“Where are we going?” Casey asked. Isaiah didn’t say anything. As usual when things got tense, he went inside himself and watched.
“I’m not sure,” Zora said. “Hang on.” The crowd streamed along behind the woman with her radio, through a white door marked Authorized Personnel Only, along a blank corridor, then into a big, bare room marked International Hold.
The explanation, then. The plane’s gear hadn’t descended on one side, and they’d be landing on one wheel. Not a crash, they said again and again. A hard landing, the plane off the runway, and an evacuation. A scenario the pilots had practiced and prepared for. The airline would keep them informed of developments, including when the plane was coming in on final approach. Ten minutes, probably. That was all the information there was to give. Please stand by for more.
The anxiety had risen in pitch now. The rugby families coalesced into a corner of the room by unspoken agreement, and most of the women had their phones out, their kids gathered close. Looking at news coverage, Zora guessed. She could see a graphic over Kate James’s shoulder. A series of sketches of a plane coming down, rolling to the right, catching a wing tip, and somersaulting off the runway, breaking apart, before orange triangles of flame obliterated the pieces.
Or landing in the water. They weren’t saying that, but it was obvious. If they went off the runway, surely they’d end up in the water.
She was going to be sick. She couldn’t be sick. She crouched down with the kids, got an arm around each of them, and said, “There’s a problem with the plane. They’re going to land it anyway, but it’ll take a little while to get everybody here. We’re going to have to wait for them.”
Isaiah said, “Somebody said the plane was crashing.” His eyes were too big, searching her face.
“It’s not crashing,” she said, and made it firm. “It’s making a hard landing, and then they’ll get everybody out.”
“Is my dad going to die?”
That was Casey. She was still standing square, but she was shaking.
“No,” Zora said. Nothing else was thinkable. They couldn’t go through everything they had, and have Rhys taken from them. It wasn’t possible.
She knew it was possible. But it still wasn’t thinkable. She told Casey, “You want to know one reason I love your dad?”
“Is he going to die?”
“Stop,” Zora said. “Listen to me. Here, let’s sit down.” She dropped to the floor, ignoring the coldness of the tile under her bare legs. She’d worn a skirt despite the weather, because Rhys liked looking at her legs. Because she’d wanted him to enjoy looking at them.
Oh, God. Please, no.
She pulled Casey into her lap, wrapped her arm around her front to pull her in tight, held Isaiah’s hand on her other side, and said, “I know that if we’re in an emergency, he’ll get us safe. He’ll do that every time, and he’ll get everybody else around him safe, too, no matter how hard it is to do. He’s up there right now, helping to do that.”
Don’t be a hero, she wanted to say. She wanted to text it to him, but she didn’t. He could no more keep from being a hero than he could keep from breathing. You couldn’t love somebody for the man he was and then turn around and tell him not to be that man.
Isaiah had dropped her hand to take Casey’s. He told her, “Uncle Rhys isn’t going to die. He’s not sick, and he’s got Strength Class 100.”
“My mommy died.” Casey was losing the battle not to cry. “She got hit by a car, and she died. She wasn’t sick. I don’t want my dad to die.”
“He’s not going to die,” Isaiah said. “He loves us. He’s going to come back.”
Zora’s phone dinged, and it took her long seconds to get it out of her purse. Her fingers were fumbling and cold, and it was getting hard to see. Hard to focus.
Don’t worry, Rhys had written. I love you and Isaiah and Casey, and I’m coming home. Will you marry me?
“It’s your dad,” she told Casey, and showed her and Isaiah the text, then read it aloud for Casey.
“See?” Isaiah said. “I told you so, Casey. You should say yes, Mum, about getting married. Uncle Rhys is very strong, and he’s nice to Casey and me, and he has lots of money. If you marry him, he’ll be your husband, and husbands are supposed to be strong and nice. So I think you should say yes.”
Zora said, “I already did,” and held up the phone to show them the screen.
