“Ow!”
“Sorry,” Britta said, lowering the flashlight beam to the torn and littered floor.
“Who’s there?” Robert asked, his voice unreal and raspy.
“Britta Franz and two passengers. Doctor…”
“Graham and Susan Tash,” Graham said.
Robert nodded drunkenly. “Dan and Dallas,” he began, stopping to clear his throat, “… and… and… Steve made it,” he said. “They’re up front. Be careful. The floor is jagged in places.”
Britta nodded.
“How is everyone downstairs?” Robert asked.
Britta looked at him blankly, her right hand rising, then falling limply to her side, an apparent attempt to gesture somewhere behind.
“I… can’t find it. There’s no… stairway either.”
Graham had been focusing on Rick Barnes’s prone body, preparing to kneel beside the man and examine him. He turned and looked behind them at the field of orange flames burning and flickering in a thousand places, all radiating toward what was becoming a light purple glow on the horizon.
A lightning strike somewhere in the distance shot a bolt of terror up Graham’s spine as if it had struck him directly. He realized he was looking at the remains of the storm that had almost killed them.
“I think… the others must be somewhere back there,” Britta said, looking blankly in the same direction, obviously in shock. “We… we’ve got to find them.”
Graham followed her gaze, recognizing the clearing of broken trees as the final flight path of the 747. He could see shapes in the distance, bits and pieces of fuselage, a shell with windows on one side, and other terrible shapes in the dark, but nothing as large as a survivable part of an airliner cabin.
There were over two hundred people on this airplane! he thought. My God! There could be hundreds injured back there!
“Doctor. Please. Mr. Barnes is injured,” Britta was saying.
Graham turned to look at the airline CEO and knelt down as Britta played the flashlight over his face. “Can you hear me, Mr. Barnes?” Graham asked.
Rick Barnes moaned, but didn’t speak.
Britta found the aircraft first-aid kit, and Graham went to work on the obvious facial injuries, stabilizing Barnes and concluding there were probably internal injuries in addition to a serious concussion.
“If you’re done for now, Doctor,” Britta said, “I need the flashlight to check the others.” Graham nodded, and she swung the flashlight forward at the tangle of debris in her pathway, stepping in toward Dan, Dallas, and Steve.
To the east, a pronounced glow was filling the horizon as dawn overtook them. They could hear a host of nonthreatening jungle sounds of birds and wind and the occasional buzz of an insect.
Graham Tash stood up and held Susan for support as he looked behind them at the wreckage path. “Susan, there will be others in terrible shape, wherever they are. We should go help.”
She nodded without a word and lifted the first-aid kit. Graham took the flashlight from Britta and stepped out of the wreckage onto muddy ground before turning to help Susan down the eighteen-inch drop. The air reeked of jet fuel. The two of them stepped carefully past jagged remains, wincing at the unique smell of the burning rubble to the east as they walked fifty yards away, then turned to look back.
The entire upper deck with the cockpit attached had sheared away from the rest of the fuselage. Somehow, the forward half had slid mostly intact into what was apparently a natural clearing, the lower fuselage having absorbed most of the speed and impact.
Behind them — toward the highway of flames and wreckage — the outlines of broken trees marked the final flight path of the disintegrated Boeing. Using the flashlight, they made their way in that direction. Susan stumbled in her low heels and twisted her ankle as they stepped gingerly through the macabre landscape of debris, both natural and man-made. They moved steadily, without speaking, until the first encounter with crushed seats and fragmented human bodies announced the western extent of the remains of Flight 5’s main cabin.
After ten minutes of searching, it seemed obvious they were wasting their time.
Susan and Graham made their way back toward the remains of the upper deck, stopping at the edge of the clearing to hold each other for what seemed like an eternity. The enormity of being unable to find a single survivor from the main cabin was too much to bear.
“When I was an emergency room nurse,” Susan said, “I… had to deal with survivors who couldn’t understand why they were spared, and others in an accident died. The ‘why me?’ syndrome, you know? Why did I survive?” Susan breathed heavily and Graham held her as tightly as he dared. She flailed a hand in the direction of the main wreckage, tears streaming down her face. “I’ve… never experienced it myself. But now — here we are alive, and… and all of them… are gone! Why?”
She buried her face in his chest and cried soundlessly, her shoulders heaving. Graham held her close, tears streaming down his own face as he tried to erase the images of the broken and torn human remains he had just seen.
“Let’s keep moving,” Graham said, as gently as he could. “We do have some of the living to care for.”
She nodded in staccato fashion, hanging on to him as they again picked their way toward the dark outline of what used to be the upper deck, the unique whalelike upper hump of a Boeing 747’s fuselage.
Dallas had lost consciousness again, for how long she didn’t know. The memory of Robert talking to her was there, but she had felt tired all of a sudden and had sunk back into the jump seat, intending to rest for a few seconds. Slowly she forced herself to swim up through the fuzzy layers of fatigue and shock to consciousness, vaguely aware that someone who sounded a lot like Britta was helping Dan Wade out of the broken cockpit.
Dallas got to her feet once more and turned to follow. She was almost at the rear of the wrecked flight deck when she remembered Steve Delaney. She turned back just in time to catch him in her arms as Steve tripped over something unseen in the still-dark cockpit.
“We didn’t make it, did we?” Steve asked her, his voice shaking and reedy.
“This ain’t a ghost you’re talking to, Darlin’. Yes, we did make it, but we sure banged up Dan’s airplane.”
Steve was breathing hard, almost in a panic. “I… tried my best…”
“What?”
He was shaking his head, his entire body quaking, his right hand gesturing to the front of the broken cockpit. “I tried… I pulled up… and… I didn’t mean to line up on the wrong lights… I…”
Dallas turned and seized the fourteen-year-old by the shoulders. “Look at me. LOOK AT ME!”
Steve looked up, his eyes huge with shock.
“You did everything right. You hear me? You did everything right, Steve! This just — happened.”
He began hyperventilating and she hugged him tightly, rocking him gently as they stood in the darkness of the wreckage.
“It’s okay, Steve! This is NOT your fault. It’s not your fault.”
There was no response.
“Do you hear me?” she shouted, satisfied only when he nodded his head. “Okay, Baby, let’s get the others and get to safety.” Dallas moved through the jumbled mess of the cockpit’s rear entrance and onto the buckled floor as Britta came forward again.
“We need to get out of here,” Britta said, finding another flashlight and snapping it on.
“You’re right about that!” Dallas agreed. “Who’s back there?”
Britta turned slowly, supporting herself on the broken wall of the cabin, as Robert reappeared.