The Dead Sea Deception (10 page)

By day three, according to the TV news, they had a part of an answer to that. Still no black box, but the insurance and FAA people had gone over most of the wreckage and it told a consistent if not yet quite complete story. One of the doors had blown open in mid-flight, causing a sudden and massive depressurisation. After that, a whole lot of other dominoes had gone and toppled over: the pressure bulkhead buckled, causing some hydraulic cables to snap, and a few seconds later the vertical stabilisers cut out. The engines stalled, the air flow broke, and the plane – which had an empty weight of thirty-two tons – was from that moment on about as aerodynamic as a great big bag of tyre irons. Gravity did its thing, enfolding Flight 124 into its ruinous embrace.

In Peason, there was still a feeling of shock and grief for the dead strangers who’d come tumbling out of the sky, but for the nation at large there seemed to be a sense that the event was a lot less interesting now it had an explanation. Consequently, on day three the human interest stories took over from the stories about the crash itself. The focus now turned on the woman flying into New York to be reunited with her sister after a twenty-year feud; the guy who was going to pop the question to
his childhood sweetheart; the three passengers who, although travelling separately and seemingly unaware of each other, had all been part of the same intake at Northridge Community High School.

And in among all of these sell-by-the-inch soap opera tragedies there were the walking dead. On day four, they came out in force.

A clerk in the New York Department of Public Works, who took Flight 124 to get home from some junket in Mexico City, had swiped in at his office, sent a couple of emails, surfed a little porn and then – without swiping out again or being seen by security or reception staff – disappeared without a trace. He was lying on a morgue slab in Peason at the time, but evidently routine is a powerful thing.

A woman from New Jersey, also a casualty of 124, took her car out of the garage and drove to a local supermarket, where she drew out fifty dollars from her checking account and apparently bought a goldfish-on-a-string pet toy and a tin of anchovies, which were found in the trunk of the car later that day when the store closed and it was still there in the lot. Her boyfriend affirmed that she always bought her Burmese, Felix, treats of this kind when she’d been away.

And maybe the creepiest of all, another passenger, a Mrs Angelica Saville, had called her brother in Schenectady to complain that the plane had been circling for hours in a fog so thick that nothing could be seen outside the windows. The call had come a full sixty-one hours after 124 hit the ground.

‘Did you read this stuff?’ Webster Gayle asked Eileen Moggs, over their regular midweek lunch at the Kingman Best of the West café, two miles out of town on the 93. He showed her the story about the New Jersey woman and she winced as though it gave her physical pain.

‘This one gets trotted out every ten years or so,’ Moggs said. The look on her face was sour and Gayle was sorry he’d put it there. He found her face – lined, strong-featured, emphatic, topped with a frizz of red hair like low brush fire – an amazing and beautiful thing to look upon. ‘They wait just long enough for everyone to have forgotten the last time, and then damn it if they don’t go right ahead and do it again. It’s a hack tradition. Goes all the way back to the Boston Molasses Flood.’

Gayle thought he’d misheard. ‘The what, now?’

‘The Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Stop grinning, Web. It was a real disaster and two dozen people died. A storage tank burst. They drowned in molasses, which must be a pretty horrible way to die.’

Chastened, Gayle nodded, agreeing that it was. Moggs carried right on making her point. ‘For weeks afterwards, the papers carried stories about how the dead were still turning up for work. Or their ghosts were. They quoted survivors – colleagues and relatives – as giving all kinds of corroborating details. Yeah, that was John’s shirt, Mary always sat in that chair, and so on and so forth. Only they never said those things. Or maybe one or two of them did. After that it was just the hacks making it up and the nut-jobs and hoaxers playing along. That’s all it ever is.’

Sheriff Gayle said he took her word for it, as he usually did on most things outside his own very limited experience – which essentially meant outside the Coconino County limits. But it was sort of a lie: on some half-buried level he was drawn to these stories of strange revenants. A whole bunch of people had died all at once, suddenly and traumatically. Was it too much of a reach to imagine that some of them might come back? That maybe their spirits might have passed over so quickly that they didn’t even realise they were dead, so they kept right on doing
the same-old-same-old until the news caught up with them and they faded away? It was a haunting image. He didn’t share it with Moggs, but he kept turning it over and over in his mind.

