David Dun: Necessary Evil

"Everybody I can see is dead," Kier said.

Quickly she checked the bodies that she could easily reach. Most had visible bullet wounds in addition to crash injuries All dead.

While Kier began looking through the papers strewn near the jet's rear door, Jessie returned to the corpse outside. Crouching by the body, she wished desperately for plastic gloves. She had studied bullet wounds in pictures, and in bodies at the morgue. This was different. Here there was the nauseating odor of a perforated bowel, the slaughterhouse reek of open entrails. And here she had to hurry. More bodies were inside. Who had done the shooting and why? Had this been a hit man or a bodyguard? Foreign agent? Mafia member?

She searched the body. Blood caked the torn shirt and suit coat-expensive clothing by the looks of it. Under the suit the chest was spongy, and the steaming innards had popped out through lacerations in the belly-bluish-green, translucent like twisted sausage.

"This is all lab stuff," Kier called from just inside the plane. He was opening a thick three-ring binder, one of many.

Jessie found nothing in the jacket or pants pockets, not even lint; it was as if the suit had been taken directly off the store rack. No I.D. This man was not law enforcement.

As she moved back to the rear of the fuselage, Kier did not even look up from his reading.

Inside and to the left lay seats for more than twenty people spaciously arranged. In the gray half-light she counted the bodies, some hanging lifeless in their belts, others squeezed between collapsed seats. Nine. Looking back, she saw Kier still studying the papers.

''We really shouldn't touch things," she said without conviction, knowing the plane could catch fire and burn, leaving nothing but a mystery.

A feeling came over her that she'd forgotten something. She looked back outside the way she had come. There it was. Partially snow-filled footprints circled the jet, ultimately leading off into the brush. She hadn't noticed them before. Someone must have survived, or found the wreck before she and Kier did.

"There are tracks," she called to Kier. "I saw. They're hard to read." He barely looked up from the black plastic binder. "What else haven't you told me?" ''I think the person doesn't want to be found.'' He shrugged. "He's long gone. Probably at the county road."

"I can't believe anybody survived," she said. "What's in the binder?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"You're taking this awfully calmly."

"The bland expression is hereditary." It struck her as the driest sort of black humor. She watched a moment longer as he pored over the pages.

The smell of jet fuel stung her nostrils. Better hurry. Stepping gun first, she began making her way through the passenger cabin. Teal leather and rose carpets told her the decorator had an eye for the gaudy. Oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling. The fuselage of the jet was crushed in places, but she saw no complete breach, except at the large hole where she now stood, and at the midsection, where a stump had pierced the side of the plane. Exposed wires, like veins on a skinned carcass, ran fore and aft. Blood stained even the ceiling.

The quiet was eerie-pregnant with tension, as if someone was waiting, watching. She took her uneasiness as a warning, and did not struggle with the illogic of it.

Four bodies, facing one another in club seating, sat slightly aft of the midsection. The stretched seat belts were almost ripped from their fittings. Near the first body, Jessie found a gun on the floor. Bullet holes riddled the back of the man's suit.

Struggling through his pockets, vomit tickling the base of her throat, she found no I.D. on this one either. On the other side of the aisle, the next body lay in the seats like a collapsed marionette without the strings. The way the body was compressed between the seats it would take a pathology team to pull it out and determine the cause of death. Only arms in camel-hair sleeves and legs in twill slacks remained visible.

In the next row forward on the left side lay the other two bodies. One had his head back, tongue extended betweet clenched teeth, and a 10-mm. Glock with a silencer in his hand. She put her nose close and caught the smell of a fired weapon.

Farther forward sat a macabre, five-person huddle-two women and three men who didn't seem to have guns. All of the men had wallets with ordinary-looking I.D., including drivers' licenses. They wore slacks and open shirts. One woman was dressed in a business suit, the other in a pantsuit. All the clothes looked middle-American plain, stuff that could have come from any mass merchandiser-nothing like the slick Italian suit of the gunman.

Kier, now some distance away, still knelt in the tail section with the binders. He showed not the slightest interest in the plane or the bodies.

"Are you finding anything I should know about?" she shouted.

"I'll tell you later."

She made herself continue to the command center of the plane. Beyond a maze of more seats and debris, a partially crushed door had been completely pierced by a heavy object- maybe a person's head. The jagged hole was as big as a basketball. Through that door she would find the flight crew.

She heard a buzzing sound and automatically ducked, squeezing her way between seats and bodies, trying to avoid looking into the sightless eyes of a grotesquely twisted head. Now the buzzing combined with a popping noise. Of course-electric wires were shorting. Her gut tightened as her nostrils caught the heavy smell of burned plastic. She saw no visible flame- yet.

"Kier," she yelled. "Kier," she said more loudly. "Get out of here. Take what you can."

She glanced behind her. He was already gone.

Her hands started shaking. An adrenaline intensity overtook her body. There was something… a presence. The physical cold mingled with her chilled spirit as the plane made deathly creaks. Outside, the forest was passing into nature's own death: winter.

As Jessie touched the cockpit door, she caught sight of something through the jagged hole: steam-delicate, ghostly puffs of vapor-each wisp so marginally visible she wondered if they really existed. It was someone's breath condensing.

For a moment he watched Jessie as she knelt over the corpse in the snow outside the fuselage. Then he turned back to the interior of the plane, intensely curious. A feeling crept over Kier unlike any he could recall. It was like being tied to the tracks with train sounds in the midst. There were many large fiberglass pods, tan in color, stored in racks in the aft portion of the cabin. Each pod was about eight feet long, two feet in diameter. Most were broken open, and those that had split had heavy mantles of ice, like refrigerators in need of defrosting. Kier supposed that subzero nitrogen gas or something similar had escaped the pods, leaving behind the icy residue.

Spilling from the broken pods were broken DeWar flasks that looked like metal-clad thermoses. Some had obviously bounced around the cabin and had spilled their contents. Each flask bore an orange-and-black biohazard symbol. Squatting down, he looked inside one of the partially torn open flasks. A vertically suspended carriage with various levels and pie-shaped metal containers hung from the screw-on lid. Inside those metal containers were small, translucent vials, some filled with liquid, some with what looked like a gelatinous material Each vial was a half inch long and coded with a number and initials. Each had a screw cap, the top with male threads, the vial itself with female threads. Some of the vials were crushed

"This is all lab stuff," he said half to himself. Jessie, seemingly intent on the body, made no response.