Lyle hated stability and disruption in equal measure. When Melanie started putting sex appointments on their shared Google calendar, he skipped town for three days. And stayed awake for most of it. Niceties give him Olympic-caliber insomnia. He twice turned down speaking gigs that offered fifteen thousand dollars because the anticipation of the event left him ghost-walking until dawn. It wasn’t the public-speaking part so much as the small talk afterward. It left him bobbing on the waves of inauthenticity, agitated, suffering fools, even ones not so foolish.
The vision outside the flight deck reminded him of one of the worst sleepless fits. The waking nightmares. A hole remained in his bedroom wall made with a broom handle attacking a waffle-size tarantula that wasn’t there. Were these dead bodies for real? Were they dead?
“Was that . . .” Long pause.
“What it looks like,” Eleanor said. “Bodies. Nothing moving out there.”
“Jesus.”
“No one answering distress calls. Nobody responding at all,” the first officer chimed in.
“I didn’t hear any shots,” Lyle said. He figured he must’ve slept through it. Naturally, his mind would go to armed attack—terror or some heavily armed, local madman. Even Lyle, as isolated as he’d made himself the last few years, overheard or read the drumbeat of periodic, indiscriminate mass killings. Just days ago, a guy at the mall in Corpus Christi had mowed down shoppers and left a manifesto about how these “materialists” didn’t understand the true spirit of Christmas.
“I don’t think it’s . . . a shooting.” The pilot’s voice sounded hoarse, phlegmy, halting. “Everything is calm.”
“You said everyone. Everyone is dead.”
“Everyone.”
Lyle cleared his throat, started to get his footing. “How do you know this isn’t an isolated thing—something at the airport?”
“I don’t.”
He looked outside, tried to. Not much to see, darkness and ghost outlines of the terminal, where he’d seen the bodies. “So why not just dock the plane?”
“We can’t just pull up to a gate without help and, besides, I don’t know how safe it is out there. Could be . . .” She shrugged. Anything.
He fell silent and realized he had no idea what they were asking of him. A medical opinion? Or some reassurance? Neither seemed realistic. He settled on a more primitive and frightening reason: they had no clue what was going on. They must have been sitting here for a while and had finally succumbed to getting outside input—from the doctor with hair matted against his forehead who had drugged himself to sleep.
“You can’t get the police?”
“Like we said.” Jerry’s voice had an edge. Lyle got the impression the man didn’t much want Lyle in the middle of this.
“You’ve sealed the vents.” Lyle heard the scratch of sleep still thick in his throat.
“We’re getting only recirculated. Mostly. The APU takes some from the outside.” The pilot paused. “Auxiliary power. We used it briefly but decided against.”
“We have flight deck oxygen. Discrete source, in the aft hold. Just below us,” Jerry added.
“Are you . . .” Lyle tried to pick his words carefully but couldn’t find suitably diplomatic ones. He asked, “Are you two feeling okay? Are you sick or is anyone on the plane feeling ill?”
“Not to our knowledge.”
“I guess we’re looking for a second set of eyes,” the pilot said.
Lyle appreciated the frankness and its tone. But what good was he? He let himself tick down a list of options that might explain a handful of bodies inert here and no communications beyond the airport. The greatest likelihood was a terrorist attack, foreign or domestic. Nut job with a gun, or many of them.
After that, what?
Dirty bomb. One of those nasty things that leaves the buildings intact and kills all forms of life. He’d heard of it, but hardly could offer counsel.
Nuke.
So this was everywhere? Or the epicenter was near here? Small potatoes. In the middle of nowhere? Without fire? No.
His mind wandered further, drawing less from the literature than from more exotic theories. Nothing he’d ever read about resembled this.
Nerve agent, likelier than a nuke, given the modest evidence in front of him, maybe even likely. Sarin gas. It inhibits release or transfer of acetylcholine, a neurochemical that caused muscles to contract. In its absence, paralysis, asphyxiation. He’d heard about the Iranians’ testing of a Zyclon B with hyperspeed effectiveness. It moved at the rate of data. A long shot but not as long as something organic, a virus, not very likely at all; nothing he knew about killed this quickly without killing the host so fast that the pathology couldn’t spread. It’s what made Ebola so, ultimately, self-destructive. When the CDC flew him into a Pakistani village, years earlier, after a Washington Post blog called him Young Dr. Pandemic, Lyle saw bodies akimbo much like the guy in the orange jumpsuit next to the luggage carrier, but in that case, with more signs of trauma, not, like this guy, just frozen in his tracks.
Bacteria. Forget it. The time between onset and death took, at its quickest, a day. Unless something had been gestating. But why only the people on the ground? Not in the plane?
He taught his last adjunct class at UCSF three years ago. Maybe there had been developments, diseases, stuff he hadn’t kept up with, a superbug in the literature or lab. It is flu season, he thought. But no flu ever acted like this.
Could he be sleeping? Could this be a drug-induced hallucination, all the toxins in his brain and liver finally spilling over into madness? All this inside his mind. And this was going to be the trip that righted his ship.
“Say something,” the pilot said.
“Food poisoning,” he muttered.
“Seriously,” said Jerry. Unclear if he was being sarcastic.
“Maslow’s hierarchy. People gotta eat. You said no one is answering the communications?”
The pilot reached to the center console, unlatched a headset, brown leather strap across the top smudged from handling. He accepted them in his right hand, tentative.
