by Bill Rancic
“Did you see this kind of thing often? When you were a nurse?”
“Oh. You know.” She shrugged, and her eyes flickered away from his for a moment, giving him the impression that she wasn’t being as truthful as she might like under the circumstances. “Now and again. Sometimes the kids in my village would have hockey fights, the occasional fender bender, that kind of thing. Usually nothing too serious.”
“But I’ll be okay?” Now she was making him nervous. In his experience, medical professionals only told you about half of what they knew, revealing the rest only on a need-to-know basis.
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “But I’ll feel better when I hear those rescue helicopters coming.”
“Thanks,” he said, but his anxiety didn’t lessen at all. “What’s your name?”
“Beverly. What’s yours?”
“Phil. Thanks for your help, Beverly.”
“No problem, Phil. Say,” she said, her forehead wrinkling in concern, “is she doing all right?”
He turned and saw Kerry lying with her head against the bulkhead—her eyes were closed, her mouth open slightly, her breathing deep and regular. Damn. He was supposed to be keeping her awake. He’d turned away for one second, and she was out cold.
Now he knelt beside her and shook her gently. “Kerry,” he said. “Kerry, wake up, you’re not supposed to go to sleep now. Come on, open your eyes.”
Kerry stirred but did not open her eyes. That couldn’t be good. He looked up and saw the dark-haired woman watching him.
“Do you know anything about head injuries, too?”
“A bit. Did she get clonked by something?”
“I think so. I didn’t see.”
Beverly knelt down next to Kerry and rolled the unconscious woman’s head back and forth between her hands, touching her scalp with careful fingers until she came to a spot over Kerry’s right temple where there was a slight discoloration. “Hmm. I don’t like that. Is this the first time she’s lost consciousness?”
“I don’t know. I was sitting behind her.”
“Miss?” Beverly asked in a loud voice. “Miss?” She looked back at Phil. “What’s her name?”
“Kerry.”
“Kerry, I need you to open up your eyes right now and look at me,” the woman said in that same authoritative tone, the one she must have used on concussed hockey players at home in her village. “Come on, now.”
No answer.
“What happens if she doesn’t wake up?” Phil asked, wishing for the first time that Daniel were here.
“Let’s worry about that when it happens,” said Beverly, leaning Kerry’s head forward over her knees. The former nurse was tiny but surprisingly strong, and Phil found he was intensely grateful to have someone there who seemed to know what she was doing. “Right now I need you to help me get her awake.”
“What do I do?”
“Talk to her.”
He watched Kerry’s head rolling back on her neck, the limp feel of her arms under his hands. She looked like she was already dead, and Phil felt a pain in his belly that had nothing whatsoever to do with his injury.
Kerry, don’t you dare die on me now. Please wake up.
“Kerry, can you talk to me? Come on, now. It’s important.”
Daniel will never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.
He looked outside to the snow, the wind, the whiteness on the hills, the other survivors milling around the back of the plane like zombies. Too many of them were bleeding, limping, crying, freezing. Too many of them were dead. They were all going to freeze to death out here, even Kerry, who was still wearing nothing on her legs but tights and a thin trench coat. Daniel had asked Phil to help her find her bag. Where was her bag? He shoved aside one carry-on after another, looking for something familiar, until he stubbed his toe on the massive suitcase he’d pulled down from the overhead bins when he was helping Beverly look for her coat. It was Kerry’s, of course; her name was written in blue ink on the little tag. He nearly laughed, looking at it, then pulled it open and found a pair of fleece pajama bottoms inside. Perfect—just what she needed to keep warm.
“I need to tell you something, Kerry. You’re never going to believe it.”
She didn’t move, didn’t answer. He could keep her body warm, but he didn’t know how to heal her mind. He tugged the pajama bottoms over her legs one by one, his eyes blurring.
I can’t do this again. I can’t watch you slip away.
But none of that mattered—his fear, his love. Kerry Egan had never been his to lose.
8
Twenty below zero—that’s what the temperature gauge had said on Daniel’s sports watch before it froze up. Dangerously cold, not made any better by the storm, which was sending icy winds down the spine of the continent, increasing the wind chill by ten degrees, maybe twenty. Daniel tried to remember what the forecast at the Anchorage airport had said, how long the storm was supposed to last—two days, three? Four, God forbid? Truth be told, he hadn’t been paying enough attention, he’d been so wrapped up in making wedding plans with Kerry. Already, that morning—those plans—seemed like a very long time ago.
He wouldn’t let himself think about anything except what needed to be done. He could feel that same strange giddiness welling up in him, threatening to come out as laughter, and he choked it back until it was little more than a coughing sound. Not that anyone was nearby to hear it at the moment: he was alone on a hillside among the broken trees and wreckage, a couple of hundred feet above the nose section of the plane and climbing, where the only sound was the roar of the wind in his ears and the pulse of his blood. He wouldn’t give in to hysteria. There was too much else at stake.
