Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales (14 page)

She rocked slightly but didn’t respond. A tiny crucifix and a string of glow-in-the-dark plastic rosary beads clutched in her hands, frequently rising up to kiss her thick, chapped lips.

The stewardess was buckled in at the front. Apparently, it was his responsibility.
For duty and humanity
, he thought, as he reached over to fasten the belt. “Let me help you…”

The girl’s hands trapped his in a sweaty, trembling vise. She cried out as if he’d woken her from a sound sleep to find herself groped, empty eyes staring as if she could see his face floating in her perpetual darkness.

Wrenching his hands free, he tried to calm her down without touching her again, but it was no use. She didn’t seem to hear or understand him, and she was already in a panic over the flight and being pawed by some strange man in the middle of it. Feeling vaguely ashamed, he looked around for help, but no one seemed to notice. The escalating howl of the engines drowned out her screaming, and then the drunken lurch of acceleration flattened them into their seats.

When the landing gear folded up and the plane leveled off, she went back to her silent prayer. Ryan turned his face to the wall and wadded his sweatshirt into a pillow. Outside, the blinking red light on the wing danced and bled as streaks of rain raced across the glass. The little coastal city was engulfed in tufts of fog like giant kites snarled in the trees. Only a few lost lights that might have been ships at sea testified that the city he’d just escaped was still down there.

Ryan was a seasoned traveler. He could sleep anywhere, under any circumstances. He clenched his legs tight around the duffel bag on the floor and tried to empty his mind. It took a while, though, because every time he felt himself sliding into slumber, the blind girl coughed loudly into her fist.

His mind kept circling back around to the mask. The customs agent had started coughing up blood at the sight of it, but let him go. Was that just some kind of crazy coincidence? The Xorocua were wiped out by disease, so it figured their folklore would invent some kind of magical spirits for protection or revenge, but fat fucking lot of good it did them… They were long gone, their weird, sad little religion just an anthro text footnote that fascinated millionaires who needed bloodthirsty pagan gods for poker partners. Were the masks some kind of vector for spreading a virus? That would explain something, if he had gotten sick, but aside from the usual tropical rashes and maladies, he felt fine. He didn’t believe in curses, unless you counted poverty.

They had leveled off at 30,000 feet when Ryan decided he wasn’t going to sleep, and decided to work on getting drunk. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands for a while. Maybe he should try to apologize to the blind girl, or better yet, move to another seat. He turned to size her up and found himself eye to eye with the Xorocua mask.

She was wearing it. The whites of her empty eyes glinted through the slits cut into the beetling, jaguar-mottled brow. Every plane of the angular face was painted a different animal texture, as if to tie all the life of the jungle into its vengeful visage. But now, on the blind girl’s face, it came to life.

The stylized, branching horns jutting from the jawline and temples glowed cobalt blue, like gas-jet flames. The interlaced fangs in the snarling mouth slid apart like the tumblers of a lock and a torrent of black, rancid blood jetted out over the curled lips to splash down the front of his shirt.

He jumped up and smashed his head into the luggage compartment, fell back into his seat. The blood all over him was cold and sticky and alive with twitching, scuttling things that disappeared under his clothing before he could tear them off. His screams went unheard by the other passengers. The blind girl’s bony arms barred his escape. She pressed closer, still coughing up gouts of infested blood and he was drenched and drowning in it when he threw out his hands to pry the mask off her face.

The mask came off with a sound like rusty nails worming out of rotten wood. It took her face off with it and she crushed him into the wall, her cold, slimy cheekbone hard against his chest.

He might’ve screamed when he woke up. His face was stuck to the cold window. Every other part of his body was crawling with sweat. He was groggy as if he’d popped a couple Ambien on top of a few shots of tequila.

Slowly, deliberately, he turned and looked at the blind girl. She sat bolt-upright in her seat, her head thrown back against the unyielding headrest, her steady breath like plumbing gurgling past a ferocious blockage.

Her traytable was unfolded, and a half-empty Styrofoam cup rested on it beside a foil bag with some kind of pickled fruit spilling out of it, and her plastic rosary beads, glowing like plutonium in the blue murk. Beverage service had come and gone while he slept.