“You have to put them on your ears.”
They were tight—the pilot had a small head—and now he glanced at her as he widened the gadget’s setting, catching her allure. Graceful, thin fingers on her right hand gripped tightly around a smaller throttle-type device, not the main throttle, next to her leg. Still couldn’t see her face.
“Just static,” he said.
She reached to the center console and turned a knob on the radio. New channel. More static. New channel. More static.
“The first two are the main air traffic control channels, the second two are backups. Nothing for nearly an hour.”
“You’ve been sitting here an hour?”
No answer.
“How did you land?”
The copilot turned to Lyle. He looked a little bit like a fish—sloping forward, eyes bugging, and widened, wide lips. He said: “When the comms go down, you land.”
Again, a slight edge. Defensive. Lyle decided not to wholly trust him but gave no indication. If Lyle had a true gift, it was mistrusting with great dignity, never with personal disdain. No one ever disliked Lyle for his healthy skepticism. Fact is, people liked Lyle, admired him, let him get away with his apparent non sequiturs and creative flights because they always sensed his goodness, even after he could no longer feel it himself.
“Mountains,” Lyle said.
“What had you expected coming to Steamboat?”
What had he expected? Not much. A keynote address to a small conference and a chance to begin to make amends. Pay the bills again.
“Can you turn on the lights?”
“We don’t want to bring attention to ourselves or continue to bring unwanted scrutiny from the passengers.”
“Because?”
“Because I said so. Because it’s obvious.”
The pilot inhaled deeply. Click. In the five or so seconds during which lights flooded the tarmac, Lyle narrowed his focus from the macro—a small tarmac, such that it was, with one, two bodies lying on the ground to the desolate corporate jet parked to the left, painted red with the insignia “Corp Go,” to the modest lounge in the single-story ranch-style airport frozen with bodies, to the dark maw of the hangar on the far right and, in the distance, wisps in the air, smoke?—to the micro—a single body, the man in the orange jumpsuit beside the luggage rack, frozen in time and space. Too far to discern anything. Other than: comatose or dead. No evidence of shrapnel wounds. No signs of explosion anywhere. But no movement since the last flood of light.
And mountains. They were in a valley.
Lights off. Just vapor trails of images. Then a fuzzy picture, inside his mind’s eye, bodies on the corrugated roof shack off a dusty road in southern Tanzania. The images jolted Lyle, turned to static, faded.
“Looks like the Andes. Ski town, right?”
“Not in November. Mud town, now. Decent airport, though. Yampa Valley Airport, popularly known as Hayden.”
“It’s gun country.”
“What?”
“People love their firearms here.”
“We’ve been over this. Where’s the blood?” the first officer asked.
Fair question. Why didn’t anyone come to help? Where was the ambulance, the firefighters?
“Maybe he killed everyone in sight and flipped the power switch.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Screw Loose. It’s as good a working theory as any. Good reason to stay on the plane, I guess. What time is it?” Lyle asked.
“Here, just past one, in the morning.”
“What’s the temperature?”
“High thirties, but not trusting our gauges.”
“You have electricity.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lyle squinted.
“Well?”
“We have fuel?”
“Yes.”
Lyle looked at the pilot with a clear, unspoken question: Then why not let’s get the hell out of here?
“Maybe enough. Probably. We’ve kept the engine running for the heat. No engine, no heat.”
“But that burns fuel,” said Jerry.
Lyle thought, I slept through it. He’d taken a Benadryl, or four. What you do when you can’t get the good stuff. He rubbed his fingers together, creating sensation, assuring himself he’s awake, sure now that he is.
“What kind of plane is this?”
“Do you know planes?”
“Not really.”
“It’s a 737, Boeing, two turbofan engines. But no communications and the electrical has been less than reliable. Some systems have gone offline. We have auxiliary power. I’m saving it. We take off, we risk coming straight down,” the first officer said. “What we’re asking is whether you’ve ever seen something like this—or read about it? That’s the opinion we’re interested in.”
Lyle reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone. “May I?”
“It won’t work. But be my guest.”
He could look something up, but what exactly? It wasn’t like he was going to go into PubMed and look up the symptom that everyone not on an airplane was dead. His phone came to life. No signal.
“Besides food poisoning,” the pilot said with patience. Lyle liked the nuance in her voice, the control under pressure.
Lyle inched forward, as much as he could, before his knees hit the instrument panel. He put his phone down and peered into the night. Useful words and thoughts failed him.
“So in sum . . .” the first officer said.
“It’s very hard to know from here. Looks to me like those people are either dead or quickly heading that direction.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s very cold.”
There was a moment of silence.
“A storm is blowing in.”
“How do you know?” Lyle asked. How could they see anything blowing in? No radar, presumably. But his interest was piqued; maybe the storm already came through, bringing something deadly, carried on the wind.
Jerry sighed. His meaning clear enough: You might be a doctor but we’re pilots.
“What happens when you call someone, anyone?”
“It goes directly to voice mail or says all circuits are busy. We’ve been trying to find another human being for over an hour, just on the ground. I can barely contain the passengers.”
“Won’t they look for us, a plane that’s off the radar?”
“One would think,” the pilot said.
As Lyle took it in, he found his attention tugged to the dark horizon outside the plane.
“There,” Lyle said.
“What?”
“The hangar. Movement.”