The passengers of flight DAL649, direct from Atlanta to Boston sat quietly amid the low thundering sound of the plane. Alfred Toram was flying alone for the first time in his life. It was an achievement he thought ridiculous at age thirty two. He was an accountant for a large firm, and would be attending a conference in Montreal over the weekend.

It was a Thursday. Gloomy, but not raining. Far below, he could see the rural area over which they flew, cars barely the size of grains of sand moving slowly along roads no bigger than the wires in his laptop. He remembered the report he had to finish.

Alfred reached down into his bag. His laptop was in there somewhere, he knew it, but he couldn't quite reach it. He had short arms, and the passenger in front of him had their seat back.

His face pressed against the back, and he reached. If he didn't know better, he'd think his arm was physically stretching he was reaching so hard. Surprise came to him, and those around him, when he heard the bones in his forearm crack.

With a yelp of pain, he pulled his arm back, clutching it with his other and hissing under his breath. He had no idea what had happened. He'd only ever broken a bone once, and that was when he fell down the stairs in his parent's apartment at age six, and even then it was just a toe.

The woman in the seat beside him looked shocked. "Are you alright, sir?" she asked, looking at his arm. "Should I call the flight attendant?"

"Please," he grunted through clenched teeth, and muttering profanity under his breath. The woman reached up and pressed the call button, and after thirty excruciatingly long seconds, the flight attendant arrived.

"Hi, I think this man just broke his arm," she explained.

"Yes, my arm is broken," he breathed, tears welling in his eyes from the overwhelming pain. He could tell that wasn't all that was wrong, though. "Is there a doctor, or drugs or anything?" he pleaded, hardly able to breathe, let alone form coherent words.

"Ok, just a moment sir," the flight attendant said. Mumbling something to herself, she looked around the cabin. "Is anyone a doctor?" A few passengers looked up, some concerned, some curious, but none seeming to have anything to offer. "Anyone? A doctor? Nurse?" She looked around, and then back to Alfred, who was looking closer and closer to passing out.

The flight attendant walked quickly up the aisle into the business class, and toward the cockpit.

Moments later, a terrified scream emitted from the seat in front of Alfred.

"JAKE!" screamed Jake's mother, shaking her son, who had a few hours earlier stopped complaining of feeling airsick, and shortly thereafter, moving at all. "Jake, oh my god wake up!" she cried, saying his name over and over again.

Alfred's head was pounding. The screaming and the terrified murmuring from around him was too much to take in addition to his throbbing arm. Of course, what had been racing through his mind had already been mentioned.

"It's the plague," came a paniced whisper from behind him. From the area surrounding the crash site of the International Space Station earlier that week, more and more unexplained injuries had been reported. Sensationalists were calling it the next big pandemic, realists were attributing it to a virus they found attached to some of the inner bulkheads of one of the larger sections of debris. It seemed that every news agency on the planet simultaneously and wordlessly agreed that it would be called 'The Plague'.

Word was already spreading down the plane. Some people were beginning to stand. The man behind Alfred had climbed over his companion and was scurrying up the aisle.

"We need to land," he mumbled, panic clearly evident in his tone. "We need to land, we need to land we need to land." The man's mood was doing very little to calm the rest of the passengers, more and more of whom were beginning to stand.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please, have a seat. There is absolutely-- sir, please." The man was attempting to push past the flight attendant. "Sir, sir!" The man ran at the flight cabin door, pushing the flight attendant out of the way in the process. He bowled into the door once, which held, and again, and again. His brow had began to collect sweat, and he winced in pain, clutching his shoulder as he ran again into the door. He hardly even noticed as he threw off the people attempting to stop him, one man falling and hitting his head hard on the emergency release handle of the outer door.

He ran again, growing painfully stronger on each failed attempt.

"Reporting for Gasp News, this is Sally McGrate," said the reporter on the television. "Moments ago, reports of infection of what sources are calling 'The Plague' arrived, making this the farthest the disease has spread."

"She knows all about spreading diseases," Sarnrei remarked, to great fanfare from the others in the room.

"And spreading in general," added Chris, barely able to get the words out from laughter. It was a tradition the group had. Mia, Chris, Sarnrei and Jarin sat in Sarnrei's living room watching a news program whose rediculous sensationalism had captured their interest, each taking turns twisting the reporter's words in a most lewd fashion.

"Reports of the newly discovered virus surfaced early yesterday morning, when representatives from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration held a press conference regarding the tragedy that befell the International Space Station."

"Why don't they just say NASA?" asked Jarin. "It's not like more syllables makes them more important." The news feed had cut to a well-aged man at a podium explaining the intricacies of space travel, touching only briefly on the topic of the virus.

"It's a show. It's all about the act," Sarnrei reasoned. "Besides, look at her. She's used to faking it." The room filled again with laughter.

