Four

“Cover your nose and mouth,” Jerry said.

They all did it—Jerry, Eleanor, and the passenger—well, not Lyle. It wouldn’t matter. Microbacteria or viruses would easily sneak through fabric or hands. He steadied himself against the wall and he whisked down a catalog of deadly invaders carried by air—the hantavirus and its many species: Puumala, Muleshoe, Black Creek Canal. Carried by rodents, defecated, dried and baked into dust, inhaled by humans. Inhaled. Delivered through the air. There are horses up here, cows, presumably, lots of dry air. Dried.

Where, he thought, was Melanie? And the baby. Got to be, what, three years old now and change? Safe, surely. Wherever they were.

“We have to get out of here,” Jerry said.

“A spore, maybe, something that comes and goes,” Lyle said, shrugging off the idea as quickly as it came, thinking aloud. Then he looked at the passenger. “What happened out there?”

“I . . .” Tears filled her eyes. “I came out of the bathroom.”

“Where?”

“The back. Stop, stop, just tell me what’s going on!” Freaked out, yes, but not entirely plaintive. Wavering between shock and what Lyle surmised as a basic inner strength. She looked distantly familiar and then he placed her; she’d been sitting next to him, sharing his aisle.

Eleanor stood and Lyle, without being aware of it, put out a gentle hand, trying to calm everyone. He made an equally subconscious decision to deliberately ask the passenger the most basic questions to steady her, so he could get as much information as possible before she imploded.

“We’re trying to figure that out. You can help us. What’s your name?”

She took a second to process it. “Alex.”

“Alex?”

“Jenkins. It’s a dream . . .”

“Alex, was there a noise? Before people got . . . sick. Was there a noise?”

“What kind of noise?”

“A scream,” Eleanor said. “Was anyone in pain? I thought I heard voices.”

“I was just going to the bathroom,” she said. She brought a petite hand to the side of her face. Clear-painted fingernails had been gnawed. A nervous person, Lyle thought. Now trying to hold it together.

“And then you came out of the bathroom, and—”

“And I started to walk up the aisle and I noticed this guy was falling out of his seat—”

“Was in the process of falling, or had already fallen?”

“Cut this bullshit out!” Jerry said through the jacket he held to his mouth.

“Jerry . . .” said Eleanor.

“C’mon, we can play doctor later. We need to make a decision.”

It was obvious what he meant. Stay or go.

Eleanor stood and walked to the door and stared out through the pinhole. “What about the cabin camera?” she said, sounding almost revelatory.

She’d completely forgotten. They had a hidden camera in the cabin that they rarely used; it felt gross, was how she put it. All the airlines had followed suit after JetBlue set the post-9/11 trend. Eleanor turned to Jerry, who fiddled with buttons in the middle instrument panel. The screen in front of him flickered. It was a scene from a horror movie. A bird’s-eye view of motionless passengers. They looked very much like soldiers felled midstep. Lyle took a step in the direction of the screen, not that there was much room to maneuver. He focused at random on one passenger, a man wearing a wool hat, form-fitting his skull, earphones protruding from the sides. His angular face tilted to the right, head almost on his shoulder. Lyle homed in further on the shoulders, pulled slightly back, not totally in repose. What was it? Lyle thought. He took a step closer, leaned in. What is it about the guy?

Then the image flickered. It went in and out. Jerry slapped the screen, willing it to life. But it flickered again, then went out.

“Does it record? Can you go back in time?” Alex asked. It was the first indication she wasn’t too terrified to speak.

Jerry shook his head.

“Is this airtight? The cockpit?” asked Lyle.

“Flight deck,” Jerry corrected him.

“Not the same thing?” Lyle regretted saying it immediately. Of course it was the same. This guy had to mark his territory.

Jerry continued. “And the answer is: the flight deck is more or less airtight. But it doesn’t matter because we already opened the door, so whatever is out there is in here.”

“Not necessarily,” Lyle said, but it came across more as an internal monologue than dialogue.

“Please, I want to hear what the doctor has to say,” Eleanor said, “and then I’ll make a decision.” Nothing subtle about her language; she, and she alone, called the shots.

Jerry tightened his hand on the gun.

“Did you notice if anyone was moving at all?” Lyle asked Alex.

