A plane had crashed, somewhere very close, and they were all in danger.
Dan hadn’t actually seen anything, but he’d heard the keening whine of the aircraft, followed by an explosion, followed by screams from the commuters at the south-facing windows. Now the entire rush-hour-stuffed train car was losing its collective shit in a manner that suggested the fiery aftermath posed an imminent threat to all of their lives.
Dan tried to stand in his seat, but there was no room—the luggage rack over his head was too low for him to straighten up, his messenger bag was taking up every bit of the narrow space in front of him, and Mousy Librarian had him boxed in on the left. She was standing with her back to Dan and her arms spread to grip the seatbacks on either side, causing her long puffy coat to hang like a curtain that made it impossible for Dan to see past her.
“Open the doors!” someone was yelling from the back of the train.
Up front, a woman kept screaming, “OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD!”
Someone else—is that Pete Blackwell?—was trying to calm her.
“It’s okay! We’re okay!”
That was a minority opinion. The prevailing mood in the car was panic teetering on the edge of hysteria.
Dan shoved his bag against the wall below the window, then took another shot at standing. This time, he managed to squirm in a half turn to face the train’s interior by putting his left knee up on the seat while he pivoted on his right foot. Then he tilted his head almost ninety degrees to peer around Mousy Librarian and try to catch a glimpse of whatever was happening out the south-facing windows.
The AirPod fell out of his left ear.
Shit!
He looked down. No sign of it on the seat. It must’ve fallen to the floor in the row behind him.
Another round of screams erupted from the south side of the car.
“OH GOD OH GOD!”
“IT’S GOING TO BURN US!”
“WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”
Fear surged through the train like an electrical charge. Mousy Librarian whipped around, her wild eyes making contact with Dan’s for a split second before she looked past him and gestured—
“Open the window!”
“What?”
He turned his head to see what she was pointing at. On the upper right corner of the window a few inches away from his eyes was a U-shaped red metal EMERGENCY EXIT bar.
PULL TO REMOVE RUBBER MOLDING, it read.
But standing like he was, hunched under the luggage rack with his back to the window, he wouldn’t be able to pull off the molding even if he could get a grip on the handle. He needed to turn his whole body around.
He also felt a competing—possibly irrational, yet strangely insistent—urge to locate his missing AirPod.
Dan began to shift clockwise, putting his foot back down on the floor and bending his knees awkwardly to negotiate the 270-degree turn that would leave him facing the window. As he turned, he kept his eyes down, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little white earpiece.
“I just dropped my—”
“OPEN THE FUCKING WINDOW!” Mousy Librarian shrieked. He looked back at her, startled—and got a brief glimpse of her eyes burning with fury, so close to his that he could see tiny red veins spiderwebbing the whites around her dark brown irises.
Then he hit his head on the luggage rack.
“Fuck!”
“OPEN IT!”
“I’m trying!” He’d misjudged Mousy Librarian. She wasn’t mousy at all. She was a bitch on wheels.
A few feet away in the aisle, people were yelling and pushing as they tried to shove their way toward the back of the car, away from whatever it was that had so terrified the passengers up at the front windows.
With a heroic twist that nearly blew out his knee, Dan managed to turn all the way back around to face the window. But then his wedged-in messenger bag blocked him from getting his right knee up and completing the maneuver.
AirPods are back-ordered at the Apple Store. It’ll take weeks to—
“DUDE! OPEN THE WINDOW!”
Hipster Captain America was screaming at him now, too.
“I am!” Dan examined the window. There were instructions posted above the glass. He looked up at them.
“OPEN IT!”
“HANG ON!”
Don’t they realize how hard this is?
All around him, people were screaming. He tried to block out the noise and focus on the words in front of him.
“OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY!”
The librarian climbed onto the seat and forced herself into Dan’s physical space, squeezing in beside him as she grabbed for the emergency exit handle.
“Jesus! What the—”
Her outstretched fingers got a grip on the red handle, and she yanked it back with everything she had. It popped loose from its retaining screws and hit Dan square in the cheekbone.
“AAAUGH!”
“The doors are open!” someone yelled.
Disoriented by pain, Dan briefly lost the thread of events. Mousy Librarian was attacking him—or the window? or both?—and there was yelling, and commotion, and someone kept bellowing, “The doors are open!”—and suddenly she’d pulled away and her elbow was no longer pinning Dan against the seat back.
He looked up. The emergency exit handle, which just a second ago had been the Ring of Power to his seatmate’s Gollum, was banging free against the pane on its half-pulled rubber line. Through the window, Dan could see commuters running down the track bed in the direction of Newark.
He turned around to see Mousy Librarian shoving her way down the aisle behind Hipster Captain America. They were headed for the car’s rear exit door.
The rows of seats on either side of Dan were already empty.
As he started to bend down to scan the floor for his missing AirPod, a voice called to him.
“Dan!”
It was Pete Blackwell. He was in the aisle, headed for the rear exit door. The car was empty now. Over Pete’s shoulder, Dan caught a glimpse out one of the far windows of a billowing cloud of orange fire.
His stomach dropped at the sight.
“Let’s go,” Pete told him.
It wasn’t a suggestion. Dan grabbed his messenger bag. Before he followed Pete into the aisle, he paused for an instant.
What about the AirPod?
A second wave of panicky commuters from the next car was barreling up the aisle toward him. To search the prior row, where the AirPod had most likely landed, he’d have to swim upstream against the mob.
He followed Pete in the opposite direction, down the aisle to the open door. After a few steps, it occurred to him that the right side of his face was throbbing with pain. He put two fingers to his cheekbone.
His fingertips came away smeared with blood.
Mousy Librarian had busted his face open.