Midnight Special (2 page)

Now Matt was flying a lot farther and the flight seemed a lot longer since he didn’t have Janey to flirt with and talk to in the seat next to him. In the seat next to him, instead, there was an eighty-year-old woman who “didn’t mind meeting strangers” and who asked Matt all about his life story. Matt made up a nice one about being a corporate headhunter with three kids and two ex-wives, which was a comfortable tale for him to tell, since it was as far from the truth as possible. Except, Matt reflected after a while, for the headhunter part. That was oddly accurate.

And where was Janey now? She was six feet under in the pine box he’d fashioned for her himself, moldering away to dust. At least, he hoped she was dust by now. He flashed on the image of her grinning skull, then shoved that away, replacing it in his mind with her lovely, living face, smiling at him in the morning light. That was better.

Lately Matt had been almost feeling relieved that she was dead and gone and not part of the world as he was seeing it. Of course, it occurred to him that maybe he was dead too. That this existence he’d been living for the past year was a special hell, fashioned just for him. That the clown-faced figure he seemed to see at irregular intervals was his special demon, individually designed to torment only him. He found that an oddly comforting thought since he figured it meant that the other people he’d seen slaughtered and maimed all around him for the past year and nine months were just illusions, phantoms, shadows; props in the play that was Matt Cahill’s Personal Inferno.

That was why he guessed it wasn’t true—anything that seemed to comfort him these days turned out to be an illusion.

This theory applied equally well to other thoughts that came to him in the night when he couldn’t sleep, when he was looking for a way out. This one came from a
Twilight Zone
rerun he had seen when he was a kid, about a guy who was being hanged, who escaped and had all sorts of adventures, but in the end the noose snapped tight around his neck and everything that had happened to him had just been a dream while he was falling to the end of the rope. So he thought maybe he was still under the forty feet of snow and the avalanche had just covered him and he was dying and all this was just a fart in his mind as it gave out.

He liked that idea better, if only because it made more sense—and it meant it was going to end soon. It certainly made more sense than the reality—that Matt Cahill had been frozen and buried for three months, then had come back to life and was able to see evil when it manifested itself. See evil in the form of rotting flesh on those about to commit violent, horrendous atrocities. See evil where no one else could.

That was sheer nonsense. So in the early hours of the morning, it seemed far more likely to him that it was just the fantasy of a dying man. Why he couldn’t be fantasizing about winning the lottery or being a rock star, he didn’t know. Why he couldn’t be fantasizing about Janey being back in his arms and never wasting away from cancer, he didn’t know, either. He felt certain only that, eventually, the lack of oxygen and the freezing cold would get to him and he would give up the fucking ghost. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

Matt tried to shift in his seat and found that, given the room allotted him by Virgin America, he couldn’t. At least he had an aisle seat, but that meant that half his ass was clear out in the aisle and was bumped into whenever the stewardess brought the refreshment cart out—which had been only once on the five-hour flight. The only time he’d had the undivided attention of a flight attendant (he remembered this once not to think of her as a “stewardess”) was when the attendant assigned to his part of the plane (who looked like she might have been Miss September in the 1975 issue of
Playboy
) had asked him, in an accusatory tone, if he had what it took to operate the exit door in case of emergency. When he’d answered in the affirmative, she grunted her doubts and walked on. Matt had vague recollections of a time when attractive stewardesses gave customers fluffy pillows and asked them suggestively if they needed anything else, but those memories were just from movies he’d seen on the late show when he was kid, and he doubted if there was ever anyone like that in reality.

And this was reality, he sadly reflected, because his throat wouldn’t be this parched if he was packed in powdery snow up on Mammoth Peaks. He reached up to press the “call” button and waited. Glancing over the seats at the passengers, something he could do rather well since he was more than six feet tall in his stocking feet (which was all he was wearing since his feet had begun to swell over Ohio and he’d slipped his shoes off), he noticed that a surprising number of them were wearing hats. Various colors and designs of porkpie hats, worn, he noted, by young men and women of the millennial generation who sensed that hats were cool but didn’t know enough to take them off inside.

