Dead on Arrival

One

“Dr. Martin?”

The voice came from the distance, echoed, died out. Lyle looked down at a square oak dinner table carved with names and initials he couldn’t make out. Deep grooves etched inexpertly with a jagged blade. In the middle of the table stood an overstuffed burlap sack. It overflowed with fine white powder. Next to it, a small, clear plastic medicine cup.

Lyle picked up the cup with an unsteady hand, studied it, squinted to make out the dose at three tablespoons. Jammed it into the chalky substance in the sack. He lifted it to his lips, tried to drink, then swallow. Coughed, dust flew. It settled.

“Dr. Martin.” Closer now. “Please. It’s… it’s vital.”

The powder stirred, churned. Then became a flurry, a miniature tornado, a violent dust storm, swirling and pregnant over the bag. Lyle withdrew, shielded his eyes. The bag bulged, a shape emerged. Black and angular. Wings. Then snarling nostrils, spewed spittle, venom. A bat. Bright red eyes. It flapped furiously. Lifted, became airborne but only momentarily. The bat stalled, fluttered, straining upward as it got sucked back down and submerged into the ashy grave.

A nudge to Lyle’s shoulder. “I… wait…” The plastic cup spilled from his hand.

He sucked in air, gulped, desperate to swallow. He shook his head. Another shoulder nudge, this one hitting its mark. Lyle willed his eyes open. He made out strands of red hair. I’m dreaming, he thought, managing, finally, a swallow. It, the dream, everything, has turned drug sour; too much diphenhydramine chasing too much insomnia.

He studied the hair—still from the beachhead of wakefulness.

“Melanie?” he whispered. The question was hardly out of his mouth before he knew the answer: no, not Melanie. Just someone with hair like hers, angry red. This woman was older than Melanie, not much of a resemblance at all. She blinked quickly. The clench of her jaw awoke Lyle.

Something was wrong.

“Are you Dr. Martin?”

He focused on the name tag on the woman’s blue uniform. Stella. She leaned in, near his left ear. A flight attendant; he started to make sense of it. Full face, freckles, an animal smell—fear.

“May I have water?”

“They need a doctor,” said the woman. She lowered her voice further. “In the flight deck. Dr. Martin. Lyle Martin?”

“How do you…”

“The manifest has all the names. Please, are you a medical doctor?”

He glanced around, saw eyes turned his direction. “Flight deck?”

“You were sleeping. On the way to Steamboat. I’m sorry to have awakened you.”

Lyle unclasped his hands. He stretched his arms so that his fingers rested on his knees. He pressed fingertips into jeans, creating sensation. He needed to get his bearings. But, really, he could see this woman’s desperation and it annoyed him. He sensed this infinitesimal delay in recognition would send a laser shot of annoyance, establish a pecking order. It was cruel and he didn’t like that he was doing it and he couldn’t help himself.

“Are you listening? Please.”

“Yes, a doctor.” More or less. Licensed, not practicing.

“Is someone sick?” asked the woman sitting next to Lyle. “Is that the problem?” She was slight, didn’t take up the full width of even these tight quarters, with a mouth that looked to open little when she spoke.

“The pilot asked for a doctor,” the flight attendant addressed the woman. “You know as much as I do from the announcement. I think everything is fine. Please keep the shades down.

“Can you join me, Dr. Martin?”

“Yes, right.”

He stood, bumped his head on the overhead compartment, felt the eyes on him again, looked down. Focused on his right foot, the aged gray-and-maroon running shoe, and understood what it was that had caught his attention. His foot was stable. Not gently rocking as it would be in flight. No engine noise. Hadn’t she said they were on the way to Steamboat? They’d landed?

He followed the flight attendant down the aisle. Around row 12, on the right, a woman with a shaking hand reached to open the shade.

“Please keep it down,” the flight attendant chirped, her voice strained to the point of cracking.

“Why?” asked the woman. “Give me a break,” someone else moaned.

“The pilot said it’s to keep the temperature down. It’s cold on the tarmac.”

“So.”

Tarmac, Lyle thought to himself. Maybe the pilot got sick and there was an emergency landing. Maybe they never took off. The woman in row 12, with thick arms—probably diabetic, Lyle thought—closed her shade. It set off another little annoyance. People are pliant on planes. Powerless, Lyle thought, flying chattel. He kept walking forward. The plane was neither full nor particularly big. One of the midsize deals, smaller even, less than three-dozen people. Cloth seats, a worn plane, but with those little screens mounted behind each one.

Lyle felt the eyes on him. Who, they must be wondering, was this man with the slight hitch in his gait, and light brown hair pasted to the side of his head from sleep? Still, even now, Lyle had the look of someone sturdy, even important, which he once had been.

“Please take your seat,” the flight attendant urged a tall man as they threaded through four rows of first class.

“I need to get something from the overhead,” the man protested. He wore noise-canceling headphones on his ears, and spoke a decibel too loudly.

“Take your seat. Just give us a few minutes.” The flight attendant paused at the flight deck door and waited until Lyle caught up.

“I’m Stella. You’re a doctor, doctor, right? Not a Ph.D. doctor.”

“Both. Infectious disease, immunology. I’m not sure I can be of much help. We’re on the ground?”

The woman nodded.

“In Steamboat?”

“Yes.” But she half shrugged, noncommittal.

“Hang on.” The flight attendant knocked on the flight deck door. A small slider window opened, giving way to an eye. The flight attendant explained she had the doctor, and the eye blinked. Lyle heard a woman’s voice, faintly, say, “Step aside and let him in.”

Lyle looked back at the planeload of passengers to see many of them craning into the aisle to glean his purpose.

He walked into the flight deck.

It was dark—outside, at least. Inside, the controls remained lit up, somewhat, a handful of red lights. The air hung, stale. Seated to his left in a tan chair, a woman, he thought, though her back was to him. She must be the pilot. To his right, facing him, sat the navigator or copilot or whatever. Between them, and overhead, a dense instrument panel that looked like the electrical version of wall-to-ceiling carpeting. In front of each pilot, two screens, each black. Between them, a big handle, which Lyle presumed to be the throttle. Other than that, it was Greek to him.

“I’m Lyle Martin.”

“Eleanor Hall; the first officer is Jerry Weathers. You’re a doctor.”

“Yes.” Thought: Doctor-ish. Enough of one. Used to be. Maybe that’s why they kept asking him. To see if it was still true. “Is someone sick?”

Eleanor reached down to her right to the control panel and flipped a white switch.

Outside, there was an explosion of bright, the airplane’s headlights. They illuminated a swath of pavement, the tarmac. A second later, she turned off the light. But the images were burned into Lyle’s drug-tinged brain: a man in an orange jumpsuit, lying on the ground beside a luggage transporter; two other workers toppled upon each other; a desolate hangar to the right; and the clincher—inside the window of a small airport, a half-dozen would-be passengers or staff. Motionless.

“As near as we can tell,” Eleanor said. “Everyone out there is dead.”

Two

Lyle hated stability and disruption in equal measure. When Melanie started putting sex appointments on their shared Google calendar, he skipped town for three days. And stayed awake for most of it. Niceties give him Olympic-caliber insomnia. He twice turned down speaking gigs that offered fifteen thousand dollars because the anticipation of the event left him ghost-walking until dawn. It wasn’t the public-speaking part so much as the small talk afterward. It left him bobbing on the waves of inauthenticity, agitated, suffering fools, even ones not so foolish.

The vision outside the flight deck reminded him of one of the worst sleepless fits. The waking nightmares. A hole remained in his bedroom wall made with a broom handle attacking a waffle-size tarantula that wasn’t there. Were these dead bodies for real? Were they dead?

“Was that…” Long pause.

“What it looks like,” Eleanor said. “Bodies. Nothing moving out there.”

