The Call - Michael Grant [29]
When it stared at Mack with its white jelly eyes and grinned its broken grin, Mack had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that it was coming for him.
“Whoa,” Stefan said. “Gnarly.”
The flight attendants were telling everyone to stay calm. But they didn’t look too calm themselves. Anyone could see that the creature was walking its way down the wing toward the plane.
“It’s coming to kill me,” Mack said, sounding far more calm than he felt.
“You’re under my wing,” Stefan said. But he sounded a little doubtful to Mack.
“It can’t get in, can it?” Mack cried in a shrill, whinnying sort of tone that was definitely not heroic.
“The door can’t be opened from the outside,” a flight attendant cried, sounding just like Mack had sounded. “Probably.”
“I hate probably,” Mack said. He tried to think of a way out, of a way to fight the monster, or alternately a way to hide. “The bathroom!”
“Yo, I have to go, too,” Stefan said, “but we got bigger problems.”
“I mean we can hide in there.”
Stefan did not argue. Click, click, and their seat belts fell away. They launched themselves out of their seats and pelted toward the bathroom.
“Sit down!” the flight attendant shouted. “The captain has illuminated the seat belt sign!”
The airplane bathroom was small, but they fit if Mack stood on the toilet. Stefan leaned his back against the door. Mack saw his own reflection in the mirror: he looked scared. Then he noticed how scared Stefan looked, and he got even more scared because Stefan wasn’t scared of anything, and if he was scared, Mack knew he himself had better be terrified.
Suddenly from outside the bathroom there were screams.
There was a loud sound and an incredible whoosh that popped Mack’s ears. The bathroom door flew open, and the two of them spilled out into the aisle.
The inside of the jet was a madhouse. Paper napkins, peanut bags, plastic cups, purses, magazines and newspapers, and great big hardcover books were flying around as if a tornado had formed inside the plane.
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