We Will Be Crashing Shortly (15 page)

“What about Flo?” I asked. She had sent us a distress signal, after all.

Officer Ned furrowed his brow. He was worried about her as well. “Should you and LaVonda just drop to the tarmac and walk back?” Officer Ned asked me, but knew before I could answer that it wasn’t a reasonable option. Not only was the belly of the airplane two stories above ground, but we were in a remote section of the runway in the middle of an expanse of flat tarmac. To leave the plane secretly would be impossible, as there was nothing to conceal our escape. Also, we would be taking our lives into our own hands, seeing as how we’d be potential airplane road kill by trying to navigate our way to the concourse surrounded by active runways.

“Maybe we could chance it anyway,” he suggested.

“You can, but I’m not going anywhere.” I was resolute. I’d known since I snatched the pairing summary from the printer in the guard house the night before; I was going to Grand Cayman. I didn’t know exactly what this flight had to do with Malcolm’s disappearance, but I knew it had something to do with it, and I was determined to find out.

“If Crash ain’t getting off the plane,” LaVonda finally snapped out of her bug-eyed fugue, “then I ain’t either.”

Officer Ned stamped his foot and yelled at us, to no effect. I was not to be deterred from my mission, and LaVonda was not to be deterred from my side. Finally Officer Ned resolved that, short of tossing us out the door and onto the tarmac—which, if it didn’t kill us, certainly would have brought attention to our position and blown our cover—he determined to wait until the pilots boarded the aircraft to activate the engines and flight deck, then he could radio the police and request a “welfare visit” to Flo’s place. But from this point forward we—LaVonda and I—were to keep ourselves safe and leave any confrontation with killers and/or criminals to him, he insisted. “I will seriously lose it if anything happens to either of you, or to Captain Beefheart for that matter. Don’t test me, please.”

He stopped ranting for a second to catch his breath, and was about to begin again when the galley door flew open, barely missing Officer Ned’s head as it swung up to rest flush against the curve of the ceiling. Suddenly the galley was awash in the sound of jet engines and the voices of the ramp workers who had just pulled up to park a portable baggage conveyor at the mouth of the galley opening. Officer Ned and I ran back and secluded ourselves on the other side of the hole in the bulkhead. LaVonda, who remained strapped into the jumpseat, was concealed—barely—by the protrusion of the tiny elevator bay between her and the galley door. She sat stiffly upright with her lips firmly zipped, staring back at us from her seat. Beefheart wagged his tail, calmly and quietly, in her lap.

A WorldAir ramp worker jumped into the galley and gave a thumbs up to his colleague below, oblivious to our presence. Lord, I thought, we really need to train our employees better. For security reasons, employees are supposed to perform a “visual sweep” whenever they enter an aircraft to begin their duties. This guy did not even give the galley a cursory once-over. I heard the luggage conveyor crank up, and soon a travel casket emerged at the top and emptied into the galley, where the ramp worker pulled it aside to make room for the next one, and then the next, and so on until four travel caskets in stacks of two crowded the galley in the small space between the meal carts on either side. The ramp worker quickly secured the cargo against the floor ballast with a series of straps and ratchets, then hopped out and down the conveyor to join his colleague. They closed the door and drove away.

“What the hell is that?” LaVonda harped, pointing to the crates. She placed Beefheart on the floor and moved to unbuckle herself from the jumpseat. But a jumpseat harness is different from a regular car seatbelt, or even from the belts on the passenger seats above us. She pulled and tugged, but only managed to tighten her restraints. “What the hell? Get me outta here.”

I gripped the center circular latch and turned it counterclockwise, and all the straps unfastened and fell away from LaVonda like the tentacles of an octopus that had suddenly grown very tired. She huffed and extricated herself from the inert straps. “I said what the hell is that?”

“Those are nothing,” I tried to redirect her attention by calling to Captain Beefheart, who had crawled to the top of one of the stacks of crates.

“Those are not nothing,” she countered me.

Officer Ned put his hand on her shoulder and told her to calm down, which is the exact opposite of what you should do to someone who needs to calm down. It even says in the flight attendant onboard manual to, quote, “Never use the words ‘calm down’ to a panicked or belligerent passenger.” Instead we were to talk to them in even tones, validate their concerns, and lie our asses off to them that everything would be all right. Seriously, for some reason telling people to calm down always seems to make them freak out even more. LaVonda raised her voice, “Don’t tell me to calm down. Just tell me what those are!”

