Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 8

Refuelling. Dawn's Early Light.

The Approach of the Langoliers.

Angel of the Morning. The Time-Keepers

of Eternity. Take-off.

1

Bethany had cast away her almost tasteless cigarette and was halfway up the ladder again when Bob Jenkins shouted: 'I think they're coming out!'

She turned and ran back down the stairs. A series of dark blobs was emerging from the luggage bay and crawling along the conveyor belt. Bob and Bethany ran to meet them.

Dinah was strapped to the stretcher. Rudy had one end, Nick the other. They were walking on their knees, and Bethany could hear the bald man breathing in harsh, out-of-breath gasps.

'Let me help,' she told him, and Rudy gave up his end of the stretcher willingly.

'Try not to jiggle her,' Nick said, swinging his legs off the conveyor belt. 'Albert, get on Bethany's end and help us take her up the stairs. We want this thing to stay as level as possible.'

'How bad is she?' Bethany asked Albert.

'Not good,' he said grimly. 'Unconscious but still alive. That's all I know.'

'Where are Gaffney and Toomy?' Bob asked as they crossed to the plane. He had to raise his voice slightly to be heard; the crunching sound was louder now, and that shrieking wounded-transmission undertone was becoming a dominant, maddening note.

'Gaffney's dead and Toomy might as well be,' Nick said. 'Right now there's no time.' He halted at the foot of the stairs. 'Mind you keep your end up, you two.'

They moved the stretcher slowly and carefully up the stairs, Nick walking backward and bent over the forward end, Albert and Bethany holding the stretcher up at forehead level and jostling hips on the narrow stairway at the rear. Bob, Rudy, and Laurel followed behind. Laurel had spoken only once since Albert and Nick had returned, to ask if Toomy was dead. When Nick told her he wasn't, she had looked at him closely and then nodded her head with relief.

Brian was standing at the cockpit door when Nick reached the top of the ladder and eased his end of the stretcher inside.

'I want to put her in first class,' Nick said, 'with this end of the stretcher raised so her head is up. Can I do that?'

'No problem. Secure the stretcher by looping a couple of seatbelts through the head-frame. Do you see where?'

'Yes.' And to Albert and Bethany: 'Come on up. You're doing fine.'

In the cabin lights, the blood smeared on Dinah's cheeks and chin stood out starkly against her yellowwhite skin. Her eyes were closed; her lids were a delicate shade of lavender. Under the belt (in which Nick had punched a new hole, high above the others), the makeshift compress was dark red. Brian could hear her breathing. It sounded like a straw dragging wind at the bottom of an almost empty glass.

'It's bad, isn't it?' Brian asked in a low voice.

'Well, it's her lung and not her heart, and she's not filling up anywhere near as fast as I was afraid she might ... but it's bad, yes.'

'Will she live until we get back?'

'How in hell should I know?' Nick shouted at him suddenly. 'I'm a soldier, not a bloody sawbones!'

The others froze, looking at him with cautious eyes. Laurel felt her skin prickle again.

'I'm sorry,' Nick muttered. 'Time travel plays the very devil with one's nerves, doesn't it? I'm very sorry.'

'No need to apologize,' Laurel said, and touched his arm. 'We're all under strain.'

He gave her a tired smile and touched her hair. 'You're a sweetheart, Laurel, and no mistake. Come on - let's strap her in and see what we can do about getting the hell out of here.'

2

Five minutes later Dinah's stretcher had been secured in an inclined position to a pair of first-class seats, her head up, her feet down. The rest of the passengers were gathered in a tight little knot around Brian in the first-class serving area.

'We need to refuel the plane,' Brian said. 'I'm going to start the other engine now and pull over as close as I can to that 727-400 at the jetway.' He pointed to the Delta plane, which was just a gray lump in the dark. 'Because our aircraft sits higher, I'll be able to lay our right wing right over the Delta's left wing. While I do that, four of you are going to bring over a hose cart - there's one sitting by the other jetway. I saw it before it got dark.'

'Maybe we better wake Sleeping Beauty at the back of the plane and get him to lend a hand,' Bob said.

Brian thought it over briefly and then shook his head. 'The last thing we need right now is another scared, disoriented passenger on our hands - and one with a killer hangover to boot. And we won't need him - two strong men can push a hose cart in a pinch. I've seen it done. Just check the transmission lever to make sure it's in neutral. It wants to end up directly beneath the overlapping wings. Got it?'

They all nodded. Brian looked them over and decided that Rudy and Bethany were still too blown from wrestling the stretcher to be of much help. 'Nick, Bob, and Albert. You push. Laurel, you steer. Okay?'

They nodded.

'Go on and do it, then. Bethany? Mr Warwick? Go down with them. Pull the ladder away from the plane, and when I've got the plane repositioned, place it next to the overlapping wings. The wings, not the door. Got it?'

They nodded. Looking around at them, Brian saw that their eyes looked clear and bright for the first time since they had landed. Of course, he thought. They have something to do now. And so do I, thank God.

3

As they approached the hose cart sitting off to the left of the unoccupied jetway, Laurel realized she could actually see it. 'My God,' she said. 'It's coming daylight again already. How long has it been since it got dark?'

