. I feel vindicated in a way because my first draft didn't have the janitor. My writing group pushed for more explanation, which led to the addition of the janitor.
I'm with the rest of the group here, Ms. Luna. I really enjoyed the story up until the end when the janitor came out. I really did.
I think the main problem with the janitor is that it breaks the self-containment of the story. As other people have stated, what happens when the airplane passengers are reported missing? If the fog is a self-contained phenomena without explanation, then we're ok. We don't know what will happen, and that becomes part of the story. Maybe there's fog like this happening all over the world, and we're only seeing the start of something huge. Maybe the dead have been erased from existence, and no one will ever remember them. Maybe there will be a huge uproar and police will find an airport strewn with bones, and truth will be found out from surveillance cameras, and the world will be shocked. The audience decides. By not offering any explanation for the unexplainable, you'd've had a bulletproof ending. When you offered an explanation, you had to defend it with the internal logic of the story. And that becomes incredibly problematic in that, as the others have pointed out, it doesn't really hold water.
Secondly, the unexplained makes something truly scary, and by explaining, you removed the mystery. An unexplained fog that rolls into an airport, causes people get naked, go mad and eat each other, then dress again with no memory of an incident is much scarier than a secret organization with a janitor agent. The hint of something would have worked better. Repeated references to a camera moving and recording all of this behavior would have worked by itself better, rather than the janitor speaking directly into the camera. This story reminds me a bit of Dean R. Koonz's Phantoms, a 90s movie that had a similar setup, and similar problems at the end.
And third, when the people put their clothes back on and start boarding the airplane, the story's done and should be sprinting towards the finish line. The large-breasted grandma throwing her granddaughter's ticket away and boarding the plane unconcerned would have made a great last line. Something on that note, that's where the story would have gone out on top.
I ended up writing a longer critique than I intended to, and I hope you don't take this as being too negative. I really got into the story, and I thought it was mostly great, and I look forward to hearing from you again on Pseudopod.
