Mayday

  Stein nodded. “Yes. But I’d like to bring my family up.”

  Berry turned and faced him. “That’s not possible, Harold. I don’t think it’s really fair.” Berry wished that Stein would just accept things as they were, but he doubted that Stein would.

  “Fair? Who the hell cares about fair? That’s my family I’m talking about. Who put you in charge here?”

  “Mr. Stein, it’s entirely too risky to bring your family up here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . . anything could happen. It might start a procession up the stairs. We really can’t have people in the lounge any longer. They may go into the cockpit. Bump against something . . . they’d be disturbing—”

  “I’ll watch my family,” Stein interrupted. His voice was firm. “My wife and two little girls . . . Debbie and Susan . . . they wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. . ..” He lowered his head and covered his face with his hands.

  Berry waited, then put his hand on Stein’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do for them now.”

  Stein looked up. “Or ever?”

  Berry avoided his eyes. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t know anything about this condition.”

  “Don’t you?” Stein suddenly took a step down the staircase. “There is something I can do for them now. I can get them away from the others. Away from . . .” He looked down the spiral stairs. “I don’t want them down there. Can’t you see what’s happening down there? Can’t you? ”

  Berry gripped Stein’s arm firmly. He nodded reluctantly. “All right, Harold. All right. After Barbara gets back, we can help these people down into the cabin. Then you can bring your family up. Okay?”

  Stein let Berry draw him back up the step. Finally, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll wait.”

  Linda Farley called out. “Mr. Berry!”

  Berry walked quickly toward the piano where the girl was kneeling beside Stuart and McVary. “What is it?”

  “This man opened his eyes.” She pointed to Stuart.

  Berry kneeled down and looked into the Captain’s wide, staring eyes. After several seconds, Berry reached out and closed Lyle Stuart’s eyelids, then pulled the blanket over the Captain’s face.

  “Is he dead?”

  Berry looked at the girl. “Yes. He is.”

  She nodded. “Is everyone going to die?”

  “No.”

  “Will my mother die, too?

  “No. She’s going to be all right.”

  “Can she come up here like Mr. Stein’s family?”

  Berry was fairly certain that Linda Farley’s mother was lying dead in the rubble or had been sucked out of the aircraft. But even if she were alive . . . Berry’s mind whirled with the possible answers—lies, really—but none of them was even close to being adequate. “No. She can’t come up here.”

  “Why not?”

  He stood quickly and turned away from the dead pilot. He said to Linda, “Trust me. Okay? Just trust me and do what I say.”

  Linda Farley sat back against the leg of the piano and pulled her knees up to her chin. She buried her face in her hands and began to sob. “I want my mother.”

  Berry leaned over her and stroked her hair. “Yes, I know. I know.” He straightened up. He was not very good at this. He remembered other occasions of bereavement in his own family. He’d never had the right words, was never able to bring comfort. He turned and walked back toward the cockpit. He took Terri O’Neil firmly by the shoulders and pushed her away from the door.

  The glow of his technical triumphs was dying quickly against the cold realities of the personal tragedies around him.

  Berry entered the cockpit.

  Sharon Crandall was on the interphone. “Hold on, Barbara. John’s back in the cockpit.” She looked up at Berry. “Barbara’s all right. How’s everything back there?”

  Berry sat heavily in his seat. “Okay.” He paused. “Not really. The passengers are getting a little . . . troublesome.” He cleared his throat and said, “The Captain is dead.”

  Sharon Crandall closed her eyes and lowered her head. She said softly, “Oh, damn it.” She felt a deep sadness, a sense of loss over Captain Stuart’s death. The signs were becoming ominous again.

  “Sharon?”

  She looked up. “I’m all right. Here. Barbara wants to talk to you about some wires.”

  Berry took the phone. “Barbara? What’s up? Where are you?”

