Four Past Midnight (38 page)

Colors ran across his cheeks and brows in a fountain-spray of hues: jungle green was overthrown by lava orange; lava orange was replaced by yellow-white tropical sunshine; sunshine was supplanted by the chilly blue of Northern oceans. The roar of the jet engines seemed muted and distant; he looked down and was not surprised to see that Brian Engle's slumped, sleeping form was being consumed by color, his form and features overthrown in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of brightness. He had become a fabulous ghost.

Nor was Nick surprised to see that his own hands and arms were as colorless as clay.
Brian's not the ghost; I am.

The rip loomed.

Now the sound of the jets was lost entirely in a new sound; the 767 seemed to be rushing through a windtunnel filled with feathers. Suddenly, directly ahead of the airliner's nose, a vast nova of light exploded like a heavenly firework; in it, Nick Hopewell saw colors no man had ever imagined. It did not just fill the time-rip; it filled his mind, his nerves, his muscles, his very bones in a gigantic, coruscating fireflash.

“Oh my God,
so
BEAUTIFUL!
” he cried, and as Flight 29 plunged into the rip, he twisted the cabin-pressure rheostat back up to full.

A split-second later the fillings from Nick's teeth pattered onto the cockpit floor. There was a small thump as the Teflon disc which had been in his knee—souvenir of a conflict marginally more honorable than the one in Northern Ireland—joined them. That was all.

Nick Hopewell had ceased to exist.

The first things Brian was aware of were that his shirt was wet and his headache had returned.

He sat up slowly in his seat, wincing at the bolt of pain in his head, and tried to remember who he was, where he was, and why he felt such a vast and urgent need to wake up quickly. What had he been doing that was so important?

The leak, his mind whispered. There's a leak in the main cabin, and if it isn't stabilized, there's going to be big tr
—

No, that wasn't right. The leak had been stabilized—or had in some mysterious way stabilized itself—and he had landed Flight 7 safely at LAX. Then the man in the green blazer had come, and—

His eyes flew open, but he was in neither a motel room nor the spare bedroom at Anne's brother's house in Revere. He was looking through a cockpit window at a sky filled with stars.

Suddenly it came back to him . . . everything.

He sat up all the way, too quickly. His head screamed a sickly hungover protest. Blood flew from his nose and splattered on the center control console. He looked down and saw the front of his shirt was soaked with it. There had been a leak, all right. In
him.

Of course,
he thought.
Depressurization often does that. I should have warned the passengers . . . How many passengers do I have left, by the way?

He couldn't remember. His head was filled with fog.

He looked at his fuel indicators, saw that their situation was rapidly approaching the critical point, and then checked the INS. They were exactly where they should be, descending rapidly toward L.A., and at any moment they might wander into someone else's airspace while the someone else was still there.

Someone else had been sharing his airspace just before he passed out . . . who?

He fumbled, and it came. Nick, of course. Nick Hopewell. Nick was gone. He hadn't been such a bad penny after all, it seemed. But he must have done his job, or Brian wouldn't be awake now.

He got on the radio, fast.

“LAX ground control, this is American Pride Flight—” He stopped. What flight were they? He couldn't remember. The fog was in the way.

“Twenty-nine, aren't we?” a dazed, unsteady voice said from behind him.

“Thank you, Laurel.” Brian didn't turn around. “Now go back and belt up. I may have to make this plane do some tricks.”

He spoke into his mike again.

“American Pride Flight 29, repeat, two-niner. Mayday, ground control, I am declaring an emergency here. Please clear everything in front of me, I am coming in on heading 85 and I have no fuel. Get a foam truck out and—”

“Oh, quit it,” Laurel said dully from behind him. “Just quit it.”

Brian wheeled around then, ignoring the fresh bolt of pain through his head and the fresh spray of blood which flew from his nose. “Sit
down,
goddammit!” he snarled. “We're coming in unannounced into heavy traffic. If you don't want to break your neck—”

“There's no heavy traffic down there,” Laurel said in the same dull voice. “No heavy traffic, no foam trucks. Nick died for nothing, and I'll never get a chance to deliver his message. Look for yourself.”