“Jesus.”

“No one answering distress calls. Nobody responding at all,” the first officer chimed in.

“I didn’t hear any shots,” Lyle said. He figured he must’ve slept through it. Naturally, his mind would go to armed attack—terror or some heavily armed, local madman. Even Lyle, as isolated as he’d made himself the last few years, overheard or read the drumbeat of periodic, indiscriminate mass killings. Just days ago, a guy at the mall in Corpus Christi had mowed down shoppers and left a manifesto about how these “materialists” didn’t understand the true spirit of Christmas.

“I don’t think it’s… a shooting.” The pilot’s voice sounded hoarse, phlegmy, halting. “Everything is calm.”

“You said everyone. Everyone is dead.”

“Everyone.”

Lyle cleared his throat, started to get his footing. “How do you know this isn’t an isolated thing—something at the airport?”

“I don’t.”

He looked outside, tried to. Not much to see, darkness and ghost outlines of the terminal, where he’d seen the bodies. “So why not just dock the plane?”

“We can’t just pull up to a gate without help and, besides, I don’t know how safe it is out there. Could be…” She shrugged. Anything.

He fell silent and realized he had no idea what they were asking of him. A medical opinion? Or some reassurance? Neither seemed realistic. He settled on a more primitive and frightening reason: they had no clue what was going on. They must have been sitting here for a while and had finally succumbed to getting outside input—from the doctor with hair matted against his forehead who had drugged himself to sleep.

“You can’t get the police?”

“Like we said.” Jerry’s voice had an edge. Lyle got the impression the man didn’t much want Lyle in the middle of this.

“You’ve sealed the vents.” Lyle heard the scratch of sleep still thick in his throat.

“We’re getting only recirculated. Mostly. The APU takes some from the outside.” The pilot paused. “Auxiliary power. We used it briefly but decided against.”

“We have flight deck oxygen. Discrete source, in the aft hold. Just below us,” Jerry added.

“Are you…” Lyle tried to pick his words carefully but couldn’t find suitably diplomatic ones. He asked, “Are you two feeling okay? Are you sick or is anyone on the plane feeling ill?”

“Not to our knowledge.”

“I guess we’re looking for a second set of eyes,” the pilot said.

Lyle appreciated the frankness and its tone. But what good was he? He let himself tick down a list of options that might explain a handful of bodies inert here and no communications beyond the airport. The greatest likelihood was a terrorist attack, foreign or domestic. Nut job with a gun, or many of them.

After that, what?

Dirty bomb. One of those nasty things that leaves the buildings intact and kills all forms of life. He’d heard of it, but hardly could offer counsel.

Nuke.

So this was everywhere? Or the epicenter was near here? Small potatoes. In the middle of nowhere? Without fire? No.

His mind wandered further, drawing less from the literature than from more exotic theories. Nothing he’d ever read about resembled this.

Nerve agent, likelier than a nuke, given the modest evidence in front of him, maybe even likely. Sarin gas. It inhibits release or transfer of acetylcholine, a neurochemical that caused muscles to contract. In its absence, paralysis, asphyxiation. He’d heard about the Iranians’ testing of a Zyclon B with hyperspeed effectiveness. It moved at the rate of data. A long shot but not as long as something organic, a virus, not very likely at all; nothing he knew about killed this quickly without killing the host so fast that the pathology couldn’t spread. It’s what made Ebola so, ultimately, self-destructive. When the CDC flew him into a Pakistani village, years earlier, after a Washington Post blog called him Young Dr. Pandemic, Lyle saw bodies akimbo much like the guy in the orange jumpsuit next to the luggage carrier, but in that case, with more signs of trauma, not, like this guy, just frozen in his tracks.

Bacteria. Forget it. The time between onset and death took, at its quickest, a day. Unless something had been gestating. But why only the people on the ground? Not in the plane?

He taught his last adjunct class at UCSF three years ago. Maybe there had been developments, diseases, stuff he hadn’t kept up with, a superbug in the literature or lab. It is flu season, he thought. But no flu ever acted like this.

Could he be sleeping? Could this be a drug-induced hallucination, all the toxins in his brain and liver finally spilling over into madness? All this inside his mind. And this was going to be the trip that righted his ship.

“Say something,” the pilot said.

“Food poisoning,” he muttered.

“Seriously,” said Jerry. Unclear if he was being sarcastic.

“Maslow’s hierarchy. People gotta eat. You said no one is answering the communications?”

The pilot reached to the center console, unlatched a headset, brown leather strap across the top smudged from handling. He accepted them in his right hand, tentative.

“You have to put them on your ears.”

They were tight—the pilot had a small head—and now he glanced at her as he widened the gadget’s setting, catching her allure. Graceful, thin fingers on her right hand gripped tightly around a smaller throttle-type device, not the main throttle, next to her leg. Still couldn’t see her face.

“Just static,” he said.

She reached to the center console and turned a knob on the radio. New channel. More static. New channel. More static.

“The first two are the main air traffic control channels, the second two are backups. Nothing for nearly an hour.”

“You’ve been sitting here an hour?”

No answer.

“How did you land?”

The copilot turned to Lyle. He looked a little bit like a fish—sloping forward, eyes bugging, and widened, wide lips. He said: “When the comms go down, you land.”

Again, a slight edge. Defensive. Lyle decided not to wholly trust him but gave no indication. If Lyle had a true gift, it was mistrusting with great dignity, never with personal disdain. No one ever disliked Lyle for his healthy skepticism. Fact is, people liked Lyle, admired him, let him get away with his apparent non sequiturs and creative flights because they always sensed his goodness, even after he could no longer feel it himself.

“Mountains,” Lyle said.

“What had you expected coming to Steamboat?”

What had he expected? Not much. A keynote address to a small conference and a chance to begin to make amends. Pay the bills again.

“Can you turn on the lights?”

“We don’t want to bring attention to ourselves or continue to bring unwanted scrutiny from the passengers.”

“Because?”

“Because I said so. Because it’s obvious.”

The pilot inhaled deeply. Click. In the five or so seconds during which lights flooded the tarmac, Lyle narrowed his focus from the macro—a small tarmac, such that it was, with one, two bodies lying on the ground to the desolate corporate jet parked to the left, painted red with the insignia “Corp Go,” to the modest lounge in the single-story ranch-style airport frozen with bodies, to the dark maw of the hangar on the far right and, in the distance, wisps in the air, smoke?—to the micro—a single body, the man in the orange jumpsuit beside the luggage rack, frozen in time and space. Too far to discern anything. Other than: comatose or dead. No evidence of shrapnel wounds. No signs of explosion anywhere. But no movement since the last flood of light.

And mountains. They were in a valley.

Lights off. Just vapor trails of images. Then a fuzzy picture, inside his mind’s eye, bodies on the corrugated roof shack off a dusty road in southern Tanzania. The images jolted Lyle, turned to static, faded.

“Looks like the Andes. Ski town, right?”

“Not in November. Mud town, now. Decent airport, though. Yampa Valley Airport, popularly known as Hayden.”

“It’s gun country.”

“What?”

“People love their firearms here.”

“We’ve been over this. Where’s the blood?” the first officer asked.

Fair question. Why didn’t anyone come to help? Where was the ambulance, the firefighters?

“Maybe he killed everyone in sight and flipped the power switch.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Screw Loose. It’s as good a working theory as any. Good reason to stay on the plane, I guess. What time is it?” Lyle asked.

“Here, just past one, in the morning.”

“What’s the temperature?”

“High thirties, but not trusting our gauges.”

“You have electricity.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lyle squinted.

“Well?”

“We have fuel?”

“Yes.”

Lyle looked at the pilot with a clear, unspoken question: Then why not let’s get the hell out of here?

