Crash

by Joseph Monninger

  Keep moving, he told himself. Do anything.

  He tried to push up onto his knees, but he couldn’t do it. Not at first. His clothes felt lined with ice. He counted to ten and tried again, and this time, at least, his body straightened out so that he was solidly perpendicular to the river. But his body had moved. So it was still possible to move, he realized. That was good to know. First his fingers had found the matches, and now his body followed his mental command. Not bad, he thought. Better than he had first imagined.

  He pushed up again and this time managed to get to his hands and knees. His knee still flashed with pain, but he stayed in that position until his head cleared a little. When he felt more solid, he began to crawl.

  He felt like a baby doing it, but it was safer than trying to stand. The ground was cold, he sensed, but really his body had gone colder than anything else around him. He felt the shakes starting deep in his core. He had to stop twice in his pitiful crawling to wait for them to stop. His knees hurt on the pebbles that covered the shoreline. His scalp throbbed, and he was sure it was still bleeding.

  He picked up the first stick with his mouth. He did it without thinking. He did not trust himself to lift a hand away from the earth, so he did what a dog would do: He used his mouth. He carried the stick to a boulder where he might be out of the wind and dropped it there.

  Fetch, he told himself.

  It nearly made him laugh.

  It took him fifteen minutes to round up enough small wood to have a prayer of lighting a fire. He made sure he had several pieces with dried lichen. They would burn, he knew, if he could get a match lit. He still didn’t know if the matches worked, but that was out of his control. Either they would work, or they wouldn’t. Meanwhile, you acted as if. He had learned that in Boy Scouts. Do your best, prepare, make good choices. Some of it, however, would always be out of your control. He couldn’t know if the sulfur matches would be sufficiently dry to strike a spark. Out of his control now. He had simply to go along and do his best and meet opportunity halfway.

  When he had his sticks together, he slowly moved into a sitting position, his back against the boulder. But as soon as he looked down at his wood, he realized he had a problem. He could not make his fingers work, so two issues presented themselves. First, he could not break up the wood so that it made a proper nest for the flames. The best he could do was to employ his fingers as dull rakes, and he did that, pushing the twigs together into something resembling a tepee. But the shakes kept erupting up from his core, so that he sometimes became distracted, fascinated by what was going on in his body. He was the reverse of a volcano, he reflected. A volcano spewed hot magma, but he, on the other hand, swallowed heat and turned it to ice.

  The matches constituted the second issue.

  He could not open the plastic bag to get them out. He could not hold a match to strike it. And he could not use his mouth, because if moisture from his lips touched the match heads, he would never be able to get them to ignite.

  It was a pickle. He solved the first part of it by holding the plastic bag together with the heels of his hands while he ripped the plastic apart with his teeth. The matches fell onto his lap, which was not a good thing. When he tried to collect them, his stiff fingers and a round of the shakes made coordination impossible.

  Almost, he thought. He had almost made it.

  For a while he sat and closed his eyes. His mind felt empty. He fell asleep, he knew, because a few minutes later he woke with a jolt. He would die, he knew, if he didn’t keep moving, and he wasn’t quite ready for that to happen. He used the heels of his hands to trap a match and carry it to his mouth. It took him a long time to do it. When he had the match in his mouth, he pushed down onto the ground and tried to strike it against a rock.

  To his astonishment, it flashed on the third try, a bright sulfur flash that stung his nostrils. Smoke blinded him and made him jerk his head to one side. The match went out in an instant. His lips felt warm from the effort.

  So it could be done, he reflected. That was interesting. It could be done if he could move his mouth and lips into the proper position and manage to drop the match into the lichen. Yes, it was a decided long shot, but it was possible. If a thing is possible, then it’s worth attempting.

  He started the long process of moving a second match to his mouth. He closed his eyes when the shudders came fast and thunderous through his core. The lichen branches scattered at the jerking of his body. The matches glinted as they fell to the rocks, into a crevice down there, and he put his lips to the earth trying to find them.

  In amazement, Paul watched the rescue guy rappel down the rope.

  Paul’s stomach did a flip-flop as he watched. Wind from the helicopter hit everything, bent the trees back, shoved the grass sideways, made the river water turn choppy and bright all at once.

  E grabbed him and started to jump up and down.

  Paul wanted to join her — they were saved, after all — but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t jump up and down and laugh and point to the rescue guy zipping down the rope beneath the helicopter. It was great to see the helicopter, of course, of course, of course, but did it have to show up an hour after Titus took to the water? Or a day and a night after Seldon had headed back to Camp Lollipop?

  He felt angry. He pushed away from E and grabbed a rock off the shore, and for a second he wanted to chuck it at the guy coming down the rope.

  It’s not that easy, he thought.

  You don’t just fly in, string a rope to the ground, and zip down. It wasn’t that easy. He felt his skin flush and his gut twist, and he felt as angry as he had ever felt in his life.

  He turned and pegged the rock as hard as he could back toward the forest. Then he picked up another and did it again. He threw three more before he felt something begin to cave in inside him.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” E shouted.

