not entirely phony, but partly recalled from the old days before all the politics and compromises. He added, “This is my aircraft, Chief.”
The fire chief called out to one of his men and said, “Get this man a bunker coat, gloves, and an air pack, and get him up into the craft.”
“Thanks,” said Johnson.
As he waited, he stared up at the hole in the side of the craft and said, “What the hell…?”
The chief followed his gaze and said, “Yeah. It’s, like, blown in. One of the guys said he thought it could be a meteor strike. You know? Or a piece of satellite. But the two holes are in the sides — horizontal. The other one is blown out — and a lot bigger-like something went in this side and out the other. Maybe a missile. What do you think?”
“Jesus Christ…” It suddenly hit him. A missile. A runaway missile. A fucking runaway military missile. Or a drone. Something that operated at 60,000 feet and didn’t explode when it hit the Straton. Some military fuckup of the first order, like all those stories about TWA Flight 800. But this one had actually happened. A missile. That had to be it. And he’d been worried about structural failure or a bomb smuggled aboard through lax Trans-United security. And all the time it wasn’t their fault. “Jesus H. Christ. What a fuckup.”
“What’s that?”
Johnson glanced at the fire chief. “Wish me luck.”
“Right.”
Two firemen helped Ed Johnson into a bunker coat, showed him the fireproof gloves and flashlight hanging from Velcro straps on the coat, and fitted him with a Scott Air-Pak. Johnson let the mask hang on his chest. He said, “Let me have one of those axes.”
One of the firemen shrugged and handed Johnson a steel-cut ax. The fireman said, “Be careful with that. It’s sharp as a razor.”
Good. “Thanks.”
A hydraulic lift raised Ed Johnson up to the rear catering-service door, that had been opened by the rescue workers.
Johnson stepped from the sunlight into the cavernous Straton 797, lit now by battery-powered lights. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness.
After half a minute he could see, but he could not comprehend. “Oh, my God…”
Slowly, he made his way up the left aisle, past rescue workers, past dead and injured passengers strapped in their seats or lying on the floor.
He came to the holes in the fuselage and examined the swath of wreckage from left to right. He had no doubt that something had passed through the Straton, something that could be called an Act of God, or an Act of Nature, or an Act of Man-but not an act of Trans-United negligence. The irony of the situation struck him, and he would have laughed at himself or cursed his take-charge personality, but he could philosophize later, when he was on vacation or in jail. Right now, he needed to get into the cockpit and to the data-link printout tray.
He moved forward in his cumbersome bunker coat. The farther he got from the holes, the worse the smoke was. He strapped on his oxygen mask and drove on.
It was darker toward the front of the aircraft, so he took his flashlight and turned the beam toward where the spiral staircase should be.
The beam of light picked out the galley and toilet cubicles and also illuminated figures moving around toward the front of the aircraft-but he couldn’t see the staircase.
He moved up the aisle, past the rescue workers who were clearing the aisles of the dead and putting them in seats. Johnson noticed that the rescue people were also strapping the injured onto stretchers and backboards, as much to protect them from internal injuries as to keep them from wandering around like the living dead. “Jesus Christ, what a mess, what a mess…” Total decompression at 60,000 feet. Let the Straton Aircraft Corporation bright boys explain that to the news media.
Ed Johnson got to the place where the spiral staircase should have been, but it wasn’t there. It was, in fact, lying on its side in the aisle ahead, looking like some giant corkscrew. “Damn…” But then it occurred to him that this was better.
Johnson stopped a passing rescue worker and spoke loudly through his oxygen mask, identifying himself as a National Transportation Safety Board investigator and asked, “Are any of your people in the dome?” He pointed the flashlight up at the circular opening in the ceiling.
The rescue worker looked up at the opening. He said, “No, sir… I don’t think so.” He called out to the people around him, “Hey, do we have anyone up in the dome yet?”
A woman called back, “No. There was that chute deployed there. Everyone up there either got out or is probably dead.” She added, “If we have unconscious people up there, they’ll have to wait. We have our hands full here.”
The rescue worker near Johnson said, “We’ve got about two or three hundred dead and injured here, but I’ll get some people up to the dome-”
“No. You’ve really got your hands full here. Just give me a boost up there, and I’ll look around.”
“Okay.” The man called out for help, and two men appeared who made a cradle by joining hands with the third. “Step up.”
Ed Johnson shouldered the fire ax and stepped onto the three men’s hands and arms, steadying himself on one of their shoulders with his free hand.
One of the men said, “Check first for bleeding, then breathing, then-”
“I’m trained in CPR. Lift!”
The men lifted in unison, and Johnson felt himself lifted-propelled, actually-up and into the opening. He grabbed at the upright newel post that still stood on the floor, and swung himself up into the first-class lounge.
He remained on the floor and looked and listened, the sounds of his own breathing into the oxygen mask filling his ears. The lounge was completely dark, its windows thick with foam. He heard someone moaning nearby and smelled the same evil odors he’d smelled below. God