Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die Read online

  A few minutes later, he flushed and washed up, relieved that his ill feelings had diminished. He attributed his nausea more to nerves than the sandwich of suspicious origins. When he opened the door, the commotion hit him. There was a line of dozens of people, elbowing and pushing each other to get to the bathrooms. Was the food bad?

  When he returned to his seat, it relieved him to find neither of the airmen appeared sick. “You two okay?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Ward answered, looking up from his game, “but we were about to go looking for you. Prescott was convinced you’d managed to smuggle a parachute on board and had flushed yourself to safety.”

  “Ha, ha,” Prescott said, turning a page.

  “A lot of people are sick,” Andrew told them. He looked around and saw several people getting up to head for the bathrooms, wiping sweat from their brows. A few were slumped in their seats uncomfortably as if they couldn’t help themselves. One man nearby, an Arab with a massive beard, was standing by his seat, shaking his head from side to side, mumbling. A woman in a hijab was looking at him, her eyes wide.

  “I’m not surprised after eating that shit,” Ward said, then glanced around. He was about to look away when he did a double take, noticing the Arab man shaking his head. “That dude isn’t a RIF, is he?”

  “A Radical Islamic Fucker?” Andrew asked. “No, he looks like an old-school imam. They aren’t radicalized very often. In fact, they generally help us, even if it’s on the down-low.”

  Ward nodded, continuing to look around. He might not be an infantryman, but as an experienced law enforcement officer, he recognized a deteriorating situation. After watching for another moment, he elbowed Prescott and gestured with his head.

  “What the fuck?” the younger man asked.

  As Ward explained to his partner, Andrew continued to assess the situation. Up in the front of the section, a flight attendant appeared leading one of the flight crew. Three stripes on his cuff identified him as one of the first officers, or copilots, aboard. There would likely be at least two complete flight crews on a trip this long. Normally, seeing someone like that taking charge would have filled him with confidence. In this case, the sight of the copilot, a man in his forties, sweating and looking a little unsteady on his feet, sent a chill up Andrew’s spine.

  At that moment, one of the flight attendants, a lovely Arab girl in her early twenties sporting a long, jet-black ponytail, slid by Andrew’s row, heading toward the flight officer. Andrew was only too aware of the sounds of a scuffle farther aft by the toilets. As she went to squeeze past the imam, the holy man howled wildly, grabbed her in a bear hug, and bit her on the neck.

  A bright red fountain of arterial blood punctuated the flight attendant’s scream of pain as the imam tore away a chunk of flesh and artery. Many of those nearby also began screaming as the bright red blood doused them.

  “Son of a bitch!” Ward barked. He tried to leap, only to grunt and fold like an accordion. He’d forgotten his seatbelt. Andrew was stuck in the middle. All he could do was help the airman, so he reached down and deftly flipped the buckle, releasing the sergeant. “Thanks!” he snapped as he got up, took two quick steps, and body-checked the imam off the woman.

  The flight attendant staggered and turned. She pressed her hand against the horrible wound, blood spraying in a red fan between her delicate fingers. She looked right at Andrew, her expression wild with pain as she watched her life’s blood pulse out.

  Andrew was up and heading toward her, when she crumpled to the floor. A man sitting next to her, already covered in blood, managed to slow her fall, and a lady helped him lower her to the ground, just as Andrew reached her. Someone handed him a blanket. Some part of his mind absurdly noted the stark white Saudi Air logo as the woman’s blood dyed it red.

  Prescott vaulted over Andrew where he was trying to help the flight attendant. Andrew looked up and saw that unbelievably, Ward was losing the grapple with the imam. The much older and weak-looking man had managed to roll Ward over, one arm pinned under a knee. Ward planted his other hand in the middle of the imam’s chest and pushed for all he was worth. Veins were standing out on his neck as the imam’s snapping jaws drew closer and closer.

  Prescott joined the fray. He threw an arm around the cleric’s neck and tried putting him into a textbook choke hold. The imam grabbed Prescott’s arm, jerked his head down under the grasp, and tore a piece out of the airman’s forearm.

