9
It’s a struggle to keep up with Nick and Mike through the woods. With each step, I can feel the air temperature dropping and the pain in my lower leg rising.
When we reach the nose section, the two of them bound up an assortment of luggage and plane bits stacked to form a rough stairway. Nick pauses at the top and reaches down for me, as he did when we climbed into the plane in the lake.
I scramble awkwardly up the pile, and he catches my arm and pulls me to the threshold. My body crashes into his, sending waves of pain through me. Worth it. So worth it.
The other two swimmers—their names escape me—are there already, and someone I don’t know, a short, bald man wearing a black sweater. He peers over his small round glasses, fixing me with a skeptical gaze gaze as if he’s about to ask who invited a girl into his boy’s-club airplane tree house.
“Harper, this is Bob Ward,” says Nick. “And you remember Wyatt and Seth from last night?”
We exchange shakes and nods, and everyone turns to the first row of seats. A man in a pilot’s jacket lies there, his face crusted with dried blood.
Bob steps forward and kneels by his side, motioning back toward Nick. “Dylan, we’ve got Nick Stone here.” His officious tone would be funny in any other circumstances. “He’s managing the situation on the ground. I need you to tell him what you just told us.”
The pilot turns his head, trying to pick Nick out of the crowd. His face is so discolored and swollen that I can barely make out the whites of his eyes, but he begins speaking, his voice a whisper.
“We lost all communications about halfway in, somewhere over the Atlantic.”
Nick raises a hand. “Stop. I need you to wait one minute.”
What’s he up to? He marches down the aisle into business, stopping next to a young Asian man who’s typing maniacally on a laptop. After a brief exchange, the Asian man gets up and follows Nick back.
“Please continue,” Nick says to the pilot, eyeing Laptop Man.
“Like I said, we lost communications over the Atlantic, but we maintained our flight path. The captain has been flying this route for three years. I’ve been on it six months. Radar still worked, but nothing else. We generally knew where we were, but it was really odd, to go dark like that. The captain swore the problem was outside the plane, but that’s impossible. Anyway, we got radio contact—Heathrow air traffic control—a little over two hours before our designated landing time. There was a global situation with communications, they told us, and they would walk us in. We should land normally, but descend to seven thousand feet for safety reasons. That slowed us down, but we did it. Then everything happened at once.”
“The blast?” Bob coaxes.
“The first one, yeah.”
“Was it above you?”
“No—behind, I think. Or all around. I don’t know. We dove, trying to get away from it.”
“And there was another blast?” Bob sounds eager, expectant.
“There was something else, I don’t know what. A series of shock waves, tossing us around in the sky. Never seen anything like it. We lowered the landing gear and went down even farther, trying to cut our airspeed, preparing for the worst. We thought it might be some mega storm. We couldn’t get away from it, though. Everything after that’s a blur. We kept diving, trying to get past it, but it caught up to us.”
Nick is still staring at Laptop Man, who hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s like a statue. What’s going on? You sleep in around here, and mysteries pop up by the minute. “What do you think of that?” Nick asks him.
Laptop man avoids eye contact with Nick and speaks in an even, controlled tone. “Like I said, I don’t know anything about it. But it sounds sort of like the communications went out during a storm, and we crashed. Can I go now?”
“Nobody’s holding you.”
The Asian guy walks back to his seat and after a last glance over his shoulder at Nick, plops down and starts typing away again.
Nick thanks the pilot and moves back into the galley between first class and the cockpit. Sabrina, who came with us from the lakeside, moves in to examine the pilot.
“You buy the pilot’s story?” Bob asks Nick, his tone skeptical.
Nick stares at Bob for a second, as if waiting for him to recant. “Yeah, I do.”
Bob nods a bit too theatrically, as if he were a TV detective finally choosing to believe an informant’s story. “The other pilots are dead, so we’ve got no corroborating witnesses—well, save for ourselves. We tried the radio, but there’s no answer.”
“All right. I think we bed down tonight, wait for rescue. If nobody’s come by daylight, we reassess.”
“You’re forgetting the most important part.” Bob’s voice is edging toward panic.
“Right. . . . What am I forgetting?”
“The guns.” Bob races into the cockpit and returns with a handgun, holding it by the end, like it’s a fish he caught on holiday.
“Put that back,” Nick says sharply. “And bring me the key.”
