Departure

by A. G. Riddle

  On the walk back to the lake, I think about why we haven’t seen any rescue personnel. Even if we’ve crashed in some remote part of England, surely the fire would show up on satellites, or helicopters could spot the column of smoke. England is bigger than it appears on a map, but it’s also a first-world country with all the kinds of technology that wouldn’t ignore a plane crashing in its borders. I make a deal with myself not to worry about it any more until tomorrow morning. Not much I can do right now anyway. Survivors—I’ll focus on them. Warmth, food, and medical care could make all the difference between life and death for a few folks.

  To my right I hear branches snapping. I turn to see 2D—Grayson Shaw—twelve feet away, holding a stick the size of a bat. He grins at me, revealing blood-covered teeth.

  I’m unarmed, too sore to run, and probably too tired to fight. This should be interesting.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Harper

  LAST NIGHT I GAVE BIRTH TO A RHINOCEROS. Not just any rhino, mind you: a pregnant rhino, with twins. And three horns. Lots of horns. I birthed a double-pregnant, triple-horned rhino. That’s what it feels like, at least.

  I’m glad I’m breathing, but I still dislike the pain every breath brings. I’m going to lie here until it doesn’t hurt anymore. On the bright side, I’m bound to lose some weight during this period. I have no appetite and can’t imagine the pain eating will entail.

  I envision myself emerging from this swaddled, fireside solitude. I’ll be slimmer and funnier and completely healed; a phoenix rising from the ashes, ready to soar high above the lake and roar in a screeching call of freedom and awesomeness before I retake my pitiful life.

  Must rest and wait for those wings to grow in.

  DOCTOR’S BEEN BY. SHE’S A good bit sterner than I remember her last night. Dry, to the point, bit of a bore, really. Though her bedside manner needs some work, she seems to know her stuff. And she’s filled me in. She fed me some pain pills after I came out of the water last night. I don’t remember it, but she says they may have resulted in strange dreams and foggy thinking. (I neglected to mention the rhino and phoenix visions, neither of which seems strictly medically relevant.)

  The doctor’s most concerned about my leg, which apparently has a nasty gash from where it was caught in the plane. She’s bandaged it up and wants to keep an eye on it.

  About all I can recall from last night is the euphoria of saving those people, the children especially, the ones I carried myself. Then the cold, and Nick’s arms pulling me, and nothing much after that.

  AWOKE FEELING EVEN WORSE. PAIN meds must have worn off completely now. Nick sent some food, but I couldn’t eat it, so I gave it away. Must sleep.

  A FEW MINUTES AGO I spotted a kid walking past the fire, an Indian girl around twelve wearing a Disney World T-shirt.

  That made me feel good enough to stand up and take a walk. My right leg is dodgy, sending spikes of pain through my body with every step, but it becomes manageable after a few paces.

  Being on my feet hurts a lot more than lying down, but I want to do something to contribute around here.

  Most people are huddled together by the fire, but a few are dragging branches in from the forest, adding their take to the dwindling flames. That seems as good an idea as any, so I set out along the branch-swept path into the woods.

  About a hundred feet into the forest, I hear a voice, one I know. One I detest.

  “Don’t worry, it won’t be like this,” Grayson says in his usual hateful, condescending tone. “I’m going to hurt you when you least expect it.”

  “I’m not expecting it now.” Nick sounds calm.

  I walk closer, just far enough to make both of them out. Nick looks exhausted. Black bags hang under his eyes, which are hard, much more so than I remember. Grayson holds a large stick at his side. His back’s to me, so I can’t see his face.

  I inch closer, and a branch pops under my foot. I look up to find both their eyes upon me.

  “Jesus, you’re like a virus,” Grayson says. “You just won’t go away.” He waits, but I don’t speak. “I bet you’re loving this. Best thing that could’ve happened to you, isn’t it?”

  Nick looks right at me, ignoring him. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, for the love of God. Please excuse me while I go throw up until I die.” Grayson marches past me. “Tell your boyfriend to sleep with one eye open, Harper.”

