Cold Fire (25 page)

“Feel what, Norby?”

“My foot. It’s funny, like something’s holding it, ’cause I can’t get loose, but then I can’t feel my foot—you know?—like it maybe isn’t there.”

Her stomach twisted at the image his words conjured in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe his foot was only pinched between two surfaces, just numb, but she had to think fast and move fast because he might be losing blood at an alarming rate.

The space in which he lay was too cramped for her to squeeze in past him, find his foot, and disentangle it. Instead, she rolled onto her back, bent her legs, and braced the soles of her shoes against the seats that peaked over, him.

“Okay, honey, I’m going to straighten my legs, try to shove this up a little, just a couple inches. When it starts lifting, try to pull your foot out of there.”

As a snake of thin gray smoke slipped from the dark space behind Norby and coiled in front of his face, he wheezed and said, “There’s d-d-dead people in here with me.”

“That’s okay, baby,” she said, tensing her legs, flexing them a little to test the weight she was trying to lever off him. “You won’t be there for long, not for long.”

“My seat, then an empty seat, then dead people,” Norby said shakily.

She wondered how long the trauma of this experience would shape his nightmares and bend the course of his life.

“Here goes,” she said.

She pressed upward with both feet. The pile of seats and junk and bodies was heavy enough, but the half-collapsed section of the ceiling, pushing down on everything else, did not seem to have any give in it. Holly strained harder until the steel deck, covered with only a thin carpet, pressed painfully into her back. She let out an involuntary sob of agony. Then she strained even harder, harder, angry that she could not move it,
furious,
and—

—it moved.

Only a fraction of an inch.

But it moved.

Holly put even more into it, found reserves she did not know she possessed, forced her feet upward until the pain throbbing in her legs was markedly worse than that in her back. The intruding tangle of ceiling plates and struts creaked and bent back an inch, two inches; the seats shoved up just that far.

“It’s still got me,” the boy said.

More smoke was oozing out of the lightless space around him. It was not pale-gray but darker than before, sootier, oilier, and with a new foul stench. She hoped to God the desultory flames had not, at last, ignited the upholstery and foam padding that formed the cocoon from which the boy was struggling to emerge.

The muscles in her legs were quivering. The pain in her back had seeped all the way through to her chest; each heartbeat was an aching thud, each inhalation was a torment.

She did not think she could hold the weight any longer, let alone lift it higher. But abruptly it jolted up another inch, then slightly more.

Norby issued a cry of pain and excitement. He wriggled forward. “I got away, it let go of me.”

Relaxing her legs and easing the load back into place, Holly realized that the boy had thought what she, too, might have thought if she’d been a five-year-old in that hellish position: that his ankle had been clenched in the cold and iron-strong hand of one of the dead people in there with him.

She slid aside, giving Norby room to pull himself out of the hollow under the seats. He joined her in the pocket of empty space amidst the rubble and snuggled against her for comforting.

From farther back in the plane, Jim shouted: “Holly!”

“I found him!”

“I’ve got a woman here, I’m getting her out.”

“Great!” she shouted.

Outside, the pitch of the sirens spiraled lower and finally down into silence as the rescue teams arrived.

Although more blackish smoke was drifting out of the dark space from which Norby had escaped, Holly took the time to examine his foot. It flopped to one side, sickeningly loose, like the foot of an old rag doll. It was broken at the ankle. She tore his sneaker off his rapidly swelling foot. Blood darkened his white sock, but when she looked at the flesh beneath, she discovered that it was only abraded and scored by a few shallow cuts. He was not going to bleed to death, but soon he was going to become aware of the excruciating pain of the broken ankle.

“Let’s go, let’s get out,” she said.

She intended to take him back the way she had come, but when she glanced to her left, she saw another crack in the fuselage. This one was immediately aft of the cockpit bulkhead, only a few feet away. It extended up the entire curve of the wall but did not continue onto the ceiling. A section of interior paneling, the insulation beneath it, structural beamwork, and exterior plating had either blown inward among the other debris or been wrenched out into the field. The resultant hole was not large, but it was plenty big enough for her to squeeze through with the boy.

