Blind Panic
Graham Masterton
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
The totemlike figures stalked closer, until they were towering over them. Behind the expressionless slits in their marks, Charlie and the others could see faint blue-white lights flickering.
“Come on, man,” said Charlie. “We really need to go.”
“Look at them,” Remo protested. “They’re not even human.”
He leaned forward and peered at them more intently. Then, without warning, the blue-white lights suddenly flared up as fiercely as welding-torches. They were so bright that the friends had to raise their hands in front of their faces to keep from being dazzled.
“Holy crap,” said Mickey—yet almost as quickly as the lights had flared up, they died down again, and he found himself in total darkness. He lowered his hand, but he was still in total darkness. He blinked furiously, and rubbed his eyes, but it made no difference. He couldn’t see anything except seamless black.
It was Cayley who screamed first…
For my mother Mary, with love
HAPTER
O
NE
Washington, DC
He was little more than halfway across the White House lawn when the president of the United States went blind.
He swayed, and his arm swung out to catch the First Lady’s hand.
“David?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Christ, Marian, I can’t see.”
Marine One’s rotors were already turning and she could hardly hear him.
“What?”
“I can’t see, Marian. Hold on to my hand; steady me. Guide me up to the steps. I don’t want anybody to know that anything’s wrong.”
“David, we have to take you to the hospital, now!”
“Dr. Cronin’s on board, he can take a look at me first.”
“David—”
“Marian, please! Think what could happen, even if I get my sight back!”
“I don’t care what could happen! I care about
you
—that’s all!”
But the president gripped the First Lady’s hand even tighter and continued to walk with jerky determination toward the helicopter, and all she could do was make sure that he didn’t veer off in the wrong direction.
“Steps,”
she said, warning him. He reached out with his right hand and felt for the guardrail. Then he turned back
and waved to the assembled press corps, smiling broadly as if nothing were wrong.
“Help me climb up. Count the steps for me.”
The two of them mounted the steps, both of them still smiling, while the First Lady said through her teeth, “One—two—three—Doug Latterby’s standing at the top, to your right. Don’t bump into him.”
“Hi, Doug!” said the president, trying to sound cheery. “How’s it going? Got those security reports in yet?”
“Just came through, Mr. President. You can look through them right now.”
“Great stuff.”
“Top step,” the First Lady cautioned him.
The president turned around again and gave another wave for the cameras. Then the First Lady steered him through the door of Marine One and along to his private cabin.
“Mrs. Perry?” said Doug Latterby, trying to follow her.
“Go fetch Dr. Cronin right now! And get this thing off the ground as fast as you like. Head for George Washington Hospital.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Perry—is the president sick?”
The president stopped and looked over Doug Latterby’s right shoulder. “I can’t see, Doug. I’ve suddenly gone blind.”
“Jesus Christ. When did this happen?”
“Only a couple of minutes ago. Maybe it’s only temporary. But get me Dr. Cronin, will you? And get us into the air.”
HAPTER
T
WO
AMA Flight 2849, Atlanta to Los Angeles
Tyler was dreaming that he was playing poker in a smoky upstairs room in Ho Chi Minh City, but he didn’t recognize the symbols of any of the cards. Instead of diamonds and clubs and hearts and spades, they were decorated with orchids and stars and fishhooks and teacups, and the court cards all had grinning green monkeys on them.
“I’ll raise you two thousand and disturb you,” said the elderly Vietnamese man sitting on his right, and shook his shoulder.
“What?” Tyler frowned. He didn’t understand this game at all, and he was terrified that he was going to lose all his money. How would he get back to the States if he lost all his money?
“Sir?” the Vietnamese repeated, and shook him again.
Tyler opened his eyes. A redheaded flight attendant was standing over him, looking worried. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but we have kind of a situation.”
Tyler coughed, sniffed, and awkwardly unfolded his legs. He was six feet, two inches and very broad shouldered, and he always found it impossible to get comfortable in coach class, especially since he had an artificial left kneecap. “Situation?”
“Maybe you could come up to the flight deck.”
