Screaming, hurricane-force winds poured through the twenty-foot rear opening, filling the cargo bay with billowing snow. Two more cows raged toward the ramp, toward freedom from the terror-filled plane. They pushed against each other in a struggle to get out. One cow’s hoof fouled on the corpse of Miss Patty Melt; it fell hard, the foreleg snapping like a gunshot. The creature bellowed in fear and pain, struggling to get up, to get out, but the broken leg wouldn’t support its efforts.
Sara saw Rhumkorrf moving from stall to stall, opening the gates and slapping the harness release buttons. The heavy canvas harnesses lowered slowly an inch or two, putting the cows’ hooves firmly on the deck, then dropped away, straps falling limply to the floor. The animals bolted out of the narrow stalls and stampeded for the ramp.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sara shouted over the screeching gale and the braying cattle.
But Rhumkorrf didn’t answer. Wind blew his comb-over back and forth. Some of the cows ran to the ramp. Others stood in place, confused, frightened.
She heard the whine of the lift machinery from above. The platform started to lower. On the metal grate she saw Alonzo and Miller standing, each grasping an end of the gurney that held Cappy. The lift would bring them down on the other side of the aisle opposite the lab table.
“Sara!” Alonzo screamed. She could barely hear him over the wind and the cows. “What the fuck?”
“We gotta move, come on!”
The lift slowly lowered, exposing their feet, their shins, their knees.
A panicked cow ran the wrong way, away from the open rear hatch. It slammed against the black lab table, tilting it, dumping Sara on top of Tim. The cow hit the table again and it fell. Sara got her hands up just in time, catching the heavy table’s edge before it smashed into her. Her muscles strained as she tried to push the table clear.
She heard a metallic rattle, the alarmed shouts of men, a bellow of animal pain, heard the lift’s whine stop, then restart.
No, Alonzo was taking it back up!
Sara screamed and forced her shaking arms to push harder. The table slid back a little and she was able to swing her legs free before she let go. The heavy black top hit the floor like a guillotine. The now vertical table-top sheltered her from the bleeding, insane, fifteen-hundred-pound cow.
“Alonzo, come back!”
Up above, Sara saw just one foot move off the grate, then nothing. She was too late. The lift was back on the upper deck, a corner dripping blood where the cow had slammed into it. Alonzo was taking Cappy to the aft ladder, looking for a safer way down. Sara threw a glance at her watch: 9:11.
One minute.
How much of that last minute had already gone by? Five seconds? Ten? Time was up. Sara felt tears—hot and sudden and uncontrollable—run down her cheeks.
Her crew wouldn’t make it.
No time no time no time…
Tim was back on her shoulders before she even gave it a thought. She stepped past the table and ran into a stampede. Bellowing black-and-white bodies heaved around her, hitting her, knocking her from side to side, but she refused to fall, refused to die.
No time no time no time…
She felt the footing change as she moved from the rubberized floor to the rear ramp’s echoing steel, then her feet splashing into icy, inch-deep water. The C-5’s interior lights lit up a cone of swirling snow and a wide, long, wet gouge torn into the snow-covered ice. Water bubbled up from thousands of cracks, a shimmering, spreading surface that ate the falling flakes. Sheets of white soared up and around her, finding ways into her eyes and mouth.
How much longer how many seconds not gonna make it notgonnamakeit…
She turned left, past the gouge, found herself fighting through waist-deep snow. She didn’t feel the cold, didn’t hear the bellowing cows, she just moved, moved away from the plane, away from death, toward life.
We’re going to die anyway any second now any—
A bang and a roar and she flew through blast-furnace heat. She hit hard and skidded face-first over the snow-covered ice.
Sara struggled to her feet and looked back. The blast had shredded the C-5 just behind the cockpit, and also behind the wings—Magnus had planted a second bomb. Blinding flames shot up thirty feet, lighting up the stormy, frozen bay with flickering brilliance.
Tim lay to her left, prone and motionless. Her crew was either dead or burning to death. There wasn’t a fucking thing she could do about it. There was only one person left to save—Tim Feely. Again he went up on her shoulders in the now-practiced move. When had she thought him light? She carried his deadweight, forcing half steps through the waist-deep snow.
Another explosion erupted behind her as the fuel tanks blew. She was farther away this time, and therefore spared the shock wave’s crushing effects. She turned for one last, haunted look. The flaming C-5 seemed to twitch like a dying antelope under a lion’s killing bite. It took Sara a moment to realize why—the plane was falling through the cracked surface. The tail went first, its weight finally too much for the thinning ice. There was a deep, reverberating snap as the sheet gave way, then the groan of metal grinding against the frozen surface, then the hiss of that same red-hot metal sliding into the water. Within seconds the tail was gone.
Sara stared, her eyes hunting through the blinding snow, hoping to see a miracle, hoping to see one of her friends. They might have gotten out, might be on the other side of the plane.
More vibrating cracks. The middle of the broken plane dropped a bit. It stayed on top for a moment, held up by burning wings pressed flat against the ice, then the wings groaned, bent, and finally snapped free at their bases as the fuselage slid into the water. The massive Boeing engines went next, cracking through, dragging most of the remaining bits of wing with them. Parts remained, scattered about the bay’s surface, but the snow was already accumulating, covering them in white.
The C-5 had all but vanished. In four or five hours the crash site would be nothing but misshapen white drifts. Sara heard a final hiss as the last piece of glowing metal slid into the water, then nothing but the sound of the blizzard.
No, there was one more sound—the faint call of a mooing cow.
Sara shivered. They were back on an island where someone really, really wanted them dead. No blankets, no food, no protection against the blizzard save for their black parkas. And she couldn’t even see the shore.
Animals have instincts that I don’t… the cows will find the shore.
She was already exhausted. She didn’t know how much longer she could carry Tim. They had to get off the bay, find some shelter from the wind or die as assuredly as if she’d never gotten off the plane at all. Sara adjusted the human burden on her shoulder, then leaned into the wind, following the cows’ faint calls.
NOVEMBER 30: 9:27 P.M.
THE COWS HUDDLED in a black-and-gray cluster. Too dark for anything to be white. Thick, heavy-limbed pine trees helped block the wind, but not much. Snow continued to fly in great sheets—even in the woods, it was already so deep it melted against the cows’ burgeoning bellies.
Sara leaned against a tree, shaking violently, trying to rub hands that the cold had turned into curled, brittle talons. The tips of her fingers stung badly. Stinging was okay. When they went numb, that meant frostbite. She felt like her entire skeleton was made from icy steel.