Writing Project #2 - 2008_03_26

“The United States Government does not take chances.

Not anymore, anyway.”

These words echoed through her head as she sat, uncomfortably, many hours into the 16 hour Trans-Atlantic flight in the back of the C130.

"The C130J Super Hercules Troop Transport," the Lieutenant said, "Is one of the most uncomfortable vehicles ever created. The word troop was only added as a lure to try and convince perfectly reasonable people, well aware that this thing won't be comfortable, that it was meant to move people from place to place."

They were standing on the tarmac of a military airbase, the sound of the running engines droned on above him, the wind from the prop wash whipped her hair about.

"The 'troop' is a lie," he said again.

She was starting to like the man, who's skin was as black as any she'd ever seen, and when he smiled, his teeth glimmered bright white, even in the dark running lights in the back of the plane, she could barely see him, and since he seemed to be resting his eyes, she could see them, but she could just make out the glimmer of his white teeth. He'd met her that afternoon, at her office at the University, his cap clutched in his hands, when he came in his dress uniform to tell her that they needed her to come with them.

She was, at first, a little confused by the situation. She couldn’t understand why these military men had just shown up in her office at the University. She was working on her lecture for the next day’s class he had stepped into the room, saying something about needing to take her to a meeting. She protested initially, but he just calmly said, "I really must insist Ms. Barber."

He didn't say much as they sat through rush hour coming into D.C. from across the river. They were in the vehicle for what felt like hours, and possibly even were hours, but she couldn't tell, trying to stare out of the tinted windows of the SUV. She pointed out, with exasperation, that if they were going into D.C., they could have let her finish with her lecture for the next day's class first, because now she was going to be horribly behind schedule, and they weren't going to arrive any sooner than they would have if they’d waited a little longer.

There was not, though, any way of arguing with these people. Clearly, their mission was to retrieve her and bring her to where ever they were going.

The back of the SUV was designed like a limousine, so that her row of seats faced back, toward the last row, which faced forward. "Can you tell me anything about what's going on?" She'd already asked several times, and the only information she'd gotten was that he was Lieutenant Marcus Jackson, and that he was merely there to pick her up and bring her, as quickly as possible to a meeting in Washington. This information, she reflected, contained only one bit she hadn't already been able to glean on her own. It was that his first name was Marcus.

They finally arrived, and she was let out in an underground parking lot, and she realized that she had no idea where she was. The soldiers, Marines by the look of them, were ushering her to an elevator just a few feet away, they had big black machine guns that were hanging from clips on their uniforms. She noticed that it seemed funny that they didn't have straps, as she'd always thought they'd been.

On the elevator was another world. While the parking garage she'd just been in seemed completely unremarkable, and perhaps a couple decades old, she felt like she'd just stepped onto some sort of futuristic tube transport. The entire car was highly polished stainless steel. There were no buttons, and no lights that she could see, even the actual light seemed to be just coming from all around them rather than from some sort of tube or bulb.

Then the car moved. It went, as far as she could tell, straight down. It did this very quickly, leaving her stomach, and most of her Caeser Salad lunch behind. It took only a few seconds to reach their destination, and the doors opened and she half stumbled off. It was like one of the express elevators that she used to ride when she was a girl in Minneapolis, back when her papa used to take her up to the top of the IDS building. You couldn't get there anymore, but she still remembered the disconcerting feeling of those elevators.

There was a short hallway in front of them, and the Lieutenant led the way toward a rather impressive set of double doors, which opened automatically as they approached with a loud hiss, and a light electric whir from somewhere inside the thick walls.

Then they were in a conference room, and there were several men seated at a large table, all of whom seemed very important and impressive, and were either wearing regal uniforms or extremely fine looking dark suits. She was directed to sit down, and they proceeded to explain exactly why she was there, and what they needed her to do.

On the C130, she'd learned to block out the sound of the huge prop engines droning on and on. She'd learned to ignore the sounds of the various metal buckles on straps that rattled and banged against the fuselage. And eventually, she slept.

