-The Road

Dad stumbled along until he reached the wreckage again, then scanned the darkness around the plane, out of the small range of his light.  He could see nothing. 

Where was she, he thought?  She couldn’t have gotten far. 

He thought again for a moment that maybe she had gotten out right after the crash, maybe while he was dazed.  She may be injured and wandering around in the dark, but she should still be close.  He picked his way out of the tangled barbed wire wreath that circled the wreckage and made his way to the tail, scanning the darkness in that direction; the way he assumed we had come from.  He had no idea how far the plane had slid, but it had seemed at the time like miles. 

Mom was no where to be seen.  He held his hands up to his face.

“Char!”  He called out.  “Charlene!!” 

            He scanned the sky above him.  The low clouds obscured all celestial landmarks and helped hide the landscape around him under a curtain of black. All he could see in either direction were a few far off pinpoints of light from what he assumed were farms or outbuildings scattered here or there.  His good eye was still swelling, further blurring things.  The perpetual ooze of blood from his head into his eyes didn’t help either.   He felt like he couldn’t judge distance at all, and was in general feeling very much disorientated. 

His current concern was that if mom had gotten out of the wreck somehow, she may be wandering in the cold and would very soon be in grave danger of freezing, especially if she was wounded and loosing blood.  He had to find her soon.  If she hadn’t gotten out by herself then she had fallen out.  He figured that if that were the case, she would be back that way, behind them.  He stumbled along the rough and bare dirt ground, scanning off to either side as far as he could see, waving the little light before him as he went, calling her name.

The churned up earth of the field appeared grey before him as he ventured farther into the darkness.  He walked in as straight of a line as he could for what he was sure was 50 or so yards before stopping at the edge of a parcel of dead grass.  He strained his eye, trying to pierce the darkness and see her in vain. 

He did not want to loose track of the kids or the plane by getting too far away.  He hadn’t seen a road or track or any other sign of the way to some kind of safety or help beyond the icy grip of this place, but wasn’t surprised.  He had been in and around plenty of these Nebraska cornfields over the years and knew how big and vast they could be.  With no means of keeping a fix on the plane, he could easily get disoriented and wander off in the wrong direction, not being able to find his way back until sunrise.  By then, we’d all be dead. 

The prospect didn’t sit well with him.  Then he thought about mom.  If she were able to move or walk, she would be in the same dilemma and be in danger of getting lost, too.

But the nipping at his ears reminded him it was the middle of February in that field.  The kids, whose status he at least knew, needed shelter of some kind.  The search for mom would have to wait for the time being.  He figured the odds of her being mobile were in reality pretty slim anyway, and she probably wouldn’t be going anywhere.  But she was out there somewhere, and he would find her, just not yet.  He took one more intense look into the night, then executed a careful about-face, and made his way over the churned up earth back towards us. 

 Chris looked through the blackness toward Rick, Kim and me from his cold perch of earth that he squatted on at our heads.  He then stared through the darkness that enveloped mom and dad and the plane somewhere beyond, for the moment unseen. 

We were neatly laid out, tucked together side by side on the bare ground.  Chris’ eyes had adjusted to the dark so he could see a little, but not much.  He had to look close to see the shadowed features of our still bodies laid out there.  Every few minutes, he blindly felt our faces to find our mouths and then bent close to listen to our breathing, to make sure we all were, although he wasn’t sure what he was suppose to do if one of us stopped.  Pound our chests, like on T.V., he figured.  But right now it didn’t seem to be an issue. 

His hand was stained and sticky from the blood he got on it from touching us.  He didn’t like the blood.  It made everything messy.

The scant pieces of clothing he and dad had tried to tuck around us seemed purely ornamental and didn’t seem to provide much protection from that increasing cold.  He shivered in the icy breeze.  At least we were out, he thought, and not having to feel it.  He gazed toward the plane. 

He could spot dad’s location on occasion off in the field, whenever he turned on the little pen light that he had gotten from somewhere.  Chris was cold, but he was growing quickly accustomed to it.  He wasn't really even scared.  He just felt…numb.  It all felt like a dream, but he knew he was not dreaming. 

