RAPTORS ON A PLANE-1
356 Words
RAPTORS ON A PLANE
If Samantha hadn’t known better, she would have sworn she’d seen a bat—a big one, a very, very big one—by the 777’s flashing wing lights. Of course, when she blinked it was gone, and not into the inky dark outside the window, she was sure, but back into her own mind, which was still half-asleep and probably hung over with Ambien. What she did see, and knew she saw, were a series of strange lights, like lightning amongst the clouds—except there was lightning amongst the clouds, they were passing through a storm, and these lights weren’t that. No, these were something otherworldly, which shown with colors she could not quite define, and she would have studied them further, even snapped a pic with her cellphone, had she not suddenly realized that the elderly couple next to her were no longer in their seats, nor, for that matter, were the people in the middle row, or the row beyond that.
Her pulse quickened, and she sat up with start.
No one was in their seats, not in the entire rear cabin—at least no one tall enough, or fat enough, to be visible beyond the head and armrests. Wait, no, she could see that wasn’t true, there was someone, she could just make out their arm on the rest in the front-most seats before the next economy class section. She noticed the “fasten seat belts” pictograph was illuminated and thought, To hell with that, then got up and began walking down the darkened aisle, finding it odd that all the TVs were stuck on static. Nor was that all that was odd, for a good portion of the seats contained items that normally wouldn’t be left unattended, purses and cellphones, laptops, iPads. Lightning flashed outside the windows as she approached the man in the seat and thunder boomed over the drone of the engines.
“Excuse me, sir, but—”
And then the airliner rocked suddenly and so did the arm on the chair rest, rolling back and forth once before it fell off completely and landed on the floor, dotting the blue carpet with blood.
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- Writer
