Chadpocalypse - 2:14 Fade to Black

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2:14 Fade to Black

It’s very cold, was Chad’s first thought. Everything hurt, and everything was freezing cold. He tried to open his eyes, but the motion caused him extreme pain. With numbed fingers, he tried to feel around for where he was. He could feel the frayed weave of his seatbelt and the scratchy fabric of his seat, but it was all so confusing. In the distance, a cannon fired three times, followed quickly by what sounded like large objects landing in scrap metal.

     “Why do they always give us the plane crashes?” asked a voice from the distance.

     “Count yourself lucky it was a red eye,” replied a gruff sounding, older man.

     “It still stinks,” came the voice of a woman.

     “You can’t even smell,” taunted the first.

     “It doesn’t mean I don’t remember.” The woman sighed. “It’s really fucking insensitive for them to put me on a plane crash, don’t you think?”

     “How many times do I have to tell you? The Corporation of Death—”

     “Death Co., how many times do I have to tell you, Dom?”

     “Whatever, fine, Death Co. doesn’t give a shit about you, Marcy. They picked you for your litigation skills, not your propensity for moaning.”

     “Fuck off, Dom.”

     Chad groaned in an attempt at speaking. He didn’t have much to say, other than whoever was bickering was giving him a massive headache. What were they talking about anyway? A plane crash? That seemed to resonate somewhere within him, but he couldn’t quite put a finger on why.  

     “Oh shit, is he awake? None of them are supposed to be awake.” There were hurried footsteps and clanking metal as the voices made their way closer to him.

     A forceful finger grabbed one of Chad’s eyelids and pried it open. The world was a bleary mess of grey, fire, and dirt. Snowflakes were falling. “Wh-wha—” Chad started.

     “Holy shit, he’s awake. Barker!” yelled the closest man who Chad assumed was Dom.

     Barker approached. He was an older man, dressed entirely in black, sporting half of a handlebar mustache. That can’t be right. Chad rubbed his eyes and they slowly adjusted. No, it was right, the man had half a handlebar mustache. The other half appeared to have been burned away. Had that happened in the plane crash they were so keen on yapping about?

     “Well I’ll be damned.” Barker put a cold hand on Chad’s forehead. “Still warm too, relatively.”

Chad’s eyes continued to adjust and the other two figures came into focus. Both were wearing black suits like the half-mustachioed man known as barker. Marcy sported burn marks up one side of her face, but had long hair combed over to cover them. Dom on the other hand looked completely normal, albeit paler than most. “Who are you then?” Chad managed, spitting up something warm that tasted suspiciously like his own blood. “Gross,” he muttered.

     “Fuck me, it speaks,” breathed Barker. “Never seen that before.”

     “No shit!” exclaimed Dom.

     “Shhhhhh!” hissed Chad. He lifted an arm, pain wracking it every step of the way. “Headache.” He pointed a limp finger at his temple. “Talking not helping.”

     “No kidding.” Barker pulled out a small ledger from the breast pocket of his suit.

     “You still use a ledger?” asked Marcy incredulously.

     “It works just fine and I don’t have to charge it.”

     Marcy rolled her eyes and pulled out a cell phone. “Ok, boomer.”

     Dom pulled out a phone of his own. “It’s so tender to watch the older generation struggle to ado—”

     Barker held up a hand and silenced him. “Don’t you two have other work to be doing?”

     Marcy and Dom looked at each other and shrugged.  

     Barker sighed. “What’s your name, son?” His tone was an approximation of calm.

     “Ch-Chad. Chad Fisher.” The thought suddenly donned on him that the three people in suits might not be trustworthy. He tried to push away, but his legs were barely functioning, and every twitching spasm brought new levels of agony with it. “What the hell happened?”

     “I don’t have him on my list,” said Dom.

     “Me neither,” replied Marcy.

     Barker scanned his ledger, flipping back and forth between the pages.

     “You know, digitizing gives you a search feature,” pointed out Marcy.

