by Bill Rancic
She shuffled toward the open door once more and guided Daniel to the place where the life rafts should have been stored, but the cover on the storage unit had broken off in the crash—the life rafts were missing.
“I don’t understand,” Kecia said. “They should be here. I checked them myself before we took off.”
Daniel reached his hand inside the dark hole where the life rafts should have been and felt around. Nothing. Probably they’d been flung out into the snow, along with half the rest of the contents of the plane. He looked around him at the expanse of whiteness, the twisted metal of the tail, the copious debris trail that the plane had left as it rolled down the hillside. The life rafts could be anywhere. The three of them could search, but it would likely take all day, and darkness would be falling in an hour or so.
“It was just a thought,” said Kecia, gazing out at the white expanse with a hopeful expression on her face. “I think we can safely assume the black box is working even if the ELT didn’t go off. If they do a sweep of the area looking for pings, they’ll find us eventually. Assuming we aren’t too far off course, that is.”
“That might be a big assumption,” Daniel said.
“I hope not. We had started to turn back when the second engine went, so we might be out of the usual flight path, but hopefully not too far out. The captain said it was less than an hour back to Whitehorse.”
“Is that a hundred miles? Two hundred?”
“Maybe more. These planes can go as much as five hundred miles an hour.”
“What do you think?” Bob was asking. “Do you think we’re likely to get a rescue today?”
She squinted up at the sky, at the tiny ice crystals still pelting them. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert, though I’ve probably had more training than anyone else here,” she said, “but the weather was definitely a factor in bringing us down.” She winced and clutched her hands closer to her. “If the ice stops soon, maybe. Otherwise I’d say tomorrow, if the weather clears up.”
Tomorrow. No big deal in the ordinary world, but out here, in the cold and wind, a single twenty-four-hour period could be deadly.
Daniel handed his gloves to Kecia, thinking through the problem, but she shook her head—he needed his gloves, she said.
“You have to put them on,” he said. “If you don’t, your hands will freeze in minutes, and then you’ll lose them.”
“All right.” She pulled them on very carefully while Daniel looked inside the rear gallery and found a single glove and a single mitten. A mismatched set, but they would work at least.
They’d have to shelter in the nose section of the fuselage. They’d have to find something to build a fire, if they could. And they’d need to gather as much food and water as they could find before darkness fell.
“We’d better get back,” Daniel said.
Kecia was looking up toward the top of the hill clutching her arm to her like a broken wing. “Oh God. I’ll never make it to the top like this.”
“I’ll help you as best as I can,” Daniel said. “Trust me. We should all stay together. It’ll be safer if we do.”
He looked over at Bob, who was looking at the cans of soda and the bags of snacks lying just inside the door of the rear galley.
“Kecia,” he said, “how much food do you figure was on the plane today when we took off?”
“Enough for every passenger to have one box meal. Some fancier stuff in the first-class cabin—some poppy-seed chicken, pasta, stuff like that. The rest are pretzels, cans of soda and water. They don’t weigh us down with too much food these days. Sometimes we even run out.”
“But we probably have enough to get us to tomorrow, right?” Bob said.
“Depends on how many passengers are left. How many were in the nose?”
“A couple of dozen, from what I remember. We should gather all this up and take it back over the hill.”
“Let’s get her back first,” Daniel was saying. “We can come back for the food later. Get some other people to come help us collect everything. It’s too big a job for just you and me.”
“I don’t want to make a second trip,” Bob said. “It’s damn hard work climbing up this far. A second trip would be extra effort we shouldn’t expend.”
“I realize that, but we need to get Kecia back safely to the nose section first. Then we can gather as much as we can carry and bring it back.”
“I can make a sled. I’ll drag it behind me. It won’t be too far.”
“Fine. But you’ll have to do it alone, because I need to help her.”
He looked at Kecia. “She can walk. It’s just her arm that’s hurt.”
“She’ll have trouble keeping her balance in all this snow unless one of us helps her.”
He frowned; Daniel watched his mouth working around the problem as if he were chewing on tobacco. “All right, all right,” he grumbled, sounding like an angry bear woken from hibernation a month before spring. “What we really need is one more set of hands. I should have made Phil come with me.”
“Phil was hurt. A lot of people were.”
“Hmm,” he said, not a noise of assent as much as a delayed argument. “Let’s get this over with.”
After Bob had gathered as much food as he could carry, they started back up the hill slowly, Bob leading the way and Daniel following behind, holding Kecia under her good elbow and moving carefully so she could keep her balance. It was slow going up the hillside, and she kept stumbling on hidden rocks and branches under the snowpack, leaning forward in steep spots to keep from sliding backward, always with Daniel’s hand there to catch her when she started to pitch forward. He was gratified to see he’d been correct in what he’d said to Bob—while Kecia could have walked steadily enough on even ground or pavement, she would have had a hell of a time making it to the top of the hill in the snow without Daniel’s help.
She stumbled again and fell forward onto her knees, letting out a small startled cry. Daniel helped her back to her feet and looked up toward the summit. He said, “Almost there. When we get to the other side, we can slide all the way to the other half of the plane.”
