Crash Read online

  With love to my two Campfire Girls, Joan and Cathy

  —JM

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART ONE: THE LANDING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  PART TWO: CAMP LOLLIPOP

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART THREE: TEAM FOUR

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  PART FOUR: THE NATURAL WORLD

  EPILOGUE

  PREVIEW

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  SURVIVAL TIP #1

  * * *

  Whenever you are lost, follow any body of water downstream. If you come to a lake, find its outlet and then follow it. Do not veer away from the water. Towns and cities — in fact, all settlements — are built beside water, and eventually a stream will bring you to some form of civilization. Civilization means help and rescue.

  Before the plane crashed, before it became more than the sound of a mosquito up in the sky, a moose, a great northern Alaskan moose, stepped into the bright body of water called Long Lake. The moose appeared coated in copper; he had been rolling in dirt and mud to rid his ears and body of the mosquitoes that peppered him all day. He weighed thirteen hundred pounds and stood over seven feet high at the shoulder. He possessed a forty-inch-long leg and measured ten feet from tail to nose. As distant relatives, he counted the wapiti or North American elk, the caribou, the mule deer, and the whitetail in his family. He was a deer, the largest in the world, and on this summer evening, his pedicels — two small knots of soft tissue just forward of the ears — had pushed out into what became, over the long summer season, the trademark symbol of moose: palmate antlers.

  He was the first animal to notice the plane.

  The sound of the plane changed when it was still a fair distance away from Long Lake. What had been a steady hum suddenly became erratic and choked. Gradually, as if the engine had tried to clear its throat and failed, the plane began to glide and spin. In all the world below, at least from the height of the plane, it seemed the only thing in motion. That was an illusion, of course, because the land beneath the plane teemed with life: the getting and keeping of calories, the squirrel on the branch, the jay, the Arctic char tucked under a white stone in cold, cold water. A cinnamon-colored bear, a grizzly, raked its fierce claws through a rotted birch log, the log cadaverous and round. The bear’s eyes cast up for a moment at the spectacle of a silver creature falling, falling, falling. The bear went back to feeding, its front teeth snapping yellow, meaty grubs like popcorn kernels.

  The plane dropped from the Alaskan sky in the last light of a late-summer evening. Seen from a distance, the plane’s plummet might have contained an element of beauty. The dying sunlight flashed on its outstretched wings, and the sudden cessation of sound — the stalled engine, the slice of air over the fuselage, the creak of the wings’ guy wires — signified the return of the natural silence that marked the north country. Wind canted the plane slightly to starboard, and if it were possible to be above the plane, one might have witnessed a flash of light coming off the pilot’s window as the forward momentum of the plane began to slow.

  The pilot thumbed at the radio, tried to restart the engine, looked hurriedly about him. Russell Hedgeman, fifty-four, had been a bush pilot for over twenty years, and he was competent and smart, a veteran, a fellow who had thrown his hat into the Alaskan guiding business years before. Two days earlier, he had already ferried Junior Action News Team’s film crew to the town of Takalut to scout locations on the southern slope of the Brooks Range. In other words, he did not panic. He had been in tight spots previously, but this time, with the plane fighting him, he felt a quiet enter his body and a premonition — yes, today was the day that he had waited for and fought off for a million miles or more — that he would not survive. Now that it was here, he did not mind it so much. He went through the necessary procedures, and if a pilot licensing board had recorded his actions, he would have passed their inspection, received nods of propriety. He did his best, and his best was quite good.

  Russell Hedgeman aimed the plane as well as he could toward water. It was his only chance, the plane’s best bet. He felt the steering harness in his shoulders and chest, and he yanked hard to get the plane to respond, but it was done listening to him. It had become a heavy, unresponsive thing, its shrug at giving in to gravity fierce and terrifying. It dropped nosefirst, and though Russell tried to get the nose to rise, the weight of the engine forced it down. In his last moments, Russell thought of a balsa glider he had owned as a boy: the lovely broad wings, the way he had once climbed to the top of a shady maple and launched the plane. It had flown for what seemed like miles on the North Carolina breeze, falling as softly as a leaf, the metal nose clip keeping the yaw intact, and once, on a stronger breeze, it had risen again almost to his height in the tree. A monumental flight. That’s what Russell remembered as he felt the trees begin ripping at the plane’s wings, the spars jabbing through and trying to impale him.

  Eleven passengers falling from the sky. Nine Junior Action News Team members, the crew of a teen-based TV magazine show that brought the viewers different adventures from around the world. They were on their way to record a program near the Brooks Range in central Alaska about summer training for the Iditarod dogsled race. Four boys, one accompanied by his father. Three girls, one on the verge of international fame, two of them twins. One thirty-three-year-old producer: a short, gabby man who hated flying, hated kids pretty much, and thought his services would be better suited to working with a real television program, not some ridiculous preteen after-school show like Junior Action News Team.

  The pilot, Russell Hedgeman, made ten. He did not see the branch that came through the window and ended his days at the cockpit.

