Four Past Midnight (15 page)

He let the engines die and just sat there for a moment. Now there was no sound but the faint whisper of an auxiliary power unit—one of four—at the rear of the plane. Brian's hand moved toward a switch marked INTERNAL POWER and actually touched it before drawing his hand back. Suddenly he didn't want to shut down completely. There was no reason not to, but the voice of instinct was very strong.

Besides,
he thought,
I don't think there's anyone around to bitch about wasting fuel ... what little there is left to waste.

Then he unbuckled his safety harness and got up.

“Now what, Brian?” Nick asked. He had also risen, and Brian noticed for the first time that Nick was a good four inches taller than he was. He thought:
I have been in charge. Ever since this weird thing happened
—
ever since we discovered it had happened, to be more accurate
—
I have been in charge. But I think that's going to change very shortly.

He discovered he didn't care. Flying the 767 into the clouds had taken every ounce of courage he possessed, but he didn't expect any thanks for keeping his head and doing his job; courage was one of the things he got paid for. He remembered a pilot telling him once, “They pay us a hundred thousand dollars or more a year, Brian, and they really do it for just one reason. They know that in almost every pilot's career, there are thirty or forty seconds when he might actually make a difference. They pay us not to freeze when those seconds finally come.”

It was all very well for your brain to tell you that you had to go down, clouds or no clouds, that there was simply no choice; your nerve-endings just went on screaming their old warning, telegraphing the old high-voltage terror of the unknown. Even Nick, whatever he was and whatever he did on the ground, had wanted to back away from the clouds when it came to the sticking point. He had needed Brian to do what needed to be done. He and all the others had needed Brian to be their guts. Now they were down and there were no monsters beneath the clouds; only this weird silence and one deserted luggage train sitting beneath the wing of a Delta 727.

But Nick had asked him a question, and Brian supposed he deserved an answer.

“Now we get off the airplane and see what's what,” he said, brushing past the Englishman.

Nick put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Do you think—”

Brian felt a flash of uncharacteristic anger. He shook loose from Nick's hand. “I think we get off the plane,” he said. “There's no one to extend a jetway or run us out a set of stairs, so I think we use the emergency slide. After that, you think.
Matey
.”

He pushed through into first class ... and almost fell over the drinks trolley, which lay on its side. There was a lot of broken glass and an eye-watering stink of alcohol. He stepped over it. Nick caught up with him at the rear of the first-class compartment.

“Brian, if I said something to offend you, I'm sorry. You did a hell of a fine job.”

“You didn't offend me,” Brian said. “It's just that in the last ten hours or so I've had to cope with a pressure leak over the Pacific Ocean, finding out that my ex-wife died in a stupid apartment fire in Boston, and that the United States has been cancelled. I'm feeling a little zonked.”

He walked through business class into the main cabin. For a moment there was utter silence; they only sat there, looking at him from their white faces with dumb incomprehension.

Then Albert Kaussner began to applaud.

After a moment, Bob Jenkins joined him... and Don Gaffney .. and Laurel Stevenson. The bald man looked around and also began to applaud.

“What is it?” Dinah asked Laurel. “What's happening?”

“It's the captain,” Laurel said. She began to cry. “It's the captain who brought us down safe.”

Then Dinah began to applaud, too.

Brian stared at them, dumbfounded. Standing behind him, Nick joined in. They unbuckled their belts and stood in front of their seats, applauding him. The only three who did not join in were Bethany, who had fainted, the bearded man, who was still snoring in the back row, and Craig Toomy, who panned them all with his strange lunar gaze and then began to rip a fresh strip from the airline magazine.

Brian felt his face flush—this was just too goony. He raised his hands but for a moment they went on, regardless.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please... please ... I assure you, it was a very routine landing—”

“Shucks, ma‘am—t'warn't nothin,” Bob Jenkins said, doing a very passable Gary Cooper imitation, and Albert burst out laughing. Beside him, Bethany's eyes fluttered open and she looked around, dazed.

“We got down alive, didn't we?” she said. “My God! That's great! I thought we were all dead meat!”

“Please,” Brian said. He raised his arms higher and now he felt weirdly like Richard Nixon, accepting his party's nomination for four more years. He had to struggle against sudden shrieks of laughter. He couldn't do that; the passengers wouldn't understand. They wanted a hero, and he was elected. He might as well accept the position... and use it. He still had to get them off the plane, after all. “If I could have your attention, please!”

They stopped applauding one by one and looked at him expectantly—all except Craig, who threw his magazine aside in a sudden resolute gesture. He unbuckled his seatbelt, rose, and stepped out into the aisle, kicking a drift of paper strips aside. He began to rummage around in the compartment above his seat, frowning with concentration as he did so.

“You've looked out the windows, so you know as much as I do,” Brian said. “Most of the passengers and all of the crew on this flight disappeared while we were asleep. That's crazy enough, but now we appear to be faced with an even crazier proposition. It looks like a lot of other people have disappeared as well ... but logic suggests that other people must be around
somewhere.
We survived whatever-it-was, so others must have survived it as well.”

Bob Jenkins, the mystery writer, whispered something under his breath. Albert heard him but could not make out the words. He half-turned in Jenkins's direction just as the writer muttered the two words again. This time Albert caught them. They were
false logic.

“The best way to deal with this, I think, is to take things one step at a time. Step one is exiting the plane.”

“I bought a ticket to Boston,” Craig Toomy said in a calm, rational voice. “Boston is where I want to go.”

Nick stepped out from behind Brian's shoulder. Craig glanced at him and his eyes narrowed. For a moment he looked like a bad-tempered housecat again. Nick raised one hand with the fingers curled in against his palm and scissored two of his knuckles together in a nose-pinching gesture. Craig Toomy, who had once been forced to stand with a lit match between his toes while his mother sang “Happy Birthday,” got the message at once. He had always been a quick study. And he could wait.

