A Mirror for the Stars Read online

  3

  Karen was nude and soaking wet. Hair clung to the sides of her face in clumps, and she was holding a bright red-and-yellow apple in one hand. I wish I could tell you that I'm evolved enough that my eyes didn't immediately flit down to her chest but I am not. Her nipples were hard and erect, but there was nothing sexual about her demeanor. Her eyes were staring straight ahead, empty and lifeless. She wasn’t looking at me. I just happened to be in the way.

  “Hey?” I asked. “Can you hear me?”

  Karen gasped and took a deep breath. Her fingers tightened around the apple and her fingernails dug hard enough into the skin that little rivers of juice ran out.

  “Jack,” she whispered. Her eyes turned and met mine and her face lit up with a brilliant smile. “Seven-seven-three. Nine-five-eight. Oh-one-one-eight.”

  The scene shifted, and Karen was nude in the middle of the aisle on the plane. Oxygen masks had fallen out of their little cubby holes in the ceiling, and all the passengers were grabbing for them and scrambling to get them over their wide eyed faces. There was a strange feeling of vertigo, and the scene out the window was a cloudy blur.

  “Jack,” Karen whispered. “Seven-seven-three. Nine-five-eight. Oh-one-one-eight.”

  Karen’s chant-like whispers were somehow louder than the screaming, and the strange, low-pitched roaring sound that nearly drowned out everything else. The plane lurched, and all the passengers around me were tossed up in the air, like riders on one of those roller coasters that goes over a double dip.

  “Karen!” I screamed and I tried to hug her.

  Something held me back and dug painfully into my groin, and I realized it was my seatbelt. I wasn’t standing in the aisle in front of nude Karen. I was still slumped down in my seat. All that shit had been a dream.

  Except the part about the plane crashing. Apparently that was real.

  “Everyone please remain calm,” said Head Flight Attendant Crone, struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “Please put on your oxygen masks and remain in your seats. Soon we’ll- Charlotte? What are you doing?”

  I turned and looked back over my shoulder. Charlotte was wearing some sort of backpack, and she was working the handle of the emergency door at the rear end of the cabin. The door burst open, and Charlotte tumbled out backward like… like a sky diver.

  “Oh shit,” I tried to say, but the sound of metal ripping itself to pieces drown out my voice. Above me, the ceiling of the plane ripped away and the world rocketed by at a crazed angle. The sounds of screams were cut off by an enormous crash, and then everything went black.