Unaccompanied Minor (18 page)

I ran to Officer Ned, who had collapsed and was breathing raggedly. “What do I do?” I asked Malcolm. There was nothing in the first aid section of the manual that told us how to treat gunshot wounds. Officer Ned was bleeding badly. I could feel the panic rise in my chest and the tears well in my eyes.

What do I do what do I do what do I do?
Then I heard my mom’s voice.
Don’t freak out. Figure it out.
I sprang into action.

“Malcolm, get me the first aid kit from above the jumpseat over by the sink. See it there? Good. Now bring me the emergency medical kit from above the other jumpseat on the other side of the elevators. Thanks. Now, grab the defibrillator from the bracket above the cupboard. It’s that red square thing with the little blinking lightning bolt by the handle. Good.”

From there I worked in a blur as all the training I’d helped other flight attendants study for kicked me into autopilot. A gunshot wound is a wound, after all. I knew how to treat those. As far as I could discern, Officer Ned had been shot in the left arm and in the torso near the right side of his ribs. I pulled off one of his motorcycle boots and, using the scissors in the defibrillator kit, cut off the strap so I could wrap it around his arm to apply pressure and secure the bandage.

Then I directed Malcolm to look into Flo’s bag for painkillers, because I knew she must have had some in there. I shook three into my palm and fed them to Officer Ned one at a time, two because he was at least twice her size and one extra because, well, he was shot up. I bundled him in airline blankets and kept the defibrillator at the ready in case he started to die on me. Thankfully he didn’t just then, and soon he seemed to be as stabilized as we could hope for considering the situation.

I sat back and exhaled, finally.

But not for long.

I ran to the elevators and banged the buttons to descend the cars so I could ride them up. “April, where are you going?” Malcolm called. We could hear some passengers above us still chattering in the kind of half panic that comes with understanding that things are not right but not knowing exactly what is wrong.

“Flo! Beefheart!” I said, still banging the buttons, but Ramona must have opened the doors above to keep the elevators from operating. “Malcolm, you have to boost me through the hatch.”

“No, I’m not letting you up there.”

I yanked an empty meal cart out from its stowage sleeve and positioned it under the hatch. “I’m going up there, Malcolm. I have to. You can help me or not.”

He arose from Officer Ned’s side and reluctantly steadied the cart as I climbed on top of it. I was encouraged to hear Officer Ned admonish me from the floor. “April, don’t you dare,” he coughed. “Get back here.”

I ignored him for two reasons. One, I had to look after Flo and Beefheart. And two, I knew it would make him mad enough to stay alive so he could tear me a new one later. I pushed open the hatch and saw that people were up in the aisles all willy-nilly.
Oh well
, I thought,
it’s chaos
, and I flipped open the hatch and popped myself into the aisle, closing it behind me.

Only a few passengers noticed me emerge, and they stared at me in stunned silence. The blood on my white blouse did not help, I thought. But no time to worry about that. I looked around the cabin to assess its condition. The first thing I noticed was Old Cinderblock, or, more accurately, the
absence
of Old Cinderblock. He was not in his seat and was nowhere to be seen. The second thing I noticed was Flo near the aft cross-aisle. She met my eyes and held up her hand in a way that appeared to be meant to warn me away.

I ignored that and ran down the aisle toward her, knocking over two teenagers and that sloppy drunk who had earlier made a scene during boarding. When I reached Flo I saw what she meant when she had tried to warn me away. Lying behind her in the cross-aisle was the air marshal, his lurid Hawaiian shirt practically glowing like plutonium, his Dockers pant leg pushed up to expose an empty holster, a bullet hole in his head that was made, presumably, by his own gun.

“Kid,” Flo said sadly, “I tried to tell you to stay back.”

It was then that I noticed Ramona, pointing the air marshal’s gun at Flo’s head.

Lord Christ
, I thought to myself, channeling Flo,
how many damn guns are there on this aircraft?
And then, once again, I sprang into action.

In the flight attendant self-defense course, they teach you ways to disarm an assailant, and one of the most interesting things in that training video—to me, anyway—is when the instructor says that he would rather face a gun instead of a knife any day of the week.

