Looking Backward in Darkness. Kathryn Ptacek
car had been more damaged than the other driver’s, and she’d had to have it towed away, and she wasn’t sure how she would get it back, because the bill was so huge, and she was running out of money. Farron tried to help her with money from time to time, until she got on her feet and got another job. But she hadn’t gotten another job. She wouldn’t be getting another job if she couldn’t get out the door.
Three, four, five.
One, two, three, four...thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
She was so tired. So weary of the repetition. Over and over those numbers floated in her head, drifted through every waking thought. She was so tired of them. She should try them in foreign languages, she thought with a sudden giggle.
Unos, dos...cinco.
It wasn’t the same.
...three, four, five....
She yawned. She could lay down on the couch, and take a nap for a while, and then when she woke up, she would be rested, and she would get up and wash the dishes and she would go out the door.
For whatever reason she had to go out the door.
But first she had to count. And she had to get it right. Because if she didn’t...she shuddered, thinking what might happen.
One. One, two, three....
She didn’t count in her sleep. At least she didn’t think she did. Usually she woke, and for the first few minutes of her day, didn’t think about counting.
Maybe that was a mistake.
It had been morning, after all, when Farron told her he was leaving her. She had cried and screamed at him, and then fallen into a silence and simply stared at him. Why, she wanted to say, why? But every time she opened her mouth, all she could do was cry.
She had counted much too late then. She had counted to one, to five, to fifteen as he picked up the suitcase he had packed before she woke, had counted as he went down the stairs and she trailed after him, had counted as he walked out the door and she had stared out the front window as he got into the car and drove away, counted as the only man she’d ever loved left her.
Counted.
Too late.
She hadn’t gotten it right.
Her father was right; she was such a screw-up.
The fear was in her veins, in her lungs, in her tissue; it permeated every bit of her body.
She wept then, loudly, forlornly, and she wanted it all undone. She wanted it to be all right again, although she never knew it would be.
Suddenly she felt a warmth in her groin, and then down her leg, and she looked down and saw the piss running there, making the pool at her feet even larger, and she recognized the foulness she’d been vaguely aware of, and realized then that she hadn’t been there for a few minutes, she hadn’t been there at the door even for hours.
She had been there all day.
Maybe all night. Maybe longer.
One, two.
Three, four, shut the door.
But how could you shut the door, if you couldn’t even open it?
Seven, eight....
How long before you begin to decay? she wondered vaguely, and knew now why there were so many flies.
Nine, ten, do it again.
She would get it right. It was just a matter of time.
BRUJA
Chato Del-Klinne looked around at the airport terminal as he stepped out of the jetway. Not precisely Kansas, he could hear Sunny say teasingly as if she stood next to him, and he would have smiled, except he didn’t feel like it; he felt...uneasy.
Not precisely Kansas, no.
Southern Texas along the Mexican border, to be more precise. He’d been asleep on the plane, thinking he was heading back to Las Vegas when the captain announced that because of the vigorous storm system to the west, he had been ordered to change his route and land at Dry Plains International instead of Dallas/Ft. Worth.
“Vigorous.” Chato shook his head. He just loved these euphemistic terms. Vigorous...meaning the entire western sky was painted a sickly yellow green, twenty twisters had been spotted between Dallas/Fort Worth and Amarillo, and if everyone was lucky, the tornados wouldn’t remove the top six inches of soil throughout the state of Texas, not to mention every single trailer park in the Lone Star State.
And so here he was. The airport was bigger than he’d expected. It was, after all, an international airport, but mostly he had discovered with great irony that in the southwest that term meant flights scheduled to and from Mexico. Period.
International.
Yeah, right.
What 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