7
It’s early morning when I wake. I’m still by the fire, which has receded to half the size it was the night before. Bodies wrapped in blankets surround the fire in concentric rings, deflated yellow life vests scattered among them, as if it rained flattened rubber duckies last night.
I feel like I spent the last eight hours bouncing around a giant electric mixing bowl. There’s no one point of pain, just radiating waves of ache. I take a breath, but stop short, trying not to cough. The crisp air hurts too. It all hurts.
After I’d warmed up by the fire last night, I moved farther out, leaving the warmest space for those who needed it most. We should have built two fires; it’s far too cold out here, even for me.
Footsteps crunch toward me across the gravel bank, purposeful, quick strides, and then Sabrina is looming over me, scanning me with her intense eyes. “How do you feel?” Her accent is thicker this morning, her words more clipped. Or maybe that’s just her Doctor Voice.
I let my head fall back to the ground. “Fantastic,” I say, and cough.
“That’s unlikely. I need you to accurately report your symptoms. You might have internal injuries that I couldn’t identify last night.”
“Good news, Doc: all my internal injuries are psychological.” I sit up, surveying the camp. “Where’s Harper?”
“This way.”
I can’t help holding my breath as Sabrina leads me across the camp to the circle closest to the fire. Harper’s lying there on her side, her small body curled toward the fire, wrapped in two fuzzy blue blankets, her matted golden hair spilling over the top. She’s not moving.
“She’s alive,” Sabrina says finally. “But I don’t know much more. She wasn’t breathing when she was brought ashore. I revived her, but she was delirious. She may have permanent brain damage, or . . . As I said last night, any strenuous exercise was dangerous.”
“What do you think we should have done—nothing? Watched? Paddled out and told them we’d love to help but we can’t, doctor’s orders?”
“No. That is not what I meant to say. I only wanted to point out that her precarious physical state before the excess exertion and oxygen deprivation may have exacerbated any preexisting injuries, making a precise diagnosis more difficult.”
“Right. Well, since you put it that way . . .” I take a deep breath and rub my temples, trying to soothe my pounding head. Sabrina probably saved dozens of lives last night, and from the looks of it, she hasn’t slept herself. “Look, I feel like hell, and I’m sort of second-guessing the decisions I made last night.”
“The fault is likely mine. I’m well outside my comfort zone here.”
“Right. You could . . . work on the bedside manner a bit.”
“I don’t visit bedsides.”
“I gathered that. What kind of doctor are you, anyway?”
She turns and steps away from the fire. “I think you should get something to eat and rest.”
“Sandwich and a nap. Sounds good to me.” Searching the distance along the shore, I listen, but I don’t see or hear anything. “So where’s the cavalry?”
“Cavalry?”
“You know—helicopters, emergency personnel. They have to be here by now.”
“I haven’t seen anyone.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I assure you I’m not.”
Human interaction just isn’t Sabrina’s bag, which is probably why she’s not a practicing physician, whatever that means. But that’s not the biggest mystery at the moment.
Maybe the rescue teams are camped out at the nose section. The plane crashed almost twelve hours ago—they have to be here by now. In the confusion last night, I left my cell phone in my pocket. I verify what I already knew: it’s dead and not coming back.
“I’m gonna check the other section, get some food. Want anything?”
“Yes, please. A half-liter bottle of water and a full meal, ideally a thousand calories—fifty percent carbohydrates, thirty percent protein, and the remaining twenty percent fat. Preferably unprocessed with minimal additives.”
“Great.”
“I can add further parameters if it would be helpful.”
“Nope, nope, I’ve got what I need. Be back.”
I trudge through the woods, following the path Harper and I ran last night. She was already winded then. I should have known better—I should never have asked her to join me and the guys in the plane. I looked back at her when I called for volunteers, practically without thinking. After the speech I gave, that was twisting her arm, putting her on the spot in front of everyone. Whatever happens to her, it’s my fault. Guilt presses on my shoulders like the weight of the world, dragging me down.
Ahead, I hear shouts. Two dozen people are crowded around the gray emergency chute that leads up to the door just right of the cockpit.
“It’s our food!”
I know that voice—the drunken jerk in 2D. He’s standing at the bottom of the chute, shouting and pushing people.
