CotH Chapter 3 Very Rough

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                                                                    Chapter 3
                                                                    Mid-Atlantic
                                                                  51.71113 North
                                                                  33.46136 West

       Rhari glanced outward, slid the thin plastic shield closed, and cowered into the soft foam padding of her seat. She bit back the whine that threatened to escape from her throat. This was wrong. All of it. If people were supposed to fly, they’d be born with wings, not arms.
       Everything would be alright, her tiny, council installed and maintained, voice of reason whispered quietly. There was nothing to worry over. More people died in automobile accidents every year than in plane crashes. Planes had emergency exits, cars had air bags. They had oxygen masks, cars had sun roofs. A car could seat five, a plane sat five hundred.
       Planes were safer.
       Better designed.
       Consumer friendly.
       Yeah, just like a pack of super sour crybabies, the ones with the cyanide center that half of America was just licking to get to.
       The good new was, 911 had produced a massive drop in air travel, the bad news was the events of September 11th and the war on terrorism that succeeded them had happened so long ago they were rapidly becoming another page in the history books.
       Overseas travel was up, ticket prices climbing, hotel rates increasing. Death toles rising.
       Ask someone what the survival rate of a plane crash was, then tell her which was safer.
       Her luggage was packed safely overhead. Everything neat and safe in one little pack. The trunk, which contained gear, files, and assorted bits of her personal arsenal, remained safely locked away in her suite.
       Rhari was weaponless once more.
       The council would provide. Rhari had the name and number of an associate she was to contact upon her arrival. The man would provide her with anything she needed... when she arrived.
       Beneath her feet the cabin shook and Rhari felt a tickle of insanity brushing at her lips, exciting itself across the roof of her mouth.
       No.
       She quieted the urge to whimper. To cower. To hide beneath the rounded aluminum tube work of her seat. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t human. This irreconcilable fear. Flight wasn’t natural. Neither was driving a car. Or getting the mail. Or a million other mundane things that happened every second of every day.
       They were natural.
       But they weren’t....
       natural to her.
       But they were...
       once.
       Why? Why did everything have to change? Why her?
       Rhari turned away from the voice. It wasn’t her asking. Not her Now. It was her then. Her then didn’t exist anymore. She couldn’t, because there was none of then left.
       The familiar pangs of hate and shame drifted upward like hidden currents from the bottom of a pond. An undertow, threatening to pull her beneath the surface. and she closed herself off. The surface of a pond, dark and disturbed. She was forced to rise upward, and stare outward once more.[Need more here!]
       [Need more here too! This is not a very good jump of subject.]
       The lack of security only heightened her sense of the impending doom. The plane could crash. They could all go down in a fiery ball of napalm, so long as the Heckler and Koch was clutched protectively in her hands.
       The silver nitrate would have made more sense, especially if she would be making a side trip into hell for a billion years or so, but her mind didn’t linger on the frivolities of her plan. She wasn’t throwing stones. Not yet anyway.
       She couldn’t take any chances in the post-911 era. The lax in air travel had vanished, the obsessive restrictions that had been placed on it had not. The crazed American obsession with firearms aboard airplanes meant she’d have more luck carrying a bomb on board than a Glock. Once upon a time the latter would have been explainable. Now Rhari had a sense she might be able to talk her way out of a nuclear payload easier than a couple of hollow-point slugs. The last thing she needed was to end up in an interrogation, or in prison... Political prison; with a bunch of right wing nuts who swore they were only upholding their right to free speech and the separation of church from state, or in this case, religion from politics. Religious persecution and racial slander, the basis of the United States immigration standards.
       It might be interesting though; she might meet Hanibal Lector, or Sean Connery; trapped behind three inches of shatterproof plexiglass. Maybe Nicholas Cage would stop by and offer her a presidential pardon if she opted to lead himself and a group of heavily outfitted Navy SEALS into the abandoned ruins of le casa de mois. Yeah Right. And then Keanu Reeves would offer her the blue pill or the red pill, so long as she got them out alive.
       “Snipers gonna get his ass.” Rhari whispered in her best British accent. The welsh influence that had leaned so heavily against her past emerged easily, providing the mimickery with more than a faint edge of realism.
       For the first time in a long time she giggled, really giggled, full and lighthearted, if not with a tinge of hysteria. In the white canvas screen of her mind Nicholas Cage did not hesitate, did not turn at the British agents self-indulgent limerick  (which he had not heard anyway), but ran on in his quest for the last missile placement, the sweaty spot between his exposed shoulder blades not issuing so much as a thin tickle. Goodspeed indeed.
        “Excuse me?” A flight attendant walking past had paused. She looked slightly offended, worried. Had she heard the part about the ass or the sniper?
        Rhari motioned her away without looking up, feigning her attention toward a folded magazine in her lap as she slipped deeper into the close comfort of her seat. The smile that had broken the smooth lines of her face deepened. Red coursed up and over her neck, blossoming against the pallid tone of her skin.
        The Council had roots, but mostly in Europe. In reality, if she were detained, it could take weeks to establish the contacts needed to free her. Time she didn’t have. Since her departure from the states two weeks prior, the police had uncovered three more scenes of a ‘suspicious’ nature. Five more were dead. One officer was near-fatally wounded following an attack with an as yet unidentified creature. Rhari had seen the plaster castings of the wounds taken from one of the deceased, as well as the polaroids. Digital blow-ups of the crime scene photo’s had been uploaded via a secure link less than seven hours ago.
        Breakfast had churned in her stomach.
        The smell of blood was still fresh on the back of her eyelids.
        It didn’t take a degree in forensic biology to realize that nothing remotely — had produced the incisions.