  A few seconds later I hear him pitch the stick into the fire.

  Nick stands before me now, his face serious and tense. I wonder what’s happened.

  “I put you up to it last night,” he says. “Going into that plane.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. If something had happened to you—”

  “Listen, if I had it to do over again, I would do the exact same thing, even if I hadn’t woken up this morning, curled up by the fire. I’ve seen them, a few of the kids I hauled out of that plane. The risk was well worth it. To me, it was all well worth it.”

  He nods, glances at the ground. His face is still solemn, but I can feel the tension flowing out of him, as if it were a wall of air brushing past me. “Where does it hurt?” he asks.

  “Everywhere. My whole bloody body.”

  He smiles and exhales, laughing for the first time. “Me, too.”

  He fills me in as we trek back to the fire, gathering loose branches as we go. Nobody’s cell phone works, which is strange, but not out of the question in rural England. He’s tried to get into the cockpit with no luck. He figures the pilots are dead; he’s had a look at the cockpit and it’s pretty tight, would have been deadly during the crash. Poor souls.

  At the fire, I insist he take one of my blankets, and after a bout of protests, he relents. We sit in silence for a while. I’m dying to ask him what he does for a living, where he’s from, anything. I want to know what Nick Stone is like, you know, when he’s not rescuing plane crash survivors from an icy lake. I’ve never met anyone quite like him. He seems to have been delivered to Planet Earth from some other place, some place where normal human weaknesses and shortcomings don’t apply.

  I’m about to launch into my first lame question, which I’ve rehearsed in my mind nine times now, when someone runs up to us, almost colliding with Nick.

  It’s Mike, the guy with the green Celtics T-shirt. He focuses on Nick, speaking between pants. “We’re . . . in.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Harper

  IT’S A STRUGGLE TO KEEP UP WITH NICK and Mike through the woods. With each step, I can feel the air temperature dropping and the pain in my lower leg rising.

  When we reach the nose section, the two of them bound up an assortment of luggage and plane bits stacked to form a rough stairway. Nick pauses at the top and reaches down for me, as he did when we climbed into the plane in the lake.

  I scramble awkwardly up the pile, and he catches my arm and pulls me to the threshold. My body crashes into his, sending waves of pain through me while he holds me close to steady us.

  Worth it. So worth it.

  The other two swimmers—their names escape me—are there already, and someone I don’t know, a short, bald man wearing a black sweater. He peers over his small round glasses, fixing me with a skeptical gaze as if he’s about to ask who invited a girl into his boy’s-club airplane tree house.

  I’m one second away from asking if this is a boob-free zone when Nick intercedes. “Harper, this is Bob Ward. And you remember Wyatt and Seth from last night?”

  Bob’s suspicious look vanishes with Nick’s words, and after we exchange shakes and nods, everyone turns to the first row of seats. A man in a pilot’s jacket lies there, his face crusted with dried blood.

  Bob steps forward and kneels by his side, motioning back toward Nick. “Dylan, we’ve got Nick Stone here.” His officious tone would be funny in any other circumstances. “He’s managing the situation on the ground. I need you to tell him what you ju
st told us.”

  The pilot turns his head, trying to pick Nick out of the crowd. His face is so discolored and swollen that I can barely make out the whites of his eyes, but he begins speaking, his voice a whisper.

  “We lost all communications about halfway in, somewhere over the Atlantic.”

  Nick raises a hand. “Stop. I need you to wait one minute.”

  What’s he up to? He marches down the aisle into business, stopping next to a young Asian man who’s typing maniacally on a laptop. After a brief exchange, the Asian man gets up and follows Nick back.

  “Please continue,” Nick says to the pilot, eyeing Laptop Man.