“Maybe enough. Probably. We’ve kept the engine running for the heat. No engine, no heat.”

“But that burns fuel,” said Jerry.

Lyle thought, I slept through it. He’d taken a Benadryl, or four. What you do when you can’t get the good stuff. He rubbed his fingers together, creating sensation, assuring himself he’s awake, sure now that he is.

“What kind of plane is this?”

“Do you know planes?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a 737, Boeing, two turbofan engines. But no communications and the electrical has been less than reliable. Some systems have gone offline. We have auxiliary power. I’m saving it. We take off, we risk coming straight down,” the first officer said. “What we’re asking is whether you’ve ever seen something like this—or read about it? That’s the opinion we’re interested in.”

Lyle reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone. “May I?”

“It won’t work. But be my guest.”

He could look something up, but what exactly? It wasn’t like he was going to go into PubMed and look up the symptom that everyone not on an airplane was dead. His phone came to life. No signal.

“Besides food poisoning,” the pilot said with patience. Lyle liked the nuance in her voice, the control under pressure.

Lyle inched forward, as much as he could, before his knees hit the instrument panel. He put his phone down and peered into the night. Useful words and thoughts failed him.

“So in sum…” the first officer said.

“It’s very hard to know from here. Looks to me like those people are either dead or quickly heading that direction.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s very cold.”

There was a moment of silence.

“A storm is blowing in.”

“How do you know?” Lyle asked. How could they see anything blowing in? No radar, presumably. But his interest was piqued; maybe the storm already came through, bringing something deadly, carried on the wind.

Jerry sighed. His meaning clear enough: You might be a doctor but we’re pilots.

“What happens when you call someone, anyone?”

“It goes directly to voice mail or says all circuits are busy. We’ve been trying to find another human being for over an hour, just on the ground. I can barely contain the passengers.”

“Won’t they look for us, a plane that’s off the radar?”

“One would think,” the pilot said.

As Lyle took it in, he found his attention tugged to the dark horizon outside the plane.

“There,” Lyle said.

“What?”

“The hangar. Movement.”

Three

“I don’t see anything. It’s too dark,” said the pilot, turning to her second in command. “No need for that, Jerry.”

Lyle saw the gun for the first time. It was holstered, sitting on the button-laden dash, beneath the copilot’s sweaty palm. Lyle knew a bit about guns from the protection he sometimes got overseas and figured rightly it was a nine millimeter, standard issue for a licensed flight officer.

Jerry drummed his fingers on the gun. Lyle felt like the presence of the weapon should be telling him something but he wasn’t sure what. It reminded him distantly of the meeting he had with the dean as things were spiraling downward. There was someone from the university’s human relations department in the meeting, like a gun, just in case the dean needed to defend herself. Lyle, your behavior belies the intellectual maturity of a…

“Maybe I imagined it.” Lyle sensed he didn’t. But there was nothing there. Shades of black; even the grays were black, no reflections or shadows. “Why aren’t the lights on out there?” Anywhere. He assured himself he saw something: a wisp, shape, vapor trail in an embodied form. Yet as he tried to see it again, he couldn’t even make out the hangar.

“Some attacks disable electrical systems.”

“So do some storms. Not unheard of.”

“I’m not sure I can be of much help. I’m sorry,” Lyle said. “Is there something specific you want from me?”

“We’re grasping at straws,” Eleanor said. Then, after a beat, she added, “I wanted to have something reasonable to say to them.” It wasn’t immediately clear who she was referring to but then, in the silence that followed, Lyle could hear the dull cacophony that swirled from outside the cabin. Voice stew starting to boil. “I wanted to make sure that we weren’t missing something.”

The pilot lifted the intercom. “I better say something.”

She sat, lifted the intercom, pressed a button on the side with a sweaty-damp thumb. “Folks, I’ve got an update for you.” Lyle almost laughed. She was using the same tone of voice they use when the gate’s not ready or they need to deice the wings. He imagined what he’d next hear: We’ve got a slight delay because everyone in the world is dead. Have some peanuts!

“As you know, we’ve arrived safely at our destination in Colorado. Just outside Steamboat Springs. We are still working to fix our communications glitch.” She stopped. Swiveled. Looked directly at Lyle for the first time. His first impression was that she was unwavering, and strikingly attractive but with slightly crooked front teeth, WASPy with a lemon twist, what his friends in college called light blue blood. He wanted to be on her team, could picture her painlessly climbing the company ladder, making only friends. “I’m going to come out and discuss all of this with you in person,” she told the intercom, then took her thumb from the button on its side.

Just as she reached for the door, a rap of knuckles came from the other side, then a scratching sound.

“Hold on, Stella,” Eleanor said through the door. “I’m coming.” She cleared her throat, muttered something that sounded to Lyle like “No manual for this one.”

To Jerry: “Only I get in here.” To Lyle: “Would you mind joining me? Follow my lead. We’re improvising, but with authority.” Paused. “Got it?”

No answer required. She slid by Lyle to the flight deck door, glanced at him. “In your considered opinion, we’re waiting to get some more information but there’s no reason at all to panic.”

“Yep. Been there, done that.”

“Not that I expect you’ll say anything.”

Eleanor thought about what she’d say: I’m Captain Eleanor Hall—the voice from the intercom. We’re taking a cautious approach. Waiting for a position at the terminal. No reason for alarm.

Another rap on the door and a woman’s voice said, “Please.”

“Okay, Stella.” Eleanor opened the door.

She wasn’t looking at Stella but a passenger.

“I’m coming out, I’d appreciate your—”

“They’re all dead,” the passenger said.

“What?”

The passenger, a short woman with short, bleach-blond hair beneath a gray-and-gold-colored knit hat, wobbled on her feet. She looked stunned and grabbed the side of the door. Eleanor glanced at Lyle, pursed her lips, and said to the passenger, “That’s not at all clear. I’ve got a doctor here and there is evidence that people in the terminal may be ill or have some syndrome. I’m coming out to address that, and it’s very important that we not spread rumors.”

“What? Outside the plane?” the woman said. “No, I’m talking about… I’m saying that—”

It dawned on Eleanor and Lyle at the same time. They jointly pushed open the cockpit door all the way. They saw what she meant.

Row after row of passengers just like the man on the tarmac. Collapsed, tilted, crumpled, absent any signs of life.

“No, no,” Eleanor said.

Lyle pulled on the arm of the passenger and yanked her inside the flight deck. He slammed shut the door.

“What the hell is going on?” Jerry said.

“It’s in here.”

Four

“Cover your nose and mouth,” Jerry said.

They all did it—Jerry, Eleanor, and the passenger—well, not Lyle. It wouldn’t matter. Microbacteria or viruses would easily sneak through fabric or hands. He steadied himself against the wall and he whisked down a catalog of deadly invaders carried by air—the hantavirus and its many species: Puumala, Muleshoe, Black Creek Canal. Carried by rodents, defecated, dried and baked into dust, inhaled by humans. Inhaled. Delivered through the air. There are horses up here, cows, presumably, lots of dry air. Dried.

Where, he thought, was Melanie? And the baby. Got to be, what, three years old now and change? Safe, surely. Wherever they were.

“We have to get out of here,” Jerry said.

“A spore, maybe, something that comes and goes,” Lyle said, shrugging off the idea as quickly as it came, thinking aloud. Then he looked at the passenger. “What happened out there?”

“I…” Tears filled her eyes. “I came out of the bathroom.”

“Where?”

“The back. Stop, stop, just tell me what’s going on!” Freaked out, yes, but not entirely plaintive. Wavering between shock and what Lyle surmised as a basic inner strength. She looked distantly familiar and then he placed her; she’d been sitting next to him, sharing his aisle.

