We Will Be Crashing Shortly (9 page)

“The airport,” Flo replied, producing from her purse a pack of cigarettes and then the ticket I’d found at Colgate’s house.

“Oh, good, you got the baggage claim ticket,” I said, recalling that Ash had said he needed it for something.

“It’s not for baggage, it’s for remains,” Flo said as she lit her cigarette and inhaled.

“What?”

“It’s not for a suitcase,” Flo spoke louder this time, releasing the smoke from her lungs. “It’s for a coffin.”

Before we reached the airport, we exited onto Virginia Avenue and pulled over so I could crawl into the small storage area behind the bench seat so Otis could sneak me inside the WorldAir employee parking lot. I had a badge of my own now—as opposed to the past, when I had to impersonate my flight attendant mother to gain access to the underbelly of the concourse—but I couldn’t risk using it to enter the employee parking lot for fear the police would be alerted. Security guards stop each auto entering the parking lot to swipe our cards through a magnetic reader, much like a credit-card transaction, and just like a credit-card transaction it’s a sure-fire way to triangulate someone’s whereabouts.

“What about you?” I asked Otis. Obviously the police were in pursuit of him as well.

“Me? I never use my own.” He opened his glove compartment to reveal a small collection of airline-employee badges.

“You have a bunch of counterfeit badges?” I marveled.

“These aren’t counterfeit.” He feigned offense. “These are authentic. They all work perfectly.”

I should not have been surprised that Otis had a connection inside security that supplied him with newly minted badges. They were probably only good for a small window of time, and needed to be renewed periodically. I made a mental note to inform Officer Ned about this on a need-to-know basis. Otis handed a badge to Flo.

“This badge is for an African-American man,” she objected.

“Close enough. They never look,” Otis reminded her. “As long as it swipes clean they don’t care.”

“You’re right.” Flo clipped the badge to her collar.

“Why don’t I get one?” I asked. “Why do I have to hide? Wait, never mind.” I ducked back down. I’m the famous poorly behaved heiress, that’s why. Thanks, Roundtree.

We sailed through parking-lot security and pulled into a space at the back of one of the bus stops. WorldAir utilized an employee bus system, collecting workers at designated spots throughout the massive parking property. Those buses then deposited the workers at different concourses throughout the Atlanta airport. For example, if a flight attendant needed to sign in for an international flight, she would catch the bus that took her to the belly of E or F Concourse. Flight attendants with domestic destinations go to a different location, and baggage handlers somewhere different still, and so on. I wasn’t sure where Otis planned for us to go, especially since I had no badge, but then Flo grabbed one from his glove compartment and clipped it to my shirt with the picture facing inward.

“No one ever asks,” she said, referring to an airline security protocol in which employees are required to stop anyone without clearly visible ID to produce their badge on demand. She was wrong, though. I knew three people at least who would demand ID without hesitation: Officer Ned, LaVonda, and me. We couldn’t be the only ones, but Flo is right in her inference that security measures have become generally complacent at WorldAir.

Each parking stop offered a covered shed that housed a community bulletin board, where employees pinned announcements that covered everything from cars for sale, missing pets, places for rent, uniform pieces for trade, etc. I noticed two missing-person posters, which were by themselves not unusual. Airline employees were a natural resource for finding missing persons, because often it turns out the people were missing on purpose and trying to get out of town, but what made these posters unusual was that the missing persons
were
airline employees. “Have You Seen John Lassateur?” one read above the face of a smiling white male in his thirties. A large wine-colored birthmark covered the left side of his neck and jaw. “He was last seen entering the employee parking lot on Thursday, March 27. If you have any information or know of his whereabouts, please contact . . .” A bus pulled to a stop in front of us and the driver opened the door.

“Hi, Otis,” she said.

Otis sprang onto the platform ahead of us and engaged the diminutive, sweet-natured driver in an animated conversation about how cancer was really the result of a government chemical experiment gone awry. She happily bantered with him on the subject while Flo and I slinked into the empty bus behind Otis and sat down. Soon Otis took the seat in front of us and we were on our way.

