by Linda Gerber
He regarded me for a moment, then turned to Mom. “I’m going to talk with him.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. We haven’t—”
“I won’t do anything,” he said. “Just talk. If I can get a reading from the instrument panel, at least we can guess where we’re headed.”
Seth leaned closer. “What are you guys talking about?” he shouted. I shook my head and pointed up to the cockpit. “What?” he repeated.
I opened my mouth, but I had no words to tell Seth how after everything he had done, after he had come all the way to Seattle to search for his father’s ring, I had put him in a plane with someone who might very well want to take that ring away from him. I just shook my head and looked away.
Stuart was crawling unsteadily toward Ryan, which I wasn’t convinced was the smartest idea. We had no idea how dangerous he was or who he worked for. My guess was the Mole, since Ryan had helped us escape from Watts, who was CIA. It didn’t really matter, since we couldn’t trust either one.
Stuart gripped the back of Ryan’s seat and hauled himself up. In the shadows, I could make out Ryan’s profile as his head turned . . . and Stuart’s fist raised. What was he doing?
Seth looked to my mom. “What’s happening?”
Before she could answer, the plane banked sharply to the left. Mom was still strapped down, but Seth and I tumbled hard against the wall. He grabbed the net with one arm and me with the other as the plane wobbled again. “What is going on?”
I wished I knew. It had looked to me like Stuart was about to attack Ryan. Maybe Ryan banked to throw Stuart off balance. If that was the case, then Ryan was done pretending to be nice. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to warn Seth. I pulled his head close to mine. “Ryan might be a—”
The plane lurched and dropped and my head smacked right into Seth’s nose. He reared back and his arm slipped away from my waist. We banked right this time, the wing almost straight down, and I slid across the floor, slamming into the other wall. Pain shot through my shoulder. I managed to grab on to the securing strap with the other arm and pull myself up. In the cockpit area, Ryan and Stuart were fighting for control over the plane. Neither one was winning.
“We have to help!” I yelled to Seth.
He shook his head and stopped rubbing his sore nose long enough to pantomime that he couldn’t hear. I let go of the net and started crawling toward him when I was thrown forward, crashing into the backs of the pilot seats. I tried to pull myself up when the plane climbed and sent me sprawling backward.
Seth grabbed my hand and pulled me back by him and my mom.
“Tie yourself in!” she yelled.
We wrapped the nets and the ties and anything else we could find around us as the plane bucked one last time. The propellers sputtered. The sound of the engines died. My stomach tumbled as the g-force pressed me back against the wall.
“Put your head between your knees!” Mom yelled. “Lock your hands behind your head like this!” She illustrated, lacing her fingers.
I followed her directions, trying to stay as calm as she appeared to be, but my hands shook and tears welled in my eyes.
“We’re going to be okay,” she yelled.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t so sure.
She broke her crash position and gave me a rough hug. “I love you, Aphra,” she said hoarsely. “No matter what happens, always remember that.”
I hugged her back—for the first time in four years—just before we went down.
CHAPTER 7
The world spun first sideways, then upside down. I clung to the cargo netting, trying to focus only on Seth and my mom as my body slammed into the floor, the ceiling, the wall. If I was going to die, I wanted theirs to be the last faces I saw.
Suddenly we jumped as if we’d been swatted by a giant hand. The plane flipped. Tumbled. Dropped. There was a horrible screeching sound. Crashing. Shattering glass and tearing metal. And then . . . we stopped.
The smell of pine trees and rain and freshly shredded wood filled the plane. Cool air washed over my skin. I craned my neck to see a huge tree branch impaled through the windshield, illuminated by a faint blue light from the instrument panel. I couldn’t see Ryan or Stuart.
“Mom?” I nudged her from the snarl of netting we were caught in. She coughed.
“Is she all right?” Seth’s voice sounded very close, but I couldn’t see him as I hung upside down in the cargo net. I reached back a hand and he brushed my fingers with his. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” And I was. Except that all the blood was rushing to my head, making my eyes bulge and my lips ache. My pulse throbbed in the bump on my scalp. “Help me get out of this.” I started to pull my arm free of the net.
“Careful,” Mom said, her voice weak. “There could be glass . . . sharp metal.”
Inch by inch I lowered my body to the ceiling of the plane. I helped Mom out of her straps while Seth undid his.
My head was still spinning. “What happened?”
“The pontoons . . . ” Mom said. “They must have slowed us down when we hit the trees.”
“Hit trees,” Seth repeated. He sounded dazed. “We crashed.”
“Yes,” Mom managed.
We sat still, letting it sink it. All around us it was eerily quiet.
“Where’s Stuart?” I asked.
“I don’t see him,” Seth said softly.
I closed my eyes, imagining him thrown from the plane, his lifeless body lying broken and still on the forest floor. “What about . . . Ryan?”
Seth craned his neck to see around the seats. “He’s still strapped in. It looks like there’s blood on the glass in front of him. His head probably hit the windshield.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
We let that one sink in, too. And then Mom coughed. “We need . . . to get out. The forest can . . . be dry in August. Flammable. If the plane . . .”