She woke as the huge plane was making its decent. She turned and looked out of the little porthole behind her. The sun was bright, though she'd left in the late evening; it was now mid-morning on arrival. The desert expanded, vast and huge into the hills and mountains, which seemed impossibly far in the distance.

The lieutenant was there then, ushering her out of the back, which opened like a huge mouth into a ramp. At the base was a small convoy of black SUVS, very similar to the one she’d ridden in from the University in Virginia. There was another soldier, who looked she was no more than 16 years old, holding the back door of the third SUV open, Lt. Jackson directed her toward that door, and then, after grabbing some of the things off the plane and putting them in the back of the fourth SUV, he got in with her.

“It’s going to be about an hour’s drive from here to the building. If you’d like to try and sleep again, you’re welcome, but I can tell you from experience that it’s tough to sleep in these things, the roads around here aren’t exactly well paved.”

She watched out of the windows, wondering at the fact that she was now in another country. Not only was she in another country, but she was in an actively war torn country, and she was on the way to study what might be the first active case of ZBHVH3 in 10 years. She was also terrified.

“Can I look at the photos again?” She asked the Lieutenant. He handed her the entire dossier, and she suddenly felt more important than she’d ever felt in her life.

She studied the photos again. There were 3 victims, so far. She had written a paper, and had most extensively studied the virus, which is why the military came to her. They had already identified it as a potential diagnosis, and had confided in her that they really hoped she could prove them wrong.

The problem was that there had only ever been a diagnosis of this particular viral infection 4 times in the last 30 years. Both had happened in very unusual circumstances and had very little documentation. She had actually studied only one of 5 known tissue samples and had only her own studies to base her conclusions on, and they weren’t positive conclusions.

The SUV bounced along the desert road past a few mud huts, small huddled communities of poor and oppressed. Slowly, though, the landscape began to give way to more developed homes and businesses. Eventually they were driving through the main street of a medium sized city. The buildings, while larger and more advanced, were still fairly rudimentary. She also noted that it was a rather monochrome, everything was a shade of desert color.

“We’re coming up on the apartment complex.”

She turned and looked out the windshield to see a large building completely covered by plastic with a plastic tube leading to a large tent that encompassed a major part of the street. There were many soldiers posted all around.

“As I said before, Dr. Barber, we’ve completely sealed the building. We’ve had our own people set up the lab, and everything is ready for you.”

The lab, as the Lieutenant called it, was filled with equipment that Dr. Jeanine Barber had been begging her grant board for years to get, and some that she hadn’t even had the opportunity to request yet. She tried to temper her excitement over the equipment with the fact that there were people inside that were really sick.

It took several minutes to get into the bio-contamination suits and pass through the quarantine seals. She had several soldiers that had volunteered, or, more likely, were volunteered, to act as assistants to her. She set them to work, initially, on setting up the equipment, and then insisted on going inside to meet with the infected.

“Dr. Barber, you’re here because you’re the most knowledgeable person in your field on ZBHVH3 virus.” The man at the head of the table was talking, and she felt herself intake harshly.

“Has there been an infection?” She asked, before she could catch herself, then, “There hasn’t been an- It’s nearly impossible!”

The man was dressed like the ever important, high ranking Generals she saw on TV, and assumed that he probably was. He was an old man with white hair cut very short against his wrinkled head, and though he was old, he looked rugged, and powerful.

Another man took over, a younger man with thin wireframe glasses, and a Clark Kent hairstyle, “Ms- Dr. Barber. We’ve had people on the ground for two hours trying to verify, unfortunately, there’s hardly any credible information available and we really only have your paper to work from. You’ve seen the virus first hand, and we hoped that you could perform the first hand analysis and give up the verification we need.”

She didn’t know what to say, but was saved the trouble of thinking of something, for at least a few moments by another man in a uniform, “We know that time is of the essence. We’d like you on a plane and in the field, leaving now, we’d have you there, under cover, within 18 hours.”

