Darkness Falling Read online

  Where could they have gone to? It didn't make any sense, no sense at all. It had been the flash of light, she reasoned, nodding again, wiping her rain-soaked hair back from her forehead. That much was surely beyond dispute. She would never have noticed the flash if she had slept normal hours like other people, but there was always so much to do for the children…

  "We must leave," Sally said, her voice now defiant.

  "Where shall we go?" one of the voices asked.

  Sally looked around the street, stepped from the sidewalk onto the pavement and tried to think. Where could they go? Where might there be others? After all, if she had survived whatever it had been, then it stood to reason that there might be others.

  "The mall," said a voice. "Let's go to the mall."

  "Yes," came a supportive voice, "the mall."

  "Oh, can we?" whined another.

  "Mommy, can–"

  Sally waved her arms around, while the very tiniest part of her, a part now virtually buried without even the tiniest trace after all these years, wondered what she must look like. What she must sound like, so many voices, so many facial expressions to accompany them…

  But those thoughts popped out of her head at exactly the same time as they popped in, leaving nary a single trace of their having been there at all.

  "Very well," she said, interrupting any further badgering from her brood. "The mall it is."

  And all of the entities that comprised Sally Davis turned their collective back on this strange and quiet new world and headed for something they knew more about. The mall.

  (7)

  Meanwhile, about an hour, hour and a half before Virgil and the bandaged Suze Neihardt took to the road in a commandeered Pontiac convertible and Sally Davis and her cerebral progeny slid behind the wheel of Sally's old Chevy, with the still lingering smell of husband Gerry's atomized brain cells and dried blood defying even the strongest air fresheners bought from the filling station over in Wheat Ridge, the late running and rapidly descending 10pm Denver to Atlanta flight had problems of its own, with the revelation that one of the remaining three people spared whatever had – well – had 'done something' with all the other passengers, this girl, she had just admitted that she saw things in her head.

  Only the sound of the aircraft could be heard for some time, Karl having turned back to face front and Ronnie looking at the girl, watching her face, waiting for her to say something else. In the end, he just repeated her own statement – and threw in a question mark.

  "You see things in your head?"

  "Great," Karl snapped, more to himself than anyone else. "Now it's starting to rain."

  Angel pulled open the zipper on her bag and then closed it again, time after time, nodding quickly all the while. And as she was doing this, and without looking up, she said, "I often see things in my head."

  And there it was. A simple statement of fact. I sure do like ice cream. I like to stay up late and read my comic books. Oh, and yeah… I see stuff in my head.

  Ronnie watched her over and over for another half-minute or so before saying, "What did you see, honey?"

  And she told him. She told him how she had been talking with her mommy and then she had experienced some kind of surge in her head – like someone had poured boiling water inside through her ears, she said, which was the way it always happened – and in that split second, she saw everyone on the plane, no matter what they were doing, awake or asleep, reading or eating or talking or watching something on their little personal video screens, everyone just blinked out. She shook her head and reached out for her mom, screaming (which is what Ronnie had heard), but before Angel had been able to tell her mother – to warn her – her mom had started to ask her what the matter was but it had come out as only What's the mat–. And then she and pretty near everyone else on the delayed 10 pm out of Denver–

  And maybe everywhere else, let's not forget that one…

  –just up and sidestepped into another world.

  "Does this – these little dreams – do they happen often?"

  The girl nodded, keeping her eyes down looking at the zipper on her Little Mermaid bag, which she was still opening and closing, opening and closing.

  Did this mean anything? Ronnie was beginning to think not and then–

  "We're going to be OK," Angel said. Then she frowned and turned to look at Karl's back. She didn't say anything more before she returned her attention to her bag.

  "OK, Karl," Ronnie said. "You heard the lady. We need to get us back into the airport."

  Karl grimaced. "Yeah, well, that may be a little more difficult even than you'd imagine."

  When Ronnie jerked his head questioningly, Karl continued.

  "Come see."

  He gestured Ronnie into the other plush leather seat and motioned for him to get in. Outside, all they could see was cloud. Karl settled himself back and fastened his seat harness. "I think we should do this," he said. Ronnie followed Karl's example.

  In front of them was a huge windshield, split right down the center by a metal divider. Another window was fixed onto each side, much closer to them than the front windshield thereby enabling both Ronnie and Karl to look out almost immediately down.

  The sky looked clear beneath them. A thick bank of cloud sat just off to the right and quite a way below them – Ronnie couldn't gauge how far – and rain was misting the windshield. Below that, more cloud was bunched up like cotton candy. Suddenly, the cloud opened up and Ronnie saw right through to the ground. It was just a mess of lights and distant roadways, a few buildings.

  "Can you turn on wipers or something?"

  Karl frowned and ran his fingers across lines of switches, levers and buttons. "Must be here someplace." He stopped at a set of three switches, leaned forward for a closer look, and said, "Hey, our luck's in."

  "You really think so?" Ronnie said.

  Karl flipped one of the switches and a pair of wipers started to move side to side across the windshield.

