‘It’s OK, Justin, I think we can stop now.’
Agnes was speaking loudly, just an inch or two from his ear, but he didn’t flinch, or react, or turn around, or give any indication that he’d heard. She tapped him, and when he turned from the mesmerizing sight of the burning terminal, she pressed her hands palms-down towards the ground, the way a nursery teacher calms and settles children in a classroom and tells them it is time to sit.
Justin sat.
They were far enough away to be safe now; even an explosion would have to cross the main north-south runway to get to them. She was panting and for the first time felt the pain in her feet, cut as they crossed the terminal floor. But her head was clear and the sequence of events transparent enough for her to wonder how her shoes had come off and when. It seemed such an odd consequence of a blast.
As they sat, a small fireball rolled up the tail of the DC-IO, then another, and another, and then the black smoke pouring out of the smashed nose thickened, and finally they saw, then heard, the explosion that ripped the plane to pieces and destroyed what was left of the terminal.
Justin stared like a bushbaby, his eyes huge, unblinking and seemingly disconnected from his brain. He looked more like a child than the disorientated teenager he was, a child watching fireworks, excited, waiting for the next explosion.
Well, you had to give the boy credit, Agnes thought. He’d sure hit the nail on the head with his crazy doom stuff. Not that she thought he’d been making it up exactly, but doom had always seemed a somewhat melodramatic expression of what she took to be ordinary teenage anxiety. She wondered if he could have known about this all along, whether the plane crash had somehow been wired in as a premonition of his fate.
It hurt her head to think so hard about something so difficult to grasp.
She wondered, as she sat bleeding slowly, watching what remained of the terminal melt into a soup of glass and metal and human flesh on the ground, if they were alive because of being blessed or in spite of being cursed.
She wondered if this were the end or the beginning of Justin’s clash with fate. Or just some fairly average incident in the middle.