“Under cover?” She asked.

Someone else spoke, this time, she couldn’t see him in the background, “Forgive him, he doesn’t know how to speak civilian. He means that this whole this is very top secret and hush-hush, and we’re not going to do anything that might get out into the media.”

She squinted a little, trying to make out the voice. She thought, strange as it was, that it belonged to the President himself, at least it sounded like him, but without the crazy accent he always used. She was so busy doing this that she didn’t realize that it had been decided she agreed. Of course, though, she’d agree. She had dedicated many years of her life to the study of this virus. It was, in her opinion, a nearly perfect virus. It held a sort of mystique for her. As she was escorted out to the elevator again, someone told her that she’d have everything she needed when she arrived.

Inside the building was dark. Very dark, and stiflingly hot, and the enormous suit she wore didn’t help. It had a small fan inside that worked to help circulate the air some, but it wasn’t much help.

She walked through the small entryway which led directly to a set of stairs. On the stairs were two soldiers wearing bio-suits, and 3 who were not, both were talking to each other in hushed tones.

“You know, they’re just gonna-“ started one, but he was cut off by another.

“Shh, shhhh,” said the other, “they aint gonna do shit like that.”

One of the soldiers, wearing the bio suit, stepped up, “you’re the Dr. they sent down?”

“Yes, I need see the infected.”

One of the soldiers that weren’t wearing bio-suits stepped up, the one who’d quieted the other, “Fourth floor, Third door to the left off the stair case, the door that’s just splinters now. We’re the ones that found ‘em. Simple raid, supposedly small group of “terror suspects” were having a meeting. Turned out to be a family of sick sand-ni-”

She gasped and he didn’t finish his sentence. He dropped his eyes, somewhat sheepishly, and returned to the alcove beside the stairs with the others. She looked up the stairs. It was an open stair case that led up, there were three units on each side and the floors were open to the stairs. She could see the doors to the units on the next floor about to the right, but other side and other floors were blocked by flights of stairs.

There were two soldiers accompanying her, one was a Private Martinez, the young woman who’d opened her door when they arrived, the other was a Corporal Donahue, who was, she believed, her translater.

They made their way, slowly in the bulky suits, up the stairs. Through small windows at each level there were streams of light that came in, focused at points on the floor. They accented the swirling dust in the air. Over the sound of the small fan in her suit, she could make out, barely, the sound of people behind each of the doors. There was mostly just conversation in a language she couldn't understand, but also she could occasionally make out a television show or cartoon here and there.

When they finally reached the unit, there were two more soldiers in suits standing guard at what was left of the door, which was broken and splintered so that only a sliver of the hollow wood still hung. It swung slightly as they brushed past it and stepped inside.

Inside the apartment was, in her opinion, another world. It was very dark and simply decorated. The walls were painted brown, or perhaps stained brown. The furniture reminded her of the 70's styles that were part of her youth.

They immediately in the living room, and she saw the first infected and was shocked. The leasons on his face and arms were more substantial now than she had expected. He sat, hunched over, smoking a cigarette. He didn't bother to look up as they entered.

She stood there looking at him, and finally realized that she was supposed to be doing something. She stepped toward him, and he looked up at her. There was anguish in his eyes, and she felt a pang of sorrow, knowing that this man would be dead within 24 hours, probably sooner. She hoped he couldn't see her pity.

"You can just speak, I'll translate for you," said Cpl. Donahue.

She looked down at the man and introduced herself. She talked with him for a few minutes, learning about him and when the symptoms presented themselves. After this she went into the bedroom where he said his wife and daughter were laying, both were, he said, worse than he was.

He was right. When she enter the bedroom, she found both of them, mother and daughter, lying on the bed together. Both were shivering almost convulsively, and she shuddered to see them.

