“Make it stop!” Bethany suddenly screamed from the doorway above them. She clapped her hands to her ears. “Oh please make it STOP!”

But the sound-wave rolled on toward them — the crunching, smacking, eating sound of the langoliers.

“I don’t like to tease, Brian, but how much longer?” Nick’s voice was taut. “There’s a river about four miles east of here — I saw it when we were coming down — and I reckon whatever’s coming is just now on the other side of it.”

Brian glanced at his fuel readouts. 24,000 pounds in the right wing; 16,000 pounds in the left. It was going faster now that he didn’t have to pump the Delta’s fuel overwing to the other side.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said. He could feel sweat standing out on his brow in big drops. “We’ve got to have more fuel, Nick, or we’ll come down dead in the Mojave Desert. Another ten minutes to unhook, button up, and taxi out.”

“You can’t cut that? You’re sure you can’t cut that?”

Brian shook his head and turned back to his gauges.

Craig crawled slowly through the rubber strips, feeling them slide down his back like limp fingers. He emerged in the white, dead light of a new — and vastly shortened — day. The sound was terrible, overwhelming, the sound of an invading cannibal army. Even the sky seemed to shake with it, and for a moment fear froze him in place.

Look, his angel of the morning said, and pointed.

Craig looked... and forgot his fear. Beyond the American Pride 767, in a triangle of dead grass bounded by two taxiways and a runway, there was a long mahogany boardroom table. It gleamed brightly in the listless light. At each place was a yellow legal pad, a pitcher of ice water, and a Waterford glass. Sitting around the table were two dozen men in sober bankers’ suits, and now they were all turning to look at him.

Suddenly they began to clap their hands. They stood and faced him applauding his arrival. Craig felt a huge, grateful grin begin to stretch his face.

Dinah had been left alone in first class. Her breathing had become very labored now, and her voice was a strangled choke.

“Run to them, Craig! Quick! Quick!”

Craig tumbled off the conveyor, struck the concrete with a bone-rattling thump, and flailed to his feet. The pain no longer mattered. The angel had brought them! Of course she had brought them! Angels were like the ghosts in the story about Mr Scrooge — they could do anything they wanted! The corona around her had begun to dim and she was fading out, but it didn’t matter. She had brought his salvation: a net in which he was finally, blessedly caught.

Run to them, Craig! Run around the plane! Run away from the plane! Run to them now!

Craig began to run — a shambling stride that quickly became a crippled sprint. As he ran his head nodded up and down like a sunflower on a broken stalk. He ran toward humorless, unforgiving men who were his salvation, men who might have been fisher-folk standing in a boat beyond an unsuspected silver sky, retrieving their net to see what fabulous things they had caught.

The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727–400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.

“All right,” he said, standing up.

“All right what?” Nick asked, also standing.

“We’re uncoupling and getting the fuck out of here.”

The approaching noise had reached deafening levels. Mixed into the crunching smacking sound and the transmission squeal were falling trees and the dull crump of collapsing buildings, just before shutting the pumps down he had heard a number of crackling thuds followed by a series of deep splashes. A bridge falling into the river Nick had seen, he imagined.

“Mr Toomy!” Bethany screamed suddenly. “It’s Mr Toomy!”

Nick beat Brian out the door and into first class, but they were both in time to see Craig go shambling and lurching across the taxiway. He ignored the plane completely. His destination appeared to be an empty triangle of grass bounded by a pair of crisscrossing taxiways.

“What’s he doing?” Rudy breathed.

“Never mind him,” Brian said. “We’re all out of time. Nick? Go down the ladder ahead of me. Hold me while I uncouple the hose.” Brian felt like a man standing naked on a beach as a tidal wave humps up on the horizon and rushes toward the shore.

Nick followed him down and laid hold of Brian’s belt again as Brian leaned out and twisted the nozzle of the hose, unlocking it. A moment later he yanked the hose free and dropped it to the cement, where the nozzle-ring clanged dully. Brian slammed the fuel-port door shut.

“Come on,” he said after Nick had pulled him back. His face was dirty gray. “Let’s get out of here.”

But Nick did not move. He was frozen in place, staring to the east. His skin had gone the color of paper. On his face was an expression of dreamlike horror. His upper lip trembled, and in that moment he looked like a dog that is too frightened to snarl.

Brian turned his head slowly in that direction, hearing the tendons in his neck creak like a rusty spring on an old screen door as he did so. He turned his head and watched as the langoliers finally entered stage left.

“So you see,” Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, “the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself — men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end — keeping communism out of South America — justifies any available means.”

“What procedures did you follow to check these fellows out?” a fat man in an expensive blue suit asked. “Did you use a bond-insurance company, or does your bank retain a specific investigation firm in such cases?” Blue Suit’s round, jowly face was perfectly shaved; his cheeks glowed either with good health or forty years of Scotch and sodas; his eyes were merciless chips of blue ice. They were wonderful eyes; they were father-eyes.

Somewhere, far away from this boardroom two floors below the top of the Prudential Center, Craig could hear a hell of a racket going on. Road construction, he supposed. There was always road construction going on in Boston, and he suspected that most of it was unnecessary, that in most cases it was just the old, old story — the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. His job was to deal with the man in the blue suit, and he couldn’t wait to get started.

“We’re waiting, Craig,” the president of his own banking institution said. Craig felt momentary surprise — Mr Parker hadn’t been scheduled to attend this meeting — and then the feeling was overwhelmed by happiness.

“No procedures at all!” he screamed joyfully into their shocked faces. “I just bought and bought and bought! I followed No... PROCEDURES... AT ALL!”

He was about to go on, to elaborate on this theme, to really expound on it, when a sound stopped him. This sound was not miles away; this sound was close, very close, perhaps in the boardroom itself.

A whickering chopping sound, like dry hungry teeth.

Suddenly Craig felt a deep need to tear some paper — any paper would do. He reached for the legal pad in front of his place at the table, but the pad was gone. So was the table. So were the bankers. So was Boston.