… but people do.
Instead of feeling shame, Craig Toomy had been dominated by vast relief and a kind of hectic, horrified happiness as he boarded American Pride’s Flight 29 to Boston. He was going to explode, and he found he didn’t give a damn. In fact, he found himself looking forward to it. He could feel the pressure peeling away from all the surfaces of his skin as he rose toward the surface. For the first time in weeks, there had been no paper-ripping. He had fallen asleep before Flight 29 even left the gate, and he had slept like a baby until that blind little brat had begun to caterwaul.
And now they told him everything had changed, and that simply could not be allowed. It must not be allowed. He had been firmly caught in the net, had felt the dizzying rise and the stretch of his skin as it tried to compensate. They could not now change their minds and drop him back into the deeps.
Bangor?
Bangor, Maine?
Oh no. No indeed.
Craig Toomy was vaguely aware that most of the people on Flight 29 had disappeared, but he didn’t care.
They weren’t the important thing. They weren’t part of what his father had always liked to call THE BIG
PICTURE. The meeting at the Pru was part of THE BIG PICTURE.
This crazy idea of diverting to Bangor, Maine … whose scheme, exactly, had that been?
It had been the pilot’s idea, of course. Engle’s idea. The so-called captain. Engle, now … Engle might very well be part of THE BIG PICTURE. He might, in fact, be an AGENT OF THE ENEMY. Craig had suspected this in his heart from the moment when Engle had begun to speak over the intercom, but in this case he hadn’t needed to depend on his heart, had he? No indeed. He had been listening to the conversation between the skinny kid and the man in the fire-sale sport-coat. The man’s taste in clothes was terrible, but what he had to say made perfect sense to Craig Toomy … at least, up to a point.
In that case, the pilot would be one of us, the kid had said.
Yes and no, the guy in the fire-sale sport-coat had replied. In my scenario, the pilot is the pilot. The pilot who just happened to be on board, supposedly deadheading to Boston, the pilot who just happened to be sitting less than thirty feet from the cockpit door.
Engle, in other words.
And the other fellow, the one who had twisted Craig’s nose, was clearly in on it with him, serving as a kind of sky-marshal to protect Engle from anyone who happened to catch on.
He hadn’t eavesdropped on the conversation between the kid and the man in the fire-sale sport-coat much longer, because around that time the man in the fire-sale sport-coat stopped making sense and began babbling a lot of crazy shit about Denver and Des Moines and Omaha being gone. The idea that three large American cities could simply disappear was absolutely out to lunch . . . but that didn’t mean everything the old guy had to say was out to lunch.
It was an experiment, of course. That idea wasn’t silly, not a bit. But the old guy’s idea that all of them were test subjects was just more crackpot stuff.
Me, Craig thought. It’s me. I’m the test subject.
All his life Craig had felt himself a test subject in an experiment just like this one. This is a question, gentlemen, of ratio: pressure to success. The right ratio produces some x-factor. What x-factor? That is what our test subject, Mr Craig Toomy, will show us.
But then Craig Toomy had done something they hadn’t expected, something none of their cats and rats and guinea pigs had ever dared to do: he had told them he was pulling out.
But you can’t do that! You’ll explode!
Will I? Fine.
And now it had all become clear to him, so clear. These other people were either innocent bystanders or extras who had been hired to give this stupid little drama some badly needed verisimilitude. The whole thing had been rigged with one object in mind: to keep Craig Toomy away from Boston, to keep Craig Toomy from opting out of the experiment.
But I’ll show them, Craig thought. He pulled another sheet from the in-flight magazine and looked at it. It showed a happy man, a man who had obviously never heard of the langoliers, who obviously did not know
they were lurking everywhere, behind every bush and tree, in every shadow, just over the horizon. The happy man was driving down a country road behind the wheel of his Avis rental car. The ad said that when you showed your American Pride Frequent Flier Card at the Avis desk, they’d just about give you that rental car, and maybe a game-show hostess to drive it, as well. He began to tear a strip of paper from the side of the glossy ad. The long, slow ripping sound was at the same time excruciating and exquisitely calming.
I’ll show them that when I say I’m getting out, I mean what I say.
He dropped the strip onto the floor and began on the next one. It was important to rip slowly. It was important that each strip should be as narrow as possible, but you couldn’t make them too narrow or they got away from you and petered out before you got to the bottom of the page. Getting each one just right demanded sharp eyes and fearless hands. And I’ve got them. You better believe it. You just better believe It.
Rii-ip.
I might have to kill the pilot.
His hands stopped halfway down the page. He looked out the window and saw his own long, pallid face superimposed over the darkness.
I might have to kill the Englishman, too.
Craig Toomy had never killed anyone in his life. Could he do it? With growing relief, he decided that he could. Not while they were still in the air, of course; the Englishman was very fast, very strong, and up here there were no weapons that were sure enough. But once they landed?
Yes. If I have to, yes.
After all, the conference at the Pru was scheduled to last for three days. It seemed now that his late arrival was unavoidable, but at least he would be able to explain: he had been drugged and taken hostage by a government agency. It would stun them. He could see their startled faces as he stood before them, the three hundred bankers from all over the country assembled to discuss bonds and indebtedness, bankers who would instead hear the dirty truth about what the government was up to. My friends, I was abducted by Rii-ip.
– and was able to escape only when I
Rii-ip.
If I have to, I can kill them both. In fact, I can kill them all.
Craig Toomy’s hands began to move again. He tore off the rest of the strip, dropped it on the floor, and began on the next one. There were a lot of pages in the magazine, there were a lot of strips to each page, and that meant a lot of work lay ahead before the plane landed. But he wasn’t worried.
Craig Toomy was a can-do type of guy.
5
Laurel Stevenson didn’t go back to sleep but she did slide into a light doze. Her thoughts – which became something close to dreams in this mentally untethered state – turned to why she had really been going to Boston.
I’m supposed to be starting my first real vacation in ten years, she had said, but that was a lie. It contained a small grain of truth, but she doubted if she had been very believable when she told it; she had not been raised to tell lies, and her technique was not very good. Not that any of the people left on Flight 29 would have cared much either way, she supposed. Not in this situation. The fact that you were going to Boston to meet – and almost certainly sleep – with a man you had never met paled next to the fact that you were heading east in an airplane from which most of the passengers and all of the crew had disappeared.
Dear Laurel
I am so much looking forward to meeting you. You won’t even have to double-check my photo when you step out of the jetway. I’ll have so many butterflies in my stomach that all you need to do is look for the guy who’s floating somewhere near the ceiling …
His name was Darren Crosby.
She wouldn’t need to look at his photograph; that much was true. She had memorized his face, just as she had memorized most of his letters. The question was why. And to that question she had no answer. Not even a clue. It was just another proof of J. R. R. Tolkien’s observation: you must be careful each time you step out of your door, because your front walk is really a road, and the road leads ever onward. If you aren’t careful, you’re apt to find yourself … well … simply swept away, a stranger in a strange land with no clue as to how you got there.