Brian did. And, although they were now over the outlying suburbs of Los Angeles, he saw nothing but darkness.

There was no one down there, it seemed.

No one at all.

Behind him, Laurel Stevenson burst into harsh, raging sobs of terror and frustration.

A long white passenger jet cruised slowly above the ground sixteen miles east of Los Angeles International Airport. 767 was printed on its tail in large, proud numerals. Along the fuselage, the words AMERICAN PRIDE were written in letters which had been raked backward to indicate speed. On both sides of the nose was a large red eagle, its wings spangled with blue stars. Like the airliner it decorated, the eagle appeared to be coming in for a landing.

The plane printed no shadow on the deserted grid of streets as it passed above them; dawn was still an hour away. Below it, no car moved, no streetlight glowed. Below it, all was silent and moveless. Ahead of it, no runway lights gleamed.

The plane's belly slid open. The undercarriage dropped down and spread out. The landing gear locked in place.

American Pride Flight 29 slipped down the chute toward L.A. It banked slightly to the right as it came; Brian was now able to correct his course visually, and he did so. They passed over a cluster of airport motels, and for a moment Brian could see the monument that stood near the center of the terminal complex, a graceful tripod with curved legs and a restaurant in its center. They passed over a short strip of dead grass and then concrete runway was unrolling thirty feet below the plane.

There was no time to baby the 767 in this time; Brian's fuel indicators read zeros across and the bird was about to turn into a bitch. He brought it in hard, like a sled filled with bricks. There was a thud that rattled his teeth and started his nose bleeding again. His chest harness locked. Laurel, who was in the co-pilot's seat, cried out.

Then he had the flaps up and was applying reverse thrusters at full. The plane began to slow. They were doing a little over a hundred miles an hour when two of the thrusters cut out and the red ENGINE SHUTDOWN lights flashed on. He grabbed for the intercom switch.

“Hang on! We're going in hard! Hang on!”

Thrusters two and four kept running a few moments longer, and then they were gone, too. Flight 29 rushed down the runway in ghastly silence, with only the flaps to slow her now. Brian watched helplessly as the concrete ran away beneath the plane and the crisscross tangle of taxiways loomed. And there, dead ahead, sat the carcass of a Pacific Airways commuter jet.

The 767 was still doing at least sixty-five. Brian horsed it to the right, leaning into the dead steering yoke with every ounce of his strength. The plane responded soupily, and he skated by the parked jet with only six feet to spare. Its windows flashed past like a row of blind eyes.

Then they were rolling toward the United terminal, where at least a dozen planes were parked at extended jetways like nursing infants. The 767's speed was down to just over thirty now.

“Brace yourselves!”
Brian shouted into the intercom, momentarily forgetting that his own plane was now as dead as the rest of them and the intercom was useless.
“Brace yourselves for a collision! Bra
—” American Pride 29 crashed into Gate 29 of the United Airlines terminal at roughly twenty-nine miles an hour. There was a loud, hollow bang followed by the sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass. Brian was thrown into his harness again, then snapped back into his seat. He sat there for a moment, stiff, waiting for the explosion ... and then remembered there was nothing left in the tanks to explode.

He flicked all the switches on the control panel off—the panel was dead, but the habit ran deep—and then turned to check on Laurel. She looked at him with dull, apathetic eyes.

“That was about as close as I'd ever want to cut it,” Brian said unsteadily.

“You should have let us crash. Everything we tried . . . Dinah . . . Nick . . . all for nothing. It's just the same here. Just the same.”

Brian unbuckled his harness and got shakily to his feet. He took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “Wipe your nose. It's bleeding.”

She took the handkerchief and then only looked at it, as if she had never seen one before in her life.

