On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

You can also get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device: an overall collection, and also genre-specific volumes!

Here's story 296, of 300 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Time To Go

I’d been sitting in the small room for more than an hour, and I knew that I should be getting annoyed by now. But, strangely, I wasn’t.

The lights were fluorescent strips, all working perfectly, and the walls were a plain and even slightly dull white. Nothing was particularly old or worn, but nothing was brand new either. I was vaguely aware that there were notices pinned to a cork board near the door, but I had no interest in reading them.

They had brought me here directly from the highway, and the more I thought about it, that was strange too.

I didn’t remember anyone asking if I needed medical attention, but maybe that was just because I was obviously fine. I certainly felt fine. But wouldn’t there be after-effects, especially psychological ones? Maybe that was why I was there.

We had only been about forty minutes out from the airport when the seatbelt sign illuminated, and we were instructed to all return to our seats immediately. It was the immediately that made me switch off the music I was listening to, and start paying attention. Then I noticed a lot of little things.

The hushed but intense-looking conversation between two of the cabin crew. The way they checked all the toilets, and locked away the drinks-service cart that they’re only brought out a few minutes earlier for its final pass through before landing. The fact that they asked everyone to ensure their window blinds were up, even though we weren’t on our final descent yet.

Except that we were.

It all progressed incredibly quickly. Perhaps that was a blessing. The tremors and shuddering through the aircraft’s structure, then the strange, hollow bang from somewhere on the opposite side to where I sat. Then the sickening feeling in my stomach as I felt the plane nosing up rapidly, pressing me back into the seat. Another sound, like a metallic shriek, and there were some screams amongst the other passengers, but for the most part it was eerily quiet. We were all braced by now, but I looked up when I could actually hear an alarm blaring from the cockpit just a few rows ahead. I saw the face of a young member of the cabin crew, and she was clutching the crossed chest-straps of the harness of her jump seat, face pale with terror.

Then the shaking that wouldn’t stop, and the sudden wind, and finally a sense of being plucked from the sky.

I don’t remember the impact. I don’t remember how I got out of the wreckage. All I remember is standing in a field beside the highway, and I could see burning fragments of metal stretching away for half a mile in either direction. I could see a row of seats nearby, except that one of them had sheared off. There was smoke, and I briefly saw the shape of a woman who might have been the frightened flight attendant, but then she was gone. And then I don’t remember much at all.

I was shown into the room by a man; I know that much. He might have been wearing a uniform, or perhaps just a suit. I was a little out of it, to be honest, but now I was calmer.

The door opened, and a man entered. He might have been the one who brought me in, or he might not have been. In any case, he had a kind sort of face, and he gave me a long look before he sat down in the chair opposite me.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, and I shrugged.

“How should I be feeling?” I replied, and then he shrugged too.

I asked him if this was a legal indemnity situation — I was surprised that my brain had managed to produce the thought — but he shook his head. He said it wasn’t about that at all.

“My only concern is your welfare,” he said. I had the feeling that he was about to address me by name, but we hadn’t met yet so how would he know what my name was? It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know my own name at that point either, but it didn’t seem especially important.

“How many other people survived?” I asked instead, and he tipped his head to one side. His facial expression, which was of a sympathy so intense that it was almost startling, gave me my answer before he did.

“In these situations, where there’s bilateral mechanical failure before initiating descent, there are very rarely any survivors. Do you remember being on the highway before you came here?”

I nodded. There hadn’t been any noticeable sections of the plane that were still intact, right enough. It was a miracle I’d lived through it, and without any serious injuries.

“I’d like to call my daughter,” I said. “She’ll have seen this on the news by now, I’m sure. She didn’t know which flight I was on, but I’d like to let her know I’m alright.”

It was both the truth and also a lie. I hadn’t spoken to my daughter — or rather, she hadn’t spoken to me — in several years. She hadn’t known I was flying across the country to attend a job interview, at my own expense. She hadn’t known I’d begun to pull my life back together. She hadn’t known that it had been her face I’d seen in my mind, in the moments I assumed would be my last.

I’d taken my brother’s death very hard, four years earlier. A senseless, stupid, wasteful death. A blood clot, and a stroke, and nothing-they-could-have-done. I disappeared into the unfairness of it, and my own anger, and then into the medication, whether prescribed or not. I felt like I’d lost so much, so I set about losing even more. But that was all behind me. It had been a setback, and it had destroyed my relationship with my daughter, which had already been on shaky ground since the divorce, but I was determined to repair all of it. The job interview was the first step. Or at least, was going to be.

The man hadn’t responded to my request for a phone call, and was instead just looking at me with compassion. For some reason, it was troubling. I cleared my throat.

“Actually, I think I’d like to leave now,” I said, and the man again shrugged, as if to say that leaving was indeed one of my options, but not the only one.

“You’re free to go at any time, of course,” he said. “But aren’t there any questions you’d like to ask?”

The strange thing was, while I could think of any number of relevant questions at that moment, none of them seemed very important. Barely worth the trouble of asking. The man seemed to understand this, and he nodded in a particular way.

It was his usual nod; his life-long nod. A bit to the right, instead of just down and up, as if it contained a note of wry amusement, or even the hint of a question. It was the only way I could ever remember him nodding, even decades earlier.

And then I realised that he was my brother.

Of course he was. It was perfectly clear and obvious, and he hadn’t aged a day. He nodded again now, still the same crooked one, and I smiled. It was reassuring to see him again, and I felt that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

I looked over at the cork noticeboard now, and saw just what I expected to see on it. It hadn’t changed, either, and was exactly as I’d left it, with the concert tickets, and the polaroid from childhood, and of course the local newspaper clipping from when he’d saved that elderly lady from being struck by a bus. None of it had changed, and indeed, why would it?

“There are very rarely any survivors,” I said, and he gave me the same look of infinite compassion; the one from just before, when he was only the man.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said, and I could hear that he meant it.

“I know,” I replied simply. I think he might have laughed then, but instead he just stood up. I joined him.

The featureless door behind him, set into the wall that was featureless except for the cork board and its trove of memories, seemed to be beckoning.

It was time to go.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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