  The eleventh passenger — Buford, a four-year-old basset hound who was the Junior Action News Team mascot and had appeared on every show to date — rested in his crate inside the cargo hold. When the plane attained maximum speed in its spin to the earth, his ears flapped behind him like two scarves stapled to his skull. He tried to stand and howl, but the violence of the plane’s passing through the treetops jerked him to the front of the crate, then the rear, then the side. He resembled a single die shaken in a cup and rattled forcefully in preparation of a throw onto a game board. Except in this case there was no game board.

  The plane skidded to a stop in ten feet of water, the broken tail scraping on the bottom like an anchor thrown out to hook anything solid, and something cracked along the right wing and turned the plane like a lazy Susan. Water began rushing into the plane from every conceivable direction, and Buford, his nose sharper than that of any of the humans on the plane, smelled fish and grass and moose and bear and a thousand other scents he hardly recognized.

  Then — before the screaming, the crying, the calls for help began — a moment of silence descended over the plane. Each ear turned to hear what would happen next, but there was no “next,” unless you counted the slow weight of water creeping quietly onto the plane. For an instant, the tremendous wrenching of the plane exploded outward in waves of sound, but the echo returned back from the woods and bright water in silence. It was as if the natural world had accepted the sound, refined it, and returned it to each ear as a thread of silence.

  Then at last, chaos.

  Get the door open!” someone screamed.

  But where was the door? Suryadi Thul looked at the EXIT sign beside him, then at the blood on his hand, then again at the EXIT sign. Someone behind him yelled
over and over to get the door open, and he sensed perhaps it might be his responsibility because he sat next to the door, but he couldn’t be certain it was this door they wanted open. It wasn’t as if any of the team had said much to him up to this point. A new guest kid appeared on Junior Action News Team every week, and Suryadi understood he had been invited to play that role because he was Indonesian and would serve as a newcomer on the adventure they had planned. Given all that, he didn’t feel exactly part of the group.

  Besides, for the moment he was more interested in his own blood.

  And water.

  Water had come into the cabin, and he could not be certain, but he was fairly sure that if he opened the door, more water would rush inside. And that was not good. The plane sat on a 30-percent incline — Suryadi loved math and geometry and could not prevent his mind from doing the calculations, always calculations, that life presented to him — and the door was on the down side of the plane. What they needed to do, he thought, was exit from the up side of the plane, but he could not quite get his mind to work in an orderly fashion. Everything happened at once, and the blood on his hand shone red and shiny in the yellow glow of the emergency lights that had come on along the floor. He touched his hand to his head again, and he felt the warmth of his blood spilling out and would have given anything for a mirror in that moment, but that wasn’t going to happen, he knew.

  “Get the door open! Now! Get it open!”

  He wished whoever it was would stop screaming so much.

  The voice belonged to Walter Eliot. He stood nearly sideways, his hand up on the baggage compartment of the small plane to brace himself, his face wild and red and terrified. He could not swim. It was a lifelong embarrassment and a lifelong fear, and the sight of the water — the feeling of it creeping along the floor, growing higher by the instant — had made him nearly crazy with terror. A small part of his brain understood he was an adult among young people, that his own son watched him with wide-eyed amazement, but he could not help himself. He panicked. Somewhere, somehow, some time ago, someone had said something about life vests, but he had blocked out the information because he had no intention of going into the water, ever.

  But now the water came toward him. Had found him after all this time. And so he stood, his body nearly sideways in the fuselage, and screamed over and over, “Open the door! Get the door open! Open it!”

  The plane shifted with the increasing weight of the water. It tilted to the starboard side, inching a little down while the tail settled on the mucky bottom of Long Lake. The great moose that had been wading into the water had fled at the noise of the plane stripping off the tops of the pines. It had run with its peculiar duck-footed gait into the first ring of forest beyond the pond, and it had made an arc, keeping the pond in view, its heart beating heavily in its chest at the approach of a sound coming through the trees.

  In the third set of seats behind the pilot, Jill Heatherton could not get Jenky to answer her. Her sister looked weird, Jill thought. Really weird. They had been holding hands when the plane started down, but something had changed, something had departed, she thought, which made no sense at all.

  “Jenky,” she said over and over, “wake up.”

  The plane bulged in next to Jenky. It looked almost like a small explosion, like the time her uncle Azelea had shot a blue jay off a branch in Tennessee. One second the bird had been there, the next it was gone, and she had had the same feeling then as she had now.

  Jenky was gone.

  “Jenky,” she said, reaching over to take her sister’s hand again, “come on now.”

  Someone was yelling, “Open the door, open the door,” and someone nearby was moaning. Jill tried to slow her breathing — she could always manage her breathing; it was one of the first things they taught you in ballet class — but now she found she couldn’t. She fumbled at her seat belt, trying to get it to release, and she had just clicked it off when the plane shifted again, sliding to the right and scooping down into the lake, or ocean, or whatever body of water it was that came crawling in looking for them all.

