First Light

by Bill Rancic

  No answer.

  “Raise her head up,” said Beverly. “Just talk to her.”

  “Come on, open your eyes. You need to listen to me now.”

  “Not like that. Don’t bark orders at her,” said Beverly, flapping her hands in exasperation at Phil’s cluelessness. “Really talk to her. Let her hear your voice and know you’re there.”

  Phil looked down at Kerry’s closed eyelids, the skin so pale it was nearly blue, at a curl of red hair around her mouth, and wondered if it would make the slightest bit of difference if she knew he was there.

  He felt a welling of anguish. He didn’t want to deal with this again. If he hadn’t been injured himself, he’d have gladly walked all the way back to Barrow rather than be responsible for another sick person, someone who might die at any moment. He couldn’t do it again. He just couldn’t.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he muttered.

  Beverly was reaching into Kerry’s sleeve to feel her pulse. “What would you say if she was awake?”

  “I don’t know. I never know what to say to her. That’s always been my problem.”

  “Tell her how you feel. Why she’s important to you, that kind of thing.”

  “What do you mean?” Phil said, his head snapping up. “We’re not a couple. I’m just her co-worker.”

  “Oh.”

  “She doesn’t really like me very much. If she were awake, I’m sure she’d tell you the same.”

  “Sorry, I thought you were her husband,” Beverly said, giving Phil a strange look. “Never mind. Just talk to her anyway. Say something that will get her attention.”

  Something that would get her attention. But what on earth would that be? He could tell her that a reporter for CNN was on the phone. Kerry loved her job—everyone knew that. The only other thing that ever seemed to matter to her was Daniel. They were very far from the job right now, so that left only Daniel.

  He took a breath and said, “Kerry! Look at me right now! Kerry, Daniel’s here, he’s hurt and he needs you to help him. Come on, now.”

  Her eyelids fluttered but didn’t open. Damn, he thought, I was sure that would work.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how long she’d been out—he’d only turned away for a few minutes, maybe no more than ten at the most—but he was very sure he didn’t want Daniel to come back and find her unconscious.

  Daniel should have been back by now. “Kerry!” Phil shouted, loudly enough that people were turning around to stare.

  He didn’t want to shake her or slap her, anything that would cause her more pain, but she wouldn’t open her eyes. Open your eyes, Kerry, please. She was shivering, a tremor that started in her jaw and spread to the rest of her, until she was a trembling, shaking mass.

  “What can I do?” he begged Beverly. “She won’t—”

  “At least let’s keep her warm until help gets here. Her body temperature’s dropped. Come on, we’ll get her in between us and wrap her up. Use our body heat.”

  “Really?”

  She glared at him. “You got a better idea?”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” he said. “I just . . . This is not what I was planning on doing today.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said, fixing him with a level look. “If we’re still here by nightfall, the whole lot of us are going to have to pile together to keep warm. Now, put your arms around her like this. I’ll get her from the back.”

  He put his arms under Kerry’s and wrapped around her tightly, while Beverly did the same from the back. Kerry shifted a little, her breath metallic with the blood from her broken teeth. She was close enough that he could have bent forward a few inches and kissed her.

  Daniel should have been the one there wrapped around her, not Phil. But Beverly was right—they had to get her warm, keep her warm until Daniel came back and took over.

  He had to admit he did feel considerably warmer lying there with the three of them pressed together, Kerry in the middle, even with the cold wind blowing up his back. After a few minutes she stopped shivering. Still, whenever he said her name, her eyelids would flutter, barely lifting, and then close again.

  After about fifteen minutes, he could feel her stirring, starting to wake. “Kerry?” he asked. He tilted his head back to look at her.

  She flicked her eyes open and said, “It’s you,” before letting her head fall forward onto his shoulder, her red hair tangled in her mouth. He pulled it loose, and she answered with a soft snore.

  “It’s me.”

  He wasn’t sure if she really did know it was him. He was reminded, horribly, of Emily near the end—her voice thick with pain, the sense that she was only partially there with him at any given moment, the fear that she might slip away when he wasn’t paying attention. Those days—he had tried to outrun them, tried to forget, but something was always bringing him back to the months Emily lived in the dining room of their house, in a rented hospital bed, while the hospice nurses came to spend the day with her while Phil took the night shift, sometimes reading to her, sometimes rubbing her feet, which she complained were always cold. She’d been too young for cancer, too lovely, and the loss of her had been more than he could bear.

  He’d failed her, failed Emily, and now he was doing the same to Kerry. It shouldn’t be Phil here with her, it should be Daniel—someone competent, someone who knew how to lead. What the hell was taking Daniel so long anyway?

  “Keep her talking,” Beverly was saying. “Ask her how she’s doing.”

  He steadied himself and said, “Kerry, stay awake for me. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m so tired,” she muttered. “All I want to do is sleep. Can’t you let me sleep?”

  It was like talking to a child. “It’s not safe for you to sleep right now,” he said. “Can you talk to me for a little while? Keep me company? I could really use a friend.”

  “I don’t know. I can try.”

