by Bill Rancic
When it was clear they wouldn’t have a fire that night, Daniel and Bob stacked the firewood inside the cabin to dry and organized the healthy passengers into a team again, asking them to take all the carry-on bags and stuff up the hole in the fuselage to keep the wind and snow out until morning.
When the others started grumbling about why they were preparing to spend the night at the crash site instead of signaling to the rescue planes that should be arriving any minute, Daniel explained about the ELT and the black box and said it was likely the storm would prevent anyone from reaching them until it blew itself out. “We’re probably going to be spending the whole night out here,” he said, with an authority in his voice that Kerry recognized was the same one he used in his job, “and if we don’t have a fire, the only warmth we have is each other. We have to stay as warm as possible as long as possible, if we still want to be here in the morning for someone to find us.”
So they’d huddled together on the floor of the cabin for warmth, one after another after another, like spoons in a drawer, covered with coats and sweaters and whatever blankets they could find, their collective breath making the inside of the plane a bit steamy, a bit close, like a barn stuffed with animal smells and sounds. Beverly was sleeping on the other side of her, and Phil on the other side of Daniel, back to back to back. Somewhere in one of the corners, the flight attendant, Kecia, huddled with the other flight attendant, Amber, the two of them murmuring to each other. Bob was here somewhere, too—every so often Kerry saw him get up, move aside a couple of the suitcases, and head outside to grab a smoke in the wind. Apparently he wasn’t sleeping any better than Kerry was.
Every two hours, without fail, Daniel would gently shake Kerry awake and ask her how she felt, and at each wake-up call, she felt herself growing more sad and frustrated. She wanted to sleep—not just because the concussion made her sleepy (though it did), but because for those minutes she was asleep she didn’t have to remember where they were and why. She didn’t have to remember that Judy was dead.
Now she watched Bob stand up, stretch and step carefully over the sleeping passengers on the floor of the cabin, heading out for his fourth cigarette of the night. The minute he moved a piece of luggage, a gust of cold air and snow blew down the length of the cabin, making the rest of the passengers shiver. He always kept a spare pack on him at any time, but she’d seen him smoke at least ten so far. At this rate, he’d run out well before they were rescued, Kerry thought. Would serve him right.
Now she brushed a few snowflakes from her eyelashes, turning toward Daniel, sliding one arm underneath him and pulling him to her. The familiarity of him pressed against her made her think of their bed at home, the down comforter, the feather pillows smelling of lavender. The light from the city outside reflected on his face. She whispered, “I wish we were alone right now. I wish we were home in our own bed and you could make love to me tonight.” She slid her hands up his back, running her fingers in the groove of it, and tried to imagine they were at their apartment in the city, listening to the sounds of traffic below and not the howling of the fierce northern wind.
He let out a breath as if he’d been holding it and kissed her very gently on the forehead. “I would like that, too. Soon, sweetheart. I promise.”
“I hate—I hate this. Being so close to you and not able to really touch you. I need you right now. I wish all these people weren’t here.”
“I know. Me, too.” He shifted and pulled her closer. “I can wait, though. We have the rest of our lives to be together.”
She rubbed her cold nose against the middle of his chest, trying to warm it. “Do you really think they’ll come for us in the morning?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Without question.”
“Daniel.”
“Okay, okay. I think so. I hope so.”
“You know you can always tell me the truth.”
He shifted with either impatience or because the floor was as uncomfortable to him as it was to her. “The ELT should lead them to us—that’s what Kecia said—so they should have a decent idea about where we are. They should be able to hear our signal and come find us.”
“That’s a lot of shoulds.”
Daniel tucked his hands underneath her arms to keep them warm. “The signals don’t always go off the way they’re supposed to. That’s what she said. They work about seventy-five percent of the time.”
“Comforting.” Kerry closed her eyes. “You could have said so. When you came back. You could have said there was a chance no one would know where we are.”
He put his chin on top of her hair, making a cave of his body, curled around her. “I didn’t want everyone to panic. There was so much to get done. People act more rationally when they think things are working the way they’re supposed to. When they think the people in charge are largely competent and know what to expect. Or even that there is someone in charge, in a situation like this.”
She tilted her head up to look at him. “Why does that someone have to be you?”
He gave a little half-laugh and pulled her closer. “Don’t worry, babe, tomorrow we’ll get out of here and go home. Go back to our lives the best we can. I will gladly relinquish the reins the moment that happens.”
“And if we aren’t rescued?”
“Let’s worry about that tomorrow,” he said, kissing her ear. “Right now I just want to hold you while you sleep. Go ahead and close your eyes, babe.”
“I can’t. I’m scared to. I’m scared I won’t wake up.”
“Don’t be. I’m here, I’ll look out for you. I promise.”
She tightened her grip on his shoulders, feeling the tension there, the strain he was bearing on behalf of them all—just like he had in Barrow, just like he always did. “You always take too much on yourself. Let Bob or Phil or one of the others take care of the rest of the passengers.”
