by Ariel Lawhon
Outside, a single member of the ground crew sees a glimpse of flame licking the great silver spine of the airship. A phosphorescent blue blaze known as Saint Elmo’s fire. This is the last visible trace of the bullet as it rips from the Hindenburg’s body, its ascent slowing, and then stopping altogether. The bullet falls unseen. It lands in the grass unnoticed. It will never be found.
Because now every horror-stricken eye has turned to the great burning airship.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max Zabel sighs with relief—the hardest part of landing is over—and then he feels an almost imperceptible shudder. It is different from the normal shifts and tugs that accompany landing. The convulsion in the floor beneath him is not right. It is not normal. Something has gone very wrong.
Max looks up. He’s not certain anyone else has felt it. But the expressions on his fellow crewmen’s faces show that they have, in fact, noticed the tremor. There is a pause. A shudder. Then a singular, unending vibration that he can feel first in the soles of his feet and then throughout his entire body. The control car shakes with it. Rattles. Hums. Glass convulses in its frame. There’s a buzzing, spinning ghost of a noise at first that morphs into something far more terrifying within seconds. The palms of Max’s hands tingle with the reverberation as he presses them into the windowsill. And then he hears the thing he doesn’t realize he has been waiting for: a muffled explosion.
THE JOURNALIST
The ground is so close Gertrud can almost touch it. Sixty feet below and a startling green from the May rain. Leonhard grabs her hand and squeezes it reassuringly as they lean over the observation windows in the starboard lounge.
“Almost there,” he whispers, and she lets out a long, calming breath. Her desire to be on the ground once again is profound, almost reckless.
The ground crew runs onto the field below them to grab the landing lines, and she can feel a slight tug as the ship goes taut. The ground begins to rise, faster now. And it is then that she turns to her husband with relief and gratitude. She is confused for one second when he does not return the smile but rather straightens and then steps away from the window, pulling her with him.
Gertrud is about to ask what is wrong, but the ship has gone unnaturally quiet, as though holding its breath. She can sense the terror coiling in her husband’s body. It’s written there in his eyes, and when his hand tightens on her she feels the dread herself.
It’s a moment, nothing more, that they stand there frozen. But it’s enough.
There is a dull report behind them, no louder than the sound of a beer bottle being opened or a paper bag behind popped. The noise comes from behind, somewhere in the bowels of the ship.
And then chaos.
THE STEWARDESS
Emilie lays the borrowed clothes on Matilde Doehner’s bed. She cannot wear them. She cannot go with the family to Mexico. She cannot leave Max. Emilie has known this all along, somewhere deep down. But she is afraid of what it means to love again. This surrendering of her heart and the vulnerability it requires of her is so much harder the second time around. It was easy when she was young and innocent, when she had never been broken. Now she knows what it is to suffer loss. Now she knows what it means to have her heart ripped from her soul. To be dislocated.
And this time she chooses, knowing that it could happen again. Emilie chooses Max. What is faith if not this? Matilde will be disappointed, of course. But she is a woman. And she will understand.
Having made her decision, Emilie is at peace. She reaches for the door and something shifts. She sees her own trembling but she isn’t afraid. She isn’t shaking. This quiver comes not from within but from without. Everything trembles. The walls. The floor. Her own body. She feels it in the air and in the balls of her feet. It rises up and through her.
She feels herself lifted. Thrown. Catapulted backward into the hard edge of the berth. Emilie hears her head hit with a crack so loud her teeth throb. She feels the flair of pain at her scalp, along her hairline. She feels it acutely, and then she’s slipping into darkness. Then there is silence. There is nothing.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner sets the last plate in the cabinet above the banquette and steps back with a triumphant grin. But this feeling is gone before he has taken a step toward the door. Werner Franz is rendered a child quickly and completely when he hears the explosion. He is frightened by what he hopes—in the single moment he has left for hope—is a crack of thunder.
