I've always had a thing about landings.
Before The Cull, before the streets filled with dead/dying/hoping-for-death bodies, before the survivors realised what was going on, before the public accusations and riots and whirlwinds of violence and lynchings and general bad shit, I was a frequent flyer.
Under less sinister circumstances I would have built up enough air-miles to take me as far as Jupiter, but when every flight is accompanied by a new passport, new name and new identity, it's difficult to keep track. In my line of work, there wasn't much by the way of perks. Not that it mattered much. Not any more.
The point is, I'd been on enough journeys to know the routine. The sudden gees of the take-off run, the misery of getting a seat next to the toilet, the Sod's Law ratio of passengers in the neighbouring seat (normal people to weirdoes, 1 to 3).
And every time, at the culmination of every tedious stint, after hours and hours of staring glumly at the inner surfaces of a brightly lit tube, when the captain's voice crackled in hidden speakers to announce the imminent touchdown, every time my stomach took a little lurch.
I know all the arguments. I've had them all. Usually with the weirdo next to me.
"…still statistically the safest way to travel…"
"…more likely to get hit by a bus than…"
Blah blah blah.
Call me a pessimist, but there's something about the image of 40,000kg of tightly compacted metal and plastic descending at catastrophic speed towards a strip of rock, which is not – let us be quite clear about this – renowned for its softness, that does my head in. There's something about 200-plus people strapped together in a cylinder with fins, undertaking a controlled stall in mid-air, that gets my palms a little sweaty.
Paint me irrational.
Five days before I woke up from the Blissout in the cabin of a doomed 737, with Bella shaking my head and telling me we were going to die, she and I had been making plans.
Talking it through, sat in a burnt-out pub in a burnt-out street on the outskirts of Heathrow, eating feral rabbit and an optimistic harvest of wild berries. Bella had told me about autopilots. I'd only found her the week before and we were still getting used to each other. To me she was someone with piloting experience, too dosed out of her head to care about the hazards, with her own private reasons for wanting to get Stateside. I didn't waste any energy caring what they were. Not then. It meant she'd help me without needing payment, cajolement or threats. Bonus.
To her, I was just the gun-toting psycho that'd get her aboard.
"Thing is," she'd said, picking blackberry pips out of her teeth, "an autopilot can do pretty much everything."
"You what?"
"S'right." She waved a dismissive hand. "I mean… obviously you need a real pilot too. Keep an eye, re-plot, react to shit. But basically the auto's doing the tough stuff. Following the course, regulating height and speed, all of that. If it weren't for the takeoff thing I figure they would've got rid of the crew altogether, given a year or ten." She scowled, adding the silent:
If not for The Cull, I mean…
Still a common thing, in conversation, talking about the future like there still was one.
"The takeoff thing?" I repeated, confused.
"Yeah. Don't ask me why. Trainers never explained it, and I was only on the course three weeks. Needs a human touch, I guess. Too many variables, too much left to chance."
I nodded, faintly relieved. The idea that each time I'd taken off in the past my life had been in the hands of a glorified calculator hadn't sat well.
Until:
"Hang on. Only takeoff?"
Bella had smiled at that. She'd cadged a cigarette off me earlier (I don't smoke, but currency's currency) and now she lit it carefully, tar drawling lazily past her teeth.
"Only takeoff."
"Then… the landing's… ah…"
"Yep." Another evil little grin, blowing out smoke like a squid venting ink, then a shrug. "Not always. Most pilots'll do it themselves. Matter of faith, I guess. But say it's raining, or there's mist on the runway. Hit some buttons, sit back, Bob's your uncle."
"Fuck."
"Yep."
"So when we, ah…"
"Heh heh."
She had a pretty laugh, all things considered. She was far more prone to sniggering nastily, which got on my nerves, but still. It's not like there was much to laugh about.
"When we fly," she said, "you can bet your last soggy Marlboro I'll be using the auto as much as I can. Trust me, it's the more reliable option."
Needless to say, this conversation had not filled me with confidence.
At around a thousand feet, with the alarms hitting an unbearable crescendo and a visible gash of smoke rising past the starboard windows, the full stinking reality of the situation leeched its way past the Bliss hangover and punched me between the eyes.
I was flying aboard a plane belonging to a notoriously unforgiving sectarian movement, which hadn't been properly maintained or serviced in five years, which had an unknown quantity of fuel in its reserves, a terrified junkie at the controls who'd never progressed in her training beyond a computerised flight simulator, and a catastrophic amount of damage to part or parts unknown of its undercarriage.
And it was being landed, single-handed, by a geriatric computer.