“It’s my job.”
“Not this time it isn’t.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “Daniel?”
“What is it?”
“I have something to tell you. I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it.”
He sat up on his elbow, alert. “Okay. I’m listening.”
“I missed my period.”
Silence. Then: “Wait, what?”
“I figured it out yesterday, before you got back. I took a test and everything. I’m definitely pregnant.”
“How did this . . . ?” Daniel started to say, then she felt him sit up and shake his head. “Never mind. I don’t care how it happened, I think it’s great.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. We’re getting married in two weeks, aren’t we? So this is a little sooner than we might have planned, but we always wanted kids.”
“So you’re happy?” She sat up and looked at him. He was smiling, his light-brown eyes dark inside the plane.
“I’m thrilled. It’s not the time or the place I would have imagined hearing this kind of news, but I couldn’t be more thrilled.”
“I’m so glad. I didn’t know how you were going to take it. I wanted to wait to tell you until we got home.”
“Go to sleep, Kerry. I know you’re exhausted,” he said, and kissed the top of her head with a little sigh. “It will all be okay. I promise.”
She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep once more, but the world kept on spinning and spinning, and she kept thinking of the baby growing inside her, the little shape curling itself inside her in the dark. It had surprised her, but she knew now that she wanted the baby, would do anything to keep it safe. It was hers and Daniel’s and that was all that mattered—that, and surviving. If it weren’t for the feel of Daniel there, so solid next to her, she would have been sure she was spinning right off the face of the earth.
12
A faint light had crept into the cabin by the time Daniel opened his eyes, and for a minu
te he wasn’t entirely sure if he was awake or dreaming. His mind was still clouded with visions of ice, of flames, of blood and the sound of someone calling for help while he dug his way through a pile of junk that seemed to get deeper and deeper the faster he dug.
When he realized it was morning, that the light coming through the cracks in the wall of suitcases was daylight and that he’d slept through the night, he sat up quickly, accidentally whacking Beverly on the nose with his wrist. The nurse had been sleeping on the other side of Kerry, but now she sat up, rubbing her nose. “Ow. What was that for?”
“Sorry,” he muttered. “It was an accident.”
Beside him Kerry was still asleep. It had been hours since he’d woken her; the last time he looked at his watch it had been near midnight. Sometime after that he must have fallen asleep. Damn it, how long was I out?
Kerry lay in the dim inside of the cabin, her skin pale and freckled, and he brushed his lips against her ear. His pregnant fiancée. Could it really be true? It might be—she’d taken a pregnancy test already, and she said it had come back positive. Part of him was thrilled, of course, but the other part was very much afraid. They were already in a precarious position as it was, and to add a baby to the mix . . .
He shook her shoulders a little, but she didn’t so much as stir. “Kerry,” he said, “wake up, babe. It’s morning.”
“Hmmpf,” she murmured. So she could respond. She wasn’t in a coma, at least.
How long was I asleep? He looked up again at the windows, which were buried under a thick blanket of heavy snow. He could see it pressed down and compacted against the Plexiglas; there must be several inches’ accumulation above it, but at the back of the plane the light was growing steadily brighter, the first sign of the polar dawn, which might last as long as a couple of hours. They were below the Arctic Circle here, but it was still close to the winter solstice, and the daylight hours would still be very short. If the weather had broken, if the rescue planes were coming today, they might already be up in the air.
He held his breath and listened. The inside of the fuselage was quiet, the air thick and warm—much warmer than it had been the day before. He smelled the scent of unwashed human bodies, heard the occasional snore, the soft breathing of a couple of dozen half-frozen people, and the blast of the wind in the trees, buffeting the sides of the plane. And was that the low droning sound of a plane’s engine overhead?
He stood, listening, but he couldn’t tell if the sound he was hearing was a plane or merely the wind. Their plane, the crashed plane, was full, the luggage wall still intact. Everyone was asleep, everyone safe inside the fuselage—which meant no one was outside to signal to rescuers.
He flung himself toward the wall of carry-on bags, thinking only of getting outside, finding a way to signal the search teams and let them know there were people alive down here, people who needed help. He tripped over the passengers as he went, not listening to the curses of the people he was waking, the sounds of interrupted sleep. What did it matter if he woke everyone up if it meant they were found?
If the noise he heard was a plane, that meant the pilot must have been following the black box signal directly to the crash site, which meant he was in range. They’d be saved—sometime today, after they’d been airlifted out of the crash site, they’d be warm and fed, their injuries seen to, their families contacted to let them know they were alive. The dead would be buried, the injured healed. Kerry would get a doctor, a hospital, a real CAT scan and the best medical care in the world. Soon this whole nightmare would be over.
He pulled a couple of suitcases away from the opening in the fuselage, ready to see the rescue planes circling—and was met by a wall of snow instead.
