Darkness Falling Read online

  "–so I said I'd do it," Karl finished saying.

  Ronnie nodded, hoping that he wasn't going to be expected to comment on anything that Karl had said.

  He waited a few seconds and then said, "You say there were lots of crashes. How come there were so many planes out there? I mean, at this time – two in the goddam morning, for Chrissakes."

  "When we left Denver, there was a backlog of traffic to move out because of the disturbances, plus several circling to come in. I'd say maybe a dozen, fifteen, something like that." He shook his head and made a clucking sound. "Just fell to earth like stones."

  Then the penny dropped with Angel. "Does that mean that everbody on those planes…" She let her voice trail off. It was something she couldn't get her head around. If everyone – everybody – on those planes was hiding, even the pilots and stewardesses, then it was a pretty dumb trick. They'd just committed themselves to a fiery death. Unless, of course, they were hiding off the plane. And even a six year old was going to find that particular cut of meat just a little tough to chew on. But that was a place Ronnie didn't want to visit with Angel Wurst anytime soon.

  Ronnie looked at the fires and, as he looked, he could make out the wreckage more clearly, huge clumps of twisted metal burning in thick palls of smoke and flame. It wasn't so much the wreckage but the fact that there were no services to be seen – no fire engines, no helmeted men hosing water and foam onto the smashed aircraft. He looked at the distant buildings and imagined the silence within them – the empty lounges and coffee shops, the stilled luggage conveyer belts, the control tower with its myriad screens of glowing green lines. "What happened to everybody?" he said again, his voice barely above a whisper.

  "I'm going to try put her down on the I-25," Karl said, so matter-of-factly that he could simply have been deciding which color sweater to wear today.

  "Why not the airport?"

  "The wreckage. We wouldn't necessarily see all the pieces, and there could be a lot of pieces." He was really shouting now, over the sound of the engines.

  "What about all the traffic on the highway?"

  "At 5.30 in the morning?" Karl shook his head. "But I'm going to need some help."

  Karl explained what he needed Ronnie to do and within minutes they were ready, the three of them buckled into their seats and watching the world come up to meet them.

  And what a world it was.

  Aside from Karl mentioning occasionally that Ronnie should push on this lever or pull on that one, the trio sat in complete silence, wisps of cloud disappearing around and about them as they lowered their altitude. The Interstate now immediately below them looked like a stock-car racetrack. Two huge longhaul rigs were jack-knifed into a rack of roadside stores, the Taco Bell franchise effectively demolished apart from its sign, which was still sputtering around the cab of one of the rigs. A third rig was upended in what appeared to be a recently ploughed field in front of a sprawling trailer park. A thick ribbon of fire – Ronnie assumed it had to be gas from a ruptured tank – led up to the cab. It appeared to be burned out.

  Without exchanging a word, both Karl and Ronnie noted the absence of any police or rescue services or medical assistance. Ronnie shifted his focus on the windshield and saw the reflection of the concerned face of Angel Wurst looking over his shoulder. What did she think to all of this? It didn't make any sense at all to Ronnie, who had been down here on the planet for four decades: so what did someone make of it all when they hadn't even put in one?

  "See that?" Karl said, apparently needlessly until he added, "No doors open."

  And it was true. The cabs of all three rigs were closed up tight, same as the doors on all the cars they passed over.

  "Everbody's hiding," Angel Wurst said from the seat behind Ronnie. Ronnie just didn't have the heart to say anything. In fact, he kind of wished he'd not started this hiding myth. It was going to make it all the harder for the girl to face the facts when the time came.

  Yeah? And what facts are those, Mr Ripley? the tiny inquisitive voice whispered in Ronnie's head.

  Holding steady on the steering column and maintaining an even green line on the bright dial to his right, Ronnie took the opportunity to glance around at Angel. She was looking out of the window, twisting around in her seat and using the back of Ronnie's as an armrest. She must have sensed him looking because she looked up into the reflective section of the window just as Ronnie had turned his attention to watching her reflection. She forced a kind of half-smile – that was the best way to describe it, as far as Ronnie was concerned – and just for a few seconds, he wondered if she was sitting there worrying about how she was going to break it to this asshole in front of her that everybody wasn't hiding. Everybody had gone permanent bye byes, maybe never to be seen again. Maybe the girl was thinking about Ronnie's wife, Martha.

  Ronnie winked at the girl's reflection and turned back front again, momentarily feeling guilty – he hadn't thought about Martha since… since the whole thing had happened. Where was–

  "You OK?" Karl's voice disturbed his reverie.

  "What? Oh, sure, OK as I can be, I guess."

  Karl nodded. The plane was now about two or maybe three hundred feet above the highway, the left side – did they call it left in the flying manuals, or was it port or starboard? – slewing over towards a group of taller buildings coming up.

