Flight of Dreams (35 page)

W
erner 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.

W
alter 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.

“Irene!”

Gertrud wonders how Matilde does it, how she goes out the window without Irene. How she chooses her sons over her daughter. But she does. Gertrud blinks and Matilde is scrambling over the windowsill, her feet dangling, and then with a wounded cry that has nothing to do with fire or pain or burning, she drops to the ground below.

Leonhard reaches for Gertrud. He will not wait any longer. But the ship hits the ground and they are knocked apart, thrown to their hands and knees. Chairs slide and topple and join together in a giant knot between them. Leonhard reaches for her. Calls her name with such a note of fear that her heart stumbles in response

He is closer to the window than she is. He could jump. He
should
jump.

Gertrud reaches for him. “Please don't leave me.”

E
milie opens her eyes. She blinks. She sees nothing but red and smells nothing but smoke. Something wet and warm drips down her forehead and into her eyes, and she realizes that her scalp is bleeding. She wipes the back of her hand across her face. Wipes the blood out of her eyes.

Emilie hears a deep groan and realizes it's coming from her. She rolls to her side. Coughs. There is so much smoke in the room and it is so hot and she can't order the frantic bursts of thought that ricochet inside her skull. Emilie tries to remember where she is and what's happening. Matilde Doehner's cabin. Something is very wrong. Something happened and she is hurt and she needs to get out of this room, but she can't remember why or how. And then…

Oh.

An explosion.

Emilie raises herself onto her hands and knees. She crawls forward.

“I
could never leave you,” Leonhard says.

He flings chairs out of the way. She hears this, barely, over the roar of the fire, and then his arm is around her waist like a steel cable and they are loping toward the window. He does not release his grip as they scramble over the edge or even as they hover there for a moment, their legs dangling into space. It is only when they drop into smoke and emptiness that she feels his grip on her waist relax, and only then because he does not want to fall on top of her.

The drop is no more than ten feet, but she has no way of preparing for the impact with so much smoke obscuring her vision. She hits the ground leaning forward with her legs slightly bent and she's pitched forward, unable to break her fall. The impact knocks the air from her lungs. Gertrud lies there, stunned, the side of her face mashed into earth that is strangely damp and cool. Leonhard's feet come into view, and then his hand is at her waistband, yanking her up. But she still can't breathe. Her lips tingle and her eyes burn. There is a scratch on her cheek, and it feels as though she's holding a hot coal in the palm of her right hand. She looks at it, confused, and sees angry red blisters where she beat out the fire on her hemline.

Gertrud feels a bright, clean thread of air entering her lungs and she gasps for it more greedily. Leonhard pulls her forward without an ounce of gentleness. He is almost brutal in his desperation to get out from beneath the burning airship. They run through the obstacle course of debris, fallen girders, flaming furniture, a charred body—she looks away from this—hunks of wreckage and objects so twisted by fire and the impact of the wreck that she cannot even identify them.

They run.

But not fast enough.

Gertrud feels the sparks on her shoulders and in her scalp. She looks up to see an inferno settling down on top of them.

M
ax runs aft. Aft. Aft. He veers around the blazing purgatory toward the passenger decks. Emilie. That is all he can think of. Her name is scorched into his mind. He must find Emilie. He must. He will.

The base of the airship is on the ground and tilting badly, but that does not stop him from throwing his shoulder against the first section of glass that he can find. He expects it to shatter or explode or lacerate his arm, but it does none of these things. The glass leading into the observation deck beside the dining room simply crumbles and he finds himself staring up into the faces of two men and two women. Shell-shocked faces. Almost blank. None of these faces belong to Emilie, but he reaches his arms out nonetheless, pulls the people from the wreckage, shoves them forward. Away.

And then he hears the screams, pitched into the highest key possible by dread. The screams are his. He is calling her name.

“Emilie!”

E
milie hears Max calling her name. She hears the fear and the desperation, and it becomes her compass. Her true north. She turns, searching for it.

She cannot stand.

She cannot see.

She cannot breathe.

But she can hear him. She can hear him calling to her, and it is enough. Emilie crawls forward into the dark, swirling, strangling smoke.

Max.

Max.

Max.

She isn't sure if she says his name out loud. If it is a whisper or a shout. But she calls it. From her heart if from nowhere else.

Hands, knees, one in front of the other. Emilie moves toward him.

“Max.”

W
erner is alive. Wet and freezing and shaking so badly that he drops to the ground in an uncoordinated heap. But he is alive. He squeezes his eyes shut and waits for the pain. Because it is inevitable.

One minute. He can feel the heat of the burning ship rolling off the field.

Three minutes. This is when the screams really begin to bother him. Screams from within the ship. He can hear the terror and fear and pain of men caught in the flames. But there is something worse about the screams coming from every direction across the field. The spectators can do nothing but watch in horror as their friends and loved ones are consumed within the
Hindenburg.
They are watching people die. And they will live to remember it.

Five minutes.

He feels nothing more than a scratch on the palm of his hand where he caught himself. It's not deep. But it stings. And this pain—insignificant though it is—is the thing that roots him to reality. It is the thing that convinces him that he isn't dead.

L
eonhard shoves her. A ruthless thrust to her back that sends Gertrud stumbling forward with a grunt and a curse. Her limbs sprawl and she hits the ground so hard that her vision blurs. The last thing she sees before the
Hindenburg
collapses and explodes into a cloud of sparks is Leonhard lying beside her in a heap of elbows and knees bent at unnatural angles.

