Dana Mentink - Turbulence

Still, she found herself drawn to the opening.

The cold air hit her like a fist, her eyes tearing, vision blurred.

She blinked them away. The piece of the wreckage she stood in was cratered on a snowy hill, wedged against a stand of pines that must have stopped the chunk of wreckage from sliding any farther. Plumes of steam rose from the snow where grotesquely twisted shards of metal protruded like the skeleton of some long-dead thing. She couldn’t see any more pieces of intact plane from her position. The impact must have thrown her some distance.

Wishing she had managed to hold on to her purse, she fumbled in her pocket and retrieved the cell phone.

Please work. Please work.

No signal available, the screen read. She would not be summoning help, or calling Paul. Maybe it was a blessing, anyway. What would it be like to hear Paul’s phone ring endlessly, imagining all the reasons why he was not able to answer? What would it be like to know she would never hear his voice again? Those ridiculous ideas that made her groan. The Donald Duck impressions he did for his young patients.

Her breath froze.

Perhaps the rest of the plane had disintegrated and she was the only one, the only survivor.

The thought paralyzed her until she balled the fear up in her mind and transformed it into rage, penetrating and intense as the cold all around her.

No. It wouldn’t be death for all these innocent people.

“That’s not the way it’s going to end.” She hadn’t realized she’d shouted aloud until the words echoed back to her. It was time to go find the others and help them.

She put out a hand to brace herself for the climb down, but yanked her fingers away when the metal burned her skin. Grabbing a couple of blackened cushions, she held one in front of her and sat on the other, skidding down the side of the plane.

Even with the fabric insulation, she could feel the heat seep into her pants. When her feet crunched into knee-deep snow, she floundered for a moment before she climbed up on a wide section of metal lying on the ground, grateful it wasn’t smoking hot. The realization hit her. It was a section of wing, broken loose.

Scooting out as far as the metal surface would allow, she peered through the smoke. Just south of her was a deep furrow of snow, gouged wide, until it disappeared over the rise ahead. She walked to the end of the wingtip and stepped off gingerly, sinking again into the whiteness. Ignoring the chill, she made her way laboriously toward the edge of the slope where she would be able to get a view of what lay below.

Stomach knotted, muscles complaining with every step, she moved on, wishing she had more than a wool blazer for warmth. The edge neared, and in spite of her earlier bravado, fear nibbled at the corners of her mind. What would she find? How could he have survived?

She realized she was thinking not of Wrigley or Jaden, but of Paul. Only of Paul.

The anger she nursed was alive as ever, bitter as gall, yet fear rose up right alongside it.

She wanted to shout, to tear through the oppressive stillness and hear the comfort of a reply. Far worse would be an answering silence. Shuddering, skin prickled with goose bumps, she forced her feet to the top of the rise.

Looking down with eyes streaming from the acrid smoke that filled the air, she saw the rest of the plane, upside down, half-buried in snow. There was no sign of movement from inside.

She continued on. Downslope, the snow was harder, fused into sheets of icy crust.

Her mind wandered back to her nieces, Ginny and Beth, on their annual trip to Bear Valley. The shrill cries of Ginny as she raced along on a toboggan with her sister close behind, Maddie’s sister, Katie, watching, eyes dancing, Maddie waiting at the bottom, where Katie’s husband, Roger, should have been if he hadn’t had an affair that ended their marriage. Katie had once told Maddie she wondered if his affair wasn’t a reaction to his Huntington’s disease diagnosis.

Maddie refused to listen. Katie had to deal not only with Roger’s life-altering diagnosis, but the terror of wondering if the girls had inherited the disease. And she’d never considered having an affair. Roger had been weak and selfish. When he left, Maddie tried to fill in for him as much as she could. They’d made their own odd little family, bound together by love and loss, and always overseeing everything was Bruce Lambert, father, grandfather and steadfast rock.

The moisture on her face hardened into icy trails, and she scraped them away as she tried to inject some logical thinking into her half-frozen mind.

She had no idea how much time had passed since the accident, or if their sudden disappearance off the radar had been noticed by airport officials. Was there a rescue crew on the way? Had her father and sister been alerted?

She hoped her family hadn’t been told. The worry could prove too much for her father’s damaged heart.

Gritting her teeth, she pressed on. The Berlin Heart would be in this section, and if she could save it, the rescuers would be able to get it to her dad. Her own heart tumbled in her chest as she drew closer to the wreck. Her feet were so cold in her leather slip-ons, she felt as if she were walking on two frozen stumps.

How long before frostbite would begin to kill her extremities, she wondered? Fifty feet away, and she could see the details now. Windows blown out, sharp twists of metal, blackened bits of plastic littered like flakes of pepper on salt-white snow.

A plume of flame erupted from behind one of the windows. Maddie screamed, the sound echoing through the snowy hollow. She waited to see if the flames would escalate into a roaring inferno, but they died away again.

She had to get in there and find Paul and Dr. Wrigley and the heart, before it was too late.

In spite of her determination, she stopped again.

The images of other deaths came back to her in all their brutality. When the girls died, it kindled an impenetrable fear inside Maddie that froze her in her tracks. She’d once armored herself against that fear with faith, but it had been ripped away in the moments after the car crash, leaving her soul tattered and exposed.

The fear had rooted deep then.

And threatened to overwhelm her now.

She could not move.

Another plume of flame erupted from a different location, bringing with it black smoke that swirled through the open side of the plane.

Through the haze, a man staggered out.

Maddie’s heart thundered and she reached a hand toward him. “Here.”

She could not tell if he reacted to her voice, or if he even heard her as he fell facedown in the snow.

Breaking free of her numbing paralysis, she ran, falling and floundering, through the snow. He was so covered with black that she could not tell his identity at first, until she saw the twisted glasses lying next to him.

Dr. Wrigley.

Not allowing herself to acknowledge the keen surge of disappointment, she rolled him over as gently as she could, to prevent him from suffocating in the snow. His eyelids fluttered as he came to.

“What…?”

“Our plane crashed. Are you badly injured?”

He blinked and struggled to sit up. She considered pushing him back to keep him from further injury, but exposure to the icy ground would kill him as certainly as any internal damage. She helped him sit up.

He clutched a hand to his front. “I think my clavicle is broken.”

She didn’t dare peel away any layers of clothing to assess. “We’ve got to get to shelter somehow. Have—did you see what happened to Paul or the other passenger?”

Wrigley gently bent his glasses back into position and put them on. “No. I didn’t see anyone inside. But the smoke was so thick.”