The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

The door—the oval door to the outside—was wide open. Mack saw black night where he should have seen a comforting steel door.

The pressure drop was sucking all the air, and anything not bolted down, straight out through that door. It was as if someone had hooked a massive vacuum cleaner up and cranked it to “deep clean.”

Mack glanced to his right. The oxygen masks had dropped, little clear plastic tubes ending in plastic bags that might or might not inflate. People were snatching wildly for the masks, which were being pulled toward the door so that many of them hung almost horizontally and jerked as though they were trying to break free.

Women’s hair was swept forward toward the open door. Headphones were yanked from ears and also jerked crazily toward the open door. An entire beverage cart rolled madly down the aisle, slammed a bulkhead, tossed off a Sprite, and was swallowed by that open door. Shoomp!

The plane now tilted down, down, down, as if it wanted to plunge straight into the ocean.

Where there were sharks.

Which Mack did not like.

A baby suddenly broke from its mother’s arms and went flying toward the door.

Mack leaped, arms outstretched, and snagged the baby by its little blue jumpsuit. But the suction was so strong that the snaps on the Dr. Dentons pop pop popped and the diapered baby came loose.

Stefan reached past and grabbed the baby’s arm, twisted, and managed to hand the baby to Mack before he lost his balance and slid toward the open door.

The suction was lessening now, but only because there was no more air.

Mack breathed in deep and got only a quarter of a lungful of oxygen.

He tried to get back to his seat, back to one of the oxygen masks, back to the screaming, hysterical mother who held out her arms for her baby. But it was an uphill climb now with the plane tilted at a sharp angle.

Mack had to use the legs of the seats almost as a ladder, straddling the aisle, climbing up the steep incline as his lungs sucked on nothing and his vision went red.

He climbed to the mother and, with his consciousness fading, and with it the last of his strength, Mack handed the baby over.

He clambered over the back of a seat—now almost a ledge beneath him—reached, and snagged one of the oxygen masks.

Oxygen was flowing freely. He filled his lungs gratefully and searched for Stefan. Stefan had managed to grab on to a seat in first class and was also sucking oxygen as the plane plunged.

And it was then that the wing monster stepped through the door, tentacle fingers grabbing bulkheads.

It hauled itself all the way in. It bowed its creepy upside-down head but still scraped its slobbery, broken-toothed mouth along the ceiling.

And then the creature did something very strange (like up until this point it had been normal). It began to melt. To change. A sort of black vapor formed a wreath around it, a swirling veil that hid it from sight.

When the smoke cleared, the monster was no more. In its place stood the most beautiful girl Mack had ever seen or ever even imagined.

She had luscious red hair and eyes greener than Mack would have thought possible. Her skin was pale and perfect. Her lips were a dark, dark red.

She stood easily, as though the tilted deck was not even an issue.

She smiled, and it was as if a sun had appeared in the middle of a storm and that sun shone just for Mack, for Mack alone.

“Hello,” she said in a laughing, musical voice. “You must be Mack.”

Mack sucked on his oxygen mask and wondered in some distant corner of his mind how she could breathe and how she could speak and how the sound waves propagated across a relative vacuum. Because he had learned in science class that sound waves needed air. In fact, he had done an experiment that…But that wasn’t really important just then because the most beautiful girl in the history of the world was talking to him, just him.

“Hi,” he mumbled into his plastic mask. “I’m Mack.”

“It’s good to meet you, Mack. My name is Ereskigal. My friends call me Risky.”

“I’ll bet,” Mack said.

“Come on, Mack,” she said. She held out one perfect, pale, red-nailed hand. “Let’s get out of here.”