Chapter Two

Pull up. Pull up. Pull up... the automated alarm droned on. If only, Irene thought, her mind blurred in fear. She was going down, she realized, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

Just when she thought she had lost the gamble, the tail hit hard; so mind-crushingly violent that at first, Irene thought the jolt had broken her back. She screamed, more out of fear and frustration than pain as she felt the tail of the aircraft crumple where it smashed into the pavement at the end of the landing strip. Just before the aircraft slammed down, the right wing rolled under. Irene saw the runway again, the white hatch marks blurred by the mind-numbing speed. She managed to apply reverse thrust with the engines still shrieking. The brakes were gone. The forward section of the plane crashed down. It was like riding an express elevator straight into hell. All ten tires exploded and the struts and hydraulics that supported them were sheared away in a shower of burning metal.

With the collapse of the landing gear, the airliner sheared sideways on its belly, folding the right wing under. The vibration rattled Irene’s eyeballs in their sockets. The plane’s backbone fractured; ruptured just where the forward doors weakened the fuselage and the nose section of the airplane broke free with the gut-wrenching screech of torn metal.

“Oh Jesus... no!” The cry came from behind, from the service area; followed by a chilling wail, the sound drifting away like someone falling into an abyss.

“God! That was one of the flight-attendants,” Brad shouted above the sound of shrieking metal. He strained against his seat restraints and was horrified to see daylight through the cabin door in the flight-deck bulkhead.

Tears welled up as Irene envisioned the torn floor opening up beneath the poor girl’s feet. She imagined a blue uniform tumbling down to disappear under the grinding fuselage as the plane skidded on its belly at three-hundred miles an hour; the girl’s body turned to pulp; a bloody smear across the asphalt.

The nose section of the plane broke off like a pencil-point with Irene and her crew inside and spun to one side. The nose seemed to trip, tumbled end over end once, twice, before spinning crazily along the apron of the runway. Irene, realizing she was still alive, watched through what was left of the windscreen and was horrified at the sight of the main section of her DC10-10, with all two hundred and ninety-six passengers inside, slide past her field of vision.

In a dozen windows she saw faces. Hundreds of tiny hands on the glass, reaching out for her.

She watched the left wing collapse and fold under, and then the starboard-side fuel tank erupted with a violent shudder; a massive fountain of flame and smoke. The reek of burning aviation fuel assaulted her sinuses and the heat scorched Irene’s face through the smashed windscreen, but she couldn’t close her eyes against the sting of horror. The port wing tank exploded, sending a plume of black smoke with orange flames crackling, skyward; lifting like a rolling volcano. And thankfully, the windows and little faces were suddenly gone, consumed in bellowing smoke. The entire passenger compartment was fully engulfed in greedy flames.

But the flames couldn’t conceal the shrieks of horror.

Oh Jesus Christ almighty. All those children!

Irene bravely walked across the tarmac to survey the burnout hulk that just minutes ago had been a sleek, forty-five million dollar aircraft; a beautiful piece of engineering. She didn’t know it yet, but miraculously, one hundred and eighty-six had survived the crash, even though the plane had been totally destroyed.

Irene staggered to breath when she saw the body litter being passed down to the men on the ground. She had to force herself to look again; to look at the blue uniform. It was one of her flight-crew.

Fearful of what she might find, Irene pushed herself forward, by-stepping the teams of rescue workers. She was conscious of heads turning, the sight of her four Captain’s bars betraying her rank and responsibility. And the reason she walked among the dead and dying. No one met her eyes as she focused on the stretcher.

As she got closer her insides emptied and she stifled a cry into a cupped hand. She saw the red hair. Susan. Her head flight-attendant and closest friend of some twenty years.

Susan lay lifeless, the right-half of her face was gone, shredded away, the left-half looking amazingly serine. Her arms stretched out, the ligaments distorted by the heat, looking like two blackened sticks; the branches from some burnout tree. It appeared as if she had been climbing out when the flames overtook her. Susan’s wedding band was melted into the flesh. She gazed up at Irene, peacefully, relieved perhaps, that the searing pain and suffering was over. Someone flipped a blanket across her face and the rescue workers hauled Susan’s body down.

Irene staggered back, her knees giddy. There was a wheel lying on its side, torn from the undercarriage and Irene managed, just in time, to drop her haunches onto the rubber sidewall.

Sharon. Gone.

The sight of Sharon’s misshapen wedding ring was searing the fabric of Irene’s brain. Christ, what was she going to tell Ted? She had stood at their wedding, less than three years ago; watched as Ted slipped that ring onto Sharon’s finger.

“Captain?”

The word cut into her thoughts. Captain– she didn’t feel much like a Captain. Not now.

Irene looked up, saw a young flight-attendant, saw the blue jacket across her arm and the four gold bars.

“The photographers have started arriving,” the girl said. “I brought you a clean jacket. Where’s your flight bag?”

Irene stared back at the girl, her mind clouded and empty. She fought to understand. Photographers?

“Captain. Your flight-bag.”

Irene hardly had the strength to raise an arm. “Somewhere, there.” She waved a hand toward the pile of crumpled metal that had once been her flight-deck.

The flight-attendant pulled a hair brush from her own bag and taking Irene by the chin, started working the tangles free.

“Who are you?” Irene asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Slip into the jacket.”

Irene shrugged on the clean uniform coat. “Where are they taking the bodies?”

“One of the maintenance hangers.”

“I have to go...”

The flight-attendant touched Irene’s cheek. “I know. Take my arm.”

“Who are you?” Irene asked again.

“Really. It doesn’t matter.”

Gathering her strength and trying desperately hard not to cry, Irene allowed herself to be escorted into the maintenance hangar that had been converted into a temporary morgue.

She tried to stand straight. They’d want the photographs for the six o’clock news: Captain Irene Ross, in her uniform, grieving over the children she had killed.

Irene was stilled by the sight of row upon row of yellow body bags; most appeared partially filled. Children, she realized. The pathetic bags were filled with the bodies of children. Then straight from her deepest, blackest nightmare, the body bags were moving. Writhing like seething yellow maggots. Internal organs coming back to life; hearts pumping, lungs filling, hands clawing, tearing the yellow vinyl. Breaking the zippers. Bodies forcing themselves back into the world of the living to rip at her legs and drag her down. She screamed. And screamed and screamed.