Naw, that didn’t make sense. Not twenty hours after the crash. If they’d had any idea where the tail was, they’d have sent teams here by now to secure the zone. If nothing else, they’d have made sure curious civilians wouldn’t come by and mess with the debris. I’d seen movies about this. The authorities had to bag and tag every last screw and bolt they could find. That way, they could later lay out all the pieces like a jigsaw, cataloguing the various wears and tears to better understand what had gone wrong. It was a slow, gruelling process, but one that always involved the first step, which was finding as much of the plane as possible, starting with the corners of the puzzle: tail, nose and both wingtips.
So, no, there had to be a good reason why they weren’t here. The problem was that I couldn’t find any such reason that was the least bit reassuring. It was getting harder and harder to push back on the notion that no one was coming. That this wee girl and I were truly on our own.
In any given situation, planning for the worst was a sound tactic—not one I liked to use if I could avoid it, but sound nonetheless. So, I reasoned to myself, if no one is coming, I should stop wasting my time sitting around doing nothing. Right, all well and good, but what can I do instead?
The starting point of getting any plan of action together was easy: knowledge. Ergo, I needed more information to fully understand this situation before moving onto the next step. Right now, the greatest unknown factor was location. There has to be a town or a road somewhere. We just need to find it. Even as I told myself this, doubt crept into my head telling me that I was already lousing up that first step.
I stood up and closed my eyes for a moment. Again, I could hear the faint sound of waves in the distance. I just wasn’t sure which way the sound was coming from. I opened my eyes again, seeing nothing more than the ever-present trees and moss. No path in sight anywhere. Still, the vegetation wasn’t dense, so it wouldn’t be too hard to walk through. I just had to choose a direction to do the walking. And doing that on this little information? Ah, there was the hard part…
Behind me, I heard the woman standing up too. There was no moan of pain this time, only a heavy exhale. An instant later, she was standing by my side.
“Any idea which way to go?” I asked, waving my pointer finger around. There weren’t a hundred choices to pick from. It was either forest leading to forest or forest leading to forest.
Though I was pretty certain she understood my gestures, if not my words, she remained silent and motionless. I sighed and nodded in the direction of the sun before I started walking. She managed to keep pace with me, hobbled leg and all.
After about fifteen minutes of walking through low shrubs and tree branches, the forest opened up, giving us an unobstructed view of a cliffside overlooking the sea. That vast expanse of blue welcomed us on the left and right, wild waves coming to meet us before crashing at the foot of the cliffs. The sun was a large ball of fire directly above of us, rising high over the rocks that stood above the surf in certain spots like submerged fingers reaching out of the depths. The shadows those rocks cast even resembled living limbs in the way they trickled and danced on their aquatic backdrop.
I moved closer to the cliff’s edge, looking around in search of something. Anything, really. But all I saw was more of the same, the edges of the cliffs curving inward until they disappeared. Not only did it seem never-ending, but it was quite a long drop to the bottom. Any fall from here would be fatal.
Finally, I spotted a small cove a little to the left, protected by a smaller set of half-submerged dark rocks set in a half-circle. When I moved closer to the edge, I could make out a little beach in those shadows, apparently made of small pebbles rather than sand. It was as croissant-shaped as the rocks themselves, about fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long.
I wondered if it was possible to get down there. While this cliff had some height, it wasn’t Cornwall-high. I pegged it as forty, maybe fifty feet high at the most. And there was a chance we’d see something more from the further edges of the cove. And if there was a way to glimpse behind those rocks, we’d see more of the coast.
I heard the rustle of clothes behind me, turning just in time to see the woman act on the very same idea I was. She was heading down the cliff, relying on her staff more than ever. With careful steps, I went down after her. While I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone for a walk on something that wasn’t concrete, she seemed to have more experience at it than I did. Despite her injury, her footing was sure, never once slipping as she forged a path between the least jagged rocks, favouring the tiny recesses where dirt had gathered. I followed as best as I could, trying to place pressure on the same surfaces she did, though that was rough on my rigid, thin ankles. I envied the woman for her ankle-high grey sneakers with their walker’s treads. The soles of my dress shoes were slick, which gave me a harder time keeping my footing.
Eventually, we got to the beach at the bottom. It was as I’d pegged it, made up of an assortment of light grey pebbles the size of £2 coins. Looking back up, the looming cliff didn’t look nearly as steep. The rocks provided protection from the winds and the idea of a private beach was appealing. It could even be a nice place to stay for a day, if one was looking for such a thing.
Behind me, the woman muttered something that sounded a lot like “Hell.” I turned back around in surprise. Did she know some English, after all?
She was kneeling sideways by the water, bringing water-coated fingers to her lips. She shook her wet finger for emphasis before saying again, “Sel.” The downward twist of her lips helped with the translation. She was telling me the French word for “salt”.
If this was salted water, then this couldn’t be a lake or a river. That helped narrow down our location some, as it meant we weren’t inland. I tried remembering the layout of Sweden, its position atop the European continent, sandwiched between Norway in the west and Finland in the east. The southern half of the country was surrounded by the Baltic Sea on all sides. The north-western part was glued to Norway, whereas the eastern stretch had the Gulf of Bothnia reaching high between Sweden and Finland. Come to think of it, wasn’t the Gulf mostly made of salted water?
I shook my head and went back to the rest of my crude mental cartography. Our intended destination, Stockholm, sat next to the Baltic Sea. But after we hit the storm clouds, we’d stopped aiming to reach the capital city. Instead, we’d been re-routed to another airport that was further north. What had the stewardess said about the town the captain had mentioned—Kiruna, I think it was called? That it was hundreds of miles north of Stockholm?
Finally, I knew Sweden and Finland joined in the North, leaving no room for a body of salt water to sit. But in the west… I did some more rough calculations in my head. The Norwegian coast wasn’t that far away in the west, was it? After putting all that I knew with all I’d observed, I realised this open-horizon could only mean one of two things. We were looking at either the Norwegian Sea or the Gulf of Bothnia. While I had no way of knowing which it was, we were totally off-course either way.
8. BEARER OF BAD NEWS