"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.
"Where am I?" he asked in a small, perplexed voice, and looked around. Suddenly he realized... and suddenly he saw them.
The langoliers had come.
They had come for him.
Craig Toomy began to scream.
19
Brian could see them, but could not understand what it was he was seeing. In some strange way they seemed to defy seeing, and he sensed his frantic, overstressed mind trying to change the incoming information, to make the shapes which had begun to appear at the east end of Runway 21 into something it could understand.
At first there were only two shapes, one black, one a dark tomato red.
Are they balls? his mind asked doubtfully. Could they be balls?
Something actually seemed to click in the center of his head and they were balls, sort of like beachballs, but balls which rippled and contracted and then expanded again, as if he was seeing them through a heat-haze. They came bowling out of the high dead grass at the end of Runway 21, leaving cut swaths of blackness behind them. They were somehow cutting the grass
No, his mind reluctantly denied. They are not just cutting the grass, and you know it. They are cutting a lot more than the grass.
What they left behind were narrow lines of perfect blackness. And now, as they raced playfully down the white concrete at the end of the runway, they were still leaving narrow dark tracks behind. They glistened like tar.
No, his mind reluctantly denied. Not tar. You know what that blackness is. It's nothing. Nothing at all. They are eating a lot more than the surface of the runway.
There was something malignantly joyful about their behavior. They crisscrossed each other's paths, leaving a wavery black X on the outer taxiway. They bounced high in the air, did an exuberant, crisscrossing maneuver, and then raced straight for the plane.
As they did, Brian screamed and Nick screamed beside him. Faces lurked below the surfaces of the racing balls - monstrous, alien faces. They shimmered and twitched and wavered like faces made of glowing swamp-gas. The eyes were only rudimentary indentations, but the mouths were huge: semicircular caves lined with gnashing, blurring teeth.
They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.
A Texaco fuel truck was parked on the outer taxiway. The langoliers pounced upon it, high-speed teeth whirring and crunching and bulging out of their blurred bodies. They went through it without pause. One of them burrowed a path directly through the rear tires, and for a moment, before the tires collapsed, Brian could see the shape it had cut - a shape like a cartoon mouse-hole in a cartoon baseboard.
The other leaped high, disappeared for a moment behind the Texaco truck's boxy tank, and then blasted straight through, leaving a metal-ringed hole from which av-gas sprayed in a dull amber flood. They struck the ground, bounced as if on springs, crisscrossed again, and raced on toward the airplane. Reality peeled away in narrow strips beneath them, peeled away wherever and whatever they touched, and as they neared, Brian realized that they were unzipping more than the world - they were opening all the depths of forever.
They reached the edge of the tarmac and paused. They jittered uncertainly in place for a moment, looking like the bouncing balls that hopped over the words in old movie-house sing-alongs.
Then they turned and zipped off in a new direction.
Zipped off in the direction of Craig Toomy who stood watching them and screaming into the white day.
With a huge effort, Brian snapped the paralysis which held him. He elbowed Nick, who was still frozen below him. "Come on!" Nick didn't move and Brian drove his elbow back harder this time, connecting solidly with Nick's forehead. "Come on, I said! Move your ass! We're getting out