“With a gun,” he says, “all you have to worry about is the little hole at the end of the barrel. Just make sure that little hole isn’t pointing at you and you have a chance of escaping the situation.”

One of the interesting things about human anatomy, I learned from this training, is that the wrist is one of the weakest parts of the body. So weak, in fact, that when you smack the back of someone’s hand sharply, it easily jackknifes at the wrist and tends to release their grip. “Swat it!” the instructor instructed. “Swat it to the ground!”

So that’s exactly what I did.
Swat!
I swatted Ramona’s weapon right to the ground. Among the three of us—me, Ramona, and Flo—I think I was probably the most surprised that it actually worked.

When the gun clattered to the floor, I dove for it, along with Ramona and Flo both.

“Flo!” I cried as I struggled with Ramona over the dead body of the air marshal to try and keep her from retrieving his weapon. “Flo, go back to the galley!” She stood, but beyond that did not seem to move. Ramona tried scratching me like a bobcat, but at that precise moment I discovered something new about myself, and that was this: You don’t get trapped in a car trunk next to the corpse of one of your only friends, only to escape to find yourself locked up in a hospital about to be turned over to a murderer, only to escape to find yourself on a flight where the three remaining friends you have on this earth—as well as an innocent emotional support dog—are about to be bombed off the planet without growing some steel-clad cojones of your own.

I grabbed the Halon fire extinguisher from its bracket by the cross-aisle jumpseat, snapped the seal, and blasted it in Ramona’s face. She screamed and retreated, coughing and spitting and trying to dig the chemical foam from her eye sockets. I had time to feel satisfied for about half a second before I heard a menacing voice from behind me.

“Yoo-hoo,” it said.

I turned to see the sloppy drunk grinning at me. Only he didn’t seem drunk at all. In fact, he seemed immensely lucid right then—evil, even—seeing as how he was pointing the air marshal’s gun at Flo’s head.

Dang!
I thought.
Did I fall for the oldest trick in the book, or what?
He was the sleeper hijacker. They teach you about this in flight attendant training: Never assume the hijackers who reveal themselves are the only terrorists on the plane.

“Oh, my
God,
just
look
at me!” Ramona griped from behind me. “Jack, can you finish these two, please? I have to try and salvage all this.” And she stormed back to the front of the plane past both panicked and oblivious passengers, some of whom still tried to intercept her to ask for beverages. She smacked their hands away and continued storming up the aisle.

“My pleasure,” the fake drunk called after her. He said it like it was anything but pleasurable. Then he pushed Flo aside and aimed the gun at me.

Here’s the thing about the D zone cross-aisle of an L-1011 aircraft: There’s an alcove that runs the length of the cross-aisle. Half of it is a coat closet, and the other half houses a remote raft. They call it “remote” because inflatable rafts are usually located in the slide bustles at each exit door. But this one, this raft at the D zone cross-aisle, is not. It’s in the closet, and the inflation handle is easy to find if you’re a third-generation flight attendant (although a fake one for now). So I yanked that inflation handle, and the result was as calamitous as you’d expect in an enclosed area where the inflation of a raft the size of a house had just been deployed.

Boom!
went the raft as the CO
₂
canisters exploded air into its chambers.

Bang!
went the air as it popped out of the rubberized canvas when the confines of the cabin proved too tight for the giant raft to expand further.

Aaaaah!!
went the screams of the passengers as it finally began to dawn on those in D zone that something was seriously amiss.

When the calamity halfway cleared, I was already up at the mid galley, already inside the elevator, and already descending when I caught sight of Old Cinderblock. He was out of his handcuffs (seriously, there are
hundreds
of videos on YouTube) and he had a yelping Beefheart by the scruff of the neck as he clomped down the aisle on his big Frankenstein feet toward the first-class cabin. I stopped the elevator car and reversed the toggle switches to re-ascend. Then I threw open the door and ran down the aisle after him.

“Grab that dog!” I implored to the passengers nearby. They all screamed in complete and utter uselessness, except for one person on an aisle seat three rows from the first-class curtain. It was a lady who must have been ninety years old with little tiny arms no bigger than broomsticks. She grabbed her cane from underneath the seat in front of her and whacked Old Cinderblock across the hand like an angry Catholic nun. Cinderblock squawked in pain and released his grip on Beefheart, who hit the ground running toward me and jumped in my arms.

