Panic Button

Fifteen

Blood oozed from the crack in the wall inches from Max’s face.

From the doorway, Jo stared at it too — horror beginning to register on her face. The dark red trickle formed an exclamation mark as it slid down the wall panel, communicating its dreadful warning of something too horrible to imagine.

Max took a breath and heaved the axe into the air again, smashing at the wall panel with increasingly heavy blows. The wall gave way beneath his attack, and he jabbed at the supporting beams with the pick head, weakening them. Dropping the axe, he shouldered the last remnants of the supporting beams and splintered sections of wall, breaking through and stumbling into the cramped luggage compartment.

It was hot and humid inside, the small interior space baked by the heat of the engines, which rumbled on noisily, either side of him. He took a step forward, sucking in a mouthful of air, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

The smell was terrible, made worse by the heat of the engines. It was an affront to the senses, ripe and pungent like rubbish bags of mouldy food left to burst open beneath the glare of a hot sun. Max gagged on the stench and bent his arm over his nose and mouth.

Behind him in the bathroom, Jo made a sound registering her disgust. She could smell it back there too.

Max was standing in the rotten belly of the plane. He glanced around at the stacks of suitcases in the scant light from the bathroom. One of the suitcases nearest to him had been torn by the axe blade and was leaking blood.

“Oh God…” Max said, grabbing the case and dragging it back into the bathroom.

He crouched and unzipped the case. Jo watched from over his shoulder, hand over her mouth. She looked terrified of what they might discover inside.

Max lifted the lid of the case, slowly.

It was crammed to overflowing with black refuse sacks. A mess of blood was oozing from the one the axe had torn. Max needed two hands to work now, trying to keep the contents of his stomach down as the full power of the stink emanating from the case invaded his nostrils. Gritting his teeth he tore open the black bag, widening the bloodied slit to see a clump of dark hair.

He jumped back in horror.

Jo cried out through her hand. “What the hell?!”

Max stared at the hair in disbelief.

It was matted with blood and protruded through the opening in the bag. He steeled himself and tore away more of the black plastic. Mike’s lifeless eyes stared back at him. Max gagged and coughed.

He scrambled over to the toilet and lifted the lid, retching his guts up into the bowl. He clambered to his feet and splashed cool water over his face and mouth, regaining his composure.

Jo stood stock still over the suitcase, looking down at the face, the blood, and those dead eyes.

“Who is it?” she asked. Her voice was barely audible through her fear.

“It’s Mike, the real Max’s brother.”

“That’s impossible… are you sure?”

“Yeah.” Max tried not to gag again. “It’s him.”

Jo peered at the man’s face, looking up at her from the bin bag. She remembered the video-cam footage Alligator had shown them. Poor Mike strapped down, his frantic screams as the killer swung the machete down severing his arms.

“But we saw him. That was live footage, wasn’t it?”

The penny dropped.

“They killed them — before we even took off.”

“Jesus,” Max said, staring at Mike’s blood-smeared face, “We’ve been watching recordings.”

They both looked over at the pile of suitcases beyond the hole in the wall. Their thought processes were racing in tandem.

“Do you think… they’re all here?” Jo asked.

It was a fearsome question and the possibilities were too dreadful to consider. But consider them she must — they’d come this far to uncovering the truth. Max dove through the wall and started dragging cases from the luggage hold into the bathroom. Jo helped him, struggling beneath the weight of the charnel cargo.

One by one they cleared the area. Max pulled the final case from the back of the compartment, revealing one last remaining item — a human shape wrapped in black bin bags and bound tightly with thick gaffer tape. Max struggled with the dead weight, managing to pull it around until the feet were at the edge of the hole in the wall. Jo grabbed the feet and helped him drag the body out and onto the pile of luggage. Max emerged from the luggage hold, sweating from his exertions. He assisted Jo in propping the body up against the shower cubicle door. They looked at each other in silent consternation.