'Less than forty minutes, by my watch,' Bob said, 'but I have a feeling that my watch doesn't keep very accurate time when we're outside the plane. I've also got a feeling time doesn't matter much here, anyway.'

'What's going to happen to Mr Toomy?' Laurel asked.

They had reached the cart. It was a small vehicle with a tank on the back, an open-air cab, and thick black hoses coiled on either side. Nick put an arm around her waist and turned her toward him. For a moment she had the crazy idea that he meant to kiss her, and she felt her heart speed up.

'I don't know what's going to happen to him,' he said. 'All I know is that when the chips were down, I chose to do what Dinah wanted. I left him lying unconscious on the floor. All right?'

'No,' she said in a slightly unsteady voice, 'but I guess it will have to do.'

He smiled a little, nodded, and gave her waist a brief squeeze. 'Would you like to go to dinner with me when and if we make it back to LA?'

'Yes,' she said at once. 'That would be something to look forward to.'

He nodded again. 'For me, too. But unless we can get this airplane refuelled, we're not going anywhere.' He looked at the open cab of the hose cart. 'Can you find neutral, do you think?'

Laurel eyed the stick-shift jutting up from the floor of the cab. 'I'm afraid I only drive an automatic.'

'I'll do it.' Albert jumped into the cab, depressed the clutch, then peered at the diagram on the knob of the shift lever. Behind him, the 767's second engine whined into life and both engines began to throb harder as Brian powered up. The noise was very loud, but Laurel found she didn't mind at all. It blotted out that other sound, at least temporarily. And she kept wanting to look at Nick. Had he actually invited her out to dinner? Already it seemed hard to believe.

Albert changed gears, then waggled the shift lever. 'Got it,' he said, and jumped down - 'Up you go, Laurel. Once we get it rolling, you'll have to hang a hard right and bring it around in a circle.'

'All right.'

She looked back nervously as the three men lined themselves up along the rear of the hose cart with Nick in the middle.

'Ready, you lot?' he asked.

Albert and Bob nodded.

'Right, then - all together.'

Bob had been braced to push as hard as he could, and damn the low back pain which had plagued him for the last ten years, but the hose cart rolled with absurd case. Laurel hauled the stiff, balky steering wheel around with all her might. The yellow cart described a small circle on the gray tarmac and began to roll back toward the 767, which was trundling slowly into position on the righthand side of the parked Delta jet.

'The difference between the two aircraft is incredible,' Bob said.

'Yes,' Nick agreed. 'You were right, Albert. We may have wandered away from the present, but in some strange way, that airplane is still a part of it.'

' So are we,' Albert said. 'At least, so far.'

The 767's turbines died, leaving only the steady low rumble of the APUs -Brian was now running all four of them. They were not loud enough to cover the sound in the east. Before, that sound had had a kind of massive uniformity, but as it neared it was fragmenting; there seemed to be sounds within sounds, and the sum total began to seem horribly familiar.

Animals at feeding time, Laurel thought, and shivered. That's what it sounds like - the sound of feeding animals, sent through an amplifier and blown up to grotesque proportions.

She shivered violently and felt panic begin to nibble at her thoughts, an elemental force she could control no more than she could control whatever was making that sound.

'Maybe if we could see it, we could deal with it,' Bob said as they began to push the fuel cart again.

Albert glanced at him briefly and said, 'I don't think so.'

4

Brian appeared in the forward door of the 767 and motioned Bethany and Rudy to roll the ladder over to him. When they did, he stepped onto the platform at the top and pointed to the overlapping wings. As they rolled him in that direction, he listened to the approaching noise and found himself remembering a movie he had seen on the late show a long time ago. In it, Charlton Heston had owned a big plantation in South America. The plantation had been attacked by a vast moving carpet of soldier ants, ants which ate everything in their path - trees, grass, buildings, cows, men. What had that movie been called? Brian couldn't remember. He only remembered that Charlton had kept trying increasingly desperate tricks to stop the ants, or at least delay them. Had he beaten them in the end? Brian couldn't remember, but a fragment of his dream suddenly recurred, disturbing in its lack of association to anything: an ominous red sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

'Hold it!' he shouted down to Rudy and Bethany.

They ceased pushing, and Brian carefully climbed down the ladder until his head was on a level with the underside of the Delta jet's wing. Both the 767 and 727 were equipped with single-point fuelling ports in the left wing. He was now looking at a small square hatch with the words FUEL TANK ACCESS and CHECK SHUT-OFF VALVE BEFORE REFUELLING stencilled across it. And some wit had pasted a round yellow happy-face sticker to the fuel hatch. It was the final surreal touch.

Albert, Bob, and Nick had pushed the hose cart into position below him and were now looking up, their faces dirty gray circles in the brightening gloom. Brian leaned over and shouted down to Nick.

'There are two hoses, one on each side of the cart! I want the short one!'

Nick pulled it free and handed it up. Holding both the ladder and the nozzle of the hose with one hand, Brian leaned under the wing and opened the refuelling hatch. Inside was a male connector with a steel prong poking out like a finger. Brian leaned further out ... and slipped. He grabbed the railing of the ladder.