She didn’t need to say anything more. Seth sat up straight. “I’ll check the door.”
“Be careful!” I said. “The glass.”
Seth slid, carefully, cautiously, inch by inch to the door. He pushed against it. “It’s jammed.”
“Try again,” I urged.
Seth wrestled with the handle and pushed a shoulder against the door. It didn’t budge. “Can we get out through the window? It’s already broken.”
I chewed my lip and looked to my mom for guidance, but she was quiet and I couldn’t see her face very well in the shadows. “I don’t know. The glass is pretty jagged. That’s probably our last resort for an escape route.” I crawled carefully toward him. “I’ll help with the door. We’re upside down, so the pressure points might be different. Let’s try pushing from a different angle.”
“I can’t even get the handle to budge.”
“We’ll do it together.”
We wrestled with the door until finally the latch gave way. The metal screeched as Seth pushed the door open.
It was unbelievably dark outside. “Where are we?” I whispered.
Seth shivered beside me. “I don’t know. I can’t see anything.”
Which was true. The moon barely managed to break through the clouds overhead, let alone direct its weak light through the tall trees that surrounded us. The only things I could make out were tree trunks and the heavy, bone-chilling mist that drifted in through the cabin door.
It almost made me want to close the door again. Mom had said that the plane could start a fire, but I wasn’t so sure. We hadn’t set off any sparks yet. Maybe we were okay. Was I willing to risk our lives on a maybe, though? “We should check around the plane. Make sure there’s no fuel leaks or anything.”
“Maybe we should get your friend out of that chair first,” Seth said, pointing to where Ryan dangled upside down from the pilot’s seat.
I flinched at his word choice. Ryan was hardly my friend. Not that it really made a difference, but I didn’t like the implication. Of course I had
earned it.
Seth eyed the gash on Ryan’s forehead and the blood that steadily drip, drip, dripped onto the ceiling. “Maybe we should check if he even has a pulse.”
I reached up between the seats and felt for Ryan’s neck. When I touched him, he moaned. I yanked my hand back. “He’s alive.”
Seth pulled a face as though disappointed. “Okay. Let’s get him down out of that chair.”
He reached beneath Ryan to support his weight as I undid the harness. Ryan slumped downward and I grabbed his legs to keep him from falling right on top of Seth.
His foot slipped away and swung down, crashing into the branches.
“Aaaah!” someone cried out.
“Seth! It’s Stuart!” I dropped Ryan’s legs and dug under the prickly pine branch. “He’s wedged under here.”
Seth lowered Ryan to the ceiling of the plane and hurried to my side. Together we worked Stuart loose and pulled him from under the branches. Even in the darkness I could tell he was pretty badly scratched up. But at least he was breathing on his own. Since he’d been in the front with no seat belt on when we crashed, that in itself was a miracle.
Everything I knew about first aid said that we should have put both of them on a stiff board before moving them, in case they had hurt their spines. Unfortunately, we had no boards.
I peered into the dark belly of the plane. “Let’s take the nets down,” I said to Seth. “We can use them to drag these guys clear of the control area so we can help them.”
We unhooked the nets and laid a couple of them flat. Carefully, we slid Stuart onto the nets and dragged him to the rear of the plane and then did the same for Ryan.
“How is he?” Mom asked. She sounded groggy.
“He’s alive,” I told her. Beyond that, I didn’t know. “How are you?”
“A little banged up, but fine.” She crawled over to where Ryan lay. “Looks like he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” I said, straightening the nets. “They look a lot worse than they are.” In fact, his head looked pretty bad, but I didn’t want to think about what that might mean. The first-aid training I had received when I got my lifeguard certification back home only covered so much. “We should probably see if we can stop the bleeding. There was a first-aid kit in here somewhere . . .”
The light from the instrument panel didn’t quite reach to the back of the plane, where I had left the kit—not that it would still be there after the way we’d been tossed about. “See if you can find it,” I said to Mom. “Seth and I are going to check the plane outside to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up to become a giant tiki torch.”
Even in the shadows I didn’t miss the way her brows raised as I was talking. Whatever. Maybe it was time she got a taste of what it felt like to have someone else tell her what to do.
Seth jumped down from the plane and reached back to help me down. I didn’t really need the help, but I appreciated the gesture.
“I can hardly see anything out here,” I said. “Can you?”
“Not much.” He tightened his grip on my hand. “Where do you think we are?”
“I can’t tell. Someplace with really big trees.”
“Thanks, Sherlock.”
“Maybe we’re on a mountain. The ground’s sloping pretty steep here. Plus it’s cold. Much colder than it was in Seattle. So we’re probably at a higher elevation.”
“Not bad.”
“I try.”
“Well, let’s get looking, since we can see so well.”
We felt our way around the plane. Between the mist and the ground cover and the fact that there was no light to speak of, we pretty much had to. I fell more than once anyway, the ground was so uneven.
