he hadn’t expected was the sheer chaos of the place. Many passengers milled around, while some clumped together to speak angrily about delayed or cancelled flights; somewhere someone was sobbing. Children darted back and forth, and several babies wailed.
He had the sense that something had happened, something horrible, and there was only one sort of thing like that that could make an airport chaotic. Yet the captain of Chato’s plane had mentioned no disaster.
Maybe it just happened now. No, he would have heard something. So, it—whatever it was—had occurred before his flight put down. It must have been after the one announcement, and it must have been too late for the pilot to go to another airport; jets had only so much reserve fuel, after all.
So, they didn’t say a thing because they wanted to keep us from panicking, he thought grimly. Swell.
A youth hardly out of his teens and dressed in old jeans and a white tee-shirt smeared with something dark walked by.
Chato grabbed the young man’s arm. “Excuse me. What happened here, can you tell me? I just got off a plane from New York and—”
”A bomb!” the youth cried, his voice thick with fear and a West Texas accent.
“Where?”
The kid nodded with his chin toward the line of tall windows opposite the gate where Chato had disembarked. “Out there. Some terrorist had a bomb. I think it was one of them Eye-ranians. Blew up the whole plane right there on the runway. It was terrible, just terrible. They got firemen and ambulances out there, but I don’t know if anyone’s gonna make it....” The kid began sobbing and Chato let go and watched as he struggled through the crowd.
Chato was stunned. A terrorist here? He moved forward, and looked out toward the line of windows on the left, and now he could see the wreckage in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile. He saw emergency vehicles, and saw the flames and billowing black smoke, even in the daylight, and he wondered how his plane’s pilot had negotiated the landing so that no one aboard had seen it.
Clever, real clever. Chato didn’t much like being manipulated like that. Of course, what good would it have done to panic them while they were still in the air? Yeah, right; wait until we’re on the ground, then we can panic.
Now, he watched as people scrambled along the tarmac, some into ambulances, others standing with emergency personnel; he sensed futility. No matter what they did out there...it was too late. Inside the building he watched as men and women and children stumbled along, some pushing others, all of them close to panicking. The bomb had set them off, too, he knew; maybe they were afraid that there were other terrorists, perhaps even in the building who might harm others.
Terrorists. In a border airport in southern Texas. Sure. Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, yeah, maybe. But here? Something wasn’t right.
He checked a monitor. Most departing flights were cancelled; his was one. Of course.
Someone next to him started complaining that when he got home he was going to write to the president of the airlines about this incompetence—he had important business in Vegas, by God, and it had to be done on time, by God—and Chato was relieved he wouldn’t have to fly all the way to Nevada with him; with his luck, the guy would have sat next to him and bitched the whole time.
Now that he knew he didn’t have to rush for a connecting flight, he took time to study his fellow strandees. They were a mixed bag: young and old and in-between, a few in wheelchairs or with canes, a fairly equal combination of Anglo and black and Hispanic, with a handful of Asians. Knots of businessmen in anonymous gray suits and look-alike leather briefcases, and several elderly nuns in old-fashioned habits, a Dallas matron with bouffant hairdo and too much eye makeup, a black kid with gold chains and a gold front tooth to match, two little girls in matching pink and lavender outfits each clutching a stuffed animal, a tall Sikh in all white, and more, dozens more. These people didn’t seem to know where they were going, only that they didn’t want to stay here, didn’t want to stay in one place for too long. And beneath the anxiety and disorientation....
He felt...it.
He supposed he’d been vaguely aware of it before this; perhaps it was what had troubled him when he first arrived. But now that he stood there, not moving, he felt it, felt that touch of something else, of somewhere else.
He had had several close brushes with the supernatural before, and he knew its caress.
An Apache shaman, he’d trained with his teacher long ago before leaving home; for a long time he had turned his back on his discipline. But in the past few years he’d gone through a lot, and his instruction had come in handy.
There was more here than just the explosion out on the runway. God knows, that would have been enough for most places, but not here. There was more...much more.
Blood had been spilled here, he could smell it, and could sense, too, that something had awakened with the spilling of the blood.
He felt as if something shifted under his feet, but when he looked back he saw nothing but the innocuous gray tile.
Sunny, he thought suddenly. He had to get to a phone and let her know that he was okay. He checked his watch. 6:15 here, which meant 4:15 at home, and she’d be expecting him in a few hours. Only he wasn’t going to be at McCarron in a few hours.
Mechanically he moved toward the phones, then stopped when he saw the lines there. They snaked back away from the handful of booths, back toward the waiting area.
Determined, he walked into another gate area, but the situation was the same there. At the newsstand no one stood behind the register. Several customers waited patiently to pay, if only someone would appear; one guy was busy reading the Wall Street Journal, not even aware of what was going on around him. Behind him a short Hispanic woman stood with a magazine in her hand.
As he studied the area, he realized that since he’d arrived he hadn’t seen a single airport employee. No one manned the ticket desks at the gates, nor had there been any announcements about incoming flights or departures. There was nothing but the damned Muzak inanely playing some cheerful mishmash of a Beatles’ tune.
He had the feeling someone was watching him, but when he looked around he saw that everyone else seemed occupied in their own little drama. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling. The hair at the back of his neck prickled, and he rubbed the area. He tightened the band holding back his long black hair, then sighed.
Puzzled, he took the escalator to the lower level where the barrage carrousels were located. The carrousels moved, all right, going around and around, but no luggage shot out of the chutes. He checked the rental car desks; no one. No one stood behind the ticket reservation counters, either.
In fact, except for hundreds of panicked passengers the airport was deserted. He looked outside and saw no taxis waiting along the curb. There were no porters, either.
Where were all the airport employees? Off somewhere having a union meeting? On a mass coffee break, perhaps?
Or had they fled?
He thought he smelled burning french fries drifting down from the upper level, and he hoped that someone would go into one of the restaurants and investigate before the whole place caught on fire.
The music system was now playing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” God, how he hated bouncy tunes like that. It was
