“In here!” she shouted, although the tangle of devastation prevented her from seeing him.
“What're you doing?”
“Looking for a little boy,” she called back. “I hear him, I'm getting closer, but I can't see him yet.”
“Get out of there!” he shouted above the increasingly loud wail of approaching emergency vehicles. “Paramedics are on the way, they're trained for this.”
“Come on,” she said, pushing forward. “There're other people in here who need help now!”
Holly was nearing the front of the first-class section, where the steel ribs of the fuselage had broken inward but not in such profusion as in the area behind her. Detached seats, carry-on luggage, and other detritus had flown forward on impact, however, piling up deeper there than anywhere else. More people had wound up in that pile, too, both dead and alive.
When she shoved a broken and empty seat out of her way and paused to get her breath, she heard Jim clawing into the wreckage behind her.
Lying on her side, she squirmed through a narrow passage and into a pocket of open space, coming face to face with the boy whose cries she had been following. He was about five years old, with enormous dark eyes. He blinked at her in amazement and swallowed a sob, as if he had never really expected anyone to reach him.
He was under an inverted bank of five seats, in a peaked space formed by the seats themselves, as if in a tent. He was lying on his belly, looking out, and it seemed as if he ought to be able to slither into the open easy enough.
“Something's got my foot,” he said. He was still afraid, but manageably so. He had cast off the greater part of his terror the moment he had seen her. Whether you were five years old or fifty, the worst thing always was being alone. “Got my foot, won't let go.”
Coughing, she said, “I'll get you out, honey. You'll be okay.”
Holly looked up and saw another row of seats piled atop the lower bank. Both were wedged in by a mass of twisted steel pressing down from the caved-in ceiling, and she wondered if the forward section had rolled once before coming to rest right-side up.
With her fingertips she wiped the tears off his cheeks. “What's your name, honey?”
“Norwood. Kids call me Norby. It don't hurt. My foot, I mean.”
She was glad to hear that.
But then, as she studied the wreckage around him and tried to figure out what to do, he said, “I can't feel it.”
“Feel what, Norby?”
“My foot. It's funny, like something's holding it, 'cause I can't get loose, but then I can't feel my foot — you know? — like it maybe isn't there.”
Her stomach twisted at the image his words conjured in her mind. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe his foot was only pinched between two surfaces, just numb, but she had to think fast and move fast because he might be losing blood at an alarming rate.
The space in which he lay was too cramped for her to squeeze in past him, find his foot, and disentangle it. Instead, she rolled onto her back, bent her legs, and braced the soles of her shoes against the seats that peaked over him.
“Okay, honey, I'm going to straighten my legs, try to shove this up a little, just a couple inches. When it starts lifting, try to pull your foot out of there.”
As a snake of thin gray smoke slipped from the dark space behind Norby and coiled in front of his face, he wheezed and said, “There's d-d-dead people in here with me.”
“That's okay, baby,” she said, tensing her legs, flexing them a little to test the weight she was trying to lever off him. “You won't be there for long, not for long.”
“My seat, then an empty seat, then dead people,” Norby said shakily.
She wondered how long the trauma of this experience would shape his nightmares and bend the course of his life.
“Here goes,” she said.
She pressed upward with both feet. The pile of seats and junk and bodies was heavy enough, but the half-collapsed section of the ceiling, pushing down on everything else, did not seem to have any give in it. Holly strained harder until the steel deck, covered with only a thin carpet, pressed painfully into her back. She let out an involuntary sob of agony. Then she strained even harder, harder, angry that she could not move it, furious, and—
— it moved.
Only a fraction of an inch.
But it moved.
Holly put even more into it, found reserves she did not know she possessed, forced her feet upward until the pain throbbing in her legs was markedly worse than that in her back. The intruding tangle of ceiling plates and struts creaked and bent back an inch, two inches; the seats shoved up just that far.
“It's still got me,” the boy said.
More smoke was oozing out of the lightless space around him. It was not pale-gray but darker than before, sootier, oilier, and with a new foul stench. She hoped to God the desultory flames had not, at last, ignited the upholstery and foam padding that formed the cocoon from which the boy was struggling to emerge.
The muscles in her legs were quivering. The pain in her back had seeped all the way through to her chest; each heartbeat was an aching thud, each inhalation was a torment.
She did not think she could hold the weight any longer, let alone lift it higher. But abruptly it jolted up another inch, then slightly more.
Norby issued a cry of pain and excitement. He wriggled forward. “I got away, it let go of me.”
Relaxing her legs and easing the load back into place, Holly realized that the boy had thought what she, too, might have thought if she'd been a five-year-old in that hellish position: that his ankle had been clenched in the cold and iron-strong hand of one of the dead people in there with him.
She slid aside, giving Norby room to pull himself out of the hollow under the seats. He joined her in the pocket of empty space amidst the rubble and snuggled against her for comforting.
From farther back in the plane, Jim shouted: “Holly!”
“I found him!”
“I've got a woman here, I'm getting her out.”
“Great!” she shouted.
Outside, the pitch of the sirens spiraled lower and finally down into silence as the rescue teams arrived.
Although more blackish smoke was drifting out of the dark space from which Norby had escaped, Holly took the time to examine his foot. It flopped to one side, sickeningly loose, like the foot of an old rag doll. It was broken at the ankle. She tore his sneaker off his rapidly swelling foot. Blood darkened his white sock, but when she looked at the flesh beneath, she discovered that it was only abraded and scored by a few shallow cuts. He was not going to bleed to death, but soon he was going to become aware of the excruciating pain of the broken ankle.
“Let's go, let's get out,” she said.
She intended to take him back the way she had come, but when she glanced to her left, she saw another crack in the fuselage. This one was immediately aft of the cockpit bulkhead, only a few feet away. It extended up the entire curve of the wall but did not continue onto the ceiling. A section of interior paneling, the insulation beneath it, structural beamwork, and exterior plating had either blown inward among the other debris or been wrenched out into the field. The resultant hole was not large, but it was plenty big enough for her to squeeze through with the boy.
As they balanced on the rim of the ravaged hull, a rescue worker appeared in the plowed field about twelve feet below them. He held his arms out for the boy.
Norby jumped. The man caught him, moved back.