She had to fight to get onto the initial research team for the virus. She had found information, quite literally hidden away, in a paper on the desk of one of her professors. She was immediately fascinated by the properties and nature of it.

While its name implies a combination of several minor viruses, this particular strain is amazing because of its apparent ability to continually over-power and add components of other viruses it encounters to itself. She had wished she could have named it herself because she felt it would have been both funny and appropriate to call it 'The Borg' virus.

She was fascinated at how long it took to find the original virus in the infected tissue samples they had, it was so completely buried in the other 3 components it had encountered. It had, by all regards, taken the most important aspects of the other viruses and added it to itself, and it seemed that resistance really was futile (which was the how she really wanted to end her paper, but on the imploring and urging of her colleagues, she left it out).

Now, standing here, she was realizing several things: first was that seeing this virus in real life, in its full force was frightening, the second was that it was infecting and progressing much faster than she thought that it could, and finally, that the wounds here looked nearly identical to those of the original victim, whose tissue she’d studied.

She confided this to her chaperones, and had to stop Cpl. Donahue has he started translating, hushing him.

Her case had been left in the other room, so she went out to it, and got out the intial supplies that she would need. She instructed Pvt. Martinez in the methods of drawing blood for testing, and marking the containers, and left her with the man in the living room. She took Cpl. Donahue with her into the bedroom.

The young girl’s breathing was shallow and weak. The mother’s breathing wasn’t much better. She stood over them, taking note of how fragile they both appeared, and again realizing that their deaths were both imminent. Again, she had to force herself to focus on the work and not the people involved.

After gathering blood and tissue samples, she hurried back down to her lab to begin tests and studies. It didn’t take long, with the advanced equipment at her disposal, to be able to verify that this was a strain of the virus. She discovered, however, that there were some differences, and as she studied and tested, those differences began to scare her. She asked to speak to the Lieutenant, and within a few minutes she was given a phone, the lieutenant on the other end.

“Have you made progress, Doctor?”

“I have, but I’ve found a few things that have me concerned.”

“I won’t guarantee I’ll understand what you’re saying, Doctor, but I’ll try and relay the information the best that I can.”

She looked at a series of print outs and glanced up at a few screens on monitors that were display various pieces of information, as if to verify what she was about to say, even though she’d already double checked her work. Triple checked it as well.

“There are a lot of anomalies here, but this seems to be an identical strain to the one that I studied.”

“So you’re sure it’s the same virus then?”

“No, that’s just it; it’s not just the same virus, it is the exact same strain. Although it seems to have gained some new characteristics along the way, including some intrinsic qualities belonging to four other viruses, it is the same virus that I studied.”

“We appreciate the verification. You’re free to study the infection inside the building now, find out if the infection has spread, and how badly.”

With that, the line went dead, and she set down the handset. Something about this didn’t add up. Why was the same virus that she’d studied years ago suddenly appearing here, over 5,000 miles away? How, from an isolated set of cases, restricted to two possible victims without the widespread infection that would have come from additional infected, with such a limited number of tissue samples available.

She tried to focus in on the research, she when back inside to talk to the family. Back in the apartment, she found the man still sitting on the couch, still smoking. She asked him again, through her translator, how he might have been infected.

They were in the middle of speaking with the man when there was a massive explosion, and as the building caved in on itself, and fire poured in through the cracks on the floor, the words echoed in her mind again, “The United States Government doesn’t take chances. Not anymore.”

Writing Project #1 - 2008_03_23

He hated planes.

It wasn't an unusual thing, he thought, being trapped inside an enormous steel tube, filled with highly explosive liquids and hurtling through the sky at ungodly speeds just didn't make him comfortable.

He knew he wasn't alone with this fear, but even as he handed over the boarding pass to the young woman with the curly blonde hair, wearing a smart blue skirt and blue airline uniform jacket, he noted that most everyone else boarding the plane, even those standing in the random security check point seemed rather calm and perfectly complacent in the ordeal.