Before I could tell him to lie to her, Officer Ned rolled his eyes in exasperation and said, “They’re just human remains.”

At that, LaVonda ran the width of the galley, touched the wall, and ran back again, her arms waving above her head. “Oh no you did NOT just tell me they’s four dead bodies—oh, my GOD, I am NOT trapped in a plane with a bunch of dead bodies. I am NOT!”

Officer Ned kept telling her to calm down, and I kept telling him to stop telling her to calm down because it was making her panic even more, when suddenly our attention was drawn to Beefheart, who began barking. All of us fell silent to look at the little dog, dumbfounded. Beefheart,
barking
?

“Come here, sweet Beefy,” LaVonda called to him. He ran toward her outstretched arms, only to touch her leg with his paw, double back, touch the casket, double back, touch her leg, etc. “Great, looks like you trained him to do your ‘back-and-forth’ fear dance,” Officer Ned rolled his eyes, but I saw it differently. Finally Beefheart, secure that he’d gotten our attention, began scratching furtively at one of the bottom caskets.

“Help me open this up,” I instructed the two of them. Officer Ned loosened the ratchets while I pulled the straps free. LaVonda joined in in spite of herself, mumbling, “You did NOT just say we gonna open a coffin.”

Once the straps were free, we tried gently pushing the top casket off the bottom one, only despite our efforts it fell clumsily to the floor on its side and busted open. Christ, I thought, what do they make these things out of, Popsicle sticks? Out rolled a body encased in a large clear plastic bag. LaVonda looked away.

“She’s wearing a WorldAir uniform,” Officer Ned said of the diminutive corpse. Yes, it was true, and now I knew what happened to the bus driver that Hackman had shot in the face the night before.

Captain Beefheart continued to whimper and scratch at the next coffin. Funny, I thought, why this one and not the others? Officer Ned had taken one of the keys off LaVonda’s monster key ring and was trying to pry open the lid. The process was as effective as attempting to open a soup can with a sewing needle, so I got up, returned to my hiding place behind the bulkhead, and came back with the crowbar I’d taken with me after my altercation with Mr. Hackman the night before. Deftly I pried the lid so it was loose enough for us to push open.

“How’d you get so good at that?” Officer Ned said.

“Don’t ask.”

The three of us put our palms against the lid and pushed it up and over until it hung open like . . . well, like a coffin lid. I looked inside the crate, and this time it was me who turned away. LaVonda put her arms around me and hugged me from behind. “You be strong,” she whispered.

“Damn it. God
damn
it,” Officer Ned cursed under his breath.

Inside the casket lay Uncle Otis. I took LaVonda’s advice to be strong and turned back around. He was encased in plastic, still wearing the clothes I’d last seen him in, when Hackman had delivered that devastating blow to his skull. I fought back tears as I assessed the wound on the side of his head, next to the black patch over his left eye. A small speckle of blood in his blond locks was the only thing betraying the fatal blow. Captain Beefheart jumped into the casket and began licking the dead man’s face through the loose plastic. My heart ached. Like Officer Ned, Beefheart always had an affection for Otis, probably because the man had been a mongrel in his own way.

“Oh, Sweet Beefcakes, stop that now,” La Vonda gently admonished. “Come on, now, you are not licking a dead man’s face. No, you are not.”

Suddenly Otis’s good eye shot open and gaped dead ahead. The three of us gasped and stumbled backward. What the hell? I thought. I’d heard of corpses doing all kinds of crazy things after death. In fact, there’s an entire television show dedicated to crazy autopsy stories alone, narrated by the medical examiners themselves. Flo and my mother were addicted to it, and I had to admit I found it fascinating, too. Like how back in the day coroners used to tie bells to the fingers of the cadavers in case anyone was accidentally declared dead. Or the details about the sounds the corpses commonly made in the hours, even days, after death, such as sighs and coughs and gargle noises. You’d be surprised at how active dead people can be. Some even suddenly sit bolt upright on the coroner’s slab, evidently a result of the combination of rigor mortis and the release of trapped gasses.

Suddenly Otis’s body sat bolt upright in the casket.

LaVonda screamed and ran through the galley, through the bulkhead and into the forward cargo area, where she pounded against the cockpit floor hatch, yelling, “Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, there’s a zombie! Let me out!”