"The virus was found on one of the inner bulkheads," the man drawled. "The correlation between the virus and the accident, if one exists at all, has yet to be determined."

Quietly, the room began to shake. Mia was the first to notice, and she immediately stopped laughing.

"What?" asked Sarnrei, who had been sitting on the couch beside her.

She hushed him. "Do you feel that?" she mouthed, straining to hear something, and putting her hand out on the coffee table.

Sarnrei nodded, and by now they'd drawn the attention of Chris and Jarin.

Chris opened his mouth to speak, but the shaking quite suddenly grew by orders of magnitude, and became accompanied by a loud whine, which pierced even through the closed window. Passing just over Sarnrei's house flew flight DAL649.

Sarnrei leaped to his feet and ran into the kitchen where he could better see.

"What the hell?!" Chris was yelling, but nobody heard him over the roar of the turbines.

As if the near miss hadn't been loud enough, the deafening crash that followed nearly knocked them off their feet.

"Sarnrei, wait!" shouted Mia, her voice seeming quiet after all the noise. Sarnrei had grabbed his coat and was making for the garage. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To help." There was no doubt that he had very little intention of being talked out of it. "Call 911 or something!"

"Already got it," called Chris in reply. His cell phone was in his hand as soon as the noise had stopped. The other end picked up, and he retreated into the ajoining room to escape Mia's shouting.

"Sarnrei, damnit, let the professionals do this!" she pleaded.

"Yeah, while people burn alive? Get your coats and come help, or save it for afterwards."

Sarnrei, Mia and Jarin sprinted out of the garage and instantly found themselves faced with a most horrific sight. The plane had crash landed in the field behind Sarnrei's house. One wing stuck into the air, providing an eerie monument to the people surely burning beneath it. The turbines attached to the tail remained powered, one ejecting a stream of dust and dirt, the other, a jet of burning fuel.

Even Sarnrei slowed when he saw the sight. The hull of the plane was entirely shredded, and by the looks of the interior, there would be few if any survivors.

Sarnrei was forced to stop, as Jarin and Mia had done only a few paces earlier. The combination of jet fuel and dry grass had quickly made the site far too hot to approach.

"Sarnrei!" screamed Mia over the roar of the turbines. Flashing lights approaching them along the road over the hill told her that help would arrive shortly, and Chris had come running from the house waving for them to come back. "Sarnrei! Come on!" she pleaded, and at last he yielded, looking nothing less than livid.

As Sarnrei grew closer, Mia reached out a hand to place on his shoulder, but he pulled away, storming past her and Jarin and making for the house again.

Inside the house, Sarnrei had taken to pacing anxiously in the kitchen. His coat had been discarded haphazardly beneath the coat rack, and the work gloves he had grabbed from the workbench in the garage had been tossed on the counter.

The moment the door opened, Sarnrei stopped. "I'm sorry," he said as Mia stepped through. She didn't respond, but rather Chris did.

"What the fuck was that, Sarnrei?" Chris shouted, entering from the office where he'd made the call. Sarnrei was startled, even taken aback. "Trying to be a god damn hero or something?"

"Excuse me?" replied Sarnrei. "No! I was trying to do what I could to help the people BURNING out there!"

"Fat lot of good you would have done dead!" Chris retorted. "That's the kind of shit that kills people, Sarnrei."

"So what, was I supposed to stand around here with my thumb up my ass just waiting for help to get here?"

To the surprise of everyone, it was now Jarin who spoke. "Enough!" His fist slammed against the counter, and he looked between Sarnrei and Chris. "Just shut up, alright? We're not doing much better yelling at each other."

The four of them standing in the kitchen shared a moment of disturbing silence as the sirens grew close enough to be heard over the ever-present roar of the jet engines. Sarnrei closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and Chris, also seeing Jarin's point, nodded in agreement.

The local fire department worked for two hours alongside the specialized search and rescue team that had arrived not long after the first trucks. Miraculously, two passengers had managed to survive the ordeal: one, a man by the name of Harold Doridan, found in the cockpit, who had found himself with the unfortunate ability of breaking his bones with the strength of his own overgrown muscle. The other was Alfred Toram, found in the flight booklet's recommended crash position, still buckled into his seat with his seat and tray upright, unconscious and clutching an arm which had suffered an unnaturally clean break.

In the living room, the TV remained on, ignored.

"In related news, in addition to the panic growing more and more widespread over what is shaping up to be a growing epidemic, an unidentified group of activists have banded together against the disease, resorting to violent killings in a desperate, and thus far futile attempt at halting it's spread," the reporter explained. "Citizens of infected areas say they refuse to seek medical care for their injuries for fear of being attacked by this group that some are calling 'The Labcoats', named after their unique and particularly odd uniform: A long white coat, boots, and bright green goggles. Autopsies performed on victims of the attacks reveal the cause of death to be the unexplained absence of the victim's entire nervous system."