Tyler looked around him. “Shit—this isn’t a hijack, is it?”
The flight attendant touched her finger to her lips. “No,
sir. Nothing like that. But I do need you to come up to the flight deck.”
“Okay.” Tyler unfastened his seat belt and followed her, limping slightly, along the aisle. Most of the other passengers were either asleep or lolling back listening to iPods. Only one or two of them had their blinds raised and were staring out into the night. The Sangre de Cristo mountains were crawling slowly below them, ghostly and blanketed in snow, and the sky was glittering with late-summer stars.
The flight attendant punched in the security number outside the flight-deck door and Tyler followed her inside. The pilot and copilot and navigator were all sitting in their seats, as he would have expected, but three flight attendants were crowded in there, too—two male and one female, and now him and the redheaded flight attendant. The other female attendant was blowing her nose and had obviously been crying.
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir,” said the elder of the male flight attendants.
“Hey, whatever I can do,” said Tyler. He wasn’t used to this kind of respect. Even though he was thirty-one, he looked five years younger, with straggly blond hair and pebble gray eyes and a squarish jaw that he had inherited from his Swedish mother. His last girlfriend, Nadine, had said that even when he was wearing a business suit, he looked as if he ought to have a surfboard tucked under his arm.
“I won’t beat around the bush, sir,” said the elder male flight attendant. “About twenty-five minutes ago, Captain Sherman lost his sight, followed about ten minutes later by the rest of the crew.”
Tyler stared at him, and then looked down at the navigator, who was sitting in front of his instruments with his hand over his eyes.
“They’ve lost their sight? All three of them? They’re
blind?
”
The flight attendant nodded. “We don’t know why.
They
don’t have any ideas, either. Maybe there’s an airborne virus in the flight-deck ventilation system. There’s no way of telling for sure.”
“So, what you’re telling me is we’re flying at thirty-five thousand feet with a flight crew that can’t see?”
“It’s not as serious as it sounds,” said Captain Sherman, turning around in his seat. He was silver haired and deeply tanned, with a large head that reminded Tyler of the TV actor Gene Barry, but his eyes were completely unfocused, as if he were staring at a spot about twenty feet behind Tyler’s back. “We have automatic pilot, of course, and ALS.”
“Well, that’s not reassuring. Do your people on the ground know what’s happened? The flight controllers?”
“We’ve advised LAX that we have an emergency. In fact, they combed through the passenger manifest to see if there was anybody on board who might conceivably have some flying experience. One of the flight directors recognized your name and that was why I called for you to come forward.”
Tyler said, “Holy shit, I’m a stunt person. The biggest airplane I’ve ever flown is a Cessna 172, and that was mostly loop-de-loops. I couldn’t fly a thing like this. I mean, there are all these
people
on board. Supposing I kill them all? Supposing I kill
me?
”
“You don’t have anything to worry about, Mr. Jones. I can guide you through all of the landing procedures. With any luck you won’t have to touch anything at all, except a couple of switches. Your granny could do this, but as an extra precaution I want somebody sitting up front who knows how to fly.”
“I don’t even know if my insurance covers anything like this.”
“Mr. Jones—your insurance is the least of your problems. Nobody on this flight is going to sue you for saving their lives, and if you
don’t
save their lives it isn’t really going to matter, is it?”
The copilot turned around, too. He was Chinese-American, with shiny black hair and a wispy mustache. He was staring sightlessly up at the ceiling.
“You can do this for all of your fellow passengers, sir. If you bring us down safely, you will be a great hero. Look.” He reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a photograph of a young girl in a red checkered dress sitting on a swing. “If you don’t do it for your fellow passengers, or even for yourself, do it for this little girl who will otherwise lose her father.”
Tyler looked from one flight attendant to the other. He had always loved to take risks—jumping over five parked cars on his Kawasaki dirt bike, free-falling out of hot-air balloons, setting himself on fire and throwing himself off buildings. But when he was performing stunts like that, he wasn’t responsible for other people’s safety, only his own. Being responsible for other people’s safety was about the only thing that ever scared him. That and spiders. He seriously didn’t like spiders.