Kids today.

A leathery hand reached over Matt’s head and turned off the “call flight attendant” light.

“Yes?” the flight attendant asked sharply. She was hardly the “coffee, tea, or me?” type. Indeterminately forty- or fifty-five, she looked like she’d spent far too much time in the sun, back when spending time in the sun was the thing to do. Her voice croaked like she’d disabled a few bathroom smoke detectors in her day, and she wore her stewardess blouse low cut, exposing what used to be her cleavage—a memory of past glories. Her expression said passengers were a lesser form of existence and the airlines would run much smoother without them.

But it wasn’t her rudeness that arrested Matt’s attention. It was her cleavage and the bare, exposed, and rotting bones that peeked out through her shirt at Matt, like a come-hither glance from a skeleton.

It was happening again. At forty thousand feet somewhere over Albuquerque.

CHAPTER THREE

Matt stared, fixated on the putrid organs he could see clearly behind the latticework of a rib cage.

“Hey, my eyes are up here,” the flight attendant said. Matt wrenched his eyes up to her face, and he could see that what she said was at least partly true. One of her eyes was there. The other one was decomposing into worm food and drooping down her cheek. “Can I help you?”

Matt swallowed. He had to remind himself, yet again, that only he could see this rotting horror. To the rest of the world she was just a fairly unpleasant flight attendant. “Uh, how long before we land?”

She switched the television monitor in the seatback in front of him on to a map of the US and a little image of a plane that moved incrementally across it. “See? About thirty-five minutes. Keep your eye on this and don’t bother me.” And she was gone down the aisle to offer her ministrations to other poor passengers.

Matt caught his breath. It had been awhile since he’d experienced this. The telltale rotting, which only he could see and smell, which was a signal that madness, that violence, that evil was coming. He’d first sensed it when Andy, his old friend from childhood, had gone on a killing spree back home in Deerpark. He’d witnessed it dozens of times since, and every time it had heralded monstrous slaughter.

The process started gradually, with a running sore on the cheek or an infection in the eye. It spread till the victim looked like the walking dead. Victim? Well, yes, he supposed that was right. Although the “victim” in each case became a killing machine. And usually the only thing that stopped these killing machines in their mayhem was a well-placed blow from Matt Cahill’s ax.

He glanced down the aisle and saw the stewardess talking angrily to a mother with a squalling baby. He could just hear her telling the mom to shut that fucking baby up before she threw it out the emergency exit.

Matt tried to calculate how much time they had before the flight attendant succumbed to the evil that was growing inside her and started acting on her threats. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Five minutes? He willed the little plane on the monitor to hurry up and get to their destination before all hell, quite literally, broke loose.

The elderly woman next to him, who had mercifully been sleeping for the past hour, turned to him and asked how much longer they had.

“About half an hour,” Matt said, distracted.

“That should give her enough time, don’t you think?”

Puzzled, he turned his head and saw that her expression had changed from one of calm understanding to one of monstrous glee, her smile so broad as to almost split her face in two.

Mr. Dark was here.

Mr. Dark, whom he’d first seen in a dream at Janey’s bedside as she was dying and who had appeared mocking him and teasing him and tormenting him through the long nightmare since. Mr. Dark, whose touch spread the contagion that had cursed his path every step of the way since his resurrection.

Matt swallowed and tried to remain calm. The opportunities to talk with Dark were few and far between. He had to quell his panic and revulsion and try to gain what information he could.

“Hello,” he said, awkwardly. “I thought you were an old lady from Moses Lake.”

“Oh, no. She died over Denver, but nobody noticed. I thought I’d take advantage.” The wicked grin was still there. It was always there. “What do you think that stewardess—excuse me,
flight attendant
—is going to do with that baby? I say she slams it repeatedly in the overhead compartment, but she could pop it in the microwave. Any bets?”

“We’re landing in half an hour. She’s not that far gone. We’ll be OK,” Matt said calmly.

