Dark Screams: Volume Two by Robert R. McCammon, Graham Masterton, Richard Christian Matheson Read Free Book Online Page A

half-smile.
    “It’s not funny,” the Reporter said. One leg was anchored beneath the chair, the stocky torso and a clenched fist rising from the seat to lunge across the aisle.
    In the instant it took Michelle to cross to the space between them, she had the uneasy realization that, moments before, if the crowd had chosen to attack her boss, she would have allowed it. She would have stood back, let them knock Wade to the ground and punch and kick him, maybe would have raced for the door and left him behind without a second thought.
    But this man had been her ally, comforting others even as he suffered the same terrible uncertainty. She would protect him. She didn’t have a choice.
    Her frame was slight, but she counted on southern gallantry. The Reporter wouldn’t dare hit her.
    “Miss, out of my way—”
    “Return to your seat,” she said, as confident as a stewardess repeating federal regulations.
Smoking is forbidden in the airplane lavatory. Please wait until the captain has turned off the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign.
    “You don’t understand. You have no idea.” He wouldn’t hit her, no, but he put one palm flat against her shoulder and shoved her out of the aisle. Michelle caught herself on the back of a chair, practically falling into Surfer Dude’s lap. As she regained her balance, she was pleased to notice Robert’s partner had escaped. And people from outside, the non–family members Wade hadn’t permitted to enter, caught the door before it crunched shut. They surged into the conference room, agitated by the commotion of agony and confusion they’d heard through the walls.
    The Reporter ran toward the doorway, and he wedged his thick body through the entering crowd. Michelle hadn’t been able to stop him, but at least she’d given Robert’s friend a head start.
    The entire situation was too big for her to grasp, so she’d fixated on this tiny battle of wills. Michelle couldn’t revive dead bodies from the wreckage, but she could damn well fight against prejudice and exploitation.
    She followed the Reporter.
    —
    She found him outside the room, the only person in the baggage claim area at this late hour. He aimed a digital camera at empty conveyor belts. So she’d been right about him all along. Michelle thought of movie crime scenes where a police chief grabs a reporter’s unauthorized camera and pulls a loop of film from the compartment, recorded images flashed away in an overexposed instant; or where a sheriff’s boot heel cracks through a lens and view screen, scrapes metal and plastic into the asphalt next to a bloodstain and chalk outline. She didn’t have that kind of bullying authority—only the force of her indignation. “Which newspaper?” she asked.
    The Reporter held the camera at arm’s length, between thumb and fingertips, with a continual pan and pivot of his wrist. “I’m sorry?”
    She called his bluff. “You don’t know anyone on that plane,” Michelle said.
    “No. I don’t.” But his confession wasn’t the triumph she expected. There was a glimmer of weakness in his flat statement, something with the flavor of authentic grief. “
This
tragedy isn’t mine,” he said, and for a moment, despite herself, she pitied him.
    But her emotions, held in check for most of the evening, now responded in quick reflexive jolts. When the Reporter next said, “He can’t have gone far,” a sneer in the pronoun set her off again. Michelle was certain she’d heard it:
He
used ironically, as if a homosexual doesn’t deserve the masculine reference.
    “Why are you looking for him? Maybe you need someone to blame for the sake of a story. Or maybe it’s something personal?” Her voice got louder as she climbed inside rediscovered anger. “But it’s chance. Random wind currents or pilot error or engine flaws or some other combination of bad luck. You can’t scapegoat an innocent man simply because—”
    “He’s not innocent,” the Reporter said. “And he’s not a