Flight #116 Is Down (6 page)

Impact had not killed those passengers.

But fire would.

Telephone, Heidi thought, hanging onto the word like religion. Telephone, telephone.

She ran back to the house, slipping on the horrible ice, the uphill of her yard as steep as waterslides, as impossible to scale. Her hands were both bare, she did not know what had happened to her mittens, or where Tally-Ho was. She felt as if she toiled up that hill for half an hour; they would have died before she even reached the house. She was worthless, she had failed them. She would never save a soul they would all be burned burned burned it was her fault.

The phone was weirdly difficult to recognize. She actually had to stop and think how it worked. Nine one one, she said to herself, poking her trembling finger at the little white squares on the phone.

Nobody answered.

Her facial muscles leaped in several directions, as if she were becoming a gargoyle, a monster. “
Answer me!
” Heidi screamed. She almost pounded the phone against the wall. Almost smashed it because people would not answer her.

On the fourth ring, a mild woman’s voice said, “Emergency. What is your location?”

She could not believe the woman’s voice was so leisurely. It made her terribly angry. “Dove House. Nearing River,” said Heidi. She was shouting. She tried to control herself. Her body had the shakes. The phone was difficult to hold. “A plane crashed,” she said. “In my yard. A plane crashed. In my yard.” The words spurted out of her.

The voice was disembodied: so calm, so matter-of-fact, that Heidi could not imagine it being attached to flesh and blood; perhaps she was talking to a computer, or a tape. “A plane?” said the voice. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. It just blew up, some of it. The rest of it is in my woods.”

“Where do you live?”

“An estate called Dove House, off Rockrimmon, off Old Pond Meadow.” There was a pause. Heidi thought, Is this it? Do I hang up now?

The voice said, “We’ll send a cruiser over to check, ma’am.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said Heidi, her voice rising. “It’s a huge plane. Like you’d take overseas. Maybe a 747 or something. There are hundreds of people down there! Some of them are alive. It’s on fire! It’s blowing up! It’s—”

“I’m alerting Fire and Ambulance,” said the voice, sounding as if the whole story were quite beyond belief. Sounding as if this were a hoax. “We’ll be there as fast as we can.”

Heidi thought, But then, I don’t believe it, either. That’s my rose garden, not my plane crash site. She whispered. “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“We’re coming,” said the woman.

This time the voice was solid. Heidi believed. She hung up. She ran back outside.

Hours seemed to have slipped away. Precious don’t-bleed-to-death hours, which she’d wasted on the phone.

She skidded down the slope to the plane section that was not on fire. People were walking around, like ghosts in the ice.

For a splintered second—all night, for Heidi, time would come in long thin divisions—she was afraid of those people.

How could they be strolling around, like tourists?

A large section of plane lay some fifty feet into the woods. She could not tell whether it was front, center, or rear. It was cut away like a diagram of a seating arrangement, and the dozen passengers exposed to view were trapped not just by the metal, but by a fir tree, an enormous spiky tree that had jabbed through the plane and the people’s bodies. The plane was so high. It had landed, and yet it was so high. It would take ladders to get to those people.

And on the ground, people were scattered everywhere, like confetti. Heidi stopped to assist the first one she came to: a woman sitting quietly upright. Still in her seat. How amazing. Both she and the seat had been neatly ejected. “You have to get out of here,” said Heidi, quickly unfastening the seat belt. “Some of the plane is already on fire. I don’t know if the rest of it will catch fire or not.” She was babbling. She tried to think of the essentials: the information the woman really needed. She said, “The house is up on the hill. You—”

The woman had no shape to her. She was soggy. She was dead.

Heidi made a noise like the dogs, a keening static-y sound, and turned away.

A man walked up out of the gloom and rain. He was wearing a three-piece suit, and looked prepared to give a speech at a major convention. There seemed to be nothing wrong with him, no wounds, so he must be a neighbor, although they had no neighbors. He’d have had to walk a mile in any direction through the woods or fields to get there. The only time they had ever met any neighbors was during the Peacock Complaint era. Then she saw that he still had his seat belt on. It, and the upholstery of the seat, were still attached to him. He seemed unaware of this, and Heidi thought it would be rude to mention it. She was having great difficulty figuring out what mattered and what didn’t.