She didn’t answer right away.

“I didn’t see anyone move,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear anything. I thought maybe everyone was asleep. After I saw the first guy, the one fallen over in the aisle, I saw another person folded forward, kind of, like how they tell you to put your face on your lap when you land. I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it but earlier this woman who was sitting in the middle of the plane had been saying she’d seen bodies—on the ground. She said she’d seen something . . .” Alex looked up and she was searching for a handrail. Lyle didn’t want to fashion one yet; he wanted the information as undiluted as possible. “This woman said something about this country being out of control with guns and rage, and then someone else mentioned Wo Hop To, that gang that shot at the mayor’s office, and an Asian man got really angry.”

“Get to the point,” Jerry said.

“Hold on,” Lyle said. “Everyone was getting anxious?”

She nodded.

“We were scared.”

On one level, of course, it was natural that people would speculate about armed attack or terrorism, especially if someone had seen a body. It was everywhere now, the violence, hardening people and accelerating a non-virtuous cycle: people wanted more police power, then feared government power and purchased more guns. Frustrated citizens hewed more tightly to views that, perversely, accelerated the trend further. More cops, more guns, more guns, more cops.

Everywhere now, in the news, the narrative had become the unzipping of civility, the hint of lawlessness, or a skepticism of the law, those who said it had become politicized. People had to prepare to defend themselves and their values. In the latest news, a group of heavily armed separatists in Oregon was daring law enforcement to come in and toss them off their compound on federal land. They’d taken a federal marshal hostage claiming him a spy and enemy combatant.

“I didn’t hear any shots out there,” Jerry said. “Did anyone have a gun?”

Alex shook her head in a way that said two things: I don’t think so and I don’t know.

“Maybe it’s multipronged,” Jerry said. He directed his comment only to Eleanor. “Guns and gas. Outside and in here.”

“We’ve got no evidence anyone is atta—”

“Respectfully, Captain, let’s not be naive here. This world has gone to absolute shit. It’s a narco war zone south of the border, Arab teenagers run down innocent pedestrians in Jerusalem to say nothing of the rest of the Middle East, and it’s bleeding onto our soil. You can’t count on the cops. Hell, some are just hired guns of the government. Look at Oregon.”

“Why here, Jerry, in Steamboat?”

“Why anywhere?” Jerry answered.

“Alex,” Lyle said, “may I ask you a question?” He was looking at her square, very intensely.

She nodded.

“Is there anything you might be leaving out?” The way he said it was so graceful that only the most astute listener would hear the surgical challenge in it. Was she, he was in effect asking, telling the whole truth?

Eleanor picked up the subtlety and she blanched. This guy was good.

“Like what?” Alex asked, holding Lyle’s gaze. “Help me remember. I want to help. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Lyle seemed satisfied.

“So speak, Doctor,” Jerry said. “Give us your opinion so we can make a decision. Are these people sick or dead or what?” In the military, Jerry had admired this medic who made a decision and went with it, making decisiveness the highest priority.

Fair enough, Lyle thought, and he flashed briefly on an experience he’d had while doing his CDC work when he had visited the Jewish Quarter in Barcelona, where there had been a small outbreak of SARS. One of the patients was the young daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. She wasn’t responding to any treatment. She was in agony, barely hanging on, having spent more than a week on the brink. Lyle recommended a new course of action. The rabbi called Lyle aside and, quietly, asked if he expected the treatment to do any good. “I can’t be sure, Rabbi. We should try everything.”

“Dr. Martin, may I ask you a question?”

Of course, Lyle had nodded.

“Do you know when to let go? When to stop fighting?”

Lyle had no ready answer to the questions or the rabbi’s soft but probing brown eyes.

“When you start to pray,” the rabbi said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an agnostic or an atheist or a man of faith. You know, deep inside, when the better part of your treatment is hope rather than science.”

Lyle had attempted, without success, to hold the rabbi’s gaze.

As he stood now in the airplane, he tried to figure out if he was hoping or praying, applying science or faith. The answer rocked him: he wasn’t sure where he stood on any of it anymore. He couldn’t find his own center, let alone an answer for these people. All he could think was, I want out. Out of here, this situation, this flight deck.