  But then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Kerry’s eyes were drooping, her face relaxing into sleep once more, her mouth pinching as if she were in pain. How much she reminded him of Emily.

  Why did he have so much trouble talking to her? What if this were Emily here, now—what would he say then? He wouldn’t have any trouble saying what was on his mind. With her, he never had. She had been his everything, and when she was gone, he’d lost himself. He’d lost everything she used to love in him—he’d turned into this sour, unhappy, pinched kind of man. No wonder Kerry disliked him. He didn’t like himself much of the time, either.

  Talk to her, Phil. She’s a human being, not a bomb. It was Emily’s voice, again, that he heard whenever he knew he was feeling sorry for himself, when he was having trouble coping. Emily had been the best part of himself—it was why he still missed her. She’d been the source of his courage.

  He took a breath and spoke in Kerry’s ear. “Did I ever tell you about my wife?” he said. “My wife, Emily?”

  Kerry’s eyes fluttered open again. “You’re married?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “I never knew that,” she murmured.

  “I don’t like to talk about it much.”

  “What happened?” Kerry said, her mouth stretching into a wide yawn and making Phil stifle his own. “Did she dump you?”

  He froze. This is why I don’t bring these things up at work. To have her make a joke, turn my loss into some kind of fodder . . .

  Grow up, Velez. Let it go for a change. It was just possible she didn’t know what she was saying, under the circumstances.

  He shook his head and said, “No, she died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kerry said, and Phil could feel her waking up for real now, could feel her attention shifting to him in ways she might never have allowed herself under ordinary circumstances. “No, I’m really sorry to hear that. What happened?”

&n
bsp; The wall inside him threatened to go back up. He’d worked so hard to keep a firm separation between his work life and his personal life. Church and state, Phil, church and state.

  Still, it was working, the way he was talking to her—Kerry was awake, she was lucid, she was paying attention. She possibly had never paid as much attention to him as she was at that moment.

  “Cancer.” He had to practically choke out the word.

  Her eyes fluttered again in sympathy. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. That must have been hard.”

  Here was the moment he should have opened up more, said It was, and then recounted the whole devastating story, give her a chance to show him some kindness, connect on a level that had nothing to do with Petrol, and his job, and her job, and the things they genuinely had in common. He should have, and he knew it—but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. How could he tell her about the nights when the sickness and the smell had overwhelmed him, made him seethe with resentment? How he’d hated Emily for being sick, hated himself for being so weak? How could he confess to Kerry Egan, of all people in the world, his most heinous crime—that when his wife had needed him most, he’d run away?

  He didn’t deserve Kerry’s love, or anyone’s. He was weak and useless—worse, he was a coward.

  He stood up abruptly and left her, pacing to the end of the fuselage, feeling everyone’s eyes on him, especially Kerry’s. He looked out into the whiteness, at the slow zombie movements of the other survivors, and took gulp after gulp of air like a man who had just escaped drowning.

  Eventually Beverly sidled up next to him, standing still for a moment and looking out at the snow. “That was a good thing you did. It worked.”

  “Thanks,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  “Your wife. It was bad?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re probably tired of hearing people say they’re sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am, though, you know. Sorry.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad you were here today.”

  She shifted; Phil could tell she was getting ready to leave him on his own. “I should see if there’s anyone else who needs help. See what I can do.” Beverly tilted her head to look at him like some kind of bright-eyed bird. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back to check on you, too, okay?”

  “I’m all right. Go on and see to the others; I’ll be fine.”

  “I’d feel better if you and Kerry both had a CAT scan and a hospital bed. But you’ll be okay for the moment. Just keep your body temperature up, and rest. Keep her awake.”

  “You’re coming back, though, right?”

  Beverly turned and smiled at him. “Don’t worry. She won’t die between now and then.” She sighed. “At least, I hope not.”

  She went outside into the snow. Phil stood a moment watching her, then turned back around into the darkness inside the plane.

  “Beverly,” he muttered to himself, “you are a real ray of sunshine.”

  10

  “Did you find anything useful?” said a voice behind him.

  Daniel had backed halfway out of the fuselage when he heard the voice, close enough that it felt like it was right in his ear. “Damn it, Bob, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  The senior VP was standing in the drift outside the rear door, his shaggy white head half-buried in someone’s heavy black nylon parka. It was not the expensive gray wool sports overcoat he’d worn the past two weeks when they were working in Barrow, and Daniel wondered, briefly, where he’d come by it, before pushing that thought aside as pointless. What did it matter who it had belonged to originally? They would all need to find and use whatever they could to survive out here, ownership be damned.

  “Our people,” the old man asked, tilting his chin at the remnants of the fuselage. “Are any of them still alive in there?”

  He was standing in snow up to his thighs outside the door to the rear galley, the flight attendant, Kecia, huddled in the snow behind him. She’d found a coat somewhere, too, a giant olive-green parka with a fur-trimmed hood, and sat against the metal skin of the plane with her broken arm clutched against her chest.

