“Just brace yourself and I’ll climb on your back,” Titus said. “I can put most of my weight on my arms.”
“Go ahead,” Paul said.
Titus hoisted himself up, using his feet to climb Paul’s back. When he cleared the opening, he swung his rear end down so he could sit and see where they had crashed.
“We’re close to shore,” he yelled down. “We’re on the shore, really.”
He put his head back up and looked around. Mountains, water, trees. That was all he saw.
Paul Eliot climbed onto the plane’s fuselage beside Titus. It wasn’t that hard to do, Paul realized. He was not the most athletic guy in the world, so if he could do it, so could others. The skin of the fuselage, however, was slick and wet. He sat carefully, his legs still back in the body of the plane. Down below, everything felt crazy and disordered. Up here, however, the night was calm. His hands out at his sides to brace himself, he looked around slowly, sensitive to the plane’s annoying habit of shifting. Titus sat across from him, his legs also in the door frame. They looked like two prairie dogs, Paul thought, sitting beside their hole.
“We have to get to shore,” Titus said.
“How?” Paul asked. He didn’t see a way. Or rather, he didn’t see an easy way. The doorway where they sat rose at least seven or eight feet above the water. To get to shore, you would have to jump or slide off the body of the plane into the water, then swim to land. On a bright, sunny day, it might have been almost fun to try it, but right now, with the sun going down, the moonlight painting the tops of the pines, it didn’t seem like a good idea. Never jump into water you don’t know, Paul thought. That had always been a family rule. Anything could be right under the surface — rocks, a piece of metal from the plane, anything. If you got impaled by a piece of metal up here — wherever “here” was — you were a goner.
“We need to find a rope or something … or tie some life jackets together,” Titus said, his eyes studying the problem. “I don’t know what we should do exactly, but we can’t stay in the plane. It could go under.”
“This is crazy,” Paul said, looking around.
It was getting dark, but he saw the place in outline. They were on a shoreline of a lake, at least he thought it was a lake, and there were a couple million pine trees in every direction. And it was cold. He felt the frigid air spilling down on them, or maybe rising from the water, he couldn’t tell. Either way, it was not a night for a swim.
“We have to get people working together,” Titus said. “We have to calm down. Can you get your dad to stop yelling?”
Paul nodded. Then, gradually, he realized Titus meant right now. Right this second. He nodded again and held out his hand. Titus grabbed it and lowered Paul back into the plane’s interior.
“Dad,” Paul said.
His father kept yelling to open the door. The door is open, Paul wanted to say, but he saw that his father had gone a little nutty. It was weird to see his father like that. It was weird to be calmer than your own father. He reached across the back of a seat and grabbed his dad’s hand. His dad shook it off and then slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat, came back to himself. Paul saw his father’s personality crawl back behind his eyes again.
“It’s open,” Paul said. “The door is open.”
“Hey. Hey. Heyyyyyyyyyy,” Titus yelled.
The interior of the plane gradually went silent. Titus looked slowly around, trying to assess the situation. That was always the Boy Scout way: Think, then act. Too many people did the opposite in an emergency. If you stopped to think, really think, then you could usually sort things out. Leadership was the single most important lesson you learned as an Eagle Scout, and leadership meant keeping your cool and channeling your emotions into productive behavior. That was basic Boy Scout training. Titus said a little thank you to all the Scoutmasters who had trained him up through Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life, and now Eagle. He realized he wouldn’t trade all that training, all that practice, for a million dollars. People could think scouting was dorky, but he couldn’t imagine any better motto than Be Prepared for the current situation.
“We need to get off the plane,” Titus shouted, then realized his voice was too loud and would only add to the potential panic. He lowered it. “This door opens to the top of the plane. We have to make a rope that we can tie off down here and use to go down the side of the plane. Look around you and find anything that can be tied together. Then pass it to Paul. If you are injured, let us know. If someone near you is injured, then we’ll help.”
“Jenky won’t wake up,” Jill Heatherton said. “She looks strange.”
Titus caught Mr. Eliot’s eye.
“Mr. Eliot,” he said, thinking it was best to give Mr. Eliot something to do to keep him from going nutty again, “will you please check on Jenky? The rest of you, start finding things to build a rope. We can make a camp on the shore for tonight. We can get a fire started. But first we need to get out of the plane.”
No one said anything. No one moved, either.
“I think the pilot is dead,” Suryadi said.
Suryadi’s seat was closest to the cockpit, Titus knew.
“We’ll check on him,” Titus said. “Now, rope, everyone. We need to climb down.”
Titus watched as E stood up and pulled two blankets together. She knotted them quickly, then passed them over to Paul. Titus had never seen E act so practically, and it made him wonder what else she could do in a pinch. She was tall and beautiful, and her singing video had gone viral, so he had automatically assumed she wouldn’t be much help in the current situation. He assumed she was a diva, a girl super into herself and her looks. But he had been wrong about Paul, and he was wrong about E, apparently. He scolded himself not to judge people hastily, or to jump to conclusions from their outward appearances. He knew better. E might be cute and dance across the computer screens of a couple million viewers, but she also looked calm and completely in control inside the plane’s fuselage. He promised himself he wouldn’t make such a mistake again.