I wasn’t exactly sure what aviation fuel smelled like, but I didn’t smell anything that didn’t seem to belong in the woods. As far as we could see, there were no sparks being thrown, there was no imminent danger of fire . . . especially since my feet were soggy just from walking around. I couldn’t imagine how anything so damp could be tinder dry. Maybe Mom was mistaken. But I wasn’t going to tell her that.
When we crawled back into the plane, Stuart was sitting up. He may have been leaning against the wall of the plane for support, but for someone who should by all rights be dead, leaning was remarkable progress.
“What did you find?” he asked. He practically grunted the words.
“Nothing exciting,” I said. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better.”
I crawled across the floor. “Where do you hurt?”
His laugh was more of a horrible wheezing sound. “What are you going to do? Fix me?”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mom said from the shadows. “He’s in a lot of pain.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He may have broken some ribs. Or at the very least bruised them.”
“Ouch,” Seth said. “That’s got to hurt.”
Stuart wheezed the awful laugh again, but this time it ended in a spasm of coughing. That must have hurt even worse, judging by the little sobbing noises that followed.
“Isn’t there anything we can do to help him?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mom said. “We can get him to a doctor.”
Ryan could use a doctor, too. And probably Mom. Since she had lost consciousness after the explosion, I worried that she might have a concussion. But first we had to find our way out of the woods. Literally.
“Mom? Do you know how to read the navigation system on one of these things?”
“Most likely. Yes.”
“The lights are still on. Do you think . . . ?”
“Not a bad idea.” She climbed up front and I followed her. She pressed some buttons and turned some knobs, but apparently whatever she hoped to accomplish didn’t happen. She grumbled.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “No luck. The navi’s broken. So is the radio.”
“So where are we?”
“We couldn’t have gone far from Seattle,” she said, maybe more to herself than to me, but I jumped on it anyway.
“That’s what I was thinking. We couldn’t have been in the air more than half an hour.”
“True. But I had no orientation from the back of that plane. I can’t even guess in which direction we were flying.”
“Northeast,” Stuart said weakly. “I saw . . . the instrument panel before we went down. We . . . were headed northeast.”
“So we’re—what? In the North Cascades?” Mom asked.
“That would be . . . my guess,” he wheezed. “West side of . . . the pass, judging by the vegetation.”
“Where was he taking us?” I wondered aloud.
“More importantly, who was waiting for us at the destination?” Mom cleared her throat. “Seth, the plane’s locator device is flashing.” She paused meaningfully. “It appears to be working fine.”
Seth flinched. “So if Ryan’s ‘friends’ were tracking the plane . . .”
Mom nodded slowly. “If we stay here, they would find us, yes.”
“Then we need to get out of here!”
“Wait a second. Hold on.” Stuart pushed himself up on one elbow. “Where would we go? We have no idea where we are.”
“We’re in the mountains, right?” Seth said. “We head downhill and—”
“Downhill which way? We’re in the Cascades, son. Mountains in all directions. With no clear sense of location, you could hike for days and end up in some valley further away from civilization than when you started.”
Panic crossed Seth’s face. He didn’t have days to wander around in the wilderness. He had to get the ring to his dad. Immediately.
“We could wait till morning,” I suggested. “Once we can see what’s around us, it’ll be easier to get our bearings.”
Seth shook his head. “Whoever Ryan’s working for isn’t going to wait till morning to send someone to look for the plane.“
Stuart sc
offed. “They’d have to hike in.”
“Unless they had a helicopter,” I argued.
Mom cut in. “We should wait until morning. It’s too dangerous to try and climb down in the dark. I’ve hiked up here before. Even in the light, the vegetation can be deceiving. The ground can drop off suddenly, and if you don’t see where you’re going, that can spell disaster. Besides, we’d be half frozen before sunrise. We can keep warmer inside the plane. If we hear anyone coming, we can hide before they reach the crash site.”
“What?” Seth drew back. “No. We should at least try—”
“Seth, you were out there,” Mom said. “Could you see where you were going?”
His shoulders slumped. “No.”
“All right, then. We wait for sunrise.”
We settled down in a huddle to keep warm. Even with the plane shut tight, the cold crept in, licking at my skin, sending shivers throughout my body. I was glad for the sweatshirt Seth had given me.
Before long, I could hear Stuart snoring softly. Even Seth’s breathing settled into a slow, steady rhythm. As tired as I was, I couldn’t make myself sleep. I shivered and snuggled closer to my mom. She’d been trying to act tough and in control, but I was worried about her. She’d been knocked out and then banged around pretty good. I couldn’t help but notice that she had let me take the lead a couple of times since the crash. That wasn’t like her. She could have a concussion. The climb down would not be easy for her.
With his injuries, it would be near to impossible for Stuart. I wondered if maybe there was an alternative to hiking down the mountain. Maybe we could hide and signal for help somehow—although I didn’t know how we’d do that without alerting Ryan’s friends.
Mom nudged me. “You should try to sleep,” she whispered.