  “In the midsection.” Her voice sounded distant, and the whistling of the rushing air and the jet engines was louder. “There’s a bundle of wires hanging down from the ceiling near the bigger hole. Some of the passengers brushed against them and nothing happened. There doesn’t seem to be any electricity in them.”

  Berry thought for a moment. Everything in the Straton seemed to be working except the voice radios. Severed cables might account for that. He hoped the wires had nothing to do with the flight controls. “They might be antenna wires.” It was logical that on a supersonic jet, the antennas would be mounted in some low-drag area like the tail. He suspected that the data-link utilized a different signal and a flat-plate antenna, which would be near the noise. That was why the link worked while the radios didn’t.

  “Do you want me to try to reconnect them?”

  Berry smiled. In a technical age, everyone was a technician. Still, it was a heads-up suggestion and a gutsy one, too. “No. You’d need splicing tools and it would take too long, anyway.” If those wires were involved somehow with the controls, he’d have to go down eventually and try to connect them himself. “They’re not important.” Something else was bothering him, and Barbara Yoshiro was in a position to clear it up. “Listen, Barbara, did you see any signs of the explosion? Anything like burnt seats? Charred metal? You know?”

  There was a pause. “No. Not really. No.” There was another silence. “It’s odd. There is absolutely nothing that looks like an explosion—except for the mess and the holes.”

  Berry nodded. That had been his impression. If the holes had been in the top and bottom of the fuselage, he would have suspected that they’d passed through a meteor shower. He knew that it was an infinitely rare phenomenon, even at 62,000 feet. Could a meteor travel horizontally? Berry had no idea, although it seemed unlikely. Should he put something out about this on the data-link? Did it matter? “Barbara, how are the passengers?”

  “About half of them are still pretty quiet. But some of the others are wandering around now. The turn stirred them up, I think. There’s been some fighting.”

  Berry thought that her voice sounded cool and uninvolved, like a good reporter’s. “Watch yourself. Work your way slowly. No abrupt movements.”

  “I know.”

  “There are people congregating at the bottom of the stairs,” he informed her.

  “I can’t see the stairs from here, but I can see part of the crowd on both sides of the forward galley and lavatories.”

  “When you get to the interphone in that galley, call me. Or shout to Stein. One of us will help you back up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take care of yourself. Here’s Sharon.”

  Barbara Yoshiro didn’t feel like talking much longer. As she looked out of the flight-attendant station in the midsection galley, she saw that the passengers were beginning to pay too much attention to her. The station was a cul-de-sac, and her only advantage with these people lay in her mobility.

  “Barbara?”

  “Yes, I’m coming back now.”

  “Is it very bad? Should I come down?” Sharon Crandall asked.

  “No.” Yoshiro put a light tone in her voice. “I’ve been a flight attendant long enough to know how to avoid groping hands.” The joke came out badly and she added quickly, “They’re not paying any particular attention to me. See you in a few minutes.” She replaced the interphone and stepped into the aisle. She kept her back against the bulkhead of the lavatory and stared into the cavern that lay between the front of the airliner and herself, then looked ba
ck toward the tail.

  The flimsy partitions of the Straton’s interior had been swept away by the decompression. Its entire length, which she remembered being told was two hundred feet, lay exposed, except for the three galley-lavatory compartments. They rose, blue plastic cubicles in a row, from floor to ceiling—one near the tail, the mid-ship one she was standing at, and the one in the first-class cabin that blocked her view of the spiral staircase.

  Dangling oxygen masks, uprooted seats, and dislodged wall and ceiling panels hung everywhere. Sixty feet from her, midway between the galley she was standing at and the first-class section, were two bomb holes—if that’s what they were.

  Barbara Yoshiro studied the possible routes she might take through the aircraft. She could see that she had two return routes to choose from. The aisle on the left—the one she had come down earlier—was now nearly packed with milling passengers. The aisle on the right had only a few people in it, but it contained more debris. Worse, it passed very near to the larger of the two holes in the fuselage. Even from where she stood, she could see the Pacific and the leading edge of the wing through the gaping hole. Perhaps, she thought, she’d travel up the right aisle, then cross over before she got to the open area of debris between the holes. While her eyes fixed on the scene in front of her, she failed to notice that a young man in the aisle next to her was watching her closely.

