Flight

I clamped shut my eyes the moment I heard the announcement. We were 10 hours into the flight from SYD to LAX when the cabin speakers had chimed and the pilot had declared “Attention passengers, this is your pilot speaking. Opening your flight window shades is now prohibited until further notice. The airline is not liable for any psychological distress experienced from viewing outside.“ The lights were off, the shades already drawn, and most passengers were asleep. The announcement had woken everyone up. It took fractions of a second before a window-seated passenger succumbed to curiousity and opened their shade.

At once I slid my eye mask down over my face and moments later the chaos began. It started with a cackle from one side, and then a grunt on the other. Before long the economy class cabin was filled with guttural cries, primal noises like those from animals. I was jostled about in my seat–I was in the middle of the middle aisle–but there was no turbulence to speak of. The movement came from the growing violence around me. The screaming and grunting was increasing further, although it already seemed to be too loud to be natural, and it was punctuated by a percussive beat, something hard hitting something wet. Hitting something getting ever wetter. There was no rhythm to it, just a frenzied slap heard in between the loudest moments of howling and screeching.

My neck tightened as I felt something slip around my head, down past my hood, to draw tight against it. My neck pillow blocked it, until I felt sticky wet fingers wrench the bean-filled u-shape away. My breath choked off as the thing cinched tight across my windpipe. It was cold and plastic, and instinctively I ducked my head forward. The cord–it was the flimsy cord from a pair of in-flight headphones–snapped quickly and my breathing returned, and I stayed down and low. On the floor now, the carpet gritty and sticky and wet, I crawled out into the aisle. I don’t know where the man sitting next to me disappeared to, but he was not there to impede my passage. I kept my head low and reached along the aisle as I went, my right hand telling me what my eyes could not. There was nothing in my way. As I moved down the aisle towards the front, the sounds within the cabin grew ever more bizzare. Babies growled and wailed. Meat slapped against meat, and I couldn’t tell if it was fucking or fighting. The screams ululated rhythmically at one another, as if they might be conversing. As if it might be a language.

Along the aisle I slunk, my hands finding body parts as I went. A foot here, a hand there. I pushed them away and moved on. There was no time to consider what might have separated them from their owners. My hands found the curtains separating Economy from the rest of the plane, and my heart sprang with hope. I scrambled through it, but before I crossed the threshold claw-like talons grasped my ankle and reefed me back, spinning me supine as I carried through the air. My ankle hurt just from the grip alone. I lashed out with my other foot and caught something in its maw and it fell away, releasing me as it screeched in pain.

Swiftly I scrambled backwards through the curtains and got to my feet. I’d made it out of economy, into the space between classes. It was quiet here, deathly silent, as if the curtains were sound insulated. I took a chance and lifted my eye mask. It took all of my willpower, but I opened one of my eyes a fraction. Warm yellow light bathed the galley between the classes. Premium Economy lay without. It was pitch black, with just the aisle strip lighting illuminating those within. The window shades were still closed. It seemed the premium economy flyers were still sleeping, but looking closer their pale skin and slack jaws gave away the illusion. I could see they were dead. Bloodlessly so, as if they had taken a poison, drunk some collective Kool-Aid to spare them the horrors in the class below.

Lightly I moved forward towards Business Class. It was a short walk, but it took me forever. I felt as though I was moving through Dante’s circles, each area different to the last, and I feared what I might see next.

Economy in the far distance, I made my way past the curtain from Premium Economy to the Business Class Galley and found another curtain blocking my sight. I was grateful for it. No sound passed either curtain, but an odd colour seeped down past the bottom of the cloth divider. It was only by analogy that it might be described a colour at all. It was not a colour of our earth or of the heavens, and it shimmered and radiated in ways my mind could neither comprehend or explain in detail.

Edging forward, I mustered my courage once again. I grabbed the slit with one hand, but before I could move it a grim masked being pushed through the portal and into the galley with me. Two huge reflective eyes and a white beak cowed me back from the entrance to Business.

“Please sir, I’m going to have to ask you to return to your seat,” the being said. It seemed annoyed. Behind it, the curtain didn’t close all the way and that colour from beyond reason poured into the galley freely. I peered past the gatekeeper to Business Class and looked within. It didn’t look like Hell at all. Inside was an orgiastic frenzy of violent, maniacal sex. Blood and shit and piss and cum flew freely in a hedonistic whirl of pleasure and pain. There was none of the tribalistic screaming I’d heared back in Economy. Instead the curtains heralded a choral celebration of life at its most essential. All societal pretense stripped away, all the heirarchical bullshit dismissed, all I could hear and see and smell was the pure essence of existence. And this masked ostiary thought they could stop me from joining in? No chance. I pushed them aside and they fell with a violent thump against a counter in the galley. I burst through the curtains. All heads within turned and appraised me as I stripped away my clothes. They eyed me hungrily, and I them, and I knew that I would devour them, or I would be devoured.