“Like that, the way E is doing it,” Titus said and then got Paul to boost him up again. The stars blinked in the sky and the moon sent a yellow path across the water behind them.
Web tested the blanket rope and felt as though he had lived this particular nightmare before. It took him a second — with people calling below him and Super Scout Titus Summers waiting in the water to help him get his feet under him — to remember what it was. Then it came to him, and he nodded a little in satisfaction at recalling the precise origin of his thought: gym class. It was the day they’d climbed a rope for a grade. It had something to do with the Governor’s Physical Fitness Test, and so they had all hung around the bottom of a thick rope, the high end tied to a beam in the ceiling, and were told to climb. Even the girls had to climb, but none of them did. They just pretended and swung from side to side, but the boys had to act macho and climb as high as they could, and Web knew his fat butt and chubby arms were not going to go up a rope any time soon. He grabbed the rope and made some faces and pretended to climb, pantomiming, and everyone had laughed, because he could be funny, he knew, but his feet didn’t leave the gym floor.
And here he was again. Back in gym class.
“Just slowly come down,” Titus coached. “It isn’t that far. If you hold on, I’ll be able to grab your feet and lower you. No worries.”
“Thanks,” Web said, then mumbled, “Super Scout,” under his breath.
He lay on his belly and slowly began lowering himself. The surface of the plane’s body was slick as butter, and he felt himself slipping. The rope shot through his hands, and he felt himself falling, falling, and then he hit the water. It was cold as anything, freezing in fact, and he shot back up, his breath contracting in his lungs.
“You had to hold on,” Titus said.
He had a bloody nose, Web saw.
“Your foot hit my nose!” Titus said, touching his right nostril. “You had to hold on!”
; Web felt a grin move across his lips. He had bloodied the great Titus Summers’s nose. That was one for the books.
“Sorry,” he said to Titus.
“Go that way. You can walk. It’s not that deep.”
Web put his feet down on the bottom. It was rocky, not muddy like the ponds in western Pennsylvania. Ahead of him, he saw the group assembled, all of them staring at the plane as if they expected it to rise out of the water and take off. Mosquitoes started buzzing in his ears.
Seldon handed Buford up to Paul. It had taken forever to strap Buford into a tiny life jacket. The life jacket formed a harness, and he had tied the makeshift rope into the back of it. They would have to lower the dog, let him slide along the fuselage like a tea bag dropping into hot water. Something like that.
“Got him,” Paul said.
“Are you sure?”
“He’s not liking this.”
“Just lower him quickly. Don’t give him a chance to see what’s going on.”
Seldon heard Buford growl, and he didn’t blame him. Then he sounded really angry. The growl turned into a snarl, and Seldon climbed up to the opening and stuck his head out.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
But Paul — little, mousy Paul, Seldon marveled — stood on the fuselage, looking over the edge until he heard Titus yell below.
“Got him,” Titus said.
Seldon heard people calling Buford from shore. He wondered if the stupid dog could swim. All animals could swim naturally, he remembered, except humans. But Buford was just stupid enough to swim the wrong way.
Before he could say or do anything else, the plane shifted again. It was the water seeping on board, Seldon guessed. It was everywhere now, as high as the seat backs in places, and it was probably pushing air out of some cavities, weighting others with its density. Eventually, Seldon thought, the plane would settle once and for all on its belly.
“You’re next,” Paul said from the open door above him, his head sticking through like an upside-down Spider-Man.
“What about …” Seldon said, moving his chin to indicate Jenky and the pilot.
“We’ll get them in the morning,” Paul said. “Right now we have to get away from the plane. It feels like it’s going to go under.”
“Seems weird to leave them….”
“In the morning,” Paul said. “Safety first.”
It made sense, Seldon agreed. But it was a hard kind of sense. He climbed into position, then used the bags they had placed as steps to scramble through the door opening. Paul showed him how to roll on his belly and hold on to the rope as it went over the edge. Seldon lowered himself carefully until he felt Titus grab his feet. Twice more hand-over-hand, and his feet plunged into the water.
My loafers, he thought.
Then he turned to see Buford paddling in circles. The dog wore his ridiculous life jacket and seemed to be waiting for him. Seldon reluctantly followed him to shore.
E knew what they needed to do from camping trips with her parents, but she couldn’t get anyone’s attention. Everyone talked at once. That was understandable, given what had happened, but it didn’t help. Talk seldom helped, she thought. She heard the voices going round and round, recounting what they had experienced during the crash, all the “likes” and “you knows,” all the stories trying to explain what had happened when it was clear no one knew what had happened. What was the point, she wondered?
The facts were simple: They were a bunch of kids from a semilame television show who’d had the bad fortune to crash in what looked like a complete wilderness. They had no adults along except for Seldon Eggerts, the show’s producer, and Walter Eliot, Paul’s father, who was the sort of nerdy middle-aged man who thought it gained him props when he told people he had an authentic Lionel Train set in the basement. Mr. Eliot didn’t really belong on the plane, but he had wheedled his way on board, claiming he was Paul’s manager or something. No one believed it, least of all Paul, but sometimes you had to pretend what people wanted you to pretend. Now they were all blabbing, probably half in shock, but it was getting colder, and no one seemed bothered by that fact.