Eleanor stood and Lyle, without being aware of it, put out a gentle hand, trying to calm everyone. He made an equally subconscious decision to deliberately ask the passenger the most basic questions to steady her, so he could get as much information as possible before she imploded.

“We’re trying to figure that out. You can help us. What’s your name?”

She took a second to process it. “Alex.”

“Alex?”

“Jenkins. It’s a dream…”

“Alex, was there a noise? Before people got… sick. Was there a noise?”

“What kind of noise?”

“A scream,” Eleanor said. “Was anyone in pain? I thought I heard voices.”

“I was just going to the bathroom,” she said. She brought a petite hand to the side of her face. Clear-painted fingernails had been gnawed. A nervous person, Lyle thought. Now trying to hold it together.

“And then you came out of the bathroom, and—”

“And I started to walk up the aisle and I noticed this guy was falling out of his seat—”

“Was in the process of falling, or had already fallen?”

“Cut this bullshit out!” Jerry said through the jacket he held to his mouth.

“Jerry…” said Eleanor.

“C’mon, we can play doctor later. We need to make a decision.”

It was obvious what he meant. Stay or go.

Eleanor stood and walked to the door and stared out through the pinhole. “What about the cabin camera?” she said, sounding almost revelatory.

She’d completely forgotten. They had a hidden camera in the cabin that they rarely used; it felt gross, was how she put it. All the airlines had followed suit after JetBlue set the post-9/11 trend. Eleanor turned to Jerry, who fiddled with buttons in the middle instrument panel. The screen in front of him flickered. It was a scene from a horror movie. A bird’s-eye view of motionless passengers. They looked very much like soldiers felled midstep. Lyle took a step in the direction of the screen, not that there was much room to maneuver. He focused at random on one passenger, a man wearing a wool hat, form-fitting his skull, earphones protruding from the sides. His angular face tilted to the right, head almost on his shoulder. Lyle homed in further on the shoulders, pulled slightly back, not totally in repose. What was it? Lyle thought. He took a step closer, leaned in. What is it about the guy?

Then the image flickered. It went in and out. Jerry slapped the screen, willing it to life. But it flickered again, then went out.

“Does it record? Can you go back in time?” Alex asked. It was the first indication she wasn’t too terrified to speak.

Jerry shook his head.

“Is this airtight? The cockpit?” asked Lyle.

“Flight deck,” Jerry corrected him.

“Not the same thing?” Lyle regretted saying it immediately. Of course it was the same. This guy had to mark his territory.

Jerry continued. “And the answer is: the flight deck is more or less airtight. But it doesn’t matter because we already opened the door, so whatever is out there is in here.”

“Not necessarily,” Lyle said, but it came across more as an internal monologue than dialogue.

“Please, I want to hear what the doctor has to say,” Eleanor said, “and then I’ll make a decision.” Nothing subtle about her language; she, and she alone, called the shots.

Jerry tightened his hand on the gun.

“Did you notice if anyone was moving at all?” Lyle asked Alex.

She didn’t answer right away.

“I didn’t see anyone move,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear anything. I thought maybe everyone was asleep. After I saw the first guy, the one fallen over in the aisle, I saw another person folded forward, kind of, like how they tell you to put your face on your lap when you land. I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it but earlier this woman who was sitting in the middle of the plane had been saying she’d seen bodies—on the ground. She said she’d seen something…” Alex looked up and she was searching for a handrail. Lyle didn’t want to fashion one yet; he wanted the information as undiluted as possible. “This woman said something about this country being out of control with guns and rage, and then someone else mentioned Wo Hop To, that gang that shot at the mayor’s office, and an Asian man got really angry.”

“Get to the point,” Jerry said.

“Hold on,” Lyle said. “Everyone was getting anxious?”

She nodded.

“We were scared.”

On one level, of course, it was natural that people would speculate about armed attack or terrorism, especially if someone had seen a body. It was everywhere now, the violence, hardening people and accelerating a non-virtuous cycle: people wanted more police power, then feared government power and purchased more guns. Frustrated citizens hewed more tightly to views that, perversely, accelerated the trend further. More cops, more guns, more guns, more cops.

Everywhere now, in the news, the narrative had become the unzipping of civility, the hint of lawlessness, or a skepticism of the law, those who said it had become politicized. People had to prepare to defend themselves and their values. In the latest news, a group of heavily armed separatists in Oregon was daring law enforcement to come in and toss them off their compound on federal land. They’d taken a federal marshal hostage claiming him a spy and enemy combatant.

“I didn’t hear any shots out there,” Jerry said. “Did anyone have a gun?”

Alex shook her head in a way that said two things: I don’t think so and I don’t know.

“Maybe it’s multipronged,” Jerry said. He directed his comment only to Eleanor. “Guns and gas. Outside and in here.”

“We’ve got no evidence anyone is atta—”

“Respectfully, Captain, let’s not be naive here. This world has gone to absolute shit. It’s a narco war zone south of the border, Arab teenagers run down innocent pedestrians in Jerusalem to say nothing of the rest of the Middle East, and it’s bleeding onto our soil. You can’t count on the cops. Hell, some are just hired guns of the government. Look at Oregon.”

“Why here, Jerry, in Steamboat?”

“Why anywhere?” Jerry answered.

“Alex,” Lyle said, “may I ask you a question?” He was looking at her square, very intensely.

She nodded.

“Is there anything you might be leaving out?” The way he said it was so graceful that only the most astute listener would hear the surgical challenge in it. Was she, he was in effect asking, telling the whole truth?

Eleanor picked up the subtlety and she blanched. This guy was good.

“Like what?” Alex asked, holding Lyle’s gaze. “Help me remember. I want to help. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Lyle seemed satisfied.

“So speak, Doctor,” Jerry said. “Give us your opinion so we can make a decision. Are these people sick or dead or what?” In the military, Jerry had admired this medic who made a decision and went with it, making decisiveness the highest priority.

Fair enough, Lyle thought, and he flashed briefly on an experience he’d had while doing his CDC work when he had visited the Jewish Quarter in Barcelona, where there had been a small outbreak of SARS. One of the patients was the young daughter of a Hasidic rabbi. She wasn’t responding to any treatment. She was in agony, barely hanging on, having spent more than a week on the brink. Lyle recommended a new course of action. The rabbi called Lyle aside and, quietly, asked if he expected the treatment to do any good. “I can’t be sure, Rabbi. We should try everything.”

“Dr. Martin, may I ask you a question?”

Of course, Lyle had nodded.

“Do you know when to let go? When to stop fighting?”

Lyle had no ready answer to the questions or the rabbi’s soft but probing brown eyes.

“When you start to pray,” the rabbi said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an agnostic or an atheist or a man of faith. You know, deep inside, when the better part of your treatment is hope rather than science.”

Lyle had attempted, without success, to hold the rabbi’s gaze.

As he stood now in the airplane, he tried to figure out if he was hoping or praying, applying science or faith. The answer rocked him: he wasn’t sure where he stood on any of it anymore. He couldn’t find his own center, let alone an answer for these people. All he could think was, I want out. Out of here, this situation, this flight deck.

“I’ll need to examine them.”

Eleanor made a clicking sound with her mouth, considering this.

“Do you want to turn the lights on again?” Lyle said, peering out the window.

Click went the lights.

“We’ve seen this,” said Jerry.

“Like I said, the only way for me to know for sure is if I can examine them,” Lyle interrupted. “Stating the obvious—repeating the obvious.” He noticed his phone on the instrument panel and snagged it. He felt an urge to say, I’ll just take my phone and be on my way. Maybe head back into the airplane and plop down and feel at home among people who were brain-dead or paralyzed or whatever they were. Is that what he was or was he just as terrified as everyone else and unable to tap into it because of the protective coating that had enveloped him since Africa and everything that had happened with Melanie?