  "Push it, push it," Karl snapped.

  Ronnie pushed.

  The plane leveled again and the nose rose, the wingtip narrowly missing a jumble of cars and a crippled eighteen-wheeler that had pushed into the stonework of a group of buildings that looked like bank offices or a realty office. A ruptured fire hydrant was spewing water in a cascade and the street was flooded at an intersection that led to another trailer park.

  "Lot of trailer parks," Ronnie observed.

  "Sign of the times," Karl said after a few seconds' consideration. Then, "We're gonna have to take it up again and swing back. Do the run all over again."

  "Yeah?" Shit, Ronnie thought. He was amazed that they had got to this point still alive. He didn't think they could do it again. "Problems?"

  "Just that, we're not careful, we're gonna run out of road. And it's getting a little clogged up down there." He adjusted the glasses on his nose and pointed. "You see? So much for me saying there'd be no traffic cos it's two in the morning."

  The road looked like a skating rink with cars, vans and trucks the skaters, every one of them sprawled out unconscious, some by themselves, others piled one on top of another, and some driven into store windows.

  Ronnie turned around again and said, in a quiet voice, "Still think we're going to make it?" Asking the girl annoyed him the way it had annoyed him once when he had gone to a fortuneteller (Madame Carnocki, he recalled now, sitting in the co-pilot's seat of a plummeting Boeing 727 on the day that the world's population had been magicked away without so much as a tap of a wand or an Abracadabra!) at nearby Kent County Fair back when he was a teenager, asking the woman if maybe Valerie Skijsmik would be able to see beyond the braces on his teeth. The woman dressed it up in some kind of mumbo jumbo bullshit about his needing to exude confidence and it would be so – and that'll be fifty cents, thank you very much – but young Ronnie could no more exude that than he could poop a turd through the eye of a needle. And now here he was again, making the same damn mistake, looking around for a shoulder to lean on. He looked at the approaching road, felt the shuddering vibrations of the aircraft, feeling like it was about to fall right apart and scatter the contents of the plane and their three fool bodies onto the littered blacktop, and he made a mental note, a promise, a note to self, that he would, in future, face whatever life threw at him with a kind of acceptance that did not require any platitudes or hollow encouragements, any assurances or conciliatory winks and nudges. What would be, would be and what wouldn't, wouldn't. It was as simple as that. Que sera, sera, as the old song had it.

  But just this time, he waited for her response.

  A
ngel Wurst smiled at him, a strange kind of smile, slightly crooked and not wholly truthful Ronnie thought. Then she glanced sideways at Karl, looked back at Ronnie and then concentrated her full attention on the windshield.

  Ronnie turned back to Karl and settled in his seat again. "You think anyone else is still around down there?" He didn't feel any further need to dress up the conversation for Angel, and Angel didn't say anything, just kept looking out of the window.

  Karl pushed more levers, checked more dials. The fact that he hadn't answered provided the answer that Ronnie himself feared. The world was empty. Deserted.

  "I take it you do know what you're doing?"

  Karl gave a half-smile and a sideways glance. "Some. Not a whole lot, mind you, but some."

  "We gonna make it down there without breaking our damn necks?" He deliberately avoided looking at the girl.

  "We're sure as hell gonna try," Karl said.

  "Pretend you're just reading a map."

  Karl nodded without turning. "That's what I been doing all the time."

  The plane leaned over to the right, turning a full circle to head back to where the I-25 still had a good twenty or so miles before hitting the outskirts of Mile High City. Now they were able to look to the right and see the true state of the world post the Big White Light. Fires seemed to be blazing everywhere but, as far as they could see – not foolproof, admittedly, from this height, speed and angle – there was no movement.

  "Looks like the aftermath of riots," Ronnie shouted.

  "See over there?" Karl asked as they veered back around again, watching the highway come back into prominence. Ronnie followed the other man's pointing finger. Way over in the distance shone a beautiful gold light, bathing the sky above it like a halo. "The mall, one of the biggest I ever saw. Open twentyfour-seven."

  "Yeah?"

  Karl turned to look at him. "Reckon it'll be quiet in there right now. Unnaturally quiet, mind. Maybe the PA's still playing the old muzak loop but aside from that, it'll be quiet.

  "I tried calling all kinds of frequencies and–" He nodded to a cellphone sitting on what Ronnie supposed was the plane's dashboard. "–all kinds of numbers, back before you came and knocked on the door." He shook his head. "All quiet. Nobody home."

  Ronnie waited for more but then they started their approach again, the I-25 looming long and straight in front of and below them, stretching out into the distance, the blacktop littered with crashed vehicles and smoking fires.

  "Nobody home," Karl said again, this time just to himself. Then, "You both belted in?"

  "I'm belted," said Angel Wurst.

  "Does it really matter?" Ronnie asked, but he kept his voice low enough that neither of them would hear.