I love you, she’d typed. And yes.
The jet was descending again. Finn was at the left exit window, and Rhys was at the right one, the frame outlined in red, the wing outside the only thing visible in the murk. That, and the bulge of the engine.
Hugh sat beside him, their shoulders touching back here in the narrow seats. The skipper had done his own texting five minutes before, and he’d got an answer. He had four kids at home, two of them babies, not walking yet. Across the aisle, Nico sat beside Finn. Two kids and four kids there. Amongst them, the four of them had twelve.
And every possible reason to make it home.
Random thoughts, and not really helpful. Rhys brought his mind back to the landing, and went over the procedure for getting the window out of the plane, sending the message to his hands, his feet, his body, rehearsing the movements, getting the sequence into his muscles.
They were dropping fast. You still couldn’t see anything, but they’d been descending for minutes. Surely, they were almost down.
“Brace brace brace.” The command came over the speaker, surprisingly loud, and hands went out to seat backs, heads bowed over them. Some sobs. Some prayers. A baby crying.
The flight attendants chanting in unison at the front of the cabin.
“Emergency brace. Emergency brace. Emergency brace.”
His hands on the seat, and Hugh’s big hands beside his, as scarred as his own. The hard jolt from underneath them, different from the wind gusts.
Impact.
The landing gear struck once on the left side, and the plane lifted up, wobbled, then came down hard again. The wing outside rose, then fell. Hugh’s forearm pressing into his, the left wheel hitting again and again, then holding.
Tilted to the left. The side where the landing gear was. Going too fast.
His body jerked backward as the pilot rammed on the brakes, and the plane swiveled around, skidded, and tilted some more, to the right this time. Tilted far. The wing tip, out his window, was striking sparks on the runway.
Too fast. Too fast.
They skidded off the runway to the right, tail first, like a carnival ride, the green that was grass, not tarmac, coming closer and closer, until they were bumping, because they’d gone off. Like it was happening in slow motion. A series of jolts, and people were screaming. They were still tipped too far, the plane resting on one wheel on the left side, its belly on the right, the wing digging in, ripping through the earth like butter, and then a hard crunch.
They were canted so far over, Hugh was practically in his lap, but the plane was slowing. Stopping. Outside, a bloom of orange flame. Beyond it, nothing but gray.
Engine fire. And water. We’re in the Harbour.
Not even a split second, and the voice on the speaker.
“Evacuate evacuate evacuate.”
Ahead of him, and behind him, he was sure, the flight attendants were going to the door. Only on the left side, though, where the exit slides wouldn’t reach the ground. Which was why he’d put the forwards there, able to fall correctly, and then to catch the others.
Why was nobody going out the right side, though? He forced the logic. They couldn’t get the doors open on that side, maybe. There wouldn’t be room for them to swing up and out, not with the plane tipped almost on top of them.
And—wait. Maybe there was land on their left. They couldn’t be in the water. If they had been, people would’ve been putting on life vests. They were just close.
He told Hugh, “Everybody goes out the left exits,” and Hugh nodded.
More chanting.
&nbs
p; “Unfasten seatbelts, come this way. Unfasten seatbelts, come this way. Unfasten seatbelts, come this way.” And passengers standing, hanging onto seat backs.
The man in the seat ahead of Rhys, his dark hair rumpled, turned around, shouting into his face. “Open the exit! Open the window! We need to get out!”
“Go forward,” Rhys bellowed back. “Go forward. Go forward.”
Hugh was turned around, shouting, “Go back. Go back. Go back,” to the rows behind them. He was waving an arm, too. Good idea, Rhys thought, and added the arm motion.
He could see, in the aisles, the taller frames that were his players. Koti James with a toddler in his arms, heading steadily forward ahead of a mum with a baby so tiny, how was she going to get down the slide safely with it? Matt Grainger, the right winger, behind her, though. He’d be holding her and the baby on the way down. Kevin McNicholl, six or seven seats ahead, lifting a frail lady who looked ninety into his arms, saying something to her, smiling, carrying her out.