'Hold on, mate,' Nick said, mounting the ladder. 'Help is on the way.' He stopped three rungs below Brian and seized his belt. 'Do me a favor, all right?'

'What's that?'

'Don't fart.'

'I'll try, but no promises.'

He leaned out again and looked down at the others. Rudy and Bethany had joined Bob and Albert below the wing. 'Move away, unless you want a jet-fuel shower!' he called. 'I can't control the Delta's shut-off valve, and it may leak!' As he waited for them to back away he thought, Of course, it may not. For all I know, the tanks on this thing are as dry as a goddam bone.

He leaned out again, using both hands now that Nick had him firmly anchored, and slammed the nozzle into the fuel port. There was a brief, spattering shower of jet-fuel - a very welcome shower, under the circumstances - and then a hard metallic click. Brian twisted the nozzle a quarter-turn to the right, locking it into place, and listened with satisfaction as jet-fuel ran down the hose to the cart, where a closed valve would dam its flow.

'Okay,' he sighed, pulling himself back to the ladder. 'So far. so good.'

'What now, mate? How do we make that cart run? Do we jump-start it from the plane, or what?'

'I doubt if we could do that even if someone had remembered to bring the Jumper cables,' Brian said. 'Luckily, it doesn't have to run. Essentially, the cart is just a gadget to filter and transfer fuel. I'm going to use the auxiliary power units on our plane to suck the fuel out of the 727 the way you'd use a straw to suck lemonade out of a glass.'

'How long is it going to take?'

'Under optimum conditions - which would mean pumping with ground power -we could load 2,000 pounds of fuel a minute. Doing it like this makes it harder to figure. I've never had to use the APUs to pump fuel before. At least an hour. Maybe two.'

Nick gazed anxiously eastward for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was low. 'Do me a favor, mate - don't tell the others that.'

'Why not?'

'Because I don't think we have two hours. We may not even have one.'

5

Alone in first class, Dinah Catherine Bellman opened her eyes. And saw. 'Craig,' she whispered.

6

Craig.

But he didn't want to hear his name. He only wanted to be left alone; he never wanted to hear his name again. When people called his name, something bad always happened. Always.

Craig! Get up, Craig!

No. He wouldn't get up. His head had become a vast chambered hive; pain roared and raved in each irregular room and crooked corridor. Bees had come. The bees had thought he was dead. They had invaded his head and turned his skull into a honeycomb. And now ... now ...

They sense my thoughts and are trying to sting them to death, he thought, and uttered a thick, agonized groan. His blood-streaked hands opened and closed slowly on the industrial carpet which covered the lower-lobby floor. Let me die, oh please just let me die.

Craig, you have to get up! Now!

It was his father's voice, the one voice he had never been able to refuse or shut out. But he would refuse it now. He would shut it out now.

'Go away,' he croaked. 'I hate you. Go away.'

Pain blared through his head in a golden shriek of trumpets. Clouds of bees, furious and stinging, flew from the bells as they blew.

Oh let me die, he thought. Oh let me die. This is hell. I am in a hell of bees and big-band horns.

Get up, Craiggy-weggy. It's your birthday, and guess what? As soon as you get up, someone's going to hand you a beer and hit you over the head ... because THIS thud's for you!

'No,' he said. 'No more hitting.' His hands shuffled on the carpet. He made an effort to open his eyes, but a glue of drying blood had stuck them shut. 'You're dead. Both of you are dead. You can't hit me, and you can't make me do things. Both of you are dead, and I want to be dead, too.'

But he wasn't dead. Somewhere beyond these phantom voices he could hear the whine of )et engines ... and that other sound. The sound of the langoliers on the march. On the run.

Craig. get up. You have to get up.

He realized that it wasn't the voice of his father, or of his mother, either. That had only been his poor, wounded mind trying to fool itself. This was a voice from ... from

(above?)

some other place, some high bright place where pain was a myth and pressure was a dream.

Craig, they've come to you - all the people you wanted to see. They left Boston and came here. That's how important you are to them. You can still do it, Craig. You can still pull the pin. There's still time to hand in your papers and fall out of your father's army ... if you're man enough to do it, that is.

If you're man enough to do it.

'Man enough?' he croaked. 'Man enough? Whoever you are, you've got to be shitting me.'

He tried again to open his eyes. The tacky blood holding them shut gave a little but would not let go. He managed to work one hand up to his face.

It brushed the remains of his nose and he gave voice to a low, tired scream of pain. Inside his head the trumpets blared and the bees swarmed. He waited until the worst of the pain had subsided, then poked out two fingers and used them to pull his own eyelids up.

That corona of light was still there. It made a vaguely evocative shape in the gloom.

Slowly, a little at a time, Craig raised his head.

And saw her.

She stood within the corona of light.

It was the little girl, but her dark glasses were gone and she was looking at him, and her eyes were kind.

Come on, Craig. Get up. I know it's hard, but you have to get up -you have to. Because they are all here, they are all waiting ... but they won't wait forever. The langoliers will see to that.

She was not standing on the floor, he saw. Her shoes appeared to float an inch or two above it, and the bright light was all around her. She was outlined in spectral radiance.

Come, Craig. Get up.

