A New Blitzkrieg

American Airlines’ Flight AA2497 departed Atlanta in the early evening, just after six, bound for Dallas-Forth Worth. It took off into a warm July sky. No storms waited in the flight path. The passengers felt mostly relaxed. It had been expected to touch earth again at 8:33 pm. local time. But it didn’t happen like that.

At 8:33 p.m. the flight was still circling, refused permission to land or continue on to any other airport. The United States Air Force had scrambled an E-3 Sentry alongside two F-22s. These interceptors waited to see what word would come down from on high. They were fully prepared to destroy civilian aircraft and snuff out American lives.

This is because Flight AA2497 had become two Flights AA2497. As the flight approached DFW, it had morphed into a set of mirror image twins. Both flights contained the exact same crew and passengers. And both planes were in a panic, as visual contact had been made between the two planes in mid-air. That is, passengers had seen their doppelgangers looking out the windows of the plane flying next to them. Transmissions from the pilots and co-pilots of these dual cockpits were nearly identical. Nobody was sure which plane was the “real McCoy” or whether such logic could even be applied to what had happened. The air traffic controllers were bewitched into stunned silence when they heard the same pilot transmitting from two different planes, his voice overlapping his voice.

The Secretary of Defense and the President were conferring. Since a state of war existed between the United States of America and that nameless species which had lately announced its existence as an interdimensional being living with us, interpenetrating us like photons, the decision was not an easy matter. They had already attacked our infrastructure and information technologies. There had been human casualties. Nobody really knew what “they” were. We had found ways to block them, we had used the best code we could finesse. But increasingly they made new incursions. They were able to interfere with the natural progression of time. They were able to use backdoors in space. We were at war. And yet nobody had ever even seen the enemy.

Everyone knew this anomaly of Flight AA2497 had been caused by them. But nobody knew the meaning of it. The President and the Secretary had to make the call. The flight was running out of fuel and refueling mid-air was not an option. It was ultimately decided to let both planes land. The military was evacuating the airport of civilians and all other flights were diverted elsewhere.

The planes taxied down separate runways only moments apart. The passengers and crews on both airlines were told they could not deboard. They were to be quarantined for an indeterminate amount of time — until the matter could be resolved. This was depressing news, but the passengers on both craft were genuinely relieved that they had managed to reach the earth alive.

The President breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was apprised that no earth-shattering disaster had occurred when the planes landed.

“We just have no idea what to do with all the extra humans,” one general joked. And which ones are the originals and who are the copies?”

They were still laughing about this when the call came through from the military brass on the ground at DFW. It was a panicked voice that relayed the information: “Sir, it’s the worst possible scenario. Nuclear option tenable. We no longer have two identical planes. We had two….then we had four identicals..then eight…sixteen…you get the picture. They’re just materializing and destroying the airport. It appears to be some sort of virus…some sort of spatial virus! There are hundreds of them if not thousands already. I have to evacuate because….”

There was a huge crashing sound of twisting metal and a scream. Many screams. Then silence.

And the mitosis of planes went on through the landscape, that warm summer night in Texas. Flight AA2497 went on duplicating, horizontally, city to city, and vertically, jets piled atop jets up into the clouds, even to the crack of doom.

And the passengers wondered and wondered and wondered as they watched and sometimes caught a glimpse of themselves through the wreckage, looking back at themselves in terror and hoping, hoping to get off the plane as soon as possible.

The Free Couch Killer

Bhakti was telling Nate that she was cutting out of work a half hour early because she wanted to have a friend help her pick up a “free couch” she had spotted curbside on the drive to work that morning.

“Don’t do it!” Nate exclaimed, so loudly that other workers in the lunchroom looked their direction.

“Don’t you know about ‘The Free Couch Killer?’” Nate put down his pudding spoon in excess of emotion.

“What the hell?” Bhakti was sure she was about to hear a really bad joke. “No. Tell me, sweetheart.”

“There was this guy, this skinny creep who modified couches so he could hide inside them. And then he would put them out by the curb or sometimes advertise them on craigslist, places like that. And people would pick up the couches and take them home, and when they were sleeping, he would slip out of the couch and murder them. He killed at least three women that they know of.”

Bhakti was still smiling at the way Nate had turned his face into a mask of terror when he had dramatically italicized the phrase “that they know of.”

“Well, is the couch creep still at large?”

“No. He was served justice. But he was never arrested.”

“Enlighten me, please.”

“Well, he was lying there in one of his couch traps one summer night, and a truck pulled up and this tarantula was loaded onto the bed of the truck inside that couch. He figured he was sitting pretty for another victim. Turns out it was a bunch of totally high kids out joyriding who had picked up the couch for a different reason.”

“Huh?”

“They had this stupid thing that they would do where they would drive around at night picking up large items to throw off Entwhistle bridge. They loved watching them fall hundreds of feet into the river, especially in winter time when they’d use things like old washing machines to break the river ice. Assholes. But they served a higher purpose that night when they threw the couch with the creep in it off the bridge. The monster must have figured out what was happening at the last moment, because they heard the couch scream as it fell. That was a first for them. None of the other appliances or furnishings they had thrown off the bridge had screamed.”

“And they found his body?”

“Yeah, he washed up downstream a few days later. They had gotten DNA samples off the couches where the murders had occurred. He would leave the couches torn open and overturned. The cops weren’t getting it at first, thought the nut just had something against couches as well as people, so he left a note at the third crime scene actually explaining his m.o. You know how some of those twisted creatures like to brag. And yet people still drive around picking up these free couches.”

“I think he was one of a kind. I doubt there are any more couch creeps out there.”

“You never know. But hey, I have a solution for you. If you are still going to pick that couch up today.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Stand real close to the couch, where any couch creep could hear you talking, and say, ‘This is just the perfect couch for the bonfire. I can’t wait to burn this old thing!’

“If the couch screams or starts acting like a Mexican jumping bean, don’t take it.”