Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.’

Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained consciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of grey from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said, Oh, Jesus.

‘His voice was wet and nasal,’ Barbara said, ‘which might have meant that Blanc broke his nose.’

Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.

SANTORELLI: Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.

BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

SANTORELLI: Pull!

BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: Pull up!

Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, struggling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.

SANTORELLI: Shit, shit!

BLANE: Are we recording?

Baffled, Joe said, ‘Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?’

Barbara shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s a pilot for how long?’

‘Over twenty years.’

‘He’d know the cockpit voice recorder is always working. Right?’

‘He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?’

Joe read the final words of the two men.

SANTORELLI: Pull!

BLANE: Oh, wow.

SANTORELLI: Mother of God

BLANE: Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI: No.

BLANE: (childlike excitement) Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI: Susan.

BLANE: Now. Look.

Santorelli begins to scream.

BLANE: Cool.

Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.

Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.

Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.

For a while he couldn’t speak.

Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.

Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, ‘Santorelli’s last word was a name.’

‘Susan.’

‘Who is she?’

‘His wife.’

‘I thought so.’

At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

‘Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,’ she said. ‘But what does it matter?’

When they had first stood together in this field, she had told him that on her arrival the morning after the crash, the debris was so finely chopped it didn’t appear to be the wreckage of an airliner. Virtually no piece was larger than a car door. Only two objects were immediately recognizable — a portion of one of the engines and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

He said, ‘Three seats, side by side?’

‘Yes.’

‘Upright?’

‘Yes. What’s your point?’

‘Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?’

‘Joe—’

‘From what part of the plane?’ he repeated patiently.

‘Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The centre rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.’

‘Damaged?’

‘Of course.’

‘Badly?’

‘Not as badly as you’d expect.’

‘Burned?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘Burned at all?’

As I remember. there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.’

‘In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?’

Her broad clear face now clouded with concern. ‘Joe, no one survived this crash.’

‘Was the upholstery intact?’ he pressed.

‘As I remember, it Was slightly torn. Nothing serious.’

‘Blood on the upholstery?’ ‘I don’t recall.’

Any bodies in the seats?’ ‘No.’

‘Body parts?’

‘No.’

‘Lap belts still attached?’

‘I don’t remember. I suppose so.’ ‘If the lap belts were attached—’ ‘No, it’s ridiculous to think—’

‘Michelle and the girls were in economy,’ he said.

Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. ‘Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.’

‘I know that,’ he assured her. ‘I know.’ But how he wished.

She met his eyes again.

He said, ‘They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.’

‘So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.’

‘If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy — that’s at least some small corroboration.’

‘Of what?’

‘Her story.’

‘Corroboration,’ Barbara said disbelievingly.

‘That she survived.’

Barbara shook her head.

‘You didn’t meet Rose,’ he said. ‘She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such. power, presence.’

On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theatre-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, ‘They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive.'

‘I understand that.’

‘God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe — but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew… in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like breadsticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel — a spray as fine as an aerosol mist — explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.’

Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.

He said, ‘You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander — and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.’

‘That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.’