Every seat she investigated was empty.
This can’t be, she thought wildly. It just can’t be! They were all around us when we got on! I heard them! I felt them! I smelled them! Where have they all gone?
She didn’t know, but they were gone: she was becoming steadily more sure of that.
At some point, while she slept, her aunt and everyone else on Flight 29 had disappeared.
No! The rational part of her mind clamored in the voice of Miss Lee. No, that’s impossible, Dinah! If everyone’s gone, who is flying the plane?
She began to move forward faster now, hands gripping the edges of the seats, her blind eyes wide open behind her dark glasses, the hem of her pink travelling dress fluttering. She had lost count, but in her greater distress over the continuing silence, this did not matter much to her.
She stopped again, and reached her groping hands into the seat on her right. This time she touched hair …
but its location was all wrong. The hair was on the seat – how could that be?
Her hands closed around it … and lifted it. Realization, sudden and terrible, came to her.
It’s hair, but the man it belongs to is gone. It’s a scalp. I’m holding a dead man’s scalp.
That was when Dinah Bellman opened her mouth and began to give voice to the shrieks which pulled Brian Engle from his dream.
6
Albert Kaussner was belly up to the bar, drinking Branding Iron Whiskey. The Earp brothers, Wyatt and Virgil, were on his right, and Doc Halliday was on his left. He was just lifting his glass to offer a toast when a man with a peg leg ran-hopped into the Sergio Leone Saloon.
‘It’s the Dalton Gang!’ he screamed. ‘The Daltons have just rid into Dodge!’
Wyatt turned to face him calmly. His face was narrow, tanned, and handsome. He looked a great deal like Hugh O’Brian. ‘This here is Tombstone, Muffin,’ he said. ‘You got to get yore stinky ole shit together.’
‘Well, they’re ridin in, wherever we are!’ Muffin exclaimed. ‘And they look maaad, Wyatt! They look reeely reeely maaaaaaad!’
As if to prove this, guns began to fire in the street outside – the heavy thunder of Army .44s (probably stolen) mixed in with the higher whipcrack explosions of Garand rifles.
‘Don’t get your panties all up in a bunch, Muffy,’ Doc Halliday said, and tipped his hat back. Albert was not terribly surprised to see that Doc looked like Robert De Niro. He had always believed that if anyone was absolutely right to play the consumptive dentist, De Niro was the one.
‘What do you say, boys?’ Virgil Earp asked, looking around. Virgil didn’t look like much of anyone.
‘Let’s go,’ Wyatt said. ‘I’ve had enough of these damned Clantons to last me a lifetime.’
‘It’s the Daltons, Wyatt,’ Albert said quietly.
‘I don’t care if it’s John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd!’ Wyatt exclaimed. ‘Are you with us or not, Ace?’
‘I’m with you,’ Albert Kaussner said, speaking in the soft but menacing tones of the born killer. He dropped one hand to the butt of his long-barrelled Buntline Special and put the other to his head for a moment to make sure his yarmulke was on solidly. It was.
‘Okay, boys,’ Doc said. ‘Let’s go cut some Dalton butt.’
They strode out together, four abreast through the batwing doors, just as the bell in the Tombstone Baptist Church began to toll high noon.
The Daltons were coming down Main Street at a full gallop, shooting holes in plate-glass windows and false fronts. They turned the waterbarrel in front of Duke’s Mercantile and Reliable Gun Repair into a fountain.
Ike Dalton was the first to see the four men standing in the dusty street, their frock coats pulled back to free the handles of their guns. Ike reined his horse in savagely and it rose on its rear legs, squealing, foam splattering in thick curds around the bit. Ike Dalton looked quite a bit like Rutger Hauer.
‘Look what we have got here,’ he sneered. ‘It is Wyatt Earp and his pansy brother Virgil.’
Emmett Dalton (who looked like Donald Sutherland after a month of hard nights) pulled up beside Ike.