“We’ll be here to guide you every step of the way,” said Captain Sherman. “I promise you, Mr. Jones—this will be a walk in the park.”
“You could have put
that
better,” Tyler told him. “The last time I took a walk in the park, somebody’s Doberman bit me in the rear end.”
HAPTER
T
HREE
Los Angeles
A cattle truck had broken down on Interstate 101 about a mile and a half east of Encino. The freeway had come to a standstill for nearly an hour while professional wranglers had been called in to calm down the panicking livestock and transfer them to another truck, and now Jasmine was running over forty-five minutes late.
She hated running late. She had worked too hard to build herself a reputation for always making her deliveries on time or ahead of schedule. Her call sign was “Early Bird,” and on the door of her tractor there was a picture of a cartoon crow pulling a stretched-out worm out of the ground.
She put her foot down flat on the floor of her big red Mack CH truck until it was bellowing along at nearly sixty miles per hour. The radio was playing “Bat Out of Hell” at top volume. She didn’t usually like white music, but Meat Loaf was different, and she sang along with him as she sped underneath Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards. “The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling / Way down in the valley tonight.”
On the back of her flatbed she was carrying three bright yellow 120 kilowatt diesel generators, weighing nearly a ton each, and she was supposed to deliver them to a construction site on Mateo Street before nine
A.M.
Jasmine had always regarded life as a serious challenge, and felt that she had to prove herself better at anything she
chose to do than anybody else, especially men. When she was sixteen years old, she took lessons in Korean unarmed combat at school, for the express purpose of throwing her father across the room. She had broken his nose and his left wrist, and after that, her father had never beaten up on her mother ever again.
Her Taekkgyeon training had stood her in good stead ever since. She was strikingly exotic, almost Ethiopian-looking, with short upswept hair and gold hoop earrings and sulky lips. She also had cleavage that made men walk into lampposts. Any man who tried to hit on her, however, was taking a serious risk of physical injury.
“Like a bat out of hell,” she screamed in a high falsetto. “I’ll be gone, gone, gone!”
Even though it was right in the middle of the morning rush hour and the traffic was heavy, she was able to switch lanes to keep her speed up. As she approached the East Los Angeles Interchange, she overtook a BP gasoline truck, and then a coachload of seniors. She was driving at well over forty-five miles per hour as she steered onto the off-ramp that crossed over the Los Angeles River.
“…And I never see the sudden curve until it’s way too late…”
Without warning, right in front of her, a green Hummer swerved sideways and struck the concrete divider. She saw bits flying off it, and it slewed around 180 degrees so that it was facing her. She slammed on her brakes but there was no way of avoiding it. The front of her truck hit the Hummer head-on and smashed it backward into the retaining wall.
She heard nothing at all, not even the shrieking of tires, and all she could see was a jumble of sky, bridge, trees, and traffic. She wrestled with the wheel as her truck careered toward the edge of the off-ramp, dragging the smashed remains of the Hummer with it like a huge monster making off with its mortally injured prey.
Oh God,
she thought.
This is where I’m going to die
.
Her truck slammed against the right-hand wall, and then
against the left-hand wall, and then it rammed the mangled remains of the Hummer right through the right-hand wall and over the edge of the off-ramp. The Hummer dropped forty feet and landed on its nose on the dry concrete riverbed below, toppling over and over with its doors flapping open.
Jasmine thought that her truck was going to go thundering after it, but right on the brink of the off-ramp the CH came to a wrenching halt. Jasmine’s forehead hit the steering wheel and her sunglasses snapped in half and she was almost knocked out. Dazed, she sat up straight again.
I’m okay,
she thought.
I’m not going to go over
. But then she felt a hefty jolt in the small of her back, and then another, and another, and another, and her cab was forced farther and farther forward, until its front wheels went over the edge and it lurched right down onto its bodywork.
