Scott Free

by John Gilstrap

  Cody Jamieson was gone. Like the area around Alpha, the snow had been churned and chewed, but unlike that other horrific scene, this one was still white, except for the few spots where tree bark and other debris had been tossed about.

  “Thank you, God,” Scott whispered, daring a glance upward. The thought flashed through his mind that he should likewise ask God for some blessing for Cody, but he couldn’t think of the right words. Truth be told, he didn’t want to think about it at all.

  Overhead, where the sky dared to peek through the towering pines, Scott saw a welcome blue that he hoped would dull the edge of the razor-sharp cold. Last night had been a bad one, even colder than the one before, and as the morning breezes sheared the topmost dusting of flakes away from the snowpack, the ice crystals seemed to bite harder against the exposed flesh of his face.

  This had to be the day. Today, he would be rescued or he would die. He’d worried about such things yesterday, yes, but he’d known that he still had time. Today, that time had expired. Today’s priority had to be food. He had to find something nutritious enough to keep his stomach from heaving out what little remained to fuel his day.

  But how? He had no idea. Today had to be the day.

  Yeah, well yesterday had to be the day, too. And tomorrow, when he tried telling himself the same thing yet again, maybe he wouldn’t have the strength to stand.

  Stop it!

  Stop what? Recognizing the truth when he saw it? Recognizing the obvious fact that the rescuers he kept fantasizing about had no idea where he was? Should he stop wondering exactly what it felt like to die, when he knew that come tomorrow morning, or the next one, or the one after that, he was just flat-out not going to wake up at all?

  Scott felt the old panic returning, and this time it rushed him like a flood, moving faster than he could react and washing away his ridiculous pretense of hope. His heart rate doubled and then doubled again as he paced a ragged circle around the crash site. I’m going to die here! his mind screamed. I’m going to starve, or be eaten or just slowly freeze to death.

  “Goddammit!” His shriek echoed off the trees, and the effort of it made his voice crack. This wasn’t right; this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. He was sixteen years old, for Christ’s sake. He was supposed to be in school today, in the warmth of history class, or English or geometry. He wasn’t supposed to be out in the middle of the damn woods, wondering when his death would arrive.

  How does shit like this happen in the first place? How, in the days of global positioning satellites and Internets and all that high technology, could they not be able to find a crashed airplane?

  The flare! The fusee! Oh, God, he’d left the second one behind when he’d dashed for cover in the shelter! Was it still there? Oh, please God, please God let it still be there!

  Scott scrambled through the snow, back toward the grisly stain that once was Alpha, and he fell to his knees, his hands outstretched as he clawed through the snow to find it.

  It has to be here. Has to be here…

  And there it was. The wolves had kicked it aside and partially buried it as they shredded their former boss, but the waxy red stick remained right where Scott had tossed it. Grabbing it up into his gloved hand, Scott examined it. It looked healthy enough; no obvious signs of damage.

  He inhaled deeply and released a long sigh that completely enveloped his head in vapor. One thing had gone right. One in a row, the first of the day. Maybe it was the start of a trend.

  Still on his knees, staring up at the sky, he started to pray silently, but then decided that maybe God needed to hear him. “I’m sorry for everything,” he said softly, a part of him aware of just how stupid he must sound. “I don’t know what you want to hear, but if you’re angry, then I’m really sorry. But you’ve got to help me out of this one. I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but—”

  Above the gentle silence of the forest, just barely louder than the soft rush of the breeze, Scott could almost make out the sound of an approaching aircraft.

  GIVEN MORRIS’S ARMY FLIGHT SUIT and the insignia on the epaulets, Brandon had expected the search aircraft to be more…military. He’d expected polished silver or olive drab; maybe something in camouflage, with muted American flags stenciled on the tail and the fuselage. Instead, he found himself the third man in a single-engine four-seater, confined to the impossibly small back bench, while Colonel Morris flew from the left front seat, and a seventeen-year-old cheerleader-type named Stacey took up space in the right seat. The high wing, supported by struts that extended from either side of the fuselage, afforded a sweeping view of the sugar-white forest, from horizon to horizon.

