He leaped through the cockpit door and Cushing wondered, as the tentacles came worming and slithering forward, wondered how long that flimsy steel door was going to protect them.
And maybe he would have kept wondering it except he saw an eruption of light outside, from somewhere in the mist. A flickering, orange-yellow light like that of a bonfire. Whatever it was, the tentacles and their master became aware of it, too. They froze on the floor, in midair, hanging from the ceiling by their suckers. They began to quiver like a cat watching a bird. More of that flickering light and very close now.
Fire.
It was fire.
Out here… but how?
A tongue of flame brushed up against the plane, throwing a greasy, churning light that jumped and flashed. Gosling, looking down towards the passenger door saw the flames quite clearly. The weeds were on fire. And either they had ignited themselves or someone had done it for them.
“What the hell is it?” someone in the cockpit said.
And Cushing was wondering just that when a shadow cut through the flames outside the passenger door. A shadow hunched and jumped through the doorway. Cushing fell backward through the cockpit hatch, expecting the very worst.
But what he saw was a human being.
A human being with a pail of something in one hand and a burning flare in the other. They tossed the bucket at the tentacles and threw the flare. Flames erupted in a gushing, spreading cloud and the tentacles retreated instantly like worms on a hotplate. They disappeared in a column of funneling smoke.
And it was then that Cushing got a look at their savior.
It was a woman.
They saw it.
They all saw it, if only for a moment or two. Something sticking up out of the weed. Something circular, disc-shaped, and very large. It wasn’t a boat and it wasn’t a plane… at least not of the world they came from. There was a word for what it might have been, but nobody dared say it out loud. They saw it for just a few fleeting seconds, then it was lost again in the fog. Thankfully.
“What do you think it was, Fabrini?”
Saks said this to him, not really expecting a reply anymore than he would expect one from a pet beagle. Because he figured that, intellectually, Fabrini was on the same level as your common ball-licking, shit-on-the-carpet, drink-from-the-fucking-toilet beagle. On a good day, that was. Most days, you could play fetch-the-goddamn-stick all afternoon with that boy and he still wouldn’t get it. Sit there, wagging his tail and waiting for you to tell him what he should be doing and what he should be thinking about it all.
At least, this is how Saks was seeing things.
His crew of misfits and ass-fuckers, as he liked to call them, were his pets now that Cook was in hairball-heaven. Old Al Saks was holding that leash and you got out of line, he’d whack you in the nose with a rolled-up Chicago Trib or rub your pink, wet little nose in your own shit, see if he didn’t.
Fabrini kept swallowing, looking around in the mist for a door that said EXIT and not finding one. “I don’t know, I don’t know what it was.”
“You hear that, Menhaus? He don’t know what it was. Fagbrini, you’re a goddamn moron, you know that?”
Ah, here we go.
Fabrini was filling up with that hatred that was just as dark as bootblack and just as searing as hot oil. His hand was going for that knife in his belt, because maybe he was thinking that this was it. This was the time he punched Saks’s ticket and Cook wasn’t there to talk reason and the other two – Menhaus and Crycek – were out of their heads more often than not and could have cared less if Fabrini killed that bullying, foul-mouthed sonofabitch.
Just as long as he did.
Saks sighed, really bored with it all. “Go ahead, Fabrini, pull that fucking blade,” he said, not bothering with his own knife. “Come over here and kill my ass. Personally, I don’t believe a neutered she-bitch like you is up to the job. But, go ahead, prove me wrong. Bring it on, you cheap ass-licker. Come on, I want to see this.”
Fabrini had his knife out, was never aware even for a moment that his buttons were being pushed and he was being manipulated by a master puppeteer.
He came on.
“Boy,” Menhaus said, “you two are starting to bore the piss out of me.”
Crycek said nothing, didn’t seem to realize any of it was happening.
“C’mon already, Fagbrini, kill me,” Saks said. “I’ll have the last laugh and you know it. Because when I’m gone, it’s going to be funny as all hell watching the three of you trying to survive out here.”
That slowed Fabrini. Stopped him, even.
You could see the doubt creeping over his face in the light of their final lantern. You could see the indecision. And finally, yes, you could hear that hot bag of air in his belly leaking.