       The metal bars began pressing into her back. She grimaced. Outside air roared past. She imagined she could hear the cough and sputter of the port engine, which some deadbeat mechanic had forgotten to overhaul after it’s fifty thousand mile call up. The exhaust gave a loud —whup!— like it had expunged a snarling jet of flame, and Rhari opened her eyes, feeling the sweat bead over her forehead. She glanced about the passenger compartment.
       Several stewardess’—excuse her, ‘flight attendants’—were making their rounds; passing out blankets, pillows, and salty, little prepackaged condiments the cognitive world liked to imagine were peanuts. She couldn’t see it, but Rhari distinctly heard the rattle of little cart wheels, the tinkle of ice striking glass, bubbling champagne being poured.
       The separation didn’t bother her, the blue felt curtain, Rhari had never liked champagne anyway. If you were going to drink, it shouldn’t be for recreation, at least, not for some little giddy feeling as a light, sparkling imposter tickled the back of your throat—it should be to get fucked up!
       If Rhari was gonna get fucked up, she wanted it fast and hard, no pussyfooting around.
       She was in coach, which by chance afforded a movie, but one that played on the wall separating those passengers with a slightly more discreet management of their revenue from the champagne and caviar dreams of the first class cabin. Headsets were ten bucks a piece. Thick tac holes distorted the picture, leaving pimply black marks over whatever set piece, scene or actor happened to be taking center screen.
        If she had really wanted to see it she could have listened in. The lady next to her, an older woman who smelled disturbing of urine, sickly sweet aftershave and vellum, had payed the handsome sum for a headset and had the thing turned up load enough to... wake the dead. If the dead might be found mid-Atlantic that was.
       (Need to incorporate this below, into the above...The cabin was small by airline standards; not much larger than the interior of a bus. A wall of curtains and turquoise paneling separated her compartment from the one forward. Behind her a second wall rose from the center of the plane, the aisles next to it left uncovered for any who wished to use the airlines rest facilities.
       The woman sitting next to her was middle age bordering on elderly. Her gray hair was cut short and sassy. Makeup expertly applied. The charcoal striping of her brown suit blended effortlessly with that of her eyes. A working woman through and through, with the air of aristocratic snarl instantly associable with career—. Nothing was — enough to hide the worry lines that alighted her eyes. The sallow rimming of brownness that no amount of liner could conceal.
       Rhari looked away before the woman caught her staring. It didn’t matter, that face would forever be locked in her —. There was nothing special about it, nothing dangerous. It was training. Only training. In twenty years she could run into the same woman and she would be instantly recognizable... it she lived that long. Either of them. If she was ever needed to give rendering ot a sketch artist, the — would look less like a mat painting and more like a scene out of life than —
       (ON ABOVE... The old lady is Joshua.... He is her, followed Rhari from France...)
       Rhari’s hands clenched unconsciously, gripping the armrests. Metal twisted beneath her fingers and she released. Glanced about awkwardly to be sure no one had heard. No one had. Distantly she heard the imaginary cough and sputter of the starboard engine. It ignited in flame and then exploded, sending white hot spears of molten shrapnel through the thin aluminum fuselage of the plane. Women screamed. Men shouted, and sounded like woman screaming. Children cried. The 744 exploded in a blinding ball of flame, expanding outward even as the wreckage began to drop; a giant, mushrooming cloud with a stem of burning fuselage falling out from beneath it.
       An armrest snapped off in Rhari’s hand and the lady beside her jumped. Rhari rushed to hide the evidence. When the woman glanced her way Rhari smiled sweetly. The old lady grimaced, looked her up and down with a reproving nod, and then returned to watching the in flight movie.
       Rhari forced herself to relax. Breathing deeply and exhaling. She wiped the sweat beading at her forehead and raised the white plastic shield far enough to peek out and see the smooth white and blue lines of the wing. The rivets were tight, all there. Gleaming and fresh with new looking paint. If she stared long and hard enough she was sure she would be able to see the wing thrumming with a quiet vibration; straining against braided wire, paper thin supports. Slowly pulling the small metal pins loose. Dumping them like spent shell casings back toward the earth.
       She closed the shield. Checked her watch. It was 2:16p.m. The seconds ticked by :08; :09; :10 Her plane was do to land in New York at 5:45 where she would catch a connecting flight to Illinois, and then finally, a smaller, chartered plane, into Michigan.
       If the information contained on the disk was correct—as she was very sure that most of it was, in the least, reasonably accurate—someone was about to deliver the biggest kick in the teeth the council had ever received... Okay, maybe not the biggest, probably not the biggest by far, but bigger than anything in the last two hundred years(change the previous one, ‘in the last two hundred years’). Bigger than —, bigger even than the Salem witch trials, maybe.
       Big enough to bring about true media attention at last. Reporters, Paparazzi, Heraldo, Oprah, Maury. Sixty Minutes. Nightline. Jay Leno and the — Band. Nothing would stop the media coverage. No amount of coverup would hide the —. It would be there. Everything. Exposed. For the first time in more than three hundred years, the truth of existence would be revealed.
       Like a bombshell.
       The first nuclear blast of an atomic war.
       And whether full scale invasion was avoided or not, whether an all out war was waged or avoided; there would be no going back. The council wasn’t dealing with peasants and baron knights, but with superpowers and oil giants. There was no silencing the gigabyte. No erasing the airwaves. The net could discredited, but it could not be absolved. This was the twenty-first century.
       The council had been around a long time. How long Rhari didn’t know. Longer than —? Longer than the Crusades?
       How long had it been there to... hide things?
       They called it protecting. But what it really was was hiding. Hiding all of it. Hiding themselves, and hiding the world... from everything.