First Light

by Bill Rancic

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Is that a good idea? Daniel said you got a pretty good bump on the head. You should probably take it easy for a little while.”

  “If I sit here much longer, I’ll fall asleep.”

  She got unsteadily to her feet, but Phil resisted the urge to take her under the elbow, although with anyone else that’s exactly what he would have done. He was never quite sure how to act around her, what would upset her; his natural instincts always seemed to be wrong in her case.

  Instead, he said, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? We don’t have to go and look for Bob, he’s probably capable of taking care of himself.”

  She gave a dry little laugh and looked down at her feet, still clad in knee-high boots, and then up into his face as if she were pleading for something. “Thank you,” she said, her voice earnest for a change, devoid of its usual layer of sarcasm, “but maybe I need something to do right now. I think it might help to move around a little.”

  He looked into her face, pale and bloody around the mouth. He didn’t have so much as a bandage or a painkiller to offer her, nothing but the fact of his presence, which didn’t feel like much under the circumstances. In the inside of what was left of Denali Flight 806, Phil Velez and Kerry Egan were more than co-workers—they were survivors. They could find a way to help each other. They should help each other, their past history be damned.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go find Bob and see if we can help. Better than sitting here feeling sorry for ourselves.”

  She gave him a wan smile and started up the aisle toward first class, Phil following at her heels, the two of them picking their way through the debris. It was cold inside the fuselage, getting colder minute by minute. Outside, the storm that had brought them down was still howling, freezing bits of snow coming in now and again on a gust of wind, stinging at his eyes. Ahead of him he could make out the shapes of people moving around, looking for their missing loved ones, their few possessions. Everyone was nearly silent, speaking in low whispers or not at all, either in shock or because speaking too loudly would disrupt the fragile luck they’d had so far.

  Surely help was on the way already. Before the crash, the flight attendants had said the pilots had radioed back to Whitehorse, and Phil had to believe them, had to trust they were right. Surely there were people on the way to them already—this was the twenty-first century, after all. Planes and people didn’t just disappear, not anymore. The plane’s own radio signals would bring the rescuers to them. By the end of the day, maybe a little longer, rescue crews would be reaching them, bringing food and blankets, transporting them out of this mess. All they had to do in the meantime was not die.

  With this thought comforting him, Phil followed Kerry’s progress up the length of the fuselage to first class, where a dim emergency light still shone over the broken cockpit door. The seats here had piled one on top of the other just as they had in the main cabin, though it was quieter here, still; the passengers were all either dead or had already evacuated. The body of one of the pilots was visible through the broken cockpit door, his head turned at an unnatural angle; his neck was broken, his eyes still bright.

  Phil yelped and jumped back. Jesus. But there had been a co-pilot, right? There might still be someone alive in there.

  Steeling himself, Phil stuck his head inside the cockpit door, hoping, but the co-pilot lay slumped over the control panel, a patch of blood above one ear. “Hey,” Phil called, still hoping, but neither of them stirred. The instrument panel was smashed in, covered with blood and stinking of chemical fumes. The cockpit had apparently taken the worst of the impact.

  “What are you doing?” Kerry asked from behind him.

  “Checking if the pilots are alive.”

  “Are they?”

  “No.” Phil turned away from the cockpit and the dead men inside, gulping deep gulps of air and blinking, trying to focus. He’d seen too much death for one lifetime.

  Kerry was hanging on to the overhead bins in first class, calling, “Bob? Are you all right? Are you here?”

  A voice growled, “I’m right here, damn it. Stop shouting.”

  “Where? I don’t see you.”

  The small first-class cabin consisted of only three rows of seats, two on each side, that had all come loose from their moorings and slammed forward into the front row, bunched one on top of the other like the folds of an accordion. Most of the people who’d been sitting there had already left, following the surviving flight attendant, but one man was still standing in the aisle, looking for something in the mess on the floor, scowling at Phil and Kerry as though they were personally responsible for the crash. But Bob wasn’t visible. They had heard him quite clearly, but they couldn’t see him.

  “Down here. Under the seats.”

  Bob had been sitting in the very first row, as was his wont, so that when the plane stopped abruptly and all the seats had kept up their forward momentum, he’d been trapped underneath, not to mention underneath the people who’d been sitting there and half the luggage in the overhead bins as well. He was a big man, but even Bob Packer was no match for a plane crashing into the side of a mountain at high speeds.

  He didn’t sound like he was too badly hurt, just pissed off.

  “What can we do?” Kerry asked.

  “You can get these damn things off of me for starters.”

  “Hold on,” she said, bending down. “I’ll try.”

  Together Phil and Kerry pulled two carry-on bags off the pile and set them aside, then bent to tackle the tangle of airline seats. The top set came loose fairly easily, though it was heavy, and they were able to push it out of the way with a little effort. The second and third rows of seats, though, were tangled together like old wire coat hangers, and every attempt to pull them apart left Kerry winded and Phil gasping, the spot under his belly button throbbing painfully. A bruised muscle—that’s probably all it was—but it hurt like hell. Even bending over was taxing him.

