As I’m making my way the wind picks up. It’s not a blast but it’s more than it was, and it feels like there could be more behind it, before long. It starts picking up snow, getting a little louder. I stop a couple of times and check the bodies I can get to, but nobody I check is alive, the guys ahead of me are the only things moving. I keep making for them. I can’t check them all.
I get up near the first guy, finally. He’s up again and trying to walk, in his boxers, and socks, half-bloody from something. He looks all broken, but it might just be the way he’s standing, or trying to stand. He’s hopping, or bobbing, one arm and one leg sticking out crooked, trying to hoist his boxers up better, then he slips and flops back, lands on his hand, screams in pain, or pissed off, or both. When I get up close to him he’s crying.
“I lost my fucking pants,” he says. It’s Ojeira. He’s a tool-pusher. I look around, no blankets, nothing, some bent seats a way off. I pull my sweater off, lay it on him.
“Can you move?” I ask him.
“Not this fucking leg, much. I think I could hop or something, in a minute. I’m going to sit a minute,” he says. “It hurts like a fucker. Fucking shit.” He’s mad at the plane for crashing, or the fucked condition of his bones. It has to hurt him, what I see of it.
“Fucking fuck—“ he’s groaning, and wincing, and getting too pissed off. He’s barely remembering to breathe. The wind's starting up on us, more. He’s freezing. So am I.
“It’s good it hurts,” I say. “That’s good.” I look at him to see if he understands.
“Oh yeah? Good,” he says. “I’m fucking terrific, then.”
“What’s bleeding?” I ask.
He looks down, lifts his shirt, his side and stomach are scratched and cut, some a little deep, but it doesn’t look bad, just cuts. It’s too cold to worry about infection. If there’s a fucking bacteria alive in this it deserves whatever it can get. There’s some big bulge sticking out under his skin, some kind of hernia, guts bulging, or something. He doesn’t notice it, and I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’ll kill him, just make it harder for him. I don’t know.
“Anything else?” I ask him. “Anything else bleeding?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t fucking know yet. Fuck.” He looks at me. “Ottway, yeah? What— John?”
I nod. “You’re Ojeira, right?”
He nods. “Yeah. Fuck.”
We look at each other. ‘Why am I alive, and yet so fucked?’ he looks like he’s thinking. He tries getting up again.
“Stay there for now, OK?” I say. Ojeira nods again. He looks at his hand. Two fingers are bent sideways, the whole hand is blowing up, I see now, it looks dark, purple, I’m guessing.
“Fuck me,” he says. He tries to clench a fist, and almost gags.
“That hurts more than the rest of it,” he says. He looks down at himself, his legs at different angles from the way he flopped down. He starts trying to set them right, and gives up, stops. He huffs in air, his eyes fill up. I think he’s going to start crying again, but he just sits there.
“I’m going to sit. A minute,” he says.
“I’ll come back for you. Stay here, OK?” I say. He doesn’t have much choice. I look across the snow to the other guy. He’s still crawling, trying to get on top of the snow, I see now he’s been moving, he’s just stuck in a drift so deep he’s barely made a yard. I go over to him, past bloody clothes and more parts of bodies and bodies. It’s Luttinger, another tool-pusher. They’re all tool-pushers.
“What the fuck,” he says. “Fuck.” He finally gets up on harder snow and stays up, this time, nothing seems wrong with him except he’s still unsteady, but no bones sticking out or limbs going the wrong way.
“Something rolled, broke open, I don’t know. Slid a fucking mile.” He touches his face, up by his eye and his forehead.
“I have any face left?” I can’t tell much in the light, but it looks like he’s just torn up. He still has a face.
“I think so. Yeah,” I say. He’s touching it.
“Feels like I scraped it all the hell off,” he says. His clothes are half-ripped away, or burned away, from sliding across snow, or something, but he’s got more on him than Ojeira.
He looks at me.
“You OK?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He looks across to Ojeira.
“That guy looks half-fucked,” he says. Ojeira’s gotten up, again, he’s trying to walk. He looks pretty bad doing it. “Who is it?”
“Ojeira.” Luttinger nods.
“Yeah. Shit.” Luttinger says. “I’m Luttinger.”
“I know,” I say. He looks at me, doesn’t know me.
“I’m Ottway.” He looks at me again, sort of guarded, nods, not so glad to see me, suddenly.
”We should get him inside a piece of plane or something. Try to get him warm,” I say. We both look around. There are more dark clumps in the snow, bodies or seats or wreckage, chunks of shell. Luttinger nods.
“Anybody else moving over here?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Nobody.” Of the ones we can see close to us, it’s plain enough they’re dead. I should start assuming everybody’s dead.
We start back for Ojeira. It’s hard going. I’m finding things hurting I didn’t know were hurting before. The cold is numbing everything but sharpening everything at the same time. I stop at the first body we pass. The guy has boots on. I pull them off, his jacket too, his sweater. The guy’s got insulated pants, I get those off him too. He looks familiar, but I don’t think I know him. Luttinger doesn’t say anything. I give the jacket to him. He looks surprised, but takes it. The other bodies we pass on the way to Ojeira are in t-shirts, or half-naked. I’m not understanding how clothes ripped off in the crash, but they did.
Luttinger and I reach Ojeira, finally. He’s glad to see us and pissed at the same time.
“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he says.
“We did, though,” I say.
We get the pants and the boots on him which seems to hurt him but he manages. Luttinger looks at him shivering, and gives him the jacket I gave him before I ask him too. I get my sweater back on.
We get on either side of him and help him walk toward the nearest piece of shell we can get to. It’s sticking up out the snow like a smoke-stack. I look for whatever piece I must have come out of and I can make out my tracks, where I think I came from, but whatever I fell out of looks tiny now, a little hunk of metal, couple of seats. I thought it was a more respectable piece of plane. We haul for the smoke-stack piece and don’t seem that much closer to it, and we pass more bodies, then more again. We set Ojeira down to check them, they’re gone. But I see blankets, get one tied around me, give the other to Luttinger, then a little further I see some bags half-ripped open, clothes spilled out, more sweaters and jackets, we get those on, too.
We move again, haul a long time, we come up on something else. Some blood, dark in the snow, something else I can’t identify, a piece of uniform wrapped in among it. It’s half a pilot, or co-pilot, or navigator, one of those guys. I can’t see anything that looks like a cockpit, he must have fallen out, or been thrown.
We keep going and get to the smoke-stack, and set Ojeira down. I see now there’s no way into it, that I can see, unless we want to tunnel under it to get in. Looking at it leaning, I think it’s going to blow down anyway, if the wind gets much bigger, and kill us that way. I look back along the trail of wreckage, more bodies, more pieces of crap, and I can just make out a bigger piece of plane, as far away again as this one was. Nothing else looks much use to us. The cold is drawing the life out of me, and I think Ojeira will die if we don’t keep trying get him into some kind of inside, and this is only a half-stiff wind, so far. We’ll die too, I think. I look at Luttinger and Ojeira.