It was light and soft, but deep, deeper even than he’d suspected from inside the cabin, nearly up to the top of the fuselage, where a bit of pale gray light filtered in. It was still snowing, hard, with no signs of stopping.
My God, Daniel thought, even if there are rescue planes out there, could they see us? Could they even find us, in all this snow? He stood still for a moment and listened, but the earlier sound that he’d thought was a plane’s engine wasn’t there any longer. If the storm was still raging, it was likely there never had been a plane. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. Wishful thinking. The airline wouldn’t dare come after them until the storm stopped, wouldn’t risk additional lives lost; they’d never be able to set down helicopters in this mess. And how much longer would the storm last until it blew itself out? Storms in Chicago rarely lasted more than a day, and twenty inches would be a lot of snowfall there, but the Yukon was not Chicago, and the storm that had been moving in from the coast the day before had been a monster by anyone’s reckoning, moving up from the south and carrying a massive amount of moisture with it. Daniel tried to remember how long it had been predicted to last, but he couldn’t remember now, and anyway, predictions were useless when dealing with actual conditions on the ground. It was still snowing; there was nothing he could do, whether it lasted an hour or ten.
Someone was standing behind him: it was Phil, holding his injured belly. “Great,” he said, looking at the white wall that stood between the passengers and the outside world, their only exit. He looked more stricken by being trapped than he did by his own injuries. “Now what do we do?”
“We dig.”
Daniel had worn his gloves all night, knowing the dangers of frostbite, and now bent to the task at hand—scooping snow out of the way so the passengers could get outside.
There was very little room to work inside the plane, so several of the less-injured passengers took turns making a hole on one side of the opening, trying to push the snow away with their hands. Daniel thought the snow might be acting as a natural insulation, keeping the inside of the plane warmer than it might have been otherwise, more protected by the wind, so they decided not to remove all the snow from the hole in the fuselage but simply make a doorway through which a single person might be able to come in and out. They stomped the loose snow underfoot and packed it down on the sides, making a kind of ramp or incline of it, until there was just enough room for one person to climb out, ducking his head to keep from bashing it on the top of the cabin.
Bob was the first out, claiming the right for himself before anyone else could speak up, and Daniel stood watching his broad back disappear up the incline and out into the weather. The snow was still falling fast, and away from the packed-down incline, the snow was deep enough that Bob sank up to his knees, sputtering and cursing. Daniel clambered out after him, standing over Bob and resisting the urge to smile or laugh while the old man struggled to pull himself out of the hole he’d fallen into.
“Need help?”
Bob looked up. “Don’t be so smug, Albrecht, help me up.” He held up his arms, and Daniel pulled. Together the two of them got the Petrol exec out of the deep snow.
Together they tamped down a spot around the mouth of the cabin, making a flat area that might allow the others to come outside for a minute or two when the closeness and confinement inside the fuselage got to be too much. It was a small area that was passable to them; if they needed to go much farther than a few feet around the plane, though, things would be more difficult.
Daniel kept tamping down more and more snow with his boots, trying to make the area bigger. When he was finished, Bob pulled out a cigarette and sat down on one of the suitcases to smoke, huge fat flakes of snow falling around his head and shoulders, covering him in more white. “You heard it, too?”
“What?”
“I woke up to the sound of a plane’s engine. Must be one of the search-and-rescue teams looking for us.”
“I don’t know what I heard. I certainly didn’t see any plane.”
“You don’t have to be cautious with me. It was a plane,” he said, as if wanting it to be a plane made it so. “They’ll be back. All we have to do is wait.”
Daniel s
tood in the snow next to his boss, saying nothing. He wanted to believe, too, but he knew something of search-and-rescue operations, after all. He knew that the airline and the Canadian authorities wouldn’t want to risk a second crash, losing more people and aircraft in this weather, especially when they probably feared that everyone aboard Denali Flight 806 was dead already, or soon would be. He knew that the bigger and more remote the area where the teams had to search, the longer and more drawn-out the process would be. It was likely the plane wouldn’t even be visible from the air. The storm had dumped a prodigious amount of snow on the crash site and debris. The place where they’d put the bodies of the dead the day before was completely covered, not even visible here at ground level, and the pile of garbage from inside the cabin looked like nothing more than a small hillock of rock covered with snow. Even the long path the nose had made through the snow the day before had disappeared completely, buried in new snowfall.
No—if the ELT wasn’t working properly, if it had been damaged in the crash, if they were too far off course for rescue planes to pick up the pings of the black box, the survivors would be completely invisible from the air. And that was assuming rescue crews were even in the air already, looking for them.
“You know we’re not going to be able to wait forever,” Bob said, stomping his cigarette out and lighting another.
Daniel raised an eyebrow at Bob, looking from the cigarette to his boss and back. “You’re going to run out of those if you’re not careful.”
Bob shrugged and took a long puff, blowing it out like a bored dragon. “I’m not planning on being here much longer.”
“Oh? You have an inside track on how long it’s going to be until we’re found?”