“We paid for it.” He jabs his finger toward the face of the man in front of him. “Our tickets paid for the food in first and business classes. Eat the food you paid for in economy. I hear it’s back at the lake.”
I don’t give much thought to what I do next. It’s nice to have an easy decision.
I push through the crowd without a word.
“You,” 2D says, snorting, before I punch him in the face as hard as I can.
He falls straight back into the chute, bounces up halfway, and lands again awkwardly. Then he’s pushing up, lunging at me, throwing a fist at least two feet short. I catch him with another shot to the face, and he flies back, at an angle this time, rolling off the edge of the chute onto the ground.
Every movement hurts, but god, it feels so good. That’s the first time I’ve hit someone since I was ten. I hope it’ll be the last punch I ever throw—but it’s worth it. Easily.
From the ground, 2D’s eyes are daggers. “I’ll have you arrested for assault when this is over!”
“Really? How?”
“I’ve got two dozen witnesses.”
“Do you?” I glance back at the crowd, who are all smiles, some shaking their heads.
“And I’ve got proof,” 2D says, pointing to his bloody face.
“Of what? Being in an airplane crash?”
I turn to Jillian, whose eyes are wide. “How much food is left?”
“Some. I’m not sure.”
“Start bringing it out. Take two people to help you.”
The mob swells forward, but I hold up my hands. “Wait. We need to stay down here. The plane could be unstable. Let Jillian bring the food out, and we’ll divide it evenly, okay?”
There’s some grumbling but no real pushback. After all, I just punched some random guy in the face, seemingly apropos of nothing.
Behind me, Jillian is struggling up the chute with the help of two guys. It seems a waste to build a stairway when we’ll be rescued soon, but someone’s likely to get hurt if we don’t. I walk over and talk with the three of them about what we might use, everything from luggage to the serving carts. We agree that that will be the next priority, after breakfast is served.
What next? The mob is still here, massed like concertgoers waiting for the show to start. We need real help. Rescue.
“Does anyone here have a working cell phone?” I ask.
Voices around the crowd call out.
No, no service.
Battery’s dead.
Been trying all night, nothing.
Nobody has, I’ve been asking.
That’s odd. No, it’s unbelievable. Out of two hundred passengers who crash-land in England, no one has a cell signal? Something’s wrong.
The crowd seems to be thinking the same thing. A man wearing a tweed blazer over a Doctor Who T-shirt and jeans steps out of the crowd. “It’s obvious what’s happened, isn’t it?” He pauses, waiting for the group’s attention. “It’s started—the third world war. They’ve taken out our communications, all electronics. The invasion’s begun, that’s why they’re not bothering with us lot. They’ve got bigger problems than rescuing us at the moment.”
Groans erupt, as well as murmurs of concern. A short, bald man wearing a black sweater and tiny round glasses takes up the dissenting position, speaking with that Down East Maine accent, slowly, deliberately, like a professor dressing down his least favorite student. “That, sir, is far-fetched to the point of absurdity.”
“Is it now?” the Doctor Who fan retorts. “What do you know about it?”
“A great deal, actually. I used to work for Northrop Grumman.”
“Oh yeah? Big whoop.”
“If this were World War Three, we’d be hearing explosions. Planes would be flying overhead. We’d probably hear tanks and troop carriers in the distance. Anyway, I doubt World War Three would start in England.”
“Maybe they’re saving England for last. It’s the perfect launching place for an invasion of continental Europe—history’s proved that.”
“It is,” Northrop Grumman guy counters. “And that’s precisely why nobody’s conquered it in almost a thousand years.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t that kind of war. Your lot always assumes the next war will be just like the last, tanks and planes right up to the end, but it’s the technology that’s the real key. They’ve taken us back to the Stone Age. They’ll wait us out, let us start starving before they invade. They probably got us with a series of EMPs. That explains the crash—the phones, too.”
“It does not, sir,” Northrop Grumman drawls condescendingly. “An EMP wouldn’t have fried our cell phones, but it would have knocked out larger electronics. I just saw a man on the plane with a working laptop.”
“He’s got a working laptop?” someone shouts.
