Four Past Midnight

meekly surrendered their option to take individual action when they entered the bird, sat down, and buckled their seatbelts around them. Once those few simple things were accomplished, all problemsolving tasks became the crew's responsibility. Airline personnel called them geese, but they were really sheep ... an attitude most flight crews liked just fine. It made the nervous ones easier to handle.

But, since it was the only thing that made even remote sense, Brian ignored what he knew and plunged on. The rags of his own dream were still wrapped around him, and a part of his mind was convinced that it was Anne who was screaming, that he would find her halfway down the main cabin with her hand plastered against a crack in the body of the airliner, a crack located beneath a sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

There was only one passenger in the business section, an older man in a brown three-piece suit. His bald head gleamed mellowly in the glow thrown by his reading lamp. His arthritis-swollen hands were folded neatly over the buckle of his seatbelt. He was fast asleep and snoring loudly, ignoring the whole ruckus.

Brian burst through into the main cabin and there his forward motion was finally checked by utter stunned disbelief. He saw a teenaged boy standing near a little girl who had fallen into a seat on the port side about a quarter of the way down the cabin. The boy was not looking at her, however; he was staring toward the rear of the plane, with his jaw hanging almost all the way to the round collar of his Hard Rock Cafe teeshirt.

Brian's first reaction was about the same as Albert Kaussner's: My God, the whole plane is empty!

Then he saw a woman on the starboard side of the airplane stand up and walk into the aisle to see what was happening. She had the dazed, puffy look of someone who has just been jerked out of a sound sleep. Halfway down, in the center aisle, a young man in a crew-necked jersey was craning his neck toward the little girl, and staring with flat, incurious eyes. Another man, this one about sixty, got up from a seat close to Brian and stood there indecisively. He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and he looked utterly bewildered. His hair was fluffed up around his head in untidy mad-scientist corkscrews.

'Who's screaming?' he asked Brian. 'Is the plane in trouble, mister? You don't think we're goin down, do you?'

The little girl stopped screaming. She struggled up from the seat she had fallen into, and then almost tumbled forward in the other direction. The kid caught her just in time; he was moving with dazed slowness.

Where have they gone? Brian thought. My dear God, where have they all gone?

But his feet were moving toward the teenager and the little girl now. As he went, he passed another passenger who was still sleeping, this one a girl of about seventeen. Her mouth was open in an unlovely yawp and she was breathing in long, dry inhalations.

He reached the teenager and the girl in the pink dress.

'Where are they, man?' Albert Kaussner asked. He had an arm around the shoulders of the sobbing child, but he wasn't looking at her; his eyes slipped relentlessly back and forth across the almost deserted main cabin. 'Did we land someplace while I was asleep and let them off?'

'My aunt's gone!' the little girl sobbed. 'My Aunt Vicky! I thought the plane was empty! I thought I was the only one! Where's my aunt, please? I want my aunt!'

Brian knelt beside her for a moment, so they were at approximately the same level. He noticed the sunglasses and remembered seeing her get on with the blonde woman.

'You're all right,' he said. 'You're all right, young lady. What's your name?'

'Dinah,' she sobbed. 'I can't find my aunt. I'm blind and I can't see her. I woke up and the seat was empty -'

'What's going on?' the young man in the crew-neck jersey asked. He was talking over Brian's head, ignoring both Brian and Dinah, speaking to the boy in the Hard Rock tee-shirt and the older man in the flannel shirt. 'Where's everybody else?'

'You're all right, Dinah,' Brian repeated. 'There are other people here. Can you hear them?'

'Y-Yes. I can hear them. But where's Aunt Vicky? And who's been killed?'

'Killed?' a woman asked sharply. It was the one from the starboard side. Brian glanced up briefly and saw she was young, dark-haired, pretty. 'Has someone been killed? Have we been hijacked?'

'No one's been killed,' Brian said. It was, at least, something to say. His mind felt weird: like a boat which has slipped its moorings. 'Calm down, honey.'

'I felt his hair!' Dinah insisted. 'Someone cut off his HAIR!'

This was just too odd to deal with on top of everything else, and Brian dismissed it. Dinah's earlier thought suddenly struck home to him with chilly intensity - who the fuck was flying the plane?

He stood up and turned to the older man in the red shirt. 'I have to go forward,' he said. 'Stay with the little girl.'

'All right,' the man in the red shirt said. 'But what's happening?'

They were joined by a man of about thirty-five who was wearing pressed blue-jeans and an oxford shirt. Unlike the others, he looked utterly calm. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, shook them out by one bow, and put them on. 'We seem a few passengers short, don't we?' he said. His British accent was almost as crisp as his shirt. 'What about crew? Anybody know?'

'That's what I'm going to find out,' Brian said, and started forward again. At the head of the main cabin he turned back and counted quickly. Two more passengers had joined the huddle around the girl in the dark glasses. One was the teenaged girl who had been sleeping so heavily; she swayed on her feet as if she were either drunk or stoned. The other was an elderly gent in a fraying sport-coat. Eight people in all. To those he added himself and the guy in business class, who was, at least so far, sleeping through it all.

Ten people.

For the love of God, where are the rest of them?

But this was not the time to worry about it - there were bigger problems at hand. Brian hurried forward, barely glancing at the old bald fellow snoozing in business class.

8

The service area squeezed behind the movie screen and between the two first-class heads was empty. So was the galley, but there Brian saw something which was extremely troubling: the beverage trolley was parked kitty- corner by the starboard bathroom. There were a number of used glasses on its bottom shelf.

They were just getting ready to serve drinks, he thought. When it happened -whatever 'it' was - they'd just taken out the trolley. Those used glasses are the ones that were collected before the roll-out. So whatever happened must have happened within half an hour of take-off, maybe a little longer - weren't there turbulence reports over the desert? I think so. And that weird shit about the aurora borealis

For a moment Brian was almost convinced that last was a part of his dream - it was certainly odd enough - but further reflection convinced him that Melanie Trevor, the flight attendant, had actually said it.

Never mind that; what did happen? In God's name, what?

He didn't know, but he did know that looking at the abandoned drinks trolley put an enormous feeling of terror and superstitious dread into his guts. For just a moment he thought that this was what the first boarders of the Mary Celeste must have felt like, coming upon a totally abandoned ship where all the sail was neatly laid on, where the captain's table had been set for dinner, where all ropes were neatly coiled and some sailor's pipe was still smouldering away the last of its tobacco on the foredeck ...

Brian shook these paralyzing thoughts off with a tremendous effort and went to the door between the service area and the cockpit. He knocked. As he had feared, there was no response. And although he knew it was useless to do so, he curled his fist up and hammered on it.