“Almost sounds like fun,” she said.
“Easier, at least.”
They looked at the broad form of Bob’s back ahead of them up the hillside, a blue airline blanket full of food boxes slung over one shoulder.
Kecia asked, “That guy seems like a real barrel of laughs. You work for him?”
“Yeah.”
“And you like it?”
Daniel grimaced a little, lowered his voice and said, “Maybe not today so much. Today I might give the job a three.”
She gave a sound that was almost a laugh, and then they were silent for a minute, huffing their way up the hillside. “That high?”
Daniel said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“You said the emergency transmitters don’t always work. Do you know how often they don’t work? I mean, what are the percentages, the likelihood that it wouldn’t have gone off in a crash?”
“To be honest, I think it’s something like seventy-five percent of the time they go off. A quarter they don’t.”
“And we’re a long way from any landmarks, aren’t we?”
“And off our planned route, too. We had to make a pretty wide turn back toward Whitehorse, and we were only halfway through it when we went down.”
“How wide?”
“Could be a hundred miles, could be ten. I don’t really know. Turning around in midair isn’t like pivoting on a dime. The pilots would know, but . . .” She left that thought unfinished, but he could see her mind working over the idea of the pilots, dead and frozen in their cabin.
“How well did you know them?”
“Who?”
“The pilot and co-pilot.”
She tilt
ed her head to one side to look at him. “Well enough. The captain and I have worked this route together a lot. We both have family in Chicago, so we like to get back when we can.”
“I suppose you get a nice discount, working for the airline.”
“Discount? Phhfpht,” she said. “After this, I better get a damn lifetime pass.”
Daniel blew out a single breath, almost a laugh. “I suppose they do owe you that.”
They were approaching the crest of the hill. The trees were thinning out, making it easier to see where they were but also providing fewer handholds. Daniel held his hand under Kecia’s elbow once again until she stood on the summit and looked down. Far below, in one direction, they could see the smashed-up tail section, silent as a coffin, their own footprints already buried by snow. On the other side they could see the nose section, where people milled about like fleas deserting a corpse. Not for the first time Daniel wished he could fly, that it would be as simple as stretching out his arms and jumping.
“I hope they come for us soon,” he said. “Going to be a long night otherwise.”
He was thinking of the people down in the nose—Kerry and Phil, the rest of the walking wounded. It would be up to him and Bob, and anyone else who was still able-bodied, to keep the hurt people warm and alive until help came. He didn’t want to think about the task before him if help didn’t come quickly enough.
Kecia looked up at the sky. The light was changing, the dimness growing thicker, gray sinking down bit by bit into black. Pretty soon it would be night again. “You’re thinking they won’t be able to search for us in the dark, aren’t you? That if the ELT isn’t working and the black box isn’t pinging, they’ll never know where we are?”
“That, too. But the cold’s what I’m really worried about,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty frigid out here soon.”
“You’re right. We should get downhill as soon as possible.”
From up ahead, they could see Bob starting down the hill toward the nose, his way made exponentially easier with the help of gravity. Slogging through waist-deep snow became a lot easier going downhill instead of up.
“Come on. Let’s get back to the others.”
Daniel found a piece of metal to use for a sled and offered to let Kecia sit and rest on it for the downhill trip. She settled onto it gratefully, easing herself down with Daniel’s help. She said, “I feel like I should be the one helping you. You were a passenger and I was the flight attendant.”
“We’re all going to need to help each other before we get out of this one,” Daniel said, then turned and fixed her with a level look. She was the best resource they had to figure out what kind of help was coming, and when. If they were going to be able to wait for rescue or take matters into their own hands. If it was a matter of someone going, he knew he would be the one. And he wanted the truth from her—all the truth.
“So tell me,” he said, settling behind her on the makeshift sled and getting ready to push off, “how will we know if the ELT went off the way it was supposed to? Is the cavalry really coming or not?”
She lifted her good arm so he could hold on for the long slide down, an echo of the disastrous landing they’d made just a couple of hours before. He held on tight, teetering right at the edge of the precipice, ready to push off, let go.
“I guess we wait and see,” she said.
11
As darkness closed in around the crash site and it started to dawn on them that they might be out in the woods all night, the surviving passengers of Flight 806 started to realize they were hungry, that they hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Kerry and Phil volunteered to go to the front galley to check for the food stashed there for the first-class passengers—fruit and cheese and crackers, bread and pastries and coffee, soup and pasta and grilled chicken that had long gone cold. The galley wasn’t exactly overflowing—it had been only a six-hour flight, after all—but between that and what Bob had brought back from the tail, there was enough for everyone to ease their hunger until the morning, and their inevitable rescue.
Under the direction of the flight attendant Kecia, they broke open the first-class liquor supply, too, bottles of Scotch and gin, vodka and beer, good California wine. Kerry opened a small bottle of gin and had drunk half of it before she remembered her missed period, put the cap back on the bottle and the bottle in her pocket. Maybe gin wasn’t such a good idea under the circumstances.