As they balanced on the rim of the ravaged hull, a rescue worker appeared in the plowed field about twelve feet below them. He held his arms out for the boy.

Norby jumped. The man caught him, moved back.

Holly jumped, landed on her feet.

“You his mother?” the man asked.

“No. I just heard him crying, went in after him. He’s got a broken ankle there.”

“I was with my Uncle Frank,” Norby said.

“Okay,” the rescue worker said, trying to strike a cheerful note, “then let’s find Uncle Frank.”

Norby said flatly, “Uncle Frank’s dead.”

The man looked at Holly, as if she might know what to say.

Holly was mute and shaken, filled with despair that a boy of five should have to experience such an ordeal. She wanted to hold him, rock him in her arms, and tell him that everything would be right with the world.

But nothing is right with the world, she thought, because Death is part of it. Adam disobeyed and ate the apple, gobbled up the fruit of knowledge, so God decided to let him know all sorts of things, both light and dark. Adam’s children learned to hunt, to farm, to thwart the winter and cook their food with fire, make tools, build shelters. And God, wanting to give them a
well-rounded
education, let them learn, oh, maybe a million ways to suffer and die. He encouraged them to learn language, reading and writing, biology, chemistry, physics, the secrets of the genetic code: And He taught them the exquisite horrors of brain tumors, muscular dystrophy, bubonic plague, cancer run amok in their bodies—and not least of all airplane crashes. You wanted knowledge, God was happy to oblige, He was an enthusiastic teacher, a demon for knowledge, piling it on in such weight and exotic detail that sometimes you felt you were going to be crushed under it.

By the time the rescue worker turned away and carried Norby across the field toward a white ambulance parked on the edge of the runway, Holly had gone from despair to anger. It was a useless rage, for there was no one but God against whom she could direct it, and the expression of it could change nothing. God would not free the human race from the curse of death just because Holly Thorne thought it was a gross injustice.

She realized that she was in the grip of a fury not unlike that which seemed to motivate Jim Ironheart. She remembered what he had said during their whispered conversation in row seventeen, when she had tried to bully him into saving not just the Dubroveks but everyone aboard Flight 246:
“I hate death, people dying, I
hate
it!”
Some of the people he saved had quoted him making similar remarks, and Holly remembered what Viola Moreno had said about the deep and quiet sadness in him that perhaps grew out of being an orphan at the age of ten. He quit teaching, walked away from his career, because Larry Kakonis’s suicide had made all his effort and concern seem pointless. That reaction at first appeared extreme to Holly, but now she understood it perfectly. She felt the same urge to cast aside a mundane life and do something more meaningful, to crack the rule of fate, to wrench the very fabric of the universe into a shape other than what God seemed to prefer for it.

For a fragile moment, standing in that Iowa field with the wind blowing the stink of death to her, watching the rescue worker walk away with the little boy who had almost died, Holly felt closer to Jim Ironheart than she had ever been to another human being.

She went looking for him.

The scene around the broken DC-10 had become more chaotic than it had been immediately after the crash. Fire trucks had driven onto the plowed field. Streams of rich white foam arced over the broken plane, frosted the fuselage in whipped-cream-like gobs, and damped the flames on the surrounding fuel-soaked earth. Smoke still churned out of the midsection, plumed from every rent and shattered window; shifting to the whims of the wind, a black canopy spread over them and cast eerie, constantly changing shadows as it filtered the afternoon sunshine, raising in her mind the image of a grim kaleidoscope in which all the pieces of glass were either black or gray. Rescue workers and paramedics swarmed over the wreckage, searching for survivors, and their numbers were so unequal to the awesome task that some of the more fortunate passengers pitched in to help. Other passengers—some so untouched by the experience that they appeared freshly showered and dressed, others filthy and disheveled—stood alone or in small groups, waiting for the minibuses that would take them to the Dubuque terminal, chattering nervously or stunned into silence. The only things threading the crash scene together and providing it with some coherence were the static-filled voices crackling on shortwave radios and walkie-talkies.