He looked out through the right side of the window. Where he thought he’d seen something. And, again, he imagined he saw movement in the pitch black with snow collecting on the window. Impossible, right? Or, maybe, that’s why he looked in that direction in the first place—because he’d picked up motion of some kind.

“What?” Eleanor asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, we get that.” She waved him off—suddenly mistrusting everything, Lyle too. “Is it colder in here?” She studied the cabin, like a dog sensing something in the air. Then she realized what nagged at her. The first observer’s seat, the one behind the first officer’s chair, was folded up. It had been folded down earlier. On the floor below the chair, a compartment door was ajar. She looked at her copilot. “You didn’t shut the door.”

“What door?” asked Lyle. This piqued his interest.

“Earlier. Before you came in here, Jerry checked the main battery and the oxygen.”

“Was there anything…” Lyle looked for a word.

“Nothing strange,” Jerry said.

Lyle nodded. Could the fact that they were getting some air seepage from the belly of the plane have spared them the syndrome?

“There’s a case of champagne down there that looks like baggage handlers commandeered and stowed it for their own use. It’s nicely chilled,” Jerry said, trying for a joke.

“And?” Lyle said.

“And what?”

“Battery and oxygen. How are the levels?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Maybe.”

“Tip-top.”

Lyle now stared at Jerry until he thought it might raise a challenge and dropped his gaze. So this first officer was down in the hold, away from everyone else, and many people were dead? Or poisoned or something? Was that worthy of note?

Lyle wanted to keep the man talking.

“I agree with you,” he said, looking at Jerry, “that we’re running short on time. One question: How long can we keep this plane heated—in your estimation?”

“Like I said before, we’re airtight-ish, which helps. Beyond that, it comes down to how much we want to run the engine, which costs fuel, obviously. What’s your thinking?”

“Just, y’know, how long can these folks last if they’re not dead—whether in here or out there. Snowy day. Night.” He watched as a heavier snow flurry hit the windshield and stuck.

Eleanor shook her head. They were going to have to deal very soon with temperature and food.

“Open the champagne,” Lyle said. “It’d warm everyone up, at least temporarily.”

Eleanor blanched and Lyle tried to cover up his raw admission; he’d do anything for a drink right now.

“Sorry,” Lyle said. “Anyhow, cold has its advantages, on a serious note. It can chill the nervous system, the brain, keep it alive.”

“What’s that have to do—”

“I’m not sure. I’m thinking aloud about the implications for us.” He paused, then added, “And them.”

“So.”

“It slows the metabolic function. That can be useful.”

“Hmph. I thought you just said that we wanted heat…” Eleanor’s voice trailed into silence. It was so quiet Lyle could feel the flakes dusting the front window, melting, sticking, melting, sticking. Silence made a sound, that dull buzz you hear at a library that, in this case, no one seemed to want to break. Talk about a situation where there wasn’t much useful to say. Lyle scanned the instrument panel, the gauges he didn’t understand. He was looking for some logic to hold onto, a guidepost. He found only the memory of how he used to love the small-plane landings on makeshift strips in hidden parts of the world where he’d been called in to consult. Physics defying, he always felt it, the engines resisting gravity, commandeering it, that terrible moment before touchdown when it certainly seemed it might go either way. He loved the apparent confidence of the pilot and would try to draft on it. If the pilot can land this metal hunk on this slab of dirt, then I can walk into the village and give death a good licking.

“I’m decided,” Captain Hall interrupted the silence.

“I’m going outside.”

Five

Until eleventh grade in San Francisco, Eleanor had played baseball, not softball with the girls, but hard ball on the high school baseball team. Helluva’n arm, is what people would say about her. She got the nickname Jane Beam for her fastball. Then, her junior year, some jerk from Arvada High, her school’s rival, had made it his personal mission to point out that girls didn’t belong. He plunked her during her first at bat with a heater that would’ve broken a rib had she not turned in time. Furious, she dug in to take the guy’s next pitch into the seats. She struck out.

She rushed the mound. Standing over the asshole pitcher, bat in hand, her teammates making a show of holding her back (but secretly wanting her to take a swing), she paused. She dropped the bat and she walked off the field. It had zero to do with being intimidated. It had to do with the fact that she’d really only liked the throwing part of baseball. She wanted to pitch. But that wasn’t realistic; she lacked the arm to throw even another year. She knew, then and there, as she stomped off the field, that she didn’t ever want to be in the position of defending an activity she didn’t give a damn about. She wanted to do something affirmative.

Right now, she felt like she needed to do something and have it not be stupid or indefensible. Going outside was the least stupid thing she could think of.

“Of the two options, going back there”—she gestured with a jerk of her neck to the passenger area—“or going out there, my gut tells me that I’d rather be in a space that’s not confined.”

“You?”

“I’m the captain. At least we know that it’s safe in here, for the time being.”

“Why not all of us?”

“Because we need to hedge our bets.”

“So you’ll take one for the team,” Jerry said. It was hard to tell if he was being generous or confrontational or maybe neither, just thinking aloud. “I don’t think so. You’re just going to slide down the window? I don’t think so.”

Eleanor clenched her jaw. Without her quite realizing it, Jerry’s attitude reminded her why she was single. Men had no idea how to talk to her, not since Frank had died. Frank, the love of her life, his body never returned from a crevasse on Annapurna. That was years ago and Eleanor recovered and kept looking. But, in addition to Frank’s memory, the challenges were manifest. She’d inherited a gorgeous house from her parents in a gorgeous San Francisco neighborhood and had self-sufficiency oozing from her pores and most men couldn’t figure out their play, what they could give her. The harder they tried, the more she turned off.

Jerry embodied the worst of it. Internet dating had been a boon for him. The virtual medium paved over the nuances such that what translated to potential bedmates was: pilot and tall. He’d never had it so good. Eleanor privately named him the “Résumé Cowboy.” He laid plenty of waitresses and aging midlevel marketing executives and started to believe his own profile hype. But they all caught on after a few dates, often the morning after. On some level, he understood that Eleanor’s outright lack of romantic interest in him was telling him a truth about himself he hated. On the other hand, Eleanor did have a soft spot for Jerry, maybe the kind of affection she’d have had for a neighbor’s dog. He was reliable, reliably Jerry.

“Through the cargo hold. I’ll be able to get a radio, cell phone, get to the communications network. We need help.”

“You have no idea what’s out there—or who.”

She chewed on this and he poured it on. “If it’s terrorists or crazy people, they may just be waiting in the weeds. It’d be a suicide mission.”

“We don’t know there’s anyone there. It seems… It seems like, I don’t know, a syndrome, to borrow Dr. Martin’s word.”

She stood, turned left, facing away from Lyle and Jerry and opened the door to a head-high cabinet mounted beside the flight deck door. She pushed aside coordinate books, logs, thick books of technical jargon, looking for something behind them. One of the tomes fell out and hit her toe. “Shit!”

Lyle tensed. He recognized what was happening: Captain Hall was unreeling. In her shoes, who wouldn’t? If he hadn’t abandoned everything in the world he once cared about, he might be freaking, too.

He almost leaned over to pick up the book and realized it would be deeply patronizing. She yanked another couple of books onto the floor, her intensity laid bare.

“Eleanor…” Jerry said. He walked to the flight deck door. “Be practical. We’re thirteen feet off the ground, even from the hold.”

“Where’s the medical kit—not the first aid kit, the one with more stuff?”

“Now you’re planning to do field surgery?”

“Jerry, I don’t like your tone.”

“I’m not letting you go out there.”

Eleanor turned. Instinctively, Lyle stepped backward. Eleanor looked like a Spanish bull turning on a circus clown. Fury. Then, just before she was about to say something, she zipped it up. Controlled again.

