Loss Of Reason, Miles A. Maxwell [electronic reader txt] 📗
- Author: Miles A. Maxwell
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People locked themselves inside porta-potties that in minutes floated in the new lake then fell over sideways. Others stood on plastic milk boxes in the tents, anything they could find. People stopped worrying about treatment and simply tried to escape.
Yet some doctors and nurses stubbornly ignored the cold burning black as it flowed around their bare ankles. Continued triaging patients until they couldn’t bear the pain, then joined their patients on gurneys, trying to wash down their own legs and ankles with bottles of saline.
In one of the tents, terror now gripped Cheri Enriquez. Pain in her joints, a dizzy, cold, sweaty kind of flu — realization set in. It was coming on so fast. This was not like any sickness she’d ever known. Among the scrambling crowd, she held Johnny against her knees in the burning mud. Maybe she deserved this sickness. She shouldn’t have let old Mrs. Goodman talk her into leaving home. Maybe Jáime was looking for them. Making the sign of the cross, she puked out the last words that would ever leave her lips:
“But Johnny, God, why Johnny?”
In seconds the brothers were hit by extreme turbulence — bouncing groans shook the plane.
The right wing dropped forty degrees or more. Everon struggled to bring it back up, over-correcting thirty degrees to the left. BAM! Turbulence hammered the wings in the opposite direction.
Franklin could see nothing through the windows. He felt his butt leave the seat, the seat belt tight across his lap, and nearly lost his hold on Melissa as his head hit the ceiling. “Can the plane take this?” he shouted, pulling his belt snug.
“It’ll take it,” Everon grunted, trying to pull the wings level again. “It’ll have to. We have to get that stuff off.”
“All this turbulence is from the cloud?”
“I — I don’t know. I don’t see how.”
The right wing dropped again. Everon corrected hard, yoke twisted full left. There was almost no effect. The cabin continued to rotate.
“No!”
But the air was not to be denied.
Over they went.
Franklin heard cries from the plane’s rear. It was all he could do to hang onto Melissa. Harry flapped into the cabin air. The engine whined, its pitch rising. BAM! something hit the big jet.
Far in back a man held onto his young son by the strap of his blue jumper. Behind him the luggage door flew open. The wide black body bag slammed upward against the web of Franklin’s climbing rope Everon had laced it down with.
The plane was upside down. Twisting metal screeched. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
“Fuck it!” Everon shouted. Reversing the yoke, he accelerated the roll. Franklin could just make out the words uttered through his brother’s clenched teeth. “Hunt’s. Just. Going to have. To deal with it —”
The jet’s lights went out. All of them.
All Franklin could hear as he felt the nose pitch down, hanging from his seat belt, clinging to Melissa, was a slamming sound and the dropping whine of the big jet’s engines winding down.
There Was Another Ending . . .
Read the original LOSS OF REASON ending,
now the first two chapters of SEARCH FOR REASON,
simply by turning the page . . .
No Hope
They were going down. There was no way around it.
Every system on the big jet was out. The overheads. Control gauges. Wing lights. Every light on the Gulfstream was dark. Under normal circumstances, Franklin might have asked the man in the pilot’s seat next to him, “What would cause something like this to happen? How can all these systems go down at the same time?” And under normal circumstances, busy as Franklin’s older brother was, Everon would have answered. Perhaps a grunt, a shouted mumble. It’s the kind of man Everon was. Under normal circumstances.
Except for one minor detail.
The big plane was totally out of Everon’s control. And it was upside down. It was all Franklin could do to hang from his seat harness in the dark and hold onto the infant in his arms, his baby niece Melissa. He was frightened out of his mind.
The jet’s engines were winding down, their pitch dropping, losing power. Yet the overall sound of the big plane, the whistling wind over the wings and fuselage, was rising in pitch and volume. And the plane’s nose felt to be dropping more and more vertical. Straight down.
Franklin clutched Melissa to his chest, acid rising in his throat and wanted to throw up. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! BAM! Screams from the back passenger compartment. The fuselage felt like it was twisting, tearing itself apart, about to rip itself to pieces in mid air. Pieces that would in the next few moments be scattered all over eastern New York State.
CREEEEK!
In a few seconds it will all be over, Franklin thought. Are we high enough that when the jet’s skin ruptures, the sudden lack of oxygen will knock us out? Or once the plane disintegrates will it be simply the terror of falling through cold space that kills us?
CLUNK!
“What was that?” Franklin yelled.
I Always Liked Him
The Sudden CLUNK made the entire fuselage vibrate.
“Aux power unit?” Everon grunted, more surprised question than answer.
A moment later several scattered dim lights blinked on across the control panel. Franklin could make out Everon’s hands in a death grip, fighting the white yoke.
He twisted the yoke hard right, and Franklin felt his head roll to his left shoulder, his body sway — as his brother’s right hand shot out to punch buttons, flip levers on the panel.