He started struggling to his feet. It was very hard. His sense of balance was almost gone, and it was hard to hold his head up - because, of course, it was full of angry honeybees. Twice he fell back, but each time he began again, mesmerized and entranced by the glowing girl with her kind eyes and her promise of ultimate release.

They are all waiting, Craig. For you.

They are waiting for you.

7

Dinah lay on the stretcher, watching with her blind eyes as Craig Toomy got to one knee, fell over on his side, then began trying to rise once more. Her heart was suffused with a terrible stern pity for this hurt and broken man, this murdering fish that only wanted to explode. On his ruined, bloody face she saw a terrible mixture of emotions: fear, hope, and a kind of merciless determination.

I'm sorry, Mr Toomy, she thought. In spite of what you did, I'm sorry. But we need you.

Then called to him again, called with her own dying consciousness:

Get up, Craig! Hurry! It's almost too late!

And she sensed that it was.

8

Once the longer of the two hoses was looped under the belly of the 767 and attached to its fuel port, Brian returned to the cockpit, cycled up the APUs' and went to work sucking the 727-400's fuel tanks dry. As he watched the LED readout on his right tank slowly climb toward 24,000 pounds, he waited tensely for the APUs to start chugging and lugging, trying to eat fuel which would not burn.

The right tank had reached the 8,000-pound mark when he heard the note of the small jet engines at the rear of the plane change - they grew rough and labored.

'What's happening, mate?' Nick asked. He was sitting in the co-pilot's chair again. His hair was disarrayed, and there were wide streaks of grease and blood across his formerly natty button-down shirt.

'The APU engines are getting a taste of the 727's fuel and they don't like it,' Brian said. 'I hope Albert's magic works, Nick, but I don't know.'

Just before the LED reached 9,000 pounds in the right tank, the first APU cut out. A red ENGINE SHUTDOWN light appeared on Brian's board. He flicked the APU off.

'What can you do about it?' Nick asked, getting up and coming to look over Brian's shoulder.

'Use the other three APUs to keep the pumps running and hope,' Brian said.

The second APU cut out thirty seconds later, and while Brian was moving his hand to shut it down, the third went. The cockpit lights went with it; now there was only the irregular chug of the hydraulic pumps and the lights on Brian's board, which were flickering. The last APU was roaring choppily, cycling up and down, shaking the plane.

'I'm shutting down completely,' Brian said. He sounded harsh and strained to himself, a man who was way out of his depth and tiring fast in the undertow. 'We'll have to wait for the Delta's fuel to join our plane's time-stream, or time-frame, or whatever the fuck it is. We can't go on like this. A strong power-surge before the last APU cuts out could wipe the INS clean. Maybe even fry it.'

But as Brian reached for the switch, the engine's choppy note suddenly began to smooth out. He turned and stared at Nick unbelievingly. Nick looked back, and a big, slow grin lit his face.

'We might have lucked out, mate.'

Brian raised his hands, crossed both sets of fingers, and shook them in the air. 'I hope so,' he said, and swung back to the boards. He flicked the switches marked APU 1, 3, and 4. They kicked in smoothly. The cockpit lights flashed back on. The cabin bells binged. Nick whooped and clapped Brian on the back.

Bethany appeared in the doorway behind them. 'What's happening? Is everything all right?'

'I think,' Brian said without turning, 'that we might just have a shot at this thing.'

9

Craig finally managed to stand upright. The glowing girl now stood with her feet just above the luggage conveyor belt. She looked at him with a supernatural sweetness and something else ... something he had longed for his whole life. What was it?

He groped for it, and at last it came to him.

It was compassion.

Compassion and understanding.

He looked around and saw that the darkness was draining away. That meant he had been out all night, didn't it? He didn't know. And it didn't matter. All that mattered was that the glowing girl had brought them to him the investment bankers, the bond specialists, the commission-brokers, and the stock-rollers. They were here, they would want an explanation of just what young Mr Craiggy-Weggy Toomy-Woomy had been up to, and here was the ecstatic truth: monkey-business! That was what he had been up to - yards and yards of monkey-business - miles of monkey-business. And when he told them that ...

'They'll have to let me go ... won't they?'

Yes, she said. But you have to hurry, Craig. You have to hurry before they decide you're not coming and leave.

Craig began to make his slow way forward. The girl's feet did not move, but as he approached her she floated backward like a mirage, toward the rubber strips which hung between the luggage-retrieval area and the loading dock outside.

And . . . oh, glorious: she was smiling.

10

They were all back on the plane now, all except Bob and Albert, who were sitting on the stairs and listening to the sound roll toward them in a slow, broken wave.

Laurel Stevenson was standing at the open forward door and looking at the terminal, still wondering what they were going to do about Mr Toomy, when Bethany tugged at the back of her blouse.

'Dinah is talking in her sleep, or something. I think she might be delirious. Can you come?'

Laurel came. Rudy Warwick was sitting across from Dinah, holding one of her hands and looking at her anxiously.

'I dunno,' he said worriedly. 'I dunno, but I think she might be going.'

Laurel felt the girl's forehead. It was dry and very hot. The bleeding had either slowed down or stopped entirely, but the girl's respiration came in a series of pitiful whistling sounds. Blood was crusted around her mouth like strawberry sauce.

