DEADLY NIGHT FLIER SPIKED VICTIMS, DRANK THEIR BLOOD, both men thought at different places on the same day. Not bad.
The Night Flier had requested permission to land at Lakeview Airport shortly after 10:30 P.M.
on the night of July 23rd. Kendall had granted permission and had noted a tail-number with which Dees had become very familiar: N101BL. Kendall had noted ‘name of pilot’ as ‘Dwite Renfield’ and the ‘make and model of aircraft’ as ‘Cessna Skymaster 337’. No mention of the red piping, and of course no mention of the sweeping bat-wing cloak that was as red as a fire engine on the inside and as black as a woodchuck’s asshole on the outside, but Dees was positive of both, just the same.
The Night Flier had flown into Alderton’s Lakeview Airport shortly after ten-thirty, killed that strapping fellow Buck Kendall, drunk his blood, and flown out again in his Cessna sometime before Jenna Kendall came by at five o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth to give her husband a fresh-made waffle and discovered his exsanguinated corpse instead.
As Dees stood outside the ramshackle Lakeview hangar/tower mulling these things over, it occurred to him that if you gave blood, the most you could expect was a cup of orange juice and a word of thanks. If you took it, however — sucked it, to be specific — you got headlines. As he turned the rest of a bad cup of coffee out on the ground and headed toward his plane, ready to fly
south to Maryland, it occurred to Richard Dees that God’s hand might have shaken just a tiny bit when He was finishing off the supposed master-work of His creative empire.
6
Now, two bad hours after leaving Washington National, things had suddenly gotten a lot worse, and with shocking suddenness. The runway lights had gone out, but Dees now saw that wasn’t all that had gone out — half of Wilmington and all of Wrightsville Beach were also dark. ILS was still there, but when Dees snatched the mike and screamed, ‘What happened? Talk to me, Wilmington!’ he got nothing back but a screech of static in which a few voices babbled like distant ghosts.
He jammed the mike back, missing the prong. It thudded to the cockpit floor at the end of its curled wire, and Dees forgot it. The grab and the yell had been pure pilot’s instinct and no more.
He knew what had happened as surely as he knew the sun set in the west . . . which it would do very soon now. A stroke of lightning must have scored a direct hit on a power substation near the airport. The question was whether or not to go in anyway.
‘You had clearance,’ one voice said. Another immediately (and correctly) replied that that was so much bullshit rationalization. You learned what you were supposed to do in a situation like this when you were still the equivalent of a student driver. Logic and the book tell you to head for your alternate and try to contact ATC. Landing under snafu conditions such as these could cost him a violation and a hefty fine.
On the other hand, not landing now — right now — could lose him the Night Flier. It might also cost a life (or lives), but Dees barely factored this into the equation . . . until an idea went off like a flashbulb in his mind, an inspiration that occurred, as most of his inspirations did, in huge tabloid type:
HEROIC REPORTER SAVES (fill in a number, as large as possible, which was pretty large, given the amazingly generous borders that mark the range of human credulity) FROM CRAZED NIGHT
FLIER.
Eat that, Farmer John, Dees thought, and continued his descent toward Runway 34.
The runway lights down there suddenly flashed on, as if approving his decision, then went out again, leaving blue afterimages on his retinas that turned the sick green of spoiled avocados a moment later. Then the weird static coming from the radio cleared and Farmer John’s voice screamed: ‘Haul port, N471B: Piedmont, haul starboard: Jesus, oh Jesus, midair, I think we got a midair — ‘
Dees’s self-preservation instincts were every bit as well honed as those which smelled blood in the bush. He never even saw the Piedmont Airlines 727’s strobe lights. He was too busy banking as tightly to port as the Beech could bank — which was as tight as a virgin’s cooze, and Dees would be happy to testify to that fact if he got out of this shitstorm alive — as soon as the second word was out of Farmer John’s mouth. He had a momentary sight/sense of something huge only inches above him, and then the Beech 55 was taking a beating that made the previous rough air seem like glass. His cigarettes flew out of his breast pocket and streamed everywhere. The half-dark Wilmington skyline tilted crazily. His stomach seemed to be trying to squeeze his heart all the way up his throat and into his mouth. Spit ran up one cheek like a kid whizzing along a greased slide. Maps flew like birds. The air outside now raved with jet thunder as well as the
kind nature made. One of the windows in the four-seat passenger compartment imploded, and an asthmatic wind whooped in, skirling everything not tied down back there into a tornado.
‘Resume your previous altitude assignment, N471B!’ Farmer John was screaming. Dees was aware that he’d just ruined a two-hundred-dollar pair of pants by spraying about a pint of hot piss into them, but he was partially soothed by a strong feeling that old Farmer John had just loaded his Jockey shorts with a truckload or so of fresh Mars Bars. Sounded that way, anyhow.
Dees carried a Swiss Army knife. He took it from his right pants pocket and, holding the wheel with his left hand, cut through his shirt just above the left elbow, bringing blood. Then with no pause, he made another cut, shallow, just below his left eye. He folded the knife shut and stuffed it into the elasticized map pocket in the pilot’s door. Gotta clean it later, he thought. And if I forget it, I could be in deep shit. But he knew he wouldn’t forget, and considering the things the Night Flier had gotten away with, he thought he’d be okay.
The runway lights came on again, this time for good, he hoped, although their pulsing quality told him they were being powered by a generator. He homed the Beech in again on Runway 34.
Blood ran down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth. He sucked some in and then spat a pink mixture of blood and spit into his IVSI. Never miss a trick; just keep following those instincts and they’d always take you home.
He looked at his watch. Sunset was only fourteen minutes away now. This was cutting it much too close to the bone.
‘Pull up, Beech!’ Farmer John yelled. ‘Are you deaf?’
Dees groped for the mike’s kinked wire without ever taking his eyes from the runway lights.
He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got the mike itself. He palmed it and depressed the send button.
‘Listen to me, you chicken-fried son of a bitch,’ he said, and now his lips were pulled all the way back to the gum line. ‘I missed getting turned into strawberry jam by that 727 because your shit genny didn’t kick in when it was supposed to; as a result I had no ATC comm. I don’t know how many people on the airliner just missed getting turned into strawberry jam, but I bet you do, and I know the cockpit crew does. The only reason those guys are still alive is because the captain of that boat was bright enough to allemande right, and I was bright enough to do-si-do, but I have sustained both structural and physical damage. If you don’t give me a landing clearance right now, I’m going to land anyway. The only difference is that if I have to land without clearance, I’m going to have you up in front of an FAA hearing. But first I will personally see to it that your head and your asshole change places. Have you got that, hoss?’
A long, static-filled silence. Then a very small voice, utterly unlike Farmer John’s previous hearty ‘Hey bo’!’ delivery, said, ‘You’re cleared to land Runway 34, N471B.’
Dees smiled and homed in on the runway.
He depressed the mike button and said, ‘I got mean and yelling. I’m sorry. It only happens when I almost die.’
No response from the ground.
‘Well, fuck you very much,’ Dees said, and then headed on down, resisting the impulse to take a quick glance at his watch as he did so.
7
Dees was case-hardened and proud of it, but there was no use kidding himself; what he found in Duffrey gave him the creeps. The Night Flier’s Cessna had spent another entire day — July 31st