He looked towards us again.  He knew my leg and my head were ripped wide open, but could only make out the wound to my scalp from where he was.  My viscous leg wound was hidden beyond his view by darkness.  When dad had finally wrestled me out from under the wreckage and brought me over, he had removed the shirt from my leg and looked over the wound with his light, Chris thought it had looked like raw chopped up meat, glistening and dripping red.  Now all the blood was blackened by the darkness.  He could not believe I was even alive.  When he felt my skin, it felt ice cold.  But I was breathing, so I wasn’t dead.    

Rick was bleeding from his head pretty good, too.  He alternated from being dead still to moaning and flopping around.  His breathing went from deep sighs to rapid staccato breaths.  He would twist and turn every few minutes, but for now seemed calm.  Chris was afraid of what to do about him if he got worse. 

Kim lay still as death; only the fog whispering from her lips in staggered and ragged breaths betrayed the life she struggled to keep.  He wondered if she would die.  She wasn’t bleeding too bad, but had a large cut on her eye, and her face was darkly bruised and felt puffy and swollen.

He hoped mom was okay, but at some part of his thought he already figured she probably wasn't.  He knew that the longer it took the worse it probably was.  He was trying to hold out hope, but wasn’t overly so hopeful.

But he could still hope a little.  Kids can always find hope.

He rubbed the sore part of his arm, and examined it as best he could in the dark.  It didn't hurt too badly, but sure looked funny.  On his way over to our refuge he had discovered that a large flap of skin had been pulled away from the back of the hand on his injured arm.  He figured it all happened while he and Kim smashed into the seat back where the oxygen tank was strapped in.  It had ripped his hand and broke his arm.

The skin had slumped back into place somewhat, but still dripped blood.  He didn’t show it to dad.  Dad had other problems to worry about.  Instead, he had taken a shirt from the clothes dad had given him and wrapped it around his hand.  His entire arm was numb, so at least he wasn’t in pain.  The rest of him felt okay.  He wasn’t sore or limping or anything, but he was worried. 

He wondered if he'd get a cast.  All of the kids at school would sign it.  The thought made him smile, but the smile quickly faded.  The thought of all those kids suddenly made him sad.  They were all home in bed safe and warm, and none of them knew about him stuck out here, wherever here was.  No one anywhere did.

            Then there was a sound being carried on the cold breeze which caught his attention, and connected with another memory.

He had been with our friend Paul, out at the end of Old Cheney Road near the little brick school we all attended, messing around one night.  It had been a dark night like this, too, although not as dark.  This was the darkest he had ever seen.  The memory was of a sound that had been coming from behind a rise in the dark distance of Rural Route 1, almost like a distant sigh which approached with greater and greater intensity, building and building, and turning into a breathy roar. 

That was the sound he heard now.  It was the sound of tires on asphalt, far in the distance!   

            A car!  Actually, it sounded like a semi truck!  He whirled his body around to look behind him and scanned the darkness.  In the distance he locked onto the sound, but he couldn’t see anything.  His view of the truck was blocked so he was unable to fix on the two distant specs of light that had just cleared an unseen hill and were now moving down a distant road.  At first he thought that the sound was coming right toward us and his hope for rescue surged.  But quickly the trajectory of the whoosh took the truck on a straight path from right to left that never even got close to them. 

He could continue to hear it as it crossed in front of him.  The cold air carried the sound even at the seemingly great distance, but the whoosh of the travel became slowly muffled.  His hope began to fade.  The road it traveled didn’t sound like it was impossibly far, but as things were it may have been on another planet.  All traces of the sound disappeared a few moments later, loosing itself under the low groan of the freezing breeze that wafted around him.

He stared at the last place he had been able to hear it for a long time, gripped once again in the embrace of the cold and dark silence of the field.  No more cars came.  Nobody on that road was looking for them, or even knew they were there. 

But at the same time, at least there was a road somewhere out there.

He listened for a long time but all was silent.  He felt a little crestfallen as he knew that truck wasn’t coming for us, but maybe there would be more and one of them would somehow know we were there.  He settled back beside us and again looked at the darkness toward the last place he saw where dad had been.