"Oh fuck." I said. "We're going to die."
Bella stopped shaking me.
"S'what I've been trying to saaaaay!" she screamed, eyes bulging.
For a moment or two we stared at each other, with nothing but the irregular whine of the engines and the spasmodic whooping of alarms between us. Then we burst into laughter.
Adrenaline does funny things.
Bella's laugh didn't sound all that pretty just then.
As near as I can tell, the auto brought us in on target.
I wasn't watching closely – the seat I'd buckled myself into was set some way back from the cockpit on the grounds that if things did get ugly the further forwards one sat the uglier they'd be – but in snatched glimpses through the open doorway I could make out the distant scar of what might be an airstrip, burnished in the bronze light of the afternoon, bordered on one side by a blurry haze of outbuildings and on the other by a bright mirror of water. To me it seemed to be directly ahead and low on the horizon, which I can only assume is the best place for an airstrip to be.
Bella sat next to me, singing freaky little nursery rhymes, refusing to talk.
Listing vaguely to the right, even through the muddy soup of my senses (ironically the pain from my arm had returned to full strength long before my instincts had), I sat grimly prepared for the wingtip to clip the tarmac, shearing off the entire thing and sending us cartwheeling – trailing fuel and smoke – like a colossal Catherine Wheel.
Or maybe the tail would dip, and we'd ricochet up like a throwing knife on the backspin, somersaulting up and over until the cockpit nosed into the rock like a blunt javelin, shattering every surface and filling the cabin with atomised glass.
Or maybe the starboard engine would blow on impact. Maybe we'd know nothing about the crash at all except an exquisite burst of fire; a supernova to shred every window, every seat, and every fragile little bone in our bodies.
Maybe we'd hit a building.
Maybe we'd over-fly the runway and bury ourselves, full tilt, into the mass of service yards and hangars cluttering the distant reaches of LaGuardia. Maybe we'd topple down into the mid-island water, venting bubbles as the dark swarmed up around us.
Maybe we'd…
Oh, fuck.
Having an imagination is never a good thing in a desperate situation.
"…in the tree top… when the wind blows, the cradle will…"
"Bella?"
Distant bushes through the windows at the edge of my vision.
"…when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…"
"Bella – shut the fuck up…"
The horizon bobbed into view on both sides. The tarmac came up.
"…down will come b…"
Kroom.
Sparks. Alarms screaming like abandoned babies.
Everything shuddered. A backblast of air funnelled down the cabin from ahead, peppered with glass and stone, and my neck twisted so hard I yelped in shock. Grass and distant buildings snickered past outside the window, but not in a straight line. We were curling on the runway, half-deployed landing gear screaming and twisting in protest beneath us, rolling us sideways, careening in a cloud of molten metal and whirligig embers. Spinning off the tarmac.
A sudden moment of weightlessness, and pain all across my midriff as the seatbelt bit. From the corner of my eye I saw Bella rise into the air, pancake-spreadeagle on the ceiling with a cockroach crunch, and then back down, nutting a headrest and flipping, upside down, onto her side.
No seatbelt.
Shit.
A bone jarring shudder, and crippled metal twisting with an operatic screech. Through the window beside me, lost behind a grid of contradictory smoke-trails and fluttering debris, I could make out the arrowhead of the wing tilting backwards and up, shearing itself off as the plane barrel-rolled into its slow skid. It ripped clear with a terrifying lurch, sprayed fuel which ignited immediately, and shattered itself magnificently across the tarmac like a neon waterfall. The metal of the fuselage – four seats in front of me – buckled with a shriek, shattering all the glass down the left side and vomiting smoke into the cabin. Everything went black and toxic, and even through the acrid fog and my own desperate coughing I could hear the battered impacts of the plane's death throes. It snarled and groaned its way across the last of the runway, ripping gouges of rock with an angle-grinder roar, then dipped with another lurch onto the grassy rough. Bella groaned somewhere in the murk.
Time started to return, piece by piece. Sparks drooled.
And – slowly at first, but gathering speed as inertia surrendered to the shifting weight – we rolled. Landing gear comprehensively AWOL, single remaining wing arcing up and over the fuselage like a shark's dorsal, ceiling bowing and sagging then snapping straight as it took the strain. My seat swapped verticality for an abrupt horizontal, lifting the whole cabin like a theme-park ride, sharp-edged seatbelt constricting me again.
The second wing slapped at the ground with a bowlike shudder and snapped off. Like some cylindrical juggernaut the fuselage rolled across it, breaking apart at the seams as it went.
Inside: tumbling chaos.