  Brandon’s neck hurt from the strain of staring at the ground through the scratched 24 x 24-inch Plexiglas window. For hours now, he’d listened silently through his headset as the flight crew chatted about the weather and about their homes and their families. Brandon had learned that Stacey was nearly certain that some young buck named Jerry was going to ask her out soon, and much to his surprise, Colonel Morris did a convincing impression of someone who cared. To Brandon, it seemed as if they purposely talked about everything but Scott—everything but the job at hand.

  Today’s search efforts involved four planes instead of just one, and each of the four had been assigned a segment of the same ground that had been searched the day before. According to the experts—what few of them there were—Cody Jamieson’s Cessna had no business being beyond these confines, and their best chances of finding and rescuing Scott was to concentrate the search in the prescribed areas.

  The preflight briefing had been conducted by a guy named Feldman, who wore the silver eagles of a full colonel on the epaulets of a bus-driver blue uniform that had been purchased a good twenty pounds before. Well into his sixties and bald, Feldman spoke with the forcefulness of one who had conducted many such searches in the past.

  “We’re looking for any signs of a crash,” Feldman had told the group. “Signs of burned or broken trees, debris, gouges out of the rock face, anything that might have been caused by a crashing airplane. If you find it, or even if you think you found it, get down as low as you can and try to confirm. If, after that, you’re still reasonably confident, then give a shout and we’ll get a chopper and a search team down there as soon as possible.”

  Brandon had been impressed by the seriousness of the assembled searchers, especially given their average age, which to his eye was about sixteen.

  Brandon didn’t understand the strategy. Covering the same real estate over and over again made no sense to him. Suppose they were looking in the wrong place? How would they ever know? And if not this place, then where? It seemed painfully obvious that Cody Jamieson was clueless from the beginning. No emergency locator, no emergency call for assistance, yet the search commanders’ whole strategy assumed that he was marginally on course.

  Where was the logic?

  Sometimes, in the absence of hard data, you had to just randomly choose a course of action and stick to it, but what if they were flat-out wrong to begin with? What then?

  Two hours. That’s how long they’d been cruising the same real estate, looking for the invisible. Two additional hours of cold and misery for Scott. Two more hours for him to lie in pain or in fear, waiting for the rescuers who might be in the wrong place altogether.

  Brandon liked the range of mountains immediately to the east. Call it intuition. Call it a hunch. Hell, call it sheer boredom from looking out the same window at the same scenery, but he felt they needed to be over there. Not here. There. And the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt.

  “Hey, Colonel?” Brandon asked into his headset.

  “Yessir?”

  “What about those ridges over to the east? We gonna take a look over there?”

  “No, sir, I don’t believe so. The search plan calls for us to focus right here. They’ve worked out the likely flight path for the downed craft, and this is where they put it.”

  Brandon n
odded. Made lots of sense. But the colonel was wrong. “I think we should take a look over there,” he said.

  Morris stiffened, glanced as Stacey. “That’s really not in the game plan, Mr. O’Toole,” he said, finally.

  “How far is that over there?”

  Morris looked, calculated in his head. “Maybe eight, ten miles.”

  “Is it that outrageous that a plane could wander that far off course in a snowstorm?”

  “It’s not outrageous, no. In fact, it’s not outrageous that it might have wandered just about anywhere, but that’s not how we conduct a search.”

  Brandon knew not to push too hard. “Seems to me, we’re coming up on two days of searching the same area, and we’ve turned up nothing. Haven’t found so much as a dent in the snow. You call that no data. I call it negative data. Maybe it’s time to assume that we’re looking in the wrong spot.”

  “You may be right, Mr. O’Toole, but I’m not in the position to make that call.”

  “Suppose you saw someone waving his arms outside of the search area. You’d fly over there to take a look, wouldn’t you?”