He said to Heidi, “Did you telephone for help?”

“Yes. They’re on the way.”

“Good. Is the house open?”

“Yes,” said Heidi, thinking, We can’t stand here and chat. We have to do something. But what?

“I’ll start moving people up to the house,” he said.

He hauled a moaning woman to her feet. Putting her arm over his shoulder, he said to her, “Come on, walk, you have to, the rest of the plane is going to go, it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.”

The rest of the plane is going to go,
she thought. That means the people in the fire are already gone. That means we have to get everybody here into Dove House. Now. I have to do it myself. Now.

She walked another ten feet and pulled a tree limb off the person touching her leg. “Can you walk?” she said.

“Yes,” said the woman. “Go help somebody else. I can make it to the house alone.”

The calm of these two passengers helped. It gave Heidi a train for her thought: Move people into the house.

Right.

Okay.

Start.

Heidi fell on a chrome pole. She staggered up. It was part of a liquor cart; tiny little bottles made a bumpy glass puddle.

She got over it, heading for the closest cry for help, but when she reached down to assist the person screaming, the person was dead. The screamer was beneath him. In the weird half-light of fire and moon and ice, the dead passenger was already a ghost. She tried to shift the body, but it was heavy and stuck to its seat. The seat itself was crushing the wounded person beneath.

“I’m coming,” said Heidi stupidly. “I’m here.”

She plucked and twitched, as weak as a butterfly, trying to get a handhold on the dead thing and its seat and finally came to her senses and just tipped it over. The person beneath was a little girl. A very little girl, with a leg bone sticking up into the air like a snapped broomstick.

Heidi had no idea what to do. None. She turned and screamed into the night “
Hurry up!
” Her scream blended with all the other screams, the screams for help, the screams in Spanish, the screams for Mama.

She looked at her watch. Three minutes had gone by since her phone call.

Only three minutes.

She was older by a decade. She was useless. She had no brain, no sense, no strength.

She did not know how to pick up a child whose bone stuck out through the flesh. “It’s okay,” she said idiotically to the child. “What’s your name?” she added, thinking, I’m insane, this is not a tea party.

“Teddie,” said the child.

Somebody crawled toward her. Heidi wanted to bolt, but instead she said, “Can you stand? I’ll get you up to the house.”

The person was drenched in blood. She had never seen so much blood; it was as if the person had just taken a shower. “It’s mostly not mine,” the person mumbled. “My leg, though. Crushed up into me.”

Heidi got her arms around the person; she couldn’t even tell what sex it was. “I’ll be back, Teddie,” she said. Like the last couple in a nightmarishly slow three-legged race, she and the bloody person hobbled up the hill until Heidi ran out of strength and just lay the person down again.

“More people are coming to help,” said Heidi.

But are they? It’s been hours.

She looked at her watch. Another minute had gone by.

One measly minute.

She tried to organize herself. Tried to think of a master plan here.

Twice she went back to the wreckage and twice moved a victim halfway up the hill.

I’m not doing the right thing, Heidi thought. But what is the right thing?

It was like a horrible test; an immense exam; she was failing; she had not worked her way through a single complete problem; people were dying and she was failing them.

I’m alone, Dear God, don’t let me be alone!

Where are they?

Make them come.

Saturday: 5:44
P.M.

Nobody was at the coffee shop. Patrick couldn’t believe it. What was the matter with this town?

“Go hang out with kids your own age,” said Noelle severely. Noelle knew everybody. She especially knew Patrick. She handed him a Pepsi as he left, winking. He winked back, although it embarrassed him; if Noelle had noticed that he could not manage coffee, had everybody else?

Okay, so now where did he go?

The girl he had been dating—if you could call it dating; the girl he usually met at things, and teamed up with, and had once kissed, but frankly he didn’t think kissing was so great; of course if he had been less nervous it might have been … Anyway, that girl was kissing somebody else these days, somebody either more interested or less nervous, and he disliked running into her. She always gave Patrick a smile he could not interpret. He emphatically did not want to run into her.