  They fell back for a second, groaning. “What are you two doing?” Bob snapped. “This isn’t a coffee break.”

  “We’re both hurt. Not too badly, but it’s making us move a little more slowly.”

  “Hurry up. I’m folded up like a newspaper and my legs are cramping.”

  When they’d both caught their breath, they knelt down again, pulling and pushing, Phil with his left arm, Kerry with both, and Bob from underneath, and slowly the three of them got the last of the heavy seats off. Bob came to his feet like an enraged bull.

  He brushed off his clothes and straightened up with the air of a man gathering what was left of his dignity. “Where the hell is that flight attendant?” he snapped. “Isn’t it her job to get everyone out safely? She went right on past me.”

  Phil was thinking that the flight attendant—the only crewmember he’d seen alive—had bigger problems on her hands than searching for a single missing passenger, but he knew better than to say so. Bob was not a man who was good at seeing the world through any perspective but his own. The old man was already huffing and sweating; the last thing they needed just then was a purple-faced 220-pound former linebacker giving himself a heart attack.

  “Are you hurt?” Phil asked.

  “No thanks to that pilot,” Bob said. “I think he was trying to kill everyone aboard. Seems like he nearly succeeded.” Then he seemed to notice for the first time that the back half of the plane was missing. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s worse than I thought.” He looked first at Phil, then at Kerry, and seemed to realize that there were just the two of them there. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “He went to look for the others,” Kerry said. “He’ll be right back.”

  “That’s a relief. Glad to know someone’s doing something useful around here. What else are we doing?”

  “The flight attendant and Daniel said we should stay inside the plane
,” Kerry said. “It’s too cold to go outside.”

  “So that’s it? We’re sitting around waiting for the cavalry to arrive?”

  “We should do what we can to help,” Phil said. “Check the rest of the plane to see if anyone’s hurt. Gather up whatever clothes and blankets we can find. Food and water, too.”

  “First we need to find our own people.”

  “Daniel’s working on that,” Kerry said. She was trying to stay calm, but Phil could see she was looking over to the place where the two dead pilots lay, behind the cockpit door. Kerry’s breathing was getting heavier, her expression frozen. “Everyone else was in the tail section. They—they might be hurt.”

  “Here,” Phil said, helping her down into a nearby seat, “you should sit down. I don’t want you to fall over.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Kerry said. “I just can’t stop thinking of Judy and the others.”

  “Sit down before you fall down, Kerry,” Phil said, more firmly now. “You’re still hurt.”

  “I can’t even help my best friend. She could be dead. They could all be dead, and—”

  “It’s okay. They’ll be fine,” he said. “We made it. They could have made it, too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Of course. I’ll bet Daniel comes back with them in ten minutes.”

  She leaned against the bulkhead and closed her eyes. “I hope you’re right,” she said. “God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Behind him Bob was cursing his lack of a cell-phone signal (had he really thought there would be one out in the middle of the Canadian wilderness?) and was working himself up into a lather about how disorganized everything was: where was the crew? Someone needed to take control of the situation, he was saying, someone needed to get on the horn with the control tower and find out who was coming and how far away they were. “Someone needs to give us some goddamn answers,” he muttered, shaking his beefy head back and forth.

  Bob pursed his lips and tilted his chin at the smashed door of the cockpit. “Can we get in there to use the radio?”

  “Everything’s pretty smashed up.”

  “So you haven’t even tried?”

  “If you’re so keen on doing something,” Phil said, “you could give Daniel a hand finding the rest of our people. I’ll stay here with her.” He inclined his head toward the place where Kerry sat. “I promised to keep her awake until Daniel gets back.”

  Bob looked toward the missing rear of the plane, where the other passengers were searching for coats, hats, gloves. “Good thinking,” he said, patting Phil on the shoulder. “You keep an eye on things here. I’ll be back with some answers.” He stopped to find himself a jacket and then disappeared out the back of the fuselage, following Daniel’s tracks in the snow.

  Phil watched him go with an enormous sense of relief. The old man was alive and kicking, all right. And Kerry and Daniel, too. My God, were they ever lucky. A few bumps and bruises were nothing compared to what could have happened. They’d survived a plane crash, of all things. They’d lived, an idea that seemed more and more improbable the longer he thought about it. They should be dead. They should be, but they weren’t.

  “You’re smiling?” said a woman standing in the aisle behind him. “I can’t believe you’re smiling right now.”

  Phil looked up in surprise. He hadn’t seen her standing there, much less realized that he was smiling at the moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I almost can’t believe it. That we’re still alive.”

  “Not all of us,” she said, looking in the direction of the cockpit door. “I heard you just now. You really think the people in the tail are all right?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. Some of my co-workers were sitting back there. A couple of our people have gone to look for them.”

  She looked at the snow accumulating out the back of the plane and shook her head. “I don’t envy them that job.”

  “Me neither.”

