Mayday (23 page)

Barbara Yoshiro didn’t feel like talking much longer. As she looked out of the flight-attendant station in the midsection
galley, she saw that the passengers were beginning to pay too much attention to her. The station was a cul-de-sac, and her
only advantage with these people lay in her mobility.

“Barbara?”

“Yes, I’m coming back now.”

“Is it very bad? Should I come down?” Sharon Crandall asked.

“No.” Yoshiro put a light tone in her voice. “I’ve been a flight attendant long enough to know how to avoid groping hands.”
The joke came out badly and she added quickly, “They’re not paying any particular attention to me. See you in a few minutes.”
She replaced the interphone and stepped into the aisle. She kept her back against the bulkhead of the lavatory and stared
into the cavern that lay between the front of the airliner and herself, then looked back toward the tail.

The flimsy partitions of the Straton’s interior had been swept away by the decompression. Its entire length, which she remembered
being told was two hundred feet, lay exposed, except for the three galley-lavatory compartments. They rose, blue plastic cubicles
in a row, from floor to ceiling—one near the tail, the mid-ship one she was standing at, and the one in the first-class cabin
that blocked her view of the spiral staircase.

Dangling oxygen masks, uprooted seats, and dislodged wall and ceiling panels hung everywhere. Sixty feet from her, midway
between the galley she was standing at and the first-class section, were two bomb holes—if that’s what they were.

Barbara Yoshiro studied the possible routes she might take through the aircraft. She could see that she had two return routes
to choose from. The aisle on the left—the one she had come down earlier—was now nearly packed with milling passengers. The
aisle on the right had only a few people in it, but it contained more debris. Worse, it passed very near to the larger of
the two holes in the fuselage. Even from where she stood, she could see the Pacific and the leading edge of the wing through
the gaping hole. Perhaps, she thought, she’d travel up the right aisle, then cross over before she got to the open area of
debris between the holes. While her eyes fixed on the scene in front of her, she failed to notice that a young man in the
aisle next to her was watching her closely.

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 slip-stream 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.

It had been her movements that had first attracted his attention. When he had focused on those movements, they had begun to
separate into perceptible components. A female.

In small flashes that were hardly more than thin sections of memory, George Yates recognized something in her form that he
wanted. His last vivid recollection in his seat before things had come apart had been a long sexual daydream. The fantasy
had included the women in blue and white who walked through the aisles. Vaguely, he remembered the woman with the long black
hair, remembered that she had aroused him. He was aroused now. He reached out for her.

Barbara Yoshiro eluded his grasp. She ran across the remaining area of debris toward the first-class cabin. The forward galley
and lavatories loomed in front of her. She slammed into the blue wall, then turned her back to it and began edging her way
toward the corner where the wall turned toward the staircase.

People began coming at her, hands outstretched. She hit a woman in the face with her fist and sent her staggering back into
the group behind her. Immediately, she realized she should not have done that.

People from all over the aircraft began migrating toward the focal point of the commotion. Some came out of curiosity, some
were caught in the tide of bodies, some came to meet the perceived danger—Barbara Yoshiro.

She worked her way to the edge of the lavatory and peered around the corner. Less than twenty feet away she could see the
spiral staircase winding upward. But the lower half was filled with people, and the intervening space between her and the
base of the stairs was a solid mass of bodies. The open area around her was getting smaller. Hands reached out to her, and
she slapped them away. A young boy caught hold of her blouse and pulled at it. The thin cotton tore and exposed her shoulder.
Another hand caught hold of her blouse and tore it half off. Someone pulled at her hair. The young man who seemed to be normal
was wedged inside the crowd that surrounded her, deliberately pushing his way through. She took a deep breath and screamed.
“Help! Someone help me!”

Her voice sounded small against the wind, the roar of the four jet engines, and the excited howls around her. A hundred or
more men and women competed with one another to make their sounds supreme in the jungle that was the Straton. She screamed
again, but knew that her screams had become indistinguishable from those around her.

She slid around the corner of the bulkhead and groped with her right hand for the lavatory door. Her hand found the knob,
and she turned it. The door gave way behind her. She turned her head and peered into the small enclosure, not knowing that
it was the same one that had saved John Berry’s life a few short hours before. Two men and a woman stood shoulder to shoulder,
wall to wall, staring at her. She slammed the door. “Oh God. Jesus Christ.” For a second she was reminded of the terror and
disgust she had felt when she had opened her kitchen cabinet late one night and found it swarming with cockroaches.

Keeping her back to the wall, she edged farther down toward the staircase. The pressing crowd was only peripherally interested
in her, and she found that if she altered between aggressive and passive behavior, she could slide by them. The young man
in the blue blazer, however, was still purposefully making his way toward her.

Barbara reached the forward corner of the cubicle, close to the staircase. The press of bodies here was so thick she could
barely push through. She called up again, but the din was so loud now that she could not even hear her own voice. She saw
that the passengers had gone a few steps higher. One man staggered up the last few steps and disappeared into the lounge.
A second later, he came crashing down and caused an avalanche of bodies to tumble over the winding staircase. Mr. Stein, she
saw, was putting up a good fight. But he could not hear her, and even if he could, he would not be able to help her.