When the bus cleared the last security hurdle and rolled onto the tarmac to join the buzzing hive that made up the bedrock of the Atlanta airport, I sat back and relaxed for the first time since that morning. For all its flaws, WorldAir was a haven for me. In the past it provided a port in the storm when my world was upside down—dead father, institutionalized mother, sociopathic criminal for a stepfather. For me, the WorldAir employee lounges provided a place of stability and escape. The employees themselves were like a league of comrades. I loved being part of it, even if my connection at the time was deceitful. The crisp uniforms, the employees with purpose, the order, the accountability—even if it was a false front, it created an atmosphere in which I could breathe easier and calm down.

“You okay?” Flo asked. I straightened immediately.
Christ
, I thought,
I’m crying
.

“Just thinking about Malcolm,” I told her and collected myself.

She put her arm around me and took a drink from her flask of vodka. “Everything’s gonna be . . . wait, why are we stopping?”

Otis stood up to assess the situation, just as the driver opened the bus door. “Hi, Hackman,” she said pleasantly. “What happened to your arm?” Hackman answered by reaching in his lunch box, retrieving a firearm, and shooting her in the face.

Flo and I screamed, sprang from our seats and ran to the rear of the bus. Otis roared in anger and dove toward Hackman, hitting him in the midsection. A wild shot rang out and ricocheted around the bus interior, grazing my hair. I flipped the latch on the emergency window exit and almost broke my foot trying to kick it open. Flo was already trying on the other side, with equal futility. Just our luck—rusted shut.

Hackman tackled Otis and they both flew onto the massive dashboard of the bus, pummeling each other with blows. The poor bus driver wilted lifeless in her seat while the two men did their best to kill each other. As they tumbled onto the aisle, Otis hit and kicked at Hackman’s gun hand viciously. Hackman held on, though. It was dark outside as well as inside the bus. The whole while motorized luggage tugs were zipping around us like oblivious birds. If anyone was suspicious of an employee bus sitting at a cold stop along the tarmac, it wasn’t evident. Other buses seemed to circumvent us without a thought, and no aircraft was in imminent need of us to move in order to clear a gate. Two more bullets fired, creating a deadly dodgeball effect for me and Flo. I pulled the lever on the emergency roof exit and thankfully it gave way.

The rooftop emergency exit on a bus like this was about the size of a toilet seat. Ever since they abolished the weight limit for flight attendants in the early nineties, some of them took that as freedom to explore their inner plus-sized model—and good for them—but I always wondered what would happen to them in a situation like this one, when our only option was to shimmy through a hole in the roof hardly big enough to allow a giraffe to poke through his head. I’m skinny but gangly, and I bruised my hip bones badly while pulling my way through. Tiny Flo, on the other hand, sailed up and out like a Romanian acrobat, of course. I swear all that tobacco and alcohol were toughening her up like dried horsehide. Once on the roof, we stood up only to have the bus literally squeal away from underneath our feet. The two of us stumbled, then fell, then rolled off the back of the bus. I hit the ground first, like a sack of wet cement, and broke Flo’s fall.

We lay groaning on the ground as the bus barreled into the distance without us. We had no idea who was behind the wheel or even if Otis was still alive. After what seemed like forever, an ambulance finally came skidding to a halt in front of us. Thank God, I thought, waving to the driver to help. The driver leaned on his horn and hollered out his window. “What the hell are you doing in the middle of the taxiway? Get out! We have an emergency to get to!”

The instant we inched out of the way, the ambulance whizzed past us. I sat back down on the tarmac to catch my breath, while Flo pulled on my arm in a futile attempt to get me to move. More work vehicles barreled by, followed by honks and curses of the drivers. A few moments later I regained my strength, and started to run in the direction in which we’d last seen Otis, but Flo called to me to stop.

“Kid, look.” She pointed to a tug train pulling four flat carts. The last of the carts contained, in three stacks of two, six identical air trays, or CCUs as they’re known in the industry, which stands for “casket combination units.” It’s the only way WorldAir will ship human remains. I set out for them in a dead run.

Here’s why I was terrified at the thought of my friend Malcolm in combination with a baggage claim for a casket—I mean besides the obvious. First, human remains are not allowed to be transported by air unless the container is hermetically sealed. Which means that anyone with ideas to stow away on a cheap flight to Fiji by booking themselves as human remains better know how to hold their breath for hours at a time, otherwise they’re going to arrive looking like a mummy that got sealed in its sarcophagus a few years too soon.