  "You know," Ronnie said, "I kind of expected something a little more, I dunno, more technical, I guess."

  Karl shrugged. "Whatever does the job does the job, right?"

  Ronnie leaned over to the side window and looked down. "Where's that?"

  "Outskirts of Denver," Karl said. "We're going to be on the ground in just a few minutes."

  "I think I'd prefer the phrase 'landed'." Ronnie turned to the other man and smirked. "Too many connotations in 'on the ground'."

  "Roger that," Karl said, and he adjusted his glasses.

  "How long before we… you know?"

  "Before we 'touch down'?"

  Ronnie nodded.

  "We should be down there before six."

  "When's sun-up?"

  Karl looked across to the east and shrugged. "Hour, hour and a half maybe. We'll be seeing signs before then–" He looked across at Ronnie with a warning glance but he didn't have to say anything. Ronnie understood. The pilot meant that they'd be seeing signs of the sun rising only if the landing went OK. Ronnie nodded, just one brisk nod, to let Karl know that he understood. Karl continued, saying, "–not too much, just a lightening of the sky."

  They sat like that for a minute or so and then Ronnie asked, "You know why we were delayed?"

  "All I know is they were talking about disturbances."

  "Yeah? What kind of disturbances?" He shook his head. "Will you listen to me?"

  "What?"

  "I'm sitting here in an airplane that was filled with people a half-hour ago but which is now empty except for me, a seriously reluctant pilot and a six-year old kid straight out of The Sixth Sense and I'm discussing what time sun-up is going to happen and asking you why we were delayed taking off."

  Karl shrugged. "Nothing much else to do."

  Ronnie wished they had the past few minutes to go through again. And he would have preferred Karl to have a fully functional pair of glasses for the job that lay ahead.

  "You want to go sit back in the main seats, honey?"
Karl called over his shoulder to Angel Wurst, who was still standing in the doorway.

  Angel turned around without answering and looked back into the main seating area. It looked lonely and somehow threatening. She didn't know what had happened to her mom and dad. If only she could see where they were inside her head, but when she tried to concentrate on them, thinking hard about their faces, all she got was static, like the white noise that came on the TV screen when someone disconnected the cable lead. She only knew that first they were there and then they were gone. And she didn't like the wide expanse of seat backs facing her – or watching her back once she had sat down (if she were to sit down, of course). She thought about what might be raising itself out of those seats when she wasn't looking.

  "Uh uh," she said, and turned back. "I wanna stay with you." She plopped herself down on the seat behind Ronnie.

  "That OK? If she stays up here, I mean?"

  Karl shrugged. "Why not." He turned to Angel and nodded at the seat harness straps behind her shoulders. "Can you pull that onto yourself, honey?" he asked.

  Angel did as she was told and Karl nodded to her, gave her a wink.

  "So, disturbances? You said about disturbances?"

  "Oh, back in Denver? Caused the delay?"

  Ronnie nodded. "What were they, these disturbances?"

  "Some kind of electrical interference in the sky is what I heard. They'd died down by the time we took off."

  Ronnie knew now who Karl reminded him of. It was the actor who played the guy in the American Splendor movie – and the wine-freak in Sideways. Ronnie loved those two movies. Paul something or other. Italian-sounding name.

  He could hear Angel tugging at the harness and not seeming to get anywhere so Ronnie got up from his seat and fastened her in. When he returned to the leather seat, clouds were swirling past the nose of the plane.

  "The rain gonna cause us any problems?"

  "Well, let's just say it would be easier if we didn't have it. But no, I don't see any problems coming from the rain." He glanced aside and gave a little ironic smile. Ronnie knew exactly what that smile said. He flashed back on the scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Newman and Redford are about to leap from a cliff into the water far below, and Redford says he can't swim. "Can't swim!?" comes Newman's response. "Hell, the fall'll probably kill ya!"

  Ronnie shook the image and its implications out of his head. "Anything you need me to do?" he asked.

  "See the wheel-thing right in front of you?" Without waiting for an answer, Karl added, "I want you to push on that. Gently at first but then harder. OK?"

  "OK." Ronnie reached out and took hold of the steering contraption. It was like a half steering wheel, curved around at the top with each side dropping to a point. He held onto it and felt the vibrations. It felt good.

  "You got that?" With the engine noise having increased, Karl was now having to shout.

  Ronnie nodded. The plane was starting to tip downwards.

  Angel Wurst grabbed her seat arms. She was sitting sidewayson behind Ronnie and so, by turning her head to the right, she could see out of the windshield or by looking straight ahead, she could see out of the window alongside and running behind Karl the pilot.

  "We're on our way," Karl shouted. "Hey, I really am pleased to see you guys, I can tell you." He pushed forward on various levers and pulled back on a couple of others. Then he nodded to the earphones curled around a handle on a section of hous ing. "There's nobody out there, you know," he added, his voice lower now. "Nobody out there at all."

  "You sure?"

  "Uh huh. Tried every frequency. And I'm not even hearing static, you know? It's just silence. There's nobody there."