They lie ten feet from a girder that glows so red she fears it will melt and the metal will spread toward them. Leonhard reaches out. Grabs her hand and gives it a tender squeeze. But pain rockets through her and she pulls away.

“You're hurt.” Leonhard is on his knees now, inspecting the raw flesh of her palm.

“It's not that bad.”

“It's not good,
Liebchen.
”

A high-pitched keening begins somewhere near them as they scramble to their feet. A form stands in the flames on the other side of the structure, waving madly. Begging.
A man,
she thinks,
desperate to find his way out of the inferno.
She is frozen at the sound of his screams. Terrified. Appalled. But something wakens in Leonhard and he lurches forward with a demon-like urge toward self-destruction, like a moth driven into the flame.

It is Gertrud's turn to save her husband. She calls to him once, twice. She begs him to stop, but he is compelled by the burning figure. Gertrud grabs his arm, her fingernails digging into the bare skin of his forearm, and she throws her weight backward, nearly sitting on the ground before she stops his forward momentum.

“No.” Her command is loud and clear and final. She will not let him go.

Leonhard stops and looks at her, startled. He reluctantly allows himself to be dragged away, the screams still ringing from a dozen places within the ship. Men. Women. Gertrud chooses not to think of Irene Doehner as they stumble away.

M
ax can't see anyone else inside the ship. Everything is consumed by flames. So he stumbles backward. Catches his heel on some plant with deep, sprawling roots.

“Fuck-bloody-fucking-hell-shit-damn-sonavabitch.” It's a prayer. It's a litany. It's the cry of a heart that has found itself in hell and is begging God, not for release, but for the chance to free another.

“Where is she?”

“Where is she?”

“Where is she?”

He repeats this over and over and over as he stumbles away again, toward the control car. He hadn't even bothered to see if anyone remained there. He has simply run after her.

The control car is illumined by raging flames, and when he stretches onto the balls of his feet to look inside he finds it empty. To the bow, then, and around the other side. This is what he intends. There are twelve men in the bow of the ship.
No,
he thinks,
there
were
twelve men.
None could have survived. The nose of the ship is completely incinerated. Rescuers carry a man, a body, still burning, from the blackened hull. He can smell the scorched flesh. The burnt hair. He can hear the gurgling, final groans of a man who did not die quickly enough.

Max Zabel vomits onto his shoes.

Then he breathes in the stench and hurls himself forward again. He circles the fiery mass to the starboard side. Flames press against the window. He sees the silhouette of a hand pressed against the glass and then it clenches and falls.

He moves toward it but someone—nameless and faceless, there might be two because each of his arms is clamped into a vise-like grip—drags him away. Drags him kicking and screaming and cursing and bellowing the only single coherent word that he knows right now.

“Emilie!”

W
erner is on his feet. He isn't sure when he stood or even how he made the decision to do so, but he's away from the wreckage, watching the flames as bile rises in his throat. He doesn't want to witness any more, but he can't seem to turn away.

“What are you doing?”

The voice is harsh and familiar. When a large, heavy hand clamps onto his shoulder he knows who it belongs to: Heinrich Kubis.

Werner turns a dazed and dirty face to the chief steward. The man has never been one to offer pity, but he does so now. Fear has softened him.

“Why are you standing here?” he shouts. “Get away!”

Kubis shoves Werner to get him moving, but the boy, exhausted and confused, goes in the wrong direction. He stumbles into the blanket of low-hanging smoke, toward the blazing wreck instead of away from it.

“Get off the field, you idiot! You'll die!” The words are English, and Werner only catches half of them in the commotion.

His English is limited, and under the circumstances he can't think of the right words to respond to the soldier who has risen out of the smoke. Not with the heat and noise and this man trying to drag him away from the ship.

So finally Werner digs his heels into the ground and points at the fire, then back at himself.
“Ich bin der cabin-boy vom
Hindenburg
!”
And again, louder this time.
“Ich bin der cabin-boy vom
Hindenburg
!”

The soldier takes in his grubby uniform and then lets go, speechless. Then he claps Werner on the shoulder and calls out to the men around them, “Hey! This is the cabin boy!”

Werner is swarmed by young American soldiers who pat him and hug him and shake his hand. They ask him questions he can't answer. They congratulate him on making it out alive, as if his surviving was up to him and not a matter of providence and stupid luck.

The first soldier is the only one to notice that Werner is soaked to the skin and shivering. He takes off his coat and wraps it tightly around the boy. The coat is six inches too long in the sleeves and hangs to the middle of the boy's thighs, but the warmth is a gift. Werner feels his muscles uncoil. His teeth stop chattering. Werner Franz stands with these strangers and watches the
Hindenburg
burn.

After several minutes, a familiar face wanders into view. Wilhelm Balla. He's limping slightly but doesn't seem to be hurt otherwise. Werner has never been so glad to see the sour-faced steward, especially when Balla wraps a protective arm around his shoulders and leads him away.

“Come on, son,” Balla says, “there's nothing more we can do here.”

The last thing Werner Franz sees as he leaves the airfield is the pristine form of Xaver Maier standing near the wreck, his white jacket as clean as though it has just been laundered. Not a smudge anywhere on him. The only thing missing is his toque. Maier doesn't look amazed or afraid or sad. He looks lost, as though for the first time in his entire life he isn't sure what to do.

Werner watches as the chef dips two fingers into the breast pocket of his coat and pulls a cigarette from the pack he keeps there at all times. Xaver tips the end of his cigarette into a burning pile of rubble, then puts it to his lips and inhales. The chef walks away, nonchalant, having once again found his bearings.