And then the air surrounding Werner splinters. It isn’t just the floor or the walls or some shudder within the structure like yesterday morning on the catwalk. It sounds as though the Hindenburg is tearing itself apart at the seams. The cupboard doors fly open and all the dishes that Werner so carefully washed and dried and put away only moments ago come sliding out and crash to the floor, where they shatter into wicked little pieces. He stands there, mute and dumb and bewildered, even as the floor tilts away behind him. To Werner, the explosion sounds like breaking glass. It will sound like that for as long as he has the capacity to remember it.
He is broken out of this stupor when the Hindenburg drops again sharply aft and he falls onto his haunches. Werner is aware of the broken china sliding across the floor toward him. He is aware of the raging, popping, explosive sounds that come from all directions now. And the screams—some distant and some in the next room—but the only thing the cabin boy can focus on is the door. It never occurs to him that he could go out the window. His only thought is of getting through the door. So he crawls and scrambles across the linoleum, grabbing onto table legs for balance and support. Once he has regained his balance, Werner throws himself toward the door, then down the corridor until he’s through the security threshold and into the ship’s cavity. The walkway is empty and, in the time it takes him to blink once, he understands why. A colossal, roiling fireball is rushing toward him, consuming everything in its wake.
THE JOURNALIST
The floor drops out from underneath them. First Leonhard and then Gertrud is hurled against the far wall. She can hear a woman scream in a cabin on the other side, a hard thump, and then nothing. The air rushes from Leonhard’s lungs, and his rib cage heaves with a thin whistling sound. Gertrud is pinned to the wall by one of his arms as chairs, dishes, and fellow passengers tumble toward them. She can feel her husband thrashing beside her, trying to cover her body with his own. To protect her.
“Leonhard,” she breathes his name and nods toward the window where blooming clouds of flame have filled the sky. “It’s on fire.”
THE NAVIGATOR
Max does not see the fire at first. He notices the glow of it lighting the ground and the clouds and the eyes of the men who stare out the window beside him. But he takes no more than one breath before he sees it in the air around him as well. Everywhere. The sky is lit with it. And then all is chaos. Max knows that the other officers are screaming, cursing, and shouting orders, but he can do nothing but stand beside the window in awe.
The sky is liquid gold.
The sky is death.
He might have stayed there, gazing into his own doom, but the stern drops suddenly, pulling him backward. Max throws out his hands to catch himself on the rear wall of the navigation room as the ship tilts upward, until he is pressed flat against the wall, supported by his hands, as though lying on the floor.
Bedlam.
A man rolls past him shrieking and smashes against the rear wall of the control car. Bauer? He isn’t sure. The contents previously on his chart table slide off and fly toward his face. He whips his head to the side just in time to avoid his nose being broken by the heavy leather-bound logbook. Pencils, pens, and instruments rain down around him and still the airship tilts ever upward.
So far the only thing he has heard are the panicked screams of his fellow crew members. But now the fire roars to life and becomes a ravenous beast consuming all other sound. It is hard to breathe. The air around him is ripped away, sucked toward the hungry flames.
Something sna
ps. Metallic and brittle. And then the bow drops and the ship is level for one protracted moment. The Hindenburg’s spine has broken in half.
Max hears Commander Pruss bellow over the cacophony. A single word, “Jump!” and Max scrambles to obey.
THE JOURNALIST
There is a man beside Gertrud, but she cannot see his face. He is praying madly, frantically in German as the ship convulses around them. People scream. Colonel Erdmann loses his grip on the windowsill and slides away. Something flies through the air. A coffee cup? There’s the smell of smoke and a strange ripping sound. A child bawls—the two Doehner boys hold on to the leg of a table, their little legs dangling in the air as their sister reaches for them. Gertrud’s mind registers each of these things in turn, but it isn’t until she sees the look of abject horror on Matilde Doehner’s face that she has a cognizant thought of her own. This maternal fear strikes something deep and instinctual inside of her, and it rips through her soul like a prayer. Oh God, Gertrud thinks, please let it end quickly.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner windmills madly away from the fire as it thunders through the hydrogen cells above him. Roaring. Consuming. Eviscerating. It is not so much heat that he feels but an incineration of the air itself. His mouth is dry from the wild gulps of air he swallows in his attempt to flee.
