"It's the fastest way to get you home," she said to him, her voice neutral. "You want to go home, don't you?"
His voice dripped with fearful outrage. "I don't want to see them. I want a forward facing seat."
If the kid would have looked around, he could have seen that there were no forward facing seats.
"It's okay," she said, tugging on his arm again. "They're going home, too."
"I don't want to look at them," he said as she pushed him to a seat nearest one of the small windows. When he didn't move to strap himself in, Pembry bent and did it for him. He gripped the handrails like the oh-shit bar on a roller coaster. "I don't want to think about them."
"I got it." I went forward and shut down the cabin lights. Now only the twin red jump lights illuminated the long metal containers. When I returned, I brought him a pillow.
The ID label on the kid's loose jacket read "Hernandez." He said, "Thank you," but did not let go of the armrests.
Pembry strapped herself in next to him. I stowed their gear and went through my final checklist.
Once in the air, I brewed coffee on the electric stove in the comfort pallet. Nurse Pembry declined, but Hernandez took some. The plastic cup shook in his hands.
"Afraid of flying?" I asked. It wasn't so unusual for the Air Force. "I have some Dramamine… "
"I'm not afraid of flying," he said through clenched teeth. All the while he looked past me, to the boxes lining the hold.
Next the crew. No one bird was assigned the same crew, like in the old days. The MAC took great pride in having men be so interchangeable that a flight crew who had never met before could assemble at a flight line and fly any StarLifter to the ends of the Earth. Each man knew my job, like I knew theirs, inside and out.
I went to the cockpit and found everyone on stations. The second engineer sat closest to the cockpit door, hunched over instrumentation. "Four is evening out now, keep the throttle low," he said. I recognized his hangdog face and his Arkansas drawl, but I could not tell from where. I figured after seven years of flying StarLifters, I had flown with just about everybody at one time or another. He thanked me as I set the black coffee on his table. His flightsuit named him Hadley.
The first engineer sat in the bitchseat, the one usually reserved for a "Black Hatter"-mission inspectors were the bane of all MAC aircrews. He asked for two lumps and then stood and looked out the navigator's dome at the blue rushing past.
"Throttle low on four, got it," replied the pilot. He was the designated Aircraft Commander, but both he and the co-pilot were such typical flight jocks that they could have been the same person. They took their coffee with two creams each. "We're trying to outfly some clear air turbulence, but it won't be easy. Tell your passengers to expect some weather."
"Will do, sir. Anything else?"
"Thank you, Load Davis, that's all."
"Yes, sir."
Finally time to relax. As I went to have a horizontal moment in the crew berth, I saw Pembry snooping around the comfort pallet. "Anything I can help you find?"
"An extra blanket?"
I pulled one from the storage cabinet between the cooking station and the latrine and gritted my teeth. "Anything else?"
"No," she said, pulling a piece of imaginary lint from the wool. "We've flown together before, you know."
"Have we?"
She raised an eyebrow. "I probably ought to apologize."
"No need, ma'am," I said. I dodged around her and opened the fridge. "I could serve an in-flight meal later if you are… "
She placed her hand on my shoulder, like she had on Hernandez, and it commanded my attention. "You do remember me."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I was pretty hard on you during those evac flights."
I wished she'd stop being so direct. "You were speaking your mind, ma'am. It made me a better Loadmaster."
"Still… "
"Ma'am, there's no need." Why can't women figure out that apologies only make things worse?
"Very well." The hardness of her face melted into sincerity, and suddenly it occurred to me that she wanted to talk.
"How's your patient?"
"Resting." Pembry tried to act casual, but I knew she wanted to say more.
"What's his problem?"
"He was one of the first to arrive," she said, "and the first to leave."
"Jonestown? Was it that bad?"
Flashback to our earlier evac flights. The old look, hard and cool, returned instantly. "We flew out of Dover on White House orders five hours after they got the call. He's a Medical Records Specialist, six months in the service, he's never been anywhere before, never saw a day of trauma in his life. Next thing he knows, he's in a South American jungle with a thousand dead bodies."
"A thousand?"
"Count's not in yet, but it's headed that way." She brushed the back of her hand against her cheek. "So many kids."
"Kids?"
"Whole families. They all drank poison. Some kind of cult, they said. Someone told me the parents killed their children first. I don't know what could make a person do that to their own family." She shook her head. "I stayed at Timehri to organize triage. Hernandez said the smell was unimaginable. They had to spray the bodies with insecticide and defend them from hungry giant rats. He said they made him bayonet the bodies to release the pressure. He burned his uniform." She shuffled to keep her balance as the bird jolted.
Something nasty crept down the back of my throat as I tried not to visualize what she said. I struggled not to grimace. "The AC says it may get rough. You better strap in." I walked her back to her seat. Hernandez's mouth gaped as he sprawled across his seat, looking for all the world like he'd lost a bar fight-bad. Then I went to my bunk and fell asleep.
Ask any Loadmaster: after so much time in the air, the roar of engines is something you ignore. You find you can sleep through just about anything. Still, your mind tunes in and wakes up at the sound of anything unusual, like the flight from Yakota to Elmendorf when a jeep came loose and rolled into a crate of MREs. Chipped beef everywhere. You can bet the ground crew heard from me on that one. So it should not come as a shock that I started at the sound of a scream.
On my feet, out of the bunk, past the comfort pallet before I could think. Then I saw Pembry. She was out of her seat and in front of Hernandez, dodging his flailing arms, speaking calmly and below the engine noise. Not him, though.
"I heard them! I heard them! They're in there! All those kids! All those kids!"
I put my hand on him-hard. "Calm down!"
He stopped flailing. A shamed expression came over him. His eyes riveted mine. "I heard them singing."
"Who?"
"The children! All the… " He gave a helpless gesture to the unlighted coffins.
"You had a dream," Pembry said. Her voice shook a little. "I was with you the whole time. You were asleep. You couldn't have heard anything."
"All the children are dead," he said. "All of them. They didn't know. How could they have known they were drinking poison? Who would give their own child poison to drink?" I let go of his arm and he looked at me. "Do you have kids?"