Alex gripped the wall of the door with a prurient fascination and horror. The tension on this flight deck threatened to blow these last survivors apart.

“Can anybody offer me better logic?” Eleanor asked.

She stood and looked at Lyle. He was a touch over six feet, just shy of tall, and she was only a few inches shorter and the quarters were so tight that he could smell the residue of mint on her breath.

“I think I should go,” Lyle said.

Eleanor studied him for the briefest moment.

“An even worse idea,” Jerry said.

“I have some experience—”

“In the apocalypse?”

Eleanor looked at Lyle, really studied him.

“What’s your game, Dr. Martin?”

He shook his head, like What do you mean? But he sensed that she, rightly, understood he wanted off this boat.

As the pilot talked, Lyle noticed for the first time the way the first officer looked at his boss. It wasn’t quite adoring but not far from it. He was absolutely letting her know that he was really listening, the way a man might on an early date. And Eleanor was using that by questioning the other man; smart, thought Lyle. She’s trying to keep together her alliances before this place turns into Lord of the Flies, or Lord of the Fliers.

Lyle had a habit of watching people’s reactions. In fact, he sometimes watched movies on silent and focused on how characters moved and gestured, what looked human and what looked forced. It was something he even encouraged med students to do to help them understand what is normal. He would tell his students that a good clinical exam could usually predict the outcome of a blood test.

What’s your game, Dr. Martin?

Curiously, in another setting, that language might be the seeds of, if not attraction, flirtation, an invitation to fire back. It was the kind of thing Lyle could invite, even if he never fully realized that he had an allure or why. Most basically, he was attractive—even before his business card said doctor. He kept fit, rangy, by rowing a kayak on Lake Merced, where he did hours of thinking, sometimes in pouring rain. He had a movie jaw and a full head of hair that showed no signs of abating. But mostly his magnetism owed to a set of dark brown eyes that had the rare quality of being able to paralyze both in groups and, more so, in intimate conversations. Melanie told him that most people communicated at a frequency that allowed them to captivate one or the other—individuals or groups—but that Lyle could do both. And, especially when he was in one-on-one settings, his potent gaze had the effect of causing people to stutter or even to go on the offensive, make jokes, keep it light. They would start the conversation with a defense mechanism.

“Jesus, we’re digressing way off course.” The pilot put her hands out, palms down, and pressed on the air. Like Okay, let’s get grounded here. She’s succeeded, though, in letting Lyle know his place on this doomed ship. “Would you mind checking for the medical stuff above the coats? I think that dimwit flight attendant from Montana left it there last time?”

Lyle wondered if Eleanor was toying with Jerry, creating another common enemy in some dimwit flight attendant from the past, pushing her agenda, using humor and authority, flirtation and fear. Or was Lyle misinterpreting? It filled him with dread. Human beings could be so manipulative, he thought. I have to get out of here. Lyle had an insatiable urge to find the drink cart and down two small plastic bottles —of anything, hell, even gin—and escape. He wasn’t going to die on this airplane, asphyxiate, victimized at last by a syndrome he couldn’t see, or, worse, hit by an errant bullet that Jerry fired at the captain to keep her from going down the hatch; or in a final dying cry of unrequited love.

Eleanor brought her hands to her head and rubbed her temples. “Jerry, is there an internal ladder—beneath the wheel bay?”

“Eleanor, please!”

“Check for an immune response,” Lyle said suddenly.

He looked out the window, let all their eyes come to him.

“What are you talking about?”

“When you go out there,” he said, “you’re going to want to look for an immune system response. Even if they’re dead, check for a mucogenic response, a pretty good indicator that T-cells have kicked in. If it’s nerve gas, or something like that, you’re likely to see…”

“What kind of doctor are you again?” Jerry asked.

“I.D.—infectious disease.” Deliberate with the jargon. “Subspecialty in immunology.”

“Where?”

“UCSF.” There was an empty office there now where he used to hang his shingle. Lyle reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet and, from it, an old business card he’d stuffed into his wallet for the conference he was attending.

Jerry glanced at it. “Clinical professor,” he said. “Is that a real kind of professor?”

“Jerry, stop it,” Eleanor said. Like What’s your deal?

“In any case, look for tachycardia…” Lyle said.

“What?”

“Accelerated heart rate. Sorry, pardon the terminology.” He wasn’t sorry at all. It was part of his plan to sound complicated. “That could be a sign of any number of things. Should you start feeling faint, strange, any symptoms, try like hell to—”

“Hold on,” Jerry said.

“I’ll slow it down,” Lyle said. “The point is, I think you’ll be okay. Jerry, I’m sure, will have things under control in here.”

Eleanor’s eyes bored a hole in him and Lyle tried to remain placid and not show that he’d overplayed his hand. Then Eleanor and Jerry exchanged a look, like parents silently communicating about a child, in this case, the unruly Lyle. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, teeth clenched. She could see where this was going, didn’t like it one bit, but was running out of ideas herself. And she couldn’t risk leaving the plane herself and putting Jerry in charge.

“Captain,” Jerry said, “maybe he’s got a point.”

“How’s that?”

“Dr. Martin,” Jerry said. “Would you be able to… could you diagnose the guy on the ground—could you tell us something about him?”

Lyle let the moment wash over him, a feeling of euphoria, trying to hold a poker face so as not to let them know he wanted off the plane, away from these people, all of it.

“Give us a minute,” Eleanor said.

“Perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“Sorry, I’ll just…” Rather than finish the sentence, he moved a step backward while the pilot and first officer put their heads together and whispered. Alex, the fourth wheel, shuffled with him. They glanced at each other, a silent moment of recognition that they’d been sitting in the same row, now fellow travelers in a wholly different journey.

“Do you…” Dr. Martin said. “You have a limp.”

She looked down.

“Are you hurt?” he followed up.

“No. No. It’s nothing. When I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis and it’s really under control.”

She said this like she wanted to move on; her clunky right knee embarrassed her. Dr. Martin honored her sensitivity but took the detail deeply inside. That was an autoimmune condition; did that have anything to do with the fact she was standing here and everyone else in the airplane was dead or sick? Might she have some internal protection?

“What do you do?” Dr. Martin said.

“Do?”

“For work.”

“Technology. Engineer, on the sales side.”

“Oh yeah?” He studied her. The hard eyes she tried to soften. Deferential but not really. He tried to place her demographic. Her bleach-blond hair suggested she might be part of the punk technology crowd. They could be a logical group, all about looking ahead.

“Good job these days. Was,” Lyle said.

“Sorry?”

“Before the apocalypse. Was a good job.” He tried to ignore the heated whispers coming from the first officer. “Please, Eleanor. Just listen…”

“You’re a doctor?” Alex asked.

Lyle nodded.

“Are we sick?” She had her arms crossed.

“I don’t… I don’t know. Do you feel anything?”

She gritted her teeth. “I was supposed to go on a hike,” she said, shaking her head. “Sponsored by the company. Get out into the air, spend some quiet time. Part of this new Stay Focused regime at work. We’ve got this new manager who…” Bitterness in her voice. Lyle stopped listening and experienced a sensation that never ceased to surprise or bother him. It was a feeling that often left him bewildered and yet he couldn’t ignore. It was an awareness that he’d noticed a clue. The moment would leave him paused. From the outside, he looked stunned, like a fish that took a blow to the head. Melanie thought it a kind of mutated version of pattern recognition: he’d hear a sound or see a seemingly random piece of evidence—anything from a medical symptom to the weather at an outbreak site to the presence of a particular government official—and he’d sense it belonged to a relevant pattern. He just didn’t know which pattern. Like seeing a crucial puzzle piece without knowing what picture it fit into. It would send his brain into a cascade, a kind of free-association free flow, often leaving him so inwardly focused that whomever he was talking to would wonder if he’d gone mute.

