Panic Button (20 page)

Then, incongruous amidst the mess of open suitcases and butchered flesh, he saw an elegant little leather pouch.
Recognising
it as the limousine driver’s, he reached down and grabbed it. Tearing it open, he rooted inside and pulled out a mobile phone. It glistened under the bathroom lights, all fake diamonds and garish pink housing - Gwen’s phone.

 

He turned it over in his hand and saw that the screen had been smashed. Max rooted through the pouch and pulled out his own phone, also smashed. He removed the back of the phone and saw an empty space where the SIM card should have been. Their captors hadn’t taken any chances.

Had they disabled that too, smashed the hard drive to bits? The thought was too much to bear. He started to rifle through the pile of body bags, looking for his own luggage.

“Fuck! Where the hell is it!?” he said.

“I can’t find her!” Jo said, desperate. The stench of human corruption was all around her. There was Dave’s friend Rory, his tattooed arm - hand still connected at the wrist. The same busy hand that had worked the games controller before his attacker blew his brains out across his living room wall. In the next case, Jo’s nostrils protested at the hot meat stink of what was left of Gwen’s sister Emily. Her dismembered body burned to a crisp, eyeballs melted into their sockets. Jo opened another suitcase, engrossed in her frantic search. Sophie had to be there somewhere - she had to be. But the more she searched, Jo found herself looking at the same dead faces, the same severed arms and legs, a second time. There seemed to be so many more body parts than could belong to the people they’d seen killed on their screens. Jo couldn’t be sure, but she hadn’t found any child-sized body parts. It was dreadful to think it, but could she have overlooked Sophie somehow? She was so tiny, just a little girl. Maybe she’d already seen her, but her mind had blocked the trauma of the awful discovery from her very eyes.
Her little Pumpkin.

Jo looked down at her hands and arms, slicked red with blood up to the elbows. Strands of someone else’s hairs snapped sickly between her sticky fingers. The fear of finding Sophie, coupled with the deep trauma of seeing Dawn dead, shook Jo to the core. Her entire body shuddered, and she cradled herself in her arms. Rocking like a madwoman, she began to scream and wail through her tears.

Dead eyes looked back at her, an audience forever silenced.

“Got it!”

Max was to the rear of the bathroom, struggling to extract his bag from beneath two heavy suitcases. He heaved, and the cases spilled their body parts as he wrenched his bag free. He crossed to the sink and unfastened the bag, pausing for a moment to prepare himself for the worst. Reaching inside, he pulled out his sticker-encrusted laptop. Elated, he saw it was still in one piece. Thumbing the little catch at the front of the machine, he opened up the screen. Unlike the mobile phones in the pouch, it was undamaged; save for the familiar little dent he’d made a few months back when he’d snapped it shut with an errant ballpoint pen inside. Max pressed the power switch at the top of the keyboard. The little green power-up LED lit up and the laptop clicked and whirred into life. Kissing the machine in thanks, Max stepped over Jo and headed back into the main cabin.

Kneeling down, he placed the laptop on the floor in front of him, cracked his knuckles and got to work.

Exhausted, Jo crawled over the mound of luggage and bodies and slumped down next to Dawn’s corpse. Her mum’s plastic bag shroud crinkled as Jo leaned against it. She stared at Dawn’s face, those eyes frozen in shock and terror.
Hope it was quick; hope you didn’t feel too much pain,
thought Jo.
She reached out her trembling hand and stroked her mother’s cold cheek.

“Is Sophie with you Mum? If there’s still hope, please tell me... please.”

But there was no hope in Jo’s voice. The image of her daughter, so small on the bed in that grubby room, flashed into her head again. And with it came all the nightmare visions of the face that hid behind the camera lens, the eyes that watched her little girl’s frail form, cold as glass. She imagined
spiralling
with the lens as it turned and
focussed
. She felt herself falling into the dark oubliette of the killer’s eyes and tumbling, bereft.

Jo broke down, sobbing, next to her dead mother.

Max was poised over the laptop keyboard like a hawk.

His fingers were still covered in blood from the luggage. Tapping away furiously, he left bloody fingerprints on the shiny keys. He jabbed at the
trackpad
, also slicked with blood, and opened another window. His mind was code now; married to the machine he was interfacing with. He ran the hacking software’s subroutine and watched as a stream of data unspooled across his screen. The bright green digits flickered past his eyes as the program tried to unlock the security protocols that were keeping him and his machine from the jet’s onboard network.

“Come on... come on!”

Machine code scrolled up across all his open windows, hard drive whirring as though the laptop were huffing and puffing with the effort. Max wiped cold sweat from his forehead and coughed. He wasn’t feeling too good. Probably psychosomatic - who wouldn’t feel sick after inhaling the awful stench in the luggage hold?