‘And their faggot dentist friend, too,’ he snarled. ‘Who else wants -‘ Then he looked at Albert and paled. The thin sneer faltered on his lips.
Paw Dalton pulled up beside his two sons. Paw bore a strong resemblance to Slim Pickens.
‘Christ,’ Paw whispered. ‘It’s Ace Kaussner!’
Now Frank James pulled his mount into line next to Paw. His face was the color of dirty parchment. ‘What the hell, boys!’ Frank cried. ‘I don’t mind hoorawin a town or two on a dull day, but nobody told me The Arizona Jew was gonna be here!’
Albert ‘Ace’ Kaussner, known from Sedalia to Steamboat Springs as The Arizona Jew, took a step forward.
His hand hovered over the butt of his Buntline. He spat a stream of tobacco to one side, never taking his chilly gray eyes from the hardcases mounted twenty feet in front of him.
‘Go on and make your moves, boys,’ said The Arizona Jew. ‘By my count, hell ain’t half full.’
The Dalton Gang slapped leather just as the clock in the tower of the Tombstone Baptist Church beat the last stroke of noon into the hot desert air. Ace went for his own gun, his draw as fast as blue blazes, and as he began to fan the hammer with the flat of his left hand, sending a spray of .45-caliber death into the Dalton Gang, a little girl standing outside The Longhorn Hotel began to scream.
Somebody make that brat stop yowling, Ace thought. What’s the matter with her, anyway? I got this under control. They don’t call me the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi for nothing.
But the scream went on, ripping across the air, darkening it as it came, and everything began to break up.
For a moment Albert was nowhere at all – lost in a darkness through which fragments of his dream tumbled and spun in a whirlpool. The only constant was that terrible scream; it sounded like the shriek of an overloaded teakettle.
He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in his seat toward the front of Flight 29’S main cabin.
Coming up the aisle from the rear of the plane was a girl of about ten or twelve, wearing a pink dress and a pair of ditty-bop shades.
What is she, a movie star or something? he thought, but he was badly frightened, all the same. It was a bad way to exit his favorite dream.
‘Hey!’ he cried – but softly, so as not to wake the other passengers. ‘Hey, kid! What’s the deal?’
The little girl whiplashed her head toward the sound of his voice. Her body turned a moment later, and she collided with one of the seats which ran down the center of the cabin in four-across rows. She struck it with her thighs, rebounded, and tumbled backward over the armrest of a portside seat. She fell into it with her legs up.
‘Where is everybody?’ she was screaming. ‘Help me! Help me!’
‘Hey, stewardess!’ Albert yelled, concerned, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He stood up, slipped out of his seat, turned toward the screaming little girl … and stopped. He was now facing fully toward the back of the plane, and what he saw froze him in place.
The first thought to cross his mind was, I guess I don’t have to worry about waking up the other passengers, after all.
To Albert it looked like the entire main cabin of the 767 was empty.
7
Brian Engle was almost to the partition separating Flight 29’S first-class and business-class sections when he realized that first class was now entirely empty. He stopped for just a moment, then got moving again.
The others had left their seats to see what all the screaming was about, perhaps.
Of course he knew this was not the case; he had been flying passengers long enough to know a good bit about their group psychology. When a passenger freaked out, few if any of the others ever moved. Most air travellers meekly surrendered their option to take individual action when they entered the bird, sat down, and buckled their seatbelts around them. Once those few simple things were accomplished, all problem-solving tasks became the crew’s responsibility. Airline personnel called them geese, but they were really sheep … an attitude most flight crews liked just fine. It made the nervous ones easier to handle.
But, since it was the only thing that made even remote sense, Brian ignored what he knew and plunged on.
The rags of his own dream were still wrapped around him, and a part of his mind was convinced that it was Anne who was screaming, that he would find her halfway down the main cabin with her hand plastered against a crack in the body of the airliner, a crack located beneath a sign which read SHOOTING STARS