Last Plane to Heaven (15 page)

Innerarity helped her aboard. As she stepped up the gangplank, she could swear she heard the skull-faced nickel rattling in her valise.

*   *   *

Takeoff was an agonizing bounce and drag over the waters offshore. The Short Sunderland was a roaring, stuttering monster that clearly had no affinity for the air. It coughed around her, reeking of electricity and fuel and exhaust and the sweat of nervous men. Cigarettes, too, though no one was smoking right then.

Perversely, Springfield wished she had a Lucky Strike. She didn't smoke, never had, but she'd always envied the easy way people who did could handle their nerves. Light up, take a draw, strike a pose. It was much more elegant than wringing one's hands and hoping for better.

The airplane lurched and banked. She looked out the porthole at the Arafura Sea gleaming in the dawn's light. Sharks lurked in the waters along shore, visible in their silhouettes. The muddy beaches were littered with storm debris, the swamps thick with trees. Shadows still lay across the land in contrast to the ocean's morning glow.

The Japanese were down there somewhere.

Springfield glanced around the upper cabin. The rest of the seats were empty. Which was strange. Surely other people had wanted to leave Merauke as badly as she. Though the RAAF wasn't in the habit of giving rides to anyone who just happened along.

It occurred to her to wonder once more what Waldo wanted. But then, that was obvious enough.
Not him,
she told herself.
Though in truth, not anyone.

Not since Ferris Roubicek. Nor since long before him.

She found the nickel in her hand then. It lay cold and heavy, like a bullet. Heavier than a coin should ever have been. Springfield could feel it vibrating against her palm. Not in time with the overwhelming drone of the engines. Rather, the coin set its own rhythm. The rhythm of a thousand shambling Japanese.

Then one of the engines coughed harder. It emitted a blatting noise. Springfield shot a look out the window to see a haze of smoke coming from her side. Left. Port. Whatever they called it on an airplane.

The engine coughed again, stuttering before it settled into the slower rhythm of the nickel.

The little metal door leading forward banged open and Waldo leaned into the passenger cabin. “What the bloody hell happened?” he demanded.

Springfield closed her fist on the coin, feeling guilty for no reason she could name. “Something's wrong with your, um, port engine.”

“I fewking know
that
.” He stalked over to stare out her porthole. “Damn it, we can't just turn back.”

The airplane bucked then. A series of thumps echoed from the outside.

“Japs,” shouted Waldo, and rushed back to the flight deck.

Japs?
But they walked in slow silence, taking over the world by numbers and rhythm. Not through violence in the air.

Outside her porthole, a slim aircraft slid by. She could see the big red circle on the side, painted over the jungle camouflage.
Why paint an airplane like a tree? Who would it hide from in the blue, blue sky?

Three more of its fellows followed.

Zeroes.
Even she knew that word, knew what those planes looked like.

One waggled his wings in salute, as if they were just friends sharing a pleasant morning's flying.

The flying boat banked hard to the right, tilting her view toward the clouds still colored salmon and rose. Springfield McKenna watched the heavens glare as around her Lieutenant Waldo Innerarity's airplane began to die. In her hand, the nickel pulsed like a beating heart.

*   *   *

The shoreline came rushing upward, a green fist folded over the troubled rim of the ocean. Waldo, or whoever was up on the flight deck with him, brought the Short Sunderland in hard, skimming the wave tops. Springfield supposed they were aiming for a welcoming stretch of beach. All she saw was the end.

Smoke curled through the cabin, and both engines were ragged and stuttering. The flying boat wallowed like a puppet with half its strings cut. The Japanese were surely out there, following their prey to earth. Sharks on a dying swimmer.

Then the great fist of the land grabbed Springfield and punched her in the chest, took the air from her lungs and the fire from her belly and handed her only pain and pressure in return.

She was not so lucky as to pass out. Rather, she was thrown back and forth in her seat, somehow held in place by the flimsy safety harness, as the world outside the porthole dissolved into a mass of spray and sand and smoke.