His fear, of course, was compounded by the fact that he was certain that everyone else could tell that he was nervous, and he was certain that he was soon going to actually sweat through his sport jacket, which was, he regretted, the only one he was bringing with him.

He took his seat, which was in row 9, seat A, and placed him a short distance in front of the wings. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He was, however, in a windows seat, which he really wasn’t happy about. He didn’t like the idea of being able to see how close, or far, they were from the ground.

He thought back to the conversation he'd had the previous day, he'd said, "I really don't know about flying out there, sir. I’m… not good with planes."

The Sheriff looked at him, his face rarely wavered, and almost never gave away his current mood, and he stared at him. "Listen, son, Mexico wants us to get that boy, so we're going to go get that boy. It's how extradition works."

"I understand that, but why me?"

The Sheriff was an old boy, he’d been in his position for well over 20 years, even if he'd run unopposed for most of those, he considered himself the right man for the job. He called everyone younger than him son if he had even a small bit of respect for them, or boy if he didn't. His face was hard, almost leathered, and he always wore the same white Stetson where ever he was, saying often that he'd be buried in that hat, and no, he wasn't going to take it off for any reason, even if God himself stood before him and directed it.

"Maria's got your ticket son. Plane leaves tomorrow afternoon, and you'll be on it. Go home, get packed, and get to the airport early, you know, nine’leven and all," and the Sheriff focused on the stack of papers on his desk.

He'd thought about arguing with him, but having worked for him for the better part of 8 years and being the ranking Deputy in the office, he knew it wasn't worth the fight. So, he collected his ticket, and went home.

He agonized that night about what to pack, though he was only going to be gone for a few days. He found that he was even more concerned about what to wear, because he didn't want to be dressed in his best clothes, the clothes he wanted to be buried in. If it came to that anyway.

The woman who was to be sitting next to him smiled sweetly as she stuffed her back pack into the overhead bin. She fell down heavily into the seat and breathed a loud sigh. She was a pretty girl, with dark hair and eyes, and a slender body. He put her in her mid-twenties, and thus, a bit too young for him, being an old man of 33.

"I hate planes," she said, very matter-of-factly.

He turned toward her, and she continued, "It’s not the flying part, just the takeoff and landing. I get so nervous."

He tried, unsuccessfully, to smile reassuringly at her, but said nothing. He wanted to focus on not being scared, and hoped, for a moment, she was going to let the subject drop. His hope failed, though, when she asked, "what about you, you like planes, Mr.-?"

"Jacobson, Deputy Mark Jacobson. And, no, ma'am, I can't say that I do."

"Deputy? You're a sheriff, then?"

"Deputy Sheriff, yes ma'am."

"What brings you to Mexico, then?" She asked this while she unwound the headphones of her iPod.

"Need to pick up a prisoner for extradition."

"That doesn't sound very exciting," she said this somewhat idly. "I'm meeting some old friends from college who're working on their graduate degrees in archeology. I'll be flying into Mexico City, and then hopping on a smaller plane for the Yucatan. Which, I think, will be even worse since those things feel like their taking off the entire time."

He nodded at her, though she wasn't actually paying any attention to him, she continued talking, mostly about where she was going in the Yucatan, and about the ruins that her friends were studying, and that she was very excited to go, because even after they'd been told the ruins had been completely picked over, they'd found a huge cache of artifacts, and it was certainly at least as interesting as her last trip to Gaza. When she began talking about the anthropological interest she had in these peoples, which was the degree she was working on, he completely tuned out.

At this point she was listening to her iPod, her eyes closed tight, both hands grasping the arm rests with knuckles white. The plane was taxiing into position. She didn't notice, as she continued to talk, that Deputy Sheriff Mark Jacobson was white as a sheet, and sweating profusely. He'd long ago lost the interest in shedding the camel hair colored sport jacket, know that at this point his shirt would look like he'd just come out of the pool with his clothes on.

