Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

“I could be wrong, Liam, but I think this is a piece off an old C-47.”

“What’s a C-47?”

“It’s the cargo equivalent of a DC-3.” When he continued to look blank, she said, “Liam, I can’t believe how little you know about flying and still manage to live in Alaska. The DC-3 was the first economically successful commercial airliner. The C-47 was the military application, a cargo and troop transport. Parachuters bailed out of them during the invasion of Normandy, for crying out loud. Mudhole Smith built Cordova Airlines around them. At the end of World War Two, when we knew we had the war won, the plant in Georgia started converting the cargo plane into the passenger plane, and Alaska Airlines puddle-jumped one all the way across the continent to Anchorage in May 1945 and started flying passengers.” She looked at him and said incredulously, “Do you mean to say you’ve never been in one?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying hard not to sound defensive. “I never pay any attention to the plane I’m in, Wy; you know that. All I care about is that they stay up in the air long enough to get me where I’m going.”

She shook her head. “Man.”

“Besides, that’s just a little piece. How can you be so sure it’s-well, it was a DC-3?”

“A C-47,” she said. “It was a military plane. The color alone tells us that.”

“How long’s it been here? When did it crash?”

“We need to find something with numbers on it.” Wy began foraging, climbing over boulders, pulling brush to one side only to have it pull free and slap her in the face. “Ouch. Damn it.”

“John said they found the arm next to a big chunk of quartz.” He walked upslope, crunching through a surface trickle of water frozen into a thin, rapidly melting crust. It had spent the summer running off the end of a slab of ice the size of Wy’s house, with man-high holes melted through it. “There.” He clambered over the ice, pieces of it collapsing beneath his weight as he went.

“Be careful!” she said as a big chunk fell with a loud thunk! Liam disappeared and for a moment she thought he had fallen through. His voice came to her a moment later. “Here it is, Wy. Walk around, though; don’t climb over-the ice is rotten right through.”

“Imagine my surprise.” She walked around the slab, a scramble of smallish boulders in her way, and found him standing between the slab of ice he had negotiated and the face of the glacier itself, a wall of prismed white with shadowed blue highlights creating narrow, unexpected windows into an inconsistent past. Another dark cave yawned at its base, curving high and large behind the ice. The ground here was a gray mixture of sand and gravel, more textbook moraine. Water was trickling down somewhere, but not much and not in a hurry about it. Winter was coming on fast.

“Kinda spooky.” Liam’s voice echoed hollowly back at him from the cave.

“Kinda,” Wy said, her voice short.

Liam looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like being this close to the face of a glacier. Glaciers calve. Where do you think that slab you just hauled your butt over came from?”

He squinted up at the face. “Think one might fall on us?” he said, sounding interested.

Her shadow lengthened on the ice in front of her, and the sun, well up over the horizon by now, felt warm on her back. “That’s what glaciers do. Where’s that quartz?” She followed his pointing finger. “I don’t see- Oh.”

He followed her, watched as she extricated a piece of plastic from the sandy gravel. “What’s that?”

She turned it between her hands. “Transparent, convex. Part of a window, probably, or the windshield.”

He repressed a shudder, his all-too-active imagination actively pursuing a picture of what the last few moments in the air had been like. Had they known they were going in, those unknown men in the cockpit of this unknown aircraft? He hoped not. He hoped it with fervor.

Two hours later, their total was three shards of metal that had been twisted like corkscrews-proving to Liam once again just how insubstantial were the craft to which he trusted himself in the air-and Wy’s piece of plastic. Other, more macabre findings included the cuff of a dark blue shirtsleeve, and a tattered dark blue sock containing what appeared to be some small bones held together by what appeared to be sinewy cartilage.

Liam bagged and tagged everything they found.

“Nothing with numbers on it, though,” Wy said with a sigh.

“Is there enough here to tell you what kind of a plane it was?”

Wy shrugged. “Military, for sure, with that paint job.”

“When?”

“Not lately.” She stared up at the face of the glacier.

“What?”

“It’s just… you don’t expect to see a glacier giving up an airplane when it calves. A T. Rex, yeah, but a plane? Glaciers have been around a lot longer than planes. Takes a long time, centuries, millennia for a glacier to give up a secret. The face of a glacier, man, it’s thousands of years old. It’s-” She cocked her head. The prickle at the back of her neck was back.

“What?” he said.

“Shhh.” She held up a hand. “I thought I heard-”

There was a distant, cracking sound, and the next thing Liam knew Wy had him in a low tackle that rolled the both of them over the blueberry bushes and beneath the high-standing lip of the chunk of ice he had climbed over. There was a BOOM! that caused chunks of ice to fall from the roof of their shelter, one of which hit Wy’s head and another of which struck Liam smack in the left eye. “Ouch! What the-”

There was an extended rending sound, deafening in decibel level, so that he couldn’t hear himself speak, let alone talk. The ground shook beneath them. Earthquake? Wy buried her face in his shoulder and he held on. There was a split second of pure, clear silence. The light outside their shelter altered, shifted somehow, and then there was a CRASH! as something immense fell heavily to the ground, and a lingering series of cracks and thumps and bumps as it splintered into pieces and slithered down the gravel moraine.

He didn’t know how long it took for the ringing in his ears to stop. “Wy?” he croaked. She was unmoving against him. “Wy! Are you all right?”

He could feel the jolt that went through her. “What? Liam?”

“Are you all right?”

He felt her come alive all along the length of her body. “I… yes, I’m all right. You?”

“I think so. Can we get out?”

She raised her head and peered over her shoulder at the way they had come. “I think so.” She eeled backward, just enough room for her wriggle over onto her back. She kicked, and something shifted.

“Wy!”

“It’s all right. I’m just clearing a path. Follow me out.”

She didn’t have to ask him twice. He barely remembered to hang on to the evidence bags.

When they were well clear of the ice and a safe distance from the face of the glacier, they stopped to take stock. Wy winced a little when she stretched. “Something got me in the shoulder.” She looked at him. “You’re going to have a shiner.”

He touched the swelling surrounding his left eye. “Ouch.”

Her lips twitched. “And your uniform’s kind of changed color on you. Well, maybe not changed, exactly, but it’s sure bluer than it was.”

“What?” He looked down to find his dark blue jacket and pants embedded with multiple squashed blueberries. “Oh, hell.” She was looking over his shoulder at the face of the glacier. He looked up and her expression made him straighten. “Wy?”

“Liam,” Wy breathed, and raised one shaking forefinger.

The skeleton of the plane was impressed into the face of the glacier like a gigantic fossil, the ribs of the fuselage curving up and around, one wing folded like paper, the tail miraculously upright. The nose was gone and the cockpit with it, but there was a barred white star on the side close to the tail, and small letters or numbers in the same white paint on the upright portion of the tail.