  “Like I said, we lost communications over the Atlantic, but we maintained our flight path. The captain has been flying this route for three years. I’ve been on it six months. Radar still worked, but nothing else. We generally knew where we were, but it was really odd, to go dark like that. The captain swore the problem was outside the plane, but that’s impossible. Anyway, we got radio contact—Heathrow air traffic control—a little over two hours before our designated landing time. There was a global situation with communications, they told us, and they would walk us in. We should land normally, but descend to seven thousand feet for safety reasons. That slowed us down, but we did it. Then everything happened at once.”

  “The blast?” Bob coaxes.

  “The first one, yeah.”

  “Was it above you?”

  “No—behind, I think. Or all around. I don’t know. We dove, trying to get away from it.”

  “And there was another blast?” Bob sounds eager, expectant.

  “I . . . I don’t know. There was something . . . else. But I don’t know what. A series of shock waves, tossing us around in the sky. Never seen anything like it. We lowered the landing gear and went down even farther, trying to cut our airspeed, preparing for the worst. We thought it might be some megastorm. We couldn’t get away from it, though. Everything after that’s a blur. We kept diving, trying to get past it, but it caught up to us.”

  Nick is still staring at Laptop Man, who hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s like a statue. What’s going on? You sleep in around here, and mysteries pop up by the minute. “What do you think of that?” Nick asks him.

  Laptop Man avoids eye contact with Nick and speaks in an even, controlled tone. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about it. But it sounds sort of like the communications went out during a storm, and we crashed. Can I go now?”

  “Nobody’s holding you.”

  The Asian guy walks back to his seat and, after a last glance over his shoulder at Nick, plops down and starts typing away again.

  What the hell was that all about?

  Nick thanks the pilot and moves back into the galley between first class and the cockpit. Sabrina, who came with us from the lakeside, moves in to examine the pilot.

  “You buy the pilot’s story?” Bob asks Nick, his tone skeptical.

  Nick stares at Bob for a second, as if waiting for him to recant. “Yeah, I do.”

  Bob nods a bit too theatrically, as if he were a TV detective finally choosing to believe an informant’s story. “The other two pilots are dead, so we’ve got no corroborating witnesses—well, save for ourselves. We tried the radio, but there’s no answer.”

  “All right. I think we bed down tonight, wait for rescue. If nobody’s come by daylight, we reassess.”

  “You’re forgetting the most important part.” Bob’s voice is edging toward panic.

  “Right. What am I forgetting?”

  “The guns.” Bob races into the cockpit and returns with a handgun, holding it by the end, like it’s a fish he caught on holiday.

  “Put that back,” Nick says sharply. “And bring me the key.”

  Bob mutters but returns with the key, placing it in Nick’s palm. “There’re four handguns in there. One for each of you.” He nods to the swimmers and Nick. I guess I didn’t make the handgun club.

  “We’re not carrying them around,” Nick says. “We have to sleep, and someone could take them off us. It’s too dangerous.” He glances at the key. “And so is this.” He hands it to me. “They know the five of us will have been in the cockpit.”

  I slip the key into my tight jeans pocket, where I swear I can feel it radiating heat. I feel like Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, knowing I may hold the key to the lives of the survivors of Flight 305. Another burden to bear, though not quite as dreadful as the Decision.

  The sun is setting as Nick and I make our way through the woods to the fire by the lake. Neither of us says a word, but in my mind, I’m going through the questions I want to ask him. Namely, what he does for a living. Ah, who am I kidding? I want to ask some roundabout question that gets at the real money shot: Is there a woman in Nick Stone’s life? A little lady waiting at home. A Mrs. Nick Stone. A soulless, way-too-skinny, fashion-victim, fake-as-Santa girlfriend. That’s unfair. My leg hurts. Excuses . . .

  At the fire, we settle in and watch the sun set over the lake. As it slips below the horizon, I start my interrogation—nonchalant, of course.

  “Where you from, Nick?”

  “All over. You?”

  “I grew up in a small town in England, but I live in London now.”

  “This feel like England to you?” He motions to the lake and forest around us.

