didn’t have to.
The kid’s upper lip was beaded with perspiration. His T-shirt was soaked. Though slender, his belly was bloated as if ready to burst. A ring of what looked to be chocolate cookie crumbs encircled grimacing lips.
No need for gloves here-just an overindulgent sweet tooth. Thankfully, he’d used the airsick bag. Samantha held out a plastic sack to take the smaller bag. She gave him an empty one in return.
“Too many Oreos for you, mister,” she scolded, touching the corners of his mouth with a moist towel she kept in the pocket of her apron.
“He hasn’t been eating cookies.” Theresa leaned across to scowl at the flight attendant.
“Then what…?”
Samantha’s face went pale as the boy’s eyes flicked open. Tears of blood trickled from a web of swollen vessels. A muffled croak escaped cracked lips. To her horror, she realized the flecks of what she’d thought were dried bits of cookie was dead flesh sloughed from the boy’s raw tongue.
A moment later, Liz ran up the aisle. Her mousy brown hair had escaped its bun and hung beside a flushed cheek as if she’d just been in a scuffle.
“She’s dead!” Liz gasped in Samantha’s ear. Her voice shook with abject terror. “I went in to check on her and she’s dead-”
Samantha grabbed her by both arms. “Who?”
“She was sitting right here.” Liz’s eyes were wild. Her voice quavered as she pointed to the empty seat beside Ian Grant. “I heard an awful groan in the bathroom, and when I checked on her… she was slumped over the toilet…” Liz dropped her voice to a grating whisper. “Sammie, she was bleeding out of her mouth…”
On the other side of Ian, Theresa stared mutely as a single drop of blood fell from her nose to land on the pages of her novel with a sickening plop.
Samantha took a step toward the restroom, seized by a sudden wave of nausea. “Get it together,” she told herself through clenched teeth.
From behind her, came the unmistakable sound of a child vomiting.
“Drew!” The terror in a mother’s voice was unmistakable.
Samantha swallowed, trying to regain some semblance of composure. Her throat was on fire.
CHAPTER 6
“Are you hearing this, Karen?” Northwest Captain Steve Holiday stared in dismay at his first officer as they listened to the flight attendants over the intercom. One passenger dead and four more were unconscious.
“Food poisoning?” Karen Banning said as she unfastened her seat belt. If it had been a terrorist incident, both pilots would have barricaded themselves behind the armored door of the flight deck. In a medical scare, it went without saying that she would check things out.
Captain Holiday reached behind his head and grabbed the oxygen mask. When alone at the controls, he was supposed to wear supplemental oxygen. His voice took on a detached, Darth Vader quality as he spoke through the mask.
“Be careful out there. Scoot back here to let me in on what’s going on. Follow protocol.” If Steve Holiday believed in anything, it was protocol. It drove his wife crazy.
The 747 was a spacious aircraft. It took the first officer three minutes to make her way through the upper- deck business class, negotiate the stairwell down to the main passenger compartment, size up the situation, and call back up to flight deck. To Holiday, each minute was an eternity.
Normally almost giddy, Karen’s voice was deadly somber as it crackled across the intercom. “You’re not going to like this, Steve….”
Her vivid description of the pandemonium in the rear of the aircraft hit Holiday like a straight jab to the nose. He ordered her back to the cockpit, where hours of training and well-established emergency procedures kicked into gear.
Holiday noted their position on the GPS-still five and a half hours from JFK-and called in a medical emergency via the satellite phone. He was told to stand by while a doctor was summoned.
When the doctor came on the line ten minutes later, Karen described what she’d seen like a child recounting a nightmare-coughing, fever, vomiting, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She looked across at Holiday, slight shoulders trembling as she spoke.
“It’s not isolated among a particular group of passengers?” the doctor mused, almost to himself.
“It is not,” Holiday snapped. He hated it when people talked to themselves when they should be talking to him. “This thing’s moving through my airplane like the plague. We haven’t been in the air four hours and already have five dead and…” Karen mouthed a number that surprised even him. “… and at least forty-two showing advanced symptoms.”
The doctor advised the pilots to use continued oxygen and have no more interaction with the passengers. With hardly a good-bye, he promised to make contact again in fifteen minutes and cut the connection.
Holiday gave a tight grin to his copilot. Blond, pert and almost elfin in appearance, Karen had always reminded him of his daughter. The sight of her trembling beside him broke his heart. She had to know she could still depend on him. “Chin up, kiddo. They’re probably trying to figure out what leper colony to divert us to.”
CHAPTER 7
Thirty-four minutes after Captain Steve Holiday placed his initial call to FAA Flight Following, Dr. Megan Mahoney of the Centers for Disease Control found herself pulled from the a plush corner booth at The Dining Room in Buckhead, on the outskirts of downtown Atlanta, and escorted to an armored limousine that smelled faintly of cigar smoke. She had been on her first date in months, with a cardiologist from Emory University Hospital. He was a handsome enough man, but loved to hear himself talk. Megan had to admit she wasn’t disappointed at the interruption.
“I have to go,” she’d said as the two young, athletic-looking men wearing dark suits and dour expressions invited her to “please come along” with them. She’d shrugged and dropped her napkin on top of her lamb shank osso buco, which she was much sorrier to leave behind than the gabby cardiologist. “Duty calls.”
“They send secret agents to fetch you from dinner?” Her date had smirked. “Who are you, Batgirl?”
“Batgirl…” Megan had nodded at that, thinking of the hundred of bats she’d dissected under lantern light in dank forests around the world. “I suppose I am…”
Mahoney was a compact woman, barely five-three, but when she wasn’t peering through a microscope at deadly pathogens, she was at the gym or in the pool. She demanded the two agents show her their credentials- though they both gave the impression she would get in the tinted limo one way or another.
Inside, Megan found herself alone. A built-in webcam in a plasma screen on the teak table broadcast her image to representatives from Homeland Security, NORAD, and the White House. James Willis, the director of the CDC leaned across his deceptively uncluttered desk, making eye contact with her over the computer screen. He’d spent the last four days and nights working nonstop in Colorado. His face was drawn with fatigue and worry.
Megan straightened her shoulder-length hair-her father called the color claybank — in an effort to look more professional and tried to settle into the overly soft leather seat.
Each of the conference participants got their own portion of the split screen so all were visible to one another, even when they weren’t speaking. She recognized several of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level bureaucrats from too much time watching C-SPAN.
“She’s four hours and twenty-one minutes off the Eastern seaboard at her present speed and course,” General Brian Randall, United States Air Force, advised the group, as if Northwest Flight 2 was an enemy missile. LEDs blinked and flashed on a wall map behind him in USNORTHCOM’s version of a Larry King backdrop.
“Is that enough time to put a plan in order?” a frumpy woman from Homeland Security asked. “I’m not sure that’s enough time…” She wrung her hands on the oak table in front of her, as if squeezing out a washcloth.
