human voice broke the unnatural quiet. Even their footfalls seemed wrong to her. She was wearing a pair of high heels, but instead of the brisk click she was used to, she seemed to hear only small, dull thuds.
Seemed, she thought. That’s the key word. Because the situation is so strange, everything begins to seem strange. It’s the concrete, that’s all. High heels sound different on concrete.
But she had walked on concrete in high heels before. She didn’t remember ever hearing a sound precisely like this. It was … pallid, somehow. Strengthless.
They reached the parked luggage trains. Nick wove between them, leading the line, and stopped at a dead conveyor belt which emerged from a hole lined with hanging strips of rubber. The conveyor made a wide circle on the apron where the handlers normally stood to unload the flatties, then re-entered the terminal through another hole hung with rubber strips.
‘What are those pieces of rubber for?’ Bethany asked nervously.
‘To keep out the draft in cold weather, I imagine,’ Nick said. ‘Just let me poke my head through and have a look. No fear; won’t be a moment.’ And before anyone could reply, he had boosted himself onto the conveyor belt and was walking bent-over down to one of the holes cut into the building. When he got there, he dropped to his knees and poked his head through the rubber strips.
We’re going to hear a whistle and then a thud, Albert thought wildly, and when we pull him back, his head will be gone.
There was no whistle, no thud. When Nick withdrew, his head was still firmly attached to his neck, and his face wore a thoughtful expression. ‘Coast’s clear,’ he said, and to Albert his cheery tone now sounded manufactured. ‘Come on through, friends. When a body meet a body, and all that.’
Bethany held back. ‘Are there bodies? Mister, are there dead people in there?’
‘Not that I saw, miss,’ Nick said, and now he had dropped any attempt at lightness. ‘I was misquoting old Bobby Burns in an attempt to be funny. I’m afraid I achieved tastelessness instead of humor. The fact is, I didn’t see anyone at all. But that’s pretty much what we expected, isn’t it?’
It was … but it struck heavily at their hearts just the same. Nick’s as well, from his tone.
One after the other they climbed onto the conveyor belt and crawled after him through the hanging rubber strips.
Dinah paused just outside the entrance hole and turned her head back toward Laurel. Hazy light flashed across her dark glasses, turning them to momentary mirrors.
‘It’s really wrong here,’ she repeated, and pushed through to the other side.
9
One by one they emerged into the main terminal of Bangor International Airport, exotic baggage crawling along a stalled conveyor belt. Albert helped Dinah off and then they all stood there, looking around in silent wonder.
The shocked amazement at waking to a plane which had been magically emptied of people had worn off; now dislocation had taken the place of wonder. None of them had ever been in an airport terminal which
was utterly empty. The rental-car stalls were deserted. The ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors were dark and dead. No one stood at the bank of counters serving Delta, United, Northwest Air-Link, or Mid-Coast Airways. The huge tank in the middle of the floor with the BUY MAINE LOBSTERS banner stretched over it was full of water, but there were no lobsters in it. The overhead fluorescents were off, and the small amount of light entering through the doors on the far side of the large room petered out halfway across the floor, leaving the little group from Flight 29 huddled together in an unpleasant nest of shadows.
‘Right, then,’ Nick said, trying for briskness and managing only unease. ‘Let’s try the telephones, shall we?’
While he went to the bank of telephones, Albert wandered over to the Budget Rent A Car desk. In the slots on the rear wall he saw folders for BRIGGS, HANDLEFORD, MARCHANT, FENWICK, and PESTLEMAN. There was, no doubt, a rental agreement inside each one, along with a map of the central Maine area, and on each map there would be an arrow with the legend You ARE HERE on it, pointing at the city of Bangor.
But where are we really? Albert wondered. And where are Briggs, Handleford, Marchant, Fenwick, and Pestleman? Have they been transported to another dimension? Maybe it’s the Grateful Dead. Maybe the Dead’s playing somewhere downstate and everybody left for the show.
There was a dry scratching noise just behind him. Albert nearly jumped out of his skin and whirled around fast, holding his violin case up like a cudgel. Bethany was standing there, just touching a match to the tip of her cigarette.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Scare you?’
‘A little,’ Albert said, lowering the case and offering her a small, embarrassed smile.
‘Sorry.’ She shook out the match, dropped it on the floor, and drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘There. At least that’s better. I didn’t dare to on the plane. I was afraid something might blow up.’
Bob Jenkins strolled over. ‘You know, I quit those about ten years ago.’
‘No lectures, please,’ Bethany said. ‘I’ve got a feeling that if we get out of this alive and sane, I’m in for about a month of lectures. Solid. Wall-to-wall.’
Jenkins raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask for an explanation. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was going to ask you if I could have one. This seems like an excellent time to renew acquaintances with old habits.’
Bethany smiled and offered him a Marlboro. Jenkins took it and she lit it for him. He inhaled, then coughed out a series of smoke-signal puffs.
‘You have been away,’ she observed matter-of-factly.
Jenkins agreed. ‘But I’ll get used to it again in a hurry. That’s the real horror of the habit, I’m afraid. Did you two notice the clock?’
‘No,’ Albert said.
Jenkins pointed to the wall above the doors of the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The clock mounted there had stopped at 4:07.
lit fits,’ he said. ‘We knew we had been in the air for awhile when – let’s call it The Event, for want of a better term – when The Event took place. 4:07 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time is 1:07 A.M. PDT. So now we know the when.’
‘Gee, that’s great,’ Bethany said.
‘Yes,’ Jenkins said, either not noticing or preferring to ignore the light overlay of sarcasm in her voice. ‘But there’s something wrong with it. I only wish the sun was out. Then I could be sure.’
‘What do you mean?’ Albert asked.
‘The clocks – the electric ones, anyway – are no good. There’s no juice. But if the sun was out, we could get at least a rough idea of what time it is by the length and direction of our shadows. My watch says it’s going on quarter of nine, but I don’t trust it. It feels later to me than that. I have no proof for it, and I can’t explain it, but it does.’
Albert thought about it. Looked around. Looked back at Jenkins. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it does. It feels like it’s almost lunchtime. Isn’t that nuts?’
‘It’s not nuts,’ Bethany said, ‘it’s just jetlag.’
‘I disagree,’ Jenkins said. ‘We travelled west to east, young lady. Any temporal dislocation west-east travellers feel goes the other way. They feel it’s earlier than it should be.’
‘I want to ask you about something you said on the plane,’ Albert said. ‘When the captain told us that there must be some other people here, you said “false logic.” In fact, you said it twice. But it seems straight enough to me. We were all asleep, and we’re here. And if this thing happened at -‘ Albert glanced toward the clock ‘- at 4:07, Bangor time, almost everyone in town must have been asleep.’
‘Yes,’ Jenkins said blandly. ‘So where are they?’
Albert was nonplussed. ‘Well . . .’
There was a bang as Nick forcibly hung up one of the pay telephones. It was the last in a long line of them; he had tried every one. ‘It’s a wash-‘ out,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead. The coin-fed ones as well as the direct-dials. You can add the sound of no phones ringing to that of no dogs barking, Brian.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Laurel asked. She heard the forlorn sound of her own voice and it made her feel very small, very lost. Beside her, Dinah was turning in slow circles. She looked like a human radar dish.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Baldy proposed. ‘That’s where the restaurant must be.’
They all looked at him. Gaffney snorted. ‘You got a one-track mind, mister.’
The bald man looked at him from beneath one raised eyebrow. ‘First, the name is Rudy Warwick, not mister,’ he replied. ‘Second, people think better when their stomachs are full.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just a law of nature.’