On the fifth day, the walking dead stories only got a limited airing in the mainstream media, but you could find a zillion of them on the internet. With the help of Connie, who was a lot less sceptical than Moggs, he went looking for them and began to compile a master list. It didn’t bother him that they weren’t always attributed and that details like names and ages changed from one report to the next. There’s no smoke without fire, he reasoned. And since that metaphor raised the hideous, indelible memory of the crash itself, it almost seemed to have something of a timeless truth about it. There were more things, in heaven and in earth. You just never knew, until it happened to you and you suddenly did.

All this time, the County Sheriff’s Department was involved in the investigation of the crash, but only in what you’d call a facilitating capacity. They kept the crowd away from the wreckage on the first day and coordinated access for the ambulances and paramedic crews. Journalists by and large were kept well away from the site, except for Moggs who was allowed to wander at will so long as she didn’t make a big deal out of it. Nobody begrudged her this privilege: Sheriff Gayle was highly regarded, and most of his deputies and troopers felt kind of a warm glow from the reflection that he was getting some.

Then when the airlines’ experts and the FAA’s experts and the insurance company experts came in, Gayle and his people took the lead in the search for the black box, which could have been a needle-in-a-haystack deal if it had been left to the out-oftowners. The thing was putting out a signal, and the locators were very fancy majiggers, locked to that one wavelength, so sensitive you could almost feel them pulling on your arm like a
pointer dog. You still needed to know the area to get anything out of them, though. If you just kept to the right heading, you’d hit a mesa or a dry creek bed after a couple of miles or so, and have to go around. And then you’d be off of your line and you’d tear away in a different direction, jam your car in a box canyon and so on. So the Sheriff’s Department had four people working with those search parties, just helping them to negotiate the terrain, as it were.

They were also officially in charge of what came and what went, laboriously logging the writing-up and removal of physical evidence. It wasn’t glamorous policing – very little that fell within Gayle’s purview could be called that – but it did keep the crash in the forefront of his mind and brought him into daily contact with the people actually investigating it.

He took the opportunity of raising the walking dead sightings with anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen. Mostly people seemed to find the topic either funny or morbid, and either way they thought it was bullshit. One of the FAA people, though, was more receptive to the idea. She was a tall, nervous woman named Sandra Lestrier, and she was a member of the spiritualist church. That didn’t make her credulous, she was at pains to point out: spiritualist wasn’t another word for sucker, it meant someone who believed in and was in touch with another dimension of the endless plurality that was life. But she did have a theory about ghosts, and although reluctant at first, she eventually consented to share it. With his impressive height and his rough and ready good looks, Gayle had always had a certain charm with the ladies, which he had never abused: in his fifties now, with his hair turned to silver but still as full as ever, the charm had metamorphosed – to his sorrow – into something avuncular and safe. Women were happy to talk to him. Only Moggs seemed willing to take that further step to pillow talk.

‘Ghosts are the wounds of the world,’ Sandra Lestrier told Gayle. ‘We see the world as a big, physical thing, but that’s only a tiny part of what it is. The world is alive – that’s how come it can give birth to life. And something that big, if it’s alive, you’d expect it to have a big soul, too, right? When the world bleeds, it bleeds spirit. And that’s what ghosts are.’

Gayle was rocked. Religion had never been a big thing in his family, but he was aware of it, and he knew that it came in three flavours: regular, which was okay; Jewish, which was sort of okay too, because the Lord appeared to the Jews and gave them what amounted to an all-clear; and Muslim, which was the bad apple. He’d never realised up until then that there could be progress in religion just like in anything else, fashions that came and went.