Bob mutters but returns with the key, placing it in Nick’s palm. “There’re four handguns in there. One for each of you.” He nods to the swimmers and Nick. I guess I didn’t make the handgun club.
“We’re not carrying them around,” Nick says. “We have to sleep, and someone could take them off us. It’s too dangerous.” He glances at the key. “And so is this.” He hands it to me. “They know the five of us will have been in the cockpit.”
I slip the key into my tight jeans pocket, where I swear I can feel it radiating heat. I feel like Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, knowing I hold the key to the lives of the survivors of Flight 305. Another burden to bear, though not quite as dreadful as The Decision.
The sun is setting as Nick and I make our way through the woods to the fire by the lake. Neither of us says a word, but in my mind, I’m going through the questions I want to ask him. Namely, what he does for a living. Ah, who am I kidding? I want to ask some roundabout question that gets at the real money shot: Is there a woman in Nick Stone’s life? A little lady waiting at home. A Mrs. Nick Stone. A soulless, way-too-skinny, fashion-victim, fake-as-Santa girlfriend. That’s unfair. My leg hurts. Excuses . . .
At the fire, we settle in and watch the sun set over the lake. As it slips below the horizon, I start my interrogation—nonchalant, of course.
“Where you from, Nick?”
“All over. You?”
“I grew up in a small town in England, but I live in London now.”
“This feel like England to you?” He motions to the lake and forest around us.
“Yeah, a bit.”
“Yeah, to me too.” He slumps over, pulling the blanket up to his chin. “I’m beat, Harper. See you in the morning.”
He’s asleep in seconds. I can’t help remembering Grayson Shaw’s last words to me. Tell your boyfriend to sleep with one eye open, Harper.
I settle in between him and the fire and stare up at the stars. Sleep won’t come tonight. I’ve slept too much today already, but that’s not really it. Truth be told, it’s been a long time since I’ve slept next to someone I fancied as much as Nick Stone.
10
I expected to wake up to helicopters, flashing lights, and waves of English first responders saying things like “Are you all right there?” and “Let’s have a look at you now.”
No such luck. The muddy beach by the blue-green lake looks exactly as it did last night: rings of people around a dying fire, wrapped up in navy blankets. Only a few are stirring, mumbling groggily to each other.
I get to my knees and lean over Harper, who’s curled toward the fire, sound asleep. I wouldn’t wake her for all the tea in China.
It’s been over thirty-six hours since we crashed. Someone should have been here by now.
At the nose section, it feels like déjà vu. Again there’s an angry mob, the second to mass here in as many days. Grayson Shaw is here too, but at least he’s not center stage this time. He’s sitting at the back, looking hung over and haggard. He must have finally run out of alcohol. But that could actually make him more dangerous.
The food in the nose section ran out last night, when I was too tired to notice. The crowd’s muttering about people hoarding food, calling for searches of the camp and redistribution. “I’d kill a man for a Diet Coke right now,” I hear a skinny man in a rumpled suit say. I’ll look up Coke stock if I live through this.
Jillian’s taking the brunt of the crowd’s ire. They’re chewing her out like this is simply a disruption to normal in-flight service. The truth is, she’s just another survivor now, but the uniform she’s wearing pegs her as the person who hands out food. She looks relieved to see me.
“Help,” she says, lunging for me and clamping both hands around my arm, pulling me up to stand beside her at the bottom of the makeshift stairway as she faces the crowd.
Bob Ward and Sabrina are here too. Their faces are solemn, but they nod, encouraging me.
The crowd quiets, people nudging each other and whispering.
That’s him.
Yeah, the guy from the lake.
“All right,” I say. “We’re going to get some food, but it’ll take some time.”
“We need something now!” a woman in a mud-stained sweater shouts.
“There isn’t anything right now, okay? Look, we have to work together here. If we work together, we’ll all eat—otherwise, we could all starve.”
The word starve is a mistake. The crowd picks it up, and it echoes from person to person in panicky counterpoint until it sounds like the Starve Chorus. It takes me a few minutes to unsay it and get their focus again.
“So how we gonna get food?” asks an overweight man with a thick New York accent.
How indeed? I hadn’t gotten that far. I can see where this is going. If I let group-think take over and devil’s advocates call the shots, we’ll still be standing here at sundown, hungry and undecided. I need a plan, right now.