I gathered him gratefully and headed back to the mid galley to descend the elevator. Thankfully the fake drunk was still trying to untangle himself from the big, air-blown boa constrictor of the remote raft and had yet to resume his murderous pursuit. Old Cinderblock must have had more pressing things to deal with, because he didn’t pursue me, either. I entered the elevator and descended, and was overcome with relief to see that Flo had made it there before me.

I burst through the door of the lift and handed Malcolm the dog. He gathered Beefheart in his arms and pressed his face against the wiry fur of the sweet little beast. “Thank you.”

I disabled the lifts by cracking open each door, as the lifts won’t function unless the doors on each end are shut securely. I had to close off access. I didn’t know what other killers with deceptively friendly faces would come flooding in. Luckily, the hatch could only be opened from below.

We barely had time to take a breath before the intercom blared. “Oh, Flo,” Ramona’s voice oozed saccharine, “I have somebody here who wants to talk to you.”

Ash’s nervous voice boomed through the speakers. “Flo, it’s Ash Manning. Been a long time, huh? Yeah… uh, listen, heh heh, funny thing, there’s a guy here with a gun on me, he says he’s gonna shoot unless you come up from down there.”

Flo began walking toward the lift. I grabbed her arm and pleaded, “No! Are you nuts?
That’s Ash!
Don’t go, Flo,
please
!”

Even now as I say this, I don’t know why Flo didn’t just let them shoot Ash. That gun was pretty small caliber. It probably would not have killed him. Besides, her days of caring about passengers were supposed to have been long gone. When I helped her study to take her annual qualifications last year, at the part about how to protect passengers in a hijacking, she laughed, “Use them as a human shield.”

But underneath all the cigarettes, the Bloody Marys, the rebellion, and the cragginess, she was still a flight attendant. She had seen it all, survived, and come out stronger on the other side. So maybe way down under that giant hair bun there was something similar to my real father, who, instead of stepping off the plane to save himself, stepped further inside to try to save others. One step is all it takes.

Excuse me… sometimes when I talk about my real dad, for some reason out of the blue I might start crying, and I sincerely hate it when that happens. Crying is of no use to anyone. And Flo was hardly any help, either, because sometimes she’d cry, too. Because not only was she the one who introduced my mother to my father, but she also introduced my mother to my stepfather as well.

“So there you go, kid,” she’d say, waving the chain-smoke from the galley area. “I am responsible for both the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to your mother.”

Today I tried to keep my grip on Flo’s arm, dig in my heels, and force her to stay with me in the tentative safety of the lower galley. But she was strong for a five-feet-nothing, ninety-five-pound firecracker. I couldn’t keep her there, or convince her to stay.

“No matter what we think of him,” Flo said, “he doesn’t deserve to die at the hands of those animals.”

“Oh, Flo,” I cried. “We see that differently.”

Malcolm put his arm around my shoulders, and Flo ascended the lift. We could see her through the window of the lift door as she disappeared to the upper galley. I could hear the lift door above us open and slam against the PA panel, and the scuffling of footsteps. Then the intercom buzzed to life again, and I heard Ramona’s slightly Southern-accented voice, twice as menacing now in its treacly friendliness.

“April, sweetheart,” she trilled. “You and your friends are gonna have to come up from below. C’mon now.”

I settled my roiling fear and anger as best I could, and spoke into the speaker. “Ramona, sweetheart, I would rather drive a railroad spike through my eye.”

“I was afraid you’d be that way, darlin’, so I hate to say we need to take drastic measures. I have your friend Flo here—” Her words made my face burn. “—and my friend Jack here has a gun to her head. I’m gonna count to twenty, and you and your friends—including the dog, now, don’t forget him—better come up from down there and stop fussin’ with us, or it just breaks my heart to say that your friendship with Flo here is gonna come to an end real quick.”

I said nothing. My hands balled into fists. Ramona knew I wouldn’t lift a finger to save Ash Manning, so she got Flo up there to use as leverage instead. I looked at Malcolm frantically, and his expression reflected mine. Officer Ned lay still with his eyes closed, and I wasn’t sure he was even conscious.