-Helen

Dad had heard the truck on the distant road too, but it took him awhile to figure out where it was.  He couldn’t see the road either, but the sound of it was unmistakable, although he had to concentrate on it to know it was even moving.  It was a long way off but if he had to, it was somewhere to go for help.

That wasn’t an immediate concern of dad’s yet.  The ELT in the plane still sent a signal pulsing non stop into space.  It should continue to work for 12 hours, if what they say was true.  Dad knew that any planes nearby would hear it, and probably already had.  Help would come, he was certain.  But for now he had to keep his family alive and wait it out.  He knew the ELT wasn’t a precise mechanism, just a beacon.  They would have to lock on to it, then follow it to it’s source.  It could be while.

He arrived back at our little safe area and stooped down next to Chris.

“I can’t find her,” dad said upon seeing Chris’ hopeful and expectant expression in the dim little circle of his penlight.  “She’s not back there.”

He reached for Chris' arm and examined it for a couple of silent second.  He poked around the edges of the swelling.

"Does that hurt to bad?" he asked, fixing the pen light on the break.  He saw the makeshift bandage Chris had put on his hand and gently unwrapped it.  The flap of skin had slid back into place roughly, but was still askew.  Dad hadn’t noticed the injury before then, and Chris hadn’t mentioned it, but it must have hurt like hell.  He pressed the edges of the skin back into the periphery of the wound and gently wrapped the shirt back around it.

“That okay?” he asked. 

"Not too bad…"  Chris said, with a slight grimaced at the slight sting from dad’s examination. 

Dad nodded and turned toward Kim.  He knelt beside her, stroking her forehead and checked her breathing and pulse.  Then he went to Rick and then to me, checking our injuries and vitals the best he could. 

We were still alive, but that was all he could tell at that point.  He waved his tiny light at Chris and motioned for him to come over and sit down.  Dad held one of the shirts he had taken from the wreckage and now struggled with it, pulling and tugging then finally ripping it into a few long strips.  This, he fashioned into a sling for Chris' gnarled arm, securing it tightly around his neck and holding it close to his body.  Although Chris still wasn’t aware of how much pain he should have been in, the act caused some throbbing to go away in his arm, and it felt a little better. 

"You’re okay," Dad said, after checking his work.  “You’ll be okay, son.” 

Dad looked back toward the wreckage once more, thinking of mom.  Could she have been ejected when we impacted, he thought?  How far would she have gone?  The plane must have slid after the impact a long ways, at least 100 yards.  Would she have gone farther than that, and was in front of the plane?  It didn’t seem possible. 

He considered going back to search again immediately, but quickly remembered the cold.  He glanced over at us and then turned again to consider the plane.  It was all they had left.  If they were going to make it through the night, they had to use it. 

"We need shelter."  He announced resolutely after a few seconds.  "I'm going to check out the plane, and see if it's safe and if we can we'll hole up in there.  You stay here with the kids, okay?" 

Chris nodded, and Dad patted his good shoulder then rose to his feet.  He turned again and just before he returned to the dark void, he stopped to look at Chris once again.  The kid had to be terrified, although he sure didn’t show it.  Still, dad reassured him.

"We'll be okay, son."  He said.  "We'll get out of this." 

Chris nodded silently at him again and tried to look confident.  Dad turned away and faded again into the dark.  Chris traced his movements by the little pen light bobbing up and down in the darkness as he stumbled. 

The rough plowed up ground would reach up and painfully trip him as he made his way back to the wreckage, but he slowly got there, the little dot from the pen light his only defense against total darkness.  As he approached the crushed and twisted wreck, he paused and wiped the blood out of his eyes from the oozing wound on his head again.  It did little to improve his sight.  He considered the crash as it lay before him. 

He studied the breeze.  It was blowing gently on his face against the in tact side of the plane.  The interior of the plane was sheltered from the breeze and that was a plus.  The wind was relatively light, maybe eight or ten knots at it’s worst, but was cooling quickly, dragging the temperature of the entire environment quickly down with it.  The wreckage might be adequate shelter if he could pack us up into it and bundle us up enough.  It was better than the exposed ground, at any rate. 