Something snaps. There’s a deafening metallic crunch and the ship’s hull crashes to the ground. Werner is knocked off his feet. Thrown to his hands and knees. He tips forward, onto his chest, and slides toward the flames. He can do nothing but grab one of the ropes that line each side of the keel corridor to slow his descent into hell.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max struggles onto the chart table but has little control over where his body goes as the room jerks and trembles and tilts around him. He is a pebble inside a can, tossed around at the whim of a belligerent child. Finally he kneels near the window, shoving the glass aside with fingers that are stiff with fear. The ground is twenty feet below—maybe fifteen—he can’t accurately measure the distance with the fire and the smoke and the screams blurring his senses.
Max means to jump feetfirst, to control his fall, but the tail of the airship hits the ground and the control car jerks sideways. He goes out the window in a frantic tumble, his foot catching on the sill and his arms splayed. He tries to scream, but a scream requires breath and his lungs are filled with smoke; all he can see is the burning, coiling mass of searing grass and the fleeing ground crew. There is no one to catch him. There is nothing to break his fall. Max drops headfirst into the inferno below.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner Franz prepares to be consumed. He can feel the heat now, so close that it singes his hair. He can smell the burning fabric and melting steel. His fingernails are hot. The boy closes his eyes. He wants to be a man, but he cannot find the courage to watch himself die.
But it is not fire that washes over him. It is water. And it is cold. It takes his breath away. The cabin boy gasps and sputters and cranes his neck to see a torrent rushing from the water ballast above the walkway forty feet in front of him. The impact of the ship hitting the ground has knocked it loose from its moorings, and the contents are cascading over the boy and down the walkway.
Sudden deliverance and bone-chilling cold return Werner to his senses, and he looks around frantically for a means of escape. There is only one option: go out the provisioning hatch to his right. Werner does not trust his trembling legs to carry him, so he crawls the six feet and kicks at the latch with the heel of his boot.
THE JOURNALIST
There is fire in the lounge. It licks the walls. It rakes its tongue across the floor. The flames are a liquid, spilling thing, and Gertrud feels the heat of it in her eyes as it crawls toward them. Dryness. Burning. A shudder that runs the length of the ship, pitching the floor forward and almost level again. This threat is all Leonhard needs to gain his composure.
“Through the windows!” It’s not a scream or a shout but an order roared so loudly that every person in the lounge looks at him, blinks, and then scrambles toward the row of observation windows.
Leonhard drags her. Four long steps and they are at the glass and Leonhard shoves it aside. She can feel him bend beside her, one arm already looping beneath her knees. He plans to throw her out the window. But she sees Matilde Doehner wrestling her boys toward the window alone, as she reaches for her daughter with one hand. Irene stands there, stupefied, screaming for her father over and over and over until the crazed pitch of her voice rises above that of snapping metal and shattered glass. It is the sound of a breaking heart, and the look on Matilde’s face alone could destroy Gertrud.
She wriggles out of Leonhard’s arms. “We need to help them.”
They have to get out of the ship. She can see that written on his face. This might be their only chance. The windows are crowded with people waiting to jump, shoving one another out of the way. Smoke swirls across the floor in boiling waves and Gertrud can no longer see her shoes. Her ankles. Her calves.
The children are not hers, but they are children, no less innocent than Egon, and she cannot leave them to the fire any more than she would be able to leave her own son.
“Clear the window,” she tells Leonhard, then runs back to Matilde Doehner.
