A very confused Donna Richards looked around her. One minute she had been talking to her friend Gloria at the Pussy Kat Klub and getting ready for her act; the next she was here, sitting in a very cramped seat in what appeared to be a bus. Rather than the panties, bra,.and stilettos she'd been wearing, she was dressed in what appeared to be a charcoal grey men's suit. A glass of clear liquid rested on the tray that was attaced to the seat in front of her, and she held a book open in her hands.
"What in God's name?" she said.
The woman sitting next to her, a blonde woman in her fifties dressed in what seemed to Donna to be a rather conservative outfit--though who was she to judge?--turned to Donna and said, "Dear? Is something wrong?"
Donna stared at the woman; she was speechless. What was this? Had she blacked out or something? Was this a dream?
"I'm fine," Donna said, though she didn't mean it. The woman looked at her a moment, then went back to reading the magazine she had in her lap.
Donna tuned from the woman and looked out the window of the bus to get a better idea of where she was. As she looked out the window, though, she suddenly realized that she was not in a bus. Clouds drifted past in the distance, level with Donna's eyes, and the ground appeared to be far, far below. A modest-sized city rolled slowly by on the ground; Donna could pick out a few familiar buildings, like the mall, the college, downtown, the run-down district where the Pussy Kat Klub was located, and the prison a ways ahead. That city down there was her hometown.
Rather than her own face, Donna saw the faint image of a grey-haired white man wearing the same charcoal suit she was wearing reflected in the glass of the window of the airplane. Suddenly, however, Donna had a more pressing concern than the stranger in her reflection or the woman next to her or the Pussy Kat Klub or how on earth she'd gotten here. Because Donna Richards was deeply, terribly, viscerally afraid of heights.
At the front of the plane, the cabin door suddenly slid open, and a man dressed sharply in a pilot's uniform stepped out. "Excuse me, folks," he said, in a nervous, unsteady voice. "Does anyone here know how to fly a plane?"
