Left Behind: A Novel Of Earth's Last Days (3 page)

“He’s gone!”

“I’m sorry?”

“He’s disappeared!”

“Well, I’m sure he slipped off to the washroom while you were sleeping.”

“Would you mind checking for me? And take a blanket.”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m afraid he’s gone off naked. He’s a religious person, and he’ll be terribly embarrassed.”

Buck suppressed a smile when he noticed the woman’s pained expression. He climbed over the sleeping executive on the aisle, who had far exceeded his limit of free drinks, and leaned in to take a blanket from the old woman. Indeed, Harold’s clothes were in a neat pile on his seat, his glasses and hearing aid on top. The pant legs still hung over the edge and led to his shoes and socks. Bizarre, Buck thought. Why so fastidious? He remembered a friend in high school who had a form of epilepsy that occasionally caused him to black out when he seemed perfectly conscious. He might remove his shoes and socks in public or come out of a washroom with his clothes open.

“Does your husband have a history of epilepsy?”

“No.”

“Sleepwalking?”

“No.”

“I’ll be right back.”

The first-class lavs were unoccupied, but as Buck headed for the stairs he found several other passengers in the aisle. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’m looking for someone.”

“Who isn’t?” a woman said.

Buck pushed his way past several people and found lines to the washrooms in business and economy. The pilot brushed past him without a word, and Buck was soon met by the senior flight attendant. “Sir, I need to ask you to return to your seat and fasten your belt.”

“I’m looking for—”

“Everybody is looking for someone,” she said. “We hope to have some information for you in a few minutes. Now, please.” She steered him back toward the stairs, then slipped past him and took the steps two at a time.

Halfway up the stairs Buck turned and surveyed the scene. It was the middle of the night, for heaven’s sake, and as the cabin lights came on, he shuddered. All over the plane, people were holding up clothes and gasping or shrieking that someone was missing.

Somehow he knew this was no dream, and he felt the same terror he had endured awaiting his death in Israel. What was he going to tell Harold’s wife? You’re not the only one? Lots of people left their clothes in their seats?

As he hurried back to his seat, his mind searched its memory banks for anything he had ever read, seen, or heard of any technology that could remove people from their clothes and make them disappear from a decidedly secure environment. Whoever did this, were they on the plane? Would they make demands? Would another wave of disappearances be next? Would he become a victim? Where would he find himself?

Fear seemed to pervade the cabin as he climbed over his sleeping seatmate again. He stood and leaned over the back of the chair ahead of him. “Apparently many people are missing,” he told the old woman. She looked as puzzled and fearful as Buck himself felt.

He sat down as the intercom came on and the captain addressed the passengers. After instructing them to return to their assigned seats, the captain explained, “I’m going to ask the flight attendants to check the lavatories and be sure everybody is accounted for. Then I’ll ask them to pass out foreign entry cards. If anyone in your party is missing, I would like you to fill out the card in his or her name and list every shred of detail you can think of, from date of birth to description.

“I’m sure you all realize that we have a very troubling situation. The cards will give us a count of those missing, and I’ll have something to give authorities. My first officer, Mr. Smith, will now make a cursory count of empty seats. I will try to contact Pan-Continental. I must tell you, however, that our location makes it extremely difficult to communicate with the ground without long delays. Even in this satellite age, we’re in a pretty remote area. As soon as I know anything, I’ll convey it to you. In the meantime, I appreciate your cooperation and calm.”

Buck watched as the first officer came rushing from the cockpit, hatless and flushed. He hurried down one aisle and up the other, eyes darting from seat to seat as the flight attendants passed out cards.

Buck’s seatmate roused, drooling, when an attendant asked if anyone in his party was missing. “Missing? No. And there’s nobody in this party but me.” He curled up again and went back to sleep, unaware.

The first officer had been gone only a few minutes when Rayford heard his key in the cockpit door and it banged open. Christopher flopped into his chair, ignored the seat belt, and sat with his head in his hands.