  “Come on, Mr. O’Toole—”

  “No, no, I’m not going to tell you I saw someone waving his arms, but I will tell you that I have a very strong feeling that Scott’s over there on that ridge. I can’t give you anything stronger than intuition, but I’m telling you, I know my son is over there.”

  Brandon could hear Morris sigh into his intercom. He looked to Stacey, who shrugged and looked away.

  “This is exactly why you shouldn’t be here. If every pilot acted on his hunches, the search pattern would become haphazard and meaningless.”

  “Please.” That one word just hung there in the air. Brandon could feel the weight of it himself. He could only imagine how it weighed on Morris.

  Another sigh.

  “Just one pass. As a favor to me.”

  In the final sigh, he heard Morris make two decisions at once: that he’d humor his passenger; and that said passenger was hereafter forever grounded.

  The pitch of the engine noise deepened as the pilot throttled up and banked hard to the right.

  SCOTT HAD BEEN WATCHING the planes all morning as they flew their oblong circles over the wrong spot, white specs against the cobalt sky, occasionally flashing like a nova as they passed through the sun’s glare at just the right angles. At one point, about an hour ago, Scott found himself screaming out at the aircraft, and wildly waving his arms, as if there were even the remotest chance that they could see him. He’d cursed, he’d begged, he’d shrieked himself hoarse, but the lazy circles continued on and on.

  Out of nowhere, a stomach cramp blossomed deep in his gut, doubling him over and forcing a grunt from his throat. He thought for a moment that he might puke again, but talked himself out of it. Nothing to barf up, remember? Maybe it was just the despair, but Scott swore that he felt weaker today. His hands shook more, and not just because of the cold; though God knew it was friggin’ freezing.

  Deep down inside, he knew that he’d begun to die. Closing in on forty-eight hours without food, and clearly no rational expectation for rescue, this was the beginning of the end.

  The planes were so close. There had to be a way. There had to be—

  Something changed in the sound of the airplane’s engine that made his head jerk up for another look. At first, he had difficulty focusing on the little spec in the distance, but when he reacquired it, he realized that it had finally broken its monotonous circular orbit, and was headed in a new direction. It looked like it was heading out, on a course directly away from him. They must have run low on fuel. Shielding his eyes against the brilliant sky and the piercing white of the snow, he watched as the lone airplane headed home. Oddly, as he watched, the growl of the engine grew louder.

  “Oh, shit,” Scott breathed. It wasn’t heading home; it was coming right at him! He let out a war whoop as he jumped to his feet and waved his arms wildly over his head. “Here I am! Right here! Right here!”

  He needed his fire.

  Scott turned too quickly as he bolted back toward his impromptu camp and lost his footing, catching a face full of snow. It hurt, but it didn’t slow him down. Jesus, this was it! Finally, he had his first good shot at a rescue. He had to light the fire, and he had maybe five minutes to do it.

  By now, his tracks through the snow were plainly visible—great carved trenches. The vibrating growl of the airplane’s engine filled the woods as he plowed on. He fell again, filling his nostrils with snow, but an instant later, he was back on his feet.

  The engine grew louder still. Scott’s arms and legs pumped wildly as he half-ran, half-stumbled past the dead fall that he’d guesstimated to be the halfway point. Scott’s entire world had compressed itself into two sounds: the noise of the approaching airplane and the frantic in and out of his own breathing. Nothing else existed. Nothing else mattered. The exertions of a 100-yard dash yielded the progress of a baby’s crawl. His legs and his lungs screamed at him to slow down, but his brain pushed him on and on.

  There was the site! He could see it now. And there was the little cup of fuel he’d put out. Some had spilled, but even from this far away, he could see that there was enough.

  If the plane wasn’t overhead, it was damn close when Scott slid to a halt and again lost his footing. He could do it! There was time! Not much, but at least there was time.

