Blood dripped into it.
Richards wiped blood from one nostril and stared in.
There it was-tiny, very tiny. A glitter of mesh.
“Acknowledge E.T.A. C-one-niner-eight-four,” the radio said.
“Hey, that’s you!” Friedman called from across the hall. “Donahue-”
Richards limped into the passage. He felt very weak. Friedman looked up. “Will you tell Donahue to get off his butt and acknowledge-‘
Richards shot him just above the upper lip. Teeth flew like a broken, savage necklace.
Hair, blood, and brains splashed a Rorschach on the wall behind the chair, where a 3-D
foldout girl was spreading eternal legs over a varnished mahogany bedpost.
There was a muffled exclamation from the pilot’s compartment, and Holloway made a desperate, doomed lunge to shut the door. Richards noticed that he had a very small scar on his forehead, shaped like a question mark. It was the kind of scar a small, adventurous boy might get if he fell from a low branch while playing pilot.
He shot Holloway in the belly and Holloway made a great shocked noise:
“Whoooo-OOO!” His feet flipped out from under him and he fell on his face.
Duninger was turned around in his chair, his face a slack moon. “Don’t shoot me, huh?” he said. There was not enough wind in him to make it a statement.
“Here,” Richards said kindly, and pulled the trigger. Something popped and flared with brief violence behind Duninger as he fell over.
Silence.
“Acknowledge E.T.A., C-one-niner-eight-four,” the radio said.
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Richards suddenly whooped and threw up a great glut of coffee and bile. The muscular contraction ripped his wound open further, implanting a great, throbbing pain in his side.
He limped to the controls, still dipping and sliding in endless, complex tandem. So many dials and controls.
Wouldn’t they have a communications link constantly open on such an important flight? Surely.
“Acknowledge,” Richards said conversationally.
“You got the Free-Vee on up there, C-one-niner-eight-four? We’ve been getting some garbled transmission. Everything okay?”
“Five-by,” Richards said.
“Tell Duninger he owes me a beer,” the voice said cryptically, and then there was only background static.
Otto was driving the bus.
Richards went back to finish his business.
Minus 007 and COUNTING
“Oh dear God,” Amelia Williams moaned.
Richards looked down at himself casually. His entire right side, from ribc; to calf, was a bright and sparkling red.
“Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?” Richards McCone suddenly dashed through into first class. He took in Richards at a glance.
McCone’s gun was out. He and Richards fired at the same time.
McCone disappeared through the canvas between first and second class. Richards sat down hard. He felt very tired. There was a large hole in his belly. He could see his intestines.
Amelia was screaming endlessly, her hands pulling her cheeks down into a plastic witch-face.
McCone came staggering back into first class. He was grinning. Half of his head appeared to be blown away, but he was grinning all the same.
He fired twice. The first bullet went over Richards’s head. The second struck him just below the collarbone.
Richards fired again. McCone staggered around twice in an aimless kind of dipsy-doodle. The gun fell from his fingers. McCone appeared to be observing the heavy white styrofoam ceiling of the first class compartment, perhaps comparing it to his own in second class. He fell over. The smell of burned powder and burned flesh was clear and crisp, as distinctive as apples in a cider press.
Amelia continued to scream. Richards thought how remarkably healthy she sounded.
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Minus 006 and COUNTING
Richards got up very slowly, holding his intestines in. It felt as if someone was lighting matches in his stomach.
He went slowly up the aisle, bent over, one hand to his midriff, as if bowing. He picked up the parachute with one hand and dragged it behind him. A loop of gray sausage escaped his fingers and he pushed it back in. It hurt to push it in. It vaguely felt as if he might be shitting himself.
“Guh,” Amelia Williams was groaning. “Guh-Guh-Guh-God. Oh God. Oh dear God.
”
“Put this on,” Richards said.
She continued to rock and moan, not hearing him. He dropped the parachute and slapped her. He could get no force into it. He balled his fist and punched her. She shut up.
Her eyes stared at him dazedly.
“Put this on,” he said again. “Like a packsack. You see how?”
