John Nance - 16 Souls

“We’ll come in on Runway Seven.”

There was a long pause and what sounded like a sigh before she replied.

“Ah… you do realize there’s a dropoff at the east end of seven, right? At least a hundred feet. And to each side… well, there are the taxiways to the north.”

“I know.”

“Any other runway would be better.”

“All the other are covered in snow, Michelle.

“I think that’s my point.”

“I’m not following you.”

He heard the phone scrape on something again and a cry of pain.

“Michelle?”

“Sorry, sorry! My shoulder is… hurt. I forgot not to move it.”

“How are you and your crew and passengers holding out?”

“We won’t die of hypothermia before you run out of fuel, but I may move to the Sahara after this. No, we’ll… we’re holding on… literally and figuratively.”

“Just a little longer.”

“Look… Marty… I want to live… I want my passengers to live… but I want everyone in your plane to live, too…”

“Michelle! That’s enough. I’ll get us down. I’m not sacrificing you guys to make a smooth landing.”

“What can I do over here.”

“Just what you’re doing. Now it’s up to us.”

There was a garbled reply

“What?” Marty asked.

“I just said… ‘I hope God is with us,’” she replied quietly. “Not my characteristic benediction but, you know what they say: There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Mountaineer 2612

“Luke, I have to ask you something,” Michelle Whittier said, wincing in pain again as she glanced at her copilot.

“Sure. What?”

“Since we know we’ve got over twelve hundred pounds of baggage in the back of this fuselage, and we’re trying to keep from tipping backwards, and the weight being so far back is a significant force trying to pull us off this wing…”

“I know where you’re going.”

“Do you? Because we’d have to use the crash axe to chop through the wall to the cargo bay, and then open the door from inside, which means it will blow off instantly, and if it doesn’t, if it just opens into the airstream, it could pull us off by itself.

“But if we could get rid of that weight…”

“Michelle, I know of one 1900 cargo door that came completely open in flight and didn’t blow off.”

“Yeah, but we’d be guessing as to whether it could affect us.”

“Wait, I have an idea,” Luke said. “I know I can get into the cargo bay… that wall is flimsy. Instead of changing the cargo door, why don’t we relay bags to the emergency exit row, pull the exit open, and dump stuff out there. Even if some of the bags won’t fit, we can dump the contents.”

“Really good idea,” she answered, “…and maybe we can find more warm stuff for our freezing passengers to wear. We also need to move people forward to the extent we can.”

“Only three empty seats forward,” Luke replied, “…but I’ll take care of it. Can you keep forward pressure on the yoke, though?”

“Yes. One way or another.”

“Okay.”

“How are you holding out, Luke?”

He had been in the process of removing his seat belt and he looked her in the eye now and paused.

“Ah… I’m very cold, like you, and I thought we were done back there, so… every minute’s a gift, y’know?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“Having something to do, to fight with, is good.”

“It is. Go. Quick. Move the people forward first.”

Present Day — August 14 th, 7:55 pm

Summit of Long’s Peak

With a deep sigh, Marty pried his mind away from the virtual reality of his memory — his all-consuming mental hologram. Somewhere in his head a small shiver registered that his body was now cold, but he couldn’t feel it, even though the temperature on the peak was probably below forty and the wind at least a steady fifteen knots. As the wrenching realism of that January night receded like an evaporating nightmare, it left in its stead a stark loneliness.

I wish Judith was here right now, he thought, I wish she had understood. Maybe I could have explained better…

But there would be no need. After all, he would be dead and gone and who gave a tinker’s damn in the broader scheme of human existence if some schmuck named Marty screwed up and people died as a result. People died all the time. No, as he’d told her, he would not be a pawn in their game of chess.

But deep inside, Marty Mitchell knew that was a damnable lie. He longed for vindication. Or, perhaps, something resembling forgiveness.

Marty took another deep breath, gazing at the boulder strewn summit, which was now bathed in semi-darkness.

It was time. Yes, he was burning to get all his points across, yet aching for relief from the all-too-vivid replaying of the accident every single solitary fucking night. And that’s what he’d climbed this ancient pile of granite to find: relief.

Marty stood and snapped on his flashlight, playing it on his pack as he started to lay out his own last supper. Whiskey and pills. Food of the gods, he chuckled. The only thing missing was peanut butter.

And that thought alone brought a smile… for at least a few seconds.

Marty had never contemplated suicide before, other than to condemn those who had… those who had indulged in it as an ultimate escape clause. Oh, he could understand someone accelerating the process of dying from cancer or Alzheimer’s or something else clearly fatal. But to eat a shotgun without warning one morning like Hemingway? Pure selfishness. Pure cowardice, or so he’d thought — until the unbelievable pain of his failures was redoubled by the harsh condemnation of society. Suddenly, suicide made sense.

For some reason he remembered Michelle Whittier’s words before the landing. What had she called it? Oh, yeah. Her “benediction.” She hoped God would be with them. Of course she had to know that there were, in fact, at least some atheists in foxholes. That old phrase insulted atheists and thumped agnostics, and he had imagined himself one or the other. In fact, he’d always worn an agnostic attitude as a slightly snobbish badge of honor. But if his cynical point of view was right and there was nothing else beyond this life, the Marty Mitchell he knew and had once been very proud of was about to evaporate. The irony was, he’d never know it. He’d never know anything. All that life and experience gone. All that training as a pilot. All that memory. Poof. Something was deeply illogical about that, he mused. Maybe in these last minutes he should at least consider that there might be something after this mortal excursion.

Marty looked down at the prepared items and reached for the bottle.

“Time to find out,” he said to the wind as he uncorked the whiskey. “Checkmate!”

Boulder — 8:05 pm

A frantic Judith Winston glanced at her brass wall clock, stalking around her office, cell phone glued to her ear. It had been less than an hour since she’d rushed back to try to convince someone to organize a rescue to Rocky Mountain National Park. Fortunately, her secretary was working late on a weekend, and she pressed him into immediate service.

A voice returned to the other end of the line, causing a head shake.

“No,” she replied. “I need General Stone. I need to speak to the adjutant general of the Colorado National Guard, as I told you. And yes, he does know me, and this is an emergency, and I can tell you with certainty that someone is going to die if I can’t get through to him!”

She rolled her eyes at the response.