The snow stinging at Daniel’s eyes and mouth and nose, burning his face and hands, brought him back to earth. It wasn’t normal snow but granular, like bits of ice, tiny snowballs that had melted and refrozen in the subarctic air, hanging in heavy clouds over the landscape. No wonder the plane’s engines had failed if this was the stuff that had gotten inside them.
The weather—that was the primary problem. If the weather was ugly enough to bring down a passenger jet, it would be far too ugly for rescue helicopters and small search planes. How many times had he dealt with something similar at Petrol? Weather was almost always a factor in a rescue operation, especially in the world’s remote places. Even now, there were probably teams of folks in Whitehorse assembling rescue crews, scouring the air for the signal from the jet’s emergency transmitter. He seriously doubted there would be flights in the air searching for the site of the wreckage, though, not while the storm still raged. At Petrol he’d waited days, weeks, to send his people in to clean up a situation if it wasn’t safe for them. Daniel and the rest of the passengers might wait hours or even days out here before help arrived, days in which people would die if they didn’t plan, prepare. It was nearly impossible for a passenger jet to disappear completely in this day and age—these big planes had enough instrumentation and electronics to run a small city—but even the most sophisticated electronics wouldn’t help them if Mother Nature decided not to cooperate in the rescue effort.
He thought of the crisis-management people at Denali Airlines and felt a grim kind of connection to them. He knew exactly the kinds of phone calls they were making, the kinds of plans they had in place for situations just like this. He knew the kinds of hours they’d be putting in to find the missing plane and passengers. And he had an idea of how he could do his part.
The first part of his plan was to find the missing passengers, the ones who’d been in the tail of the plane when it broke in half, and keep everyone together and alive until help arrived. The second part involved looking for a bit of high ground from which he might spot a town or a road or even, if he was really lucky, pick up a cellular signal. There might be a town or village nearby, someplace that might have emergency-rescue crew
s, snowmobiles, trucks with four-wheel drive, even a small trauma center. Or barring all that, a telephone, a CB radio. Something.
He was cursing the loss of the satellite phone. Its battery would last maybe an hour or two in this cold, nothing more. If he could find it, he could use the emergency charger, but finding it in the snow would be like looking for a single drop of water in the ocean. The regular cell phone would be their best bet, as long as they weren’t too far out of range.
But first, the missing passengers. He could only hope that the people in the tail section had been as lucky as the people in the front of the cabin, and that most of them—no, all of them—were still alive. That he could help them somehow.
—
It was slow going through the snow and the cold. The landscape around the crash site was hilly, gently sloping in some places but steep in others, heavily wooded with fir trees, and between the trees and the snow coming down thick, it was difficult to see more than a hundred feet or so in front of him. He knew he was going uphill by feel more than by sight, through snow nearly past his knees in places, covered with a crust of the stinging bits that were still filling the air, but light and soft underneath—none of that heavy, wet stuff that fell during winters in Chicago and turned the roads to slush, at least.
He was following the depression in the snow gouged out by the front of the plane where it had skidded down the hill for several hundred feet before coming to a violent halt against a low outcropping of rock. The snow was not quite as deep in the depression, so Daniel followed it like a road, knowing it would lead him to the rear of the plane and whatever he might find there.
After just a hundred feet or so he was already fatigued, stopping every few minutes to catch his breath. The muscles of his thighs and calves already burned. He should have snowshoes for this, or skis, but fat chance he had of finding any. If Judy or the other Petrol employees were alive, they might be seriously hurt and needing help; by now they’d be close to hypothermic. If the tail section had broken off cleanly just behind the wings, as appeared to be the case, the tail might have slid to a stop the way the nose had, like a sled going down a hill, coming to rest against a tree or boulder. Yes—it was just possible for Daniel to believe that when he found the tail section, he might find there were people still alive in it.
He lifted his head to look around, take stock of his surroundings and catch his breath. Here and there along the trail there were bits of debris—suitcases, airplane seats, foil packages of pretzels and cookies. A hole in the snow contained a plastic water bottle, which he stopped to pick up, followed by a can of ginger ale and another of tomato juice. Soon his pockets were stuffed, and he made a mental note to gather all the food he could find on the way back. There wouldn’t have been much food on the plane, but there’d be enough, perhaps, to last a day or two out here if they were careful.
No satellite phone, though. He wasn’t that lucky. The damn thing could be anywhere.
He passed bits of the plane’s hull, pieces of aluminum blackened by smoke and dented almost beyond recognition. He passed a yellow inflatable life jacket and several loose oxygen masks lying like dead fish on a beach. Already these artifacts were being buried by the new snow coming down in the storm; in a little while, most of the debris would be invisible from the air, a thought that definitely gave him pause until he remembered the emergency beacon, the electronic signal that all planes carried along with its pinging “black box.” The plane could be at the bottom of Hudson Bay and air-traffic controllers would still be able to find them—assuming the emergency beacon was still working.
He kept going up the slope, his breath coming harder and harder. At another deep hole in the snow he stopped to look. Always he looked for something that he might be able to use, if not now, then later on. A carry-on, he thought, or maybe a piece of a wing they could use to close up the back of the nose section, shelter them from the wind.
