But if there were any survivors…
Matt proceeded toward the ruined Cessna. “Hello!” he yelled, feeling foolish.
No answer. No surprise there.
He crept under a bent wing and crunched through broken safety glass. The windows had shattered out as the fuselage crumpled. From the engine compartment ahead, smoke continued to billow, choking him, stinging his eyes. A stream of gasoline flowed underfoot.
Matt held his arm over his mouth and nose. He tried the door. It was jammed and twisted tight. He stretched up and poked his head in the side window. The plane was not empty.
The pilot was strapped into his seat, but from the angle of his neck and the spar piercing his chest, he was clearly dead. The seat next to the pilot was empty. Matt began to crane around to check the backseats — then a shock passed through him as he recognized the pilot. The mop of black hair, the scraggly beard, the blue eyes…now glazed and lifeless.
“Brent…” he mumbled. Brent Cumming. They had played poker regularly back when Matt and Jenny were still together. Jenny was a sheriff for the Nunamiut and Inupiat native tribes, and because of the vast distances under her jurisdiction, she was of necessity a skilled pilot. As such, she knew the other pilots who serviced the region, including Brent Cumming. Their two families had spent a summer camping, their kids romping and playing together. How was he going to tell Cheryl, Brent’s wife?
He shook himself out of his shock and poked his head into the back window, numbly checking the rear seats. He found a man sprawled on his back, faceup. He wasn’t moving either. Matt started to sigh when suddenly the man’s arms shot up, a gun clutched between his hands.
“Don’t move!”
Matt startled, more at the sudden shout than the threat of the gun.
“I mean it! Don’t move!” The man sat up. He was pale, his green eyes wide, his blond hair caked with blood on his left side. His head must have struck the window frame. Still his aim did not waver. “I’ll shoot!”
“Then shoot,” Matt said calmly, leaning a bit against the plane’s fuselage.
This response clearly baffled the stranger. His brow pinched together. From the man’s brand-new Eddie Bauer Arctic parka, he was clearly a stranger to these parts. Nonetheless, there was a hard edge to him. Though having just crashed, he clearly had kept his wits about him. Matt had to give him credit there.
“If you’ll put that flare gun down,” Matt said, “maybe I’ll even think about finishing this rescue mission.”
The man waited a full breath, then lowered his arms, sagging backward. “I…I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. You just fell out of the sky. In such rare cases, I have the tendency to forgive a lack of gracious hospitality.”
This earned a tired grin from the man.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“Head took a good crack. And my leg’s caught.”
Matt leaned through the window, having to stretch up on his toes. The front section of the plane had crimped back, trapping the man’s right leg between the copilot’s seat and his own. So much for just having the man crawl through the window.
“The pilot…” the man began. “Is he…”
“Dead,” Matt finished. “Nothing we can do for him at the moment.” He tugged again at the door. He wouldn’t be able to free it with brute strength alone. He tapped one knuckle on the fuselage, thinking. “Hang on a sec.”
He crossed back to Mariah, grabbed the horse’s reins, and walked her closer to the wreckage. She protested with a toss of her head. It was bad enough being pulled away from the pasture of milk vetch, but the burning engine smell spooked her, too. “Easy there, gal,” Matt soothed.
His dogs simply remained where they lay sprawled. Bane sat up, ears perked, but Matt waved the wolf down.
Once close enough, Matt ran a rope from the saddle to the frame of the plane’s door. He didn’t trust the handle to be secure enough. He then crossed back to the mare and urged her to follow. She did so willingly, glad to leave the vicinity of the foul-smelling wreckage, but once she reached the length of her tether, she stopped.
Matt coaxed her with tugs on her reins, but she still refused. He slid behind her, biting back a curse, then grabbed her tail and pulled it up over her hind end. He hated tailing her like this, but he had to get her to pull. She whinnied at the pain and kicked a hoof at him. He tumbled away, letting go of the tail and landing on his backside. He shook his head. He and the female species never did know how to communicate.
Then Bane was there, barking, snapping at the horse’s heels. Mariah might not respect Matt, but a half wolf was another thing. Old instincts ran deep. The mare leaped ahead, yanking on the tether.
A groan of metal erupted behind him. Matt rolled around. The entire tilted fuselage of the Cessna canted to the side. A shout of alarm arose from inside. Then, with the popping sound of an opening soda can, the crumpled door broke away.
Mariah reared up, but Matt returned to calm her. He undid the saddle hitch and walked her away, waving Bane off. He settled her at the edge of the clearing, then patted her flank. “Good girl. You’ve earned yourself an extra handful of grain tonight.”
He strode back to the wreckage. The stranger was almost out of the plane. He was able to slide his trapped leg along the edge of the two crammed seats until he reached the open door. Then he was free.
Matt helped him down. “How’s the leg?”
The man tested it gingerly. “Bruised, and the worst damned charley horse, but nothing feels broken.” Now that the man was free, Matt realized he was younger than he first appeared. Probably no more than his late twenties.
As they hobbled away from the wreckage, Matt held out a hand. “Name’s Matthew Pike.”
“Craig…Craig Teague.”
After they were well away from the plane, Matt settled the man to a log, then shoved away his dogs when they came up to nose the stranger. Matt straightened a kink from his back and glanced back to the plane and his dead friend. “So what happened?”
The man remained silent for a long moment. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. “I don’t know. We were heading to Deadhorse—”
“Over in Prudhoe?”
“Prudhoe Bay, yes.” The man nodded, gingerly fingering his lacerated scalp. Deadhorse was the name of the airport that serviced the oilfields and township of Prudhoe Bay. It was located at the northernmost edge of Alaska, where the North Slope’s oil fields met the Arctic Ocean. “We were about two hours out of Fairbanks when the pilot reported something wrong with the engine. It seemed he was losing fuel or something. Which seemed impossible since we had just tanked up in Fairbanks.”
Matt could smell the fuel still in the air. They had not run out of juice, that’s for sure. And Brent Cumming always kept his plane’s engine in tiptop shape. A mechanic before becoming a bush pilot, Brent knew his way around the Cessna’s three-hundred-horsepower engine. With two kids and a wife, he depended on that craft for both his livelihood and his lifeline, so Brent maintained his machinery like a finely tuned Rolex.
“When the engine began to sputter, we tried to find a place to land, but by that time we were among these damn mountains. The pilot…he…he tried to radio for help, but even the radio seemed to be malfunctioning.”
Matt understood. There had been storms of solar flares this past week. They messed with all sorts of communication in the northern regions. He glanced back to the wreckage. He could only imagine the terror of those last moments: the panic, the desperation, the disbelief.