Sole Survivor

by Dean Koontz

  She sighed. “We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.”

  “Reliable?”

  “A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequence of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains—four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.”

  Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.

  He said, “What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?”

  “No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,” Barbara said. “Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent—no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.”

  Frustrated, Joe said, “Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?”

  Barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: “But where the hell did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.”

  “Not totally.”

  “Totally stable guy,” she insisted. “Passed all the company psychological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find one person out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behavior. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man—but a happy man.”

  Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.

  Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. “At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the maneuver, Captain Blane said, ‘This is fun.’ There are these other sounds on the tape—here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.”

  This is fun.

  Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.

  Barbara turned the page for him. “Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change, of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft—a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.”

  “Laughing,” Joe said with incomprehension. “He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?”

  “It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a mad laugh, either. It was…a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.”

  This is fun.

  Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first maneuver and, with the second, said, Oh, wow!

  “This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,” Barbara said. “In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees, with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.”

  “They were finished.”

  “It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.”

  Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it—or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.

  The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning Traffic! because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.

  Joe asked, “What’s this reference to the ‘stick-shaker alarm’?”

  “It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.”

  Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained consciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of gray from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said, Oh, Jesus.

  “His voice was wet and nasal,” Barbara said, “which might have meant that Blane broke his nose.”

  Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.

  SANTORELLI: Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.

  BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

  SANTORELLI: Pull!

  BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we recording?

  SANTORELLI: Pull up!

  Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, struggling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.

  SANTORELLI: Shit, shit!

  BLANE: Are we recording?

  Baffled, Joe said, “Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?”

  Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s a pilot for how long?”

  “Over twenty years.”

  “He’d know the cockpit-voice recorder is always working. Right?”

  “He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?”

  Joe read the final words of the two men.

  SANTORELLI: Pull!

  BLANE: Oh, wow.

  SANTORELLI: Mother of God…

  BLANE: Oh, yeah.

  SANTORELLI: No.

  BLANE: (child-like excitement) Oh, yeah.

  SANTORELLI: Susan.

  BLANE: Now. Look.

  Santorelli begins to scream.

  BLANE: Cool.

  Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.

  Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.

  Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.

  For a while he couldn’t speak.

  Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.

  Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, “Santorelli’s last word was a name.”

  “Susan.”

  “Who is she?”

  “His wife.”

  “I thought so.”

  At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling ne
arer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

  Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

  11

  From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

  “Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,” she said. “But what does it matter?”

  When Barbara first arrived in the meadow on the morning after the crash, the shredded and scattered debris of the 747-400 had not resembled the wreckage of an airliner. Only two pieces had been immediately recognizable: a portion of one engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

  He said, “Three seats, side by side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Upright?”

  “Yes. What’s your point?”

  “Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?”

  “Joe—”

  “From what part of the plane?” he repeated patiently.

  “Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The center rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.”

  “Damaged?”

  “Of course.”

  “Badly?”

  “Not as badly as you’d expect.”

  “Burned?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Burned at all?”

  “As I remember…there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.”

  “In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?”

  Her broad, clear face now clouded with concern. “Joe, no one survived this crash.”

  “Was the upholstery intact?” he pressed.

  “As I remember…it was slightly torn. Nothing serious.”

  “Blood on the upholstery?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Any bodies in the seats?”

  “No.”

  “Body parts?”

  “No.”

  “Lap belts still attached?”

  “I don’t remember. I suppose so.”

  “If the lap belts were attached—”

  “No, it’s ridiculous to think—”

  “Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.

  Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.”

  “I know that,” he assured her. “I know.”

  But how he wished.

  She met his eyes again.

  He said, “They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.”

  “So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.”

  “If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy—that’s at least some small corroboration.”

  “Of what?”

  “Her story.”

  “Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.

  “That she survived.”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “You didn’t meet Rose,” he said. “She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such…power, presence.”

  On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theater-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

  In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive force—”

  “I understand that.”

  “God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe—but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew…in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like bread-sticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel—a spray as fine as an aerosol mist—explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”

  Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.

  He said, “You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander—and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”

  “That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”

  “Some of the families of survivors…Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is…they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It’s more than mere belief.” He remembered Georgine Delmann’s shining eyes. “It’s a profound conviction.”

  “Then she’s a con artist without equal.”

  Joe only shrugged.

  A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of gray rain fell to the east.

  “For some reason,” Barbara said, “you don’t strike me as a devoutly religious man.”

  “I’m not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday school and church every week, but I didn’t go. It was the one thing I didn’t share with them.”

  “Hostile to religion?”

  “No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash…I took the one step left in my ‘spiritual journey’ from disinterest to disbelief. There’s no way to reconcile the idea of a benign God with what happened to everyone on that plane…and to those of us who’re going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.”

  “Then if you’re such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?”

  “I’m not saying Rose Tucker’s survival was a miracle.”

  “Damned if I can see what else it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,” Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.

  “No divine intervention. There’s another explanation, something amazing but logical.”

  “Impossible,” she said stubbornly.

  “Impossible? Yeah, well…so was everything that happened in the cockpit with Captain Blane.”

  She held his gaze while she searched for an answer in the deep and orderly files of her mind. She was not able to find one.

  Instead, she said, “If you don’t believe in anything—then what is it that you expect Rose to tell you? You say that what she tells them ‘lifts them up.’ Don’t you imagine it’s got to be something of a spiritual nature?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Repeating Joe’s own words heavily colored with exasperation, she said, “‘Something amazing but logical.’”

  He looked away from her, toward the trees along the northern edge of the field, and he realized that in the fire-blasted aspen cluster was a sole survivor, reclothed in foliage. Instead of the characteristic smooth pale trunk, it had scaly black bark, which would provide a dazzling contrast when its leaves turned brilliant yellow in the autumn.

  “Something amazing but logical,” he agreed.

  Closer than ever, lightning laddered down the sky, and the boom of thunder descended rung to rung.

  “We better go,” Barbara said
. “There’s nothing more here anyway.”

  Joe followed her down through the meadow, but he paused again at the rim of the impact crater.

  The few times that he had gone to meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had heard other grieving parents speak of the Zero Point. The Zero Point was the instant of the child’s death, from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes and wants—which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams—was turned on end and emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations. In a clock tick, the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation—and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.

  He had existed at the Zero Point for more than a year, with time receding from him in both directions, belonging to neither the days ahead nor those behind. It was as though he had been suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen and lay deep in cryogenic slumber.

  Now he stood at another Zero Point, the physical one, where his wife and daughters had perished. He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle’s claws at his viscera. But at last he wanted something else as