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
— on the ramp, but that was really only where the creeps began. It was the blood his loyal Inside View readers would care about, of course, and that was just as it should be, world without end, amen, amen, but Dees was increasingly aware that blood (or, in the case of good old Ray and Ellen Sarch, the lack of blood) was only where this story started. Below the blood were caverns dark and strange.