Chapter 1159 Mid-Atlantic Time Zone （MST）
into the footwell. Their legs thrashed. Horation’s right arm rose and fell, pistoning up and down with the gun in it, clubbing
Heck with the gun.
Allie reeled herself, first one way, then the other, into the emergency exit at the top of the stairs. Her forehead bonked
the smeary little porthole in the exit hatch. She steadied herself against the door and stared out into the night.
An attack jet—an F-16, Allie thought—yawed away through the cloud, dragging that terrible scream behind it, the scream not
of a dragon but of its massive turbofan engine. It tilted up on one wing to show the Vulcan cannon slung beneath it and flash
its Sidewinder missiles, and then it fell away out of sight and into smoke.
The 747 leveled out. Allie staggered back from the emergency exit and looked up the aisle. Heck was face down, Horation on
top of him, both of them on the floor in Horation’s row. Heck kicked and made dry choking sounds, trying to thrash free of
the man with a knee in the small of his back. The gun was over there somewhere, and in the movie version of her life Allie
would’ve thrown herself into the scrum, come up with it after a desperate struggle, and put the barrel under Horation’s jaw.
She ran instead. She fled past the blond flight attendant, who was crouched low on the top step like a soldier peering over
the rim of a foxhole. She went down the stairs three at a time.
Even then, her thoughts were not hysterical.
They were fast, which was not the same at all.
She thought she should dart for the cockpit and tell those pilots, really, no more fucking around, time to land.
But when she hit the bottom of the stairs the plane angled steeply to port, so steeply it toppled her.
She sprawled on the floor and stayed there for a moment, long enough to determine they were descending.
She could feel their rapid descent in the roots of her hair.
They were already landing, and if they had any sense they’d have the cockpit door locked.
No sooner had she found her feet than the deck pitched under her feet again. She let the momentum carry her to the exit hatch
on this level. She needed to see what was happening out there. She peered into the dark boil of clouds, searching for the
F-16 again.
Lightning pulsed deep in a thunderhead. King Sorrow flashed through skeins of vapor, a vast, monstrous shape, and Allie wanted
to cry out at the sight, although whether from horror or exultation, she could not have said. Even from a distance, his enormity
was breathtaking in a literal sense—it was like someone had stamped on her chest and driven the air from her lungs.
An F-16 flashed after him—she didn’t know if it was the same plane or another—with a rending shriek and let go a Sidewinder.
She saw the rocket strike King Sorrow and detonate with a clap of thunder and a great jet of flame. For a moment the dragon
was illuminated in silhouette in all his terrible vastness, with his bat-like wings and his hundred feet of serpentine tail
and his proud head with its open scaly fan like the crown of an emperor. The gout of flame brightened, flickered, and faded . . .
but in its last guttering, smoky glow Allie saw King Sorrow drop, corkscrewing toward the earth. Felled was the word that came to mind.