Debris dropping then lifting, blood rushing to and from eyeballs, hands swapping between lap and forehead.
Bella flapped like a dying fish, thud, thud, thud, off ceiling and floor with each new rotation. If she was still alive, she didn't look it. Nothing much I could do to help.
We seemed to be slowing down.
Then something detonated behind us. The all pervading jet-whine of a long-lost engine maxed out with a painful hiss and – oh fuck oh fuck – striated everything, inside and out, with shrapnel. Metal was punctured. The craft rocked and shunted forwards, heat-blast roiling back from the mangled tail, and hacked at the rags of my bloody clothes. Something stung my knee. My face bled. What few windows remained exploded like froth on a wave, and I had the fleeting impression of singed grass surfing past the shattered porthole as we rolled again. Something sharp and long punched itself through the metal beside me, coming to rest a scant foot from my side: a shattered stanchion from the rough beside the runway, picked up like a thorn.
And finally, like a great engine throbbing itself into dormancy, the airplane came to an appalled halt; listing on its back like a clapped-out whore, waiting for another bout. Smoke plumed on every side, and the quiet crackle of flames tugged at my punch-drunk consciousness.
"Shit." I said.
And Bella's inert body – half resting on the back of a chair directly above my head – surrendered to gravity, flopped in mid-air with a boneless kick, and impaled itself on the jagged spike in the wall.
I don't think I'll ever forget the sound it made.
The first instinct was to get out.
All that Hollywood bullshit about fuel tanks spontaneously going up like Krakatoa – long after the crash – could be safely ignored. The second engine had fallen silent shortly after the mad tumbling stopped, killing with it any obvious danger of explosion. But the irrational panic remained like an ember in my guts, and the fires already lit were plentiful enough to be scary. With the smoke gradually thickening and the slippery cut across my forehead leaking into my eyes, I thrashed about to get to the seatbelt buckle, finding a sudden unshakeable need to be away from this bastarding plane.
Away from Bella's limp little body. Staring straight at me.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier.
Sir, no sir, etc etc.
It was stealing over me by degrees that I'd done it. I'd got to the States. I'd fucking done it.
And yeah, there had been sacrifices and hardships. Yeah, there had been pain and chaos and untidy scrambling. Yeah, there had been death.
But you don't do what I used to do, for fifteen years, without seeing some or all of that at some point. You don't get to slink like a shadow between the raindrops, killing and cutting behind the scenes of a hundred and one foreign powers, without learning how to bottle it all away. Screw it up into a venomous little ball and dump it, derelict and forgotten, somewhere in the poisonous wastes of the unvisited mind. Anything it took to get-on-with-it. Mental conditioning. Emotional disconnection. Whatever.
I'd got to America. Nothing else mattered.
Though, to be fair, the victory was soured somewhat by the attendant uncertainty of what I'd find out there. Five years ago, before the news-shows stopped broadcasting and the emergency radio fell silent, before the Internet became an unchanging frieze – dying piece by piece as humming servers across the world sputtered out – it had looked like the US had not fared well.
Certainly they'd caught a nuke or two.
Listen: it turns out nothing brings out the aggression in a population like a shared disaster. If you believed the projections they made back at the start – and I did – the AB-virus took out 93% of the world's population. That's fifty-nine billion people, for the record, bent-double with the pain, spitting mangled clusters of alveoli out of their lungs and into their mouths, bleeding from eyes and ears and arse, dying by fractions.
You hear that?
Fifty. Nine. Billion.
It's a bigger number than I can imagine – and that wasn't even the end of it.
There was a time – perhaps a month or two – when the governments and networks and lines of communication were still nominally functional. Stripped down, understaffed, kept afloat by the efforts of men and women who'd watched nine out of ten of their colleagues drop dead, who'd been left blinking in the glare of responsibility with no clue, no hope and no idea.
I guess it was inevitable some stupid fuckwit would start throwing accusations.
The AB-virus was manufactured, they said.
Biological weaponry, they said.
State-sponsored terrorism hiding behind pandemic disaster, they said, and they pointed fingers and found 'proof', and let the tension escalate. The news was all but dead by the time the missiles dusted off, but we heard about it. Even in London.
I like to think nobody targeted Britain because our diplomatic status was untarnished, our potential involvement in any biological assault was laughable, and our impartiality prevented any accusations being aimed at us.
Yeah. And pork-chops come with wings.
No, we were spared because there were no wankers left in Whitehall to stick their heads over the parapet and join the row. No one left to contribute to the growing worldwide squabble. No one left to press Big Red Buttons.
After the Cull, any poor fucker left in charge was either lynched by the mob or ran and hid. It was a very British way of dealing with disaster.
