Flight or Fright Read online

  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.

  Before the last one had disappeared into his mouth, the 727 touched down with a rough jerk and skidded on the tarmac as if the runway were a plain of loose boulders.

  When the plane finally pirouetted to a stop and the cabin lights turned on, not a single passenger stirred to turn on cell phones or try to pull their luggage out of the overheads. Ryan hauled himself to his feet and knocked once more on the cockpit door, but whatever was on the other side was quite content to stay behind.

  He pulled the latch on the cabin door and turned the wheel. Two baggage handlers pressed quizzical faces to the porthole and tapped on the glass. Ryan smiled at them, forgetting he was wearing a mask, and threw open the door.

  He tried to explain, but they didn’t see him at all. They fell to their knees, choking on red phlegm. He pushed past them and skipped down the stairs to kneel and kiss the tarmac with a forked black tongue.

  It was so good, after all his wandering, to be at home …

  AIR RAID

  JOHN VARLEY

  John Varley was born in Texas and went to Michigan State University on a National Merit scholarship—supposedly because of the schools he could afford, MSU was the farthest from Texas. There are science fiction writers who have brilliant ideas, and science fiction writers who are fine prose stylists. Varley is one of the fortunate few who are both. “Air Raid” was published in 1977 (under the pen name Herb Boehm, an amalgam of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name, because he had another story appearing in the same issue of Asimov’s), was nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula Award, was expanded into the novel Millennium in 1983, and became a movie in 1989. Once you start this one, you won’t be able to put it down. So welcome aboard Sun-Belt Airlines Flight 128, departing Miami and bound for New York. The passengers, however, may be heading for a far different destination.

  I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut down until you sit up, so I did. All around me in the darkened bunkroom the Snatch Team members were sleeping singly and in pairs. I yawned, scratched my ribs, and patted Gene’s hairy flank. He turned over. So much for a romantic send-off.

  Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reached to the floor for my leg, strapped it on and plugged it in. Then I was running down the rows of bunks toward Ops.

  The situation board glowed in the gloom. Sun-Belt Airlines Flight 128, Miami to New York, September 15, 1979. We’d been looking for that one for three years. I should have been happy, but who can afford it when you wake up?

  Liza Boston muttered past me on the way to Prep. I muttered back, and followed. The lights came on around the mirrors, and I groped my way to one of them. Behind us, three more people staggered in. I sat down, plugged in, and at last I could lean back and close my eyes.

  They didn’t stay closed for long. Rush! I sat up straight as the sludge I use for blood was replaced with supercharged go-juice. I looked around me and got a series of idiot grins. There was Liza, and Pinky and Dave. Against the far wall Cristabel was already turning slowly in front of the airbrush, getting a caucasian paint job. It looked like a good team.

  I opened the drawer and started preliminary work on my face. It’s a bigger job every time. Transfusion or no, I looked like death. The right ear was completely gone now. I could no longer close my lips; the gums were permanently bared. A week earlier, a finger had fallen off in my sleep. And what’s it to you, bugger?

  While I worked, one of the screens around the mirror glowed. A smiling young woman, blonde, high brow, round face. Close enough. The crawl line read Mary Katrina Sondergard, born Trenton, New Jersey, age in 1979:
25. Baby, this is your lucky day.

  The computer melted the skin away from her face to show me the bone structure, rotated it, gave me cross-sections. I studied the similarities with my own skull, noted the differences. Not bad, and better than some I’d been given.

  I assembled a set of dentures that included the slight gap in the upper incisors. Putty filled out my cheeks. Contact lenses fell from the dispenser and I popped them in. Nose plugs widened my nostrils. No need for ears; they’d be covered by the wig. I pulled a blank plastiflesh mask over my face and had to pause while it melted in. It took only a minute to mold it to perfection. I smiled at myself. How nice to have lips.

  The delivery slot clunked and dropped a blonde wig and a pink outfit into my lap. The wig was hot from the styler. I put it on, then the pantyhose.

  “Mandy? Did you get the profile on Sondergard?” I didn’t look up; I recognized the voice.