Another soft noise joined the whistling wind. A whining, behind and to the right. Everon flipped more switches. A similar noise grew from the left. “Go . . .” he urged, “GO!”
The whine grew louder, and in the moment Franklin recognized it for what it was, two things happened, more wonderful than he could imagine. Dim lights came on around the cockpit, then back through the cockpit door in the cabin. And the windshield went from pure black to being splattered with bright points of light.
Stars. Overhead there were stars!
The wind-sound dropped away. A dim cloud-filled horizon righted below them. The turbulence dissipated. Franklin felt pressure from the seat on the backs of his legs, the weight of Melissa in his arms. They were on top of an ocean of moonlit cotton, flying between mountains of white.
He leaned forward, looked back through the right side cockpit window. There was no black gunk on the wing. It was gone. The wing was clean. He found the radiation meter wedged behind his seat and moved its probe around the ceiling . . . the walls, the windshield.
“How is it, Bro?” Everon asked.
“A trace. That’s all.”
“You know what that was,” Everon said, not really a question.
Franklin waited, gently jiggling Melissa to calm her crying.
“There’s only one answer. Another bomb. Had to be. I wonder where. Close enough to affect us, not close enough to do permanent damage.”
Franklin floated between worry, sadness, anger. “How is this happening?” he asked softly. Louder, “Is the plane okay?”
“I don’t know. The few systems I’m using appear functional. We’ll find out about the rest when we get to the Valley.”
Franklin watched the plane’s lights play over Everon’s tired blond features. Hours without sleep. Hopefully the autopilot was still working and could do most of the flying.
Franklin’s eyes dropped to Melissa. He smoothed a hand over her dark hair much like his own, soothing her, then looked to the aisle where Harry sat shaking softly on the floor and scooped the owl back into his soup box. A feather molted from his right wing into the bottom.
Someone was sobbing in the back of the jet. More than one.
“Okay to go back there?” he asked Everon.
“Go ahead. We should remain stable for now but don’t be too long out of your seat.”
He unlatched his seat belt, stepped around Harry’s box, carrying Melissa.
The passengers were pretty shaken up. Severe strap burns across necks. Deeply bruised stomachs. Somehow there were no obvious broken bones.
He knelt along the seats, stopped and talked to each person, letting his voice drop down like a salve, at first mirroring their nervous discomfort then bringing them each down out of the shock they were feeling.
“YOU YOU OKAY?” he suggested.
“I — I think so.”
He nodded and moved on.
“Is the plane okay?”
“We think it is. YOU’RE ALRIGHT? Beginning to . . . FEEL EASIER, NOW?”
Soothing the adults, pacifying the children. Tranquilizing the fast-beating heart. Some, a few moments. Others, longer until they were calm.
Back past the pantry, through the now-open door to the luggage compartment, tied to the floor was the black body bag. He moved closer, knelt down. He wished he could just unzip it and say, “Cynthia! Wake up!” like she’d done for him so many birthdays and Christmases ago. He thought of the charred Aztec blanket inside, wrapped around Cynthia and Steve’s bodies. Holding each other, clinging in their final moment.
He gulped down a swallow of air, holding Melissa just a little tighter. He stood and closed the luggage door. He didn’t want to say the words he would have to, to Everon. It wasn’t going to be a very pleasant ride back to Nevada.
“What was that?” Someone asked as he moved back to the front.
“We don’t know,” Franklin answered softly, moving forward.
“It had to be a second bomb,” one of the men behind him said.
“Where do you think it went off?” a woman’s voice called out. “Boston? Washington? No point sending another one to New York.”
She was answered only by the whine of the engines.
Franklin put his seat belt on.
“This better not be like all the other things the government never figured out,” Everon spit out. “But how can they? Unless someone comes right out and takes credit for it.”
“I hope Chuck’s okay,” Franklin began, dodging the inevitable.
“At least he’s inside the hospital. Higher ground,” Everon answered absently, adjusting one of the jet’s controls.
Franklin remembered Cynthia’s face. When she —
He looked at his brother. “Uh —” He felt the pain and anger rise up in his chest, behind his eyes, flowing out to his wrists, his fingertips. “Cynthia was alive when I got to her.”
“What!” almost a scream from Everon. “Wasn’t there anything —”
“I tried,” he whispered.
“Couldn’t you —”
“Jesus Christ!” Franklin said, shocking himself. Never in the last six years had he taken the Lord’s name in vain. “She gave out a death rattle!”
Everon stared miserably out the jet’s front window.
“She told me Steve died an hour before.” Franklin felt tears well up. “Her last words were ‘I’ve had better nights-out in New York.’ Then, ‘The cabinet . . .’ That and spotting Harry shaking next to it were how I found Melissa.”
He waited for Everon to scream something else, about the time lost in the subway. The extra time they’d taken on the bridge.
But it didn’t come.
For the rest of his life these things
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