The Captain's voice came over the PA system, and he said some words in the way that Airline Captains do: the first syllable of each sentence and phrase elongated to the point of absurdity. He told them that the weather was fine and that they would reach their destination on time, or possibly a little early being that they had a good tail wind.

Then Sheriff's Deputy Mark Jacobson did something that he'd never done in his life, something that he'd have never thought possible while sitting in a seat, even on an airplane.

He passed out.

He was flying, high over the Arizona desert. He marveled at the beautiful colors of the rocks and crags below. He was amazed at the sheer vastness of the world he was soaring over, and he felt a serene sort of calmness. How could he have been so worried about flying?

Suddenly there was a bump, a gentle jostle that was barely noticeable. The world below him seemed suddenly further away, though, and he became aware, painfully, that a fall from this height wouldn't be favorable to his goals of living another thirty or forty more years.

The next bump actually shook him, and he felt something tight around his waist, and the world around him began to fade, become a bit darker. It was night time, then, as he hurtled over the world. Panic gripped him, and he tried to stand up.

In his dream he was diving, uncontrollably at the ground. As he came out of the haze of the dream he realized that he was on the airplane, half standing. The fasten seat-belt light was burning bright right in front of his eyes; he was hearing the tail end of the Captain's announcement.

"-unfortunately lost both engines. We will need to attempt an emergency landing. Everyone will need to remain in their seats-"

Another bump, this time, in the waking world so that it seemed that it was more like the plane had actually leaped from where it was, many feet higher, and he felt that his stomach had remained where it had been, before they took off.

He looked around at the others in the cabin. All the calm faces he'd watched boarding the plane were now just grimaces and tightly shut eyes. He could see a boy, around 14 or 15 who'd gotten on the plane, trying hard to look older than he was, now he was crying softly, saline tears streaming down his cheeks. An older woman in the seat behind him was muttering something, her eyes closed, her hands clenched together. He couldn't hear her, but he was certain she was praying.

He closed own eyes and thought of a wife and two boys, a family he'd never had, but now found that he wished he did. He thought it remarkable that he heard his mother's voice telling him that he needed to just find himself a nice young woman to settle down with. And it wasn’t for lack of trying, but he thought when he was Sheriff, maybe then the time would be right.

He opened his eyes one more time and found a man, sitting calmly next to the praying woman. He sat comfortably, reading a novel, one he recognized as a book he'd only recently finished himself. The man seemed not only calm, but almost serene. Something about the man seemed unreal, but Mark just assumed that he was a very used to flying and that this seemed perfectly natural to him.

The plane jolted again, and then, his whole world lurched. The world outside the window changed from a dark grey sky to a strange vertical horizon to just the ground, and he knew then that they were rolling.

The cabin filled with the screams of passengers, and this mixed with a sort of alarm klaxon that began to buzz indistinctly somewhere above him. Then, with a hiss and a click, the doors above them all opened and the oxygen masked deployed. People all around were scrambling to get a hold of them, fighting against the constantly changing force of gravity as the plane rolled over and over.

He remembered, strangely, reading in a book about how the oxygen masks deployed in every situation, not just cabin de-pressurization, because the pure oxygen would make the passengers docile and more accepting of their inevitable fate. He considered, for only a moment, before deciding that he would gladly go out calmly, if he could, and reached forcefully for his own mask. He pulled it down and stretched the thin band of elastic around the back of his head and let the plastic mask smack in him the face.

He could hear himself breathing; it was a strange sensation, like snorkeling. It was odd that he made that comparison, he thought, since he'd not snorkeled in over a decade. He looked at the girl next to him, the one who was headed to the Yucatan to visit her college friends, the one who'd been talking inanely, he suspected, for quite a while after he'd passed out. She now had her knees up, her arms wrapped tightly around her legs, and her face buried deeply. She was sobbing silently, her whole body convulsing heavily.