  She drew a deep breath and took a few tentative steps up the aisle. The stench was overpowering despite the fresh, cold breeze, and she felt queasy. She looked up as she walked, her eyes darting quickly in all directions. About a hundred men and women still sat in their seats, blocking the spaces between the rows. Another hundred or so stood in groups or by themselves blocking the main aisles. Some were walking aimlessly, bumping into people, falling into the aisles or into the seats, then getting up again and continuing. Everyone was babbling or moaning. If they would only remain quiet she might be able to ignore them.

  It was their clothes, too, she realized, almost as much as their faces or their noises, that gave them away. Their smart suits and dresses were tattered; some of them were half naked. Most people had one shoe or were shoeless. Almost everyone’s clothes were stained with blood and splattered with vomit.

  Yoshiro noticed that some of the passengers had been wounded in the explosion. She hadn’t looked at them, she realized, as individual people who were injured, but as a great amorphous thing whose color was gray and whose many eyes were black. Now she could see a woman whose ear was grotesquely hanging, a man who had lost two fingers. A small girl was touching a terrible-looking wound on her thigh. She was crying. Pain, Yoshiro realized, was one thing that they could still feel. But why could they still feel that and not feel anything else? Why couldn’t the sense of pain have died in them, too, and spared them that last agony?

  She saw a body lying in the aisle in front of her. It was Jeff Price, the steward. Where were the rest of the flight attendants? She looked around carefully and slowly for the familiar white-and-blue uniforms.

  Kneeling almost motionless in the shaft of bright sunlight in front of her, she spotted another flight attendant. The girl had her back toward her, but Barbara Yoshiro could see by the long black hair that it was Mary Gomez. The flight attendant appeared oblivious to everything around her, oblivious to the people stumbling into her, oblivious to the wind blowing her long hair in swirls around her head and neck. Barbara Yoshiro remembered that Mary Gomez had rung up the below-decks galley and asked if she could help. She remembered Sharon’s words very clearly. No, thanks, Mary. Barbara and I are nearly finished. We’ll be up in a minute. It had actually been almost five minutes before they were ready to come up. Had they come up sooner . . . Her religion did not stress fate, but this kind of thing made one wonder about God’s sense of timing. She turned away from Mary Gomez.

  Someone came up behind her and grabbed her shoulder. She froze, then slowly moved aside. A boy of about eighteen stumbled past her. Someone in the seat she was leaning against grabbed her right wrist. Gently, she pulled it loose and continued up the aisle, her heart beginning to beat rapidly, her mouth dry and pasty.

  Yoshiro got a grip on herself and began edging into a corner row of seats. She sidestepped past two seats, then stopped when she saw she couldn’t squeeze by the two men who were sitting in the last two seats. Carefully, she climbed over onto the empty seat in front of her and made her way into the left aisle.

  She approached the wide area of rubble where stark sunlight illuminated the grotesque dead shapes mingled with the debris. Passengers crawled and stumbled through the twisted wreckage. She watched in horrified fascination as a woman made her way toward the large gaping hole, brushed through the hanging wires and debris, and then stepped out into space. She saw the woman breeze past the cabin windows.

  Yoshiro was too stunned to make a sound. Had the woman committed suicide? She doubted it. None of the passengers seemed to have enough intellect left to do even that. As if to confirm this, an old man began crawling toward the same hole in the fuselage. As he neared it, still oblivious to his surroundings, the slip-stream took hold of him. He was whisked outside. Yoshiro saw his body bump against the top of the wing before it fell beneath the aircraft. She turned abruptly away and looked down the aisle that would lead her to the safety of the stairs.