“What’s going on, Ray?” he said. “We got us more than a hundred people gone with nothing but their clothes.”

“That many?”

“Yeah, like it’d be better if it was only fifty? How the heck are we gonna explain landing with less passengers than we took off with?”

Rayford shook his head, still working the radio, trying to reach someone, anyone, in Greenland or an island in the middle of nowhere. But they were too remote even to pick up a radio station for news. Finally he connected with a Concorde several miles away heading the other direction. He nodded to Christopher to put on his own earphones.

“You got enough fuel to get back to the States, over?” the pilot asked Rayford.

He looked at Christopher, who nodded and whispered, “We’re halfway.”

“I could make Kennedy,” Rayford said.

“Forget it,” came the reply. “Nothing’s landing in New York. Two runways still open in Chicago. That’s where we’re going.”

“We came from Chicago. Can’t I put down at Heathrow?”

“Negative. Closed.”

“Paris?”

“Man, you’ve got to get back where you came from. We left Paris an hour ago, got the word what’s happening, and were told to go straight to Chicago.”

“What’s happening, Concorde?”

“If you don’t know, why’d you put out the Mayday?”

“I’ve got a situation here I don’t even want to talk about.”

“Hey, friend, it’s all over the world, you know?”

“Negative, I don’t know,” Rayford said. “Talk to me.”

“You’re missing passengers, right?”

“Roger. More than a hundred.”

“Whoa! We lost—nearly fifty.”

“What do you make of it, Concorde?”

“First thing I thought of was spontaneous combustion, but there would have been smoke, residue. These people materially disappeared. Only thing I can compare it to is the old Star Trek shows where people got dematerialized and rematerialized, beamed all over the place.”

“I sure wish I could tell my people their loved ones were going to reappear just as quickly and completely as they disappeared,” Rayford said.

“That’s not the worst of it, Pan Heavy. People everywhere have disappeared. Orly lost air-traffic controllers and ground controllers. Some planes have lost flight crews. Where it’s daylight there are car pileups, chaos everywhere. Planes down all over and at every major airport.”

“So this was a spontaneous thing?”

“Everywhere at once, Just a little under an hour ago.”

“I was almost hoping it was something on this plane. Some gas, some malfunction.”

“That it was selective, you mean, over.”

Rayford caught the sarcasm.

“I see what you mean, Concorde. Gotta admit this is somewhere we’ve never been before.”

“And never want to be again. I keep telling myself it’s a bad dream.”

“A nightmare, over.”

“Roger, but it’s not, is it?”

“What are you going to tell your passengers, Concorde?”

“No clue. You, over?”

“The truth.”

“Can’t hurt now. But what’s the truth? What do we know?”

“Not a blessed thing.”

“Good choice of words, Pan Heavy. You know what some people are saying, over?”

“Roger,” Rayford said. “Better it’s people gone to heaven than some world power doing this with fancy rays.”

“Word we get is that every country has been affected. See you in Chicago?”

“Roger”

Rayford Steele looked at Christopher, who began changing the settings to turn the monstrous wide-body around and get it headed back toward the States. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Rayford said over the intercom, “we’re not going to be able to land in Europe. We’re headed back to Chicago. We’re almost exactly halfway to our original destination, so we will not have a fuel problem. I hope this puts your minds at ease somewhat. I will let you know when we are close enough to begin using the telephones. Until I do, you will do yourself a favor by not trying.”

When the captain had come back on the intercom with the information about returning to the United States, Buck Williams was surprised to hear applause throughout the cabin. Shocked and terrified as everyone was, most were from the States and wanted at least to return to familiarity to sort this thing out. Buck nudged the businessman on his right. “I’m sorry, friend, but you’re going to want to be awake for this.”

The man peered at Buck with a disgusted look and slurred, “If we’re not crashing, don’t bother me.”