Instead what he found was the body of a man, his head nearly severed, the wound raw around the neck and shoulders. The snow splashed with bright-red blood. Snow was falling right in his open eyes and mouth, into his nose.
Daniel startled, taking three quick steps back and stumbling into the deep snow, which he fell into up to his ears. Daniel had seen dead bodies before, plenty of times, but for some reason the sight of this one was too much. All these people who just wanted to go home, just wanted to finish their work and get home to their families, all these people who had been so glad to know they weren’t going to be snowed in at Anchorage. They’d practically cheered when the plane had taken off. And now—and now—
He put his head in his hands and wept for all the people who would be late home, or not at all.
And what about Kerry and Phil and me? What if we don’t make it home, either?
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Albrecht. It won’t help you out of this situation.
When Daniel was calm again, he pushed himself to his knees and crept toward the depression. He didn’t want to look again, but he had to make sure the body wasn’t that of someone he knew. Looking down into the man’s open mouth and his eyes, which were a light greenish brown, Daniel had a sudden feeling of vertigo, as if he might pitch forward into the hole himself, never to be found. The dead man was looking directly up at the sky, not at Daniel after all. Seeing nothing.
But what Daniel really couldn’t stop looking at was the angle of the man’s head, thrown back two or three inches from the neck, exposing bits of blood and bone and sinew. The head was still connected on the left side by a bit of skin and muscle. Daniel gulped air and looked away as quickly as he could, already knowing that for the rest of his life the image of the man’s head would appear to him behind his closed eyes.
He stood for a second, shivering in the snow, wishing he had something to cover the man with, a blanket at least, and he spent maybe a minute looking around for one. The wind howled around his ears, almost like it was screaming. He stopped, his hands clenching and unclenching, and then realized it was stupid: if he found a blanket, he should use it to help the living. There would be time to mourn the dead later, when they were safe again. He left the dead man where he was and kept going.
The smell of broken pine branches and the ozone tang of new snow came to him, along with jet fuel and—yes, he was sure of it now—a bit of oily smoke. Through the haze of the storm he could just make out a thin black column coming from a deep depression in the snow, which turned out to be one of the plane’s massive engines. It sat at the base of an ancient fir that had probably grown unmolested in the Yukon soil for two hundred years before Denali Flight 806 came dropping out of the sky. Now the tree was broken perhaps a third of the way up its length, the spar toppled over on one side and oozing the smell of turpentine, while beneath it the round engine emitted that single mournful thread of black smoke and the acrid smell of burning jet fuel.
He was close to the crest of the hill now, a rocky outcropping of gray stone jutting toward the sky. Likely it had been the hill itself that had broken off the tail section. The plane had been struggling to maintain altitude, dragging its tail behind it. When it fell, the top of the ridge had probably sheared off the tail section, sending it backward down the hill in one direction, the front pitching forward in the other.
At the top he should be able to get a better view of the land around the crash site, as well as any remaining bits of the plane. About fifty feet from the crest of the hill, the depression in the snow left by the nose section came to an abrupt end, marked by a sudden profusion of debris, including several rows of airline seats. Some still had bodies strapped to them.
He checked each one, feeling sick. He called, “Hey there. Hey, anyone hurt?” No one stirred. If they’d survived the crash, they were dead from exposure already. None of them were wearing coats. None of them were Judy or the other missing Petrol employees.
He checked one or two for a pulse—nothing—and left them where
they were for now. There would be time to tend to the dead later, while the business of the living was still urgent. He kept going, up and up.
At the top, the trees thinned a little, the clouds still thick as the storm gathered itself. Finally Daniel stood on a piece of bare rock at the top of the hill and looked around.
He was standing on the ridge of a hill as stony and broken as the spine of an ancient beast only half-buried. The other side of the hill fell away steeply toward the thin trickle of what Daniel guessed was a creek, a thin frozen white line limned by trees of deep green. The hills on the other side of the valley were rockier than the one he stood on, more sparsely treed, but everywhere there was snow—snow on the ground, in the air, on the trees, in his eyes. Snow everywhere, and more falling by the minute. And not even the smallest hint of a town, a road, an electrical line.
He didn’t really have any hopes of being within range of a cell-phone signal in all this wilderness, but still he took out his phone and held it up, waved it around in the air in the hopes of seeing those little bars jump. Nothing. Out here the phone was nothing more than a bit of electrical junk, a hunk of metal and wire that would be useless to him when his battery ran down. He did have his hand-crank backup charger, but that would only provide an hour or two of useful battery life. For emergencies only. And what is this if not an emergency? he thought. It was a bit of luck that he had such a thing, that he hadn’t lost it in the crash. His only bit of luck, so far.
So much for looking for a town this way.
Maybe the other direction, then. If the plane had finished its turn and was facing west when they crashed, instead of south, like he’d first assumed, then Whitehorse would be in the opposite direction of the way he’d just come. The nose of the plane would be like an arrow pointing the way back to civilization. It might be worth checking out anyway.