He looked outside, then at Eleanor and Jerry, back to the tech engineer, down at the door to the hold, slightly ajar, letting in air. What was it about her? Or was it this situation? Something was ringing too familiar.

He thought back to those last days, searching for some connection: the ill-fated trip to Tanzania, the whimper of an end with Melanie, ignominiously sleeping on his couch at the university, the mounting skepticism about humanity. There was a connection there somewhere, a puzzle piece that fit and he couldn’t grasp it.

“Okay, Dr. Martin,” he heard. “You win.”

He almost smiled. All those years, he had devoted himself to ferreting out disease, often risking himself, giving obscene energy, particularly for one fundamentally introverted. But, now, he realized with stunning clarity, he really had no investment anymore in people. He just wanted to be spit out from the belly of this sarcophagus. Maybe left to die, but, at least, left to himself.

Six

The soupy emotions left Lyle in an eyeblink, and there he stood again on the flight deck, tuned in to the voices.

“I’m prepared to allow you to go out there, Dr. Martin,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin!”

“Yes, yes.”

“We’re going to run out of heat. We need to know if we can go inside the terminal or inside the plane. I can’t make that call without knowing what’s out there. My personal preference is for me to go but Jerry makes a firm and fair case. So I want to ask you: Are you truly prepared to go out there and examine that man on the ground?”

“Yes.”

“You understand there could be a huge risk. We don’t know what’s out there.”

“Yes.”

“Jerry will go with you into the hold.”

“And cover you,” Jerry added, meaning: with the gun.

Now Lyle thought he understood Jerry’s motivations in allowing him to go outside. The first officer wanted to do something. He wanted to attack. This guy unnerved Lyle, and he’d already been in the hold, doing who knows what.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Lyle said. “Viruses or toxins don’t respond to gunplay.”

“So now this is a virus or toxin?” Eleanor said.

“I don’t see blood. No obvious violence.”

Eleanor handed him a yellow poncho, matching one that he noticed now that Jerry already was wearing.

“It’s not much,” she said.

“Good for visibility.”

“You read my mind. What else would be useful?”

“Not the slicker.”

“I thought you just—”

“Yes, it is good for visibility. You can see me better out there. But so could someone else, if someone is watching. Like I said, I personally doubt this is an armed attack though I’m not an expert on that front. Regardless, surely, you and Jerry talked about this and realized it is a potential suicide mission. That’s why I’ll be out there with the body and he’ll be below with his”—he looked for the word—“weapon. In case.”

She laughed bitterly. “This was your idea and don’t pretend it wasn’t.”

Lyle smiled but the meaning was unclear. Was he saying she read his manipulations correctly or that he accidentally made this bed himself?

“So what else do you need, Dr. Martin?”

Lyle looked out the window and made a show of thinking. Truth was, he wasn’t really consumed with the idea of figuring out what was going on. Most likely, these people were dead and he just wanted to get off the plane. He hadn’t particularly been approaching this as doctor, so much as escapee; not that he’d just start running. He was at least curious. If something killed these people, what was it? He’d like to feel for a pulse. He just wasn’t determined the way he once had been, not even close. He listed a few items: flashlight; face masks; rubber gloves from the medical kit; antiseptic wipes.

“Can we bring the defibrillator—below? Have it ready—in the hold.”

Eleanor shrugged. “It’s kept just beyond first class, in the overhead.”

“Well, let’s get to it,” Lyle said. “Down through there?” He looked below the observer’s seat.

Lyle nodded thoughtfully; made sense.

Lyle lifted the latch under the observer’s seat.

“Whoa, there, cowboy,” Eleanor said. “We have no plan.”

Lyle laid out how he saw it. He and Jerry would drop into the hold. They’d close the door behind them. Jerry would help lower Lyle to the ground and then wait while Lyle checked out the body of the guy in the jumpsuit. Lyle said he would use basic hand signals. Thumbs-up, thumbs-down.

“Thumbs-down means he’s dead?”

“Let’s not worry about him. Thumbs-up means I’m okay and forget about thumbs-down. I’ll either give a thumbs-up or ask you to join me. You can relay what I’m saying to them and we’ll go from there.”

Lyle didn’t wait for an answer. He started down to the hatch.

Eleanor grabbed his arm. She used just enough force to turn him around and let go. She locked on to his eyes. For the slightest moment, everything around them swept away and he felt her magnetism, connection’s seeds, and he blinked and looked down.

“You don’t have to do this, Dr. Martin.” Earnest.

He nodded.

“You need to stay low and be careful.”

Lyle looked down. He couldn’t handle this much sincerity, not now, and not for years. People who cared left him wondering whether or not to trust. The memories jagged in and out: Tanzania, Dean Jane Thomas, Melanie, all of it somehow leading here.

“Get a quick reading, make your best guess, and then get your ass back here,” she said. “I very much appreciate this.”

Lyle barely heard the last of this. He refused to let himself listen. He plopped down into the cold belly of the plane and wiped a tear from his cheek.

Cold seized him. The frigidity reminded him of when he used to walk into the refrigerated part of the lab. One time, early on in his relationship with Melanie, they stole into one of the Mortech units and tore off each other’s clothes and got after it. In walked a grad student who, in fierce backpedal, spilled incubating disease in test tubes that, thankfully, weren’t yet airborne. Truly, Melanie had joked, their first shared STD.

Lyle probed with his foot for a landing spot and caught the bottom rung of a rope ladder. He tested the footing, then allowed himself to rest on the rope ladder. He dipped his head into the plane’s belly. He let go of the last handle in the cockpit and, presto, dropped into a new world.

“Flashlight,” he yelled. He held his hand up again, waving blindly. A hand put the cylindrical light into his palm. He felt Eleanor give him a squeeze.

He heard Jerry say, “I should’ve gone first. This is the worst idea.”

“Get down there then. Lyle, wait at the bottom for Jerry.”

Lyle dropped to the floor of the hold and crouched. The light, already turned on by Eleanor, danced about, a wayward laser. Lyle steadied it dead ahead and found himself face-to-face with a crate. He listened to Jerry descend, holding a second dancing light. He dropped, scraping Lyle’s leg with a loafer. Lyle could see only the crate ahead and their breath.

“Okay?” asked a muffled voice from above.

“Okay.”

Jerry pointed the light to his left, revealing an opening between the crates. He walked that way and Lyle followed. He couldn’t tell if the first officer’s silence reflected his distaste for Lyle or a business-like approach. Seconds later, skirting crates, they arrived near the nose. Lyle flooded his light upward but felt Jerry push the tip of the light down.

“I got grounded once taking supplies into Baghdad. It was just before dawn and we had to sit for two fucking hours at the edge of this shithole village controlled by the other guys. We crouched the whole time. My point being that it’s good to keep visibility low.” Jerry focused his light on the floor. “Tricky latch. Can you hold the light?”

Lyle did as asked. Jerry tinkered and unlatched. Lyle noticed the frayed skin on the first officer’s cuticles. Could mean nothing? When it happened to Lyle, it meant he hadn’t been sleeping. A gasp of even colder air seeped out of the plane.

“We have time, Dr. Martin. There’s no urgency.”

Lyle responded, “I know. I appreciate it.” He cleared his throat. “I honestly don’t think this is all that risky. Medically speaking.”

Jerry opened the hatch. Lyle pointed the light toward the ground. He could see damp tarmac, way down there, and wisps of snow in the air, and the wheel base. Big drop, leg-breaking distance. He brought the flashlight angle back inside and looked for a handhold. Next to the door, a rope handle. Lyle tested it with his right hand. Jerry took his point.

“We should look for a ladder.”

“We should,” Lyle said. Then he undercut his meaning by dropping from his knees to his butt, letting his rear touch the cold metal underbelly. “Let’s do the old human ladder. You hold my arms and I’ll drop down.”