She nodded. “I. Can’t. Jump. Scared.”
“We’re going down. You have to jump.”
“Can’t. ”
“All right. Shoot you then.”
She popped out of her seat, knocking him sideways, and began to pull the packsack on with wild, eye-rolling vigor. She backed away from him as she struggled with the straps.
“No. That one goes uh-under.”
She rearranged the strap with great speed, retreating toward McCone’s body as Richards approached. Blood was dripping from his mouth.
“Now fasten the clip in the ringbolt. Around. Your buh-belly. ”
She did it with trembling fingers, weeping when she missed the connection the first time. Her eyes stared madly into his face.
She skittered momentarily in McCone’s blood and then stepped over him.
They backed through second class and into third class in the same way. Matches in his belly had been replaced by a steadily flaming lighter.
The emergency door was locked with explosive bolts and a pilot controlled bar.
Richards handed her the gun. “Shoot it. I . . . can’t take the recoil.”
Closing her eyes and averting her face, she pulled the trigger of Donahue’s gun twice.
Then it was empty. The door stood closed, and Richards felt a faint, sick despair. Amelia Williams was holding the ripcord ring nervously, giving it tiny little twitches.
“Maybe-“she began, and the door suddenly blew away into the night, sucking her 455
along with it.
Minus 005 and COUNTING
Bent haglike, a man m a reverse hurricane, Richards made his way from the blown door, holding the backs of seats. If they had been flying higher, with a greater difference in air pressure, he would have been pulled out, too. As it was he was being badly buffeted, his poor old intestines accordioning out and trailing after him on the floor. The cool night air, thin and sharp at two thousand feet, was like a slap of cold water. The cigarette lighter had become a torch, and his insides were burning.
Through second class. Better. Suction not so great. Now over McCone’s sprawled body (step up, please) and through first class. Blood ran loosely from his mouth.
He paused at the entrance to the galley and tried to gather up his intestines. He knew they didn’t like it on the Outside. Not a bit. They were getting all dirty. He wanted to weep for his poor, fragile intestines, who had asked for none of this.
He couldn’t pack them back inside. It was all wrong; they were all jumbled.
Frightening images from high school biology books jetted past his eyes. He realized with dawning, stumbling truth the fact of his own actual ending, and cried out miserably through a mouthful of blood.
There was no answer from the aircraft. Everyone was gone. Everyone but himself and Otto.
The world seemed to be draining of color as his body drained of its own bright fluid.
Leaning crookedly against the galley entrance, like a drunk leaning against a lamppost, he saw the things around him go through a shifting, wraithlike grayout.
This is it. I’m going.
He screamed again, bringing the world back into excruciating focus. Not yet. Mustn’t.
He lunged through the galley with his guts hanging in ropes around him. Amazing that there could be so much in there. So hound, so firm, so fully packed.
He stepped on part of himself, and something inside pulled. The flare of pain was beyond belief, beyond the world, and he shrieked, splattering blood on the far wall. He lost his balance and would have fallen, had not the wall stopped him at sixty degrees.
Gutshot. I’m gutshot.
Insanely, his mind responded: Clitter-clitter-clitter.
One thing to do.
Gutshot was supposed to be one of the worst. They had had a discussion once about the worst ways to go on their midnight lunch break; that had been when he was a wiper.
Hale and hearty and full of blood and piss and semen, all of them, gobbling sandwiches and comparing the relative merits of radiation poisoning, freezing, falling, bludgeoning, drowning. And someone had mentioned being gutshot. Harris, maybe. The fat one who drank illicit beer on the job.
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It hurts in the belly, Harris had said. It takes a long time. And all of them nodding and agreeing solemnly, with no conception of Pain.
Richards lurched up the narrow corridor, holding both sides for support. Past Donahue. Past Friedman and his radical dental surgery. Numbness crawling up his arms, yet the pain in his belly (what had been his belly) growing worse. Still, even through all this he moved, and his ruptured body tried to carry out the commands of the insane Napoleon caged inside his skull.