So he drove around instead of trying to find the action.

Patrick loved driving. Loved roads. Loved cars. Among the many things Patrick wanted to do with his life was surround himself with vehicles. Anything with wheels. Anything with engines.

He loved the act of driving: every detail, from putting the key into the ignition to steering around tight corners. He loved keeping perfect track of the traffic around him, the traffic approaching, the traffic coming up from behind.

He loved the interior of his truck.

The accessories: the scanner that was always on; the radio that was always on softer, so he wouldn’t miss any calls. He was dying for a car phone, but his parents simply looked amused when he brought it up. Patrick swore that when he had kids, he would never look amused.

It was his parents’ only flaw, though.

The scanner sang the four electronic notes of Nearing River Emergency, and Patrick turned his radio down even softer to listen. Icy rain tapped gently on the hood, the windshield wipers shunted back and forth, the engine throbbed. To Patrick they were a symphony: the sound of a boy wrapped in a car with a big engine.

“Nearing River personnel, reported plane crash in the north end of town. Unconfirmed. Location, woods behind private home called Dove House off Rockrimmon Road off Old Pond Meadow.”

It was Patrick’s mother. Her voice was completely calm. “Ambulance and fire personnel await confirmation.”

For Patrick, time did not include seconds and milliseconds. He did not debate choices. He just stepped on the gas and hauled hell for leather to Rockrimmon. He couldn’t be but a mile from there. “Whooo-eee!” said Patrick out loud, laughing. I’ll be first! he thought.

Rockrimmon was a very old road, cut through a rocky, high area. Few houses had ever been built there. Putting septic systems and wells into those ravines and ledges was either impossible or horrendously expensive. The road, however, was wrapped in manmade stone walls. Two or three hundred years ago, some poor slob had actually tried to farm up here.

Old Pond Meadow had been widened so school buses could manage the curves. Rockrimmon had not been widened. It seemed to Patrick that there was somebody taking the bus from there this year, though. The road’s name had come up at a meeting he’d attended with his parents, where they asked for Ambulance and Fire input on possibly widening Rockrimmon. It was one of those meetings meant to solve the world’s problems, but they got bogged down in something pointless and never decided anything.

Patrick used the call-back frequency, but not his name. He did not say, “Hey, Mom, so exactly where is this place?” In his radio voice—his smooth, un-Patrick, un-nervous voice—he said, “Please identify driveway location on Rockrimmon.”

Scanner listening was a big hobby in rural areas. That was one reason why you used codes on the air, so the entire world didn’t know what you were talking about. ’Course, the entire world knew the codes, too, but still nobody ever said, “We’re back at the barn and we put gas into the ambulance for the next run.” They said, “We’re 40.”

Everybody would be listening. Men and women all over the area would be zipping up snow jackets, grabbing gloves, racing for their cars, turning on the de-icers, turning on the strobe lights and the sirens, and heading toward their fire and ambulance stations. For a call like this, it didn’t matter whether you were signed up for duty or not; for a call like this, you were on duty.

His mother knew his voice, no matter how suave he tried to be, but she did not say, “Patrick! What are you doing over there, young man? You’re supposed to be …”

She said, “It’s exactly three eighths of a mile from the intersection with Old Pond Meadow. On your left. Two stone pillars and an open iron gate. Then a driveway also three eighths of a mile long.”

His adrenalin was pumping like nothing he had ever felt before. He hardly needed a vehicle; he could have run as fast; he hardly needed an engine; his heart could have moved the truck. He would never need sleep or food again. Arrival first on the scene would satisfy him forever.

The stone gate appeared, and now he recognized it. Peacock Place, they used to call it, because several times in past years when the peacocks had screamed their horrible dying wails, neighbors had called in that somebody in the woods was hurt.

Patrick turned into the private drive. The first reality hit him and his heart sank. The drive was too narrow for two-way traffic. An ambulance could get in, but there would have to be traffic monitors to get it back out.