Cost of Life Read Online Free PDF

relax—a bit—comforted by the fact that most airplane fatalities occurred during takeoff. Sure, they were still trapped in this steel coffin and suspended several dozen thousand feet above the planet, but statistically speaking, the worst was over. The enthusiastic fliers, like Leticia Morgan in Seat 23C, ruminated with wonder and awe at the fact that they were, at this very moment, soaring above the clouds like something out of Greek mythology. What a god man had become!
    It was time for the captain to make his opening remarks. Larry activated the intercom, and whatever complimentary media the passengers were listening to cut out, only to be replaced by a popping, followed by a clicking, followed by the sound of their captain taking a deep, dry swallow.
    “I…sorry about that…ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain and it…I mean…it is my pleasure to…”
    He stopped—and the reason he stopped was because the next words ready to leap from his mouth were to inform them just how fucked up their day was about to become. There were 174 passengers on this plane, men and women with families of their own, children whose lives had barely begun, and here he was prioritizing his own kin over theirs. How was this anything other than selfish? He tried to swallow, tried to generate enough moisture to speak, but his throat had gone all Sahara on him.
    “Skipper,” muttered Reese, “you OK there?”
    These men with the barcode tattoos were kidnappers and killers. What would happen once Larry landed the plane? Did the lives of Marie and Sean really outweigh the lives of 174 innocents?
    Yes.
    Yes, they simply did. And that was that.
    Larry turned off the intercom. “Reese, I need you to remain calm.”
    “Hey, chief, I hate to break it to you, but the last thing you want to tell a guy you want to remain calm is to remain calm. What’s going on? All our readings look five by five. Altitude, engines, fuel, speed, yaw, navigation…although shouldn’t we be over the ocean by now?”
    Reese checked his navigation display, then stared at his captain with genuine confusion. This was Larry Walder. The man was a veteran pilot. Everybody liked Larry and, more so, everybody trusted him.
    And yet, where was the fucking ocean?
    “Captain, I’m going to be straight with you: You’re scaring the shit out of my balls. Now tell me what the holy hell is going on or so help me, I’ll…”
    After 9/11, the US government voted to allow commercial airline pilots to carry handguns; however, some of the countries to which these commercial airlines regularly flew did not see eye-to-eye with the United States on this point of law. The compromise that Pegasus enacted for its international flights was simple: Stow the captain’s and first officer’s handguns in the footlockers under their seats.
    This was what Larry had filched from Reese’s footlocker and this was what Larry now with his right hand pointed at Reese’s face, this fully loaded semi-automatic Glock 17.
    “I need you to remain calm,” said Larry. “Please.”

Chapter 6
    At 7:01 A.M., precisely thirty minutes before Larry Walder hijacked Pegasus Airlines Flight 816, Xanadu Marx finished off her third cigarette of the day, plinked its stub into her empty can of Red Bull, and seriously contemplated pitching the can with full force at the chipper-grinned, pneumatic-breasted twentysomething currently jogging along her sidewalk.
    Alas, no, because at that moment Xana’s hippie Hindu flatmate Moonbeam—or was it Sunbeam?—flip-flopped out the front door and perched herself beside Xana on the hillock of cracked bricks that functioned, more or less, as their house’s front stoop. And so Xana’s window of opportunity had passed. The youthful jogger had gone out of range.
    “Can I have a sip?” asked Moonbeam. The breeze turned her hip-length gray hair into Victorian curtains.
    The same breeze did absolutely nothing to Xana’s obsidian pixie cut. She handed the Red Bull can