Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

He recalled the small caskets in which his family’s remains had been conveyed to him, and the strength of the memory compressed his heart into a small stone.

Eventually, when he could speak again, he said, ‘My point is that there were a number of passengers for whom the pathologists were unable to find any remains. People who just… ceased to exist in an instant. Disappeared.’

‘A large majority of them,’ she said, turning onto State Highway 115 and heading south under a sky as hard as an iron kettle.

‘Maybe this Rose Tucker didn’t just… didn’t just disintegrate on impact like the others. Maybe she disappeared because she walked away from the scene.’

‘Walked?’

‘The woman I met wasn’t disfigured or crippled. She appeared to have come through it without a scar.’

Adamantly shaking her head, Barbara said, ‘She’s lying to you, Joe. Flat out lying. She wasn’t on that plane. She’s playing some sort of sick game.’

‘I believe her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of things I’ve seen.’

‘What things?’

‘I don’t think I should tell you. Knowing… that might put you as deep in the hole as I am. I don’t want to endanger you any more than I have to. Just by coming here, I might be causing you trouble.’

After a silence, she said, ‘You must have seen something pretty extraordinary to make you believe in a survivor.’

‘Stranger than you can imagine.’

‘Still. I don’t believe it,’ she said.

‘Good. That’s safer.’

They had driven out of Colorado Springs, through suburbs, into an area of ranches, travelling into increasingly rural territory. To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness. To the west, the land rose gradually through fields and woods toward foothills half screened by grey mist.

He said, ‘You’re not just driving aimlessly, are you?’

‘If you want to fully understand what I’m going to tell you, it’ll help to see.’ She glanced away from the road, and her concern for him was evident in her kind eyes. ‘Do you think you can handle it, Joe?’

‘We’re going. there.’

‘Yes. If you can handle it.’

Joe closed his eyes and strove to suppress a welling anxiety. In his imagination, he could hear the screaming of the airliner’s engines.

The crash scene was thirty to forty miles south and slightly west of Colorado Springs.

Barbara Christman was taking him to the meadow where the 747 had shattered like a vessel of glass.

‘Only if you can handle it,’ she said gently.

The substance of his heart seemed to condense even further, until it was like a black hole in his chest.

The Explorer slowed. She was going to pull to the shoulder of the highway.

Joe opened his eyes. Even the thunderhead-filtered light seemed too bright. He willed himself to be deaf to the airplane-engine roar in his mind.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t stop. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. I’ve got nothing to lose now.’

They turned off the state highway onto an oiled-gravel road and soon off the gravel onto a dirt lane that led west through tall poplars with vertical branches streaming skyward like green fire. The poplars gave way to tamarack and birches, which surrendered the ground to white pines as the lane narrowed and the woods thickened.

Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.

Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, ‘We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.’

Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.

He trailed Barbara between columns of tall trees, under green vaults. Even in the late morning, the shadows were as deep as those in a monastery cloister.

The air was crisp with the aroma of pine. Musty with the scent of toadstools and natural mulch.

Step by step, a chill as damp as ice melt seeped from his bones and through his flesh, then out of his brow, his scalp, the nape of his neck, the curve of his spine. The day was warm, but he was not.

Eventually he could see an end to the ranks of trees, an open space past the last of the white pines. Though the forest had begun to seem claustrophobic, he was now reluctant to forsake the crowding greenery for the revelation that lay beyond.

Shivering, he followed Barbara through the last trees into the bottom of a gently rising meadow. The clearing was three hundred yards wide from north to south — and twice that long from the east, where they had entered it, to the wooded crest at the west end.

The wreckage was gone, but the meadow felt haunted.

The previous winter’s melting snow and the heavy spring rains had spread a healing poultice of grass across the torn, burnt land. The grass and a scattering of yellow wildflowers, however, could not conceal the most terrible wound in the earth: a ragged-edged, ovate depression approximately ninety yards by sixty yards. This enormous crater lay uphill from them, in the northwest quadrant of the meadow.

‘Impact point,’ Barbara Christman said.

They set out side by side, walking toward the precise place where three-quarters of a million pounds had come screaming out of the night sky into the earth, but Joe quickly fell behind Barbara and then came to a stop altogether. His soul was as gouged as this field, ploughed by pain.

Barbara returned to Joe and, without a word, slipped her hand into his. He held tightly to her, and they set out again.

As they approached the impact point, he saw the fire-blackened trees along the north perimeter of the forest, which had served as backdrop to the crash-scene photograph in the Post. Some pines had been stripped bare of needles by the flames; their branches were charred stubs. A score of seared aspens, as brittle as charcoal, imprinted a stark geometry on the dismal sky.

They stopped at the eroded rim of the crater; the uneven floor below them was as deep as a two-story house in some places. Although patches of grass bristled from the sloping walls, it did not thrive on the bottom of the depression, where shattered slabs of grey stone shown through a thin skim of dirt and brown leaves deposited by the wind.

Barbara said, ‘It hit with enough force to blast away thousands of years of accumulated soil and still fracture the bedrock beneath.’

Even more shaken by the power of the crash than he had expected to be, Joe turned his attention to the sombre sky and struggled to breathe.

An eagle appeared out of the mountain mists to the west, flying eastward on a course as unwaveringly straight as a latitude line on a map. Silhouetted against the grey-white overcast, it was almost as dark as Poe’s raven, but as it passed under that portion of sky that was blue-black with a still-brewing storm, it appeared to grow as pale as a spirit.

Joe turned to watch the bird as it passed overhead and away.

‘Flight 353,’ Barbara said, ‘was tight on course and free of problems when it passed the Goodland navigational beacon, which is approximately a hundred and seventy air miles east of Colorado Springs. By the time it ended here, it was twenty-eight miles off course.’