Brian passed her and plodded slowly into the main cabin. He stood in the doorway, counting noses. His passengers—those few still remaining, that was—seemed all right. Bethany's head was pressed against Albert's chest and she was sobbing hard. Rudy Warwick unbuckled his seatbelt, got up, rapped his head on the overhead bin, and sat down again. He looked at Brian with dazed, uncomprehending eyes. Brian found himself wondering if Rudy was still hungry. He guessed not.

“Let's get off the plane,” Brian said.

Bethany raised her head. “When do they come?” she asked him hysterically. “How long will it be before they come this time? Can anyone hear them yet?”

Fresh pain stroked Brian's head and he rocked on his feet, suddenly quite sure he was going to faint.

A steadying arm slipped around his waist and he looked around, surprised. It was Laurel.

“Captain Engle's right,” she said quietly. “Let's get off the plane. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks.”

Bethany uttered a hysterical bark of laughter. “How bad can it look?” she demanded. “Just how bad can it—”

“Something's different,” Albert said suddenly. He was looking out the window. “Something's changed. I can't tell what it is ... but it's not the same.” He looked first at Bethany, then at Brian and Laurel. “It's just not the same.”

Brian bent down next to Bob Jenkins and looked out the window. He could see nothing very different from BIA—there were more planes, of course, but they were just as deserted, just as dead—yet he felt that Albert might be onto something, just the same. It was
feeling
more than seeing. Some essential difference which he could not quite grasp. It danced just beyond his reach, as the name of his ex-wife's perfume had done.

Don't you remember?

“Come on,” he said. “This time we use the cockpit exit.”

Brian opened the trapdoor which lay below the jut of the instrument panel and tried to remember why he hadn't used it to offload his passengers at Bangor International; it was a hell of a lot easier to use than the slide. There didn't seem to be a why. He just hadn't thought of it, probably because he was trained to think of the escape slide before anything else in an emergency.

He dropped down into the forward-hold area, ducked below a cluster of electrical cables, and undogged the hatch in the floor of the 767's nose. Albert joined him and helped Bethany down. Brian helped Laurel, and then he and Albert helped Rudy, who moved as if his bones had turned to glass. Rudy was still clutching his rosary tight in one hand. The space below the cockpit was now very cramped, and Bob Jenkins waited for them above, propped on his hands and peering down at them through the trapdoor.

Brian pulled the ladder out of its storage clips, secured it in place, and then, one by one, they descended to the tarmac, Brian first, Bob last.

As Brian's feet touched down, he felt a mad urge to place his hand over his heart and cry out:
I claim this land of rancid milk and sour honey for the survivors of Flight 29 ... at least until the langoliers arrive!

He said nothing. He only stood there with the others below the loom of the jetliner's nose, feeling a light breeze against one cheek and looking around. In the distance he heard a sound. It was not the chewing, crunching sound of which they had gradually become aware in Bangor—nothing like it—but he couldn't decide exactly what it
did
sound like.

“What's that?” Bethany asked. “What's that humming? It sounds like electricity.”

“No, it doesn't,” Bob said thoughtfully. “It sounds like . . .” He shook his head.

“It doesn't sound like anything
I've
ever heard before,” Brian said, but he wasn't sure if that was true. Again he was haunted by the sense that something he knew or should know was dancing just beyond his mental grasp.

“It's them, isn't it?” Bethany asked half-hysterically. “It's them, coming. It's the langoliers Dinah told us about.”

“I don't think so. It doesn't sound the same at all.” But he felt the fear begin in his belly just the same.

“Now what?” Rudy asked. His voice was as harsh as a crow's. “Do we start all over again?”

“Well, we won't need the conveyor belt, and that's a start,” Brian said. “The jetway service door is open.” He stepped out from beneath the 767's nose and pointed. The force of their arrival at Gate 29 had knocked the rolling ladder away from the door, but it would be easy enough to slip it back into position. “Come on.”