Her dress was homespun cotton, richly embroidered with garish butterflies and birds. As he studied her, fighting the urge to pinch himself, she was wracked with a string of wet, red choking coughs. Fuck this noise, he thought, and grabbed his bag. Gingerly clearing the junk from her traytable, he folded it against the back of 10C and undid his seatbelt.

The cabin was hotter than the fucking Yucatan. His inner ears throbbed as they always did when he flew, but they felt like he was deep underwater, and not skipping over the upper atmosphere. The only light came from the spotty fiber-optic strips along the aisle, and a couple spotlights over passengers nodding over laptops or reading Kindles with iPod plugs in their ears.

Moving one limb at a time with total concentration, he levered himself out of his seat and threw a leg over the girl’s knees to plant his foot in the aisle. It was a good plan, and he was careful as hell, but his foot slipped on something and he skidded into the splits with a stifled yelp.

The girl’s knees jabbed his ass. He braced himself for the shrieking and batting fists, but they never came. The girl coughed so hard he felt the wet force of her expelled breath through his shirt. Fighting panic, he lurched over her into the aisle, dragging his duffel bag and swinging it over the slumbering head of the passenger in 10C, a fat mother with a mustache and a double armload of squirming kids in her lap.

He must’ve been out for a couple hours. The plane bounced off roiling pockets of turbulence somewhere over the lightless Mexican interior. The aisle was clear, except for a couple of cups rolling in loopy circles with the rise and fall of the plane. The stewardess was nowhere in sight.

Ryan hurried down the aisle, trying not to bump into passengers’ dangling arms and legs. The last row of seats before the restroom was empty, and he made for them like a seasick drunk.

The plane dipped alarmingly just as he reached the seats and fell into them. His heart raced, muscles jittered with spurts of misspent adrenaline. His bag felt weightless as he dropped it into the window seat. Holy shit, but he’d got himself worked up. He needed a drink. Maybe the stewardess would let him buy a bottle of hard stuff. Hell, maybe she’d share it with him. He deserved something good, after everything he’d been through.

He cradled the duffel bag against his hip. It was weightless because it was empty.

Shock galvanized him. Ripping the zipper open, he plunged his hand into the bag and found himself looking at his grabbing hand again, when it popped out the ragged hole in the bottom of the bag. Only a couple pairs of rolled-up tube socks and some boxer shorts were still in the bag, and they were wet, clinging to the walls of the bag in a slimy black paste. The hole was not just a rip in the double-walled nylon. It was a gaping circular fucking hole, like the material had been dissolved… or chewed up.

“Fuck!” he seethed through gritted teeth, looking up the aisle at the scattered yard sale of his possessions trailing all the way back to his old seat. He staggered down the aisle, scooping up slimy piles of clothing. Finally, his hand caught something with heft to it that he snatched up with a grateful whimper, but it turned out to be his shaving kit.

He felt eyes tracking him and the unmistakable sense of someone laughing at his predicament, but every face was turned away, tucked into its neighbor’s shoulder or tilted back, mouth agape.

The whine of the engines seemed to subside, the plane to rock laterally and the cups in the aisle tumbled towards the nose. Were they descending already?

Finally, he reached his old seat. Dan and Lori were fast asleep. The carpet was spongy with pooled fluid all around the blind girl in 11D. She must have thrown up, he thought with distaste, or wet herself. His mask was not anywhere in the aisle, so it must have fallen out under his seat when he made his escape. From there, it could have rolled away with the turbulence, could be anywhere in the goddamned plane. There was nothing else to do, but go looking.

He started to kneel beside the blind girl. The plane tilted nose-down and sent him sprawling to the floor. He threw his hand out to save his head and caught an armrest in the eye. He fell to the deck and laughed at his clumsiness when something stabbed him.

A bolt of pure agony was driven by his falling weight into his right leg, just under his right kneecap, until it popped through the tender flesh between the thongs of tendon and muscle at the back of his knee.

It hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced, until he tried to straighten his leg, and whatever had intruded into the delicate mechanism of his knee snapped inside him, and then pain became his whole, wide world.