  “Motherfucker!” Prescott roared and jerked his arm away, leaving the mad imam with another mouthful of human meat. Ward seized the opportunity to free his other hand, cock his arm back, and deliver a heel strike to the imam’s nose. Andrew heard the crunch clearly, even over the screams and shouts of a couple hundred panicking passengers. The imam’s head rocked back, and blood started flowing from the shattered nose. Properly delivered, a strike like that was often lethal; however, this time, the mad man went right back to trying to bite the sergeant. Ward hit him again, and again, and again. The muscles stood out on his arms like steel bands, and he pummeled his assailant to no avail.

  Mexico, Andrew suddenly thought. He remembered thousands of crazed people moving down a road, attacking people with their hands and mouths. Nothing stopped them, not even gunfire. Andrew looked back down at the flight attendant and noticed she had gorgeous blue eyes, uncommon for someone of Arab descent. Then he noticed they were blankly staring. He gently reached out and closed her eyes.

  “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?” he heard someone roar. And then a fist hit him in the side of the head, and threw him into darkness.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 14

  Saturday, April 21, Morning

  Kathy carefully extricated herself from Cobb’s muscled arms. Waking up with the sunlight falling through the old linen drapes and onto their naked bodies, she’d briefly considered waking him for another go. It had obviously been quite a while since he’d taken a woman to bed. The thought of how he’d made love to her with intense abandon caused a little shiver to run up her belly. He’d finished in only a couple of minutes the first time, but that had only been the first of many. She’d silently thanked her ingrained field habits. Never go on assignment without extra batteries…and condoms.

  She took a moment as she opened the old door to look back and admire his muscled torso and his delightfully perfect manhood. Yep, quite the guy. She resolved to stop on her way back up north and thank him again. She’d think of something to thank him for later.

  In the room he’d offered her, she dropped her robe and padded into the bathroom. After last night, she needed a bath. Bath finished and hair brushed, she went into her room and found her clothes, cleaned and folded, on the bed. She shook her head in amazement. Apparently, Cobb had gotten up in the middle of the night, cleaned and dried her clothes, folded them, and left them on her bed. She could still see him gently snoring in the master bedroom, so she headed toward the kitchen. In the light of the morning she noticed his gun cabinet. She found all sorts of rifles, shotguns, and assault weapons there. She shrugged. Texas.

  With a small pang of guilt, she helped herself to a couple of doughnuts and a banana from the kitchen, and finished the last of his milk. She figured after last night, he wouldn’t mind. With some food in her stomach and feeling refreshed from the sleep she got, Kathy headed outside, closing the noisy screen door as quietly as she could.

  The truck sputtered and caught on the first try. She turned around and headed down the driveway.

  A few miles away as she was consulting the map on her smartphone, she felt a crinkle in the breast pocket of the farm-style shirt she was wearing. It was a handwritten note that simply said, “Thanks for last night. Be safe. Cobb.” She grinned and put it back. She was definitely coming back that way. Ten miles further down U.S. Highway 101, she turned south. “Mexico Border – 14 Miles” the sign read as she drove past. High overhead, a flight of aircraft left delicate white trails in the sky as they moved south as well.

  *
* *

  Andrew felt his consciousness return, fractured pieces dribbling into his skull through iridescent pain. “Motherfucker,” was the first thing he said.

  “That one is awake!” he heard someone yell, and then sensed, more than heard, people coming toward him. He forced his eyes open and saw a balding, middle-aged African-American man with a neatly-trimmed silver goatee holding a nine-iron over his head like a baseball bat. Stupidly, Andrew focused on the name inset in the club’s head; Mizuno.

  “Say something intelligent,” the man said, with a hint of a British accent.

  “Is it too late to get off in London instead of connecting to Dallas?” Andrew reached up and tentatively felt the side of his head. There was a nice lump there, but nothing felt broken.