  “Yeah, a bit.”

  “Yeah, to me, too.” He slumps over, pulling the blanket up to his chin. “I’m beat, Harper. See you in the morning.”

  He’s asleep in seconds. I can’t help remembering Grayson Shaw’s last words to me. Tell your boyfriend to sleep with one eye open, Harper.

  I settle in between him and the fire and stare up at the stars. Sleep won’t come tonight. I’ve slept too much today already, but that’s not really it. Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I’ve slept next to someone I fancied as much as Nick Stone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nick

  I EXPECTED TO WAKE UP TO HELICOPTERS, FLASHING lights, and waves of English first responders saying things like “Are you all right there?” and “Let’s have a look at you now.”

  No such luck. The muddy beach by the blue-green lake looks exactly as it did last night: rings of people around a dying fire, wrapped up in navy blankets. Only a few are stirring, mumbling groggily to each other.

  I get to my knees and lean over Harper, who’s curled toward the fire, sound asleep. I wouldn’t wake her for all the tea in China.

  As I survey the camp, watching the survivors of Flight 305 wake to another day, two simple facts strike me: It’s been over thirty-six hours since we crashed. And someone should have been here by now.

  AT THE NOSE SECTION, IT feels like déjà vu. Again there’s an angry mob, the second to mass here in as many days. Grayson Shaw is here, too, but at least he’s not center stage this time. He’s sitting at the back, looking hungover and haggard. He must have finally run out of alcohol. But that could actually make him more dangerous.

  The food in the nose section ran out last night, when I was too tired to notice. The crowd’s muttering about people hoarding food, calling for searches of the camp and redistribution. “I’d kill a man for a Diet Coke right now,” I hear a skinny man in a rumpled suit say. I’ll look up Coke stock if I live through this.

  Jillian’s taking the brunt of the crowd’s ire. They’re chewing her out like this is simply a disruption to normal in-flight service. The truth is, she’s just another survivor now, but the uniform she’s wearing pegs her as the person who hands out food. She looks relieved to see me.

  “Help,” she says, lunging for me and clamping both hands around my arm, pulling me up to stand beside her at the bottom of the makeshift stairway as she faces the crowd.

  Bob Ward and Sabrina are here, too. Their faces are solemn, but they nod, encouraging me.

  The crowd quiets, people nudging each other and whispering.

  That’s him.

  Yeah, the guy from the lake.

  “A
ll right,” I say. “We’re going to get some food, but it’ll take some time.”

  “We need something now!” a woman in a mud-stained sweater shouts.

  “There isn’t anything right now, okay? Look, we have to work together here. If we work together, we’ll all eat—otherwise, we could all starve.”

  The word starve is a mistake. The crowd picks it up, and it echoes from person to person in panicky counterpoint until it sounds like the Starve Chorus. It takes me a few minutes to unsay it and get their focus again.

  “So how we gonna get food?” asks an overweight man with a thick New York accent.

  How indeed? I hadn’t gotten that far. I can see where this is going. If I let groupthink take over and devil’s advocates call the shots, we’ll still be standing here at sundown, hungry and undecided. I need a plan, right now.

  There are only two logical sources of food: the meals in the other half of the plane and fish from the lake. We might manage to kill something here on land, but with a hundred mouths to feed, it likely won’t go far. Unless . . . there’s a farm nearby. It’s a long shot, but I tuck the idea away for future use.

  “Okay, first step,” I say as authoritatively as I can. “We’re going to take an inventory.”

  “Inventory?”

  “Yes.” I point to Jillian—poor Jillian—and Bob Ward, who straightens up and puts on his ultraserious camp counselor face for the crowd. He, at least, is still loving this. “Jillian and Bob are going to come around and ask you what was in your carry-on and checked baggage and what your seat was—or, more importantly, what overhead bin your bag was in. Describe anything that might be of use out here, especially food. Come see me right now if you had any fishing or diving gear in your luggage—a wet suit, even snorkeling gear.”