Crash

by Joseph Monninger

  “You’re awake?” Walter Eliot said.

  He did not come from the fire, Titus noted. He came from down the shoreline.

  “I guess I am,” Titus answered.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Walter Eliot said. “I did a little scouting instead.”

  “We should probably stay together, Mr. Eliot. If you got lost or hurt yourself, we wouldn’t know where to look for you. Jill was lost last night for a few minutes, and it could have easily gone another way. We were lucky we noticed she was gone so quickly. Another fifteen minutes and she might have been too far into the woods to find.”

  “I didn’t go far. I thought maybe I could make sense of where we landed, but it’s just a big lake in the middle of nowhere.”

  Titus nodded and stood. He remembered Mr. Eliot asking over and over again for someone to open the door.

  “What do you think our first plan should be?” Mr. Eliot asked.

  Titus looked at the older man. Something didn’t seem quite right with Mr. Eliot, but Titus couldn’t point to anything in particular. Maybe it was a form of panic or worry, but the man seemed impatient, as if everything should have an answer right away. Titus looked out over the water so he wouldn’t have to meet Mr. Eliot’s eyes.

  “We have a lot of work we can do,” Titus said, giving voice to things he had already thought about through the night. “We should keep everyone busy, that’s the first thing. We need to build structures. Shelters, because it could rain anytime. It already rained a little during the night. We probably need to establish a latrine so our waste doesn’t contaminate the water. Collect wood, a lot of wood. We have to think about food, too. There’s probably some on the plane, but it won’t last forever.”

  “Forever!” Mr. Eliot said, his voice almost like a bark of surprise. “There will be a full-out search for us! I’m sure they’re in the air right now.”

  “Probably so. I hope so. But meanwhile we’re here. We need to salvage whatever we can from the plane. We might be able to use some of the plane parts for building materials … for roofs and things. We should probably divide up into teams and give every team a job. We can rotate the jobs eventually, but for the time being we need to make careful steps. We need to stay organized. We almost lost Jill because we weren’t organized.”

  Titus heard people moving beside the fire. Light continued to build behind them. He wondered if it was a good thing to be positioned so the sun didn’t hit you immediately in the morning, or if they would be better off moving across the lake. It was amazing, he reflected, how much had to be done to make them even marginally safe and comfortable. It was like a lot of the camping he had done, multiplied many times over.

  “What about the pilot and the girl?”

  “We’ll take a team in and bring them out. And we’ll give them a respectable burial away from here. I’m worried about Jill, but we can only do so much. The big thing is to stay active. All of us. Even if we make poor decisions sometimes, it’s better to be active.”

  “These bugs …” Mr. Eliot said and slapped at the mosquitoes that had lifted around them.

  “We need a smudge fire to keep them down. The good news is we should have a frost pretty soon. That will kill them off.”

  “You don’t really think we’ll be here until the frost, do you?”

  “Don’t think, just plan,” Titus said.

  That was something he had learned in Scouts.

  He left Mr. Eliot at the water’s edge and walked back to the fire.

  Paul Eliot climbed the rope ladder into the plane’s fuselage for what had to be the thirtieth time. It reminded him of a nature documentary he had once seen on leafcutter ants of Central America. Leafcutter ants laid down a chemical trail, and then all the ants in a colony trudged along it, all of them carrying something. They brought in leaves, primarily, to form a food store. At least that’s what Paul remembered. He remembered being mesmerized by the ants, and he had even lobbied for an ant farm for Christmas. His dad had pointed out the risk of ant farms, how they could tip over and release the ants, and no one wanted that.

  But Paul did. He wanted that.

  Not that he wanted it to tip over. He had simply wanted an ant colony, but his dad had vetoed it.

  Anyway, that was a different time, a different place. A way different place. Thinking about an ant farm had to be on a top-ten list of strange things to think about while on an improvised ladder climbing into the dead fuselage of a plane beside a lake in the shadow of the Brooks Range. That’s what Paul thought about, how each one of them was like an ant with a job to do to support the colony.

  He also thought how much his hands and legs and back hurt.

  But they were making progress. And when he stuck his head up to the height of the doorway on the upside of the plane, E met him. She wore a bandanna over her head, and she looked cool. It was typical of E that she could look fashionable even while emptying a plane of its contents.

  “Anything else?” Paul asked.

  She shook her head. They had been working all morning and into the afternoon.

  “I’m going to take a break. We’ve got everything,” she said.

  “Everything?” he asked.

  She shrugged. Paul was the team captain on the plane team, at least in theory, but everyone listened to E anyway. He knew he did. She was tall and smart and very capable.

  “Web is still up in the cockpit working on the radio,” she said, starting to climb out. “It’s busted up and probably won’t work, but what the heck? It’s worth a try.”

  “And it gets him out of doing other work,” Paul said, his voice going low. Web had become the running joke of the plane team because he was lazy and a know-it-all.