Her hearing returned as if somebody had switched a radio back on. Checking her rearview mirror, she could see that some of the steel cables holding the generators onto her flatbed had snapped, and that two of them had fallen sideways onto the roadway. They had acted as two thousand-pound anchors, preventing her truck from careening through the gap in the off-ramp’s retaining wall.
But the repeated jolting was being caused by scores of vehicles crashing into the back of her truck—cars and SUVs and buses and trucks. The entire off-ramp was a tangled clutter of wrecked metal, with smoke rising from it. Some drivers were climbing out, but many of them were trapped in their seats, their doors wedged against the vehicles next to them, or up against the retaining walls.
“God Almighty,” said Jasmine, and she didn’t say it as a profanity. “God Almighty, I seriously got to get out of here.”
The cab of her truck was tilted forward at an angle of twenty degrees, and through the windshield she could see the concrete riverbed and the Hummer lying on its roof. There was no sign that anybody had managed to crawl out of
it. Cautiously she opened her door and looked downward. She would have to climb out of her cab and try to make her way back onto the off-ramp, and hope that the remaining cables holding the generators didn’t suddenly snap.
With the door open, she could hear people shouting and screaming, and the ceaseless banging of even more vehicles adding to the pileup.
Come on, Jazz,
she told herself.
You can do this
.
She eased herself out of her seat and climbed down onto the top step of her cab. Vehicles continued to crash into one another all the way back along the interstate, and two helicopters started to circle overhead, one from the highway patrol and another from KNBC News.
Now that she was outside her cab, Jasmine could see that there were more than two hundred vehicles caught up in the accident. The off-ramp looked like the road to Basra at the end of Desert Storm. What alarmed her most was that a Ford Explorer right in the middle of the pileup was pouring out thick black smoke, and that it was only three or four vehicles away from the BP truck.
She edged her way up the sharply tilting step until she reached the back of her cab. Then she swung herself downward and sideways, until her boot reached the concrete lip of the roadway. With an awkward hop and a skip, she jumped down onto the off-ramp and caught hold of one of the generator handles to steady herself.
The piled-up cars and SUVs were jammed so close together that she had no choice but to clamber across their hoods. Drivers and passengers were sitting helplessly in their seats, some of them blowing their horns, which added to the pandemonium, and others beating on their windshields with their fists. Several managed to open their side windows and climb out, but Jasmine saw one overweight driver who had managed to squeeze himself out of the rear window of his Shogun SUV, only to tumble down the narrow gap between his vehicle and the FedEx panel van behind him and become inextricably wedged. He was beating on
the panel van’s radiator with his fists, red-faced and sobbing like a baby, while the FedEx driver could do nothing but stare back at him.
Jasmine was still more than a hundred yards from the interstate, climbing over one vehicle after another, when the smoke from the burning Explorer suddenly began to blow more thickly. She turned around just as the Explorer blew up, and a huge orange fireball rolled up into the air. The explosion was deep and deafening, but even worse were the muffled screams of the hundreds of people caught in their cars.
Within seconds a station wagon next to the Explorer was blazing, and then a van directly in front of it. Dense brown smoke poured across the pileup, making it look even more like a battlefield. Jasmine clambered over the sloping silver hood of a Cadillac STS and managed to reach the retaining wall on the opposite side of the off-ramp. Now she was able to balance her way along the top of the wall, occasionally grabbing onto the vehicles next to her to stop herself from falling.
Over the
flack-flack-flack
of the helicopters, she heard a sharp series of pops and crackles, and then the BP truck exploded. Even though she was making her way up the opposite side of the ramp, shielded from the full force of the blast by a Jeep, she felt a wave of superheated air on the back of her neck, and she was blown so violently to the right that she almost lost her footing.
Another car’s gas tank blew up, and then another, and another. The screaming began to rise in a crescendo, an opera from hell. Within less than a minute, more than fifty vehicles were blazing, and the smoke was so thick that it blotted out the sun.
Jasmine saw six or seven people staggering and stumbling across the wreckage, some of them smoking and blackened, some of them still ablaze. Only two vehicles away from her, she saw a father and a mother and four young children, all of them frantically knocking on the windows of their burning
Voyager. They were all sandy-haired. She didn’t know why that made such an impression on her, but it was like seeing a whole family album thrown into a fire.