  She had a bustling, focused energy that reminded Phil of a mother hen gathering up her chicks, though all she seemed to be doing was searching for her belongings amid the wreckage. Probably no taller than five feet, with short black hair threaded with gray and a deep cut over one cheek that was bleeding down the side of her face, the woman made him think of the native Alaskans he’d met in Barrow, the Petrol employees, the shopkeepers and restaurant owners who seemed to view the Petrol crisis team as something to be both resented and embraced simultaneously. “Why were you headed to Chicago?” she asked Phil.

  “Going home. We’d been dealing with that oil-rig accident up in the Beaufort Sea the past couple of weeks. You?”

  “Catching a connecting flight. My mother’s been in the hospital in Cleveland for two months now. They don’t think she’s going to make it. I’m trying to get there in time to say my good-byes, but I suppose this means I’m going to miss my connection.”

  He knew he was supposed to smile at that, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not over such a subject, not now. “What does she have?” he asked.

  “Congestive heart failure. They were hoping to buy her a little more time, but . . .” She trailed off.

  Phil was silent for a moment, thinking about Emily, about hospital beds and constant doctors and the people who came in at the end to say whatever they had left to say to her, say their own good-byes, her friends and family. He’d driven her to see some of the doctors in the Cleveland Clinic himself before the end, too, though Emily had known no one would be able to help her. She’d known, but Phil had insisted anyway, saying they had to do everything they could to save her. They had to try everything, he’d said, because he didn’t know how he’d go on without her. He couldn’t fathom it.

  No one can ever try everything, she’d said to him. I can live with ending like this, Phil. I just hope you can learn to live with it, too.

  “I’m sorry,” he said now, not quite able to keep his voice even.

  She shrugged. “I might still make it. You never know how long people are going to be able to hold on in these situations.”

  She was remarkably calm about it, almost businesslike. Phil didn’t know what to make of that. He simply said, “I hope you do make it. For your mother’s sake, and your own,” and left it at that.

  She thanked him, then went back to climbing over the debris, trying to reach the bin over her head.

  “Here,” Phil said, standing up immediately. “Let me help you. What are you looking for?”

  “My coat.”

  Phil reached up and started pushing things aside, looking for the woman’s coat. There were two carry-on bags in the way, so he started pulling them out, thinking of the things in there they could use until rescue crews arrived. He might find sweaters, socks, pants. Food, even.

  The first bag came out no problem, and he set it down next to him in the aisle, but the second bag, which must have weighed a good fifty pounds, came free and pushed Phil back into the seat behind him, falling into his arms so heavily that he felt the spot in his belly throb painfully. Just a bruise, he thought. He coughed, and the spot throbbed again. What if Daniel was right, and he had some internal injuries? What would happen then?

  He set the bag down and returned to search through the overhead bin for the lady’s coat, finally coming across something puffy and soft in the far corner. “Here you go,” he said weakly, handing the coat down to her.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, wrapping it around herself and pulling the hood up. “That’s better.”

  “Thank God we were coming from Alaska and not Hawaii, right?” Phil said, his breath short.

  “If we were coming from Hawaii we wouldn’t have crashed in a snowstorm,” the lady said. She was watching him, her face full of concern. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You don’t look so good.”

  “Something hit me just about here,” he said, touching t
he aching spot on his belly. “A chair leg, I think. It’s still a little sore.”

  His fingers found the spot and halted just a millimeter away from the place where the pain began, felt where it wasn’t just the skin but whatever was underneath that felt tender. He tried to remember which organ went on which side of the body in that spot. Bladder? Large intestine? Either way, something he needed. He gave a little gasp and sat back down heavily in a seat.

  “Ah,” said the lady, her voice falling in sympathy, “you shouldn’t have been helping me, you should be taking care of yourself. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” he said, “it’s okay. You need your coat. I may have overdone it with that last bag, is all. I’ll be all right.”

  “Here,” she said now, with the air of someone used to being obeyed, “let me take a look at that. You might have some internal bleeding.”

  “That’s what my co-worker said. Is that bad?”

  “It’s no picnic. But I could be wrong.” She grimaced. “I’m an ER nurse, or was, before I got married and had my kids.”

  She stepped over a piece of metal debris into the aisle, stooped next to Phil and lifted both his coat and the edge of his shirt the way Daniel had done, feeling around in the tender place just under his belly button. Her fingers were gentle but insistent, and soon she found the most tender spot. He gasped and squirmed, the pain intensifying—for a moment he saw stars, the insides of his eyelids going bright with them—but then she was done and pulled his coat back around him again.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to tell without a scan, but you definitely have a bruise. I can’t tell if there’s distention—it’s too soon—but if there is, you might have some internal bleeding.”

  “Anything I should worry about?”

  “Well. You should definitely take it easy. I wouldn’t go running off after your friends.” She looked around the mess inside the plane, the other injured people. “There’s no puncture wound at least. Still, if there’s internal bleeding it won’t be easy to spot. You should be looked at right away, and by a doctor. With any luck they’ll find us right away and we can all get looked at by a doctor.”