Laurel began, 'I think -'and then Dinah said, quite clearly, 'You have to hurry before they all decide you're not coming and leave.'

Laurel and Bethany exchanged puzzled, frightened glances.

'I think she's dreaming about that guy Toomy,' Rudy told Laurel. 'She said his name once.'

'Yes,' Dinah said. Her eyes were closed, but her head moved slightly and she appeared to listen. 'Yes I will be,' she said. 'If you want me to, I will. But hurry. I know it hurts, but you have to hurry.'

'She is delirious, isn't she?' Bethany whispered.

'No,' Laurel said. 'I don't think so. I think she might be ... dreaming.'

But that was not what she thought at all. What she really thought was that Dinah might be

(seeing)

doing something else. She didn't think she wanted to know what that something might be, although an idea whirled and danced far back in her mind. Laurel knew she could summon that idea if she wanted to, but she didn't. Because something creepy was going on here, extremely creepy, and she could not escape the idea that it did have something to do with

(don't kill him ... we need him)

Mr Toomy.

'Leave her alone,' she said in a dry, abrupt tone of voice. 'Leave her alone and let her

(do what she has to do to him)

sleep.'

'God, I hope we take off soon,' Bethany said miserably, and Rudy put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

11

Craig reached the conveyor belt and fell onto it. A white sheet of agony ripped through his head, his neck, his chest. He tried to remember what had happened to him and couldn't. He had run down the stalled escalator, he had hidden in a little room, he had sat tearing strips of paper in the dark ... and that was where memory stopped.

He raised his head, hair hanging in his eyes, and looked at the glowing girl, who now sat cross-legged in front of the rubber strips, an inch off the conveyor belt. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life; how could he ever have thought she was one of them?

'Are you an angel?' he croaked.

Yes, the glowing girl replied, and Craig felt his pain overwhelmed with joy. His vision blurred and then tears - the first ones he had ever cried as an adult - began to run slowly down his cheeks. Suddenly he found himself remembering his mother's sweet, droning, drunken voice as she sang that old song.

'Are you an angel of the morning? Will you be my angel of the morning?'

Yes - I will be. If you want me to, I will. But hurry. I know it hurts, Mr Toomy, but you have to hurry.

'Yes,' Craig sobbed, and began to crawl eagerly along the luggage conveyor belt toward her. Every movement sent fresh pain jig-jagging through him on irregular courses; blood dripped from his smashed nose and shattered mouth. Yet he still hurried as much as he could. Ahead of him, the little girl faded back through the hanging rubber strips, somehow not disturbing them at all as she went.

'Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby,' Craig said. He hawked up a spongy mat of blood, spat it on the wall where it clung like a huge dead spider, and tried to crawl faster.

12

To the east of the airport, a large cracking, rending sound filled the freakish morning. Bob and Albert got to their feet, faces pallid and filled with dreadful questions.

'What was that?' Albert asked.

'I think it was a tree,' Bob replied, and licked his lips.

'But there's no wind!'

'No,' Bob agreed. 'There's no wind.'

The noise had now become a moving barricade of splintered sound. Parts of it would seem to come into focus ... and then drop back again just before identification was possible. At one moment Albert could swear he heard something barking, and then the barks ... or yaps ... or whatever they were ... would be swallowed up by a brief sour humming sound like evil electricity. The only constants were the crunching and the steady drilling whine.

'What's happening?' Bethany called shrilly from behind them.

'Noth -'Albert began, and then Bob seized his shoulder and pointed.

'Look!' he shouted. 'Look over there!'

Far to the east of them, on the horizon, a series of power pylons marched north and south across a high wooded ridge. As Albert looked, one of the pylons tottered like a toy and then fell over, pulling a snarl of power cables after it. A moment later another pylon went, and another, and another.

'That's not all, either,' Albert said numbly. 'Look at the trees. The trees over there are shaking like shrubs.'

But they were not just shaking. As Albert and the others looked, the trees began to fall over, to disappear.

Crunch, smack, crunch, thud, BARK!

Crunch, smack, BARK! thump, crunch.

'We have to get out of here,' Bob said. He gripped Albert with both hands His eyes were huge, avid with a kind of idiotic terror. The expression stood in sick, jagged contrast to his narrow, intelligent face. 'I believe we have to get out of here right now.'

On the horizon, perhaps ten miles distant, the tall gantry of a radio tower trembled, rolled outward, and crashed down to disappear into the quaking trees. Now they could feel the very earth beginning to vibrate; it ran up the ladder and shook their feet in their shoes.

'Make it stop!' Bethany suddenly screamed from the doorway above them. She clapped her hands to her ears. 'Oh please make it STOP!'

But the sound-wave rolled on toward them - the crunching, smacking, eating sound of the langoliers.

13

'I don't like to tease, Brian, but how much longer?' Nick's voice was taut. 'There's a river about four miles east of here - I saw it when we were coming down - and I reckon whatever's coming is just now on the other side of it.'

Brian glanced at his fuel readouts. 24,000 pounds in the right wing; 16,000 pounds in the left. It was going faster now that he didn't have to pump the Delta's fuel overwing to the other side.

