Angel Fall (3 page)

A
manda stared around the terminal and mumbled, “This is creepy.” The huge room was jammed, and the noise should have been deafening, but instead, there was total silence. Nobody was talking at all. Not even the kids. And on every face there was a slight bewilderment as though the blur outside had entered their brains. She turned to her sister. “Come on, let’s find a restroom.”

As they walked away, Alex stared at the crowd. Amanda was right. Everybody looked half asleep, or maybe half dead. Pushing the luggage cart to the center of the room, he scanned the huge board that listed departures. Every slot flashed with a single message.

F
LIGHT
D
ELAYED
—S
EE
R
EPRESENTATIVE

So that was it; the airport was jammed because no planes were taking off. But that made the silence even weirder.

Everybody should be yelling.

Travelers always yell when the slightest thing goes wrong. But at the ticket desk a fat little man in a red jacket actually whispered in answer to his questions as though he were giving out secret information: “Flight 466 to London, with a stop in Boston, has been delayed until three o’clock. Watch the board for more information.” It was like a recorded message. He never even looked up from his computer screen.

When the girls returned, they processed their tickets and began the endless journey through security, then passport control, then baggage, then more security, and more security after that. At the gate everything sludged down into a blurry bore. Amanda read her book, Tori played a video game, and Alex sat with earbuds stuck in his head, not really listening, just staring out the window.

Three o’clock came and went, and nobody appeared at the desk.

At six o’clock he checked his cell phone. No signal.

He checked again at six-thirty and seven. Finally a few bars appeared, but no messages. His mother hadn’t even tried to call. Big surprise—for all she cared, they could be dead and buried on a farm in Wisconsin. He told himself it didn’t matter.

Hour after hour the delay was extended. By the time the call came to board, it was ten o’clock and Tori was whining. She had been asleep since eight-thirty. Amanda wasn’t much better. She had been asleep too and remained uselessly groggy, which left Alex with the task of getting all of them and their backpacks onto the plane.

To make matters worse, even after they were buckled into their seats, the wait wasn’t over. There was still another forty-five minutes of sitting at the gate. The girls went back to sleep, but Alex couldn’t close his eyes.

At last there was movement. Slowly the big jet eased away from the terminal, crawled across the tarmac, and got in line for takeoff. Thirty minutes later they roared up into the moaning darkness.

Alex realized something odd. The airport had been crowded, but their plane was half empty, plenty of room for everyone to stretch out with pillows and blankets. Which he and his sisters did as soon as the fasten seatbelt sign had been turned off. Lying in the gloom, half-formed thoughts flickered through his mind.

England. Flying away to live with a father he hadn’t seen in over a year. A father with a new “family.” He and his trophy wife even had a son. How much would this new “family” want three leftovers from Chicago? About as much as Alex wanted to live with
them
. As far as he was concerned, they were streaking away at six hundred miles an hour toward nothing, and nothing was what his life had become. In the last moments before sleep, it was easy to pretend that their jet would never land. With his heart at the controls, Alex kept on flying.

Away from Chicago…

Away from London…

Away from houses where they didn’t belong…

Into the silent coldness beyond the stars.

I
t seemed that no time had passed before a flight attendant was shaking him.

“Is this…London?” His eyelids felt like they had been stuck shut with superglue.

“No, we’re about to land in Boston. Please sit up and fasten your seat belt. And maybe you could help your sisters with theirs.”

It took a great deal of effort, but finally the girls were buckled into position, though still fast asleep. With a screeching bump, the jet landed. Then it taxied to the gate and stopped. The big door slid open and a few haggard passengers straggled out.

That’s when the weirdness began.

Suddenly, onto the plane rushed a man and a woman in heavy overcoats and gloves. The woman was carrying a baby. They seemed nervous; every move had a kind of jerky twitch about it. The woman held the baby in a funny way, stuck out in front of her as though he had peed on himself and she didn’t want to touch him.

