The Langoliers Page 22

  Craig began to make his slow way forward. The girl’s feet did not move, but as he approached her she floated backward like a mirage, toward the rubber strips which hung between the luggage-retrieval area and the loading dock outside.

  And… oh, glorious: she was smiling.

  10

  They were all back on the plane now, all except Bob and Albert, who were sitting on the stairs and listening to the sound roll toward them in a slow, broken wave.

  Laurel Stevenson was standing at the open forward door and looking at the terminal, still wondering what they were going to do about Mr. Toomy, when Bethany tugged the back of her blouse.

  “Dinah is talking in her sleep, or something. I think she might be delirious. Can you come?”

  Laurel came. Rudy Warwick was sitting across from Dinah, holding one of her hands and looking at her anxiously.

  “I dunno,” he said worriedly. “I dunno, but I think she might be going.”

  Laurel felt the girl’s forehead. It was dry and very hot. The bleeding had either slowed down or stopped entirely, but the girl’s respiration came in a series of pitiful whistling sounds. Blood was crusted around her mouth like strawberry sauce.

  Laurel began, “I think—” and then Dinah said, quite clearly, “You have to hurry before they decide you’re not coming and leave.”

  Laurel and Bethany exchanged puzzled, frightened glances.

  “I think she’s dreaming about that guy Toomy,” Rudy told Laurel. “She said his name once.”

  “Yes,” Dinah said. Her eyes were closed, but her head moved slightly and she appeared to listen. “Yes I will be,” she said. “If you want me to, I will. But hurry. I know it hurts, but you have to hurry.”

  “She is delirious, isn’t she?” Bethany whispered.

  “No,” Laurel said. “I don’t think so. I think she might be… dreaming.”

  But that was not what she thought at all. What she really thought was that Dinah might be

  (seeing)

  doing something else. She didn’t think she wanted to know what that something might be, although an idea whirled and danced far back in her mind. Laurel knew she could summon that idea if she wanted to, but she didn’t. Because something creepy was going on here, extremely creepy, and she could not escape the idea that it did have something to do with

  (don’t kill him… we need him)

  Mr. Toomy.

  “Leave her alone,” she said in a dry, abrupt tone of voice. “Leave her alone and let her

  (do what she has to do to him)

  sleep.”

  “God, I hope we take off soon,” Bethany said miserably, and Rudy put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

  11

  Craig reached the conveyor belt and fell onto it. A white sheet of agony ripped through his head, his neck, his chest. He tried to remember what had happened to him and couldn’t. He had run down the stalled escalator, he had hidden in a little room, he had sat tearing strips of paper in the dark… and that was where memory stopped.

  He raised his head, hair hanging in his eyes, and looked at the glowing girl, who now sat cross-legged in front of the rubber strips, an inch off the conveyor belt. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life; how could he ever have thought she was one of them?

  “Are you an angel?” he croaked.

  Yes, the glowing girl replied, and Craig felt his pain overwhelmed with joy. His vision blurred and then tears—the first ones he had ever cried as an adult—began to run slowly down his cheeks. Suddenly he found himself remembering his mother’s sweet, droning, drunken voice as she sang that old song.

  “Are you an angel of the morning? Will you be my angel of the morning?”

  Yes—I will be. If you want me to, I will. But hurry. I know it hurts, Mr. Toomy, but you have to hurry.

  “Yes,” Craig sobbed, and began to crawl eagerly along the luggage conveyor belt toward her. Every movement sent fresh pain jig-jagging through him on irregular courses; blood dripped from his smashed nose and shattered mouth. Yet he still hurried as much as he could. Ahead of him, the little girl faded back through the hanging rubber strips, somehow not disturbing them at all as she went.

  “Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby,” Craig said. He hawked up a spongy mat of blood, spat it on the wall where it clung like a dead spider, and tried to crawl faster.

  12

  To the east of the airport, a large cracking, rending sound filled the freakish morning. Bob and Albert got to their feet, faces pallid and filled with dreadful questions.

  “What was that?” Albert asked.

  “I think it was a tree,” Bob replied, and licked his lips.

  “But there’s no wind!”

  “No,” Bob agreed. “There’s no wind.”

  The noise had now become a moving barricade of splintered sound. Parts of it would seem to come into focus… and then drop back again just before identification was possible. At one moment Albert could swear he heard something barking, and then the barks… or yaps… or whatever they were… would be swallowed up by a brief sour humming sound like evil electricity. The only constants were the crunching and the steady drilling whine.

  “What’s happening?” Bethany called shrilly from behind them.

  “Noth—” Albert began, and then Bob seized his shoulder and pointed.

  “Look!” he shouted. “Look over there!”

  Far to the east of them, on the horizon, a series of power pylons marched north and south across a high wooded ridge. As Albert looked, one of the pylons tottered like a toy and then fell over, pulling a snarl of power cables after it. A moment later another pylon went, and another, and another.

  “That’s not all, either,” Albert said numbly. “Look at the trees. The trees over there are shaking like shrubs.”