  Some of the people on the port side had fallen down in the aisle. Others were bunched up, trying to move around and past each other, like wind-up dolls, their feet marking time, their bodies recoiling from the continuous encounters with each other. It was obscene, and Barbara Yoshiro felt as if a string inside of her was tightening, stretching, about to snap.

  Barbara moved the last few feet down the aisle to where it opened up into the wreckage. She stepped carefully over the contorted forms on the floor. Less than fifty feet in front of her rose the blue plastic galley-lavatory cubicle, behind which was the spiral staircase.

  People kept brushing and bumping her. The noise that came out of their mouths was not human. For some reason, it suddenly swelled into a crescendo of squeaking, wailing, moaning, and howling, then subsided like the noises in the forest. Then something touched it off again and the cycle began all over. An involuntary shudder passed through her body.

  She forced herself to look into the faces of the men and women around her to try to determine if they were communicating with each other, telegraphing any movements, so she could act accordingly. But most of their faces showed nothing. No emotion, no interest, no humanity, and in the final analysis, no soul. The divine spark had gone out as surely as if they’d all sold themselves to the Devil. She could more easily read the facial expressions of an ape than the blood-smeared faces of these hollow-eyed, slack-jawed former humans.

  There were a few, however, who showed signs of residual intelligence. One young man, in a blue blazer, seemed to have followed her in a parallel course down the right aisle. He was standing on the other side of the rubble area now, near the large hole, and staring at her. She saw him glance at the hole, then move away from it, toward her, pushing his way through the people near him. He stopped abruptly, then looked down at his feet.

  Barbara Yoshiro followed his gaze. She noticed a dog in the twisted wreckage. The dog of the blind man, a golden retriever. It sat on the floor, poking its head between the two upturned seats. It was eating something. . .. She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! Oh, God!”

  The young man moved deliberately around the dog. A wave of panic began to wash over her. Her knees began trembling, and she felt light-headed. She grasped a section of twisted aluminum brace to steady her balance. The dog pulled something up from the debris. A bone. A rib. “Oh! Oh!” She felt a scream rising in her throat and tried to force it down, but it came out, long and piercing, then tapered off into a pathetic wail. “Oh, dear God.”

  The people around her turned toward the sound. The young man moved quickly toward her.

  Barbara Yoshiro ran. She stumbled over the smashed bodies and seats, then
fell. The floor between the holes was damaged and sagged slightly. Her arm plunged through it, into the baggage compartment below. She yanked it out and tore her wrist. Blood ran from the jagged wound. The dog picked up its head and growled at her, a strange growl that sounded more like a man choking or gagging. She rose quickly to her feet. The young man in the blue blazer reached out for her.

  George Yates was normally a mild-mannered young man. He was in superb physical condition, a jogger, a scuba diver, and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. For a variety of physiological reasons, the results of decompression had left a large portion of his motor function unimpaired. The thin air had, however, wiped away his twenty-four years of acculturation and civilization, that part of the psyche that George Yates would have referred to as the superego. The ego itself was impaired, but partially functional. The id, the pleasure center of George Yates’s brain, the impulsive drives, the instinctive energy, that part of the psyche closest to the lower forms of life, was left dominant.

  It had been her movements that had first attracted his attention. When he had focused on those movements, they had begun to separate into perceptible components. A female.

  In small flashes that were hardly more than thin sections of memory, George Yates recognized something in her form that he wanted. His last vivid recollection in his seat before things had come apart had been a long sexual daydream. The fantasy had included the women in blue and white who walked through the aisles. Vaguely, he remembered the woman with the long black hair, remembered that she had aroused him. He was aroused now. He reached out for her.

  Barbara Yoshiro eluded his grasp. She ran across the remaining area of debris toward the first-class cabin. The forward galley and lavatories loomed in front of her. She slammed into the blue wall, then turned her back to it and began edging her way toward the corner where the wall turned toward the staircase.

  People began coming at her, hands outstretched. She hit a woman in the face with her fist and sent her staggering back into the group behind her. Immediately, she realized she should not have done that.