Page 43 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 3

“You knowwhat this reminds me of?” Will said, suddenly.

“What?” she asked, grateful he’d broken the silence. Neither had spoken in the last ten minutes as they’d followed the trail left by the cockpit. She hadn’t known what was safe to say, though she wasn’t stupid. He’d invited her trust in him—and she couldn’t. God, there were days when she wondered who that fool in the mirror was.

“Those kids in the Andes. Look at this and then look at the fuselage.” They turned back to face the way they’d come. Through the trees, she could make out the bright orange flicker of their signal fire; the wind was with them and laced with a scent of resin and burning wood. “Their cockpit ended up some distance away, too, as I recall. I think that’s what happened here. Burke kept turning us in a square, remember, to keep us clear of the peaks? But then the engine caught and he started pulling up. I remember him yanking back on the yoke. So he came in from the north.” He pointed at a faraway saddle between mountains. “He threaded us through that. We might have made it, too, if he’d only been able to pull us up faster and higher.”

Which Burke obviously hadn’t. Judging from a series of broken, splintered trunks thrusting up from the snowpack behind the fuselage, the plane had smashed into tall spruces, which had caught them by the wings, shearing those away and sending them spinning before the plane had slammed down in a hard belly flop and then slalomed down an incline. The impact fractured the plane and their portion, which wasn’t as streamlined, had plowed to a halt, while the cockpit had bulleted into the forest.

“But how does that remind you of the Andes crash?”

“The slope. It’s a natural chute, maybe even a sometime waterway, you know, when there’s spring melt? I can feel the incline. With the momentum the plane had built up, once it got going on this, it would be like bombing down a ski run. Same thing happened in the…”

He stopped as a small, static-filled fart blatted from a pocket of his parka. Pulling out a small yellow walkie-talkie, Will depressed a button. “You okay, Mattie? Is there a problem? Over.”

“No. I’m checking in to make sure you guys are all right.” There was a long pause. “Oh. Over.”

Will grinned. “Well, we still see you. In fact, I’m waving, even if you can’t see it. Is your mom still asleep? Over.”

“Yes. How long are you going to be? What if she wakes up while you’re gone? Over.”

“If she wakes up, you get on the horn, and I’ll hustle back. You know, you’d probably feel better if you got outside into the sunshine. Over.”

A pause and then Mattie came back. “If she wakes up and I’m outside… Over.”

“Set up a schedule. Thirty minutes out, fifteen in, something like that. Keep an eye on the fire and don’t forget to keep drinking. Over.”

“Okay. Will you be back in time for lunch?”

She was not going to hang around and listen to them talk about food. Catching Will’s eye, she mouthed, Going to check something out then, at Will’s nod, turned back to study the cockpit’s trail, thinking Will had something there about water. Approaching the trough from the side, she used the hiking pole as a probe, trying to feel the terrain through her too-large snowshoes, silently cursing when a shoe flopped and threatened to trip her up. She studied the spray of snow from the cockpit’s passage, the way the cockpit had carved a runway for itself. I could swear this is a bank or… She felt the tip of her pole skid and skip. Rock? Kneeling, she swept at snow, swishing the flat of her gloved hand back and forth.

She heard Will come up behind her. “Find something?”

“I think so.” She pointed at a sheet of dense white ice that had been hidden by snow. “That’s pretty solid. I think that probably answers why they kept going. Nothing to stop them, really, and it’s wide enough.” The cockpit simply wasn’t that large. Like all aircraft, the Chieftain’s cockpit had been big enough for two men and a central console with enough maneuvering room along the sides left over so neither was constantly was banging an elbow. “With no wings to stop them or get them hung up, they’d have shot down this like a luge.”

“To wind up where?” Will asked.

“I guess we follow and find out.” But she already had a suspicion, which also probably meant she really hadn’t heard anything. Because if she was looking at a frozen waterway carved by years of snowmelt or simply a run-off channel, there were only two possibilities. One was that the water emptied into a lake, which might not be a bad thing for them because lakes, unless at very high altitudes, usually meant fish, didn’t they? Whether that lake was also iced over enough to hold the cockpit’s weight…well, that was a separate question.

The other possibility was, well, gravity.

After another several minutes, she felt the woods pulling away and the way ahead opening up. Through gaps in the trees, distant peaks thrust toward the sky and, closer in, she glimpsed the snowy tops of tall spruce.

“Uh-oh,” Will said.

“Yeah.” The fact that they were looking at treetopsmeant a drop-off. Hell. Stopping a good distance back from the edge, she gazed down into a very wide, U-shaped valley.

“So the stream ends in a waterfall,” said Will.

“Or a cliff.” Which was another way of saying a waterfall without water. There’d been that show years back people had loved about an airplane that had crashed on this wacky island and blah, blah. She and Ben had streamed the entire series. She’d liked the first couple of seasons but finally got pissed when nothing was ever really explained and then the whole thing turned out to be a dream which she’d always suspected because, in the very first episode, when the Matthew Fox character woke up on the beach, she remembered turning to Ben and saying, You watch. It’ll all be a dream.

The sight of the cliff ahead reminded her of the episode where John Locke found that drug smugglers’ plane—a Beechcraft, as she remembered it—mired in trees over the jungle floor. The smugglers had stuffed heroin into statues of the Virgin Mary and then…well, she couldn’t remember the rest, other than the plane eventually fell out of the trees.

“Looks like they went over,” Will said.

“Looks that way.” It also seemed to her that if anyone had survived—a miracle, in and of itself—she couldn’t possibly have heard them. The woods were dense, and they had to be almost a quarter mile from the fuselage. Sure, sound carried in the wilderness, and especially at night, but that far?

Will must’ve been thinking the same because he reached his good hand to touch her arm. “I’m sorry. About what I was saying before. I was being unfair. This is pretty far from the fuselage and, in a storm, I’m not at all sure the sound would’ve carried.” He didn’t say that the reverse was also true: if there had been someone who survived, they might not have heard her calling.

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