A middle-aged woman in a NYU sweatshirt speaks up. “The Internet went out during the flight. I was reading e-mail. That was at least an hour before we crashed.”
“True,” says a tall man beside her.
“Maybe it’s just a problem with the satellites.”
Northrop Grumman turns to the NYU woman. “A satellite failure could have contributed to the crash, true, but it doesn’t explain the cell phones. They connect to land-based towers—well, except for sat phones. The one thing we can conclude is that all land-based towers in the area must be down.”
“Or there aren’t any. Maybe we’re not in England at all.”
That, I find interesting.
NYU speaks up again. “The little readout showed the plane over England—I saw it.”
“It’s possible,” Northrop Grumman says, considering, “that if the plane had a malfunction, and all external communication was lost, the readouts would have shown us on the original flight path. The plane’s position could have been calculated based only on our flight time.”
“Then we could be anywhere!” a frightened voice shouts.
“Greenland, for all we know. It’s bloody cold enough.”
“Or Iceland, or another island off the coast of England. No man’s land.”
“They’ll never find us.”
An elderly woman steps toward me. “What do you think, sir?”
For some odd reason—because I punched that guy in the face, who knows?—every eye turns to me.
“I think . . . that we’re going to know a lot more once we get into the cockpit. The computers, or hopefully the pilots, can tell us where we are. And the communications equipment could help us contact help.”
It amounts to kicking the can down the road, the proverbial answer we’ve been waiting for locked just feet away, but it does the trick. The crowd mellows. As food slides down the inflated chute, the group breaks up. People get their half meals and start trooping back to the warmth of the blankets and fire by the lake.
“You won’t get into that cockpit.”
I turn to find Northrop Grumman standing bizarrely close to me.
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s reinforced. All airplane doors were, after 9/11, especially on long-haul flights. You’d have a better chance of getting into Fort Knox.”
“What about the windows?”
“Same. They can withstand about any impact, even at high speed.”
The guy’s still staring at me, almost expectantly. He’s got more to say. Heck, I’ll bite. “What do you suggest?”
He moves even closer, almost whispering. “You can’t get in, but if someone is alive inside, they can get out—that’s our only hope. It’s only been twelve hours. Maybe one of the pilots was just knocked unconscious. If we could wake them up, they could unlock the door.”
“Makes sense. So we’ll make some noise.”
“Exactly. Now, this is important, Mr. . . .”
“Stone. Nick Stone.” I extend my hand, and he shakes quickly.
“Bob Ward. Now we need to make sure we—or someone we trust—are the ones who get into that cockpit first.”
Someone we trust. My mind flashes to the three guys that followed me onto the plane last night—and to Harper. I can’t help wondering how she’s doing. Dread fills the pit of my stomach.
“Why?” I ask, trying to focus on the issue at hand.
“Because there’s a box inside the cockpit, filled with guns. If the wrong people get to them, this camp will become a very dangerous place.” He glances back at the chute, to where I laid out 2D.
“I agree.”
“Are we ready to begin, then?” Bob’s already shuffling toward the chute. This guy is having the time of his life.
With the help of a few passengers, we make our way into the plane, where Jillian’s sorting food in the little galley just behind the cockpit.
“How’s the food supply?” I ask.
“This is the last of it.”
That’s less than ideal. “Okay, we’ll figure out what to do this afternoon. Could you take two meals to the lake—one for the doctor, and one for Harper? And ask the three guys who were helping me on the plane last night to join us here?”
“Sure.”
“Also, do you have a crew and passenger manifest, something that will give us the pilots’ names?” Maybe calling them by name will help.
Jillian tells me the pilots’ names and passes me some stapled pages, which I scan. I see my own name, then Harper Lane, and my nemesis in 2D: Grayson Shaw. Sabrina Schr?der, passenger in 11G, business class. Yul Tan, the Asian typing on his laptop last night, 10B. I glance down the aisle. He’s still there, typing away, the glowing screen lighting his gaunt face. Either that laptop gets great battery life, or he’s taken a break—which doesn’t look likely. He seems strung out, agitated. There’s something off here, but what, I don’t have a clue.
“Ready, Mr. Stone?” Bob asks.
“Yeah. And call me Nick.”