9
8:22 PM
They sipped their drinks again.
Another flashing blue light passed on the street beyond the car park that faces the side of the Millennium Centre crossed the CCTV screen.
"Reminds me. See the way Jack lit out of here?" Owen asked. "One dead person cut in half and he's all 'Captain' and shit."
"Yeah, yeah," Ianto said, rolling his eyes. "There was a school killing thing too. This morning. A dad took out his kids and a few others."
"Jesus. He shoot them?"
Ianto shook his head. "Nope. Tire iron."
"Fuck." Owen sucked a dribble of coffee from the rim of the cup.
"That's messed up." He rummaged in his pocket for his phone. "Are there pictures?"
"You're sick," said Ianto. He finished the rest of his drink. "And no. I couldn't find any. Jack isn't sharing for some reason."
Owen tapped on his phone's screen a few times. "No network. What the fuck does this mean? 'No network'?"
"It means you've got no network," said Ianto. He took out his own phone and checked the screen. "Huh. Same here. Must be a fault."
"Hang on. I'm going to tweet to their customer support." Owen tapped an icon on his screen, waited a few seconds, and then huffed. "Fuck. No network."
"Aaaand the penny drops," said Ianto. "Tosh has gone home for the night, no joy there then."
They both put their phones away.
"We should get back to work," Ianto said.
Owen shook his head. "Why the rush? Are we not entitled to breaks?"
"No," said Ianto. "We took them like two hours ago. I want to get everything filed then go home.
Unless Jack is coming back to tell us what the hell is going on"
A movement in the car park caught Ianto's eye. He turned and gazed out. "What the Hell?"
Owen turned to look. A figure was racing across the car park, arms flailing wildly.
"Is that Ifan?" Owen asked. "I gotta hand it to him, for a fat guy who was dying from asthma ten minutes ago, that bitch can run."
"He's not stopping," said Ianto, standing up. "Why isn't he stopping?"
BOOM! Ifan hit the glass at full speed. The large pane rumbled like thunder as Ifan bounced off, leaving a bloody marking where his face had hit.
Owen couldn't stop himself laughing. "Holy shit! Did he forget the door was there? God, why wasn't I recording that? That's guaranteed viral right there."
Ianto approached the screen. "He might be hurt."
"Dude, he's definitely hurt," Owen said. "Did you see the way he hit the glass? He's going to be in a coma for, like, a month!"
"He's moving," Ianto said when Ifan rolled over onto his back. Blood gushed from his nose and a gash on his forehead, but it was his eyes that stopped Ianto moving away from the screen.
Ifan scrambled to his feet, and both Owen and Ianto jumped in surprise at how fast he moved.
Owen glanced sideways at Ianto. "Does Ifan seem, I don't know, different to you?"
Ifan screamed and threw himself at the glass. His nose exploded. He slammed his face forward again, this time busting open his bottom lip.
Ianto gasped, as Ifan smashed his face against the glass yet again. "Should we go help him up there? He is our neighbour."
"Of course we shouldn't!" said Owen. "Look at him."
"Maybe he's just trying to get help."
Owen snorted. "Or maybe he's trying to feast on our tender young flesh," he said, "because that bitch right there? That, my friend, is a zombie."
"Shut the fuck up. Zombies aren't real."
"Correction. Zombies weren't real," Owen said. Ifan hurled himself at the door again, his fingernails trying to scratch right through the glass. "Until now."
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8:18 PM
This flight feels like it has taken forever! The gentleman next to me has gone to the bathroom – thank goodness - so I take a minute to stretch and fidget, and console myself with the fact that we're almost there. Half an hour left. Maybe a little more.
Then I get to see Nathan and the kids for the first time in nearly a week.
My seat tray is still folded down, the half-eaten remains of what they had the nerve to call a meal still sitting on top of it.
Thought they'd have tidied everything away by now, but now that I think about it, I haven't seen a stewardess in a while. I heard something about a passenger getting sick about an hour back. Maybe that's it.
I feel for the person, don't get me wrong, but come on. We've all been sitting here with our trays in front of us for way too long now. How many cabin crew does it take to look after one sick person?
I wanted to get some writing done, but I can't with this plate of mashed-up… whatever it's supposed to be sitting there.
I'm halfway through hating myself for thinking about eating some more of the potatoes when I see something crawling on the back of the chair. It's shiny and black and, and big – maybe the size of a chocolate bar. Bigger, even. It's the biggest, ugliest spider I've ever seen.
I hear myself letting out a yelp and a few heads turn my way. I glance round, embarrassed, then look back to find that the spider has gone. I'm about to jump up from my seat to try to find where it went, but all of a sudden it's like I don't even care. The spider was there, and then it wasn't, and it already feels like a lifetime ago.
The guy from the seat beside me comes back from the bathroom, and I have to step right out into the aisle to let him squash his fat arse past. He grunts as he squeezes in past the tray, huffing and sweating like a damn hog.
"Thank you," he wheezes, so breathless I suspect he's about three jumping jacks away from dropping dead. It'd serve him right. He's a horror-show. Someone should have put his fat ass out of its misery before we took off, so I wouldn't have had to spend six hours breathing in his body odour and listening to him fighting for air.
A whisper in my head agrees with me that someone should put this man down.
No, not man. He doesn't deserve that label. He's an animal. A fat, blubbery whale no-one should be forced to even look at, never mind be jammed in next to for several hours.
He looks at me with his sunken eyes and twists his blubbery lips into something that I guess is supposed to look like a smile, but which makes me want to throw up all over him. That'd teach him. That'd show him what decent, normal people think of horrible fat fucks like him.
But no. That's not enough. He looks down at his dinner tray. Empty, of course. He devoured the whole lot in minutes.
Caught him eyeing mine up, too. He'd have eaten all my scraps, given half the chance.
Left unchecked, he'll probably eat all of us.
Someone needs to teach him a lesson. Someone needs to carve some of that disgusting fucking lard from his bones.
Someone.
Anyone.
The spider whispers in my head.
Me.