'Fifteen minutes,' he said. He could feel sweat standing out on his brow in big drops. 'We've got to have more fuel, Nick, or we'll come down dead in the Mojave Desert. Another ten minutes to unhook, button up, and taxi out.'

'You can't cut that? You're sure you can't cut that?'

Brian shook his head and turned back to his gauges.

14

Craig crawled slowly through the rubber strips, feeling them slide down his back like limp fingers. He emerged in the white, dead light of a new - and vastly shortened - day. The sound was terrible, overwhelming, the sound of an invading cannibal army. Even the sky seemed to shake with it, and for a moment fear froze him in place.

Look, his angel of the morning said, and pointed.

Craig looked ... and forgot his fear. Beyond the American Pride 767, in a triangle of dead grass bounded by two taxiways and a runway, there was a long mahogany boardroom table. It gleamed brightly in the listless light. At each place was a yellow legal pad, a pitcher of ice water, and a Waterford glass. Sitting around the table were two dozen men in sober bankers' suits, and now they were all turning to look at him.

Suddenly they began to clap their hands. They stood and faced him applauding his arrival. Craig felt a huge, grateful grin begin to stretch his face.

15

Dinah had been left alone in first class. Her breathing had become very labored now, and her voice was a strangled choke.

'Run to them, Craig! Quick! Quick!'

16

Craig tumbled off the conveyor, struck the concrete with a bone-rattling thump, and flailed to his feet. The pain no longer mattered. The angel had brought them! Of course she had brought them! Angels were like the ghosts in the story about Mr Scrooge - they could do anything they wanted! The corona around her had begun to dim and she was fading out, but it didn't matter. She had brought his salvation: a net in which he was finally, blessedly caught.

Run to them, Craig! Run around the plane! Run away from the plane! Run to them now!

Craig began to run - a shambling stride that quickly became a crippled sprint. As he ran his head nodded up and down like a sunflower on a broken stalk. He ran toward humorless, unforgiving men who were his salvation, men who might have been fisher-folk standing in a boat beyond an unsuspected silver sky, retrieving their net to see what fabulous things they had caught.

17

The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727-400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.

'All right,' he said, standing up.

'All right what?' Nick asked, also standing.

'We're uncoupling and getting the fuck out of here.'

The approaching noise had reached deafening levels. Mixed into the crunching smacking sound and the transmission squeal were falling trees and the dull crump of collapsing buildings. just before shutting the pumps down he had heard a number of crackling thuds followed by a series of deep splashes. A bridge falling into the river Nick had seen, he imagined.

'Mr Toomy!' Bethany screamed suddenly. 'It's Mr Toomy!'

Nick beat Brian out the door and into first class, but they were both in time to see Craig go shambling and lurching across the taxiway. He ignored the plane completely. His destination appeared to be an empty triangle of grass bounded by a pair of crisscrossing taxiways.

'What's he doing?' Rudy breathed.

'Never mind him,' Brian said. 'We're all out of time. Nick? Go down the ladder ahead of me. Hold me while I uncouple the hose.' Brian felt like a man standing naked on a beach as a tidal wave humps up on the horizon and rushes toward the shore.

Nick followed him down and laid hold of Brian's belt again as Brian leaned out and twisted the nozzle of the hose, unlocking it. A moment later he yanked the hose free and dropped it to the cement, where the nozzle-ring clanged dully. Brian slammed the fuel-port door shut.

'Come on,' he said after Nick had pulled him back. His face was dirty gray. 'Let's get out of here.'

But Nick did not move. He was frozen in place, staring to the east. His skin had gone the color of paper. On his face was an expression of dreamlike horror. His upper lip trembled, and in that moment he looked like a dog that is too frightened to snarl.

Brian turned his head slowly in that direction, hearing the tendons in his neck creak like a rusty spring on an old screen door as he did so. He turned his head and watched as the langoliers finally entered stage left.

18

'So you see,' Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, 'the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself - men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end - keeping communism out of South America - justifies any available means.'

'What procedures did you follow to check these fellows out?' a fat man in an expensive blue suit asked. 'Did you use a bond-insurance company, or does your bank retain a specific investigation firm in such cases?' Blue Suit's round, jowly face was perfectly shaved; his cheeks glowed either with good health or forty years of Scotch and sodas; his eyes were merciless chips of blue ice. They were wonderful eyes; they were father-eyes.

Somewhere, far away from this boardroom two floors below the top of the Prudential Center, Craig could hear a hell of a racket going on. Road construction, he supposed. There was always road construction going on in Boston, and he suspected that most of it was unnecessary, that in most cases it was just the old, old story - the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. His job was to deal with the man in the blue suit, and he couldn't wait to get started.

'We're waiting, Craig,' the president of his own banking institution said. Craig felt momentary surprise - Mr Parker hadn't been scheduled to attend this meeting - and then the feeling was overwhelmed by happiness.

'No procedures at all!' he screamed joyfully into their shocked faces. 'I just bought and bought and bought! I followed No ... PROCEDURES ... AT ALL!'

He was about to go on, to elaborate on this theme, to really expound on it, when a sound stopped him. This sound was not miles away; this sound was close, very close, perhaps in the boardroom itself.

A whickering chopping sound, like dry hungry teeth.