Though Holly was searching for Jim Ironheart, she found instead a young woman in a yellow shirtwaist dress. The stranger was in her early twenties, slender, auburn-haired, with a porcelain face; and though uninjured she badly needed help. She was standing back from the still-smoking rear section of the airliner, shouting a name over and over again: “Kenny! Kenny! Kenny!” She had shouted it so often that her voice was hoarse.

Holly put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and said, “Who is he?”

The stranger’s eyes were the precise blue of wisteria—and glazed. “Have you seen Kenny?”

“Who is he, dear?”

“My husband.”

“What does he look like?”

Dazed, she said, “We were on our honeymoon.”

“I’ll help you look for him.”

“No.”

“Come on, kid, it’ll be all right.”

“I don’t want to look for him,” the woman said, allowing Holly to turn her away from the plane and lead her toward the ambulances. “I don’t want to see him. Not the way he’ll be. All dead. All broken up and burned and dead.”

They walked together through the soft, tilled earth, where a new crop would be planted in late winter and sprout up green and tender in the spring, by which time all signs of death would have been eradicated and nature’s illusion of life-everlasting restored.

Something was happening to Holly. A fundamental change was taking place in her. She didn’t understand what it was yet, didn’t know what it would mean or how different a person she would be when it was complete, but she was aware of profound movement in the bedrock of her heart, her mind.

Because her inner world was in such turmoil, she had no spare energy to cope with the outer world, so she placidly followed the standard post-crash program with her fellow passengers.

She was impressed by the web of emotional, psychological, and practical support provided to survivors of Flight 246. Dubuque’s medical and civil-defense community—which obviously had planned for such an emergency—responded swiftly and effectively. In addition psychologists, counselors, ministers, priests, and a rabbi were available to the uninjured passengers within minutes of their arrival at the terminal. A large VIP lounge—with mahogany tables and comfortable chairs upholstered in nubby blue fabric—had been set aside for their use, ten or twelve telephone lines sequestered from normal airport operations, and nurses provided to monitor them for signs of delayed shock.

United’s employees were especially solicitous, assisting with local overnight accommodations and new travel arrangements, as quickly as possible reuniting the uninjured with friends or relatives who had been transported to various hospitals, and compassionately conveying word of loved ones’ deaths. Their horror and grief seemed as deep as that of the passengers, and they were shaken and remorseful that such a thing could happen with one of their planes. Holly saw a young woman in a United jacket turn suddenly and leave the room in tears, and all the others, men and women alike, were pale and shaky. She found herself wanting to console them, put an arm around them and tell them that even the best-built and best-maintained machines were doomed to fail sooner or later because human knowledge was imperfect and darkness was loose in the world.

Courage, dignity, and compassion were so universally in evidence under such trying circumstances that Holly was dismayed by the full-scale arrival of the media. She knew that dignity, at least, would be an early victim of their assault. To be fair, they were only doing their job, the problems and pressures of which she knew too well. But the percentage of reporters who could perform their work properly was no greater than the percentage of plumbers who were competent or the percentage of carpenters who could miter a doorframe perfectly every time. The difference was that unfeeling, inept, or downright hostile reporters could cause their subjects considerable embarrassment and, in some cases, malign the innocent and permanently damage reputations, which was a lot worse than a backed-up drain or mismatched pieces of wood molding.

The whole spectrum of TV, radio, and print journalists swarmed into the airport and soon penetrated even those areas where their presence was officially restricted. Some were respectful of the survivors’ emotional and mental condition, but most of them badgered the United employees about “responsibility” and “moral obligation,” or hounded the survivors to reveal their innermost fears and relive the recent horror for the delectation of news consumers. Though Holly knew the drill and was expert at fending them off, she was asked the same question half a dozen times by four different reporters within fifteen minutes: “How did you feel?” How did you feel when you heard it might be a crash landing? How did you feel when you thought you were going to die? How did you feel when you saw that some of those around you had died?