encounters with each other. It was obscene, and Barbara Yoshiro felt as if a string inside of her was tightening, stretching, about to snap.
Barbara moved the last few feet down the aisle to where it opened up into the wreckage. She stepped carefully over the contorted forms on the floor. Less than fifty feet in front of her rose the blue plastic galley- lavatory cubicle, behind which was the spiral staircase.
People kept brushing and bumping her. The noise that came out of their mouths was not human. For some reason, it suddenly swelled into a crescendo of squeaking, wailing, moaning, and howling, then subsided like the noises in the forest. Then something touched it off again and the cycle began all over. An involuntary shudder passed through her body.
She forced herself to look into the faces of the men and women around her to try to determine if they were communicating with each other, telegraphing any movements, so she could act accordingly. But most of their faces showed nothing. No emotion, no interest, no humanity, and in the final analysis, no soul. The divine spark had gone out as surely as if they’d all sold themselves to the Devil. She could more easily read the facial expressions of an ape than the blood-smeared faces of these hollow-eyed, slack-jawed former humans.
There were a few, however, who showed signs of residual intelligence. One young man, in a blue blazer, seemed to have followed her in a parallel course down the right aisle. He was standing on the other side of the rubble area now, near the large hole, and staring at her. She saw him glance at the hole, then move away from it, toward her, pushing his way through the people near him. He stopped abruptly, then looked down at his feet.
Barbara Yoshiro followed his gaze. She noticed a dog in the twisted wreckage. The dog of the blind man, a golden retriever. It sat on the floor, poking its head between the two upturned seats. It was eating something… She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! Oh, God!”
The young man moved deliberately around the dog. A wave of panic began to wash over her. Her knees began trembling, and she felt light-headed. She grasped a section of twisted aluminum brace to steady her balance. The dog pulled something up from the debris. A bone. A rib. “Oh! Oh!” She felt a scream rising in her throat and tried to force it down, but it came out, long and piercing, then tapered off into a pathetic wail. “Oh, dear God.”
The people around her turned toward the sound. The young man moved quickly toward her.
Barbara Yoshiro ran. She stumbled over the smashed bodies and seats, then fell. The floor between the holes was damaged and sagged slightly. Her arm plunged through it, into the baggage compartment below. She yanked it out and tore her wrist. Blood ran from the jagged wound. The dog picked up its head and growled at her, a strange growl that sounded more like a man choking or gagging. She rose quickly to her feet. The young man in the blue blazer reached out for her.
George Yates was normally a mild-mannered young man. He was in superb physical condition, a jogger, a scuba diver, and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. For a variety of physiological reasons, the results of decompression had left a large portion of his motor function unimpaired. The thin air had, however, wiped away his twenty-four years of acculturation and civilization, that part of the psyche that George Yates would have referred to as the superego. The ego itself was impaired, but partially functional. The id, the pleasure center of George Yates’s brain, the impulsive drives, the instinctive energy, that part of the psyche closest to the lower forms of life, was left dominant.
It had been her movements that had first attracted his attention. When he had focused on those movements, they had begun to separate into perceptible components. A female.
In small flashes that were hardly more than thin sections of memory, George Yates recognized something in her form that he wanted. His last vivid recollection in his seat before things had come apart had been a long sexual daydream. The fantasy had included the women in blue and white who walked through the aisles. Vaguely, he remembered the woman with the long black hair, remembered that she had aroused him. He was aroused now. He reached out for her.
Barbara Yoshiro eluded his grasp. She ran across the remaining area of debris toward the first-class cabin. The forward galley and lavatories loomed in front of her. She slammed into the blue wall, then turned her back to it and began edging her way toward the corner where the wall turned toward the staircase.
People began coming at her, hands outstretched. She hit a woman in the face with her fist and sent her staggering back into the group behind her. Immediately, she realized she should not have done that.
People from all over the aircraft began migrating toward the focal point of the commotion. Some came out of curiosity, some were caught in the tide of bodies, some came to meet the perceived danger-Barbara Yoshiro.
She worked her way to the edge of the lavatory and peered around the corner. Less than twenty feet away she could see the spiral staircase winding upward. But the lower half was filled with people, and the intervening space between her and the base of the stairs was a solid mass of bodies. The open area around her was getting smaller. Hands reached out to her, and she slapped them away. A young boy caught hold of her blouse and pulled at it. The thin cotton tore and exposed her shoulder. Another hand caught hold of her blouse and tore it half off. Someone pulled at her hair. The young man who seemed to be normal was wedged inside the crowd that surrounded her, deliberately pushing his way through. She took a deep breath and screamed. “Help! Someone help me!”
Her voice sounded small against the wind, the roar of the four jet engines, and the excited howls around her. A hundred or more men and women competed with one another to make their sounds supreme in the jungle that was the Straton. She screamed again, but knew that her screams had become indistinguishable from those around her.
She slid around the corner of the bulkhead and groped with her right hand for the lavatory door. Her hand found the knob, and she turned it. The door gave way behind her. She turned her head and peered into the small enclosure, not knowing that it was the same one that had saved John Berry’s life a few short hours before. Two men and a woman stood shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, staring at her. She slammed the door. “Oh God. Jesus Christ.” For a second she was reminded of the terror and disgust she had felt when she had opened her kitchen cabinet late one night and found it swarming with cockroaches.
Keeping her back to the wall, she edged farther down toward the staircase. The pressing crowd was only peripherally interested in her, and she found that if she altered between aggressive and passive behavior, she could slide by them. The young man in the blue blazer, however, was still purposefully making his way toward her.
Barbara reached the forward corner of the cubicle, close to the staircase. The press of bodies here was so thick she could barely push through. She called up again, but the din was so loud now that she could not even hear her own voice. She saw that the passengers had gone a few steps higher. One man staggered up the last few steps and disappeared into the lounge. A second later, he came crashing down and caused an avalanche of bodies to tumble over the winding staircase. Mr. Stein, she saw, was putting up a good fight. But he could not hear her, and even if he could, he would not be able to help her.
Yoshiro considered several alternatives. Playing dead was one, but there were so many people pressing around her that this was not possible, and she hadn’t the nerve for it anyway. She could see now that she was not being singled out by the crowd any longer, but acts of random violence made it too dangerous to try to mingle with them. Besides, that young man had singled her out. She saw that her only chance was to get into the galley area and ride the elevator to the below-decks galley. She would be safe there and she could call the cockpit on the interphone. With this goal set, she calmed herself and began pushing harder through the crowd. She noticed as she moved that she was becoming light-headed and was tiring quickly. She looked down. The blood was still running from her right wrist. She grasped it with her left hand as she moved. She kept her back to the bulkhead and edged along the forward-facing wall opposite the staircase to the next corner. She made the turn and inched sideways, back in the direction of the tail. She lost sight of the man with the blazer.
Her back slid easily along the plastic wall, and her hand felt the open space of the galley entrance.
The elevator. Get to the elevator. Blood continued to seep between her clenched fingers, and her legs were trembling with fatigue. Faces and bodies squeezed against her, foul breath filled her nostrils. Her stomach heaved, and she began to gag on the taste of bile.
Her shoulder slid into the galley opening, and she moved with more force until only her left arm was still pinned against the bulkhead.
The crowd around her seemed to part, and in the opening she saw the man with the blazer. He smiled directly at her. He looked so nearly normal that for a moment she considered calling for him to help her. But, she realized, he could not be normal. She was becoming irrational in her desperation. He stepped up to her.
She fell back into the galley and braced her hands against the door frame. She kicked out with her feet and