Suddenly Craig felt a deep need to tear some paper - any paper would do. He reached for the legal pad in front of his place at the table, but the pad was gone. So was the table. So were the bankers. So was Boston.

'Where am I?' he asked in a small, perplexed voice, and looked around. Suddenly he realized ... and suddenly he saw them.

The langoliers had come.

They had come for him.

Craig Toomy began to scream.

19

Brian could see them, but could not understand what it was he was seeing. In some strange way they seemed to defy seeing, and he sensed his frantic, overstressed mind trying to change the incoming information, to make the shapes which had begun to appear at the east end of Runway 21 into something it could understand.

At first there were only two shapes, one black, one a dark tomato red.

Are they balls? his mind asked doubtfully. Could they be balls?

Something actually seemed to click in the center of his head and they were balls, sort of like beachballs, but balls which rippled and contracted and then expanded again, as if he was seeing them through a heat-haze. They came bowling out of the high dead grass at the end of Runway 21, leaving cut swaths of blackness behind them. They were somehow cutting the grass

No, his mind reluctantly denied. They are not just cutting the grass, and you know it. They are cutting a lot more than the grass.

What they left behind were narrow lines of perfect blackness. And now, as they raced playfully down the white concrete at the end of the runway, they were still leaving narrow dark tracks behind. They glistened like tar.

No. his mind reluctantly denied. Not tar. You know what that blackness is. It's nothing. Nothing at all. They are eating a lot more than the surface of the runway.

There was something malignantly joyful about their behavior. They crisscrossed each other's paths, leaving a wavery black X on the outer taxiway. They bounced high in the air, did an exuberant, crisscrossing maneuver, and then raced straight for the plane.

As they did, Brian screamed and Nick screamed beside him. Faces lurked below the surfaces of the racing balls - monstrous, alien faces. They shimmered and twitched and wavered like faces made of glowing swamp-gas. The eyes were only rudimentary indentations, but the mouths were huge: semicircular caves lined with gnashing, blurring teeth.

They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.

A Texaco fuel truck was parked on the outer taxiway. The langoliers pounced upon it, high-speed teeth whirring and crunching and bulging out of their blurred bodies. They went through it without pause. One of them burrowed a path directly through the rear tires, and for a moment, before the tires collapsed, Brian could see the shape it had cut - a shape like a cartoon mouse-hole in a cartoon baseboard.

The other leaped high, disappeared for a moment behind the Texaco truck's boxy tank, and then blasted straight through, leaving a metal-ringed hole from which av-gas sprayed in a dull amber flood. They struck the ground, bounced as if on springs, crisscrossed again, and raced on toward the airplane. Reality peeled away in narrow strips beneath them, peeled away wherever and whatever they touched, and as they neared, Brian realized that they were unzipping more than the world - they were opening all the depths of forever.

They reached the edge of the tarmac and paused. They jittered uncertainly in place for a moment, looking like the bouncing balls that hopped over the words in old movie-house sing-alongs.

Then they turned and zipped off in a new direction.

Zipped off in the direction of Craig Toomy who stood watching them and screaming into the white day.

With a huge effort, Brian snapped the paralysis which held him. He elbowed Nick, who was still frozen below him. 'Come on!' Nick didn't move and Brian drove his elbow back harder this time, connecting solidly with Nick's forehead. 'Come on, I said! Move your ass! We're getting out of here!'

Now more black and red balls were appearing at the edge of the airport. They bounced, danced, circled ... and then raced toward them.

20

You can't get away from them, his father had said, because of their legs. Their fast little legs.

Craig tried, nevertheless.

He turned and ran for the terminal, casting horrified grimacing looks behind him as he did. His shoes rattled on the pavement. He ignored the American Pride 767, which was now cycling up again, and ran for the luggage area instead.

No, Craig, his father said. You may THINK you're running, but you're not. You know what you're really doing - you're SCAMPERING!

Behind him the two ball-shapes sped up, closing the gap with effortless, happy speed. They crisscrossed twice, just a pair of daffy showoffs in a dead world, leaving spiky lines of blackness behind them. They rolled after Craig about seven inches apart, creating what looked like negative ski-tracks behind their weird, shimmering bodies. They caught him twenty feet from the luggage conveyor belt and chewed off his feet in a millisecond. At one moment his briskly scampering feet were there. At the next, Craig was three inches shorter; his feet, along with his expensive Bally loafers, had simply ceased to exist. There was no blood; the wounds were cauterized instantly in the langoliers' scorching passage.

Craig didn't know his feet had ceased to exist. He scampered on the stumps of his ankles, and as the first pain began to sizzle up his legs, the langoliers banked in a tight turn and came back, rolling up the pavement side by side. Their trails crossed twice this time, creating a crescent of cement bordered in black, like a depiction of the moon in a child's coloring book. Only this crescent began to sink, not into the earth - for there appeared to be no earth beneath the surface - but into nowhere at all.

This time the langoliers bounced upward in perfect tandem and clipped Craig off at the knees. He came down, still trying to run, and then fell sprawling, waving his stumps. His scampering days were over.