He felt that she needed to go out calmly as well, so he reached out to grab her swirling mask, which rolled oddly in space with the plane, and then tried to grab her shoulder. She flailed out and knocked it out of his hand in her panic, before she realized he was trying to help her. She fixed her eyes on him then, and grabbed onto him, clinging to him. He tried to reach is far arm around her, to comfort her, but it was no use, there was no way to turn his body enough.

He struggled out of her vice like grip, and reached far out for the mask, which was coming back toward him from the aisle as the plane rolled again. He snatched it out of the air and helped her get it on. She held it on her face, apparently afraid that the thin strip of elastic wasn't going to be enough to hold it on her head.

Surveying the cabin, other people were now sitting more calmly, grasping their arm rests, or loved ones. Fewer people were screaming. He looked out the window and saw that the ground was getting very close now. It wouldn't be much longer, and he looked back over his shoulder and saw that the man reading the book was still reading, his eyes wide, he had to work very hard to hold the book steady. Then he turned one last page, smiled hugely, and closed the book and held it to his chest. Apparently he was finished.

Then time slowed down. He felt that the author must have been right about the oxygen, because he felt very calm, and very docile. It was that, or he was somehow naturally more accepting of what he knew was coming, but he doubted that. The first impact was actually the tail section of the plane, which whipped the front of the craft straight down into the rocks and sand. They were sliding, gouging a huge crater into the desert. Parts of the plane were ripped away, though they continued moving, just moving in different directions and speeds.

Then they stopped suddenly and his upper body was snapped forward, where he saw the hard back of the seat in front of him coming toward his face.

Then everything was black.

He knew, or he thought he knew, that he was dead. It was black, and he was nowhere. Part of him felt as though he could just imagine the look on his late, overly religious Grandmother's face when she realized the afterlife wasn't pearly gates and clouds and harps, but instead an eternity of nothing.

They used to go to her house every Sunday, after church, and she would go on and on about the Reverend's amazing message, or how the new preacher was too young, too radical. She was the sort of woman who would put God into everything that happened, no matter how big or small. He hated Sundays growing up.

Somewhere in the blackness he thought he heard a fire, the big log bonfires they used to make when he was in high school, where they’d all drink and party until the early hours of the morning. He couldn't tell where it was coming from, but he could tell that there was a throbbing in his forehead.

He coughed.

There was smoke all around him. Thick black smoke. And then someone else coughed, or gasped, and retched. It was out there in the blackness. But he knew, slowly, that he was on the plane.

He reached down and tried to un-hook his seatbelt. It was harder than he thought for, because it was nothing like the belts that hold you down in a car. This has a strange design that he was completely unfamiliar with. He pulled at the release, and a little bit of the belt let loose, and no matter how much he tugged, he couldn't get anymore out. He closed the release and tried opening it one more time, desperately. It let a little more out, and he realized finally that it was, for whatever reason, ratcheting. He pushed and pulled over and over and finally the red strap came free.

He fell up.

Down.

He was lying on the overhead compartment above, his shoulder pressed against the Steward's call button; his head was wrenched over on the other side, his legs flailing helplessly in the air.

He twisted and turned his body and finally became free. He realized, with little joy, that although it hurt incredibly to do so, he could twist and turn his body. He tried to right himself, and slipped slightly on something wet and slick, and even though it was very dark in the cabin, and he was enveloped by a thick smoke, he knew that it was blood. He looked up and saw that the girl that had sat next to him was now only half there. Her body had been sheered just below her neck, and from there blood was literally pouring down. Up.

He focused, then, on trying to get out. He crawled toward the center aisle and tried to get his bearings. He tried hard to recall the woman in the smart blue skirt and airline uniform jacket, this one with deep, rich brown hair, pointing out the exits. There was supposed to be one just a few feet up.

He heard a thick, wet, cough, and then a gargling sound. He turned and saw the boy who'd been crying now holding a wound on his neck that was spewing blood out in thick spurts. He was gurgling, gasping, trying desperately to breath, breath air, instead of blood. Mark tried to half crawl and duck walk over to the boy, but it was already too late. A death rattle, and the spark was gone from the boy's eyes.