  But they were not just shaking. As Albert and the others looked, the trees began to fall over, to disappear.

  Crunch, smack, crunch, thud, BARK!

  Crunch, smack, BARK!, thump, crunch.

  “We have to get out of here,” Bob said. He gripped Albert with both hands. His eyes were huge, avid with a kind of idiotic terror. The expression stood in sick, jagged contrast to his narrow, intelligent face. “I believe we have to get out of here right now.”

  On the horizon, perhaps ten miles distant, the tall gantry of a radio tower trembled, rolled outward, and crashed down to disappear into the quaking trees. Now they could feel the very earth beginning to vibrate; it ran up the ladder and shook their feet in their shoes.

  “Make it stop!” Bethany suddenly screamed from the doorway above them. She clapped her hands to her ears. “Oh please make it STOP!”

  But the sound-wave rolled on toward them—the crunching, smacking, eating sound of the langoliers.

  13

  “I don’t like to tease, Brian, but how much longer?” Nick’s voice was taut. “There’s a river about four miles east of here—I saw it when we were coming down—and I reckon whatever’s coming is just now on the other side of it.”

  Brian glanced at his fuel readouts. 24,000 pounds in the right wing; 16,000 pounds in the left. It was going faster now that he didn’t have to pump the Delta’s fuel overwing to the other side.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He could feel sweat standing out on his brow in big drops. “We’ve got to have more fuel, Nick, or we’ll come down dead in the Mojave Desert. Another ten minutes to unhook, button up, and taxi out.”

  “You can’t cut that? You’re sure you can’t cut that?”

  Brian shook his head and turned back to his gauges.

  14

  Craig crawled slowly through the rubber strips, feeling them slide down his back like limp fingers. He emerged in the white, dead light of a new—and vastly shortened—day. The sound was terrible, overwhelming, the sound of an invading cannibal army. Even the sky seemed to shake with it, and for a moment fear froze him in place.

  Look, his angel of the morning said, and pointed. />
  Craig looked… and forgot his fear. Beyond the American Pride 767, in a triangle of dead grass bounded by two taxiways and a runway, there was a long mahogany boardroom table. It gleamed brightly in the listless light. At each place were a yellow legal pad, a pitcher of ice water, and a Waterford glass. Sitting around the table were two dozen men in sober bankers’ suits, and now they were all turning to look at him.

  Suddenly they began to clap their hands. They stood and faced him, applauding his arrival. Craig felt a huge, grateful grin begin to stretch his face.

  15

  Dinah had been left alone in first class. Her breathing had become very labored now, and her voice was a strangled choke.

  “Run to them, Craig! Quick! Quick!”

  16

  Craig tumbled off the conveyor, struck the concrete with a bone-rattling thump, and flailed to his feet. The pain no longer mattered. The angel had brought them! Of course she had brought them! Angels were like the ghosts in that story about Mr. Scrooge—they could do anything they wanted! The corona around her had begun to dim and she was fading out, but it didn’t matter. She had brought his salvation: a net in which he was finally, blessedly caught.

  Run to them, Craig! Run around the plane! Run away from the plane! Run to them now!

  Craig began to run—a shambling stride that quickly became a crippled sprint. As he ran his head nodded up and down like a sunflower on a broken stalk. He ran toward humorless, unforgiving men who were his salvation, men who might have been fisher-folk standing in a boat beyond an unsuspected silver sky, retrieving their net to see what fabulous thing they had caught.

  17

  The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727-400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.

  “All right,” he said, standing up.

  “All right what?” Nick asked, also standing.

  “We’re uncoupling and getting the fuck out of here.”

  The approaching noise had reached deafening levels. Mixed into the crunching smacking sound and the transmission squeal were falling trees and the dull crump of collapsing buildings. Just before shutting the pumps down he had heard a number of crackling thuds followed by a series of deep splashes. A bridge falling into the river Nick had seen, he imagined.

  “Mr. Toomy!” Bethany screamed suddenly. “It’s Mr. Toomy!”

  Nick beat Brian out the door and into first class, but they were both in time to see Craig go shambling and lurching across the taxiway. He ignored the plane completely. His destination appeared to be an empty triangle of grass bounded by a pair of crisscrossing taxiways.

  “What’s he doing?” Rudy breathed.

  “Never mind him,” Brian said. “We’re all out of time. Nick? Go down the ladder ahead of me. Hold me while I uncouple the hose.” Brian felt like a man standing naked on a beach as a tidal wave humps up on the horizon and rushes toward the shore.

  Nick followed him down and laid hold of Brian’s belt again as Brian leaned out and twisted the nozzle of the hose, unlocking it. A moment later he yanked the hose free and dropped it to the cement, where the nozzle-ring clanged dully. Brian slammed the fuel-port door shut.

  “Come on,” he said after Nick had pulled him back. His face was dirty gray. “Let’s get out of here.”

  But Nick did not move. He was frozen in place, staring to the east. His skin had gone the color of paper. On his face was an expression of dreamlike horror. His upper lip trembled, and in that moment he looked like a dog that is too frightened to snarl.