It was also, now, half a world away.
I drew myself painfully through the interior of the destroyed plane and tried to anticipate. From the heat and glare ebbing through the largest of the ragged rents in the fuselage it looked like a pleasant day, which was something of a novelty after five years of acid rain and London skies.
I threw a last look back at Bella – hating myself for not having the energy to lift her off that spike; for not pausing a moment longer to at least close her eyes. But no… that same feeling of being bottled-up; trapped in a cage. Waiting for something to come and get me.
It's a cliche, but you don't get any good at what I used to do without letting your instincts guide you. That and the fact that, in my line of work, there was always something coming to get me.
Logic suggested the Neo-Clergy would be nearby. This was, after all, their plane. It was also their route, plotted ahead of time into their autopilot, landing us (for want of a better word) at their chosen destination. They could be relied upon to take exception to the way I'd treated their property.
I probed a hand into the pocket of my coat, seeking reassurance.
Still there.
Good.
But what else to expect? A nuclear desert? A radioactive wasteland haunted by the insane and the dying? Cancerous wildlife staggering on tumourous legs, lurching up to feast on the new arrival?
I'd been to New York once before. It didn't sound all that different.
I'd stowed the supplies pack in a luggage locker near the cockpit. Working my way forwards, past twisted seats and dangling airmasks, it was easy enough to retrieve. But as I tried to heft it onto my shoulders, grunting under my breath, it occurred to me exactly how weak I was. My head rushed for a split second – the legacy of the Bliss – and I staggered, overbalancing awkwardly.
"Bollocks!" I hissed, falling onto my arse.
It saved my life.
A stuttering burst of semi-auto rang out from somewhere behind me, clawing a neat geyser of shattered plastic and fibrous insulation from the ceiling/wall above my head.
Exactly where I would have been.
I dropped and rolled, textbook fast, before my brain even caught up. A chatter of gunfire followed – I guessed from the same source – shaking the air like a giant fan and tugging on my raggedy coat as it ripped a hole in the trailing edge. I swatted out the singed fabric before it caught light, finding myself hidden by the padded shield of a sideways seat, and let the adrenaline take over.
Identify the enemy.
"Where the fuck," a voice shouted, NY accent thicker than a sergeant's skull, "are the kids?"
Ah.
The kids.
"I can explain!" I shouted, keeping the terror thick in my voice. "Just… just don't shoot me! Oh god oh god. It wasn't me! They sent me to tell you!"
"Who sent you?"
"T-the…" Think fast. "The Bishop! There was a problem! W-with the kids, I mean. They wanted me to explain, s-so they…"
"What problem? Where the fuck are they?"
Get a direction. Zero-in.
"Answer me! Where are they?"
Further along the cabin. Standing in the aisle. Must have climbed in through the missing tail.
Alone?
"Please, I… I just… oh god…" I knocked out my best sob. I hammed it up like a true thesp. I poured every false fear into that gurgling pitiful little voice, and when the figure appeared slowly on the edge of my vision, creeping forwards with his lips pursed, it was set in a posture of laughable unwariness. His gun was lowered.
He rolled his eyes when he saw me, cowering and shivering in bloody rags with snot pouring off my nose.
And the Oscar goes to…
"Pull yourself together," he said, a fraction softer. "Now tell me who the fuck you are or it's…"
I moved faster than my own senses could register. Mental conditioning. Third year training. Biological reactions: without thought or judgement. Zen disciplines with chemical catalysts: reaching down into the subconscious, switching off your abstractions and distractions, becoming something less and more than rational.
Letting the body take over.
"Hng." he said.
I took out his jugular and carotid with a single sweep of the hunting knife I'd been carrying since Heathrow. More blood, soaking through my coat.
Doesn't matter.
I pirouetted downwards whilst the poor bastard was still wondering where I'd gone, wondering why his voice had stopped working, wondering why only gurgles arrived in his mouth where there should be angry, demanding words.
Three stabs to the ribs. Two directly between intercostals, the third glancing sideways off the breastbone, snapping something with a greasy pop, then sliding in as soft as you like.
Stepped back.
Considered a fourth stab upwards from solar plexus, decided it wasn't needed.
Retreated to my cover behind the chair and waited with animal patience for the human parts of my brain to come back on line.
Start to finish, it took about six seconds.
The man stayed upright for another five as his body worked out it was already dead.
He hit the puddle of his own blood like a belly-flopping pig, jerked once or twice, and went still.
I wiped the knife clean on a sleeve and cleared my throat.
There didn't seem to be anyone else around.