Flight 171: Chapters 9–16

Rebecca and several others follow, as if the sudden explosion of forward motion snaps them out of their panicked stupors.

“What are you doing? I don’t want to be in charge,” I say. It’s the truth. Thwarting authority has always been more my thing, not becoming it.

Rebecca purses her lips petulantly but doesn’t challenge the vote.

At least he’s out cold and can’t feel it. He looks almost peaceful. Maybe the smoke put him into some kind of stasis?

Stupid, stupid, I silently chastise myself as I mentally list what I remember about emergencies.

Flight crews are on planes to keep the passengers safe. That’s why they get some medical emergency training during their orientation.

Under her steady gaze, my thoughts feel muddled. What she’s saying almost makes sense, it...
“Get out of my head!” I yell, scrunching my eyes shut so I can’t see her anymore.

His skin is so ashen my stomach flips. He is going to need way more medical intervention than a couple of bandages and some antiseptic.

“Can you stop recording right now?” Jeanne asks, her voice quavering. “Please?”

She’s practically convulsing, she’s shaking so hard.

When her sobs get more intense, deep furrows appear between his eyebrows as he looks over the top of her hair at Mai.

Jeanne is halfway to hysterical. This same girl seemed totally unflappable before today, the sort of person who goes through her days with a permanent bounce in her step, who’s the life of just about every party.

But so-called psychics can read people really well. There are all these documentaries about it, debunking their abilities.

Yara leans over the seat to record the vomit. “Very visceral,” she murmurs.

The clamorous music is putting me on edge.

“This is your fault. If you hadn’t been so careless, so utterly stupid, she’d be okay. But that’s too much to expect, isn’t it? Because stupid is your default setting.”

No matter how hard I keep trying to be like her, this situation has my self-control fissuring. The old me, the one with a venom tongue, who speaks before she thinks, is seeping through the cracks.

“Can someone hand me some gauze? It’s in the medical emergency bag.”
Jack stoops to rifle through the bag, then throws Kiara a few packs of sterile gauze.

They assume because I’m in a band, I’m a massive partyer. But the thing is, I was too busy trying to play a perfect set, to get discovered and become famous.

I don’t know about the rest—about whether God exists or not. Sometimes I catch myself praying to him anyway. Like that makes any sense, right? Praying to a being that keeps allowing bad things to happen, who doesn’t seem to answer those prayers no matter how badly you want him to. I mean, he isn’t intervening right now, is he?

“It’s got everything, including the flight manifest,” Jack says. “The old lady said her name was Dorothy, right? She was sitting in fifteen B.”

“Listen. I know you don’t trust me. You want to figure out what happened to Emily and I’m the most logical choice of suspects.”
This is an understatement. It isn’t just that he was at the party. It’s that his car had damage to the front hood that wasn’t there before Halloween.

I hate myself for it, but that reputation is part of what intrigued me in the first place—he was wild in a way I can’t seem to allow myself to be.

“I felt it, that creature—the thing inside of her. It’s not human. And we cannot defeat it.” Her voice is flat, void of emotion, but it’s her eyes that worry me most, the complete and utter resignation in them.

The silence above me remains thick, oppressive.

I convinced myself that if I got overwhelmed, I could come to get her and let her take over. It was stupid and naive.

I push a wayward strand of hair out of her face.

We look silly clad in our snow boots and Disney princess nightgowns under our coats.

“Happy Christmas!” she shouts at the camera, her cheeks ruddy from running, her eyes so bright they sparkle.

It's no surprise people liked to be around her more—not just people, but my parents. I get why. And it wasn’t like she was trying to be the favorite on purpose. But still, I couldn’t stop resenting her.

He could also be doing this because he feels guilty. Because he is the one who hit Emily and now he’s trying to alleviate the guilt he feels—or worse, he wants to make himself look less sacrifice-worthy if it comes down to it.

“Yes. It’s time,” I say loudly, feigning more confidence than I feel.

Spencer crushed the Valium into as fine a powder as he could, but if there are any pieces too large to pass through her veins, she could have a pulmonary embolism. We could kill her.

If we’re right, and this is some form of mass mind control, then once the sedative takes effect, the other passengers should start waking up.

I square my shoulders and try to muster the courage I’m going to need to get through the next few minutes.

Instead, a wave of fetid air rolls out of the bathroom.

The air inside the galley seems to contract like the oxygen is disappearing.

One eye drifts out of position, tilting unnaturally to the left. When it does, something opaque and white emerges out of the corner of her eye, something alive.

Then she launches herself down the fuselage, scrabbling across the ceiling like a spider, another inhuman howl erupting from her mouth.

She watches, a grotesque grin stretched across her face.