The Bug - Episode 2 by Barry J. Hutchison

DELTA AIRLINES, FLIGHT 2174  
24th May, 8:18 PM
     
    This flight feels like it has taken forever! The gentleman next to me has gone to the bathroom – thank goodness - so I take a minute to stretch and fidget, and console myself with the fact that we’re almost there. Half an hour left. Maybe a little more. Then I get to see Mike and the kids for the first time in nearly a week.
    My seat tray is still folded down, the half-eaten remains of what they had the nerve to call a meal still sitting on top of it. Thought they’d have tidied everything away by now, but now that I think about it, I haven’t seen a stewardess in a while. I heard something about a passenger getting sick about an hour back. Maybe that’s it.
    I feel for the person, don’t get me wrong, but come on. We’ve all been sitting here with our trays in front of us for way too long now. How many cabin crew does it take to look after one sick person? I wanted to get some writing done, but I can’t with this plate of mashed-up… whatever it’s supposed to be sitting there.
    I’m halfway through hating myself for thinking about eating some more of the potatoes when I see something crawling on the back of the chair. It’s shiny and black and, and big – maybe the size of a chocolate bar. Bigger, even. It’s the biggest, ugliest bug I’ve ever seen.
    I hear myself letting out a yelp and a few heads turn my way. I glance round, embarrassed, then look back to find that the bug has gone. I’m about to jump up from my seat to try to find where it went, but all of a sudden it’s like I don’t even care. The bug was there, and then it wasn’t, and it already feels like a lifetime ago.
    The guy from the seat beside me comes back from the bathroom, and I have to step right out into the aisle to let him squash his fat ass past. He grunts as he squeezes in past the tray, huffing and sweating like a damn hog.
    “Thank you,” he wheezes, so breathless I suspect he’s about three jumping jacks away from dropping dead. It’d serve him right. He’s a horror-show. Someone should have put his fat ass out of its misery before we took off, so I wouldn’t have had to spend six hours breathing in his body odor and listening to him fighting for air.
    A whisper in my head agrees with me that someone should put this man down. No, not man. He doesn’t deserve that label. He’s an animal. A fat, blubbery whale no-one should be forced to even look at, never mind be jammed in next to for several hours.
    He looks at me with his sunken eyes and twists his blubbery lips into something that I guess is supposed to look like a smile, but which makes me want to throw up all over him. That’d teach him. That’d show him what decent, normal people think of horrible fat fucks like him.
    But no. That’s not enough. He looks down at his dinner tray. Empty, of course. He devoured the whole lot in minutes. Caught him eyeing mine up, too. He’d have eaten all my scraps, given half the chance. Left unchecked, he’ll probably eat all of us.
    Someone needs to teach him a lesson. Someone needs to carve some of that disgusting fucking lard from his bones.
    Someone.
    Anyone.
    The bug whispers in my head.
    Me.

FRANKLIN, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
24th MAY, 8:54 AM
 
    When she woke up that morning, it never occurred to Amy Banks that she’d bash her dad’s skull in with a frying pan.
    And now that she had – now that the screaming and the thrashing were over, now that his brains were painting the linoleum – she could only stare in mute shock as her mind tried to shut down from the horror of it all.
    Her legs were shaking too much to stand yet. She used her hands to shuffle away from the corpse on the floor until her back was against the dishwasher. The smell of the blood left a coppery tang in her mouth. She spat it out and let her breath come back in big shaky gulps.
    Amy didn’t want to look at the dead thing, but she was afraid to look away, as if the moment her back was turned it