When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she made a high-pitched screeching sound. It was from a cartoon — she had forgotten which one — and was a tactic that she and her brother used in the backseat of the family car on long trips when her parents hopped out to get gas or use the restroom. It drove the other person insane. The trick was to start low, just on the outside of people’s hearing range, then incrementally increase the volume until it became annoyingly painful. Then go a little further. Her brother, Ralphy, called it the Hippo Hurricane. It wasn’t a bad name.
So she used the Hippo Hurricane until gradually, one by one, people turned to face her. When she had all of their attention, she lowered the volume and partially swallowed the sound. She didn’t want them to think they could get her to click it off just like that.
“We need a fire,” she said. “Big duh, I know, but we need it now. We can talk later.”
No one moved.
“Now,” she said, underlining the word with intonation, “everyone collect wood if you’re not injured. There’s plenty here on the beach. We’ll build a fire right here.”
“What was that sound?” someone asked, but at least people began moving.
“She’s right,” someone else said, but it was too dark to see who had said it.
E walked down the shoreline, aware of other people moving around, too. They needed a fire pronto. Whatever else happened, a fire was a top priority, because it was cold and everyone was wet. She couldn’t say for sure, but she imagined the temperature had fallen into the forties. At least. She could see her breath sometimes when she bent to pick up hunks of pine, and the rocks under her feet were slippery with frost.
When she had a good bundle, she stopped and looked around. She deliberately forced herself to take inventory. They were on the shoreline of a lake. The lake went on forever. Beyond the lake, she spotted the dim outline of mountains. She knew the sun set in the west. So the lakeside camp looked westward, because the sun set behind the mountains and threw its last light across the lake. That was worth knowing, she figured. Her dad had always made her take notice of things like that. He had always said there was a difference between looking and observing, which was something he’d gotten out of Sherlock Holmes. But she knew what he meant. It was important to see, not just let your eyes bounce off things with a kind of wild monkey vision.
She carried an armload of wood back to the group and dropped it in the pile she had put together.
“Everyone should get more wood,” she announced to people as they streamed in and out. “You always need more than you think you do.”
“Who has a match?” Web asked, ignoring her. “And no one’s found a knife? If I had a knife, I could whittle some shavings and it would be a lot easier to start a fire.”
He bent over the ring where they hoped to build a fire. He was probably the last person who should be trying to make a fire, E thought, but she didn’t think it would help to point it out.
“Come on,” she said to Jill. “Help me.”
Jill walked behind her like a robot. E didn’t blame her. Jenky was still on the plane.
“I’ll load you up,” E said to Jill when they found another bunch of driftwood. “Just hold out your arms.”
Jill did as she was told. E slapped at the mosquitoes around her own head. The bugs were intense. Beyond intense. Every time you breathed, you sucked in insects. Stick by stick, she loaded Jill’s arms. E felt like the mad scientist with the evil assistant, Igor. Jill just looked dead in the eyes.
“Do you have lip gloss or Vaseline?” Titus asked when they came back.
“Why?” E asked.
“Oil-based. You can make a wicked fire-starter with Vaseline,” he answered.
E tapped her pockets. Her clothes were soaked. She found a tiny tub of lip gloss in her jeans pocket.
“Here,” she said.
Titus handed it to Web. Web smooched some paper around in the lip gloss, then put it under the bunch of twigs he had gathered. Titus squatted next to him and added pine needles. That made more sense, E knew. She had made enough beach fires with her parents. They always used pine needles and pinecones.
“Go ahead,” Titus said.
The fire started like a tiny old man dancing in an empty room. Then, slowly, it began to grow. Once, Titus loaded on too much pine, and E worried that he had put it out, but then the flame began to lick around it. She grew conscious of everyone circling the tiny flame, rooting for it to grow. Web kept blowing on the bottom, which wasn’t always a bad idea, but it could also kill the flames. Fortunately, the wood was so dry and seasoned that it began snapping and throwing sparks almost immediately. E felt a trickle of pride that the fire had been her idea. It threw light when it grew to knee height, and she saw people’s outlines slowly emerge from the darkness: the survivors, the ones who had come flying in like an arrow from the sky.
Suryadi looked at his hand. He had just finished reaching under his shirt to touch his side at the warm place. That’s what he called the center of the pain. He did not want to think about what it might be. Once, in his native village near Kuta Puri, he had seen a fisherman come in after being attacked by a shark. The man had been spearfishing, and the frenzied movement of the speared fish, the bloody bodies attached to a stringer at the fisherman’s belt, had attracted the shark. The man had been bitten in the side and under the right arm, and now Suryadi thought of his own side as though it had been bitten by a shark. That was impossible, of course, but something had wounded him in the ribs, and now he had a warm place that throbbed and quivered and felt empty. Yes, empty. Blood tried to fill the empty warm place.
Crash Page 2