“I’ll need to examine them.”

Eleanor made a clicking sound with her mouth, considering this.

“Do you want to turn the lights on again?” Lyle said, peering out the window.

Click went the lights.

“We’ve seen this,” said Jerry.

“Like I said, the only way for me to know for sure is if I can examine them,” Lyle interrupted. “Stating the obvious—repeating the obvious.” He noticed his phone on the instrument panel and snagged it. He felt an urge to say, I’ll just take my phone and be on my way. Maybe head back into the airplane and plop down and feel at home among people who were brain-dead or paralyzed or whatever they were. Is that what he was or was he just as terrified as everyone else and unable to tap into it because of the protective coating that had enveloped him since Africa and everything that had happened with Melanie?

He looked out through the right side of the window. Where he thought he’d seen something. And, again, he imagined he saw movement in the pitch black with snow collecting on the window. Impossible, right? Or, maybe, that’s why he looked in that direction in the first place—because he’d picked up motion of some kind.

“What?” Eleanor asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, we get that.” She waved him off—suddenly mistrusting everything, Lyle too. “Is it colder in here?” She studied the cabin, like a dog sensing something in the air. Then she realized what nagged at her. The first observer’s seat, the one behind the first officer’s chair, was folded up. It had been folded down earlier. On the floor below the chair, a compartment door was ajar. She looked at her copilot. “You didn’t shut the door.”

“What door?” asked Lyle. This piqued his interest.

“Earlier. Before you came in here, Jerry checked the main battery and the oxygen.”

“Was there anything . . .” Lyle looked for a word.

“Nothing strange,” Jerry said.

Lyle nodded. Could the fact that they were getting some air seepage from the belly of the plane have spared them the syndrome?

“There’s a case of champagne down there that looks like baggage handlers commandeered and stowed it for their own use. It’s nicely chilled,” Jerry said, trying for a joke.

“And?” Lyle said.

“And what?”

“Battery and oxygen. How are the levels?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Maybe.”

“Tip-top.”

Lyle now stared at Jerry until he thought it might raise a challenge and dropped his gaze. So this first officer was down in the hold, away from everyone else, and many people were dead? Or poisoned or something? Was that worthy of note?

Lyle wanted to keep the man talking.

“I agree with you,” he said, looking at Jerry, “that we’re running short on time. One question: How long can we keep this plane heated—in your estimation?”

“Like I said before, we’re airtight-ish, which helps. Beyond that, it comes down to how much we want to run the engine, which costs fuel, obviously. What’s your thinking?”

“Just, y’know, how long can these folks last if they’re not dead—whether in here or out there. Snowy day. Night.” He watched as a heavier snow flurry hit the windshield and stuck.

Eleanor shook her head. They were going to have to deal very soon with temperature and food.

“Open the champagne,” Lyle said. “It’d warm everyone up, at least temporarily.”

Eleanor blanched and Lyle tried to cover up his raw admission; he’d do anything for a drink right now.

“Sorry,” Lyle said. “Anyhow, cold has its advantages, on a serious note. It can chill the nervous system, the brain, keep it alive.”

“What’s that have to do—”

“I’m not sure. I’m thinking aloud about the implications for us.” He paused, then added, “And them.”

“So.”

“It slows the metabolic function. That can be useful.”

“Hmph. I thought you just said that we wanted heat . . .” Eleanor’s voice trailed into silence. It was so quiet Lyle could feel the flakes dusting the front window, melting, sticking, melting, sticking. Silence made a sound, that dull buzz you hear at a library that, in this case, no one seemed to want to break. Talk about a situation where there wasn’t much useful to say. Lyle scanned the instrument panel, the gauges he didn’t understand. He was looking for some logic to hold onto, a guidepost. He found only the memory of how he used to love the small-plane landings on makeshift strips in hidden parts of the world where he’d been called in to consult. Physics defying, he always felt it, the engines resisting gravity, commandeering it, that terrible moment before touchdown when it certainly seemed it might go either way. He loved the apparent confidence of the pilot and would try to draft on it. If the pilot can land this metal hunk on this slab of dirt, then I can walk into the village and give death a good licking.

“I’m decided,” Captain Hall interrupted the silence.

“I’m going outside.”