He went back to trying to get off the plane. He focused trying to navigate what used to be the ceiling to get to the emergency hatch that he knew was only a few feet away. And it was there, and it was open already, and he reached it and breathed the fresh air, holding onto the doorway and leaning out into the brightness of daylight.

His eyes adjusted to the daylight and he looked out over the desert, over the crash site, as he figured it would come to be known soon. Pieces of the craft were scattered all over, bodies lying strewn on the ground. His section seemed to be the largest of three broken bits of fuselage. There was a long cut in the earth, a scar that extended back at least a mile from the impact. There were similar cuts trailing behind each of the other sections.

He looked down and saw that he was at least 5 feet off the ground still, and he ducked in the doorway and hopped down in what turned out to be a less than agile landing. He rolled and then, with nothing else to do, he stood up and continued to look around at the wreckage.

He became aware of how much his body ached, and he wanted to sit down. He was almost certain he had a concussion, and feared that sitting would lead to laying, and laying would lead to sleeping, and that, he though, would certainly lead to death. He decided it was best to keep moving. He hadn't died in the plane crash, it seemed silly to lie down and die now.

He walked around, trying to see if anyone else was alive. He got ten yards from the plane and heard a coughing sound behind him. He turned, and in the doorway was The Man Who'd Been Reading. He still held his book, and he ducked down and hopped out of the plane, and performed a similar roll.

Deputy Mark Jacobson watched The Man Who'd Been Reading who was looking around at the carnage. Mark started to walk back toward him. The man looked at him, with almost blank eyes and smiled benignly. There was a sound behind him, and the Deputy turned to see that there was someone else stumbling from another part of the plane. Mark began to turn back around, saying, "Want to give me a hand-"

But The Man Who Had Been Reading wasn't standing there. The book he'd been reading was lying on the ground, and the man was a good twenty paces off, heading out into the desert, to the east, away from the setting sun.

"Hey, where are you going?!" Mark shouted. The Man just kept walking.

He considered going after him, but he could hear more people, some now calling for help. So he rushed off to do what he could.

It was a few days later. They'd found his bag, and had it shipped to him at the hospital in Tucson. He'd found out that the plane had crashed a short distance over the border. Everyone was airlifted, much to his chagrin, out of the desert and all the way to Tucson. There were only 5 survivors, including himself, but not including the man that had walked into the desert.

The Deputy had told his story to the emergency workers, and a search was mounted. Near as anyone could tell, there wasn't far this man could have walked, and there was certainly no where that he could be hiding, but in the end, after several days, they were forced to call it off.

The deputy knew, however, by the next day, that The Man would never be found. Mark had trouble falling asleep, mostly the pain of the broken clavicle and two broken ribs kept him awake, even with the drugs. When he finally slept, it was restless.

The Man was walking away, into the desert. There was no plane wreckage; it was just him and The Man. The sun was high in the sky, but it wasn't hot, it wasn't anything. Mark watched as The Man walked away, and then he was walking with him, next to him.

The Man looked at him, fixing him with his blank eyes. He said something, and Mark couldn't understand the words, but he understood the meaning. He said that he'd needed the crash, he'd needed the souls. And then he said that he was sorry, that he didn't cause the deaths, just that he had to be there to take them.

Mark tried to ask him something, and The Man smiled, gently. He said something else, and again, it was understood that he wasn't supposed to be seen, and that he was sorry that Mark had seen him, but then he assured him that he wouldn't see him again for quite a while.

Mark cried. He felt an enormous relief. He watched as Death walked away into the desert, the souls of those he was taking, following behind. They were all flickering and translucent, and yet they were as plain as anything else. He wondered how he hadn't noticed them all before. The girl he'd been sitting set too looked at him, and smiled before continuing on behind them. Death's hood and cloak flowed in the wind, and it seemed to extend on for miles.

For all eternity.