When the Pan-Continental 747 was finally within satellite communications range of the United States, Captain Rayford Steele connected with an all-news radio outlet and learned the far-reaching effects of the disappearance of people from every continent. Communication lines were jammed. Medical, technical, and service people were among the missing all over the world. Every civil service agency was on full emergency status, trying to handle the unending tragedies. Rayford remembered the El-train disaster in Chicago years before and how the hospitals and fire and police units brought everyone in to work. He could imagine that now, multiplied thousands of times.

Even the newscasters’ voices were terror filled, as much as they tried to mask it. Every conceivable explanation was proffered, but overshadowing all such discussion and even coverage of the carnage were the practical aspects. What people wanted from the news was simple information on how to get where they were going and how to contact their loved ones to determine if they were still around. Rayford was instructed to get in a multistate traffic pattern that would allow him to land at O’Hare at a precise moment. Only two runways were open, and every large plane in the country seemed headed that way. Thousands were dead in plane crashes and car pileups. Emergency crews were trying to clear expressways and runways, all the while grieving over loved ones and coworkers who had disappeared. One report said that so many cabbies had disappeared from the cab corral at O’Hare that volunteers were being brought in to move the cars that had been left running with the former drivers’ clothes still on the seats.

Cars driven by people who spontaneously disappeared had careened out of control, of course. The toughest chore for emergency personnel was to determine who had disappeared, who was killed, and who was injured, and then to communicate that to the survivors.

When Rayford was close enough to communicate to the tower at O’Hare, he asked if they would try to connect him by phone to his home. He was laughed off. “Sorry, Captain, but phone lines are so jammed and phone personnel so spotty that the only hope is to get a dial tone and use a phone with a redial button.”

Rayford filled the passengers in on the extent of the phenomenon and pleaded with them to remain calm. “There is nothing we can do on this plane that will change the situation. My plan is to get you on the ground as quickly as possible in Chicago so you can have access to some answers and, I hope, some help.”

The in-flight phone embedded in the back of the seat in front of Buck Williams was not assembled with external modular connections the way most phones were. Buck imagined that Pan-Con Airlines would soon be replacing these relics to avoid complaints from computer users. But Buck guessed that inside the phone the connection was standard and that if he could somehow get in there without damaging the phone, he could connect his computer’s modem directly to the line. His own cellular phone was not cooperating at this altitude.

In front of him, Harold’s wife rocked and whimpered, her face buried in her hands. The executive next to Buck snored. Before drinking himself into oblivion soon after takeoff, he had said something about a major meeting in Scotland. Would he be surprised by the view upon landing!

All around Buck, people cried, prayed, and talked. Flight attendants offered snacks and drinks, but few accepted. Having preferred an aisle seat for a little more legroom, Buck was now glad he was partially hidden near the window. He removed from his computer bag a tiny tool kit he had never expected to use, and went to work on the phone.

Disappointed to find no modular connection even inside the housing, he decided to play amateur electrician. These phone lines always have the same color wires, he decided, so he opened his computer and cut the wire leading to the female connector. Inside the phone, he cut the wire and sliced off the protective rubber coating. Sure enough, the four inner wires from both computer and phone looked identical. In a few minutes, he had spliced them together.

Buck tapped out a quick message to his executive editor, Steve Plank, in New York, telling of his destination. “I will bang out all I know, and I’m sure this will be just one of many similar stories. But at least this will be up to the minute, as it happens. Whether it will be of any use, I don’t know. The thought hits me, Steve, that you may be among the missing. How would I know? You know my computer address. Let me know you’re still with us.”

He stored the note and set up his modem to send it to New York in the background, while he was working on his own writing. At the top of the screen a status bar flashed every twenty seconds, informing him that the connection to his ramp on the information superhighway was busy. He kept working.

The senior flight attendant startled him several pages into his own reflections and feelings. “What in the world are you doing?” she said, leaning in to stare at the mess of wires leading from his laptop to the in-flight phone. “I can’t let you do that.”

He glanced at her name tag. “Listen, beautiful Hattie, are we or are we not looking at the end of the world as we know it?”

“Don’t patronize me, sir. I can’t let you sit here and vandalize airline property.”