Howling, he crumpled on the deck, hugging his impaled knee to his chest. He screamed over and over, but it didn’t dawn on him right away how strange it was that, for all his screaming, nobody on the plane had reacted at all.

Reaching out for the couple in 11B and C, he yanked the blanket off them so Dan’s novel fell into the aisle. They knocked heads and the husband slumped onto his traytable. A rivulet of deep red flowed out from his left nostril, out of which protruded the hilt of a coffee stirrer. His wife belched and something crawled out of her open mouth, a red shadow slathered in bright arterial blood.

A moan escaped his slack, flapping lips. He rocked back on his leg and was jolted by a fresh stroke of agony. His right leg had a knife in it. Pulling back the leg of his jeans, he saw a white plastic hilt protruding from the wound in the depression just under his kneecap.

A wave of nausea threatened to carry him away when he looked at it, but pure disbelief kept him staring. He’d been stabbed with a plastic knife. The point of it poked out the other side, whittled or chewed until it was sharp as a scalpel.

He turned and pawed at the blind girl, hoping to make her scream like a fire alarm, but she only flopped over her armrest to knock her long, hollow skull against Ryan’s forehead. Her mouth hung open, lips flecked with glossy red stains that matched the mire he was sitting in. Her skin was cold as marble, her limbs loose and inert as a doll’s, but she shook against him, wracked by a postmortem coughing fit.

They came out of her mouth. With the wracking cough, they scrambled out over her lips and down into the sunken meadow of her lap to leer at him over the armrest.

They looked like beetles or stick insects, with their fluted thoraxes and tapered, exoskeletal limbs. Their bodies borrowed promiscuously from the insect, reptile and amphibian clades, but their hideous faces were (or were hidden behind) miniature Xorocua harvest masks.

The tallest of them was not quite eight inches high, but looking down on him from their perch, they owned him.

Ryan dragged himself backwards, down the aisle towards the cockpit. Everywhere he looked, he saw them creeping over corpses, peering down at him from behind headrests. He passed the mother with her children—bloated and black with asphyxiation—and a business man slouched over his laptop—ballpoint pens shoved into the ruins of his eyes—and the stewardess—the broken neck of an Imperial beer bottle sticking out of a new mouth in her neck. He dragged himself backwards until the solid armored bulk of the cockpit door stopped him.

Everyone in the plane was dead, but cockpits were like bank vaults these days. He thrashed against the door, screaming for them to open it before he was killed, something killed everyone on the plane, but it wasn’t him, he was innocent and he didn’t deserve to die—

“
Ladies and gentleman, we thank you for flying Pura Vida Air, and ask that you wait until the plane has come to a complete stop before activating personal electronics or attempting to retrieve luggage…”

It was a calm, almost sleepy voice, soothing… and pre-recorded. They weren’t scheduled to be over Los Angeles for another hour.

The door stayed sealed. The crew on the other side might be dead, too, or they might be totally oblivious to what was going on. He turned to look for a phone.

The darkness leapt out of the seats to fill the aisle and came streaming towards him like army ants. He pounded on the door, shrieking beyond words, but they did not come to kill him.

They wanted him to have the mask. They brought it to him and laid it on the deck.

They wanted him to wear it.

The plane shuddered as its landing gear was lowered into the screaming wind. The cabin was still a lightless cavern, but the ugly amber sodium glow of Tijuana poured in the windows like the overflow of a public urinal.

Huddled against the door, it slowly dawned on him that he didn’t have to die. Numbly, he picked up the mask, seeing it too late with new eyes. It was not a trinket or a treasure, or even a mask.

It was a door.

The blood he’d spilled had opened it. To let them leave this place, the door only had to open again. It was simple, when there was no other choice but to accept.

Ryan put the mask to his face. The hard, rough inner surface caressed him with splinters that grew and intertwined under his skin.

They climbed each other to reach his lips. The narrow, fanged mouth only allowed one at a time, and they were beyond counting. They scuttled up his shivering body and into the gate of teeth, but he could feel them piling up inside his belly, restless, hungry for trouble, and he could feel a whole new world, cold, black and infinite, inside.