Nelson DeMille - Mayday

She drew a deep breath and took a few tentative steps up the aisle. The stench was overpowering despite the fresh, cold breeze, and she felt queasy. She looked up as she walked, her eyes darting quickly in all directions. About a hundred men and women still sat in their seats, blocking the spaces between the rows. Another hundred or so stood in groups or by themselves blocking the main aisles. Some were walking aimlessly, bumping into people, falling into the aisles or into the seats, then getting up again and continuing. Everyone was babbling or moaning. If they would only remain quiet she might be able to ignore them.

It was their clothes, too, she realized, almost as much as their faces or their noises, that gave them away. Their smart suits and dresses were tattered; some of them were half naked. Most people had one shoe or were shoeless. Almost everyone’s clothes were stained with blood and splattered with vomit.

Yoshiro noticed that some of the passengers had been wounded in the explosion. She hadn’t looked at them, she realized, as individual people who were injured, but as a great amorphous thing whose color was gray and whose many eyes were black. Now she could see a woman whose ear was grotesquely hanging, a man who had lost two fingers. A small girl was touching a terrible-looking wound on her thigh. She was crying. Pain, Yoshiro realized, was one thing that they could still feel. But why could they still feel that and not feel anything else? Why couldn’t the sense of pain have died in them, too, and spared them that last agony?

She saw a body lying in the aisle in front of her. It was Jeff Price, the steward. Where were the rest of the flight attendants? She looked around carefully and slowly for the familiar white-and-blue uniforms.

Kneeling almost motionless in the shaft of bright sunlight in front of her, she spotted another flight attendant. The girl had her back toward her, but Barbara Yoshiro could see by the long black hair that it was Mary Gomez. The flight attendant appeared oblivious to everything around her, oblivious to the people stumbling into her, oblivious to the wind blowing her long hair in swirls around her head and neck. Barbara Yoshiro remembered that Mary Gomez had rung up the below-decks galley and asked if she could help. She remembered Sharon’s words very clearly. No, thanks, Mary. Barbara and I are nearly finished. We’ll be up in a minute. It had actually been almost five minutes before they were ready to come up. Had they come up sooner… Her religion did not stress fate, but this kind of thing made one wonder about God’s sense of timing. She turned away from Mary Gomez.

Someone came up behind her and grabbed her shoulder. She froze, then slowly moved aside. A boy of about eighteen stumbled past her. Someone in the seat she was leaning against grabbed her right wrist. Gently, she pulled it loose and continued up the aisle, her heart beginning to beat rapidly, her mouth dry and pasty.

Yoshiro got a grip on herself and began edging into a corner row of seats. She sidestepped past two seats, then stopped when she saw she couldn’t squeeze by the two men who were sitting in the last two seats. Carefully, she climbed over onto the empty seat in front of her and made her way into the left aisle.

She approached the wide area of rubble where stark sunlight illuminated the grotesque dead shapes mingled with the debris. Passengers crawled and stumbled through the twisted wreckage. She watched in horrified fascination as a woman made her way toward the large gaping hole, brushed through the hanging wires and debris, and then stepped out into space. She saw the woman breeze past the cabin windows.

Yoshiro was too stunned to make a sound. Had the woman committed suicide? She doubted it. None of the passengers seemed to have enough intellect left to do even that. As if to confirm this, an old man began crawling toward the same hole in the fuselage. As he neared it, still oblivious to his surroundings, the slipstream took hold of him. He was whisked outside. Yoshiro saw his body bump against the top of the wing before it fell beneath the aircraft. She turned abruptly away and looked down the aisle that would lead her to the safety of the stairs.

Some of the people on the port side had fallen down in the aisle. Others were bunched up, trying to move around and past each other, like wind-up dolls, their feet marking time, their bodies recoiling from the continuous encounters with each other. It was obscene, and Barbara Yoshiro felt as if a string inside of her was tightening, stretching, about to snap.

Barbara moved the last few feet down the aisle to where it opened up into the wreckage. She stepped carefully over the contorted forms on the floor. Less than fifty feet in front of her rose the blue plastic galley-lavatory cubicle, behind which was the spiral staircase.

People kept brushing and bumping her. The noise that came out of their mouths was not human. For some reason, it suddenly swelled into a crescendo of squeaking, wailing, moaning, and howling, then subsided like the noises in the forest. Then something touched it off again and the cycle began all over. An involuntary shudder passed through her body.

She forced herself to look into the faces of the men and women around her to try to determine if they were communicating with each other, telegraphing any movements, so she could act accordingly. But most of their faces showed nothing. No emotion, no interest, no humanity, and in the final analysis, no soul. The divine spark had gone out as surely as if they’d all sold themselves to the Devil. She could more easily read the facial expressions of an ape than the blood-smeared faces of these hollow-eyed, slack-jawed former humans.

There were a few, however, who showed signs of residual intelligence. One young man, in a blue blazer, seemed to have followed her in a parallel course down the right aisle. He was standing on the other side of the rubble area now, near the large hole, and staring at her. She saw him glance at the hole, then move away from it, toward her, pushing his way through the people near him. He stopped abruptly, then looked down at his feet.

Barbara Yoshiro followed his gaze. She noticed a dog in the twisted wreckage. The dog of the blind man, a golden retriever. It sat on the floor, poking its head between the two upturned seats. It was eating something… She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! Oh, God!”

The young man moved deliberately around the dog. A wave of panic began to wash over her. Her knees began trembling, and she felt light-headed. She grasped a section of twisted aluminum brace to steady her balance. The dog pulled something up from the debris. A bone. A rib. “Oh! Oh!” She felt a scream rising in her throat and tried to force it down, but it came out, long and piercing, then tapered off into a pathetic wail. “Oh, dear God.”

The people around her turned toward the sound. The young man moved quickly toward her.

Barbara Yoshiro ran. She stumbled over the smashed bodies and seats, then fell. The floor between the holes was damaged and sagged slightly. Her arm plunged through it, into the baggage compartment below. She yanked it out and tore her wrist. Blood ran from the jagged wound. The dog picked up its head and growled at her, a strange growl that sounded more like a man choking or gagging. She rose quickly to her feet. The young man in the blue blazer reached out for her.

George Yates was normally a mild-mannered young man. He was in superb physical condition, a jogger, a scuba diver, and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. For a variety of physiological reasons, the results of decompression had left a large portion of his motor function unimpaired. The thin air had, however, wiped away his twenty-four years of acculturation and civilization, that part of the psyche that George Yates would have referred to as the superego. The ego itself was impaired, but partially functional. The id, the pleasure center of George Yates’s brain, the impulsive drives, the instinctive energy, that part of the psyche closest to the lower forms of life, was left dominant.