The same goes for anyone hoping to transport kidnap victims, if you ask me. I’m not an expert on this by far, but I do know that the airlines have spent untold hours thinking of ways a person can smuggle a breathing human across country lines, and still they haven’t touched the tip of the Mt. Everest of ingenuity that is the human imagination. Last year a Cuban girl shipped herself to Miami inside a wooden crate via DHL, for chrissakes. The crate was no bigger than a two-drawer filing cabinet. She could not have possibly known whether the aircraft assigned to her freight load had a pressurized cargo area—some do and some don’t. She was literally leaving her life to the wind.

Not everybody wins the crapshoot in that regard. I regularly rifled through the security alerts on Officer Ned’s desk to read report after report depicting stowaway attempts by young people from impoverished countries who climb into the wheel wells of jetliners, hold on for takeoff, and expect to arrive alive at the other side of the hemisphere. First, it’s a million degrees below freezing at 35,000 feet, with oxygen so thin you’ll die from hypoxia before the first icicles form on your big dead face.

In the distance, I could see the tug train come to a stop along side a 737 connected to a gate near the end of B Concourse. A portable conveyor ramp had been set up underneath the plane, leading up to its open cargo door. The driver got out and began tossing suitcases and other items from the first cart onto the rotating belt of the conveyor ramp, which carried them to the top, where another ramp worker crouched inside the cargo bin caught them as they rolled off the ramp, then tossed them willy-nilly throughout the interior of the hatch. A lot of people think there are shelves or some other means of order in the cargo hatches of WorldAir passenger aircraft, but no. Like with most airline fleets, our aircraft cargo hatches are unadorned metal caverns where bags, boxes, packages, even pet carriers with pets inside, are flung one on top of another with all the care and symmetry you’d expect from a dump truck backing up to a landfill.

I reached the tug train before Flo. My fall from the bus had me moving stiffly but I did my best to shake it off. The tug driver wore regulation earplugs to protect his ears from the constant and deafening roar of the surrounding jet engines, so he was pretty much oblivious to any activity in proximity to his surroundings. See? Situational awareness. People wonder how mechanics and ramp workers get run over by slow-moving jets, but it happens all the time. Just recently a Boeing employee was run down by a brand-new jet backing out of the construction hangar. The jet was being pushed by a tow tug and only traveling five miles per hour, but those wheels are like giant balls of rubber quicksand; once one of them clips your foot or your coat tail it will suck the rest of you under with it. The driver of the tug was wearing earplugs, so he couldn’t hear his coworker screaming at him to cut the engine.

I hadn’t memorized the number on the claim ticket from Colgate’s house, but at least I knew the casket we were looking for was traveling to Grand Cayman, an island in the British Antilles. The caskets were not all facing the same direction, and there was no uniform method for the ticketing agents in the cargo department when it came to sticking claim checks on crates, so my progress was hindered while I flailed around looking for identifying numbers. Flo reached my side just as the ramp agent had gripped one of the transport caskets from the baggage cart and maneuvered it onto the conveyor ramp.

“Wait!” we yelled to no avail. Earplugs, remember. I jumped onto the conveyor ramp and climbed onto the casket. The worker up in the cargo area caught sight of me and stopped the belt, leaving me perched halfway between the ground and the aircraft. He must have thought I was a grieving passenger, because it sounded like he was hollering condolences or something. I caught snippets of “onto a better place” and the like. The ramp agent at the bottom of the belt was not nearly as forgiving. “Get the hell off there!” the driver yelled, waving a crowbar at me. I ignored him and continued to search for the claim sticker. Flo snatched the crowbar from his hand and smacked him up against the head. A shouting match ensued. He must have known Flo personally because he threw up his arms, stormed back to his tow tug, and plunked down in the driver’s seat with a huff. The ramp worker in the cargo belly, led by curiosity, stepped out onto the belt to begin his descent, but then tripped and stumbled madly toward me. He fell and barreled into the casket with a thud, knocking it off the belt and toward the tarmac below. It hit the concrete corner first and burst apart like it was built from balsa wood. A plastic-wrapped cadaver tumbled free from the planks. The clumsy ramp worker and I both ogled the scene in shock. He reached for me to steady himself, but instead knocked me off my feet and sent me over the edge as well. Luckily the corpse cushioned my fall.