     “Kindly be quiet.” Barker looked through the ledger a final time, and snapped it shut. “I need to make a call.”

     Dom and Marcy looked around. “Don’t see a payphone round here boss,” joked Dom. “If only your ledger also possessed the ability to make calls…”

     Marcy gave him a sly low five.

     “Sometimes, the old ways are best. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Barker looked up at the sky and shouted: “I could use a line, please.”

     There was brief silence, followed by cannon fire. Moments later, a phone booth rocketed out of the sky and crashed into a heap of metal less than fifty feet away. Chad winced at the sound it made. “What part of quiet did you not understand?” His temples were on fire, no they were fire, whatever, something worse.  

     “The man said to keep it down,” moaned a voice from Chad’s side.  

     Chad turned his head, weakly, and saw James, still sitting in his seat, buckled in. The world came into focus all at once and Chad remembered. They were sitting in in the burned out wreck of their international flight to milan. Chad looked up and saw the night sky peaking in above them from a massive rip in the plane’s fuselage. “I guess Death wasn’t bluffing after all.”

     “If he was, it hurts like the real thing.” James groaned. “Don’t suppose you lot have any Advil?”

     “Holy shit, there’s two of them.” Dom bent down to examine James.

     “Yeah, boo, kid, Advil, you got any?”

     Dom laughed. “Don’t think Advil is going to fix the hundreds of broken bones in your body, but all the same, no I don’t have any. Usually the spirits we collect have passed on from their corporeal form.”

     “Don’t just give up the goose, you imbecile,” snapped Barker. “I’m going to make a quick call.” He walked over to the phone booth which was miraculously intact after its hasty flight to the surface. Barker stepped into the booth, picked up the handset and immediately started yelling.

     Chad couldn’t make out much at first, but as Barker’s anger grew, so did the volume of his voice. “Divine intervention?!” he yelled. “And no one thought it would be important to warn us before we came down here?” There was a brief pause. “Am I to expect angels with sawed-offs coming down here to cut me in half then?” Another pause. “Oh, they’re going to leave him down here are they? Well he’s in pretty bad shape, you fucks.”

     Dom and Marcy looked to Chad and then to each other. Quietly, they both drew pistols from their belts and thumbed back the hammers.

     Chad’s eyes widened.

     “Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” whispered Dom.

     “Tend to him with what?!” yelled Barker. Another cannon fired. A cannister about five feet in diameter blew a hole in the plane landing right next to the four of them.

     “So, Heaven just fires things out of a cannon then?” asked Chad, trying to get a handle on the situation.

     “Not heaven exactly,” started Marcy, but thought better of it. “You’ll find out eventually, but I can’t say much more.”

Barker peered through the glass at the cannister with disdain. “And what about the other one?” A pause. “Well, he’s not on our lists, he has to be on one of yours.” Barker raised a hand to twirl the good half of his mustache. “He’s not? Well, isn’t that interesting. Yup, I understand, don’t collect him either. Too much paperwork, of course.” Barker slammed the handset down and stormed out of the phone booth.

     “Marcy, go open up that capsule and bring me whatever’s inside.”

     She did so without question.

     Chad watched Barker approaching with trepidation. “Who the hell are you people?” he asked.  

     “Lucky for you, that’s none of your concern today.”

     Marcy popped open the cylinder that had fallen through the plane and pulled out a small, silver tube with two prods sticking out of one end. “Only one?” asked Marcy.

     “Only one,” confirmed Barker.

     “Heavenly bastards.” She handed him the cylinder. Even in the dim firelight of the burning plane wreck, it shone with heavenly light.

     “They always are.” Barker flipped the cylinder between his fingers. “Turns out, they only care about one of you.” He slid a panel open on the side of the cannister and looked to Chad. “I suppose it’s only half your lucky day then.”

     “Why is that?”

     “Turn around you two. Go find some work to do,” ordered Barker to Dom and Marcy.

     “What? Why?” asked Dom.

     “Because I don’t want you to be liable for what I’m about to do.” Barker took the cylinder and pressed it to Chad’s arm.