  “Roger.”

  “We’ve located her near the airport. We can slip you in before take-off, so you’ll be the joker.”

  I groaned, and looked up at the face on the screen. Elfreda Baltimore-Louisville, Director of Operational Teams: lifeless face and tiny slits for eyes. What can you do when all the muscles are dead?

  “Okay.” You take what you get.

  She switched off, and I spent the next two minutes trying to get dressed while keeping my eyes on the screens. I memorized names and faces of crew members plus the few facts known about them. Then I hurried out and caught up with the others. Elapsed time from the first alarm: twelve minutes and seven seconds. We’d better get moving.

  “Goddam Sun-Belt,” Cristabel groused, hitching at her bra.

  “At least they got rid of the high heels,” Dave pointed out. A year earlier we would have been teetering down the aisles on three-inch platforms. We all wore short pink shifts with blue and white stripes, diagonally across the front, and carried matching shoulder bags. I fussed trying to get the ridiculous pillbox cap pinned on.

  We jogged into the dark Operations Control Room and lined up at the gate. Things were out of our hands now. Until the gate was ready, we could only wait.

  I was first, a few feet away from the portal. I turned away from it; it gives me vertigo. I focused instead on the gnomes sitting at their consoles, bathed in yellow lights from their screens. None of them looked back at me. They don’t like us much. I don’t like them, either. Withered, emaciated, all of them. Our fat legs and butts and breasts are a reproach to them, a reminder that Snatchers eat five times their ration to stay presentable for the masquerade. Meantime we continue to rot. One day I’ll be sitting at a console. One day I’ll be built in to a console, with all my guts on the outside and nothing left of my body but stink. The hell with them.

  I buried my gun under a clutter of tissues and lipsticks in my purse. Elfreda was looking at me.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Motel room. She was alone from 10 PM to noon on flight day.”

  Departure time was 1:15. She cut it close and would be in a hurry. Good.

  “Can you catch her in the bathroom? Best of all, in the tub?”

  “We’re working on it.” She sketched a smile with a fingertip drawn over lifeless lips. She knew how I liked to operate, but she was telling me I’d take what I got. It never hurts to ask. People are at their most defenseless stretched out and up to their necks in water.

  “Go!” Elfreda shouted. I stepped through, and things started to go wrong.

  I was faced the wrong way, stepping out of the bathroom door and facing the bedroom. I turned and spotted Mary Katrina Sondergard through the haze of the gate. There was no way I could reach her without stepping back through. I couldn’t even shoot without hitting someone on the other side.

  Sondergard was at the mirror, the worst possible place. Few people recognize themselves quickly, but she’d been looking right at herself. She saw me and her eyes widened. I stepped to the side, out of her sight.

  “What the hell is … hey? Who the hell …” I noted the voice, which can be the trickiest thing to get right.

  I figured she’d be more curious than afraid. My guess was right. She came out of the bathroom, passing through the gate as if it wasn’t there, which it wasn’t, since it only has one side. She had a towel wrapped around her.

  “Jesus Christ! What are you doing in my—” Words fail you at a time like that. She knew she ought to say something, but what? Excuse me, haven’t I seen you in the mirror?

  I put on my best stew smile and held out my hand.

  “Pardon the intrusion. I can explain everything. You see, I’m—” I hit her on the side of the head and she staggered and went down hard. Her towel fell to the floor. “—working my way through college.” She started to get up, so I caught her under the chin with my artificial knee. She stayed down.

  “Standard fuggin’ oil!” I hissed, rubbing my injured knuckles. But there was no time. I knelt beside her, checked her pulse. She’d be okay, but I think I loosened some front teeth. I paused a moment. Lord, to look like that with no makeup, no prosthetics! She nearly broke my heart.

  I grabbed her under the knees and wrestled her to the gate. She was a sack of limp noodles. Somebody reached through, grabbed her feet, and pulled. So long, love! How would you like to go on a long voyage?