“You okay?” Phil asked.
“Yeah. Just saving the rest for later.”
They passed out the alcohol, which warmed them and made them relax, and soon everyone was falling asleep, the cabin filling with the soft sound of snoring and the rustling of people settling down for the night. Lit by a single flashlight, which gave everything the look of a slumber party for the damned, the cabin had been cleared of broken seats, debris and bodies, which were now outside in the cold, already half-buried in the snow.
Kerry didn’t want to think about all those bodies, the people who had been alive just this morning. She squirmed and tried to get more comfortable on her hard, cold piece of floor, but no matter which way she turned, something was poking her—a person, a piece of metal, a bit of plastic.
“Can’t sleep?” Daniel said in her ear, tightening his arms around her.
“Not really,” she said, drawing up her knees to her chin for extra warmth. “I know you’re going to wake me in an hour or so anyway.”
“No choice. Beverly says I need to wake you every couple of hours to make sure you’re still conscious.”
“I wonder if anyone’s ever told Beverly she’s a royal pain in the ass,” Kerry whispered. Beverly was, in fact, asleep at her back. Either she didn’t hear Kerry’s insult or didn’t care.
Daniel looked over Kerry’s shoulder at the sleeping nurse. “I think she would consider that a compliment,” he said.
Kerry reached up and touched his face, feeling the stubble beginning to pop on his chin; it had been nearly a full day since he’d last shaved. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Daniel with so much beard—he said beards made him itchy—but she decided she liked it. It lent his appearance a bit of roughness that made him even more appealing, new almost, both familiar and strange at the same time.
He wasn’t settling in to sleep. There was a wakefulness to him, a watchfulness, that she knew all too well.
“Don’t stay up tonight,” she said. “You need to sleep, too.”
He rearranged his limbs, trying to get comfortable, and said, “I’ll sleep when we’re rescued.”
“You can’t take on everything yourself.”
She was afraid—afraid for him, and for herself. Kerry was uncomfortably aware that the dizziness she’d been feeling all day was growing. At first it had been mild, nothing more than a bit of a tilt at the edge of her perception, but all afternoon the dizziness had grown, so that now every time she closed her eyes she felt as if the cabin were lurching sideways, about to tip her over, and then the sickening sense of falling from a great height. That was the real reason she didn’t want to close her eyes: it was like reliving the crash over and over again.
Combined with a slight queasiness that had only grown worse since she ate her bit of cold chicken for dinner, the feeling had Kerry worried. If she were pregnant, if what she feared were true, then the baby would suffer from everything she suffered from. There were other people here more damaged than she was—people with crushed and broken bones, people with puncture wounds, people dead—but she knew what she was feeling wasn’t usual or ordinary. She just didn’t want to tell Daniel, didn’t want him to worry, especially when he could do nothing to stop it or make it better.
She was falling again, the plane lurching to the side, and she jerked herself back to equilibrium.
“Are you cold?” Daniel asked, wrapping himself more closely around her.
“Everyone’s cold,” she muttered, “but t
hanks. It does help.”
“Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll wake you in a bit.”
She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t seem to sleep. It was like a hand just out of reach—she couldn’t grab hold of it. “I’m glad you’re still here,” she told him. “I don’t know what I’d do if . . .”
He untangled the hair from her face and brushed his lips against her ear. “I’m glad you’re still here, too.”
They didn’t talk about who wasn’t there any longer, but they were both thinking it, their thoughts outside with the bodies in the snow.
As promised, Daniel hadn’t told her about Judy when he returned. He hadn’t needed to—she’d seen him coming down the hill toward them with a dark-skinned woman of about forty wearing a flight attendant’s uniform and cradling her broken arm in front of her. Kerry had glimpsed them out the back of the cabin and had felt the cry reach her throat before she could stop herself. Judy wasn’t with him. Judy was dead. Daniel had folded her in his arms and let her cry until she was wrung out.
Afterward, exhausted and heartsick, she’d watched Daniel and Bob and Kecia taking charge of the other passengers, organizing a group of the less wounded to clear the cabin of broken seats and dead bodies, another group to go outside to look for wood for a fire, a third to gather up whatever clothes and blankets they could find. Daniel had stood out clearly in the middle of the crowd, quietly giving orders, and Kerry had been amazed at how calmly the other passengers listened to him and accepted what he was saying as the course of action they should take. Maybe it was only that they were shell-shocked, or maybe they were glad to follow anyone who gave the impression he knew what he was doing, but they did as he asked without arguing. Daniel was a natural at this, she realized—he was at his most calm and collected when everyone else was falling apart. She closed her eyes and thanked God he’d been spared. That they both had been.
By the time it was full dark, the teams of passengers had come back with stacks of firewood, though it quickly became clear the storm had made everything too damp to burn. Even the seat cushions would not catch, though the passengers made a good attempt at lighting them. Flame-retardant, Kecia said—to protect the passengers in a cabin fire. “Ironic, isn’t it?” She shrugged and pulled her coat around her more tightly.