  E smiled. She sat on the edge of the doorway and looked down at the camp. The building team had already pulled out a dozen dead fir trees and piled them in a stack near the fireplace. They had also been digging a wide, shallow hole in the beach.

  “It’s starting to look like a camp,” E said, nodding at the shoreline.

  “Lucky we have Titus with us.”

  “I always thought scouting was pretty lame,” E said. “Until now. Now it seems pretty smart.”

  “He says these are just temporary huts.”

  “It’s a pretty good idea, though. What did he think of the crossbow we found?”

  “He loved it. But he said we’d stand a better chance of catching fish than hunting anything.”

  E nodded. It was kind of cool, Paul thought, that the crash had made it possible for him to talk to E. Made it possible that they could be on the same team, seek the same ends, do the same job. Before the crash, E hadn’t really acknowledged him. She had always been polite, he admitted, but hadn’t engaged with anyone, so to speak. Now she was. Now she was probably the second in command behind Titus. It turned out she was friendly and strong and funny.

  “Is that it?” Seldon called from the water below them. He stood with his hand up to his eyes for shade, looking up at them.

  He was another leafcutter ant on the plane team, Paul thought. The one who went from the plane to the shore, then back again. It went E to Paul, Paul to Seldon, Seldon to shore. Web did nothing except pretend to work on the radio.

  “Looks like it. It’s everything we can get to without tools,” Paul said.

  “Did you get all the food?”

  “Yep,” Paul said.

  E nodded.

  “Okay,” Seldon said, “then I’m going to go up on the beach for a while. I’m getting cold in this water.”

  “You can go ahead,” Paul said to E. “I’ll go check on Web.”

  “He’s not getting anywhere.”

  “Well, he’s on the team, so I should check.”

  He had to trade places with E. She squeezed by him and shimmied down the ladder. Paul went the other way, climbing into the dark interior of the plane. Water had seeped into the plane and filled it up to the seats. It was a sloppy mess, with things floating and swirling in the water. Now and then, th
e plane groaned or shuddered, and you could feel it going deeper. It couldn’t go far, and there was a discussion about turning the plane into their sleeping compartment, but it was too wet and disgusting. They were better off on land.

  Paul waded down the aisle to the cockpit.

  “Any luck?” he asked Web as he sloshed into the nose area.

  “Naw,” Web said.

  He had his head ducked under the steering apparatus. Paul couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like Web had stuck his head under there when he heard Paul approach. That was the kind of thing that Web did. He was sneaky and smart and lazy, and Paul admired some of that, he did, but the kid drove him nuts mostly.

  But Web knew the most about electronics. And it was worth letting him fiddle with the radio.

  “You would think it would have a rescue beacon or something,” Paul said.

  “I checked it. This plane is old, you know? Really old.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Some of the manual was in here,” Web said, pointing to a small leather box near the pilot’s seat. “It’s not complete, but some of it’s from the seventies.”

  “The nineteen seventies?” Paul asked.

  Web nodded and pulled himself up from the space under the steering apparatus.

  “I think it’s shot,” Web said. “Kaput.”

  “Can you use anything else?”

  “Like what?” Web asked.

  “I don’t know. Use the battery to give us some light. Anything. Titus said we should all think outside the box.”

  “Titus doesn’t know everything. It’s not exactly rocket science to pull some trees out of the woods and dig a ditch.”

  Paul looked out the cockpit window. Web had a front-row seat to see all the leafcutter ants going back and forth.

  “Well, he says any plan is better than no plan.”

  “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I think he means to keep people positive.”

  “So, if you’re lost it’s better to go deeper into the woods than to sit down and figure things out? Is that what Titus recommends?”

  “Look,” Paul said, “everyone is doing the best he or she can. Titus is trying to help.”

  Web shrugged. Then he smiled as if he had just hit on an idea.

  “You could fight zombies better from up here than down on the ground,” he said. “This wouldn’t make a bad zombie-fighting headquarters.”

  Paul nodded. He knew Web had brought up zombies again because that was what they used to talk about and that was the only way Web knew how to be friends. It was kind of pitiful given the circumstances, but Paul didn’t have the heart to say so.

  “It would be pretty good,” Paul said to give Web something neutral to talk about. “It would be easy to defend.”

  “Wicked easy to defend,” Web said, smiling. “And with that crossbow we found? I’m telling you, we could live through a zombie attack in here.”

  “Okay, well, we’re going to call it a day. We’ve got everything we can get to easily. Tomorrow, we can come back in and dig around some more. We can help on the buildings while there is still light.”

  “If we could figure out a way to drain the water away, we’d be better off in here.”

  “That wouldn’t be easy the way the plane is situated. It’s going to keep sinking and settling.”

  “We should figure out a way to get it up on the shore. Then we’d have a real shelter.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  Paul slapped Web on the shoulder. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but he felt sort of sorry for the kid. Web didn’t have many friends in the group, and that had to be difficult. Paul watched Web smile and slip out from behind the steering apparatus.

  That was the other thing about the crash, Paul realized. Once everything was stripped away, it was really easy to see what people were like.

