“Do what you have to,” he said. “Never mind me, just get us down.”
She risked a look at him and saw that his face was white but determined. He looked like he thought he might die, but that there was nothing he could do about it.
“We’re fine,” she said.
“I know.” Nothing he could do but trust her.
They were coming off the end of the runway now, gaining altitude but not enough to lose the airstrip. They went into another left turn and the wind slammed into them again. This time they were more ready for it, braced. Wy felt like she was riding a bucking bronco, only higher.
“You ever go sailing?” Liam shouted.
“What?”
“Sailing, like on a sailboat.”
“No,” she said, working the yoke and the rudder in subtle movements, trying for the best altitude to produce the most forward motion and the least turbulence. The horizon, a mass of dark green intersecting with a mass of dirty white, tilted up.
Liam kept shouting. “When the wind’s blowing, the sailboat heels over, to the right or to the left, depending on the tack the boat is taking into the wind. Why doesn’t the boat go all the way over and swamp, you ask?”
She was bringing the Cessna around to a southwesterly heading before the storm blew them to Anchorage, but she shouted back, “Why?”
“There’s a part of the hull that sticks down like a sword out of the center of the keel. It’s filled with lead. Ballast.”
“Oh. Right. Good.” Their airspeed kept fluctuating, and she had no idea what their true ground speed was. Her biceps were beginning to tremble from the strain of hauling so long and so steadily on the yoke.
“I never think there’s enough ballast,” he shouted.
“What?”
“I never think there’s enough ballast on a sailboat. I always think it’s going to go all the way over. It never does.”
They were lined up with the runway again, although they kept sliding north and Wy kept having to correct. She came in full power again because she didn’t dare do anything else. This time the gear touched down, not just once but three times, hard enough every time so that it felt like the struts were going to come up through the wings.
Trees flashed past, the gravel strip screamed beneath them, the Cessna keeping on the straight and narrow only when it was crossing it.
“Wy?” Liam said.
The end of the runway was fast approaching.
“Wy?” Liam said.
So was the Nushagak River.
“Wy!”
She waited until the last possible moment to cut power. When she did, they had maybe a hundred feet of runway left. She pushed in the throttle and kicked right rudder simultaneously. The Cessna pulled hard right. A gust of wind came screaming down the runway and hit the tail. It raised up, enough to pull the plane up off its right wheel. The left wingtip dipped toward the ground. They were still rolling.
“Wy?”
The gust seemed never-ending, pushing, pushing, pushing. The left wing of the plane dipped lower and lower, and they were still rolling, right toward a stand of three large cottonwoods. She cut power completely. The prop stopped straight up and down.
“Wy?”
Momentum kept them moving. Ground loop, she thought, goddamn it a goddamn groundloop, we’ll be okay but what about my goddamn plane goddamn it. “We’ll be okay Liam we’ll be okay we’llbeokaywe’llbeokay oh shit!”
The Cessna paused, poised on nose and left gear, the left wing barely a foot from the ground. It seemed that everything was holding its breath. Wy, Liam, the Cessna, even the wind.
The wind died. Just like that. Stopped in mid-roar, for that precious second the Cessna needed to recover. The tail settled down, the right gear fell back on the runway with a thump, and the left wing came up.
They were still rolling. Wy hit left rudder hard, swerving to avoid the cottonwoods, only to run into a stand of alders. Smaller trees, but still trees. The Cessna hit them hard enough to bury its nose up to the leading edge of the wings. They bounced back once from the impact, and stopped.
They sat there for a moment in silence. The wind as suddenly started up again, a long, angry howl.
“You’re a good pilot, Wy,” Liam said finally, in a conversational tone.
“The best,” she said in a very faint voice.
“I wonder if my heart is ever going to get back to normal sinus rhythm,” he said, still in that same conversational tone.
“I wonder if mine’s going to start beating again anytime soon.”
They sat for another moment, trying to grasp the fact that they were still alive, and trying to remember what it was they were supposed to do next.
Tim. That’s why they were here. Tim. There was a crazed killer on the loose who might hurt Tim. Moses. Bill. Amelia.
Wy stirred. “We’d better get going, see if we can find a boat.” She unstrapped her seat belt with hands that did not seem to belong to her. The door was hard to open against the alder branches crowded up against it, but once the wind caught an edge she had to hang on so it wouldn’t be yanked out of her grasp. On the other side of the plane Liam was having the same problem. A branch caught at his uniform, ripping a hole in his sleeve, and he cursed.
Wy tugged a backpack from the cargo compartment and pulled it on. Liam did the same with his. They were both wearing heavy boots and jackets. She forced the smaller door shut and turned to leave.
“What about the plane?” Liam said.
“Leave it,” she shouted back. “Those alders are probably better than a tie-down in this wind. Come on.”
He paused, looking up.
“What?” she shouted.
“Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
He stared over her shoulder. “Nothing.” Any sensible bird out in this wouldn’t waste time croaking out hellos, he’d be keeping his beak shut and his head down.
They staggered down the strip, bent double into the wind. It wasn’t very cold, Wy thought dimly, and noticed that the four inches of snow that had fallen overnight had almost completely melted away. “Chinook?” she yelled.
“It feels like it,” he yelled back. “Did the forecast call for it?”
“No.”
“Figures.”
The runway ended in a small berm overgrown with more alders and salmonberry and raspberry bushes. The red and yellow fruits seemed almost incongruous on such a day, hanging in fat succulent clumps from stalks bowed beneath their weight. Bears, Wy thought suddenly. “Bears,” she said out loud.
“Shit! Where?”
“Berries,” she said, pointing. It was hard to get words out, the wind snatched her breath away.
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Where’s the dock?”
“Over the berm.”
They found the path and struggled down it. It terminated in a dock, a rectangular pier surfaced with one-by-twelve wooden planks. There was no boat.
“Shit!”
“Well, great,” Liam said, more tired than annoyed. “What do we do now?”
“There has to be a boat, there has to be. It’s September, there’s nobody left on this part of the river except Moses.” She turned and let the wind blow her ashore.
“Where are you going? Wy, wait, wait for me!” He lumbered after her, to find her wading through the brush along the river. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a boat,” she said. There was a crash of brush ten feet to her right, a hasty scramble of feet and big body, a panicked breaking of branches; Wy didn’t even look around. Liam never did see what creature’s hiding place they disturbed. “There has to be one, Liam, a lot of people with fish camps leave their boats here over the winter. They pull them up on the bank and-” She stopped, so suddenly that he ran into her.
He looked over her shoulder, and there was an old wooden skiff, about twelve feet long, he estimated, lying hull up on a trampled patch of ground.
Wy was already bending down and hooking her hands beneath the gunnel. He moved forward to stand next to her. “Ready? One, two, heave!”