She had almost reached the top of the off-ramp when she heard a woman screaming,
“Save my baby! For God’s sake! Save my baby!”
Jasmine lifted her hand to shield her face from the heat. The smoke was so thick now that she could hardly breathe. Right in the center of the pileup, a young blonde-haired woman had managed to open the passenger-side window of her SUV and was holding up a baby boy in both hands. Next to her, in the driver’s seat, a man in a white T-shirt was slumped over the steering wheel, his hair matted with blood.
The baby was red-faced and kicking its legs and crying, but the woman managed to keep him aloft and continue to scream out,
“Save my baby! Somebody save my baby!”
Jasmine climbed onto the hood of a taxi that had been crushed between the retaining wall and the side of a trailer. The taxi driver was slumped sideways in his seat, unconscious or dead, but the woman passenger in the back was shouting hysterically and trying to break the window with a gold high-heeled sandal.
Jasmine crawled across the hood on her hands and knees, and then walked across the trailer. Less than a hundred yards away five or six more vehicles exploded, and one old Chevy pickup was flung right into the air, landing on its roof with a thunderous crash.
Once she had crossed the trailer, Jasmine was able to climb onto the roof of the dark blue newspaper-delivery van that was crushed up alongside the woman’s SUV. The woman held up her baby as high as she could and begged her, “Save my little boy, please.”
Jasmine leaned over the edge of the van’s roof and tried to take hold of the baby’s hands, but he kept waving his arms and she couldn’t reach him. “Ma’am—can you lift him just a little higher?” she asked.
“I can’t. Both of my legs are trapped.”
“Okay, then, I’ll see if I can climb down farther.”
There was another explosion, much closer this time. The woman said, “Oh my God, listen to all of those poor people!”
Jasmine managed to get a grip on the van’s side mirror with her left hand, and lean over a few inches farther. She touched the baby’s fingertips with her fingertips, and suddenly the baby stopped crying and blinked up at her in bewilderment. He lifted up one hand toward her, and in that instant Jasmine thrust herself over the edge of the van’s roof as far as she dared and snatched the sleeve of his pale blue romper suit.
For one instant she thought that she had reached out too far, and that she was going to drop the baby and fall on top of him. But with something between a grunt and a scream, she heaved herself back upward, inch by inch, even though the mirror that she was holding onto was gradually bending.
“Please take care of him,” said the baby’s mother.
“Of course,” Jasmine told her. “You’ll be okay. The rescue services will be here any minute—they’ll get you out.”
The young woman gave her a panicky, wide-eyed stare, as if she didn’t believe her for an instant.
Jasmine climbed back toward the edge of the off-ramp, holding the struggling baby close to her chest. As she reached the retaining wall, she heard another explosion, right behind her, and then another. She turned around and saw that the young mother’s SUV was blazing fiercely, and that she was sitting in her seat, shaking her head from side to side in agony. The young man beside her was still leaning against the steering wheel, not moving at all.
“Oh, dear God,” said Jasmine. “How could you let this happen?”
But more and more vehicles exploded with a series of bangs that made Jasmine’s ears ring. By the time she reached the main highway, the smoke was so thick that she could hardly see where she was going. She could hear fire trucks
whooping and warbling and blasting their horns, but there was no way that they could force their way through a half mile tangle of wrecked vehicles to reach the off-ramp.
Jasmine kept on walking along the side of the freeway, with the wailing, wriggling baby held tight against her shoulder. “There,” she kept saying, patting his back. “Everything’s going to be fine, l’il feller. You just wait and see. Everything’s going to come up roses.”
At last they were clear of the smoke. Jasmine kept on walking in the hot morning sunshine and didn’t once look back, even when she heard more explosions, and more echoes of explosions. Just before she reached the off-ramp that would take her down to Alameda Street, the baby fell asleep, snuffling and bubbling against her neck. She couldn’t even guess what he was dreaming about.