Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

white leather at fifty-one thousand feet, they're headed south along the Red Sea, all the way to Jedda, where they'll hang a left.

The other guys in the air right now, all of them headed for their own assigned targets, you have to wonder how they made their money. What pain and torture they went through.

You can still see where Webber got his ears pierced, and how pulled down and stretched out they still look from those dangle earrings.

Looking back, most of the wars in history were over somebody's religion.

This is just the attack to end all wars. Or at least most of them.

After Flint got control of his tits, they toured from college to college. Anywhere people drank beer with nothing to do. By now, Flint had a detached retina floating around, making him blind in that eye. Webber had a 60-percent hearing loss from his brain getting bounced around. Traumatic brain lesions, the emergency room called it. They were both of them a little shaky, needing both hands to hold a mascara wand steady. Both of them too stiff to work the zipper up the back of his own dress. Wobbly on even their medium heels. Still, they went on.

When it came time, when the jet fighters from the United Arab Emirates would come to shadow them, Flint might be too blind to fly, but he'd be in the cockpit with everything he'd learned in the air force.

Here, in the white leather cabin of their Gulfstream G550, Flint has kicked off both his boots, and his bare feet show toenails still painted titty-pink. You can still smell a hint of Chanel No. 5 perfume mixed with his BO.

One of their last shows, in Missoula, Montana, a girls steps out of the crowd to tell them they're hateful bigots. That they're encouraging violent hate crimes being acted out against the gender-conflicted members of our otherwise peaceful pluralistic society . . .

Webber standing there, cut off in the middle of singing “Buttons and Bows,” the spiffy Doris Day version, not the cheesy Dinah Shore version, he's wearing a strapless blue satin sheath with all his chest hair, his shoulder and arm hair billowing from wrist to wrist like a lush boa of black feathers, and he asks this girl, “So you wanna buy a punch or not?”

Flint's one step away, at the head of the line, taking people's money, and he says, “Take your best shot.” He says, “Half price for chicks.”

And the girl, she just looks at them, tapping one of her feet in its tennis shoe, her mouth clamped shut and pulled way over to one side of her face.

Finally, she says, “Can you fake-sing that Titanic song?”

And Flint takes her ten bucks and gives her a hug. “For you,” he says, “we can play that song all night long . . .”

That was the night they finally topped out the fifty grand for the mission.

Now, outside the jet, you can see the torn brown-and-gold coastline of Saudi Arabia. The windows of a Gulfstream are two, three times the size of the little porthole you get on a commercial jetliner. Just looking out, at the sun and ocean, everything else mixed together from this high up, you'd almost want to live. To scrub the whole mission and head home, no matter how bleak the future.

A Gulfstream carries enough fuel to fly 6,750 nautical miles, even with an 85-percent headwind. Their target was only going to take 6,701, leaving just enough jet fuel to trigger their luggage, their suitcases plus the bags and bags that Jenson loaded in Florida, where they landed because the pilot started to feel sick. This is after they got him a cup of coffee. Three Vicodins ground and mixed in black coffee would make most people dizzy, groggy, sick. So they landed. Offloaded the regular pilot. Onloaded the bags. Mr. Jenson humping the ammonium nitrate. And here was Flint's girl, Sheila, fresh out of flight school and ready to take off.

In the open doorway to the cockpit, you can see Sheila slip her earphones down to rest around her neck. Looking back over one shoulder, she says, “Just heard on the radio. Somebody dove a jet full of fertilizer into the Vatican . . .”

Go figure, Webber says.

Looking out his window, kicked back in his white leather recliner, Flint says, “We got company.” Off that side of the plane, you can see two jet fighters. Flint gives them a little wave. The profiles of the little fighter pilots, they don't wave back.

And Webber looks at the ice melting in his empty glass and says, “Where are we going?”

From the cockpit, Sheila says, “We've had them since we made the turn inland at Jedda.” She puts her headphones back over her ears.

And Flint leans across the aisle to pour the empty glass full of Scotch, again, and Flint says, “Does Mecca ring a bell, old buddy? The Al-Haram?” He says, “How about the Ka'ba?”

Sheila, one hand touching the earphone over one ear, she says, “They got the Mormon Tabernacle . . . the National Baptist Convention Headquarters . . . the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock . . . the Beverly Hills Hotel . . .”

Nope, Flint says. Disarmament didn't work. The United Nation didn't, either. Still, maybe this will.

With their friend, Jenson, our Reverend Godless, to be the sole survivor.

Webber says, “What's in the Beverly Hills Hotel?”

And Flint drains his glass and says, “The Dalai Lama . . .”

That girl in Missoula, Montana, Webber got her name and phone number that night. When it came time for them all to write out their last will and testaments, Webber left that girl everything he had in the world, including the Mustang parked in his folks' breezeway, his set of Craftsman tools, and fourteen Coach purses with the shoes and outfits to match.

That night, after she paid fifty bucks to kick Webber's ass, the girl looks at him with his blind white eye swollen