Aside from the unthinkable, there are only two logical sources of food: the other half of the plane and fish from the lake. We might manage to kill something here on land, but with a hundred mouths to feed, it likely won’t go far. Unless . . . there’s a farm nearby. It’s a long shot, but I tuck the idea away for future use.
“Okay, first step,” I say as authoritatively as I can. “We’re going to take an inventory.”
“Inventory?”
“Yes.” I point to Jillian—poor Jillian—and Bob Ward, who straightens up and puts on his ultra-serious camp counselor face for the crowd. He at least is loving this. “Jillian and Bob are going to come around and ask you what was in your carry-on and checked baggage and what your seat was—or, more importantly, what overhead bin your bag was in. Describe anything that might be of use out here, especially food. Come see me right now if you had any fishing or diving gear in your luggage—a wetsuit, even snorkeling gear.”
A bloated guy in his forties laughs, turning to the crowd. “Hey, Jack, folks don’t do much snorkeling in New York in November.” That gets a few laughs, and he grins at me, waiting.
I know this guy’s type, and I’d love to stick it to him, but I can’t afford to make another enemy. I opt for the high road.
“That’s true. I’m thinking about people making a connection, passengers departing from the Caribbean, somebody diving on vacation, making their way home. JFK is a major hub for international destinations. Nassau to JFK to Heathrow isn’t out of the question. Or maybe someone on their way to the Mediterranean via Heathrow. I thought maybe we could get lucky.”
Jillian starts the survey, but Bob hangs back. “You want to start diving for the food and any supplies in the lake.”
“Yeah, it seems like our only move.”
“I agree, but there’s a problem.” Bob pauses dramatically. I get the impression he likes saying “There’s a problem” and pausing.
“What’s that?”
“All the checked baggage will be in LD3s.”
Oh, LD3s.
“What’s an LD3?”
“It’s a unit load device.”
A unit load device. Why didn’t he just say so?
“I don’t know what that is, Bob.”
“They’re metal cases that hold the luggage. On smaller aircraft, they simply load the bags in. On larger ones, like our fateful Boeing 777, they place the bags in the LD3s, then move them onto the plane. They can get more bags on that way and keep them straight. The 777 can carry up to thirty-two LD3s, and maybe a dozen pallets. I can’t remember.”
“Pallets?”
“Yeah, with food, supplies, etcetera.”
“What does all this mean?” I ask.
“The LD3s will be stacked two wide all the way to the tail. Even if we can dive down to them, they’ll be hard to get to. We might be able to get into the first two, but there’s no way we can haul them out and get to the rows behind them. Bottom line: we can’t count on getting to anything in the checked baggage.”
So much for that plan. “That’s good to know.”
“I’ll check with Jillian and the pilot, try to figure out where the pallets might be positioned. If they’re near where the plane broke apart, or here in the nose, we could get lucky.”
“All right. Thanks, Bob.”
Bob Ward. Annoying? Yes. Helpful? Also yes.
The doctor is queued up next, that “Something is seriously wrong, Mr. Stone” look on her face. Maybe that’s just how she always looks.
“Hi, Sabrina,” I say, bracing myself.
“We need to build a shelter.”
At least somebody around here gets right to it.
“Why?”
“Most of the passengers suffered mild hypothermia on the first night. Some, such as yourself and Ms. Lane, moderate cases. This morning, I’ve observed a trend: about half the passengers have a cold. If they remain out in the elements, that could progress. If it rains, they’ll fare even worse. We could have cases of bacterial infection or pneumonia soon. At a minimum, I would like to move anyone with a compromised immune system, older passengers, anyone on an immunosuppressant therapy, which are common for autoimmune diseases, to the nose section and enclose it.”
“Okay. Let me have someone check the trees supporting it. It moved some last night. If it collapses under the added weight, we’ll be worse off. I’ll be back this evening, and we’ll reassess then.”
“Where are you going?”
“Someone has to scout the area around us, look for food, maybe even help—or a better shelter.”
Her eyes grow wide. “You can’t leave.”
“Why?”
“It would be chaos here without you.”
I just stare at her, unsure what to say. She’s probably right. That worries me, but it also brings a sense of something I haven’t felt in a long time: fulfillment. Right now I feel like I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing, that I’m making a difference in people’s lives. I haven’t felt that way in a very long time.