  She kept dancing and pointing and yelling.

  He rubbed his sleeve against his eyes. Then the rescue guy stood next to them. His goggles made him look like an alien or a bug, and he shouted to ask how many?

  How many what? Paul wanted to ask.

  “Three people!” E shouted. “One of our people went down the river. Titus. His name is Titus.”

  “Down the river?” the guy asked, his voice lost a little as he turned his head to look at the rapids.

  It was loud with the copter and the river.

  “Just a while ago!” she screamed. “An hour, maybe longer.”

  So maybe she hadn’t been jumping up and down with happiness, Paul realized. Maybe she was jumping up and down with anxiety over Titus. Paul felt something click inside him, and he comprehended the best way to help Titus was to tell the guy what he knew.

  “He tried to swim the rapids because he thought we needed to get out….”

  The rescue guy cut him off and spoke into his shoulder. It was a radio, Paul understood, doubtless connected to the helicopter. A second later, the helicopter reeled in the rappelling line and shoved off like a dragonfly leaving a flower bud.

  “They’ll check the river,” the rescue guy said. “You say he just tried to swim it?”

  Paul nodded.

  “A while ago. Where the river tightens between the walls of the mountains!” E said, shouting though it was no longer necessary to shout.

  “And there’s another guy,” Paul said. “Seldon. He was on his way back to camp.”

  “Back toward the lake?”

  “You know about the lake?” Paul asked.

  Paul urged his mind to get with it, to make the connections it needed to make, but he was too tired to ask much more of it.

  “We got everybody out of camp,” the rescue guy said, pulling down his goggles so they hung on his neck. “Your dad, right? We got three out of camp. You say there’s another person on the way back to camp?”

  “He should be there by now,” E said.

  “Let’s get you to sit down. The copter will be right back. They’ll find him if h
e’s there. The one in the water, I mean.”

  “He thought we had to make it out. Titus, I mean,” Paul said.

  “It’s okay. Everything is okay now. You hungry? I’ve got some PowerBars in my vest. My name is Dan, by the way. Dan Kelly.”

  Paul didn’t realize how exhausted he was until he had collapsed onto a piece of driftwood not far from the water’s edge. It was over. It was over, but it was not over. The rescue guy handed them PowerBars, and Paul thought he had never tasted anything better. Or sweeter. It was coated with honey and some sort of flakes, and he had to concentrate to chew it. The rescue guy, Dan, squatted in front of them.

  “You did a pretty great job surviving out here,” he said. “You know, a lot of people wouldn’t have made it this far.”

  “Some didn’t,” Paul said.

  The man, Dan the man, nodded.

  “How about Buford? Our dog?” E asked.

  “Got him. He’s okay. We’ve had a vet look him over. He’s a little underfed, but he’s okay.”

  “Good,” E said.

  She said it softly, almost like a prayer, Paul thought.

  It would be over soon enough, Titus thought. The shakes came more rapidly now. Before he had experienced moments of composure when his body at least tried to follow his thoughts, but now that had all disappeared. He trembled when he wasn’t shaking insanely. Pretty soon, he knew, his core would run out of heat once and for all, and the fire had been a good idea, but you needed fingers to make a fire and he no longer had real fingers. He had ice-cream-cone fingers. He had Popsicle fingers. He tasted sulfur on his tongue and lips.

  An odd thing kept happening, though.

  He couldn’t help thinking about the strange cloud he had seen when he had been in the river. It had looked exactly like a helicopter, which was impossible, naturally. He was certain it was wishful thinking, that was all, but it had been convincing. Persuasive. He now sat against the boulder, facing the river, the matches scattered underneath him, and the peculiarly shaped cloud occupied his mind. Clouds could look like helicopters, he knew. They could look like anything. Who hadn’t played the game of finding animal shapes in clouds? Or faces? He had wished for a helicopter, for rescue, but that was natural and easy to explain. Wishful thinking. He was like a cartoon character seeing an apple pie as a desert mirage when he was starving.

  Then, out of the corner of his mind — Yes, minds had corners, wasn’t that amazing? Wasn’t that something to know? — he heard gravel crunch.

  A bear, he thought.

  He didn’t mind a bear eating him. Not once he was dead. In fact, that was a pretty cool way to return back to the earth. But he didn’t want a bear to get on him now, starting to lick him, huff his bear breath in his face, then slowly curl back his lips. That had to happen eventually. Eventually, the bear had to take a bite, just like you had to bite a sirloin finally, because you couldn’t lick it forever.

  “Hey,” someone yelled. “Hey.”

  Titus tried to answer. But then more gravel crunched near his head and a woman looked down at him, a woman in a uniform, and the woman said over and over, “We got you. Titus, right? We got you.”

  “Yes,” Titus said.

  “You made it. What have you been doing? You trying to light a fire?”

  He nodded. Or maybe he spoke. He couldn’t be sure.

  “Good man. Don’t give up. Never give up.”

  He didn’t say anything, though. He wasn’t sure what question he answered or not. Or even if there had been a question.

  “Yes,” he said. “You got me.”