  “He’s fine,” the black golfer/baseball star declared. After lowering the club to his side, he moved closer to look at Andrew, examining his head with a critical eye. “That dude smacked you with his cane pretty good, though there appears to be no lasting damage.”

  “What are you, a doctor?” Andrew asked as he got to his feet.

  “Actually, yes,” the man said and offered Andrew his hand. “Dr. Abraham White, at your service…”

  Andrew looked abashed and took the hand. “Lieutenant Andrew Tobin, U.S. Air Force.”

  “More to that than you are saying,” Dr. White said, nodding to the handcuffs on Andrew’s left wrist.

  “Maybe later,” Andrew suggested and looked around. There were eight of them locked in a compartment about the size of a tiny apartment, maybe 400 square feet total. The walls angled from both sides down toward the floor, suggesting they were somewhere in the bottom of the plane. Metallic cabinets lined the walls, each with their own twist lock and number code. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Galley stowage, aft,” a woman answered. She was an attractive Middle Eastern woman with short brown hair, wearing an improvised bandage over her upper arm that was seeping blood. “The whole plane has gone completely insane!”

  “More like a kind of psychosis,” Dr. White interjected. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say some sort of encephalitic fever, a nasty one with a short onset.”

  “You mean like rabies?” Andrew asked. He’d been a bit dizzy, but that was going away quickly.

  “Sort of,” the doctor said. “It seemed to begin shortly after dinner was served.”

  Andrew shook his head. “Some of the passengers were sick before they boarded.” They trained pilots to recall events from the beginning. What did that gauge read a minute ago? What course were you on when you spotted that target? He thought back to the time before boarding, standing in line for his sub sandwich, noticing people getting sick. There had been a lot in that airport terminal. He just hadn’t thought about it until now. Shit. “The food probably triggered it.”

  “That’s possible,” Dr. White agreed, rubbing his chin and considering.

  “But why are they going so crazy they’re trying to eat each other?” one of the others, obviously an American tourist returning home asked.

  “Illness-induced psychosis can manifest in unusual ways,” the doctor explained.

  All the same way, though? Andrew wondered, but kept it to himself. He was again thinking of that road in Mexico he’d photographed. “How did I end up in here?” he asked instead.

  “I dragged you back into the galley when that guy knocked you out,” the flight attendant told him, “right after Annabelle was killed.”

  Andrew nodded, guessing Annabelle was the flight attendant the imam had bitten, and he had tried to save. “Did you see what happened to the two security force people with me?” The flight attendant looked confused. “The soldiers in uniform?”

  The doctor nodded. “Them, yes! Last thing I saw as we fled into the kitchen, was them fighting with a dozen crazed people.”

  “Jesus,” Andrew said. Then a thought occurred to him. “How long have I been unconscious?”

  “About six hours,” the doctor admitted.

  Andrew did the math in his head. A couple of hours watching videos. Three or four more sleeping. Six down here in this storage area. It had been eleven, maybe twelve hours since the flight took off. He rummaged in his pockets and found his ticket. “Flight time: 16 hours, 20 minutes.” And his numbers were only estimates. He reached for his smartphone. It was gone. His watch was in his personal effects bag, over his seat in Row 62, somewhere above them. “Anyone have a watch set to arrival time?”

  A woman he hadn’t seen before pulled out a phone and glanced at it. “Four forty-five in the morning,” she said.

  Andrew glanced at the ticket. They were three hours, twenty-nine minutes from their destination.

  The information meant a lot of things. One, they hadn’t stopped to land at the first airport they’d come to after the crisis began. Two, they were certainly over North America by now, probably somewhere in Quebec. In their flight path they’d passed over Greenland and Iceland, both providing opportunities for an emergency landing. The engines sounded even and constant. It was unlikely they were descending or even at a lower altitude. And three, the presence of an ill member of the flight crew spoke to the fact that they could all be sick or even crazed.

  “There is a possibility no one is flying the plane,” Andrew told them. Seven sets of eyes looked at him, all wide in suddenly-renewed fear. They’d felt their hideout was safe; all of them had temporarily forgotten they were in a plane 36,000 feet up.

