No Passengers Beyond This Point (23 page)

R
ight turn in fifty feet,” the calm authoritative voice of the GPS tells us, oblivious to the helicopters all around.

I’m looking at the speedometer on the cart when my eyes suddenly register the brass plate on the dashboard:
Property of Falling Bird.

“Abandon the cart,” I tell India. “That’s what they want, not us.”

“We need it. We can’t walk that far.”

“Left turn in ten feet,” the GPS commands.

The clock is ticking. I have thirty-nine minutes left. Mouse and India have more. We don’t have time for this and then suddenly: “You have arrived at your destination.”

Boom shoots out of the cart and scrambles up the hillside, where the cart can’t go.

“C’mon!” I say, and we all jump out, leaving the vehicle.

Boom is running so fast, it’s all we can do to keep pace. We’re headed into the wind. Mouse is staying with Boom. India is close behind. It’s me who can’t keep up.

My legs aren’t working. There’s a disconnect between my head and my feet. My head is telling my feet to run, but my feet can’t hear.

Inside I’m running like crazy, but my body feels heavy, like my legs are thick bags of sand. My eyelids are magnets. My body is shutting down, quitting out.

My teeth aren’t chattering. I’m not warm or cold. I can’t feel my chest. The urgency of the clock ticks on in my mind, but my mind can’t control my body. The ticking is comforting like a lullaby; a clock singing for me. My mind is fighting to get control, but everything is slipping away.

“C’mon, Finn!” India shouts in my ear. “We can’t do this without you.”

“Finn,” Mouse calls, her voice soft as if it’s penetrating acres of gauze. Minutes go by or maybe they don’t. I can’t tell. The minutes are floating around me. The clock is still ticking, but I can’t move anymore. Boom is licking my face. Boom has her jaws gently around my wrists, tugging me up. Mouse is several places at the same time. Once she yanks my arm. Then she slaps me. But my body is like a metal blanket too heavy to lift. I can see Mouse’s hand, hear the noise of the slap, but I feel nothing. Boom shoves me with her cold wet nose. This I feel.

We are down to minutes, and we don’t have the black box.

India hoists me, carrying my front half. Mouse tries to drag my legs with her one good arm. It isn’t storming out anymore. The sky is overcast, a dull gloomy gray, but it’s calm like we are in our own tinted glass room. The weather can’t reach us. Nothing can reach us. We follow Boom through the field with my sisters half carrying me.

Boom barks. She’s agitated. She runs around in circles half whining, half howling.

“India!” Mouse shouts. “How much time do we have?”

We follow the dog. The blue-eyed dog with one trailing bandage. There’s a
beep, beep, beep
, I hear it now.

She leads us to a landslide of rubble. Metal springs, dust, dirt, smoking pieces of a motor still running, an overhead compartment, a suitcase burst at the seams, a man sleeping with his eyes open. His clock is still in his hand. It says 0:00.

“That’s the man with the green socks,” Mouse says.

I look down at his ankles—Mouse is right, they are green—and up again at his eyes. I remember my father that day. But now I’m older. I know what this means. I hope Mouse does not.

Boom stands barking next to a big piece of twisted aluminum. Under it I see the corner of an orange box.

My eyesight is hazy, dipping in and out. I fight to stay clear. Mouse shakes me and for a minute that helps.

I try to understand, but there’s a roaring river in my head that is washing the words away. I need to let go, let the river take me down. India slaps me. Hard, stinging slaps. “Finn, you have eleven minutes left. DO YOU HEAR ME?” she shouts.

I am moving. They are trying to carry me. My sisters love me. They love me very much.

I try to focus on Mouse’s curly red hair. Her freckles look funny, like they are jumping out at me. The orange box is sitting on the ground exactly as the wrist screen showed it would be.

“It’s here!” Mouse shouts.

How do we get it open? It’s as solid and tightly closed as a brick.

“Maybe we could bang it against the ground,” India cries.

But Boom is barking again—barking at another box.

This box is cracked in two, revealing a small black box inside.

I force my eyes open. I see the box, but just beyond I see the white courtesy phone, sitting on a heap of rubble.

I have seven minutes left. I could pick up the phone. I could go to work for Sparky. He has all the facts I will ever need. His world makes sense. There are no surprises. I wouldn’t have to worry again.

But there would be nothing worth worrying about. No Mom, no India, no Mouse, no Uncle Red. Nothing that mattered at all.

Inside the orange box, the small black box has buttons. I push the one that says
play
. Nothing happens. India pushes
rewind
and a squeaking noise like weird Martian syllables breaks the silence. They pick up speed, then click to a stop. She pushes
play
again.

It sounds like cockpit noise, like an airplane flying, like a man’s voice. Slowly the sounds sort themselves into words.

“Push up! Way up! Climb! Climb! Climb! Now, now, now!”

My head is clear. I focus with everything I have inside me. Force my mind to get a grip on my body.

“We have to climb!” I shout.

India turns around, her eyes full of shock. Her voice is shaking like she’s hyperventilating. “A tree?”

“A tree big enough for all of us.” My voice is coming through loudly now.

There are trees everywhere, but the branches are so high India can’t reach them.

Three minutes left. She hasn’t found one yet. She’s running around crazy, checking the same trees she’s already checked.

Two minutes now.

“That one!” I shout. I’m pointing to a tree with one low branch and a huge spread of branches and leaves up top—a canopy with room for all of us. I make it there, but Mouse’s arm is broken. She can’t climb. She makes little pained squeaks as she tries to pull herself up with her good arm. I breathe down deep into strength I didn’t know I had and together India and I heave her up. “Up farther,” India shouts, shoving Mouse’s blue corduroy pockets. Mouse pulls and we get her all the way up.

