Sarah realized that her eyes were practically glued shut before she tried to open them. At the same time, she felt immobilized; as though someone was holding her down. The paralysis that glued her body to the hospital bed was real — or was it? Something was keeping her head from its normal range of motion. She could not remember a time when her mouth felt this dry. It would be a real chore to let anyone near know that she was awake and needing some answers.
She did her best to utter some guttural sounds and to pry her eyelids open at the same time. She felt her hearing start to come around; she recognized the sounds of nurses and doctors milling about in her room. Her eyes opened halfway — halfway was enough for the light in the room to hurt her eyes and enough for her to make out a shadowy figure in white standing at the end of her bed.
“Welcome back, you gave us a start young lady.” The doctor glanced up from her iPad as she tapped incessantly on its surface. “My guess is that you’re feeling pretty lousy right now. I can say that and get away with it since you are verbally defenseless right now.”
Sarah attempted to crack a smile, but her face still hurt. She turned her head to the right and uttered one word at the nurse standing next to her.
“Adam?”
The nurse’s facial expressions spoke before she did. She looked at Sarah and said, “I’m sorry.”
Sarah was going to have to endure her grief and pain in silence. She felt a stream of hot tears leaking from her eyes, rolling down her face and onto her neck. She couldn’t even reach up and wipe her face.
“Try to get some more rest, Sarah. I don’t think your body is ready for anything more right now.”
Sarah’s mind raced. She was amazed at how fast the thoughts came and went now that she was unable to speak. She replayed the events that nearly took her life; she remembered hearing the deafening sounds and trying to run away from the impending doom. The beating her body took from a variety of inanimate objects, both fixed and movable, were forever etched in her consciousness. The memory of the physical pain was too fresh, and she could still remember and feel the dull throb of each blow. Somehow, she ended up outside of the main waiting area, twisted and contorted on the tarmac.
Her thoughts turned to what should have been; this was a trip that she and Adam had been waiting to make. This was their first real lead in a case that had a host of loose threads. A prominent professor was missing, and more and more strange terrorist-like attacks kept popping up all over the East Coast and the Midwest.
Meanwhile, back at the Kansas City airport, large earth movers were doing their best to clear away the largest pieces of the airport terminal’s support structure to allow rescue personnel and dogs to find survivors.
At another location in the airport, the Incident Review Team was meeting to try to piece together what happened. The Quality Assurance manager was waiting to hear if the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) Go Team was able to get their hands on the Digital Flight Data Recorder and all the other black boxes and voice recorders on the airplane. Anytime there was a major air craft accident, the Go Team’s job was to begin the investigation at the site of the accident scene, as soon as possible. As with other accidents, the NTSB assembled a team of personnel with a broad spectrum of technical competencies needed to solve a host of complex transportation safety problems.
An airplane seemed to fall out of the sky and there was nothing routine about the circumstances leading up to the catastrophe. The air traffic controllers were the first ones who had any inkling of what happened. The QA manager was eager and anxious to hear their accounts of the accident.
Once the team assembled in the War Room, it took nearly 30 minutes for them to get to a point of productivity; there were upwards of 20 people in attendance and the introductions alone were enough to bring any momentum to a grinding halt. The administrative assistant was the first to notice the ashen face of the young man in charge of the presentation slides.
“What is it, Hans?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know what I am looking at. This looks like a scene out of a horror movie. My God…”
Get Ray Jarrett’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That got the attention of everyone in the room. Four or five people hovered around the laptop and looked at the screen in disbelief. They all leaned over to get a closer look at the footage taken from the surveillance camera mounted in the terminal.
“Oh my God… what happened to them?”
“Let’s all get seated. Hans, go ahead and lead off with the video. Let’s all take a look.”
There was a predictable, collective gasp from the room as the team watched the mayhem unfold. The camera shook and there was a blur of action, activity and smoke that clouded the visual chronology of events.
“THERE…look at them. Do you see that?” Hans could scarcely contain himself and was apoplectic in his narration of what he tried to point out in the video.
Bodies. Each of the passengers aboard the plane looked…different. A camera in the far corner of the terminal captured footage of the mangled side of the fuselage. The entire left side of the airplane was peeled back — as though someone had taken an oversized can opener to the structure. The footage revealed a row of disfigured corpses still strapped in their seats. Each of the passengers looked like mummified bags of hardened, dehydrated fruit. Their desiccated, prune-like remains looked as though something or someone sucked the liquid and air out of their remains.
“What the…?” The head of the NTSB started barking orders. “Have the team get those bodies out of that terminal right away. I want the coroner to start by examining the passengers. Make sure that the press DOES NOT get a hold of this footage. We need to get a handle on this puzzle. That was more than bizarre. Do we have the black box data? The voice recorders?”
“Not yet boss, the crew has been working all night, and we haven’t been able to get close to the airframe. It’s been slow moving.”
“Do we have anything? “ Everyone could sense the tension in the room. No one said a word.
“Alright, let’s get the air traffic controllers in here and start with what they heard.”
In a large building in a remote area near the east coast, Professor Bruce Kingston contemplated his next move. He vacillated on what to do next, and he wondered if his plea for help made it to the authorities. The professor waited to be rescued…he knew that he could reverse what he knew was the abuse of his research. Dr. Kingston felt nauseous whenever he saw or suspected the tell-tale markers that led him to believe that his discovery was being used as a weapon. He watched cable news every evening with a feeling of ominous trepidation and a hope that all he would hear about would be the latest story about what was happening in the nation’s capital. He’d hoped that his subterfuge was subtle enough to alert his colleagues of his whereabouts. He knew that the authorities were looking for him; at least his notoriety was worth something.
Seven hours northeast of the airport, a group of young men casually gathered at East Cedar Beach, located on the northeast side of Cedar Lake on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota. One of the men answered his phone and talked for less than a minute. The others gathered around and started an ad hoc meeting.
Within a matter of minutes, the meeting disbanded, and the group headed to their vehicles. Two of the men huddled at the back of a silver rental van. One of the men took out a small suitcase and the other was handed a small package. He crammed it in his backpack as fast as he could and took off on foot over a small ridge into the wooded area of the park.
The driver of the van closed the hatch and took a moment to look at the city’s skyline which was visible from their location in the park. He wished they’d selected a more secluded location to develop a strategy and make exchanges, but everything went according to plans and now his main concern was getting his team out of the city. He knew he should have looked up the location of the park before agreeing to meet there, but he trusted his lieutenant to make the arrangements.
As he sat on the back bumper of the van, he started to notice something unnatural about the smattering of people milling around the beach. A coordinated, choreographed dance replaced what should have been random patterns of movement. His hair stood on end. He ran to the front of the van and motioned for the rest of the crew to leave.
“Let’s get out of here!” The driver turned the key over and threw the van into reverse. Before they knew it, they were surrounded. Three FBI agents drew their weapons and converged on the vehicle. They screamed for them to turn off the engine and get out of the van. The other men were already in the custody of the other agents. One of the other men sprinted to the edge of the clearing and exchanged gunfire with the person carrying the backpack. Half of the other agents ran into the foliage to engage in the action.
The area grew eerily quiet as the remaining agents crouched behind their cars with weapons drawn and waited for their comrades to come out into the clearing. Two agents emerged from the area near the tree line carrying a man between them; but they could not see a backpack. The lead agent got on his radio and instructed agents in the area to set up a net around the wooded area of the beach. At the same time, another agent made a call for an ambulance.
Back at the hospital, Sarah drifted in and out of a lucid state of awareness. She was anxious to get out of Kansas City and back on the case. She would find the person responsible for her partner’s death. She would find whoever did this — whatever the cost.