Overcoats and gloves in August? Alex thought. Maybe Boston was cold at night, but it couldn’t be
that
cold.

Their seats were one row up and across the aisle. Without taking off their coats and gloves, they sat down. Alex stared at the baby. He was a little boy about one year old, with a chubby face and reddish hair. As the baby wriggled into a new position, maybe it was only the light, but for a moment his eyes flashed with a dark, silvery glow, almost like those of an animal caught in the headlights of a car.

Alex blinked.

When he looked again, the baby was staring straight at him. It wasn’t a trick of the light. His pupils were shining silver. It was unlike anything Alex had ever seen, and the intensity of the shining was growing every second. But then the little boy smiled. Instantly all the anger and exhaustion that had made Alex so miserable in the past few hours were gone, replaced with a mysterious warmth.

The feeling remained until the woman turned the child away.

Then all the ugliness rushed back.

The longer Alex stared at the woman, the more convinced he became that she looked exactly like the pictures he had seen of his father’s new wife, Cynthia. She had jet-black hair that hung straight and silky, and her chiseled features made her look like a mannequin. It took only a little imagination for Alex to believe that the touch of bronze on her cheeks wasn’t makeup, but places where the fake head was showing through. Just the kind of female his father would think was
hot
. And her traveling companion was a male copy. The coat couldn’t hide it. The guy was ripped. Clearly a workout freak loaded with enough steroids to play professional baseball. Whoever they were, Alex knew that they couldn’t be the baby’s parents. No way. Not the slightest chance. People like that hated kids. And just look at how she was still holding him—like he was poison. So if they weren’t the parents, who were they? His mind raced. Kidnappers. That was it. Why else would they act so weird? Important thought: If they were kidnappers and he turned them in, there might be a reward. Not only would he get rich, he’d be on cable news. Heroes always got on cable news.

Suddenly the man twisted in his seat and stared straight at him; the look was so menacing that it drained the fantasy right out of his head.
Stupid fool
. That’s what the look said, and Alex withered. With a sneer the man turned away, and it was as though he had awakened from a trance. He stared at them. Suddenly, try as he might, he couldn’t find anything unusual at all. Kidnappers? They were just two people with a baby on the seat between them reading magazines—
Sports Illustrated
and
Cosmopolitan
.

No joke. He really was going nuts.

Alex was seriously contemplating his loss of sanity when a grinding rumble almost made him jump out of his seat. He noticed that the flight attendant had swung the huge door shut in preparation for departure. That was it. He rubbed his eyes. First, weird babies and kidnappers, and now he was jumpy enough to explode out of his skin. He had to get some sleep or he would go stark raving wacko. Forcing himself to relax, he closed his eyes.

Then he jumped again and swore.

Someone outside the closed door had begun pounding on it as though with a sledgehammer. The whole plane shook. The startled attendant rushed over and looked through the porthole. Instantly the pounding stopped. After unlatching the door, she pulled it open.

No one was prepared for the person who walked onto the plane. Handing her boarding pass to the flight attendant was a blind woman led by a seeing-eye dog. But there, all touch with the world Alex had known came to an end, for she was almost seven feet tall, and the head of the dog came to her chest. Both were old, so old that Alex couldn’t imagine any living thing more ancient, yet in neither was there the slightest weakness or quavering. Mist drifted in the woman’s clothes and the animal’s fur, as though they had just walked through an ocean fog. Yet the darkness outside was clear and windy.

And the attendant…what was wrong with her? She acted as though everything was totally normal—as though every day of the week seven-foot-tall people got on planes after pounding on them with sledgehammers.

Turning toward the aisle, the old woman stared vacantly in Alex’s direction. A glistening film covered her eyes, but if anything, it added to her majestic presence. On her face was the shadow of a great beauty, creased with a thousand lines and careworn by age. Her iron-gray hair was pulled back into a long braid that hung almost to the floor and around her shoulders was draped a tattered shawl coarsely woven like a fisherman’s net. In her hand she held a worn leather bag.