I climb after her, just as I start to lose control of my arms. They begin to wobble as if they’re turning to liquid, but with the whole force of what matters to me, I get them back.

India is next to me now. Mouse folds my hand around the branch and then India’s hand binds us all three to the tree.

“Hold on.” I force the words out of my throat, when a deafening boom blows my ear canals out of my head. “Hold on!” I yell as heat rolls in suddenly, unbearably.

The trees sway wildly from the great torch of heat. My skin can’t drip sweat fast enough. Mouse huddles against the trunk. India is barely gripping the branch, her legs hanging down. With a great heave, she swings them up.

And then a fireball is unleashed, racing toward us—the size of a house and headed straight for our tree.

“Farther . . . go up farther!” I scream, but the fire is a blinding ball, a yellow-orange explosion of flame ballooning toward us. I grab Mouse, my arm shaking wildly.

The branches will catch fire. The tree will go up in flames. The embers crackle and fly, trying like evil fingers to touch our tree. The tree to the left bursts into a blue, then yellow, explosion of flame. The fire hisses. The tree to the right explodes like a firecracker, a star exploding in the smoky light.

Mouse’s shoe slips off. It drops into the smoky abyss. We do not hear it land.

I
t was the dog that found those kids. The shepherd I’d been trying to get rid of. Scrawny and too smart for her own good. Not much of a farm dog either. She showed up one day, paws all dinged up. I didn’t much want her, got my three already—so I bandaged her real good and found a town family to take her in, but by nightfall she was back. Every time I’d get her all set with a new home she’d run to our place, hurt paws and all. Nice homes too—the kind that gives their dogs collars with fancy jewels and every kind of doggy treat. But no, she’d be back in a day, maybe two.

After a while, I quit trying. No getting rid of her, once she got it in her mind she was ours. Started calling her Boom, short for Boomerang because of the way she always come back.

Anyways, the plane went down—some kind of bird strike, they think, though they won’t know for sure until they find the black box. The plane lost radio contact, seemed to vanish off the radar screen. A big 727 like that don’t just
poof
disappear. Everyone and their brother was looking for it. We’re the closest spot to the big reserve where they thought the flight went down, so we saw it all. Those with people on the plane, they were out of their minds with worrying. They were all over town with news folks coming in a swarm behind them.

Two of them came to our place, knocked on the door. A big guy with red hair. That was his name too, Red. And the mother of three of them kids I saw on TV. I couldn’t understand why she had all three of her kids on the flight when she wasn’t on it. City people is different, I guess.

The mom, she kept talking about geography. India, Switzerland, Finland. I couldn’t follow until I finally figured out it was her kids’ names. But then she said she just knows in her gut they’s alive. Moms know that kind of thing. I’m the same with my two.

Maybe city folks ain’t so different. They love their kids even if they do have a strange way of showing it, naming them after foreign countries and sending them on plane flights all by themselves. Still, I felt for her.

It was something else she said that stuck in my mind real good. Her youngest one was interested in planets and she was smart. Said she had blue corduroys and blue sneakers that probably had a few coins in them. I guess she liked to carry dimes in her shoes.

Oh, there was a lot of other stuff too. Her son played basketball, her daughter was in the church choir and counting the days until she got her driver’s license. They was moving to the uncle’s up in Fort Baker, times being tough now and all. She was asking if I’d get my Ben to look with his crop duster.

Of course I said I would. “Benjamin Bean,” I told my Ben, “the corn can wait. You got to look for these kids.” Just about everybody in town did their bit.

But the blue shoes with the dimes—that stuck with me.

When I was fixing to feed the dogs, I was cleaning their bowls when Boom, that skinny German shepherd, sets a dusty blue, kid-size sneaker on my foot.

Boom is an odd dog. Don’t come up for a love the way the other ones do. Acts more like a cat. Comes in with dead mice, squirrels, rats, lays ’em at my feet like I’m supposed to be happy about it. But when I pick up this shoe, to take it out to the rubbish heap, something jingles. And sure enough, there were dimes taped to the inside just like that mom said and I remembered about the little girl.

Ben Bean, he was in our plane looking for the kids. So I gave Boom the shoe and I hopped in the truck and I’ll be darned if that dog didn’t lead me straight to those kids. Hundreds of people hunting for them, but the only one knew where they were was a skinny old dog ought to be livin’ in town.

Guess where she found ’em. Sittin’ in a tree. Yep. All three buckled in like the flight was still going on. They was alive too. Not conscious, but alive. The older girl had her hand so tight around the branch we couldn’t hardly pry it off. She was holding all three of their hands together, it looked to me. The little girl with just the one blue shoe had her arm in a homemade sling made from the boy’s sweatshirt. Can’t imagine how they did that. But they was right, because that arm was broke in three places.

The boy was the one worried me the most. He had his head at a funny angle didn’t seem natural, plus he was missing his sweatshirt on account of it was the little girl’s sling. Colder than the devil out there. March can surprise you that way. Think winter’s over but it ain’t. All of ’em frostbit something fierce, but they was alive.

About the only ones who survived the crash were kids. The TV said kids is the ones that make it if anyone do. I’m not sure what happened with them other two they found, but the Tompkins kids’ seats were all three bound together. They was thrown clear and the canopy of branches caught them like a big old tree hand. Probably wouldn’t have if they’d been the size of my two, but they wasn’t so big yet and they was just hanging there when Boom found them.

With that fuel on board the rest of the plane exploded. Some kind of fireball, I reckon. It was a miracle those kids didn’t burn up. A miracle their mom told me about the dimes. A miracle Boom let me know where they was at. That’s three miracles. Most folks don’t ever get but one.