Out of the Box 7 - Sea Change Read Online Free Page B

eyes, a skeletal, malnourished look. He looked a little like a ginger skeleton, some sort of vagrant who had wandered in from somewhere far up north. Kat’s horrified gaze was locked on her bodyguards’ fallen forms, blood rushing out of the wounds in their ribcages where something had torn through them. “Do you have any idea?” the man asked with a steadily rising voice. “Do you know?” He sounded deranged, furious, and then Scott noticed the phone clenched in his other hand, the camera pointed right at Kat’s horrified face, capturing her emotions with its glass eyes glinting in the California sun. “You kill them,” he said, shoving her roughly to one knee and letting her loose as he raised a hand high to strike at her in the same way he’d struck at her bodyguards, his phone still aimed at her, the crowd breathless and still at the spectacle playing out before their very eyes. “And I’m gonna show the world what it looks like when it happens to you—”

4.
Midwest Airlines Flight 404
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
    Tara Garcia had been on planes most of the day, starting her morning in New York City with a quick run to Orlando that took off at local 8 a.m. and now finishing her last flight from Chicago to Milwaukee now, local time 9:06 p.m. Midwest Airlines was a mostly regional carrier that had been expanding rapidly the last few years thanks to rock bottom prices. She’d signed on as a flight attendant eighteen months earlier and found it to be mostly enjoyable. There were always a few assholes on any given day, but she’d worked retail before this during the holiday season, and so dealing with only one or two a-holes at a time was a refreshing break given her prior experience.
    On the other hand, Tara had never really felt as imperiled working retail as she felt right now, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat on this DC-9 that was just about empty of fuel.
    “Shit shit shit,” the man in the pilot’s seat said. His name was Neil Ericson, he looked about mid-forties, and she’d just met him for the first time two hours earlier, under less-than-ideal conditions. He was fighting fatigue and stress of a sort she was feeling more than a little of herself. It had been just that sort of stress that had caused Captain Michael Donowitz to have a heart attack, slipping into unconsciousness about fifteen minutes before their scheduled landing.
    Of course, it might also have been slightly aggravated by having the co-pilot, Jason Treadway, pass out into a state of unconsciousness so complete that they’d had to summon a doctor from the passenger section into the cockpit. Captain Donowitz had looked a little white before that, but watching his co-pilot, a man in his early thirties, dragged insensate out of his seat had seemed to push the captain a little more. When he’d gone down just a few minutes later, Tara hadn’t panicked exactly. She hadn’t had time to. Instead, she’d calmly gone to the back and asked if anyone had had flying lessons, stepping over the unconscious bodies of both pilot and co-pilot to do so. Now this Neil Ericson was now at the controls, a man who had taken three flying lessons some six years ago … was the best-qualified person to sit in the captain’s chair. When they’d realized the autolanding systems were not functioning properly only a few minutes later, that was when the first icy tingles of panic had started running down Tara’s back.
    Since then, Tara had had almost two whole hours of watching the fuel gauge steadily sink to work herself into a complete panic, but she had not ever reached it. She talked low and calmly to Milwaukee tower in the exact same way she’d heard the pilot do on the occasions she’d been in the cockpit, not letting a hint of the panic she should have been feeling creep into her voice.
    “Milwaukee tower,” she said cheerfully, as if she was putting on her best customer service voice when dealing with one of those inevitable a-holes that seemed to find