-The Field

Dad sat bolt upright as the sound caressed his ears causing his whole body to tense.

“Dad..?”  The boy said meekly from the depths of the wreckage, his voice tentative and shaken. 

Dad lurched himself up and onto his feet, pulling himself toward the gapping wound that had been torn into the side of the fuselage.  The kids! Charlene and the kids were still in the plane!  His ragged thought process had not gotten to that realization quite yet and now it came as a shock, and snapped his brain into action mode once again.

Even if there was no fire yet, there easily could be..  He still had to get us all out before a fire really did happen, which it could at any time.  The smell of highly flammable 100LL aviation fuel still lingered in the air.  He peered into the darkness toward the gash in the plane, but could barely make out anything in the interior through the trauma of his swollen face.

            “I’m here, son,” he called hoarsely as he made his way back onto the shattered wing, trying get a look inside and see Chris.  “It’s okay, I’m here.” 

Suddenly he focused at a point just inside the darkened gap.  An icy hand gripped his heart causing his body to stiffen, the buzz in his head increasing in intensity at his discovery. 

Mom’s seat was askew and was empty; he had not encountered her as he quickly exited the plane, he now realized.  He waved his hand into the empty darkness of the devastated compartment, pawing the air for one hint of her, but quickly realized that she was gone.  He reached down and grabbed the seatbelt hanging limply off to the side of the seat.  Somehow it had been taken off.  He didn’t remember at that moment that mom had handed Kim back to Chris.  When she had sat back in her seat, he hadn’t noticed that she had not put it back on. 

He thought instead that perhaps she had taken it off after the crash and had evacuated the plane.  He stood erect on the wing and looked hard into the night, rotating his body to scan the darkness that ran infinitely away from him in all directions.  He may as well been standing in the middle of outer space.  If she had gotten out already and was hurt, she may be somewhere nearby.  But he couldn’t see her anywhere.  He couldn’t see anything.

He glanced down at the ground just behind the crumpled flap of the wing and was hit by yet another shock.  Behind the wing he could make out the small cargo door.  It had been ripped open by the impact, and now hung tweaked on its hinges.  He knew Rick and I were back there.  Concerned, he moved toward it and could just make out something protruding from it.  Something that was not part of the plane, he could tell.  He made his way off of the wing and stooped down to examine it. 

My right leg had peen pulled from the plane on impact, and now was mostly under the plane.  He placed his hand on the knee and positioned himself to look through the hatch.  The leg was ice cold.  He could see my limp body slumped unnaturally just inside.  He couldn’t see my wounds, but my leg lay jutting out of the opening, curved at the knee, then disappeared into the churned up mud under the plane.  All practical experience as a doctor told him that it was mangled under there, and he tugged at it, finding it stuck and unmoving.  I wasn’t moving either.  The leg was so cold that for the moment he could not tell if I was alive or dead.  But he knew there was nothing he could do about that yet.

“I’ll have to get to you last,” he thought.  If the plane did catch fire, he knew I was going to die.  He felt a tinge of guilt at the thought, but he had to save the ones he could first. He stood.  He needed his wife to help him.

            “Char!” he called out again.  “Chaleeeene!!” He was met only with total silence, save for the moan of the breeze through some nearby trees.  If she was not in the wreckage… he realized that it was useless to worry.  He had no way to tell where she went and he had to get these kids out right now. 

Blocking the horror of the empty space where she had just been sitting a few moments before, he turned his attention to his newly defined mission.  Resolved for the moment to do so, he pulled forward the seat where mom was not, and worked his upper body into the fuselage as far as he could to try and survey Chris. 

He could barely make out his shape sitting there in the deep dark of the interior.  He appeared shrunken, small and helpless.  The boy’s wide and terrified white eyes blinked out of the darkness up at him.  He clutched the limp body of his little sister tightly to his chest.

“Kim is hurt,” Chris said, fearfully.  “She’s not waking up.”

Dad reached out for his son.  “Hand her to me,” he said gently.

Chris tried to rotate his body towards his father, but quickly found he was unable to budge.  His sister seemed to push him back into the seat with her limp weight.  He jerked his body again trying to get free.  The fear of being trapped began to rush up from his stomach, manifesting in sudden panic. 

Dad could hear the grunts from his struggle.

            “Son, the belt…” he said as gently as he could. “Undo the belt first and hand her to me.” 

The seatbelt!  Chris reached around the front of Kim and found the buckle that held them both into the seat.  He hadn’t unbuckled it yet.  He fumbled with it for a moment and suddenly it clicked loose, popping away from them.  He drew a deep breath, unaware until that instant how much he had needed to breathe.

            He regained his composure then turned toward dad again shifting Kim’s dead weight across him as he went.  Her body flopped to the right and he caught her fall with the crook of his arm.  He gripped her tightly and began to lift her toward dad when he became aware of a grating crack coming from under her.  Suddenly, with a sharp snap, his hand and wrist popped and shifted down, just as Dad grasped Kim and pulled her into him. 

Chris grabbed his arm with the fingers of his other hand, and felt his wrist.  It felt as if an additional joint had been placed just about half way up his forearm.  He moved the finger on his injured hand and was aware of the way the jagged bones grated at the muscles in his forearm.  It was distressing, yet he felt no pain.  But he was scared by that.  His eyes shot across the darkness toward his father.

            Dad stared briefly at his son’s twisted arm.  He had clearly heard it break, and felt Kim’s body shudder under it as he gripped her.  Chris meekly folded the arm across his chest and wrapped his other arm around it, holding it in place.  The lack of Chris yelling in pain was a good indicator that he was numb from shock, but Dad knew he couldn’t do anything for him until he put Kim down.   

“It’s okay, son,” Dad said, trying to reassure him.  “Just hold on..!” 

He lifted Kim into him, lowering his ear onto his daughter’s tiny chest.  Somewhere from deep within he heard the faint beat of her heart.  A brief jolt of hope lurched into him.  He looked back at his son.  “I’ll be right back.  Try to get out, okay?  It’s really a wreck out here, though, so be very careful.” 

Dad looked around to pick his way carefully backward through the hole in the plane and then stepped gingerly off the back of the wing onto the frozen ground.  The contrast of stepping out into the cold breeze was momentarily painful to experience and made him shudder. 

He negotiated a path through the jagged debris and the barbed wire halo that was wrapped around the plane, then stumbled across the rough dirt to a spot roughly 30 feet away where he thought Kim would be safe from any fire or explosion.  Once there, he knelt down and gently laid her there on the cold stiff dirt. 

He stood, then paused for a moment to consider his options.  The ground around him was clear of debris or junk and only a few patches of icy snow covered it.  Still, the air was very cold, and was getting colder quickly.  In a few hours it would be dangerously so.  She couldn’t stay this way for long, exposed completely, or she would certainly freeze to death.  They all would.  

But at this point, that was better than burning to death instantly in the plane if it caught fire.  He didn’t have a lot of options.  He knew that their survival in this mess would be calculated in terms of moment by moment for at least awhile.  And at this moment he, Kim and Chris were alive, and that was all that mattered.  He’d take the problems one at a time.   

It was all he could do.