Outside his window, the fire was raging. Inside the fuselage, he smelled smoke. And still the rows emptied. So slowly. Too slowly. He told Hugh, “I’ll go forward. You go back,” and saw Finn and Nico splitting off in the same way opposite him. Waiting to make sure everybody was out. Waiting until the end. The smoke was thicker, a choking blanket of gray, and he was finally moving forward, touching seatbacks, counting his way to the exit, row by row.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
Emergency lighting, two ribbons of white, showing him the way. Nico pulled his shirt up over his nose and mouth, and Rhys thought, Oh, and did the same thing.
Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
Nico ahead of him, moving steadily onward. Rhys didn’t look behind him. He couldn’t have seen through the smoke anyway, and he didn’t need to, because his players would have done their jobs. He knew it as surely as he knew they’d be running at their mate’s shoulder when the pass came. Doing their part, and trusting their mate to do his. Playing what was in front of them. Keeping their heads.
Coughing, now, in the smoke, which smelled evil, like burning metal. The flight attendants at the exit, the last ones left, the only ones looking backward. Nico’s head disappearing as he jumped onto the slide, and then Rhys was jumping after him, landing on the soft surface and feeling the rain begin to pelt him, like a ride at a water park. He slid down fast and was caught in midair by arms he couldn’t see, then moved off to the side, because there’d be two more after him. The last two. The flight attendants. Everybody on the ground.
He pivoted so he was beside the men at the left-hand side of the slide. Marko Sendoa, and Kors beside him. They caught a flight attendant between them, and Rhys shouted, “That’s it! Go go go!” Marko pointed to the left and they headed off. Alongside the plane, staying clear of the wings, around the tail, and to the left, toward the runway, because on the other side, meters away, was the water.
Shouts ahead of them. Will Tawera, yelling the way you had to in order to be heard above eighty thousand screaming fans, directing his squad. “Toward me! Toward me! Keep moving! Toward me!”
Rhys could feel the heat of the fire on his back, but he didn’t look. He followed Marko and Kors and headed toward that voice as the rain plastered his hair to his head and beat down on his body.
They were nearly at the runway—he could see the black tarmac, the whirling red lights of emergency vehicles reflected in the wet surface—when the plane exploded.
Zora only remembered a few things, afterwards, about that wait.
The hush amongst the group of people huddled in the bare room, punctuated by the wail of a baby, the soft sobbing of an older Asian lady, a scarf over her hair, and her husband’s arm around her. A child on the plane, Zora guessed. Her grandchildren, maybe.
The pattern of the floor tiles, a curving gray shape like the neck of a dragon, and how she’d pointed it out to the kids. “Look,” she told Casey, tracing the shape. “It’s a dragon. It’s an omen.”
“There’s no such thing as omens,” Isaiah said.
“Yes, there are,” Casey said.
“You don’t even know what omens are,” Isaiah said.
“They’re good things,” Casey said. “Like my pendant. My dad says it’s him holding me, and the part at the inside is me being strong. That’s like an omen. It says he’s very strong. And yours is not being scared.”
“No,” Zora said, “it’s not about not being scared. It’s about being scared, and holding strong anyway. We’re going to sit here, and we can feel scared, but we can hold hands anyway. We can believe.”
“I believe,” Casey said.
“Close your eyes,” Zora said. There was too much crying around them, too many clasped hands at mouths. “Say it. I believe. I believe.”
“I believe,” Casey said, scrunching her eyes shut. She was crying again, her skinny chest heaving, but she was saying it. Isaiah still had hold of her hand, and his mouth was moving silently.
Zora held both of them and thought the words.
Rhys. Come on. You can do it. Come on.
When the speaker crackled into life again, everybody jumped, and there were some screams.
“The plane is on the ground,” the disembodied voice said. “Passengers have been evacuated.”