Another sound penetrated the periphery of his senses, over his coughing.

It sounded like she was talking to somebody.

Or some body.

Max shuddered,
focussed
his attention on the laptop screen again. One of the data streams had narrowed and locked, while the other window ran through the remaining decryption work. The jet’s air conditioning breathed down the back of Max’s neck as he crouched over the screen. He shivered and coughed again. His throat was so dry, the hacking cough made him gag a little. He watched anxiously as the scrolling in the other window stopped. An administration message popped up on his screen, followed by a new window with the
Deppart
Airlines logo.

“Okay, I’m in!”

Jo appeared in the bathroom doorway. She swayed, as if on the verge of collapse. All the trauma and shock at what she’d witnessed was still etched into her expression.

“The onboard network,” Max said, interpreting the data, “It’s a closed network, hosted by someone on the ground. The webcams are all feeding off to another location.”

He double-clicked on an entry in the list of data and brought up a video window.

Webcam footage of their struggle with Dave played out in front of their eyes, filmed from a high angle. Max glanced upwards - cameras were hidden in the cabin’s overhead lights. The footage paused, then started up again in a loop. Max watched, silent for a moment, as he saw himself plunge the crash axe into Dave’s head all over again.

“If I can get a fix on the I.P. address of the network administrator, maybe we can contact the authorities, at least set off some alarms signposting them our way...”

“We should make it our priority to contact All2gethr - warn those poor people there’s a plane headed their way,” said Jo.

Max continued hacking, pallid and sweating as he went about his work. Jo watched from over his shoulder, clutching one of the seat backs for support. Had he even heard what she’d said?

Neither of them noticed that in the distance, at the front of the plane, the light by the cockpit door turned from red to green.

And neither of them noticed as the cockpit door opened, slowly...

Jo watched as Max worked furiously at the laptop keyboard.

He was rambling, only snatches of what he was saying breaking through. And those brief sentences were unintelligible to her, something about
source code
and
closed networks
- techno-speak,
gobbledegook
. Her mind was a fug, numbed by the shock of finding Dawn among the bodies in the luggage compartment. Only the vague hope that they might contact the outside world was keeping her brain from shutting down completely.

“Give me the laptop.”

The man’s voice cut through the fog of Jo’s thoughts, startling her back into the here and now. He was standing just a few feet away, dressed in the signature smart white shirt and black tie of an airline pilot. He was pointing a bright yellow plastic
taser
gun at them. His eyes darted from Max to Jo, as though ascertaining which was the biggest threat to him. Brow slicked with sweat, he looked to be full of nerves, but determined to conquer them.

Seeing the
taser
gun, Max retracted his hands from the laptop keyboard and looked up at Jo. She looked back at him,
gobsmacked
by the intruder’s sudden appearance in the cabin.

“Hand it over, slowly.”

Max relented - there was clearly no other choice but to comply. He slid the laptop across the floor. It came to a halt a few inches away from the man’s feet.

Not lowering his guard for a second, the man lifted his foot and brought it down on the laptop, hard. Stamping again and again, he smashed the screen until it snapped away from the keyboard. Grinding his heel into the keys, the machine made a pained whining sound then died.

Max winced, looking as crushed as his beloved machine.

Jo watched as the man took a single, bold step closer to them.

Broken glass crunched beneath his shiny black leather shoes. His eyes widened as he took in the carnage. Blood stains everywhere, from the gory mausoleum in the luggage hold and from Dave’s shattered skull. Seeing Dave and Gwen’s partially covered bodies, the man took a sharp intake of breath, tightening his grip on the
taser
. His gaze rested on Jo’s hands, her skin still slicked with gore.

She placed them behind her back.

“What the... hell has been going on in here?”

Bile rose in Jo’s throat. How the hell could he stand there and ask her that?

“Alligator,” she spat. Every ounce of bitterness she possessed was in her voice.

“Stay back.” The man turned the
taser
gun toward Jo, retreating slowly.

Jo glanced at Max. Their eyes met and she knew he had reached the same conclusion she had. Together, they launched themselves at the man with all their might, giving him no chance to trigger the
taser
. The man struggled against their assault, but they were too much for him and he toppled. Jo scratched and bit at him like a feral woman. Max grappled him to the floor and began raining blows.

Max wrestled the
taser
gun from his hands and scrambled to his feet. The
taser
was now trained on its previous owner.

Jo backed away from the man, catching her breath amidst the adrenaline rush.

The man scurried backwards until his back was resting against the bar area. He shook his head, dizzy from their blows. Dabbing at his bleeding lip, he looked up at Max, afraid.

Max staggered forward, coughing. His skin was now deathly pale and slicked with perspiration. For a moment he looked as though he might collapse. Then he coughed again and cleared his throat, regaining his composure - and his grip on the
taser
weapon.