He believed the danger of fire was no longer an issue as all the fuel had been left back there…wherever the wings went.  The smell of fuel wasn’t very prominent at the main wreckage anymore.  Most of the loose fuel had evaporated already. 

He began the task of pulling out the rest of the luggage from what was left of the nose and then moved to the aft luggage compartment and unloaded the bags from there.  He proceeded to open all of the suitcases and bags and dump them into a pile on the ground.  He quickly separated the useless junk like shower bags and toys, tossing them to the side, and presently had a fairly sizeable cache of clothing that he could use as bedding to keep us warm. 

He made his way outward from the wreckage stomping down the tangles of barbed wire that ensnared it to clear a sort of path around the right wing and into the large hole on that side.  He worked his way into the fuselage and pulled forward mom’s seat and pushing the seat back down as flat as he could.  He then crawled into the middle seats and looked around.  It was definitely warmer in there than it was outside.  He breathed in the air and could not smell fuel, so it appeared that the fire danger had indeed passed.  He hoped he was right. 

Satisfied for the moment, he climbed back out of the plane and gathered an armful of clothes from the pile.  Then he made his way back into the center of the plane and placed them evenly over the seats in a few layers, forming a nest where his injured children could lie and hopefully fend of hypothermia. 

Once he was finished he climbed back out of the wreckage, and turned to make his way back to Chris and the rest of us.  Without thinking about, it he glanced at his wrist - but paused in shock.  He hadn’t noticed his watch before, that being the first time it occurred to him to check the time.  The face of the piece was pulverized, like it had been smashed by a hammer.  The stainless steel case was warped and askew.  He lifted his wrist and held the watch to his ear but could not hear the sweeping tick of the gears.  It was completely destroyed.  He carefully pulled it off expecting to discover yet another injury he wasn’t aware of, but was further amazed to see his wrist was un-marked; not a single bruise or scratch was upon it. 

Whatever had destroyed the watch had done so with incredible force, but the watch appeared to have taken the brunt instead of his arm.  He didn’t want to think about trying all of this with a broken wrist too, and he didn’t understand how it was possible that the watch took all of the damage without any of the force transferred to his arm, but there it was.  He wasn’t going to question that now. 

He held the watch in his other hand and flexed a fist a couple of times.  His wrist felt fine.  He was truly not injured there.  Without thinking about it, he put it back on, as useless as it was at the moment and began his trek towards us again.  He didn’t bother to look at it again. 

If the watch would have worked it would have said it was 7:15 PM.  We had been on the ground for about 45 minutes.

    

Helen Bowman walked along the neat rows of tables in the common room of a small church in Hebron, Nebraska.  The church was hosting their regular soup dinner and those always brought out a large group of locals from town.  The soup was always good, and tasted even better on cold nights like that one was.  She enjoyed these occasions, which were really as much social times as dinner.  Some of the people would come and leave cranky, but most of them enjoyed just spending time with friends. 

Helen had moved to Hebron from Cuba, Kansas after she had married her husband Loren.  She loved the slow pace and the laid back lifestyle the country life provided.  It suited her.  She enjoyed her job as a nurse at the hospital, and doing it gave her the opportunity to get to know most of the people in the town.  She really felt that she made a difference in the town.  She was glad that she and her family had decided to settle here.  Hebron was her speed. 

Helen smiled at the thought and paused to sip a cup of punch when she overheard some of the conversation coming from a small knot of ladies talking excitedly nearby.  Curious, she listened in.

“It was a huge boom, like a massive explosion.” one of them said in a hushed tone, like she was telling a secret.  Helen listened closer, intrigued.

“It seemed like it was right next to the road, but I didn’t see any fire or anything.  I couldn’t even tell where it had come from, so I just kept driving” she continued. 

“Just the strangest thing!”

It was an odd sounding thing, for sure, Helen thought.  She wondered along with the other ladies what the woman could have possibly heard.  She wasn’t particularly worried or concerned.  If there had been any kind of big accident or incident, she would have known.  The hospital would have called her.  Just something about the words…they made here feel a little strange. 

Helen walked away from the group toward her table, and focused on her warm bowl of soup.  It was good, but she couldn’t turn off the alert switch that the conversation had tripped in her brain.  For some reason, she kept thinking about what that lady had said.