“You mean she’ll go wacko in the terminal, and you’ll be long gone by then? Could be. Then it’ll be someone else’s problem, right?” The old woman unwrapped a lollipop, took out her teeth, and started to suck on it.

“Why not?” Matt said, trying to remain casual and doing a piss-poor job of it. “I can’t be everywhere at once. These things must be happening all over. In places I’ve never been and never will be.”

“Maybe,” the old woman gummed. “Maybe not. Maybe you’re the carrier. Ever think of that?”

“I’ve thought of just about everything. But I’ve never been in New Orleans. Or Austin, Texas. Or Charlottesville, Virginia. Or Portland, Oregon. Have I?”

The old woman shifted in her seat uncomfortably and looked down the aisle to where the flight attendant was screaming now, trying to drown out the baby. “It’s starting. Too bad you had to check your ax with the baggage, huh? You could really use it about now.”

“What is this about?” Matt asked.

“Pardon?”

“You don’t come to see me unless there’s something you want to tell me, or…”

“Impart? Relate? Give? ‘What fresh hell is this?’ Do you know that quote?”

“No,” Matt said.

“Read a book, why don’t you?”

“Or do you want to stop me? Is that it? Do I know too much? Am I threatening to spoil your plans?”

“Please. I can’t just drop in and visit a colleague?”

Matt wondered what he meant by that. An enemy, an adversary, yes. But a colleague? He decided Dark was just playing mind games with him and he countered with one of his own.

“You’re worried about me,” Matt said. “I’m getting too close to something.”

“I’d be worried about that Waitress in the Sky, if I were you.”

He (or she?) pointed his long, bony finger ahead, and Matt’s attention was drawn to the scene in the cabin in front of him. The baby was screaming its lungs out now, and the stewardess was struggling to grab it from the hysterical mother. A male flight attendant was rushing to the altercation. A few people were trying to undo their safety belts and come to the mother’s aid when the stewardess seized the baby with now rotting arms and bolted down the aisle toward Matt.

Taking one glance at his seat neighbor, who was now a peacefully dead old woman, and thank God for that, Matt thrust himself from his seat (he didn’t wear his seat belt all the time, no matter how much they begged him to) and blocked her way.

The stewardess blinked at him, crushing the howling baby to her bare ribs. “I’m going to have to ask you to remain in your seat for the remainder of the flight.”

The seat belt lights flashed on and the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker to say that they were beginning their descent. No one paid him any mind.

“Give me the baby,” Matt said in even tones.

“Don’t make me call the ground crew.” She sounded reasonable, but her clutch on the squalling infant was vicious. “They will arrest you when we land for hindering a flight attendant in the furtherance of her God-given duty to keep the airways peaceful and clean and free of
goddamn
,
screaming
,
shit-producing babies
!”

“Elaine!” This was the soft-spoken male flight attendant with a bad comb-over, who was now reaching out to the stewardess from behind. “Calm down,” he was saying. “The pilot says to get back in our seats. We’re almost there.”

“Fuck you, Barry!” she said in low guttural tones, like a comic doing a parody of
The Exorcist
. “Do you want me to give this baby something to cry about?” And with that she raised her talon-like painted nails to the baby’s eyes.

The mother behind her screamed.

Matt took advantage of the distraction to punch Elaine straight in the jaw. Her flesh ripped at the impact of his fist, peeling loose from her jawline like the skin from a rotten peach.

Her neck snapped back with a nauseating crunch, and she looked at him. “Striking a flight attendant on duty is a violation of federal law! You’re gonna burn in hell for that!”

She lashed out with her claw of a right hand, still holding on to the baby. Matt dodged, but there was very little room to maneuver in this cramped space, and he felt his shoulder ripped by her nails. He fell into the aisle and tried to find some room to plant his feet, to launch another blow. He swung his right again, but she wasn’t there.

She was bending over the dead old woman by the window and tearing loose the plastic protection of the exit door, just like she’d taught him when the plane was taking off. He hadn’t paid attention then.

He was paying attention now. Elaine looked back at him in triumph. “I told you to keep your fucking seat belt fastened.”