Reaching down, she touched the animal standing motionless beside her. For some reason the fur on the dog’s neck was bristling. But Alex didn’t really notice because he was transfixed by the creature’s eyes. They were blue, haunting, and somehow didn’t fit the rest of his body. Nothing so young should have been in anything so old. He was old, grizzled beyond description, a misshapen mongrel; and he was covered with scars…terrible scars…as though he had spent his entire life locked in vicious battles. Something about the way he stood spoke of endless pursuit, deadly peril, and bloody victory. Here was an animal both brave and dangerous beyond imagining, and he was gazing steadily at the man and the woman in the overcoats—staring at them as though, at any moment, he might leap across the seats and tear them to pieces. Alex had never seen a dog stare like that—with absolute, unwavering intensity. Then his lips drew back in what could have been nothing less than a canine grin of pleasure.

His teeth were like knives.

The response of the people across the aisle was not hard to understand. They were frozen with terror for a moment, but then the moment passed. The flight attendant led the new arrivals to a seat several rows up, where, with aching slowness, the old woman sat down. The dog stretched out on the floor next to her and promptly closed his eyes. The old woman rummaged in her bag, mumbling in exasperation, until finally she drew out a small book attached to a golden chain. Carefully placing the chain around her neck, she opened to a page marked with a purple ribbon and began to read.

Alex leaned forward. For a brief moment the woman held the book high enough for him to see its pages. As he had expected, there was no printing on it. He had seen books for the blind. But as he continued to watch, he realized that something was wrong. To read Braille you had to move your fingers across the paper touching dots, but the woman never moved her fingers. She held the empty book as though she were reading just like anyone else. Alex was completely mystified. But before he could think any more about it, he was pushed back into his seat by the thrust of the engines.

As soon as the plane was in the air, the old woman closed the book and folded her arms. Alex tried to keep watching, but his eyes just wouldn’t stay open. Before he knew it, he had plunged into a deep sleep.

A jarring bump, and then another, and Alex lurched into total awareness.

The flying was getting rough. Sliding over to a window, he looked out. It was dark—and that was strange. He checked his watch. They had been heading east for a long time. The sun should be rising. But it wasn’t.

As the minutes passed, the bumping grew worse. Then the seatbelt sign came on, and the flight attendants began waking everyone. Alex got Amanda and Tori buckled into the seats next to him. The girls were afraid, especially Tori who had awakened with no memory of where she was. For their sakes he tried to appear calm. But this kind of bumping wasn’t normal. As he stared out the window, he couldn’t help imagining that there was something thick and heavy in the air. They must be flying into a storm, but there were no clouds. Far below, moonlight sparkled on a furious ocean.

Soon the bumping grew to bashing. There was a crash as though a giant fist had struck the underbelly of the plane, and instantly it dropped from the sky, only to climb again moments later like a speck in a hurricane. Amanda and Tori screamed. Alex’s ears popped. His head swam as all of the air was sucked from the compartment. Oxygen masks tumbled down. They struggled to put them on.

Just as the plane leveled off, lightning appeared. Through the window Alex could see it falling like torrents of glowing rain. And with it was thunder.

The jet plummeted as though off a cliff.

Amanda and Tori clutched wildly at each other. Everybody was screaming. The terror was indescribable—except in one person. The old woman didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. She was still reading from her book, mumbling and staring at it with rigid concentration. And the dog? Well, that was the most amazing thing of all. He had climbed into the seat next to her and was wearing an oxygen mask. Not only did he look ridiculous, it barely covered his nose, but it appeared that he was enjoying every moment of it—huffing and puffing into the mask with total delight.

Then came a roar that made every other crash seem like a whisper. The jet groaned and lurched, and the lights went out.

The captain’s tense voice crackled over the loudspeaker. “I’m sorry to tell you this…but we’ve experienced total engine failure. I have no choice but to land in the ocean. Please remain calm. We have rafts and your seat cushions are made for flotation. Prepare for impact. And God be with us all.”