  I sat on her rented bed to get my breath. There were car keys and cigarettes in her purse, genuine tobacco, worth its weight in blood. I lit six of them, figuring I had five minutes of my very own. The room filled with sweet smoke. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

  The Hertz sedan was in the motel parking lot. I got in and headed for the airport. I breathed deeply of the air, rich in hydrocarbons. I could see for hundreds of yards into the distance. The perspective nearly made me dizzy, but I live for those moments. There’s no way to explain what it’s like in the pre-meck world. The sun was a fierce yellow ball through the haze.

  The other stews were boarding. Some of them knew Sondergard so I didn’t say much, pleading a hangover. That went over well, with a lot of knowing laughs and sly remarks. Evidently it wasn’t out of character. We boarded the 707 and got ready for the goats to arrive.

  It looked good. The four commandos on the other side were identical twins for the women I was working with. There was nothing to do but be a stewardess until departure time. I hoped there would be no more glitches. Inverting a gate for a joker run into a motel room was one thing, but in a 707 at twenty thousand feet …

  The plane was nearly full when the woman that Pinky would impersonate sealed the forward door. We taxied to the end of the runway, then we were airborne. I started taking orders for drinks in first.

  The goats were the usual lot, for 1979. Fat and sassy, all of them, and as unaware of living in a paradise as a fish is of the sea. What would you think, ladies and gents, of a trip to the future? No? I can’t say I’m surprised. What if I told you this plane is going to—

  My arm beeped as we reached cruising altitude. I consulted the indicator under my Lady Bulova and glanced at one of the restroom doors. I felt a vibration pass through the plane. Damn it, not so soon.

  The gate was in there. I came out quickly, and motioned for Diana Gleason—Dave’s pigeon—to come to the front.

  “Take a look at this,” I said with a disgusted look. She started to enter the restroom, stopped when she saw the green glow. I planted a boot on her fanny and shoved. Perfect. Dave would have a chance to hear her voice before popping in. Though she’d be doing little but screaming when she got a look around …

  Dave came through the gate, adjusting his silly little hat. Diana must have struggled.

  “Be disgusted,” I whispered.

  “What a mess,” he said as he came out of the restroom. It was a fair imitation of Diana’s tone, though he’d missed the accent. It wouldn’t matter much longer.

  “What is it?” It was one of the stews from tourist. We stepped aside so she could get a look, and Dave shoved her through. Pinky pop
ped out very quickly.

  “We’re minus on minutes,” Pinky said. “We lost five on the other side.”

  “Five?” Dave-Diana squeaked. I felt the same way. We had a hundred and three passengers to process.

  “Yeah. They lost control after you pushed my pigeon through. It took that long to re-align.”

  You get used to that. Time runs at different rates on each side of the gate, though it’s always sequential, past to future. Once we’d started the Snatch with me entering Sondergard’s room, there was no way to go back any earlier on either side. Here, in 1979, we had a rigid ninety-four minutes to get everything done. On the other side, the gate could never be maintained longer than three hours.

  “When you left, how long was it since the alarm went in?”

  “Twenty-eight minutes.”

  It didn’t sound good. It would take at least two hours just customizing the wimps. Assuming there was no more slippage on 79-time, we might just make it. But there’s always slippage. I shuddered, thinking about riding it in.

  “No time for any more games, then,” I said. “Pink, you go back to tourist and call both of the other girls up here. Tell ’em to come one at a time, and tell ’em we’ve got a problem. You know the bit.”

  “Biting back the tears. Got you.” She hurried aft. In no time the first one showed up. Her friendly Sun-Belt Airlines smile was stamped on her face, but her stomach would be churning. Oh God, this is it!

  I took her by the elbow and pulled her behind the curtains in front. She was breathing hard.

  “Welcome to the twilight zone,” I said, and put the gun to her head. She slumped, and I caught her. Pinky and Dave helped me shove her through the gate.

  “Fug! The rotting thing’s flickering.”

  Pinky was right. A very ominous sign. But the green glow stabilized as we watched, with who-knows-how-much slippage on the other side. Cristabel ducked through.