She had always found her gun- and knife-obsessed male relatives to be faintly ridiculous. But she would go so far as to admit that a knife was a good thing to have, in a whole lot of different ways. She had, therefore, been looking around for things in her environment that might be convertible into knives. Plan A had been to shatter the glass screen of the television monitor, pull out a shard, and then fashion a handle by wrapping one end in a strip torn from a bedsheet. She reckoned that this would work but that it would be loud and difficult to hide and might produce knives of highly variable quality.
Plan B, then, had been simply to steal an actual knife from the galley: a nook between the bathroom and the cockpit, which she came close to whenever she went up to pee. She had conceived this idea after her first pee trip—the one where she had looked up through the cockpit windows to see the 747 directly above them. She had planned it during her second pee trip and executed it during her third, scoring a large, heavy steak knife from a drawer. She had shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans, piercing the pocket’s internal lining so that the blade was between her thigh and her pant leg, and the wooden handle was concealed in the pocket. With a chef’s knife, this would have been crazy, but the steak knife wasn’t sharp enough to do damage as long as it stayed flat against her skin.
Which only reminded her of a bit of lore she’d picked up in Girl Scouts, which was that jeans were the worst possible clothing for cold and wet weather. The heavy cotton fabric would soak up moisture and then lose its power to insulate.
Anyway, trapped now in the cabin by Khalid’s free-floating rage, unable to sleep, and with absolutely nothing to do, she decided to kill some time by watching a movie. It was a ridiculous urge, but it might be the last movie she’d ever watch and she literally could not think of anything else to do. One of the DVDs on the shelf was
The cabin was so arranged that the television monitor was in its aft bulkhead, facing forward, at the foot of the bed. Zula had made a pile of pillows at the head of the bed and arranged herself facing the screen, which meant that her back was to the entrance, off to one side.
Perhaps an hour into the movie, she became aware that she was not alone. The door had been opened a crack. Someone had been peering through, watching the movie with her.
Her first reaction was embarrassment more than anything else, since the film had a couple of ridiculous comic-relief subplots featuring extremely broad sexual comedy, probably meant to be self-mocking and read ironically by most of the intended audience, but which others on this plane might be inclined to take at face value.
She then got a feeling of vulnerability and discomfort from her position: lying on a bed. So she grabbed the remote, paused the video, and swung her feet onto the floor, preparing to stand up and see who was peeking in at the door.
As she was getting to her feet the door swung inward violently and knocked her back. The edge of the bed caught the back of her legs and made her sprawl back onto the mattress. Khalid stepped into the room, closed the door behind himself, and locked it.
She was making to sit up and get back on her feet, but he swung wildly at her face. She recoiled enough to take most of the force out of the blow, but something hard and sharp sideswiped her across the cheek and sent her back onto her ass with tears welling out of her eyes: not out of emotion, but an involuntary response to being struck in the face. Had she just been pistol-whipped? She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes and felt something hard and cold press into her forehead: the barrel of a gun. It kept coming, obliging her to roll back. She ended up supine with the top of her head against the aft bulkhead, the frozen TV monitor and the control panel of the DVD player above her. The gun came away. She blinked away tears and saw the muzzle of the weapon aimed at her from maybe two feet away, Khalid holding it in his right hand, using his left to undo his trousers and pull them down. A totally erect penis snapped out. Zula was not a huge penis expert, but she knew it took at least a little bit of time for one of them to get that hard, which made her realize that Khalid must have been standing outside the door for a while, getting himself ready for this. All the other men in the cabin must have fallen asleep.