  His hands seemed to know exactly what to do as they snatched the fusee from its perch in the snow. He pulled the plastic cap, yanked the protective cover with his teeth and struck it like a giant match. It lit instantly, enveloping him in a cloud of acrid white smoke.

  • • •

  “SLOW DOWN,” Brandon said into the intercom. They’d dropped their altitude to treetop level, and at this distance, the unbroken carpet of white sped by at an impossible speed.

  “This is as slow as she goes without falling out of the sky,” Morris replied.

  If he were able, Scott would make a sign, of that Brandon was certain. A smoke column made the most sense, but it might be anything.

  Scott was down there. Don’t ask him how he knew, but he did. He was there.

  But the white carpet yielded nothing; not even a brief glimpse into the world that lay below.

  THE WOODS SHOOK with the lumbering vibration of the airplane. In Scott’s mind, it could have been a hundred airplanes for all the noise it made. It was close—so, so close—maybe even on top of him already.

  But there’d be time. There had to be time. This was his moment!

  He touched the fusee’s searing red flame to the surface of the fuel in the cup, taking care to remain a respectful distance, just in case it flashed. The flame touched the surface and…

  …nothing happened.

  “What?” Scott yelled. “No!” He tried again, and again. Still, nothing. “Shit!”

  How could it not light? He raised the cup to his nose and recoiled from the stench of the fuel. It was the right stuff, so why wouldn’t it light? He put it back on the ground and again touched the flame to the shimmering surface. The noise of the plane vibrated in his chest.

  Nothing happened.

  “Come on!” he yelled. “Light, goddammit!”

  And it did, with a slight, nearly inaudible woof a pitiful orange flame appeared for just an instant over the surface of the fuel, but in the time it took for Scott to smile, the flame went out again.

  “No!”

  As he tried again, and again, only to see the same brief flashes of flame, the noise of the engine peaked, and through the canopy of leaves, Scott saw the giant shadow pass overhead. The sound Dopplered and began to diminish.

  “No!” Scott screamed to the woods. “No! I’m here! I’m right here!”

  Trembling now, and working faster than his hands could manage, he frantically waved his fusee over the top of the basin. He needed smoke, goddammit. They were here! Right here! And he couldn’t get the fuel to light!

  “Don’t do
this to me!” he yelled, and then a shiver hit him, launching itself like a torpedo from the base of his spine to his shoulders. It made him jump, an odd reflex motion that came from nowhere, and lasted only an instant.

  His hand jerked, dunking the tip of the fusee into the contained puddle of fuel, extinguishing its flame forever.

  16

  SHERRY SAT AT THE ELABORATE fold-down desk in the living room, her fingers hovering over the keys of her laptop, waiting for the muse to arrive. She’d been like this for an hour. She never should have accepted the seminar gig. What was she thinking? Way out here in the middle of nowhere, how could she ever imagine that enough people would sign up to make it all worthwhile? The people in charge told her that it would be a packed house, but she recognized the feel of sunshine being blown up her skirt.

  It was billed as an empowerment lecture, based on the principles set forth in The Mirror’s Not the Problem. Women these days were their own worst enemies. The baggage they carried with them through life, shouldering not only the guilt of failure, but also the guilt of success, made the glass ceiling bulletproof. Good Lord, she’d delivered her speech so many times, you’d think she’d have had it memorized by now. Maybe she did. Who could know? But it was part of her routine to rewrite it in full on the day before she was due to hit the stage. That kept it all fresh.

  But not when your son is missing and everybody wants something from you; not when everyone is watching to see how well you hold up under the pressure. Nobody can concentrate in conditions like that.

  Sherry had instructed Larry to get her out of this thing, to persuade the conference center manager that she was too distraught to go onstage, but it didn’t work. They had a contract, the manager reminded him, and people had traveled to SkyTop from all over the country to hear Sherry Carrigan O’Toole talk about her philosophies of life. They were here, and they were snowbound, and the manager was not about to deal with a revolt simply because the featured speaker was feeling worried.