Jo turned back to face the bagged body in front of her. She reached out with a trembling hand and tore open the plastic covering the head. Tears gushed from her eyes like a torrent from a broken dam. Two dead eyes gazed back at her, cold, bereft of life and frozen in terror. It was Dawn, her mother. A small entry wound had been punched through her forehead, framed by congealed blood.

“Mum… No, no, no, nooo!”

Jo’s sobs turned into a strangled scream of anguish. Not her Mum, what had she done to deserve that? Jo’s mind boiled. Then, the further implications of what she was seeing exploded in her brain like a gunshot. Sophie, she thought, ohmygodSophie.

She tore her gaze from the horrific death mask of her mother’s face and started tearing through the bags and suitcases, unzipping them, frantic; searching.

Staring down in horror as the vile contents of the luggage were spilled on the bathroom floor, Max grabbed Jo’s shoulder and tried to drag her away. She fought him off and wrenched herself back to her bloody work, fingers already stained dark red. Each and every case was filled to bursting with plastic-wrapped, eviscerated body parts. The need to see, the need to know, Sophie’s fate had overridden Jo’s disgust as she dug through the luggage’s ripe butchery. She knew the merest glimpse of her daughter would unravel the last tenuous strands of her sanity, but she was compelled to search on.

Max stepped back, distancing himself from Jo and the growing pile of dead cargo.

He knew the grim purpose to which she had resigned herself and, while it shook him to the core, he had to focus on getting out of this nightmare and off this plane alive. His eyes darted around the bathroom, searching for his bag. It had to be there, somewhere — had to be.

Then, incongruous amidst the mess of open suitcases and butchered flesh, he saw an elegant little leather pouch. Recognising it as the limousine driver’s, he reached down and grabbed it. Tearing it open, he rooted inside and pulled out a mobile phone. It glistened under the bathroom lights, all fake diamonds and garish pink housing — Gwen’s phone.

He turned it over in his hand and saw that the screen had been smashed. Max rooted through the pouch and pulled out his own phone, also smashed. He removed the back of the phone and saw an empty space where the SIM card should have been. Their captors hadn’t taken any chances.

If they’d been so thorough, so efficient, with the phones — then what about his laptop?

Had they disabled that too, smashed the hard drive to bits? The thought was too much to bear. He started to rifle through the pile of body bags, looking for his own luggage.

“Fuck! Where the hell is it!?” he said.

“I can’t find her!” Jo said, desperate. The stench of human corruption was all around her. There was Dave’s friend Rory, his tattooed arm — hand still connected at the wrist. The same busy hand that had worked the games controller before his attacker blew his brains out across his living room wall. In the next case, Jo’s nostrils protested at the hot meat stink of what was left of Gwen’s sister Emily. Her dismembered body burned to a crisp, eyeballs melted into their sockets. Jo opened another suitcase, engrossed in her frantic search. Sophie had to be there somewhere — she had to be. But the more she searched, Jo found herself looking at the same dead faces, the same severed arms and legs, a second time. There seemed to be so many more body parts than could belong to the people they’d seen killed on their screens. Jo couldn’t be sure, but she hadn’t found any child-sized body parts. It was dreadful to think it, but could she have overlooked Sophie somehow? She was so tiny, just a little girl. Maybe she’d already seen her, but her mind had blocked the trauma of the awful discovery from her very eyes. Her little Pumpkin.

Jo looked down at her hands and arms, slicked red with blood up to the elbows. Strands of someone else’s hairs snapped sickly between her sticky fingers. The fear of finding Sophie, coupled with the deep trauma of seeing Dawn dead, shook Jo to the core. Her entire body shuddered, and she cradled herself in her arms. Rocking like a madwoman, she began to scream and wail through her tears.

Dead eyes looked back at her, an audience forever silenced.

“Got it!”