  Brian turned his head slowly in that direction, hearing the tendons in his neck creak like a rusty spring on an old screen door as he did so. He turned his head and watched as the langoliers finally entered stage left.

  18

  “So you see,” Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, “the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself—men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end—keeping communism out of South America—justifies any available means.”

  “What procedures did you follow to check these fellows out?” a fat man in an expensive blue suit asked. “Did you use a bond-insurance company, or does your bank retain a specific investigation firm in such cases?” Blue Suit’s round, jowly face was perfectly shaved; his cheeks glowed with either good health or forty years of Scotch and sodas; his eyes were merciless chips of blue ice. They were wonderful eyes; they were father-eyes.

  Somewhere, far away from this boardroom two floors below the top of the Prudential Center, Craig could hear a hell of a racket going on. Road construction, he supposed. There was always road construction going on in Boston, and he suspected that most of it was unnecessary, that in most cases it was just the old, old story—the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. His job was to deal with the man in the blue suit, and he couldn’t wait to get started.

  “We’re waiting, Craig,” the president of his own banking institution said. Craig felt momentary surprise—Mr. Parker hadn’t been scheduled to attend this meeting—and then the feeling was overwhelmed by happiness.

  “No procedures at all!” he screamed joyfully into their shocked faces. “I just bought and bought and bought! I followed NO… PROCEDURES… AT ALL!”

  He was about to go on, to elaborate on this theme, to really expound on it, when a sound stopped him. This sound was not miles away; this sound was close, very close, perhaps in the boardroom itself.

  A whickering chopping sound, like dry hungry teeth.

  Suddenly Craig felt a deep need to tear some paper—any paper would do. He reached for the legal pad in front of his place at the table, but the pad was gone. So was the table. So were the bankers. So was Boston.

  “Where am I?” he asked in a small, perplexed voice, and looked around. Suddenly he realized… and suddenly he saw them.

  The langoliers had come.

  They had come for him.

  Craig Toomy began to scream.

  19

  Brian could see them, but could not understand what it was he was seeing. In some strange way they seemed to defy seeing, and he sensed his frantic, overstressed mind trying to change the incoming information, to make the shapes which had begun to appear at the east end of Runway 21 into something it could understand.

  At first there were only two shapes, one black, one a dark tomato red.

  Are they balls? his mind asked doubtfully. Could they be balls?

  Something actually seemed to click in the center of his head and they were balls, sort of like beachballs, but balls which rippled and contracted and then expanded again, as if he was seeing them through a heat-haze. They came bowling out of the high dead grass at the end of Runway 21, leaving cut swaths of blackness behind them. They were somehow cutting the grass—

  No, his mind reluctantly denied. They are not just cutting the grass, and you know it. They are cutting a lot more than the grass.

  What they left behind were narrow lines of perfect blackness. And now, as they raced playfully down the white concrete at the end of the runway, they were still leaving narrow dark tracks behind. They glistened like tar.

  No, his mind reluctantly denied. Not tar. You know what that blackness is. It’s nothing. Nothing at all. They are eating a lot more than the surface of the runway.

  There was something malignantly joyful about their behavior. They crisscrossed each other’s paths, leaving a wavery black X on the outer taxiway. They bounced high in the air, did an exuberant, crisscrossing maneuver, and then raced straight for the plane.

  As
they did, Brian screamed and Nick screamed beside him. Faces lurked below the surfaces of the racing balls—monstrous, alien faces. They shimmered and twitched and wavered like faces made of glowing swamp-gas. The eyes were only rudimentary indentations, but the mouths were huge: semicircular caves lined with gnashing, blurring teeth.

  They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.

  A Texaco fuel truck was parked on the outer taxiway. The langoliers pounced upon it, high-speed teeth whirring and crunching and bulging out of their blurred bodies. They went through it without pause. One of them burrowed a path directly through the rear tires, and for a moment, before the tires collapsed, Brian could see the shape it had cut—a shape like a cartoon mouse-hole in a cartoon baseboard.

  The other leaped high, disappeared for a moment behind the Texaco truck’s boxy tank, and then blasted straight through, leaving a metal-ringed hole from which av-gas sprayed in a dull amber flood. They struck the ground, bounced as if on springs, crisscrossed again, and raced on toward the airplane. Reality peeled away in narrow strips beneath them, peeled away wherever and whatever they touched, and as they neared, Brian realized that they were unzipping more than the world—they were opening all the depths of forever.

  They reached the edge of the tarmac and paused. They jittered uncertainly in place for a moment, looking like the bouncing balls that hopped over the words in old movie-house sing-alongs.

  Then they turned and zipped off in a new direction.

  Zipped off in the direction of Craig Toomy, who stood watching them and screaming into the white day.

  With a huge effort, Brian snapped the paralysis which held him. He elbowed Nick, who was still frozen below him. “Come on!” Nick didn’t move and Brian drove his elbow back harder this time, connecting solidly with Nick’s forehead. “Come on, I said! Move your ass! We’re getting out of here!”