A Crack in the Sky (Tentative Title)

A CRACK IN THE SKY

By
Herminio Salgado 







“…as I woke up one morning, and while falling back into the confusion of consciousness, I realized that for one brief moment I understood everything… and I knew that from that point on, my purpose of being was changed forever.”
- Alan “A-186”
 






Prologue

Confusion struck Alan mid-laughter. While sure that all sounds in the dining room were normal, internally his senses were not perceiving them as such. His friends at the table became a gradual but somehow familiar nauseating haze. Their remarks and increasingly wittier comebacks filling the room also distorted into distant echoes as if heard through a metal pipe. He shook his head briskly; a natural reaction to his plugged ears. Water always accumulated in them when showering, and he must have forgotten his ritualistic use of a Q-Tip that day.
"Sugar levels dropping?” Alan wondered failing in clearing his ears. It had happened before. Specifically, after skipping breakfast one morning, he went through a similar experience while helping his aunt cut thick overgrown mango tree branches under the hot mid-day sun in the Rio Grande suburbs. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.
“Freakin’ Eli!” the thought came as casual, just as he had done countless times before. His idiot friend had been too eager to be early to dinner, claiming they were already late. Of course, Danni was the real reason he’d been rushed. He couldn't blame him though. She was really something to behold. Shaking his head again should do the trick of clearing them for now.
“Perhaps a little harder…”
A blinding brightness swallowed the room instead. Squinting at the now ghostly images of his friends, heart-pounding fright built. The strangely familiar white haze quickly covered his field of view and momentarily triggered a memory of a similar experience while at the rainforest El Yunque during one of their hikes. Everything faded away sinking him deeper into confusion, just as it happened then. And the flashback took a backseat to the current events.
"Shit, not again!" His struggle fueled his confusion.
Oblivious to the nature of the situation, Alan realized it was a definite first for him. The sensations sharply diverged from his experience at the rainforest. This time it seemed to bring him deeper, threatening to consume him.
“Something’s very wrong.” The thought fell short in describing it. Oddly enough, understanding the mutation of his senses proved futile much sooner than expected. Alan was no quitter. He’d never been one to just accept things just because. His past several hikes to the peak of El Yunque, while being mostly dares, were completed as a race against his best friend Eli, even if it meant pushing himself to the brink of a stroke. This time, however, he just couldn't beat the ongoing bombardment of changes bestowed upon him.
A droplet of oily dark matter magically swirled from the middle of the white haze like ink on water. It startled him how quickly it spread over his entire field of view, enhancing everything in the process into a sharp and crisp level of clarity he knew to be impossible.
“Help!” the cry failed to materialize, and the resulting rush of adrenaline turned his fright into a paralyzing panic.
“I think I’m having a stroke?” the thought fed his fear. "Help me!" He failed again, trapped inside his now unresponsive body. And it all went unnoticed by the rest.
The chattering echo that still filled the dining room shifted, becoming the background of something unclear. Dizziness ensued and an unwavering pressure slowly crept into the part of the brain that integrates sensory information; the parietal lobe. Yet, Alan somehow managed to hone his attention at the one unclear element…
“Whispers!” The realization startled him. “Whispers... from within me!”
Naturally, Alan attempted to make sense of this new impossibility, but as the very initial thought to do so barely formed, one more change hit. Until now, his senses had confused him, bringing dread and despair. This latest sensory stimulus he had desperately hoped for some time now, not to mention welcomed. As his fears dissipated, so his tightened chest released, relieved by an utter sense of security that felt aggressively imposed somehow. It didn't matter who or what was the source. It so soothed his discomfort, and he gladly surrendered himself to it. It was all he cared for now. His heartbeat normalized. The panic was gone. Relief reached his very soul, and he was relieved it was all finally over. The new sense of safety enveloped him like a warm blanket in winter, so thoroughly that the fear previously experienced privately embarrassed him.
But that too was quickly snatched away as a blurred vagueness of an idea abruptly took its place.
“What the fuck!” he said to himself, for it struck as artificial as the security just felt. The more the whispers increased in clarity, the stronger the idea became. And with it, something even more incredible began; the awareness of other’s presence grew within his mind.
“How could this be?” It astonished him how quickly they too intensified, becoming as prominent as his own thoughts.
The idea took the unexpected form of an airplane taxiing on a runway, and it quickly replaced his short-lived astonishment. As strange and sudden as everything else had been for the past few minutes, so the overwhelming tingling felt as he crossed a ghostly gelatinous membrane of sorts that suddenly and physically brought him there with it…
Gasps suddenly filled the dining room, threatening to force his attention back to his immediate surroundings. His first instinct was to comply with that natural response. But somewhere in between, Alan compensated for it all with ease. His clarity of concentration prevailed, enhanced, somehow balancing his awareness of both the vision and the here and now. To his further amazement, the balance proved to be as natural as breathing.
The women’s reactions startled Eli out of his chair. There, and before asking, the reason for the commotion became clear. He witnessed the last moments of his friend's mutation as his skin slowly turned the color of ash, and his eyes filled to become pitch-black marbles. The women rushed towards the farthest end of the dining room, frightened.
“Mom, hurry!” Danni called terrified. Her mother rushed in response to the urgency.
“Oh my god!” Her gasp muffled under her own hand. Alan remained seated, expressionless, frozen in time in a trance-like state as unknown to him as it was for the rest. The others did not dare to move.
“Alan?” Eli nervously tried attempting to assess the situation.
“Careful Eli.” The woman’s warning barely trembled out of her, still muffled from under her hand.
Eli approached with slow and very careful steps while slowly reaching for Alan’s right hand.
“Please don’t touch him… Someone call for help!” The lady continued whispering loudly, pointing at a cell phone lying on the table. No one dared to comply.
“Alan… are you alright bro?”
Alan swiftly reached for his cell phone, raising the tension in the room to almost panic. Eli jumped backwards knocking over his chair, still positioned between the frightened crowd and his bizarrely looking friend who, without looking, dialed a number-