“Out, out, out,” someone was shouting. Springfield didn't know who. It might have been her. She still couldn't breathe, couldn't talk, but she could unclip her belt and tumble from the chair and slide across the carpeted wall and see nothing but sand out of the opposite porthole set into the floor.

A man was screaming as well, the kind of scream someone lets out when their arm is ripped off. She ignored that, ignored the smoke and flames and reek of fuel and the irregular chatter of gunfire outside, to claw her way toward the portholes where the world still peered through. New Guinea was briefly surprised by her latest invader before the jungle would come to claim them all.

A few panicked moments later, Springfield found herself hidden away among great, tall roots. She watched the RAAF flying boat burn while one of the Japanese Zeroes lazed overhead, laying down gunfire on the beach every second or third pass. In case any of the Aussie airmen inside had notions of surviving their crash.

She stared impassive, tears streaming down her face, unfeeling, grief-stricken, the coin clutched in her hand like a beating heart, waiting for the fire to die and all of Innerarity's crewmates with it.

Springfield McKenna knew then that her life had been bought too cheaply.

*   *   *

Night brought wakefulness once more amid the reek of smoke and jungle rot. She didn't even realize she'd fallen asleep. The snarl of the last loitering Zero had been in her ears, until it was replaced by the chatter and howl of New Guinea's moonlit jungles.

The tree she'd wedged herself into still protected her. Sure, there were some bugs crawling down the leg of her coveralls, but they seemed to be using her as a throughway, not as a meal ticket.

At least someone is getting some good out of this.

The coin was quiescent in Springfield's hand. She slid from the tree's embrace and stepped aching onto the sand. Her body was bruised in places she didn't even know she had. The skin on the side of her head felt sticky and tight in a way that suggested she really didn't want to look into a mirror. The surf rolled in before her, foaming wave tops glowing slightly in the light of the three-quarter moon.

“Now I give you back to the ocean,” she whispered into her clenched fist, then cocked her arm to throw the skull-faced nickel far out to sea. She might have been a girl, but Springfield McKenna could throw. Two seasons playing left field for the Jax Maids down in the Crescent City had proven that. Before she'd had to leave the country.

“Ferris,” screamed Springfield, her eyes filling with tears for Waldo and the men she didn't even know, “you bastard.”

A voice groaned out of the darkness. “Sheila…”

She aborted her throw, spinning in place to face the sound. “What?”

Someone was crawling toward her across the muddy beach. He
creaked
as he came, moving no faster than the shambling Japs of her dreams. “Spring…”

Dropping to her knees, Springfield peered at him. “Waldo?”

He made another three or four crawling steps, then collapsed to roll over on his side. “I…”

She looked close, trying to peer into those Andaman blue eyes. All she saw was rippled, bubbled skin. The smell of crisped pork filled her nostrils. His teeth gleamed unnaturally large, lips burned away and gums drawn back with the heat.

His breath … He had no breath at all. Lieutenant Waldo Innerarity had exhaled his last trying to reach her.

Springfield jumped to her feet and swallowed the urge to scream. This was another dream. All of it. The flight. The Zeroes. The crash.
This.
Waldo.

She backed away from him, slowly, her heels kicking at the slimy mud. Stumbling into a tree root, Springfield turned to catch herself on a branch.

Except it was no branch.

She had bumped into the leg of another burnt corpse. He hadn't been there a minute earlier, when she hopped out of the tree.

The nickel twisted in her hand. It vibrated, tapping out its rhythms as if preparing to sing.

The sea brought the odors of watery death and seaweed. Infinitely preferable to fuel fires and roasted pork. Behind her, the jungle breathed. Springfield stared at the two dead men at her feet. Then she opened her hand to drop the nickel.

“N'a do 'at,” said another voice in her ear.

This time she did shriek. Springfield twisted to find another Aussie airman, crisped by fire, half his skull shattered from a Japanese bullet.

This
was Waldo, she realized with horror. Not the corpse behind her. She spun again and he was gone. So was the other airman.

A dream, a dream,
she told herself.
Like the shambling Japs. Wake up now, damn it.