  The flight attendant went to one end of the space and opened a box, revealing a phone. With the ease of someone who did it a dozen times a day, she snatched the phone from the cradle and dialed before putting it to her ear. Andrew could hear it buzzing as the line rang on the other end…over, and over, and over.

  “The cockpit isn’t answering,” she said at last, her eyes wide with fear. “I dialed the situation code. The only time someone would not answer is if there were an emergency underway!”

  “I need to get up there,” Andrew said, half to himself.

  “No offense,” Dr. White said, “but what good would you be?”

  Andrew grabbed his uniform and pulled out the tab under his name with the camo wings sewn into it. “Pilot,” he said.

  “Can you fly something like this?”

  “They all follow the same rules,” he said and went over to the elevator. “Where does this come out?”

  “Aft of the galley,” the flight attendant said, wiping her sweating brow. “The door swings out and into the corner wall. It’s not very big.”

  “But it is very exposed,” Andrew added, looking around for anything to use as a weapon. The good doctor’s club wasn’t a bad choice, though in the crowded space of the elevator he suspected it would be less effective. “How does this thing work?” The flight attendant described the elevator’s operation and told him it took over a full minute for it to arrive on the flight deck, even though it was only about 12 feet above.

  “It’s not designed to be fast,” she explained. All Andrew could think about was a hundred sick and insane passengers attacking him as the elevator slowly ground its way upwards.

  “I wish there were another way up,” he said to himself as he examined the tiny elevator car.

  “There is,” the flight attendant said. She pointed to a series of rungs set into the opposite wall.

  He looked up to where they terminated at a hatch in the roof. “Where does it open into?”

  “Lavatory Four,” she said, “a few feet from the galley.”

  Andrew nodded, and immediately started climbing.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” the doctor asked.

  “Staying down here and waiting for this crate to auger into the ground is not wise,” he said as he climbed. “Everyone should be ready to follow me, if it’s clear.”

  None of them said anything as he reached the top, found the release lever and pulled it. Using his shoulder as leverage, he pushed. It easily lifted and swung back, and he found himself looking into the interio
r of a typical airplane bathroom. Only this one had a dead body in it. “Fuck,” Andrew cursed and almost lost his grip on the ladder. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  The man was Middle Eastern and had most of his throat ripped out. Pale white vertebrae were visible deep in the torn flesh. Blood slowly seeped from the hideous wound. He swallowed hard, and pushed the hatch wider to get into the bathroom. Blood practically covered the floor. He reached up for a handhold inside the bathroom, and he began to hear the carnage above him.

  Fighting raged outside in the passenger area. He could hear screams of pain, howls of rage, bodies slamming into each other, people throwing things, and desperate pleas for help. His hand froze as he reached for the handle, mesmerized by the sounds of horror coming through the partly-open door. Then a hand reached around and grasped the door. Fresh blood dripped from the finger tips, and its owner wheezed as the door slowly pushed inward.

  Andrew dropped back down, and he shut and locked the access panel.

  “What happened?” the doctor asked as Andrew’s feet came back down to the deck of the storage area.

  Andrew looked at the people, his face ashen in horror. Just looking at him, they knew what he’d found. Blood dripped down from above, a drop landing on the flight attendant’s uniform sleeve. She looked down at it, and her eyes grew as big as dinner plates. Their heads all turned upward, looking at the hatch. Something thumped hard against the floor above them, once, twice, a third time.

  “Bloody hell,” Dr. White said for all of them.

  “We’re not getting out of here alive,” another passenger said.

  “There’s got to be another way to the cockpit,” Andrew said. The flight attendant sat down on the floor, hard. She was mumbling and shaking her head from side to side. “Don’t let her lose it,” he instructed the doctor. “If they realize we’re down here…” he didn’t finish the statement. He didn’t think he needed to. Dr. White nodded and knelt next to her, taking the woman’s hands in his and talking to her in Arabic.