He threw the lever, jumped out and down, staggered, almost fell, and caught his camera before it could strike the concrete of the taxiway. There was another growl of thunder, but only a growl this time, distant and unthreatening. A breeze touched him like the caressing touch of a kind hand on his face . . . but more icily below the belt. Dees grimaced. How he had pissed his pants when his Beech and the Piedmont jet had barely scraped by each other would also not be in the story.
Then a thin, drilling shriek came from the General Aviation Terminal — a scream of mingled agony and horror. It was as if someone had slapped Dees across the face. He came back to himself. He centered on his goal again. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t working. Either the concussion had broken it or it had stopped. It was one of those amusing antiques you had to wind up, and he couldn’t remember when he had last done it.
Was it sunset? It was fucking dark out, yes, but with all the thunderheads massed around the airport, it was hard to tell how much that meant. Was it?
Another scream came — no, not a scream, a screech — and the sound of breaking glass.
Dees decided sunset no longer mattered.
He ran, vaguely aware that the genny’s auxiliary tanks were still burning and that he could smell gas in the air. He tried to increase his speed but it seemed he was running in cement. The terminal was getting closer, but not very fast. Not fast enough.
‘Please, no! Please, no! PLEASE NO! OH PLEASE, PLEASE NO!’
This scream, spiraling up and up, was suddenly cut off by a terrible, inhuman howl. Yet there was something human in it, and that was perhaps the most terrible thing of all. In the chancy light of the emergency lamps mounted on the corners of the terminal, Dees saw something dark and flailing shatter more glass in the wall of the terminal that faced the parking area — that wall
was almost entirely glass — and come flying out. It landed on the ramp with a soggy thud, rolled, and Dees saw it was a man.
The storm was moving away but lightning still flickered fitfully, and as Dees ran into the parking area, panting now, he finally saw the Night Flier’s plane, N101BL painted boldly on the tail. The letters and numbers looked black in this light, but he knew they were red and it didn’t matter, anyway. The camera was loaded with fast black-and-white film and armed with a smart flash which would fire only when the light was too low for the film’s speed.
The Skymaster’s belly-hold hung open like the mouth of a corpse. Below it was a large pile of earth in which things squirmed and moved. Dees saw this, did a double-take, and skidded to a stop. Now his heart was filled not just with fright but with a wild, capering happiness. How good it was that everything had come together like this!
Yes, he thought, but don’t you call it luck — don’t you dare call it luck. Don’t you even call it hunch.
Correct. It wasn’t luck that had kept him holed up in that shitty little motel room with the clanky air-conditioner, not hunch — not precisely hunch, anyway — that had tied him to the phone hour after hour, calling flyspeck airports and giving the Night Flier’s tail-number over and over again. That was pure reporter’s instinct, and here was where it all started paying off. Except this was no ordinary payoff; this was the jackpot, El Dorado, that fabled Big Enchilada.
He skidded to a stop in front of the yawning belly-hold and tried to bring the camera up.
Almost strangled himself on the strap. Cursed. Unwound the strap. Aimed.
From the terminal came another scream — that of a woman or a child. Dees barely noticed.
The thought that there was a slaughter going on in there was followed by the thought that slaughter would only fatten the story, and then both thoughts were gone as he snapped three quick shots of the Cessna, making sure to get the gaping belly-hold and the number on the tail.
The auto-winder hummed.
Dees ran on. More glass smashed. There was another thud as another body was ejected onto the cement like a rag doll that had been stuffed full of some thick dark liquid like cough-syrup.
Dees looked, saw confused movement, the billowing of something that might have been a cape . .
. but he was still too far away to tell. He turned. Snapped two more pictures of the plane, these shots dead-on. The gaping belly-hold and the pile of earth would be stark and undeniable in the print.
Then he whirled and ran for the terminal. The fact that he was armed with only an old Nikon never crossed his mind.
He stopped ten yards away. Three bodies out here, two adults, one of each sex, and one that might have been either a small woman or a girl of thirteen or so. It was hard to tell with the head gone.
Dees aimed the camera and fired off six quick shots, the flash flickering its own white lightning, the auto-winder making its contented little whizzing sound.
His mind never lost count. He was loaded with thirty-six shots. He had taken eleven. That left twenty-five. There was more film stuffed into the deep pockets of his slacks, and that was great .
. . if he got a chance to reload. You could never count on that, though; with photographs like these, you had to grab while the grabbing was good. It was strictly a fast-food banquet.
Dees reached the terminal and yanked open the door.
9
He thought he had seen everything there was to see, but he had never seen anything like this.
Never.
How many? his mind yammered. How many you got? Six? Eight? Maybe a dozen?
He couldn’t tell. The Night Flier had turned the little private terminal into a knacker’s shop.
Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Dees saw a foot clad in a black Converse sneaker; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it. Here was a man in a greasy mechanic’s coverall who was still alive, and for a weird moment he thought it was Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic from Cumberland County Airport, but this guy wasn’t just going bald; this guy had entirely made the grade. His face had been chopped wide open from forehead to chin. His nose lay in halves, reminding Dees for some mad reason of a grilled frankfurter, split and ready for the bun.
Dees shot it.
And suddenly, just like that, something inside him rebelled and screamed No more! in an imperative voice it was impossible to ignore, let alone deny.
No more, stop, it’s over!
He saw an arrow painted on the wall, with the words THIS WAY TO COMFORT STATIONS below it. Dees ran in the direction the arrow pointed, his camera flapping.
The men’s room happened to be the first one he came to, but Dees wouldn’t have cared if it was the aliens’ room. He was weeping in great, harsh, hoarse sobs. He could barely credit the fact that these sounds were coming from him. It had been years since he had wept. He’d been a kid the last time.
He slammed through the door, skidded like a skier almost out of control, and grabbed the edge of the second basin in line.
He leaned over it, and everything came out in a rich and stinking flood, some of it splattering back onto his face, some landing in brownish clots on the mirror. He smelled the take-out chicken Creole he’d eaten hunched over the phone in the motel room – this had been just before he’d hit paydirt and gone racing for his plane – and threw up again, making a huge grating sound like overstressed machinery about to strip its gears.
Jesus, he thought, dear Jesus, it’s not a man, it can’t be a man —
That was when he heard the sound.
It was a sound he had heard at least a thousand times before, a sound that was commonplace in any American man’s life . . . but now it filled him with a dread and a creeping terror beyond all his experience or belief.
It was the sound of a man voiding into a urinal.
But although he could see all three of the bathroom’s urinals in the vomit-splattered mirror, he could see no one at any of them.
Dees thought: Vampires don’t cast reflec —
Then he saw reddish liquid striking the porcelain of the center urinal, saw it running down that porcelain, saw it swirling into the geometric arrangement of holes at the bottom.
There was no stream in the air; he saw it only when it struck the dead porcelain.