  "Are you belted up?" Angel's voice was kind of high-pitched and a little indistinct but Ronnie caught it and checked the girl's reflection in the windshield. She was looking across at Karl's back but he hadn't heard her. Ronnie focused on the road – it seemed so close that he felt they must surely be running along it already, but he knew they weren't. Not yet. But soon, he thought, very soon.

  "Here goes," Karl shouted, the words coming between clenched teeth.

  The plane shook and groaned as though they were flying through a gale. Ronnie looked at different dials, saw needles spinning or edging into solid green areas but couldn't make out their significance, if there was any. In the end, he stopped looking at them and instead just stared out of the window. The road was coming up fast but somehow its proximity beneath them seemed to remain constant.

  Then Karl shot a hand out and pulled back on a thick handled switch and something started to whine beneath them.

  "That the wheels?" Ronnie asked, without taking his attention from the windows. Alongside him, the wing scraped across the front of an eight- or nine-story building, scattering glass and concrete debris over the road. He glanced to the right just in time to see the word "LOANS" painted onto the brick before the wing-tip scored through it in a puff of dust. The plane juddered and the wings wobbled.

  Directly in front of them, a white stretch limo lay on its side.

  Ronnie shouted out in excitement – one of the rear doors was open. He scanned the road as quickly as he could but they were moving too fast for him to spot anyone. And anyway, wouldn't whoever was out there come and wave at them?

  It's a goddam plane, fuckwit! the little voice said. You don't flag down a goddam airplane.

  Ronnie nodded to himself and tried to imagine what might be going through that someone's head, whoever he or she was. Maybe a celebrity, being driven around in one of those ridiculous cars. Had they gone right up into the city? He glanced up at the horizon and saw the buildings towering a few miles away like a fabled El Dorado mirage.

  Karl was up out of his seat now, the belt still around him but bracing himself like a jockey, pushing on the steering column.

  A bank of telegraph poles appeared from nowhere on the left and the wing scythed through them like a knife through butter, though there was a flurry of sparks. Then one of the poles shot towards them and caromed off the airplane's nose, dragging another three or four poles, all attached by the overhead wires, to spread across them.

  "Shit!"

  "No, that may help," Karl said, grunting at the strain of keeping the plane steady. "Slow us down."

  "Like a parachute, right?"

  Karl nodded. When he turned to Ronnie he was smiling, a little crooked sarcastic grin and a suspicious frown on his face. "You sure you're not a pilot?"

  "Funny."

  Karl adjusted his glasses again and faced front, chuckling.

  "I'm scared," Angel Wurst's small voice said from behind Ronnie. So small, in fact, that it was amazing that Ronnie even heard it above the scream of the engines and the buffeting of the cabin, with things bouncing about on the floor around their feet.

  You're scared! Ronnie thought. And you're the one been telling us we'd be OK. Smell that? That's how scared I am. He reached a hand back and patted the girl's leg.

  "We're going to be OK," he yelled. "Nearly down now." He turned to Karl. "Aren't we?"

  Karl didn't answer.

  Ronnie felt his attention being drawn to the girl's reflection, knew she was watching him in the windshield, waiting for him to ask her, but he wouldn't. Wouldn't give her the satisfaction. What did she know anyways! He closed his eyes and tried to think of a prayer.

  Gentle Jesus, meek and mild

  Look upon your little child

  The plane lurched and then jinked to the side, grinding noises coming from somewhere beneath where they were sitting. The trunk and rear fender of a car appeared just below their line of vision and then disappeared off to the side.

  Pity me my simplicity

  Suffer me to come to thee

  Ronnie stared out of the window to catch a glimpse of it, to see what make it was, though he did wonder just for a few seconds why that could possibly be important: he guessed it was to make some sense of the completely senseless situation they were in.

  A streetlamp buckled forward as the left wing hit it, the grinding noise making Ronnie wince and run his tongue over his rear teeth. The impact wasn't enough to slow them down with any significance but it did manage to slew the plane's nose towards the left. A retail park appeared set back on the left, its parking lot mostly empty save for a handful of vehicles. One of them, a small flatbed truck – a Dodge, maybe, Ronnie thought, in that ohso-casual way one picks up meaningless minutiae at a time of great stress and concern – had its lights on. Though there was no chance he would be able to hear anything, Ronnie leaned forward – he suspected the engine would be running: someone had come out of a restaurant or a coffee house, turned on the lights and the engine and pow! end of story. He glanced around the storefronts and saw a 24 hour McDonald's with its lights on. As he watched, the right wing tip caught a U Haul van and spun it around, the van's wheels buckling and the tires popping like blown-up paper bags burst in a hand-clap, before sending it crashing into a
drugstore.

  "You any idea what these things cost?"

  "The plane?"

  "Yeah."