  Daniel kept his back to them, not daring to turn around. He was feeling a little raw from his trip inside the tail, his throat tight, his face dirty with tear tracks and grease and blood. He didn’t appreciate Bob showing up here like this, standing outside after it was all too late and demanding a headcount of the living and the dead like he was tallying up accounting figures. Assets and liabilities. The people inside the tail were not abstracts, not pencil scratches in anyone’s accounting ledger. They were husbands, sons, daughters. Friends. But the old man would never grieve them, not in public. Maybe not even in private. And if Kerry and I had been sitting back there, Daniel thought, it would have been exactly the same.

  “Who did we lose?” Bob demanded again.

  There was no point in lying. “Jack Wisniewski and Doug Fraser. And Judy.”

  He neglected to mention that he’d sat with Judy while the poor woman suffered through her last minutes, her skin going gray, her eyes filmy, her thoughts confused as the blood leaked from her body. She’d called for her mother at the end, and Daniel had been able to do nothing but hold her hand and whisper that it would be over soon, that the pain would stop soon. “Don’t be afraid,” he’d said to her, though he was afraid himself. In fact, he’d never been so scared in his life.

  Now Judy’s suffering was over. Daniel hadn’t even tried to move her; there was no point. When she was gone, he’d called out for anyone else—Is there anyone alive in here? Anyone?—and receiving no answer, he’d gone slowly back the way he’d come in, picking his way through the mess and outside.

  He hadn’t expected to see Bob there, like the Abominable Snowman, his breath puffing in the air, his hair full of snowflakes.

  “How’d you get down here?” Daniel asked.

  “Same way you did. I was looking for a town, a road. Can’t see a damn thing in this weather, though. Might as well be walking through soup.” He stood back and gave the ball of twisted metal and plastic a frown, as if it had disappointed him somehow. “What a waste,” he said. “Those pilots should have turned back the minute we hit this weather. In fact, they should never have taken off in the first place.”

  Daniel didn’t disagree with that assessment, but it was pointless to argue now about what should have been done. They’d been cleared for takeoff, and they had run into weather, and they had crashed. Now it was time to deal with problems that were still fixable.

  “You’re one of the flight attendants, right?” Bob was asking Kecia. “So what kind of emergency beacon does this baby have? What signals does it give off in a crash?”

  She was looking at the ball of metal that had been the plane. “All commercial aircraft are fixed with an emergency location transmitter. It’s fastened to the frame of the aircraft, somewhere in the tail,” she said. “Usually it goes off with a sudden deceleration, like in a crash. When that happens, the aircraft is usually found in a few hours.”

  “What does that mean, ‘usually’?” Bob asked.

  “Most of the time they work the way they’re meant to,” she said. “The rest of the time they don’t.”

  “So sometimes they don’t work at all?” Daniel asked.

  “Sometimes they’re damaged in the crash. There’s an antenna that sometimes breaks off in a crash. We rolled downhill for a ways before we stopped. The rolling could have broken off the antenna that’s connected to the ELT.”

  “They’re emergency transmitters!” Bob barked. “They have one job—to go off in a crash. They should always work properly.”

  “They’re not indestructible. Everything on an airplane is breakable if you hit it hard enough, even the black boxes.”

  Daniel squared his shoulders. “Is there any way to know if the ELT is working properly now? Se
e if the captain set it off, or if it went off automatically?”

  “No,” she said. “The signal’s monitored by satellite from space, and on the ground by VHF signal. We wouldn’t be able to pick it up without a radio. The only VHF I know of is in the cockpit, and if there’s no power . . .” She shrugged.

  “Maybe it would have some lights or screens, something to show us it was working. Do you know where it’s located?”

  “They’re mounted as far back as possible on the frame of the aircraft. You’d have to be able to get under the skin of the plane somehow and into the far end of the tail.” They all turned and looked at the ball of metal that used to be the plane’s tail and tried to imagine how they might pry it apart to get at the frame. “It’s a bright-orange metal thing. Looks a little like a car battery.”

  “Shouldn’t we look for it?”

  “We can try, but there are no guarantees.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the rest of the passengers with a ‘maybe.’”

  They took a few minutes to search the crash site, going slowly through snow that was deepening at every moment. They circled the back of the plane and looked for holes that might let them inside the tail; there were a few small ones the size of a fist, nothing big enough to admit a full-grown man. Daniel shaded his eyes and looked inside. It was dark in there, but he thought he could see, just barely, something bright orange and boxy. There were no lights, no displays to show that it was working. He had to assume it was damaged.

  He felt his hopes sink. “We’re not going to be able to rely on the ELT. Anything else?” he asked Kecia. “There’s something in the black box, too, right?”

  “Right. It emits a signal, too, so rescue crews can find it, even underwater, but they have to be in range, maybe within ten or fifteen miles. And usually there are ELTs on the life rafts.”

  “That makes sense. So the life rafts can be found even in the middle of the ocean.” Daniel thought for a second. “We might want to activate those just to be sure. Are there any life rafts in the tail, do you think?”

  “There should be several just inside the exit there. I can show you where.”