  SURVIVAL TIP #4

  * * *

  When returning from an extreme situation — like a severe period of isolation — learn to be patient with yourself. Just as it took time to acclimate to your former situation, it will also take time to adjust back into your life. Remember, things have changed not just for you, but for your family and friends as well. While you may understandably focus on what you have endured, your friends and family have experienced things as well. Take your time. Do not feel slighted if someone does not comprehend entirely what you have been through. Recall your feelings when someone showed you photos from a vacation they had recently enjoyed. Unless you were on the vacation with them, chances are you don’t find it as interesting as they do. It may feel unfair that people don’t “get” your situation. Take it easy. Go slow. Be gentle with yourself and others.

  One bright, moonlit night in the beginning of November, a hunting party of wolves came out of the forest, crept along the banks of the lake, and spent nearly an hour searching for food. They did not rest or stop long at any one spot, but probed unfamiliar scents and moved with their back legs tensed and ready to carry them away. The wolves were gray-colored and matched the pale light from the moon. Only their eyes gave them away. When they turned their heads to look, or to peer more closely into the confines of the curious pine hut, the moon snapped against the surface of their eyes and went bright for a moment. It turned their sight to fire.

  In that same hour, a horseshoe rabbit lay quivering beneath a thornbush on the outskirts of the wood. It watched the wolves move around the clearing, and it fought a dire impulse to flee for its life. Had any individual wolf come near, the rabbit would have panicked and succumbed to its elemental need for blind flight. Snow fell over the scene, and the rabbit, white in its winter coat, blended perfectly into the ground, a lump of beating blood in the otherwise empty snowscape.

  Ice already trapped the fuselage of the plane that had brought Junior Action News Team to Camp Lollipop. It had been too late in the season to remove the plane body, though the insurance company had agreed reluctantly to see to it the next spring. The truth is, they would never carry out the task. The plane slid farther into the lake the following thaw, but in that first winter birds sometimes landed on the slick fuselage and preened in the dull sunlight. Now and then, a new swelling in the plane let water reach an untouched pocket of air, and at those times the plane would groan in a ghostly moan. It took seven seasons for the ice and water to claim the plane entirely. Web’s nest floated for a long time in the last air pocket against the upper side of the fuselage, then, saturated at last, drifted to the bottom and lost all shape.

  For a while, the crash site became an attraction. Pilots pointed it out to their passengers whenever they passed it, and snowmobilers searched on maps for its location. Eventually, however, people lost the thread of interest, and Camp Lollipop returned to its natural state.

  The trees that had been sliced off at the top by the incoming plane never regained the height of the surrounding forest. The broken pine tops fell, one by one, until a person would have missed them unless she or he had known what to look for. In time, of course, those trees would fall and take all memory of the plane that had cut them off and bent their tops toward the lake.

  One slightly miraculous thing occurred at the site, though no human witnessed it. It occurred before the plane slid entirely underwater, when a bear, swimming, felt something solid beneath its paws. Thinking it had come to nothing more than a boulder, it climbed onto the fuselage and stood for a moment in the late-summer sun. It was a young bear on the edge of its adulthood, and it stood for a moment enjoying the restful evening, the warmth brought by the sun. Light caught the last little surface of the plane’s aluminum side and threw its reflection up into the air. Had anyone been there to see it, the bear would have looked mythical, lit by fire from below, its brown hair turned golden in that instant.

  There was no way for that bear to know but, nearby in its grave six inches from the shoreline, the pilot’s knife rested. Twice it was thrown up onto the shore by winter ice, then was pulled back into the water by the spring thaw. Its six-inch blade had rusted and turned to a brown color, not unlike the dull stones that covered the lake bottom and climbed onto the shore. Even in the harshest sunlight, it no longer glinted or tried to show itself. The leather wrapping around its handle had fallen away in small pieces. Mud sheathed it finally, an
d it sank down into the earth, never to be used by a human hand again.

  The floor began to heave and move and the walls, even these huge stone walls, she realized, had started to shake. It went on and on. Probably it was only a few seconds, but it felt like a million billion years, everything shaking and dancing, and for the tiniest instant she nearly convinced herself the wind had caused everything. Strong winds, very strong winds. But the shake came up from the ground, you felt it in your feet and in your guts, and the magazines were made of stone. Rock. Dirt. Wind couldn’t do much to it.

  Then everything became quiet. Supernaturally quiet. That was the strangest thing of all, she thought. She looked around, her headlamp catching the expressions of people near her. Some looked scared; others looked bewildered. Mr. O’Connell held his hands in front of him like a person walking down a dark hallway. And Bob Worm, the giant Bob Worm, had turned crazily into a karate stance, ready to combat whatever came at him. It made her smile to see him, because only Bob Worm would figure you could karate chop a tremor, and she kept her headlamp beam on him for a three count.

  And then someone screamed.

  JOSEPH MONNINGER lives in New Hampshire. He is the author of the young adult novels Baby, Hippie Chick, Wish, and Finding Somewhere.

  Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Monninger

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  First printing, January 2014