He asked Ms Lestrier to tell him more about the wounds of the world, but the specifics turned out to be a little confusing and uninteresting. It was something to do with the persistence of life in the valley of death, and several different kinds of human soul that all had their own names and places in a hierarchy. The more technical it got, the more Gayle tuned out. In the end, he was left with the metaphor and very little else. But he did like the metaphor.

Things were getting a little crazy by this time: the black box from Flight 124 still hadn’t been found and that was becoming kind of an embarrassment to the federal guys. The signal had started to break up, apparently, and now it was hard for them to get a fix on it, even though they’d brought in a spy satellite of some kind to coordinate the search. The FAA guys on the ground were keen to pass some of the blame along to inadequate support from the Sheriff’s Department, and Gayle had harsh words with one of their bigwigs who came into the station to throw his weight around.

It was getting a little ugly and a little political. Gayle hated politics and wanted the box found before anyone from the governor’s office got involved. He started running the search recons himself, which had the incidental benefit that he sometimes got to ride shotgun for Ms Lestrier and hear a little more about her newfangled religion.

He was riding solo when he met the pale people, though. He was following the line of a broad arroyo with a whole lot of tributaries – badly broken ground that the feds had already hit and bounced off of. It was late afternoon but still hot, the kind of cloudless day where the shadows are as black as spilled ink and the sun hangs dead centre in the sky like a piece of fruit you could almost reach up and touch. Gayle stayed in the air-conditioned car as much as he could, but had to get out to walk down to the stream whenever the banks were high enough to hide it. Not that there was much of a stream at this time of year: just little puddles here and there on the creek bed, each with a few skinks around it like an honour guard.

There was nobody else in sight. Nobody much would have a reason to come out here in the heat of the day. Gayle had got out of the car a half-dozen times to trek down to the bottom of the arroyo, kick a few rocks around to prove he’d been there, and trek back up again.

Then one time he came scuffling and sliding down the steep bank to find himself abruptly face to face with two complete strangers. They weren’t hiding or anything: they didn’t jump out on him from cover. It was more like he’d been lost in his own thoughts and the first time he registered their presence they were right there in front of his damn nose, staring him down.

A man and a woman. Both young – maybe in their mid-twenties or so – tall, and lean in a way that suggested a whole lot of effort spent in a gym or on a track. They had incredibly pale
skin, almost like albinos, but the man had dark red flashes high up on his cheekbones where he’d obviously caught a little too much sun. They both had jet black hair, the guy’s long and loose, the woman’s fastened up at the back of her head into a no-nonsense bun the size of a fist. Their eyes showed black, too, although they were probably just dark brown.

But the thing that Gayle noticed first of all, and most of all, was the symmetry: identical sand-coloured shirts, tan slacks, tan shoes, as though they were aiming to blend in with the surrounding desert; identical stares on identical faces, like he was looking at the same person twice, even though they were of different sexes and weren’t even physically alike at all. He thought of the Viewfinder toy he’d had as a kid, and how each picture was really two pictures, on opposite sides of the reel. It was like that – and for a second he was almost afraid to speak to them in case they answered in creepy unison.

But they didn’t. In answer to his belated ‘Howdy’, the woman nodded while the young guy gave him back a strangely formal ‘Good day to you’. Then they both went back to staring at him: neither of the two had moved an inch so far.

‘I’m looking for the black box from the airplane that went down,’ Gayle explained, unnecessarily. ‘About so big by yay long.’ He gestured with his hands, which of course took them away from his belt where his department-issue FN five-seven rested in its worn leather holster. He realised this a moment later, dropped his hands again awkwardly, and still neither of the strangers had moved. Gayle was at a loss to understand why he felt so ill at ease.

‘We haven’t seen anything like that here,’ the man answered. His voice was deep and it had a weird something to it that Gayle couldn’t quite get his head around. It wasn’t that he sounded foreign, although he did, just a little. It was the tempo, which
was sort of sing-song, like someone reading from a book: slightly slower than normal speech, with a weight behind it that a casual remark like that just didn’t need. The man also put a slight but noticeable emphasis on the word
here
, which Gayle picked up on and thought was odd.