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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/bloodoftheforest on 2024-10-29 02:28:49+00:00.
"What do we do?" Mark asked.
Assuming that Karen had left the new dead person with the doctor straight away this time and had managed to get to the intercom under a minute after they'd died, we still only had seven minutes to change course or another person gets killed. I hadn't meant to waste any time and in fact as soon as we'd been told that there'd been a second death I had leapt to set up a ten minute timer. Unfortunately that was the only useful thing I'd managed to do before the full impact of what was going on had hit me and my brain had spiralled into panic.
"Are we changing course?" Mark asked, shaking me slightly.
I thought about it.
"I don't think we can. Anyone who's willing to do this, whatever they want us to do has to be bad, right?"
Mark nodded but his eyes flicked towards the timer.
"But if we don't then we might all die."
I tried to work it out in my head.
"If we change course to the closest airport and he kills someone every ten minutes then that'll be ten maybe? If he sticks to his own rules."
"No." Mark said quietly.
"You think he can kill us faster?" I asked.
"I don't know. But the letter said it's random. If both of us are randomly selected to die then do you think the plane's gonna land safely?"
Somehow I hadn't even considered that. The numbers on the timer were only getting smaller and no matter how terrible I beleived the intentions of the man in the suit were, trading the lives of everyone on the plane to oppose him didn't feel much better. Even if I stood firm, would Mark do the same if I died next? And then if he was fourth...
"He needs us." I said suddenly.
The man in the suit wanted the plane diverted and so he needed somebody to be able to fly it. As my thoughts raced, the timer was getting closer and closer to zero and I wished I'd never set the damned thing.
"He needs us to fly the plane," I said to Mark, "so it can't be random, not really. So he's choosing people?"
Mark disagreed.
"The letter said that people will still die if he's been knocked out. He could be lying but..."
"Then what makes us safe?"
Mark reached the conclusion a split second before I did and made an announcement to the plane.
"Nobody read the yellow books! Nobody read them!"
A wave of relief crashed over me only to turn to cold sweat a second later.
The timer had hit zero. One more person down.
_____
We didn't need Karen to come and tell us that another passenger had died this time but she did anyway. I asked her how many people had read the yellow books. She didn't know. Neither her nor Ava had been offered one so they were safe but it was impossible to guess beyond that. Some people had flicked through them and so it would depend whether that counted as reading or if the whole thing needed to be read cover to cover. Hopefully some people hadn't even looked at them.
I almost expected retaliation from the man in the suit for warning the passengers about the yellow books but as far as I could tell, the rules hadn't changed. I wasn't too sure that was something to be happy about. It could be that actually couldn't kill people faster than he had been doing but it could just as easily be that our guess as to what made us different was completely wrong or that enough people had read the yellow books already that the warning was pointless.
"Will he really know if we contact someone?" Mark asked.
"Yes." I said, though I didn't know any more about it than he did.
"What about the passengers?"
Shit. Three people had died on the flight and we'd just made an incredibly weird announcement -- it would be foolish to assume that of all the passengers on the flight absolutely all of them had kept their phones on airplane mode and told nobody what was happening.
"I don't know."
I'd reset the timer as soon as it had run out, though the constant pressure to make a choice was crushing me.
"So we have three options." Mark said, "We do what they say, we continue on our normal route or we divert to the nearest airport."
Mark looked physically ill and I knew that he didn't like the list of options any more than I did.
"The way the note was written... will people die faster if we divert to another airport?" I asked.
"I don't remember."
I could have asked Karen to come back with the note but I was willing to guess that both her and Ava were having to calm an increasing number of panicked passengers behind us. It didn't seem worth it for a note that could be unclear or even outright lies.
"Do we think he'll let us go if we do as he says?" Mark asked.
My heart sank.
"I don't know. So I guess we can assume the worst and that we're doomed that way too."
Diverting to another airport seemed like it might be the smartest move but we weren't near another airport. As far as I knew there was nothing but grassland below us and we'd have to travel a decent way before we even got close to a decent population centre, nevermind one that had an airport. The timer ticked to zero and Karen's voice came onto the intercom shortly after.
"Tyler died." she said simply.
It took me a moment to remember the name, even though we'd discussed him earlier. Ava's boyfriend.
"Oh, fuck this!" I yelled and for the first time my brain wasn't searching for a solution but simply a way to make the man in the suit pay.
He'd said this would continue if he died and the fact his companion had sacrificed himself suggested that death was more acceptable for him than it is for most people anyway. I'd thought that the only thing I could do to oppose him was to not refuse to go in the direction he'd asked me to but my sudden anger at this whole situation made me realise something. I could refuse faster.
"Where are we going?" Mark asked, still trying to get me to decide from our three earlier options.
"Nowhere. We're going to land."
"You've got to be joking," he said, as if he couldn't see me already making moves to adjust our altitude, "do you even know what's below us?"
"I think fields." I replied unnconvincingly, "Nice, soft fields."
"We're not going to land in one piece."
I shrugged.
"People have died, we're already not in one piece."
It hadn't escaped my attention that the timer was still running. Even if the ground below us was suitable to land on and everything went on without a hitch, avoiding one more death was impossible and even avoiding two was extremely unlikely.
"Are you annoucing this or am I?" Mark asked.
"Nope. Any annoucement gives that bastard a chance to react. We're just going to have to go for it and hope for the best."
"You're mad."
"You aren't stopping me."
The ground came into view and for the first time in our flight the gods had smiled upon us and the ground was as flat as we could have hoped for.
"I'm glad I got to fly with you." Mark said.
We aren't that close and I can see now, looking back on the whole thing, that he said this because he thought we might die. At the time I was too focussed to read a single thing into it though.
"You too."
_____
There's a reason that crash landings aren't called 'nice and pleasant landings.' I remember how shaken everyone looked once we were all outside of the plane and just staring at them, dazed by what had happened. I remember watching Karen lead Ava out of the plane and how fucking empty her face looked. But most of all, I remember how little the man in the suit seemed to care.
"You need to stop this now." I screamed at him and pointed at the broken plane, "Look at this. We can't fly you anywhere anymore so there's no point killing any of us! There was no point to any of this."
I heard a scream and expected the worst but it was Ava, launching herself at the man in blind fury. It was my last statement that had set her off, I think, the idea that her boyfriend had died for no reason. She hit him over and over before Mark and Karen could tear her away. She hadn't knocked him out but his face wasn't the same shape anymore.
I still had my timer, I realised. The last ten minute turnover had been only seconds ago but everyone who had made it out of the plane was still alive. Whatever the suited man had set in motion he had finally stopped.
"I want to know what he fucking brought." Mark said and headed to the cargo hold.
I watched the man in the suit, Karen stayed with Ava and Mark pulled the suitcases out for all of us to see. Even though nothing else about the flight had been normal, I think I'd still expected to see drugs as the precious cargo of the suited men. Guns, maybe, perhaps something explosive? Something that made some sort of sense to be smuggling.
"It's just books." Mark said as he opened them both.
He opened the first page of one and I yelled for him to stop. He had a strange look on his face but he stopped. Nothing else happened. These books weren't the same as the ones on the plane but I didn't trust them.
"Let's burn them." I said.
Mark nodded and began to pour them onto the ground.
"No..." the man protested.
"We collected the yellow ones. I can go and get those." Karen added.
Watching Ava was no longer a concern, she'd slumped to the ground in the same absent manner that she'd been in when she'd left the plane.
"Don't burn them." the suited man said, "They're important. I'll make it worth your while. I can give you anything....
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