The wave let us go.
I rolled onto my back and gasped for air, letting the life vest hold me up. I made sure the boy’s face was out of the water, and then Anita. “It’s okay,” I murmured to them, my voice pitched so high it frightened me. “We’re doing okay.” The boy had his arm around my neck, so tight it was painful. I was glad. It told me he was strong, not like Anita. She drifted beside us, nearly unconscious.
The wave had carried us maybe fifty feet from the broken fuselage. A fire still shimmered beyond it, though it was less than it had seemed through the window. A yellow fragment of moon floated low above the horizon, illuminating a line of white water that must surely mark a distant reef … and I realized then that the fuselage must have been resting on a reef, with waves breaking around it … but it made no sense. The north Pacific is vast and nearly empty, and while I could believe our pilot had hoped to come down near some patch of reef or on some spot of an island — Johnston Atoll maybe? Palmyra? — to imagine that he had succeeded was more than I could accept.
With my charges in tow, I swiveled around, where I was presented with more evidence of the impossible.
Visible in the moon’s light, not a hundred feet away, was a sand beach, rising steeply to a line of brush and skeletal trees. Water sloshed into my open mouth. I spit it out, sure I was suffering a hallucination, seeing a mirage. Reality had slipped. We had come to a place where the odds did not allow us to be.
Somehow, we had been given a chance — and I took it.
With one hand on Anita’s straps and the boy clinging to me with a relentless grip, I kicked my shoes off, kicked at the water, and slowly, slowly, I brought us all to that impossible shore.
The boy stood up as we reached the shallows, but Anita couldn’t walk, or maybe she didn’t want to. “I’m not going to leave you,” I warned her, and I dragged her arm around my shoulder, hauling her up the beach, while the boy ran ahead, scouting beneath the vegetation until he found a hollow that offered shelter from a relentless wind. I got Anita out of her vest, and used it as a pillow for her head. Her skin was hot, but she was shivering so I piled sand around her legs. The boy helped me.
“What’s your name?” I asked him as I unbuckled his vest. He gave me a puzzled look, so I tried one of the few Tagalog words I knew. “Pangalan”
“Hilario,” he told me in a shy, frightened voice. I tried to remember who he’d been traveling with … mama or daddy or both? But they’d been strangers, of no importance to me, and I’d paid no attention. I ruffled his wet hair and gave him a hug.
Out on the reef, the broken fuselage had been pushed over by the waves, submerged just below the surface. Every time a breaker rolled past, spray flew into the air, brilliant white in the moonlight. I watched it and realized: I survived.
I was alive, I’d saved two other people, and rescue was surely on its way.
“Come, Hilario.” I took his hand and we walked up and down the windswept beach, but nowhere did we find any other survivors, not even a body washed up on the beach, and no debris from the wreck.
This was not reality as I knew it. It was unnatural. All too neat.
As dawn began to lighten the sky, we made our way back to Anita. On the way, I listened for a rescue plane or a helicopter from some passing navy ship, but I heard only the boom and rumble of waves.
“Is there water?” Anita whispered when we returned to her. “Tubig”
“No, there’s nothing. But rescue should be coming soon.”
I sat cross-legged beside her. Hilario tumbled into my lap, and I held him close. He was mine now. It felt that way. I kissed his salty cheek, and then I put my hand on Anita’s forehead. The dry heat of her skin shocked me. Her fever was much worse. “My God.”
“Right on time,” she whispered.
“What?”
“I meant to die in LA.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t … really matter.”
Her voice was weak, her words hard to hear. I leaned closer, and my gaze fell on the rash at her neck. Like her fever, it was worse, a collection of tiny pustules, some of them glimmering wet with fluid.
I pulled back. “That’s not from an allergy. What’s wrong with you, Anita?”
She smiled at me as if we were good friends. “You survived the crash, Halley, just like you said you would.” Her whispery voice was almost lost in the wind. “Maybe you’ll survive the plague, too. It’s possible. One in a hundred should. Maybe two in a hundred, with the best hospital care.”
She was delirious. She didn’t know what she was saying. Her fever, her head injury, the shock of the crash, had combined to plunge her into the nightmare that must have haunted her career, the worst-case scenario of a biohazard plague escaping one of her labs …
That’s what I wanted to believe.
But when I looked again at the pustules on her neck, I couldn’t hold onto my denial. With Hilario in my arms, I stood up, and backed a step away. Her gaze followed me. “Everyone on the plane,” she murmured, “infected by the time we reached LA.”
“We didn’t make it to LA.”
“You’ll make it. It only takes one. You’re that one. The right one, because you’ll do what’s needed to survive.”
It’s not true.
That’s what I told myself, over and over again as Hilario and I held hands and walked the beach. It couldn’t be true.
But what if it was? What if she had made herself the dark angel of the apocalypse, bearing a pestilence that only one in a hundred would survive?
I went back to see her, to plead with her to tell me the truth, but the truth was lost. Her eyes had clouded. She was gone.
I sat on the beach with Hilario, shivering, but not from cold. Wasn’t it a miracle the plane had crashed? Euphoria swept over me as I thought about it. Horror rolled in on its heels. Over 330 people had been on that plane. They were gone now, lost. It was a tragedy — and yet if Anita could be believed, so many more, almost all the world, had been made safer because of it.
The drone of a distant helicopter startled me from my musings. I looked up, to see, beyond the reef, the silhouette of a navy ship looming against the yellow glow of the predawn sky. The helicopter was a flyspeck, speeding toward the boiling water that marked the sunken fuselage of the plane.
Hilario leaped up. His eyes went wide as he took in the ship, and a beautiful grin broke out across his face. He whooped, jumping up and down and waving his arms in mad greeting.
I whooped and waved too, but my delirious relief faded as dread descended over me. I sank to the sand, watching Hilario jump up and down, up and down, his high voice crying out in words that I did not understand.
Wasn’t it a miracle that our plane had crashed? And wasn’t it a miracle that Anita had survived, if only just long enough for me to learn that she’d placed an apocalypse in my hands?
“Come!” Hilario screamed, using a rare English word. “Come!”
My voice broke as I told him, “No, baby. They can’t come here.”
He hesitated, turning to me with worried eyes. I got up and ran to the top of the beach where a line of driftwood had collected. I grabbed a large stick. I remembered Anita’s last words to me, You’ll do what you need to do to survive. She’d been so sure of me. I’d been so sure of myself.
I darted back down to where the sand was wet, as close to the wave wash as I dared, and I started scratching deep scars, digging down to the wet, dark sand to form giant letters. Hilario came to watch me with a worried frown on his sweet face. I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile but I kept working, because it wasn’t the apocalypse that Anita had placed in my hands after alclass="underline" it was the lives of ninety-nine out of a hundred people — and how personal every one of those lives felt to me, resting in my hands.