Officer Ned looked frightened as well, and stepped between me and the casket, his arm out protectively. I peeked out from behind him and gaped at Otis in alarm. He still looked dead, his eye open but unseeing through the thick loose plastic, his arms limp and his back stiff.

“Beefheart, come here, pup,” Officer Ned uneasily tried to whistle the dog away from the body, but in vain. Beefheart continued to yip, jumping up from Otis’s lap, trying to lick the dead man’s face. LaVonda continued to scream from behind the bulkhead.

Otis’s corpse let out a sigh. Officer Ned jumped like a nervous cat and backed us farther away from the casket. Oh, Christ, I thought, is his body going to run the entire gamut of post mortem acrobatics? “Come on now, Beefheart.” Officer Ned began to sound frantic. “Leave the dead man alone.”

“What dead man?” Otis asked.

Officer Ned buckled to his knees in a half faint. LaVonda’s screams descended into unintelligible wailings. I flew forward, pulled the loose plastic away, and threw my arms around the man. “Uncle Otis!” I cried. “You’re alive!”

“That’s debatable,” he coughed.

Officer Ned gathered himself and helped me help Otis stand. He climbed stiffly out of the crate and sat down on the floor. We sat down with him. LaVonda stopped howling and timidly peeked through the bulkhead at us. “You are NOT sitting there with a zombie, no you are NOT,” she whimpered. Beefheart wriggled around in circles, a canine happy dance.

“Ouch,” Otis rubbed his temple. “What happened?”

He was asking
us
? The last time I saw him he had a crowbar embedded in his head! “Uncle Otis, I thought you were dead! I saw Hackman bash in your head! You dropped like a shot moose!”

“That explains the migraine,” he said. I got up and examined his head more closely. Dried blood crusted in his hair. “Ow, ouch, ow,” he objected. I found the wound and gently pressed my thumb against it. Otis pushed my hand away, but I slapped his wrist and continued.

“What the hell is that?” I asked. I felt a pronounced dent in his head, but no pliable mealy-ness that would indicate a cranial fracture. I was also alarmed at the lack of blood in the area of the wound. “Do you have a head made of concrete?”

“Metal,” he corrected me. “Or at least that part of my head is metal.”

“You have a metal plate in your skull?” Officer Ned asked.

Of course
Otis had a metal plate in his skull! He’d survived the most horrific aviation disaster in human history—and not without extensive injury.

“Yep,” Otis concurred, “titanium plate in the head, titanium shoulder socket, titanium elbow joint. I’m pretty much a bionic man.”

“Ooh, my second cousin Lamar had a metal plate in his skull.” LaVonda’s fear had turned into fascination as she stepped back through the bulkhead and over to Otis. She put her hand out to touch his head but he smacked it away. LaVonda was unperturbed. “Lamar got it after a building fell on his head during an earthquake in El Segundo. Afterward he said he couldn’t see the color yellow anymore. He wasn’t color blind, he was just yellow blind.

“Can you see the color yellow?” she asked Otis.

“I don’t know, show me something yellow,” he said.

I admit I was curious, too, but LaVonda couldn’t find anything yellow to wave in front of his good eye to prove her theory. Officer Ned soon lost patience and asked us to get serious. “Otis, you don’t remember being put in the travel casket?”

Otis shook his head, and for the first time seemed to notice the travel caskets. He cursed under his breath when he saw the lifeless body of his friend the bus driver. I felt bad for him; the two of them did seem to have a pleasant repartee. The claim sticker on her crate indicated this very flight to Grand Cayman, as did Otis’s crate.

“Well, there’s only one next step as I see it,” he said, rising shakily to his feet. Officer Ned seemed to have the same idea. They both approached the other stack of caskets and pried the lid off the one on top. Inside was the guard from the security hut that Flo and I had found dead at his desk the night before.

“See?” LaVonda told Officer Ned. She was quickly getting accustomed to dead bodies. “April wasn’t hallucinating after all.”

“I gathered that,” Officer Ned said grimly.

Otis and Officer Ned placed the lid back on the casket, lifted it, and set it aside so they could access the one underneath. I recognized this travel casket from the night before. It was the one we didn’t open. At the time I didn’t think it was necessary because it had come from Jacksonville. Surely some of these caskets had to be at the airport for non-nefarious reasons. Take the one containing the body of the middle-aged lady who broke my fall from the luggage conveyor. She was obviously on her way home after croaking on vacation or something. Here, this casket, in addition to the claim sticker with the GCM destination, still retained its original sticker showing its JAX origin.