  "They can't all have gone," Ronnie said, hoping that he didn't sound as desperate or as scared as he felt. "I mean, we're here, right?"

  Karl didn't say anything, just looked sideways at Ronnie and then glanced back at the girl. "The three of us, huh? Some cavalry," he said. "I never thought I'd wind up as a savior of the human race." He twisted a dial and watched rectangles of green overlay each other. "But we got to get down out of the sky first."

  Ronnie said, "She says we're going to be OK." He slapped Karl's arm and kept looking straight ahead.

  Outside, the cloud swirled about them like fog and then suddenly cleared. Stretching ahead of them was empty air and darkness, dotted here and there with wispy cloud-trails. Below that, Ronnie could see the distant sprawl of Denver, and the endless gray strips of the I-25 and the I70 feeding into it, like tied ribbons come together on a parcel. Immediately beneath them was Denver International Airport, some twenty-five miles to the north-east of the city. They must have turned around and were coming in over Laramie and Cheyenne.

  It was quite a scene. But the most fascinating part of it was the fires. They were everywhere – out on the Interstates, along the airport runways and amidst the spires and buildings of distant Denver – plumes of smoke twisting and twirling lazily into the early morning sky.

  Ronnie heard Angel Wurst draw in her breath.

  "It was like a meteor storm," Karl shouted finally. "When it happened – whatever 'it' was – we lost altitude,. dropped like a stone. I was in back–" He pointed to a table immediately behind them and to one side of the small cabin. "–checking weather charts. Then–" He snapped his fingers. "–poof! Everyone was gone.

  "Out there, planes were just… just falling out of the sky. I watched them, man. Five, six, maybe more. I never want to see anything like that again."

  Ronnie said, "There probably wasn't anyone on them."

  Karl shrugged. "Maybe not anyone who could fly, you mean."

  Ronnie didn't say anything to that one. He knew what the other man was thinking, what he was picturing in his head: plane passenger cabins pretty much deserted apart from one or maybe two people, maybe a half-dozen of them, standing up – or trying to stand up – as the plane they were on just nosedived right out of the sky. At that instant, Ronnie fancied he could hear their screams, drifting on the wind around them, brought into the plane by the strangeness of the situation because no sound ever truly dies but just keeps on going around and around, getting fainter and fainter.

  "OK, but they could also have been completely deserted," Ronnie said, wishing it with all his heart.

  "Maybe. But it was the sheer helplessness of humanity that got to me. That make any sense at all to you?" He glanced sideways at Ronnie, who was watching him closely.

  "Giamatti!"

  "Excuse me?"

  "That's his name, the guy you look like. Paul Giamatti." Ronnie shook his head. "Nobody's ever told you that?"

  "Uh uh." Karl faced forward again. "Should I be pleased? I mean, not that they haven't told me but that I look like this guy."

  Ronnie shrugged. "Well, you know what you look like."

  After a few seconds' thought, Karl said, "Yeah."

  They sat in silence for a minute or so and then Karl said, "Here we are, making all these scientific breakthroughs and then along comes something that just stops us in our tracks. I mean, you know, what the hell happened to everyone?"

  "They're hiding is all," Angel Wurst shouted from behind Ronnie, though she didn't sound convinced.

  "Anyway, it took me a while to level her out, but I managed it. I just sat here, trying to figure out how everything worked together while I watched billions of dollars of aircraft drop out of the sky." He shrugged.

  Ronnie felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. Who was this guy? He just sat there trying to figure out how everything worked? Jeez, Louise, Ronnie thought. Looks like I may yet get to wear my sphincter as a baseball cap.

  "So–" He tried to choose his words carefully, playing it supercasual, not wanting to get the wrong answer. In a few minutes, it wouldn't matter anyway. "So you're not a pilot?"

  Karl gave a snort and a chuckle. "Hell, no," he shouted. "Wish I was."

  He pushed forward a little harder on the wheel and the plane seemed to let out a rattle, droppi
ng and steadying and then dropping and steadying again, like it was making a little protest, but then it seemed to even out again.

  "I'm heading for JFK, so hopping to Atlanta and then on to New York on the red-eye. They need a maps-man for an earlymorning hike over to Beijing – that's what I do, by the way."

  "Cartography?"

  Karl glanced at him with a big grin. "Hey, that's right. How'd you know that?"

  Ronnie shrugged. It was just another example of the things you pick up as you go through life: like the word "adrenaline" from one of his friend Tommy's father's comic books – Strange Adventures #110, as he recalled, with 'The Hand From Nowhere' being the lead story; the word "desultory" from a Simon and Garfunkel song (he had also picked up a love of Emily Dickinson from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation"); and a kind of love-hate relationship with Melville and Whitman, courtesy of the author Ray Bradbury. When they had first started going out together, Martha Baez ("Hey, no relation," she always liked to tell people) had told Ronnie he had poetry in his soul. When she had told him that, they had been almost naked on the small bed in the spare room of his parents' home in Cuyahoga Falls, Martha's face a mask of love and admiration. How times changed.