  No one on earth could have been more surprised at Seldon Eggerts’s first thought when the plane stopped than Seldon Eggerts himself.

  He thought of Buford.

  That stupid, stupid dog. The dog that had been the bane of his existence, his responsibility on trips like these, his cross to bear when he had to get the idiotic animal to sit still for the camera and to play off Web Simon, the obnoxious little redheaded twit who starred in the show. Who else was going to walk the dog on road trips, make sure it was fed and watered? Not the kids, that was for sure. Not any of the network people who loved the dog in the abstract, thought it was the key to the show, but never lifted a finger to feed or walk or clean up — oh, yes, that was part of the care of a dog — and left everything to him.

  He stood. He had to tilt sideways and put his hand out on the baggage rack. He saw Walter Eliot yelling something about an open door, or to open a door, Seldon couldn’t be sure, but he wished the guy would get a grip anyway.

  “Hey,” Seldon yelled, “where’s the pilot?”

  “No,” someone yelled back, but whether the answer had anything to do with the pilot, Seldon couldn’t say.

  Seldon turned and pulled open the cargo door. Water sizzled around his feet as the door came open, and he half closed the door to keep the water out. But it was too late. The water ran down toward the nose of the plane, and Seldon felt it ooze into his socks and loafers. The loafers were expensive, darn expensive, and he tried to keep his feet up and away from the water, but it was no use.

  The plane shifted again. He lurched to the left and caught himself as he heard Buford from inside the cargo hold, scratching at something.

  “Yes,” Seldon said to the dog, “I’m coming.”

  He could barely see the dog crate. It was upside down. The glow of the emergency lights caught Buford’s eyes. Seldon had half a notion to let the dog stay, but he didn’t like thinking of the conversation he would have to have with Tommy Stevens, the head of programming, if he let the dog go down with the ship.

  He leaned half his body into the cargo hold and jiggled the latch to the door. It took him a minute — the crate door was wedged against the side of the plane — but finally the latch popped and the door shot open. Buford fell out like a long hot dog, dripping through the opening buttfirst, then finally plunking into the deepening water. The dog faced the wrong way around.

  “Open the door,” someone still yelled from the center of the plane. “Open the door.”

  “Come on,” Seldon whispered to Buford. “This way.”

  The dog — with his long, droopy face — turned around with difficulty in the narrow confines of the cargo hold. And Seldon, not even sure why he did it, reached out and ran his fingers down the dog’s long ears, his eyes growing wet at the sight of the dog’s apparent health. Stupid dog, he thought. Stupid, stupid dog.

  Titus pushed open the port-side emergency door. It did not want to open. He had to stand on the arm of a seat and extend his entire body straight up, straining against the weight of the door and the added push of gravity, but at last the door swung back. It made a huge boom as it fell against the side of the plane and he heard someone inside scream, but there was no way to make the door open more softly. He kept his hands above his head in case anything fell through the door, but instead he saw nothing but the moon.

  It was three-quarters full — waxing or waning, he couldn’t remember — and ironically, it sat directly over the open door, as if he had centered its location in a camera’s viewfinder. Dead center. The last light of the day entered through the opening, too, and he gradually lowered his arms now that he felt fairly certain nothing else planned to fall off the plane in the next second or two. He tried to boost himself up so he could see out, but the opening was too high. He couldn’t pull himself up and scramble through, so he ducked his head back toward the interior of the plane and spoke to Web Simon.

  The
kid stared at him and didn’t move.

  “Web,” Titus said, “I need a boost.”

  “I can’t,” Web said.

  “Yes, you can.”

  Web shook his head.

  “If you boost me, I can climb out and then pull you up. We can all get out. It’s the only way to exit. The plane is resting on its side, and this is the high point. Come on, don’t freeze up on me.”

  Web shook his head and looked away.

  Titus reached over the seat in front of him and tapped E on the shoulder.

  “I need a boost,” he said when she looked around.

  She hadn’t moved, he realized. She hadn’t done anything except stare straight ahead. Shock, he reminded himself. Shock was the first thing you had to think about in an accident. But when he looked again, he realized she still had headphones on and was watching a movie on her iPad.

  Watching a movie! The idea, the absurdity of the idea, didn’t calculate for him. Who watched a movie while a plane crashed?

  “I need a boost!” Titus yelled, frustrated that people were not comprehending the situation. “We can get out this way.”

  To his surprise, Paul Eliot, the smallest guy in the group, the show’s “nerd,” slowly climbed over a seat and offered to boost him.

  Titus and Paul weren’t particularly close. Web and Paul spent the most time together, always talking about made-up stuff that didn’t interest Titus. Paul didn’t strike Titus as the sort to step forward and assert himself. Now, though, with Paul volunteering to help out, Titus reassessed the kid standing in front of him. Paul was short, true, but he was nimble and clever about everything. Paul almost always had an angle on things, a way to approach a problem. So when he thought about it a second longer, Titus realized it probably made sense that Paul would rally and offer to help. Paul “got it.” He had evaluated the situation as fast as anyone and now stood ready to help.