Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

And then, something. Something came in sharp after a moment, at first dull and sweeping, like noise from the back of a cave, but then pure and unbidden, like sounds to a surprised eavesdropper.

Children. Laughter. Like recess at grade school.

I opened my eyes and flashed my light around the silver crates. I found them waiting, huddled with me, almost expectant.

Children, I thought, just children.

I ran past Hernandez and Pembry to the comfort pallet. I can’t tell you what they saw in my face, but if it was anything like what I saw in the little mirror above the latrine sink, I would have been at once terrified and redeemed.

I looked from the mirror to the interphone. Any problem with the cargo should be reported immediately—procedure demanded it—but what could I tell the AC? I had an urge to drop it all, just eject the coffins and call it a day. If I told them there was a fire in the hold, we would drop below ten thousand feet so I could blow the bolts and send the whole load to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, no questions asked.

I stopped then, straightened up, tried to think. Children , I thought. Not monsters, not demons, just the sounds of children playing. Nothing that will get you. Nothing that can get you. I tossed off the shiver that ran through my body and decided to get some help.

At the bunk, I found Hadley still asleep. A dog-eared copy of a paperback showing two women locked in a passionate embrace lay like a tent on his chest. I shook his arm and he sat up. Neither of us said anything for a moment. He rubbed his face with one hand and yawned.

Then he looked right at me and I watched his face arch into worry. His next action was to grab his portable oxygen. He recovered his game face in an instant. “What is it, Davis?”

I groped for something. “The cargo,” I said. “There’s a…possible shift in the cargo. I need a hand, sir.”

His worry snapped into annoyance. “Have you told the AC?”

“No sir,” I said. “I—I don’t want to trouble him yet. It may be nothing.”

His face screwed into something unpleasant and I thought I’d have words from him, but he let me lead the way aft. Just his presence was enough to revive my doubt, my professionalism. My walk sharpened, my eyes widened, my stomach returned to its place in my gut.

I found Pembry sitting next to Hernandez now, both together in a feigned indifference. Hadley gave them a disinterested look and followed me down the aisle between the coffins.

“What about the main lights?” he asked.

“They don’t help,” I said. “Here.” I handed him the flashlight and asked him, “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Just listen.”

Again, only engines and the Jetstream. “I don’t…”

“Shhh! Listen.”

His mouth opened and stayed there for a minute, then shut. The engines quieted and the sounds came, dripping over us like water vapor, the fog of sound around us. I didn’t realize how cold I was until I noticed my hands shaking.

“What in the hell is that?” Hadley asked. “It sounds like—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “That can’t be it.” I nodded at the metal boxes. “You know what’s in these coffins, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything. The sound seemed to filter around us for a moment, at once close, then far away. He tried to follow the sound with his light. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

“No. I’m just glad you hear it too, sir.”

The engineer scratched his head, his face drawn, like he swallowed something foul and couldn’t lose the aftertaste. “I’ll be damned,” he drawled.

All at once, as before, the sound stopped, and the roar of the jets filled our ears.

“I’ll hit the lights.” I moved away hesitantly. “I’m not going to call the AC.”

His silence was conspiratorial. As I rejoined him, I found him examining a particular row of coffins through the netting.

“You need to conduct a search,” he said dully.

I didn’t respond. I’d done midair cargo searches before, but never like this, not even on bodies of servicemen. If everything Pembry said was true, I couldn’t think of anything worse than opening one of these caskets.

We both started at the next sound. Imagine a wet tennis ball. Now imagine the sound a wet tennis ball makes when it hits the court—a sort of dull THWAK—like a bird striking the fuselage. It sounded again, and this time I could hear it inside the hold. Then, after a buffet of turbulence, the thump sounded again. It came clearly from a coffin at Hadley’s feet.

Not a serious problem, his face tried to say. We just imagined it. A noise from one coffin can’t bring a plane down , his face said. There are no such things as ghosts .

“Sir?”

“We need to see,” he said.

Blood pooled in my stomach again. See , he had said. I didn’t want to see .

“Get on the horn and tell the AC to avoid the chop,” he said. I knew at that moment he was going to help me. He didn’t want to, but he was going to do it anyway.

“What are you doing?” Pembry asked. She stood by as I removed the cargo netting from the row of caskets while the engineer undid the individual straps around that one certain row. Hernandez slept head bowed, the downers having finally taken effect.

“We have to examine the cargo,” I stated matter-of-factly. “The flight may have caused the load to become unbalanced.”

She grabbed my arm as I went by. “Was that all it was? A shifting load?”

There was a touch of desperation in her question. Tell me I imagined it , the look on her face said. Tell me and I’ll believe you, and I’ll go get some sleep.

“We think so,” I nodded.

Her shoulders dropped and her face peeled into a smile too broad to be real. “Thank God. I thought I was going crazy.”

I patted her shoulder. “Strap in and get some rest,” I told her. She did.

Finally, I was doing something. As Loadmaster, I could put an end to this nonsense. So I did the work. I unstrapped the straps, climbed the other caskets, shoved the top one out of place, carried it, secured it, removed the next one, carried it, secured it, and again. The joy of easy repetition.

It wasn’t until we got to the bottom one, the noisy one, that Hadley stopped. He stood there watching me as I pulled it out of place enough to examine it. His stance was level, but even so it spoke of revulsion, something that, among swaggering Air Force veterans and over beers, he could conceal. Not now, not to me.

I did a cursory examination of the deck where it had sat, of the caskets next to it, and saw no damage or obvious flaws.

A noise sounded—a moist “thunk.” From inside. We flinched in unison. The engineer’s cool loathing was impossible to conceal. I suppressed a tremble.

“We have to open it,” I said.

The engineer didn’t disagree, but like me, his body was slow to move. He squatted down and, with one hand firmly planted on the casket lid, unlatched the clasps on his end. I undid mine, finding my finger slick on the cold metal, and shaking a little as I pulled them away and braced my hand on the lid. Our eyes met in one moment that held the last of our resolve. Together we opened the casket.

First, the smell: a mash of rotten fruit, antiseptic, and formaldehyde, wrapped in plastic with dung and sulfur. It stung our nostrils as it filled the hold. The overhead lights illuminated two shiny black body bags, slick with condensation and waste. I knew these would be the bodies of children, but it awed me, hurt me. One bag lay unevenly concealing the other, and I understood at once that there was more than one child in it. My eyes skimmed the juice-soaked plastic, picking out the contour of an arm, the trace of a profile. A shape coiled near the bottom seam, away from the rest. It was the size of a baby.