Max was to the rear of the bathroom, struggling to extract his bag from beneath two heavy suitcases. He heaved, and the cases spilled their body parts as he wrenched his bag free. He crossed to the sink and unfastened the bag, pausing for a moment to prepare himself for the worst. Reaching inside, he pulled out his sticker-encrusted laptop. Elated, he saw it was still in one piece. Thumbing the little catch at the front of the machine, he opened up the screen. Unlike the mobile phones in the pouch, it was undamaged; save for the familiar little dent he’d made a few months back when he’d snapped it shut with an errant ballpoint pen inside. Max pressed the power switch at the top of the keyboard. The little green power-up LED lit up and the laptop clicked and whirred into life. Kissing the machine in thanks, Max stepped over Jo and headed back into the main cabin.

Kneeling down, he placed the laptop on the floor in front of him, cracked his knuckles and got to work.

Exhausted, Jo crawled over the mound of luggage and bodies and slumped down next to Dawn’s corpse. Her mum’s plastic bag shroud crinkled as Jo leaned against it. She stared at Dawn’s face, those eyes frozen in shock and terror. Hope it was quick; hope you didn’t feel too much pain, thought Jo. She reached out her trembling hand and stroked her mother’s cold cheek.

“Is Sophie with you Mum? If there’s still hope, please tell me… please.”

But there was no hope in Jo’s voice. The image of her daughter, so small on the bed in that grubby room, flashed into her head again. And with it came all the nightmare visions of the face that hid behind the camera lens, the eyes that watched her little girl’s frail form, cold as glass. She imagined spiralling with the lens as it turned and focussed. She felt herself falling into the dark oubliette of the killer’s eyes and tumbling, bereft.

Jo broke down, sobbing, next to her dead mother.

Max was poised over the laptop keyboard like a hawk.

His fingers were still covered in blood from the luggage. Tapping away furiously, he left bloody fingerprints on the shiny keys. He jabbed at the trackpad, also slicked with blood, and opened another window. His mind was code now; married to the machine he was interfacing with. He ran the hacking software’s subroutine and watched as a stream of data unspooled across his screen. The bright green digits flickered past his eyes as the program tried to unlock the security protocols that were keeping him and his machine from the jet’s onboard network.

“Come on… come on!”

Machine code scrolled up across all his open windows, hard drive whirring as though the laptop were huffing and puffing with the effort. Max wiped cold sweat from his forehead and coughed. He wasn’t feeling too good. Probably psychosomatic — who wouldn’t feel sick after inhaling the awful stench in the luggage hold?

Another sound penetrated the periphery of his senses, over his coughing.

Jo, in the bathroom a short distance away.

It sounded like she was talking to somebody.

Or some body.

Max shuddered, focussed his attention on the laptop screen again. One of the data streams had narrowed and locked, while the other window ran through the remaining decryption work. The jet’s air conditioning breathed down the back of Max’s neck as he crouched over the screen. He shivered and coughed again. His throat was so dry, the hacking cough made him gag a little. He watched anxiously as the scrolling in the other window stopped. An administration message popped up on his screen, followed by a new window with the Deppart Airlines logo.

“Okay, I’m in!”

Jo appeared in the bathroom doorway. She swayed, as if on the verge of collapse. All the trauma and shock at what she’d witnessed was still etched into her expression.

“The onboard network,” Max said, interpreting the data, “It’s a closed network, hosted by someone on the ground. The webcams are all feeding off to another location.”

He double-clicked on an entry in the list of data and brought up a video window.

Webcam footage of their struggle with Dave played out in front of their eyes, filmed from a high angle. Max glanced upwards — cameras were hidden in the cabin’s overhead lights. The footage paused, then started up again in a loop. Max watched, silent for a moment, as he saw himself plunge the crash axe into Dave’s head all over again.

“If I can get a fix on the I.P. address of the network administrator, maybe we can contact the authorities, at least set off some alarms signposting them our way…”

“We should make it our priority to contact All2gethr — warn those poor people there’s a plane headed their way,” said Jo.

Max continued hacking, pallid and sweating as he went about his work. Jo watched from over his shoulder, clutching one of the seat backs for support. Had he even heard what she’d said?

Neither of them noticed that in the distance, at the front of the plane, the light by the cockpit door turned from red to green.

And neither of them noticed as the cockpit door opened, slowly…