A cheer went up all around them, and Zora looked at her hands, shaking like leaves where they clasped the kids, and said, “I told you so. I told you. He’s coming home.”
The blast threw Rhys forward, and he hit the runway hard, tucking and rolling like he knew how, because he did. Scrape of palm and face on tarmac, a pain you wouldn’t feel until later, and a bloom of heat on his back. Leaping to his feet and looking around. Nico, staggering up in front of him, and other shapes. Marko and Kors and Iain, Finn, and the final two flight attendants. All of them moving ahead without a word to join the crocodile of wet passengers, shivering with shock and cold, stumbling in bare feet, jandals lost in the scramble from the plane, into puddles and out of them again, directed by workers in fluorescent vests holding signal beacons. Heading toward the bright twin lights that pierced the gloom.
Buses. They’d sent buses, a whole fleet of them. Airport shuttles, their drivers standing outside, anoraks streaming with water, yellow vests on top, waving their arms, directing the final group onward. To the last bus.
Hand over hand again, clutching seat backs, nodding to familiar faces. All rugby players here, his forwards, his nines and tens, who’d got everybody away from the plane and onto the runway, doing their roles. Them, and the flight attendants. A commotion behind Rhys, and he turned to see the pilot and co-pilot, their hats gone, their faces muddy, a red graze on the older man’s cheek oozing blood, mixing with the rainwater.
They’d made it, too, and nobody could have been left behind. Surely, nobody would have got past his team.
He found his seat beside Finn, shook his hand, lifted his jacket to wipe blood from his face, and tried not to let any of it out.
Nearly there. A few minutes more.
“Mate.” Finn had a hand on his shoulder. “We made it.” He was standing to shake hands with the pilots, and Rhys did the same, feeling the sting on his grazed palm and fingertips only vaguely, like they belonged to somebody else. At the front of the bus, the driver leaped up the stairs, put the vehicle in gear, and rumbled forward. Driving up the runway, then, following the other buses to the terminal.
Rhys looked behind him. A glow out the rear window that was a 777 burning to the metal, the fuselage filled with toxic smoke. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and tried not to shake. Adrenaline, bleeding off. Absolutely normal.
Out of the bus, ten minutes later, into a sea of flashing red lights. Back into the rain, then through a door, down a corridor, into a room. Official faces, official voices. A woman checking names against a manifest. A man assessing people for injury, elderly people being deposited in wheelchairs, putting an older bloke onto a gurney and wheeling him off fast. Heart, maybe. Kids crying, everyb
ody shaking. Two women handing out blankets, and the damp chill trying to get through to your bones as shock set in.
Five more minutes. You could always do five more minutes. Rhys gave his name, collected his blanket, suffered the cut on his face to be cleaned and closed with butterfly bandages, and brushed off anything else with, “I’m all good. No worries.” Then raised his voice, waved his arm, and called out, “Blues! Over here! Let’s go!”
Time to get them together. Time to count heads, and make sure everybody was accounted for. Time to check everybody’s mental and physical state and settle the nerves. Time to be the coach.
When the first person jumped up and shouted the news out, holding the phone up in his hand, saying, “They’re here! They made it! Being held while they do counts and process them, but they’re here!” Zora closed her eyes and held the kids tighter. When the tenth and the twentieth and the fiftieth texts came, half the room was standing up. And still, she hadn’t heard anything.
The first thing she got was buzz. Not the buzz of her cell phone. Buzz around her. “They’re coming. They’ve let the team go. They’re coming.” Heads turning toward the door, bodies shifting. Everybody watching.
When the first player came through, raising his arms above his head in triumph, there was nearly a sob from the room, and then the doors were being rushed.
“They let us go first,” Zora heard from somewhere. From Koti James, that was, who had a kid in each arm and was still, somehow, managing to kiss his wife. “Everyone had their passport, and the coaches could vouch for us. Still processing the rest.” He raised his voice so the words reverberated off the walls. “Everybody’s off. Everybody got off.”
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