1-1. Waiting for the End to Come
Elijah Hart ran a hand over his hairless head as he tried to ignore the curious or disgusted glances originating with the plane’s other passengers. His lack of hair wasn’t really the issue – not by itself, at least. Instead, the real problem was the lack of eyebrows; he’d never really considered how much the presence of those two short tufts of hair affected the way someone looked. Not until he’d lost his, that is. In addition to the alien absence of hair on his brow, he was also afflicted with sunken cheeks, red-rimmed eyes, and a pallid complexion. One look, and anyone who knew anything would recognize precisely what he was.
He sighed, drinking in the stale, antiseptic atmosphere. He hated flying, but not because he was terrified of crashing. No – it was more the act itself. The sudden jumps and jerks, the steady drone of the engines, the cramped confines of the cabin – it all added up to a particularly uncomfortable experience that, if he had any choice in the matter, he would have avoided.
But some things were more important than the avoidance of discomfort.
“Elijah!” came his sister’s voice, jerking his attention back to the tablet in his lap.
“Shit. Sorry,” he mumbled, locking his eyes on the screen. “Chemo-brain, I guess.”
Alyssa shook her head, pushing a lock of blonde hair back behind her ear before saying, “I wish you would have waited for me to come pick you up.”
Before Elijah had been diagnosed with cancer and forced to undergo the horrors of radiation and chemotherapy, he and his sister had looked strikingly similar. Now, though, when Elijah looked at his sister’s sandy blonde hair and clear skin, he couldn’t help but be reminded of all he’d lost.
Of everything he’d yet to lose.
“It would’ve just been a waste of money,” Elijah said with a tired sigh. “There’s no point in you paying for a flight all the way out to the island when I’m perfectly capable of sitting in a plane by myself for a few hours.”
Of course, Elijah didn’t mention the half-dozen times he’d had to race – or hobble, given his distinct lack of energy – to the plane’s lavatory to vomit. The treatments had torn him apart, leaving him a shell of his former self. And though he’d recently finished his last round of chemotherapy, he still hadn’t had time to completely recover.
And he never would, either. What the treatment hadn’t destroyed, the disease itself had. Soon, it would all be over. Or that’s what the doctors had said, at least. It was the reason he’d left his home in Hawai’i to fly back to Seattle where he’d grown up. He didn’t want to spend what little time he had left drugged out of his mind in hospice care. Instead, he wanted to spend it with the only family he had left – his sister, her wife, and their son.
Still, just because he preferred going home to lying in a hospital bed didn’t mean he was happy with his circumstances. As much as he wanted to see Alyssa and her family, the last thing he wanted was for them to see him wither away and succumb to cancer. He’d have preferred to be remembered as he’d been – vibrant and alive. Not the husk he had become.
“Elijah, I –”
The tablet stuttered, then went dark. At the same time, the lights in the plane’s cabin went the same way, leaving the passengers mired in complete darkness. Someone screamed. Others gasped. Most of the reaction was confined to a low murmur, though. There was no point in panicking.
Elijah felt something dig into his forearm, and it only took him a moment to realize that the claw-like fingernails belonged to the woman next to him. He was just about to say something comforting, but his words were cut off when his stomach jumped into his throat as the plane dropped.
There were more screams.
Elijah’s heart pounded, and his stomach clenched.
And then he realized what was wrong. The hum of the plane’s engines had ceased when his tablet stopped working. Had they been struck by lightning? Or was there some other mechanical issue? He didn’t know enough about planes to figure it out. Instead, as was the case with everyone else on the plane, the panic had truly begun to grip him. His fingers wrapped around the armrest, squeezing the hard plastic with every ounce of his meager Strength.
Elijah had long since come to terms with his own mortality. Death was inevitable. He would just have to confront it a little earlier than most. And though he’d spent a few weeks after his diagnosis railing against his own fate, questioning why he’d been chosen to die an early death, he’d slowly made peace with leaving the world behind. After all, what choice did he have? It was coming for him, regardless of how he felt. Whether it was in a few more weeks or a scant few minutes shouldn’t have mattered all that much to him.
But it did.
With everyone else panicking all around him, Elijah couldn’t stop himself from reacting similarly. It was simple human nature at work, and as the plane continued to plummet, his heart raced out of control. He murmured, “It’s going to be fine. These planes can glide for miles without power. It’s going to be okay.”
“Y-you think so?” asked the woman beside him, her voice small, quiet, and terrified. Elijah couldn’t see her – it was night, and with the plane’s lights having stopped working, he was almost entirely blind. Still, he remembered her being an attractive redhead, and she spoke with an Irish accent. She’d introduced herself out of politeness, but after a four-hour flight, most of which Elijah spent mired in self-pity, he couldn’t remember her name. He wanted to say it was “Gwen” or something like that, though that might’ve been completely wrong.
“I think –”
Elijah never got the chance to finish his statement because, only a moment later, something wholly unexpected flashed before his eyes. A disembodied block of text appeared:
| Your planet (Earth) has been touched by the World Tree. Scanning…
|