Chad yelped at the initial pain, but it quickly turned to warmth spreading through his limbs. “What is that?”

“The good stuff. Someone upstairs likes you, kid.” Barker waited for the cannister to reach its halfway full point and pulled it away. “But, I’m an old softy, and I can’t leave a man in a permanent state of half death.” He turned to James.

     “What the hell is going on?” asked James.

     “Well, my young friend, you should be dead right now, but for some reason, you’re not on my handy little list.” Barker pressed the cylinder to James’s arm. “Now, him, he appears to be the result of some divine prophecy, but you, you’re just not on the map. I’m not sure how you did that,” the cannister clicked empty, “but you’re going to need to square that somehow if you ever want to rest in peace.

     Chad flexed his arm experimentally. It was still sore, but the pain had mostly receded.

     “Now, I’ve given you each half a can of this here divine go-go juice. I was supposed to give the whole can to you,” he pointed to Chad, “but again, didn’t seem right. You’ll need to take it easy for the next few days, but you’ll live.” He looked around the wreckage. “Better than most of these poor saps fared. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s fucking freezing out here, and we’ve got some souls to collect.” Barker turned back toward his colleagues. “Alright, let’s get to work!”

     The three of them wandered off towards the crash, and Chad watched as they picked their way through the bodies. Marcy leaned down and put a hand on the corpse of the flight attendant that had been serving them drinks. A spectral copy rose from the body and immediately started screaming.

     “Oh, calm down,” chided Marcy. “It’s only death, and from the looks of it, you went rather quickly.”

     The flight attendant stopped screaming and felt to his forehead. There was a bloody lump where a renegade piece of luggage had hit him.

     “Probably kept you relaxed during the rest of the crash. You’re lucky your body’s as intact as it is.”

     At the same time, Dom was trying to calm down a woman who, from the looks of it, had been split into four pieces. She was trying to pull herself together, literally, but it wasn’t working.

     Chad turned to James who was looking around wildly. Most of the plane had been completely shredded in the accident, but somehow, their seats were still intact, upright and attached to the fuselage. “I think we might have caught a lucky break.”

     James groaned. “I don’t think luck had much to do with it.” He pointed a lazy finger skyward. “Sounds like you might be on a mission from God after all.”

     Chad laughed at that, sending pain shooting through his ribs. He coughed, but no blood came up this time. “Think we should get out of here?” In his shock, Chad had almost forgotten about the fact that he was freezing.

     James blew out a long breath and watched it fog the air. “Yeah, I guess so.” He reached down and unbuckled his seatbelt. “You know, I really believed that was an illusion for a second.” He stood experimentally, shaking the deathly accident out of his limbs.

     “So did I.” Chad unbuckled and stood as well. Walking felt so strange given the accident they had just been in, and he stumbled forward. Directly in front of them was a gash through the side of the airplane. Beyond, he could see a snowy field. Together, they crawled through the wreckage. As they made their way outside the plane, Chad caught a glimpse of one of the engines, still semi-intact and spinning idly on the icy breeze.

     The plane had melted a wide trench in deep snow. Helping each other, they climbed out and over the lip of the trench. Beyond, was a long, snowy field leading to mountains. Above, the clouds broke revealing a pale shaft of moonlight. Tiny lights dotted the mountains in straight lines.

     “Must be ski hills,” commented James.

     “Where do you think we are?”

     “I was bored and watching the in-flight map before we went down. I can’t be sure, but I think we’re in Switzerland.”

     “I guess Switzerland gets cold then.” Chad shivered.

     “These mountains are kind of famous for it.” James laughed.

     From across the field, bright lights illuminated and the sound of roaring engines cut through the air. Chad stood to get a better look, and sank ankle deep into the snow. Blue and white lights flashed as a group of large machines made their way across the field. “Well, we’re going to have a good time explaining this.”

     “Don’t suppose doctors believe in divine intervention?”

     “Or the apocalypse.”

     “Nah, I think they’ll believe in that. I’m on a mission from God, remember?”