The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal Read Free Page A

and pearly from its descent, smelling like spring rain. She shined her light on the long row of windows. Every interior shade was pulled down.
    That was strange. She was spooked now. Majorly spooked. Dwarfed by a massive, $250-million, 383-ton flying machine, she had a fleeting yet palpable and cold sensation of standing in the presence of a dragonlike beast. A sleeping demon only pretending to be asleep, yet capable, at any moment, of opening its eyes and its terrible mouth. An electrically psychic moment, a chill running through her with the force of a reverse orgasm, everything tightening, knotting up.
    Then she noticed that one of the shades was up now. The fine hairs went so prickly on the back of her neck, she put her hand there to console them, like soothing a jumpy pet. She had missed seeing that shade before. It had always been up—always.
    Maybe …
    Inside the plane, the darkness stirred. And Lo felt as if something were observing her from within it.
    She whimpered, just like a child, but couldn’t help it. She was paralyzed. A throbbing rush of blood, rising as though commanded, tightened her throat …
    And she understood it then, unequivocally: something in there was going to eat her …
    The gusting wind started up again, as though it had never paused, and Lo didn’t need any more prompting. She backed down the ramp and jumped inside her conveyor, putting it in reverse with the alert beeping and her ramp still up. The crunching noise was one of the blue taxiway lights beneath her treads as she sped away, half on and half off the grass, toward the approaching lights of half a dozen emergency vehicles.
    JFK International Control Tower
    C ALVIN B USS had switched to a different headset, and was giving orders as set forth in the FAA national playbook for taxiway incursions. All arrivals and departures were halted in a five-mile airspace around JFK. This meant that volume was stacking up fast. Calvin canceled breaks and ordered every on-shift controller to try to raise Flight 753 on every available frequency. It was as close to chaos in the JFK tower as Jimmy the Bishop had ever seen.
    Port Authority officials—guys in suits muttering into Nextels—gathered at his back. Never a good sign. Funny how people naturally assemble when faced with the unexplained.
    Jimmy the Bishop tried his call again, to no avail.
    One suit asked him, “Hijack signal?”
    “No,” said Jimmy the Bishop. “Nothing.”
    “No fire alarm?”
    “Of course not.”
    “No cockpit door alarm?” said another.
    Jimmy the Bishop saw that they had entered the “stupid questions” phase of the investigation. He summoned the patience and good judgment that made him a successful air-traffic controller. “She came in smooth and set down soft. Regis 7-5-3 confirmed the gate assignment and turned off the runway. I terminated radar and transitioned it over to ASDE.”
    Calvin said, one hand over his earphone mic, “Maybe the pilot had to shut down?”
    “Maybe,” said Jimmy the Bishop. “Or maybe it shut down on him.”
    A suit said, “Then why haven’t they opened a door?”
    Jimmy the Bishop’s mind was already spinning on that. Passengers, as a rule, won’t sit still for a minute longer than they had to. The previous week, a jetBlue arriving from Florida had very nearly undergone a mutiny, and that was over stale bagels . Here, these people had been sitting tight for, what—maybe fifteen minutes. Completely in the dark.
    Jimmy the Bishop said, “It’s got to be starting to get hot in there. If the electrical is shut down, there’s no air circulating inside. No ventilation.”
    “So what the hell are they waiting for?” said another suit.
    Jimmy the Bishop felt everyone’s anxiety going up. That hole in your gut when you realize that something is about to happen, something really, really wrong.
    “What if they can’t move?” he muttered before he could stop himself from speaking.
    “A hostage situation? Is that what you