'No!' he screamed. 'No, Daddy! No! I'll be good! Please make them go away! I'll be good, I SWEAR ILL BE GOOD FROM NOW ON IF YOU JUST MAKE THEM GO AW -'

Then they rushed at him again, gibbering yammering buzzing whining, and he saw the frozen machine blur of their gnashing teeth and felt the hot bellows of their frantic, blind vitality in the half-instant before they began to cut him apart in random chunks.

His last thought was: How can their little legs be fast? They have no le

21

Scores of the black things had now appeared, and Laurel understood that soon there would be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions. Even with the jet engines screaming through the open forward door as Brian pulled the 767 away from the ladder and the wing of the Delta jet, she could hear their yammering, inhuman cry.

Great looping coils of blackness crisscrossed the end of Runway 21 and then the tracks arrowed toward the terminal, converging as the balls making them rushed toward Craig Toomy.

I guess they don't get live meat very often, she thought, and suddenly felt like vomiting.

Nick Hopewell slammed the forward door after one final, unbelieving glance and dogged it shut. He began to stagger back down the aisle, swaying from side to side like a drunk as he came. His eyes seemed to fill his whole face. Blood streamed down his chin; he had bitten his lower lips deeply. He put his arms around Laurel and buried his burning face in the hollow where her neck met her shoulder. She put her arms around him and held him tight.

22

In the cockpit, Brian powered up as fast as he dared, and sent the 767 charging along the taxiway at a suicidal rate of speed. The eastern edge of the airport was now black with the invading balls; the end of Runway 21 had completely disappeared and the world beyond it was going. In that direction the white, unmoving sky now arched down over a world of scrawled black lines and fallen trees.

As the plane neared the end of the taxiway, Brian grabbed the microphone and shouted: 'Belt in! Belt in! If you're not belted in, hold on!'

He slowed marginally, then slewed the 767 onto Runway 33. As he did so he saw something which made his mind cringe and wail: huge sections of the world which lay to the east of the runway, huge irregular pieces of reality itself, were falling into the ground like freight elevators, leaving big senseless chunks of emptiness behind.

They are eating the world, he thought. My God, my dear God, they are eating the world.

Then the entire airfield was turning in front of him and Flight 29 was pointed west again, with Runway 33 lying open and long and deserted before it.

23

Overhead compartments burst open when the 767 swerved onto the runway, spraying carry-on luggage across the main cabin in a deadly hail. Bethany, who hadn't had time to fasten her seatbelt, was hurled into Albert Kaussner's lap. Albert noticed neither his lapful of warm girl nor the attache case that caromed off the curved wall three feet in front of his nose. He saw only the dark, speeding shapes rushing across Runway 21 to the left of them, and the glistening dark tracks they left behind. These tracks converged in a giant well of blackness where the luggage-unloading area had been.

They are being drawn to Mr Toomy, he thought, or to where Mr Toomy was. If he hadn't come out of the terminal, they would have chosen the airplane instead. They would have eaten it - and us inside it - from the wheels up.

Behind him, Bob Jenkins spoke in a trembling, awed voice. 'Now we know, don't we?'

'What?' Laurel screamed in an odd, breathless voice she did not recognize as her own. A duffel-bag landed in her lap; Nick raised his head, let go of her, and batted it absently into the aisle. 'What do we know?'

'Why, what happens to today when it becomes yesterday, what happens to the present when it becomes the past. It waits - dead and empty and deserted. It waits for them. It waits for the time-keepers of eternity, always running along behind, cleaning up the mess in the most efficient way possible ... by eating it.'

'Mr Toomy knew about them,' Dinah said in a clear, dreaming voice. 'Mr Toomy says they are the langoliers.' Then the jet engines cycled up to full power and the plane charged down Runway 33.

24

Brian saw two of the balls zip across the runway ahead of him, peeling back the surface of reality in a pair of parallel tracks which gleamed like polished ebony. It was too late to stop. The 767 shuddered like a dog with a chill as it raced over the empty places, but he was able to hold it on the runway. He shoved his throttles forward, burying them, and watched his ground-speed indicator rise toward the commit point. Even now he could hear those manic chewing, gobbling sounds ... although he did not know if they were in his ears or only his reeling mind. And did not care.

25

Leaning over Laurel to look out the window, Nick saw the Bangor International terminal sliced, diced, chopped, and channelled. It tottered in its various jigsaw pieces and then began to tumble into loony chasms of darkness.

Bethany Simms screamed. A black track was speeding along next to the 767, chewing up the edge of the runway. Suddenly it jagged to the right and disappeared underneath the plane.

There was another terrific bump.

'Did it get us?' Nick shouted. 'Did it get us?'

No one answered him. Their pale, terrified faces stared out the windows and no one answered him. Trees rushed by in a gray-green blur. In the cockpit, Brian sat tensely forward in his seat, waiting for one of those balls to bounce up in front of the cockpit window and bullet through. None did.

On his board, the last red lights turned green. Brian hauled back on the yoke and the 767 was airborne again.

26

In the main cabin, a black-bearded man with bloodshot eyes staggered forward, blinking owlishly at his fellow travellers. 'Are we almost in Boston yet?' he inquired at large. 'I hope so, because I want to go back to bed. I've got one bastard of a headache.'

1