THE NAVIGATOR
Max hits the ground—whether by miracle or willpower he isn’t sure—roughly on his feet. But the impact sends him staggering forward wildly and he crashes onto his hands and knees, then farther forward onto his chin. He is stunned. His head is ringing. There is blood in his mouth and grass in his nose. He has bitten his tongue and the side of his cheek. He tastes iron and dread. With his arms pinned beneath him and his kneecaps throbbing, he can turn his head only a few inches to the side to see the entire flaming mass of the airship falling all around him. On top of him.
Max pitches forward. Rolls. Stumbles to his knees and then his feet, despite the fact that forty different places on his body are protesting the sudden movement.
He runs. And just as he does he can feel the middle of the ship hit the ground behind him. Sparks fall in a shower on his hair and his jacket and the toes of his shoes. One of them burns a deep black hole into the back of his hand. He feels it. He ignores it. He runs.
And then the ship does the impossible. It rebounds, driven back into the air a dozen or more feet by the impact of the landing wheel crashing into the ground. It is the only thing that stopped the structure from coming down on top of him. That extra twist he gave to lock the wheel in place. His thoroughness has given him the chance to stumble out from beneath the flaming debris.
Max’s foot hits fresh soil and then the airship descends a second time. It shatters into ochre and flame.
THE CABIN BOY
Werner kicks at the provisioning hatch with water dripping in his eyes even as everything around him is obliterated by flames. The flat, inset door is four feet wide and four feet long and Werner is afraid to touch the handle and burn his bare hand, so he kicks and kicks until it unlatches. The hatch swings upward three inches and he forces it the rest of the way open with his foot.
The cabin boy slides forward on his stomach and looks over the edge to find that the ground is rising toward him rapidly. Ten feet. He takes a deep breath and scrambles into a crouched position at the lip of the opening. Five feet.
He jumps.
Werner hits the ground at the same time as the airship, and he is certain that it will crush him. There is an explosion of sparks. The sickening, shattering crunch of metal. The sound of a structure collapsing upon itself.
But then the ship rebounds upward, bizarrely, miraculously off the forward landing wheel, and Werner sees a path forward beneath the wreckage.
He runs.
THE JOURNALIST
Walter Doehner is heavier than he looks. He screams and reaches for his mother, so Gertrud drags him bodily to the window. He thrashes, arms and legs flailing in terror. Matilde is right behind her, little Werner tucked beneath one arm
like a bag of oats.
“Thank you,” she whispers, huffing behind Gertrud. “I can’t carry them both.”
And then Matilde screams for Irene, begs her to follow, but the girl is walking backward, away from the windows, searching for her father, calling his name.
The fire is everywhere. It touches everything, and Gertrud looks down at Walter to see a line of flame trace its way across his cheek toward his hair. The boy is on fire. His shirt. The tips of his shoes. A patch of hair. A tear drips from the end of his nose and is evaporated by the flame that eats his face.
All reason is lost to Gertrud then. She throws the boy at her husband and Leonhard catches him by his collar. Like a cat. Like some sort of feral animal. With one arm he holds the small boy over the open window and simply drops him. Walter Doehner vanishes from sight, his screams fading as he falls.
It is much harder to get little Werner through the window. He’s frightened and fighting hard to stay with his mother. When Leonhard picks him up like an invalid and throws him at the window, the child bounces off, splayed across the casement like a starfish.
There is sadness and gentleness in Leonhard’s deep voice when he looks at the boy and says, “I’m sorry.”
Gertrud’s husband sets a huge, strong hand on each side of the boy’s waist and pushes. Like a peg in a hole he pops through. And then he too is gone.
“Irene!” Matilde shouts, but her daughter is nowhere to be seen. The three of them are the only people left in the lounge, and they can barely speak or breathe or cry with the smoke billowing and churning around them. The hem of Gertrud’s dress is on fire and she is slapping at it madly. A part of her registers that the skin on the palm of her right hand begins to hum in pain.