2
At the other end, an internal line rang.
"Was jetzt! (What now!)" the annoyed German thought followed a sigh.
“Tower, Jana.”- The controller’s voice came with her attention locked on the crammed traffic on her radar screen at the Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport.
The reply changed all that. The voice of many spoke in unison, and it immediately caught her attention.
“The second aircraft aligned to depart, flight 186, will have an undetected electrical short in the avionics compartment below the cockpit just after takeoff. It will initiate a fire. By the time the system detects it, it will be too late. You must prevent its departure now. Otherwise everyone onboard will perish.”
“Who's this!” her obvious bad temper surfaced.
“Do not let the voices fool you.” It almost overlapped her. “Follow protocol.”
“WHO IS THIS!” She instinctively reacted to the soberness of the voices while frantically waving at someone across the room.
“You must not allow the aircraft to take off.” The collective voices continued. “You have been warned!”
“Wait!” Jana barely uttered before the line disconnected. “Scheiße! (Shit!)”
Her monitored flights were instantly transferred to other controllers as someone briskly approached.
“What've you got?” the fat bulky form of the supervisor leaned over towards her display while adjusting his glasses.
“A call just came through the internal line. It… they said that the next aircraft to take off would have an undetected short after takeoff and that it would kill everyone onboard if we didn't stop it.”
“A prank?”
“Well...” she hesitated.
“Well what Jana?”
“I don't know what to say Rey. The voices sounded like many talking at the same time, but were very serious otherwise.”
“Ummm!” Indecision became apparent on his face as he considered the options.
“They also demanded that we followed protocols, and it is protocol to evacuate the aircraft immediately-”
“You think I don’t know that!” He snapped. “It also costs money, a lot of money in fact Jana to pull the damn flight if for nothing!”
“With all due respect Rey,” she authoritatively insisted, “the aircraft was just cleared for departure and it's positioning itself to take off as we speak. What will it be?”
On the runway, Flight 186 began revving up its engines. Flight attendants locked themselves in while some youngsters peaked out the windows readying to experience the thrill of takeoff. Soon acceleration would ensue.
The situation left him with no choice but to pull the flight before “V-1”, the takeoff point of no return, was called. His following actions had been clearly dictated.
“Rey!” Jana exclaimed looking at the plane through binoculars. “The aircraft just began its run!”
“Damn!” It crossed his mind ending his futile internal debate. Annoyance was apparent when he nodded the go.
“Spirit one-eight-six, come in, over.” Jana immediately began.
"Get me F.A.A. security on the line, now!" Rey overlapped, signaling elsewhere.
“This is Spirit 186, over.” The clattered voice came back through her headset.
“Spirit one-eight-six you have a no-go. I repeat you have a no-go. Do you copy, over?”
“…Close the damn runway and alert emergency teams. Divert all able incoming traffic through Aguadilla…” The orders continued in the background.
“Roger that control!” The pilot replied immediately applying maximum breaking power a mere second after the take-off decision speed “V-1” called was made by the co-pilot. The breaking force abruptly yanked unsuspecting passengers forward causing a panic. The aircraft vibrated as the cabin filled with the loud turbine’s noise. Flight attendant’s instructions to assume brace positions barely made it past the first rows of seats, swallowed by the commotion. The pilots pressed on with the deceleration process hoping there was enough runway left. By the time the aircraft broke enough speed, the National Weather Service Building located at the end was mere meters away. The pilots brought the craft to a full stop realizing that, had the “V-1” call taken place sooner than it did, they wouldn’t have had enough runway to stop. The pilots sighed giving each other a relief look.
“There goes another cancelled flight” The co-pilot muttered while initiating system’s shutdown.
“I’ll tell you, there are times I really hate this job!” The pilot stated to no one in particular while securing some controls.
“Tower, dare I ask what seems to be the problem, over?”
“We received a direct threat regarding your flight. Prepare for immediate emergency EVAC of the aircraft. Assistance is on the way-”

3
“In spite of thorough searches conducted, officials reported the fire remained undetected until it was too late. So, the question on the safety of today's aircrafts, and the millions of travelers that rely on them to get them safely to their destinations has now taken a front seat...” The reporter continued as broadcasted images of the burning fuselage surprised the country later that evening.
Eli stood in the middle of the living room, stunned.
“I heard someone warned the authorities.” A woman told her tale on T.V.
Eli turned to Alan wide-eyed only to find him already staring back, hand-on-mouth, lost and clearly scared.
“If it wasn’t for him…” Her broken voice continued. “My family is alive, thanks to him… and as far as I’m concerned, he’s an angel… an angel of flight one-eighty-six…”
Both of their cell phones rang almost simultaneously. Their eyes immediately locked again. For what seemed like forever, the surreal moment felt as if time itself had stopped, and they both felt the unpleasantness in their gut.
The ringing continued, ignored.
“I swear I can't remember...” Alan barely utter, trembling.