“We'll have to use the emergency slide,” Brian said, “so I want to review the procedures with you. Listen carefully, then form a single-file line and follow me to the front of the aircraft.”

Four minutes later, the forward entrance of American Pride's Flight 29 swung inward. Some murmured conversation drifted out of the opening and seemed to fall immediately dead on the cool, still air. There was a hissing sound and a large clump of orange fabric suddenly bloomed in the doorway. For a moment it looked like a strange hybrid sunflower. It grew and took shape as it fell, its surface inflating into a plump ribbed slide. As the foot of the slide struck the tarmac there was a low
pop!
and then it just leaned there, looking like a giant orange air mattress.

Brian and Nick stood at the head of the short line in the portside row of first class.

“There's something wrong with the air out there,” Nick said in a low voice.

“What do you mean?” Brian asked. He pitched his voice even lower. “Poisoned?”

“No... at least I don't think so. But it has no smell, no taste.”

“You're nuts,” Brian said uneasily.

“No I'm not,” Nick said. “This is an
airport,
mate, not a bloody hayfield, but can you smell oil or gas? I can't.”

Brian sniffed. And there was nothing. If the air was poisoned—he didn't believe it was, but if—it was a slow-acting toxin. His lungs seemed to be processing it just fine. But Nick was right. There was no smell. And that other, more elusive, quality that the Brit had called taste ... that wasn't there, either. The air outside the open door tasted utterly neutral. It tasted canned.

“Is something wrong?” Bethany Simms asked anxiously. “I mean, I'm not sure if I really want to know if there is, but—”

“There's nothing wrong,” Brian said. He counted heads, came up with ten, and turned to Nick again. “That guy in the back is still asleep. Do you think we should wake him up?”

Nick thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Let's not. Haven't we got enough problems for now without having to play nursemaid to a bloke with a hangover?”

Brian grinned. They were his thoughts exactly. “Yes, I think we do. All right—you go down first, Nick. Hold the bottom of the slide. I'll help the rest off.”

“Maybe
you'd
better go first. In case my loudmouthed friend decides to cut up rough about the unscheduled stop again.” He pronounced
unscheduled
as
un-shed-youled.

Brian glanced at the man in the crew-necked jersey. He was standing at the rear of the line, a slim monogrammed briefcase in one hand, staring blankly at the ceiling. His face had all the expression of a department-store dummy. “I'm not going to have any trouble with him,” he said, “because I don't give a crap what he does. He can go or stay, it's all the same to me.”

Nick grinned. “Good enough for me, too. Let the grand exodus begin.”

“Shoes off?”

Nick held up a pair of black kidskin loafers.

“Okay—away you go.” Brian turned to Bethany. “Watch closely, miss—you're next.”

“Oh god—I
hate
shit like this.”

Bethany nevertheless crowded up beside Brian and watched apprehensively as Nick Hopewell addressed the slide. He jumped, raising both legs at the same time so he looked like a man doing a seat-drop on a trampoline. He landed on his butt and slid to the bottom. It was neatly done; the foot of the slide barely moved. He hit the tarmac with his stocking feet, stood up, twirled around, and made a mock bow with his arms held out behind him.

“Easy as pie!” he called up. “Next customer!”

“That's you, miss,” Brian said. “Is it Bethany?”

“Yes,” she said nervously. “I don't think I can do this. I flunked gym all three semesters and they finally let me take home ec again instead.”

“You'll do fine,” Brian told her. He reflected that people used the slide with much less coaxing and a lot more enthusiasm when there was a threat they could see—a hole in the fuselage or a fire in one of the portside engines. “Shoes off?”

Bethany's shoes—actually a pair of old pink sneakers—were off, but she tried to withdraw from the doorway and the bright-orange slide just the same. “Maybe if I could just have a drink before—”

“Mr. Hopewell's holding the slide and you'll be fine,” Brian coaxed, but he was beginning to be afraid he might have to push her. He didn't want to, but if she didn't jump soon, he would. You couldn't let them go to the end of the line until their courage returned; that was the big no-no when it came to the escape slide. If you did that, they
all
wanted to go to the end of the line.

“Go on, Bethany,” Albert said suddenly. He had taken his violin case from the overhead compartment and held it tucked under one arm. “I'm scared to death of that thing, and if you go, I'll have to.”

She looked at him, surprised. “Why?”

Albert's face was very red. “Because you're a girl,” he said simply. “I know I'm a sexist rat, but that's it.”

Bethany looked at him a moment longer, then laughed and turned to the slide. Brian had made up his mind to push her if she looked around or drew back again, but she didn't. “Boy, I wish I had some grass,” she said, and jumped.

She had seen Nick's seat-drop maneuver and knew what to do, but at the last moment she lost her courage and tried to get her feet under her again. As a result, she skidded to one side when she came down on the slide's bouncy surface. Brian was sure she was going to tumble off, but Bethany herself saw the danger and managed to roll back. She shot down the slope on her right side, one hand over her head, her blouse rucking up almost to the nape of her neck. Then Nick caught her and she stepped off.

“Oh boy,” she said breathlessly. “Just like being a kid again.”

“Are you all right?” Nick asked.

“Yeah. I think I might have wet my pants a little, but I'm okay.”

Nick smiled at her and turned back to the slide.

Albert looked apologetically at Brian and extended the violin case. “Would you mind holding this for me? I'm afraid if I fall off the slide, it might get broken. My folks'd kill me. It's a Gretch.”

Brian took it. His face was calm and serious, but he was smiling inside. “Could I look? I used to play one of these about a thousand years ago.”