Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

He said, "I'm here to save the woman and the girl, no one else.”

"That's horrible.”

Opening the lavatory door, he said, "I don't like it any more than you do, but that's the way it is.”

She did not let go of his arm but jerked at it angrily. Her green eyes were haunted, probably with her own visions of battered bodies strewn across the earth among smoking chunks of wreckage. She repeated herself, whispering fiercely this time: "You can't let all those people die.”

Impatiently, he said, "Either come with me, or die with the rest of them.”

He stepped out of the lavatory, and she followed him, but he did not know whether she was going to accompany him back to his section.

He hoped to God she would. He really could not be held responsible for all the other people who would perish, because they would have died even if he had not come aboard; that was their fate, and he had not been sent to alter their destinies. He could not save the whole world, and he had to rely on the wisdom of whatever higher power was guiding him. But he most definitely would be responsible for Holly Thorne's death, because she would never have taken the flight if, unwittingly, he had not led her onto it.

As he moved forward along the port aisle, he glanced to his left at the portholes and clear blue sky beyond. He had a too vivid sense of the yawning void under his feet, and his stomach flopped.

When he reached his seat in row sixteen, he dared to look back.

Relief flooded through him at the sight of Holly trailing close.

He pointed to a pair of empty seats immediately behind his and Chris tine's.

Holly shook her head. "Only if you'll sit down with me. We have to talk.”

He glanced down at Christine, then at Holly. He was acutely aware of time slipping away like water swirling down a drain. The awful moment of impact was drawing closer. He wanted to pick the reporter up, stuff her into the seat, engage her seatbelt, and lock her in place. But seatbelts didn't have locks.

Unable to conceal his extreme frustration, he spoke to her through grit ted teeth. "My place is with them," he said, meaning with Christine and Casey Dubrovek.

He had spoken quietly, as had Holly, but other passengers were beginning to look at them.

Christine frowned up at him, craned her neck to look back at Holly, and said, "Is something wrong, Steve?" "No. Everything's fine," he lied.

He glanced at the portholes again. Blue sky. Vast. Empty. How many miles to the earth below? "You don't look well," Christine said.

He realized that his face was still sheathed in a greasy film of sweat.

"Just a little warm. Uh, look, I ran into an old friend. Gimme five minutes?" Christine smiled. "Sure, sure. I'm still going over a mental list of the most-eligible.”

For a moment he had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

Then he remembered that he had asked her to play matchmaker for him.

"Good," he said. "Great. I'll be right back, we'll talk.”

He ushered Holly into row seventeen. He took the aisle seat next to her.

On the other side of Holly was a grandmotherly tub of a woman in a flower-print dress, with blue-tinted gray hair in a mass of tight curls.

She was sound asleep, snoring softly. A pair of gold-framed eyeglasses, suspended around her neck on a bead chain, rested on her matronly bosom, rising and falling with her steady breathing.

Leaning close to him, keeping her voice so low it could not even carry across the narrow aisle, but speaking with the conviction of an impassioned political orator, Holly said, "You can't let all those people die.”

"We've been through this," he said restively, matching her nearly inaudible pitch.

"It's your responsibility" "I'm just one man!" "But one very special man.”

"I'm not God," he said plaintively.

"Talk to the pilot.”

"Jesus, you're relentless.”

"Warn the pilot," she whispered.

"He won't believe me.”

"Then warn the passengers.”

"There aren't enough empty seats in this section for all of them to move here.”

She was furious with him, quiet but so intense that he could not look away from her or dismiss what she was saying. She put a hand on his arm, gripping him so tightly that it hurt. "Damn it, maybe they could do something to save themselves.”

"I'd only cause a panic.”

"If you can save more, but you let them die, it's murder," she whispered insistently, anger flashing in her eyes.

That accusation hit him hard and had something of the effect of a hammer blow to the chest. For a moment he could not draw his breath.

When he could speak, his voice broke repeatedly: "I hate death, people dying, I hate it. I want to save people, stop all the suffering, be on the side of life, but I can only do what I can do.”

"Murder," she repeated.

What she was doing to him was outrageous. He could not carry the load of responsibility she wanted to pile on his shoulders. If he could save the Dubroveks, he would be at working two miracles, mother and child spared from the early graves that had been their destinies. But Holly Thorne, in her ignorance about his abilities, was not satisfied with two miracles; she wanted three, four, five, ten, a hundred. He felt as if an enormous weight was bearing down on him, the weight of the whole damned airplane, crushing him into the ground. It was not right of her to put the blame on him; it wasn't fair. If she wanted to blame someone, she should cast her accusations at God, who worked in such mysterious ways that He had ordained the necessity of the plane crash in the first place.

"Murder." She dug her fingers into his arm even harder.

He could feel anger radiating from her like the heat of the sun reflected off a metal surface. Reflected. Suddenly, he realized that image was too apt to be anything less than Freudian.

Her anger over his unwillingness to save everyone on the plane was no greater than his own anger over his inability to do so; her rage was a reflection of his own.

"Murder," she repeated, evidently aware of the profound effect that accusation had on him.

He looked into her beautiful eyes, and he wanted to hit her, punch her in the face, smash her with all of his strength, knock her unconscious, so she wouldn't put his own thoughts into words. She was too perceptive. He hated her for being right.

Instead of hitting her, he got up.

"Where are you going?" she demanded.

"To talk to a flight attendant.”

"About what?" "You win, okay? You win.”

Making his way toward the back of the plane, Jim looked at the people he passed, chilled by the knowledge that all of them would be dead soon. As his desperation intensified, so did his imagination, and he saw skulls beneath their skin, the glowing images of bones shining through their flesh, for they were the living dead. He was nauseous with fear, not for himself but for them.

The plane bucked and shimmied as if it had driven over a pothole in the sky. He grabbed at the back of a seat to steady himself But this was not the big one.

The flight attendants were gathered farther back in the plane, in their work area, preparing to serve the lunch trays that had just come up from the galley. They were a mixed group, men and women, a couple in their twenties and the others as old as fifty-something.

Jim approached the oldest of them. According to the tag she wore, her name was Evelyn.

"I've got to talk to the pilot," he said, keeping his voice low, although the nearest passengers were well forward of them.

If Evelyn was surprised by his request, she didn't show it. She smiled just as she had been trained to smile. "I'm sorry, sir, but that isn't possible.

Whatever the problem is, I'm sure I can help-" "Listen, I was in the lavatory, and I heard something, a wrong sound," he lied, "not the right kind of engine noise.”