But there was no waking up. There were only burnt, bloody hands tugging at the sleeve of her coveralls, clumsily brushing through her hair which had come flyaway loose, stroking at her feet.

Springfield screamed again. She really put her lungs into it this time. She kicked, too, with what had once been deadly accuracy. But these men … creatures … whatever they were … they didn't care.

She grabbed a piece of driftwood and swung it as hard as any Louisville Slugger. Teeth sprayed in the moonlight, a puff of ash flying with them. A broken skull shattered. Grasping hands were slapped back.

There were only two of them. Or maybe three, or four. Not like the Japanese soldiers in her dreams who filled the streets of Merauke and came on in their blind, implacable, unstoppable numbers.

Just a handful of men. One of whom she'd actually kind of liked in his strange way. “Damn you, Waldo,” she shouted at the twitching corpses. “Why the hell did you go and do this?”

She kicked and kicked again, then had to whack her own leg with the stick to force an independent, questing hand off her calf.
Just like a man.
Breath whooping, tears threatening, Springfield McKenna fought a nightmare on the moonlit beach at the mouth of the Torres Strait until eventually she was surrounded by only bones and pulped flesh and shattered teeth and wispy shreds of scalp.

She stood over the corpse she thought might actually be Waldo. Like all of them, it was in several pieces. At the least, they'd come apart easily under the blows from her stick. Springfield resolutely ignored the fact that various severed body parts were moving and twitching. She ignored the yawning gap where her heart used to be, where her nerve used to live.

“It's yours now.” She raised her clenched fist to drop the skull-faced nickel with the rest of her dead.

The click of a rifle bolt sliding home just behind her arrested Springfield's hand in mid-motion.

A small man, frowning, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a uniform pale gray by moonlight, stepped in front of her. A Jap officer.

“Some things are not meant to be thrown away.”

Springfield blurted the first thing that came into her head. “You speak excellent English.”

“For a Jap?” He nodded and smiled, a small, controlled expression that seemed more practiced than real. “Lieutenant Ginnosuke Sakamura. Stanford Law School, class of nineteen thirty-six.” The officer glanced at her fist. “Do not let go of that.”

What?
she wanted to ask, but it would have been a foolish question. She settled for, “How do you know?”

“Some things can be seen clearly enough.” He shouted in Japanese over her shoulder, though she'd heard no noise behind her since the click of the rifle bolt sliding home.

Slowly, Springfield turned. Sakamura held his ground. She could feel his smile boring into her back like the first thrust of a knife.

An entire platoon of Japanese soldiers stood between her and the tree line. They were ranked in unbreathing silence, staring at not quite anything, moving no more than a line of stones might be expected to do.

Only one held his rifle trained on her. He was as unblinking, unmoving as the rest.

“I'm never going to wake up from this, am I?”

Sakamura chuckled lightly. “You already have woken up, Miss McKenna. That is the nature of your problem. You are no longer dreaming.”

How did he know her name?

Ferris,
she realized. Somehow, this Jap lieutenant had learned about her from Ferris Roubicek.

“You know what I hold, then,” she said cautiously. Her heart shuddered. Waldo and the rest of the Aussies had died for … what? Ferris to play a revenge game against her? There was no justice in that.

Not that there was much justice anywhere else, either.

“You are a spendthrift, Miss McKenna.” Sakamura sounded sympathetic. Almost loving, even. “You have sold your life cheaply and gained nothing in the bargain.”

“Yet I am the one who has saved my nickel.”
Thrift is a virtue, isn't it?

Every time she'd tried to throw it away, things had gotten worse. Springfield seriously doubted that Lieutenant Sakamura would take the thing from her now. He knew too much already.

There was only one solution.

She slapped her hand over her mouth and swallowed the nickel, taking it down as hard and ugly as any emetic. Sakamura cried out, but he didn't wrestle her to the ground or try to stick his fingers down her throat.

“Good day, gentlemen,” Springfield said, and began walking toward the water.

No shot rang out. No shouts called for her to halt or face the consequences.