“I’ve never seen someone so anxious to walk into a bear cave,” Jerry said. He scoped around, looking for a ladder or tool, rope, or other bit of technology to help the drop. That’s when Lyle saw a box of booze. It was rectangular, with a flap open and those cheap little bottles showing. It was within arm’s reach. Lyle reached. Saliva gathered on his lips. He pulled as gently as he might to keep the bottles from tumbling and getting the attention of Jerry, who was shining a light on the floor to the left, and pushing things around with his toe.

“Rope,” he said.

“I’ll help you,” Lyle said, but only to cover the sound of him groping and succeeding. He got three little bottle necks into his hand and stuffed them into his pocket.

“I got it.” Jerry turned and unfurled a rope and, with some ceremony, tied a fancy knot and flung the rope down into the breach. Jerry clearly had his attributes. He pulled the rope, testing it. “Okay.”

Lyle pulled out the plastic gloves, making a show of it himself, and snapped them on. It echoed a sound he associated with “game on.” The gloves always were the last thing he’d done before he walked into a disease scene. He stuffed the flashlight into his back pocket. He swung his legs into the hole. With his right hand, he grasped the rope handle the makeshift ladder was tied onto. Then he changed his mind. He reached down and felt the dangling rope with his right hand. He extended his left to Jerry. The first officer took it.

After a few seconds of wrangling, he found the position he wanted; his legs wrapped around the rope. He lowered himself, feeling with his right hand and letting Jerry hang tight to his left arm.

“Good,” said Lyle.

Jerry let go.

Lyle slid down the rope. He lost his grip. The flashlight flew from his pocket. He heard it slam to the ground right before he did. Ankle, he thought, just twisted. Just twisted. He winced. He suspected it was worse than that. Nothing broken. But contusions and scrapes.

“Dr. Martin.”

“I’m… I’m okay.”

Holy shit, it was cold. And dark. The only immediate light came from above, Jerry’s flashlight. Some other ambient light shone to the right, distant, a building Lyle couldn’t make out. Lyle tested his left ankle. Definitely a sprain. He decided to give it a rest and sat on the ground. Frozen ground met his ass. He jammed his hand into his right pocket and pulled out a bottle. His brain crackled happily when the vodka hit the back of his throat. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and decided not to have another one.

“Dr. Martin?”

“Just getting my bearings.”

He pawed for the pieces of the flashlight. But he knew it was hopeless. Brittle plastic had collided with frozen ground. He remembered his phone and pulled it out and ignited the flashlight feature. It would drain the battery. The alternative was to ask Jerry for his flashlight and that just meant more complications.

Lit by his phone, he stood and walked toward the man in the orange jumpsuit.

Seven

Eleanor and Alex saw edges of light peek from around Lyle as he appeared beyond the nose of the plane. The slightest phone light framed him.

“Do you think they’re okay? Back home?” Alex asked. “Are they…”

“Hmm,” Eleanor said, focused on Lyle.

“Why not use the big light?” Alex mumbled, referring to the Boeing’s external lights.

“I don’t want to bring attention.” Eleanor clenched her teeth. She even wanted to whisper to Lyle: Turn off the light. It brings attention.

Lyle got within five feet of the orange lump on the ground. He turned off the light. He must’ve been having the same thought as Eleanor. But from the flight deck, who the hell knew what he was doing?

They could see Lyle suddenly pause. He bent at the waist, to about seventy degrees.

“What’s he doing?” Alex said.

“He’s looking for blood.”

Lyle marveled at the silence. It was so quiet as to be distracting. Just him and an unseen power, overwhelming silence as its emblem.

He waited for his eyes to adjust. Five feet away from the body, he concluded there was no bullet or shrapnel that had felled this body. That was evident from the way the man—it was a man, right?—had fallen. Not ripped from the ground, not propelled. But toppled, on his side, more or less, face flat. The man fell as Lyle had seen other bodies fall naturally. In Tanzania, one of the adolescent sons of a tribal elder had taken his last step in the direction of a water tank. His foot sunk into the soft dirt and he fell to the side, midstep, a recently deceased statue in perfect human form.

He took two steps forward and stopped again. Now he was sure it was a man, the jawline gave that away. Caucasian. Stringy long hair appeared from the edge of a wool cap. His hairstyle made Lyle think the man was youngish, twenties or early thirties, maybe someone who snowboarded, though that extraneous observation faded. The man’s right arm stretched forward onto the ground. Did that mean he’d had a second to brace himself for the fall?

Lyle took two steps forward and knelt at the body.

Eleanor tasted blood. She’d bitten her lip. She wanted to call Lyle back. Her gut told her this wasn’t right. She shouldn’t be sending a passenger out there, and, was that motion there, over to the right of the airplane, by the hangar? “Jerry!” she yelled.

Lyle was twenty feet, she guessed, from the tip of the plane. It was too dark to distinguish shapes. His lump of black melded into anything else. “Jerry. Get him back in here!”

Calm overcame Lyle. He put his left hand on the man’s cheek. It was cold. That didn’t tell him a thing, and Lyle quietly cursed the lack of light and tools. That could be solved. He turned on the light on his phone. He shone it on the man’s face, the left eye, the one he could see. Yes, Caucasian, and long hair. Face rosy. That was worth noting. Blood had flowed there, either recently or before death. Lyle put the light beneath the man’s nose, looking for breath. If it was there, it couldn’t be seen in this light or was too faint.

Lyle put his hand on the carotid artery. Where are you, pulse? Nothing. Lyle repositioned his hand. A blip. Was it a blip? He lost it. He repositioned again. He couldn’t tell.

He scooted over and took the man’s right wrist. Same thing. He thought he’d found a pulse, then it seemed he couldn’t. His freezing hands weren’t helping. He blew on them through the rubber gloves.

He heard a scuffling sound.

Lyle turned off the light.

He looked in the direction of the hangar. Nothing. What could he possibly see? He closed his eyes and listened. Whatever scuffling he’d heard, or imagined, was gone. He could hear the distant hum of machinery. A generator, he guessed. Otherwise, the air filled with the silence of falling snow.

Lyle turned on the light again.

He looked at the man’s angular nose. A droplet of moisture hung on the right nostril. Mucus. Maybe useful. An immune response or a response to cold. In either case, the body had responded at some point, relatively recently. Be alive, Lyle heard himself think.

Lyle heard a sound behind him, a voice. He assumed it was Jerry looking for an update. Lyle put up his thumb without looking back.

He pulled back the light to get some context. The orange jumpsuit looked puffy, indicating clothing worn underneath. Good news, thought Lyle; if the man’s alive, his layers may have saved him. He was at least six feet tall, thin, sinewy with muscle. Lyle scanned upward along the body and saw the blood.

It was near the back side of the man’s head. Just a trickle. Must have come when the man hit the ground, Lyle surmised. Only one way to find out.

Lyle set the phone down and slid his hands under the body. He tried to feel for heartbeat and warmth but knew he couldn’t cheat this. He’d have to have the body turned over and get a good look, really confront this man. The thought jarred him. He tipped the body gently, trying not to injure a vertebrae. Gently, again, he lowered the body down.

He lifted the light. The man wore a name tag. Don.

“Hello, Don,” Lyle said. “Let’s see what’s going on with you.”

He looked at the temple where the blood originated. As Lyle had suspected, Don had scraped his head when he’d fallen. It indeed looked more like a scrape than a massive contusion. It was further evidence that the man had been able to brace himself, felt himself falling, perhaps, rather than hitting like a stone.

Lyle brushed the hair away from the man’s scalp. It was time to look into the man’s eyes. Peel back the eyelids and look for signs of life. He reached for his face.

Don’s body jerked upright.