  Suryadi knew the warm place had grown bigger. He felt it in his side, the gap of flesh growing bigger every minute, every hour, every breath. Flies found the warm place without a problem. They knew. They might as well have formed an arrow and pointed at the blood oozing out of his side.

  He wanted to concentrate on the warm place, to see if he could send his mind around it to discover its true dimensions, but Jill, his so-called buddy, had come to squat beside him and repeated something. She knew a little about the warm place.

  “Something something something … move,” she said and motioned with her chin toward the lodge they were building behind him.

  He shook his head.

  He didn’t know what she had said.

  “Mr. Eliot?” the girl called, standing for a second before she squatted back in front of Suryadi. “We need to do something with him.”

  Suryadi shook his head. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to keep the warm place secret, but he did. He closed his eyes and leaned back. Sometimes, if he gained just the right posture, the pain went away. It was good to have the pain removed, but it was also true that the pain returned even more intensely when it swam back up his bloodstream. He had come to think of the shark, the shark that bit the fisherman back in Indonesia, as the pain that swam through his veins.

  He felt more than saw the older man step beside the fire and block the sun. The man did not seem to like being called on to examine the wound.

  “What is it?” he asked Jill.

  “He’s got it all clamped up, and he won’t show anyone. He’s bleeding.”

  “A lot?”

  “Some. I don’t know.”

  “What’s the story?” the man asked, but whether he asked the girl or directed the question to him, Suryadi couldn’t say.

  The girl bent forward and waved her hand to chase away the flies.

  “We need to look at it,” she said with a loud voice. She said it as if he, Suryadi, were a child and couldn’t understand. She put spaces between each word.

  Suryadi pretended not to understand.

  “We looked at it once, didn’t we?” Mr. Eliot asked. “Back in the plane.”

  “That was last night. He needs some attention.”

  “Well, I’m not a doctor.”

  “No one here is a doctor,” Jill said.

  Suryadi dozed away and then woke up with a start when the shark bit more deeply into his side. He wasn’t sure how long he had passed out, but when he regained consciousness, his shirt was open and the girl had a wet cloth against his side to clean the cut.

  “There’s something in there,” the girl said.

  Mr. Eliot watched over her shoulder.

  “Like what?”

  “I can see the tip of something, but I don’t know. Something went into his side.”

  Suryadi closed his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, three or four people stood around him. They all bent and looked at the warm place. They reminded him of chickens, their heads bobbing up and down. It made him want to laugh or kick at them; he couldn’t say which was the more attractive option. He wanted them to leave him alone. He wanted his father to come and get him. It had been his father’s idea to get him on the show in the first place. A good experience, his father had said. He wondered what his father would say now.

  “Let’s lift him into the shelter,” Titus said.

  “Is it ready?” Mr. Eliot asked.

  “For the time being, it is.”

  Then Suryadi felt his body leave the ground. He wasn’t entirely certain they carried him. It was conceivable that he floated. His mind, his thoughts, felt like a pale balloon dangling from a string attached to his body. Sometimes the thoughts dropped down and bounced against his body, and other times they floated off and away. Then the sky closed over him. He heard them say, this way, no, right here, easy, slowly, and then he understood what they had been building. They had dug a waist-deep hole in the beach, then used pine trees to construct a circular shelter. They had a tarp suspended over the top, but more pine trees, too, and the result was comfortable and dry and less filled with insects than outside. I
t resembled a honay, the traditional hut of Indonesia, and it pleased him to be inside it.

  “Thank you,” Suryadi said.

  The girl, Jill, sank down beside him. She lifted her hand and kept the flies away. She knew about the warm place. They all did now. Suryadi closed his eyes and smelled the pine and wood smoke.

  E stopped on her way to the food station and adjusted a corner tree that had popped loose. When she had it back in position — she was the tallest of the group and had been called on to do the top tier — she backed away, studying her work. It looked solid, she thought. Titus had been correct: They needed a temporary shelter, and this one would work. It wouldn’t last forever, and it would be useless against colder temperatures, but for the time being, it served their purpose.

  And the design, she admitted, was truly quite clever.

  First they had dug a circular area — call it a basement, she thought — about four feet down into the beach. Then they had pounded poles into the area around the circle, leaving enough room for benches around the ring. The poles only went up about six feet, but given the depth of the basement that gave them a ten-foot-high ceiling. Then, under Titus’s guidance, they had woven young pine trees into a thatch that created a green, fragrant wall. It was simple, really. Now they had an entire structure built in the middle of the beach, and inside, you could get away from the worst of the insects. Not bad for their first full day’s work.

  There had been a short, heated debate about whether it was safe to have a fire inside the hut — if the tree boughs dried out and a spark got to them, they would go up like a flare — but Titus had said given the greenness of the trees and the dampness from the rain, it would probably be okay as long as they kept the fire low. Extremely low. Besides, he said, and she agreed, they needed a center to cling to, a place where they could come and have tribal meetings.