Frazer Lee - Panic Button

He scrambled over to the toilet and lifted the lid, retching his guts up into the bowl. He clambered to his feet and splashed cool water over his face and mouth, regaining his composure.

Jo stood stock still over the suitcase, looking down at the face, the blood, and those dead eyes.

“Who is it?” she asked. Her voice was barely audible through her fear.

“It’s Mike, the real Max’s brother.”

“That’s impossible… are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Max tried not to gag again. “It’s him.”

Jo peered at the man’s face, looking up at her from the bin bag. She remembered the video-cam footage Alligator had shown them. Poor Mike strapped down, his frantic screams as the killer swung the machete down severing his arms.

“But we saw him. That was live footage, wasn’t it?”

The penny dropped.

“They killed them — before we even took off.”

“Jesus,” Max said, staring at Mike’s blood-smeared face, “We’ve been watching recordings.”

They both looked over at the pile of suitcases beyond the hole in the wall. Their thought processes were racing in tandem.

“Do you think… they’re all here?” Jo asked.

It was a fearsome question and the possibilities were too dreadful to consider. But consider them she must — they’d come this far to uncovering the truth. Max dove through the wall and started dragging cases from the luggage hold into the bathroom. Jo helped him, struggling beneath the weight of the charnel cargo.

One by one they cleared the area. Max pulled the final case from the back of the compartment, revealing one last remaining item — a human shape wrapped in black bin bags and bound tightly with thick gaffer tape. Max struggled with the dead weight, managing to pull it around until the feet were at the edge of the hole in the wall. Jo grabbed the feet and helped him drag the body out and onto the pile of luggage. Max emerged from the luggage hold, sweating from his exertions. He assisted Jo in propping the body up against the shower cubicle door. They looked at each other in silent consternation.

Jo turned back to face the bagged body in front of her. She reached out with a trembling hand and tore open the plastic covering the head. Tears gushed from her eyes like a torrent from a broken dam. Two dead eyes gazed back at her, cold, bereft of life and frozen in terror. It was Dawn, her mother. A small entry wound had been punched through her forehead, framed by congealed blood.

“Mum… No, no, no, nooo!”

Jo’s sobs turned into a strangled scream of anguish. Not her Mum, what had she done to deserve that? Jo’s mind boiled. Then, the further implications of what she was seeing exploded in her brain like a gunshot. Sophie, she thought , ohmygodSophie.

She tore her gaze from the horrific death mask of her mother’s face and started tearing through the bags and suitcases, unzipping them, frantic; searching.

Staring down in horror as the vile contents of the luggage were spilled on the bathroom floor, Max grabbed Jo’s shoulder and tried to drag her away. She fought him off and wrenched herself back to her bloody work, fingers already stained dark red. Each and every case was filled to bursting with plastic-wrapped, eviscerated body parts. The need to see, the need to know , Sophie’s fate had overridden Jo’s disgust as she dug through the luggage’s ripe butchery. She knew the merest glimpse of her daughter would unravel the last tenuous strands of her sanity, but she was compelled to search on.

Max stepped back, distancing himself from Jo and the growing pile of dead cargo.

He knew the grim purpose to which she had resigned herself and, while it shook him to the core, he had to focus on getting out of this nightmare and off this plane alive. His eyes darted around the bathroom, searching for his bag. It had to be there, somewhere — had to be.

Then, incongruous amidst the mess of open suitcases and butchered flesh, he saw an elegant little leather pouch. Recognising it as the limousine driver’s, he reached down and grabbed it. Tearing it open, he rooted inside and pulled out a mobile phone. It glistened under the bathroom lights, all fake diamonds and garish pink housing — Gwen’s phone.

He turned it over in his hand and saw that the screen had been smashed. Max rooted through the pouch and pulled out his own phone, also smashed. He removed the back of the phone and saw an empty space where the SIM card should have been. Their captors hadn’t taken any chances.

If they’d been so thorough, so efficient, with the phones — then what about his laptop?

Had they disabled that too, smashed the hard drive to bits? The thought was too much to bear. He started to rifle through the pile of body bags, looking for his own luggage.

“Fuck! Where the hell is it!?” he said.

“I can’t find her!” Jo said, desperate. The stench of human corruption was all around her. There was Dave’s friend Rory, his tattooed arm — hand still connected at the wrist. The same busy hand that had worked the games controller before his attacker blew his brains out across his living room wall. In the next case, Jo’s nostrils protested at the hot meat stink of what was left of Gwen’s sister Emily. Her dismembered body burned to a crisp, eyeballs melted into their sockets. Jo opened another suitcase, engrossed in her frantic search. Sophie had to be there somewhere — she had to be. But the more she searched, Jo found herself looking at the same dead faces, the same severed arms and legs, a second time. There seemed to be so many more body parts than could belong to the people they’d seen killed on their screens. Jo couldn’t be sure, but she hadn’t found any child-sized body parts. It was dreadful to think it, but could she have overlooked Sophie somehow? She was so tiny, just a little girl. Maybe she’d already seen her, but her mind had blocked the trauma of the awful discovery from her very eyes. Her little Pumpkin.

Jo looked down at her hands and arms, slicked red with blood up to the elbows. Strands of someone else’s hairs snapped sickly between her sticky fingers. The fear of finding Sophie, coupled with the deep trauma of seeing Dawn dead, shook Jo to the core. Her entire body shuddered, and she cradled herself in her arms. Rocking like a madwoman, she began to scream and wail through her tears.

Dead eyes looked back at her, an audience forever silenced.

“Got it!”

Max was to the rear of the bathroom, struggling to extract his bag from beneath two heavy suitcases. He heaved, and the cases spilled their body parts as he wrenched his bag free. He crossed to the sink and unfastened the bag, pausing for a moment to prepare himself for the worst. Reaching inside, he pulled out his sticker-encrusted laptop. Elated, he saw it was still in one piece. Thumbing the little catch at the front of the machine, he opened up the screen. Unlike the mobile phones in the pouch, it was undamaged; save for the familiar little dent he’d made a few months back when he’d snapped it shut with an errant ballpoint pen inside. Max pressed the power switch at the top of the keyboard. The little green power-up LED lit up and the laptop clicked and whirred into life. Kissing the machine in thanks, Max stepped over Jo and headed back into the main cabin.

Kneeling down, he placed the laptop on the floor in front of him, cracked his knuckles and got to work.

Exhausted, Jo crawled over the mound of luggage and bodies and slumped down next to Dawn’s corpse. Her mum’s plastic bag shroud crinkled as Jo leaned against it. She stared at Dawn’s face, those eyes frozen in shock and terror. Hope it was quick; hope you didn’t feel too much pain, thought Jo. She reached out her trembling hand and stroked her mother’s cold cheek.