Амброз Бирс: Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales

Something nasty crept down the back of my throat as I tried not to visualize what she said. I struggled not to grimace. “The AC says it may get rough. You better strap in.” I walked her back to her seat. Hernandez’s mouth gaped as he sprawled across his seat, looking for all the world like he’d lost a bar fight—bad. Then I went to my bunk and fell asleep.

Ask any Loadmaster: after so much time in the air, the roar of engines is something you ignore. You find you can sleep through just about anything. Still, your mind tunes in and wakes up at the sound of anything unusual, like the flight from Yakota to Elmendorf when a jeep came loose and rolled into a crate of MREs. Chipped beef everywhere. You can bet the ground crew heard from me on that one. So it should not come as a shock that I started at the sound of a scream.

On my feet, out of the bunk, past the comfort pallet before I could think. Then I saw Pembry. She was out of her seat and in front of Hernandez, dodging his flailing arms, speaking calmly and below the engine noise. Not him, though.

“I heard them! I heard them! They’re in there! All those kids! All those kids!”

I put my hand on him—hard. “Calm down!”

He stopped flailing. A shamed expression came over him. His eyes riveted mine. “I heard them singing.”

“Who?”

“The children! All the…” He gave a helpless gesture to the unlighted coffins.

“You had a dream,” Pembry said. Her voice shook a little. “I was with you the whole time. You were asleep. You couldn’t have heard anything.”

“All the children are dead,” he said. “All of them. They didn’t know. How could they have known they were drinking poison? Who would give their own child poison to drink?” I let go of his arm and he looked at me. “Do you have kids?”

“No,” I said.

“My daughter,” he said, “is a year-and-a-half old. My son is three months. You have to be careful with them, patient with them. My wife is really good at it, y’know?” I noticed for the first time how sweat crawled across his forehead, the backs of his hands. “But I’m okay too, I mean, I don’t really know what the fuck I’m doing, but I wouldn’t hurt them. I hold them and I sing to them and—and if anyone else tried to hurt them…” He grabbed me on the arm that had held him. “Who would give their child poison?”

“It isn’t your fault,” I told him.

“They didn’t know it was poison. They still don’t.” He pulled me closer and said into my ear, “I heard them singing.” I’ll be damned if the words he spoke didn’t make my spine shiver.

“I’ll go check it out,” I told him as I grabbed a flashlight off the wall and started down the center aisle.

There was a practical reason for checking out the noise. As a Loadmaster, I knew that an unusual sound meant trouble. I had heard a story about how an aircrew kept hearing the sound of a cat meowing from somewhere in the hold. The Loadmaster couldn’t find it, but figured it’d turn up when they off-loaded the cargo. Turns out the “meowing” was a weakened load brace that buckled when the wheels touched runway, freeing three tons of explosive ordnance and making the landing very interesting. Strange noises meant trouble, and I’d have been a fool not to look into it.

I checked all the buckles and netting as I went, stooping and listening, checking for signs of shifting, fraying straps, anything out of the ordinary. I went up one side and down the other, even checking the cargo doors. Nothing. Everything was sound, my usual best work.

I walked up the aisle to face them. Hernandez wept, head in his hands. Pembry rubbed his back with one hand as she sat next to him, like my mother had done to me.

“All clear, Hernandez.” I put the flashlight back on the wall.

“Thanks,” Pembry replied for him, then said to me, “I gave him a Valium, he should quiet down now.”

“Just a safety check,” I told her. “Now, both of you get some rest.”

I went back to my bunk to find it occupied by Hadley, the second engineer. I took the one below him but couldn’t fall asleep right away. I tried to keep my mind far away from the reason that the coffins were in my bird in the first place.

Cargo was the euphemism. From blood plasma to high explosives to secret service limousines to gold bullion, you packed it and hauled it because it was your job, that was all, and anything that could be done to speed you on your way was important.

Just cargo , I thought. But whole families that killed themselves…I was glad to get them the hell out of the jungle, back home to their families—but the medics who got there first, all those guys on the ground, even my crew, we were too late to do any more than that. I was interested in having kids in a vague, unsettled sort of way, and it pissed me off to hear about anyone harming them. But these parents did it willingly, didn’t they?

I couldn’t relax. I found an old copy of the New York Times folded into the bunk. Peace in the Middle East in our lifetimes, it read. Next to the article was a picture of President Carter and Anwar Sadat shaking hands. I was just about to drift off when I thought I heard Hernandez cry out again.

I dragged my ass up. Pembry stood with her hands clutched over her mouth. I thought Hernandez had hit her, so I went to her and peeled her hands away, looking for damage.

There was none. Looking over her shoulder, I could see Hernandez riveted to his seat, eyes glued to the darkness like a reverse color television.

“What happened? Did he hit you?”

“He—he heard it again,” she stammered as one hand rose to her face again. “You—you ought to go check again. You ought to go check…”

The pitch of the plane shifted and she fell into me a little, and as I steadied myself by grabbing her elbow she collapsed against me. I met her gaze matter-of-factly. She looked away. “What happened?” I asked again.

“I heard it too,” Pembry said.

My eyes went to the aisle of shadow. “Just now?”

“Yes.”

“Was it like he said? Children singing?” I realized I was on the verge of shaking her. Were they both going crazy?

“Children playing,” she said. “Like—playground noise, y’know? Kids playing.”

I wracked my brain for some object, or some collection of objects, that when stuffed into a C-141 StarLifter and flown thirty-nine thousand feet over the Caribbean, would make a sound like children playing.

Hernandez shifted his position and we both brought our attention to bear on him. He smiled a defeated smile and said to us, “I told you.”

“I’ll go check it out,” I told them.

“Let them play,” said Hernandez. “They just want to play. Isn’t that what you wanted to do as a kid?”

I remembered my childhood like a jolt, endless summers and bike rides and skinned knees and coming home at dusk to my mother saying, “Look how dirty you are.” I wondered if the recovery crews washed the bodies before they put them in the coffins.

“I’ll find out what it is,” I told them. I went and got the flashlight again. “Stay put.”

I used the darkness to close off my sight, give me more to hear. The turbulence had subsided by then, and I used my flashlight only to avoid tripping on the cargo netting. I listened for anything new or unusual. It wasn’t one thing—it had to be a combination—noises like that just don’t stop and start again. Fuel leak? Stowaway? The thought of a snake or some other jungle beast lurking inside those metal boxes heightened my whole state of being and brought back my dream.

Near the cargo doors, I shut off my light and listened. Pressurized air. Four Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines. Fracture rattles. Cargo straps flapping.