The going was slow and Shane had no idea whether he was even traveling in the right direction. Getting lost in the woods would be easy to do, especially at night. If he wasn’t careful he could find himself wandering in a big circle and missing the crash site entirely, or walking off in the wrong direction and not being able to find his way back to the road. He picked his way around boulders and over downed trees, moving slowly toward where he guessed the plane had gone down.
Ten minutes later, sweat covering his body despite the chilly nighttime Maine temperatures, a hint of a glow suffused the darkness and Shane knew he was getting close. Then he heard the sound of fire crackling and smelled the oily stench of burning fuel and something else, thick and metallic. He picked up his pace and burst into a small clearing created by the downed aircraft.
The wrecked fuselage lay in a heap, charred metal twisted almost beyond recognition. The nose of the aircraft was canted to one side, half-buried in the forest floor. Long slabs of sheet metal, probably parts of the wings, littered the wreckage, some hanging from neighboring trees, some slashed into the forest like knife-blades.
A fire had begun burning in the middle of the fuselage and was rapidly spreading along the airframe in both directions, sending noxious black smoke skyward. The heat from the blaze was unrelenting. Shane shaded his eyes with a hand and peered into the artificial brightness. After the near-complete blackness of the forest, the sudden intense light was unnerving.
He scanned the length of the wreckage quickly. If any passengers had been sitting in the middle portion of the plane, they were by now dead, consumed by fire even in the unlikely event they had survived the impact.
The tail section had not yet begun to burn, but accessing that area due would be impossible due to the intense heat of the fire. He had emerged from the woods directly in front of the nose, and reaching the rear of the aircraft would take too long at the rate the fire was progressing. Any survivors back there faced a hideous death. Shane hoped if anyone had been seated in the rear, they had died instantly in the crash.
An image rose in his head of innocent people choking and suffocating on that thick black smoke before being burned alive, and he forced it away, focusing his attention on the front of the aircraft. The flames had not quite reached it, although that they would soon. The windshield was gone, and all that remained were jagged shards of glass thrusting haphazardly out of the frame.
He moved forward, stepping around razor-sharp pieces of torn sheet metal, some tiny and others as big as his VW Beetle. Wreckage littered the landscape. It was hard to believe all of it had come from the massive hulk now burning out of control in front of him. The closer he came to the plane, the more the heat threatened to overwhelm him. He shrugged out of his jacket and held it between the flames and his face in an effort to gain a bit of relief from the searing heat.
At last he reached the twisted metal of the cabin. The crackling of the fire had become more pronounced, roaring and wheezing like a living being as it raced along the plane’s airframe. Shane knew he was running out of time. The temperature was becoming unbearable and the entire aircraft would soon be engulfed by flames.
As he scrambled up an unidentifiable piece of equipment torn clear of the fuselage, he could feel the heat radiating through the soles of his sneakers. He wrapped his jacket around his right arm and hand, hoping it would provide protection against the shards of glass and ripped sheet metal. He grabbed the windshield frame for support and hoisted himself up, then peered through the smashed windshield into the face of death and destruction.
Victims littered the cockpit, none of them moving. Two men wearing United States Air Force flight suits had been tossed around the interior of the craft during the crash. Their bodies were smashed and broken. One of the men was missing most of an arm, the bloody stump extruding from his uniform. The other had been wedged into a tiny opening along the side of the cockpit, bent awkwardly backward, his spine clearly broken.
Two other people — one man and one woman — remained strapped into their seats. The man also wore a flight suit. His head was wrapped in a bloody gauze bandage, as if he had been attempting to fly the plane while badly injured.
The woman, however, did not wear a flight suit. She was dressed in civilian clothing, a pair of jeans and a button-down blouse. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled on her shoulder. Blood oozed out of a deep gash on her left leg.
They were all dead. They had to be. The two crew members lying in the cabin, bent and broken like dolls after a child’s tantrum, were obviously beyond hope, and the other two must have been killed by the force of the crash. Fire licked at the small open doorway at the rear of the flight deck, the guttural roar of the blaze sounding to Shane like the shriek of some inhuman monster. Poisonous black smoke roiled at the top of the wreckage, accumulating fast. The suffocating heat radiated through the broken windshield.
Shane shook his head. Was there any point crawling into the plane and risking being trapped inside with the other victims? The damage was so extensive survival seemed unlikely in the extreme. In just the few seconds he had been checking out the interior of the cabin, the flames had engulfed the doorway and threatened to consume the cockpit.
It was time to get away from here before he perished, too.
He prepared to drop to the ground and the woman moved. She lifted her head off her shoulder and moaned, her eyes still closed.
This changed everything. Without thinking — he knew if he hesitated at all he would never be able to do it — Shane pushed off with his feet and hooked his arms at the elbows over the metal windshield frame. He pulled himself up and scrambled through the smashed-out windshield into hell.
He tumbled through the opening, landing face-down atop the body of the crew member with the missing arm. The man’s body slumped sideways from the impact and Shane could see that half his skull was missing.
He pushed off, sickened by the sight. Something had gone horribly wrong inside this airplane, something more than just a mechanical problem. Maybe the damage to this man’s skull had been caused by the crash. Maybe. But that strange injury, together with the bloody gauze bandage around the pilot’s head and the presence of a civilian woman where one of the crew members should be, set alarm bells ringing in Shane’s head.
But none of that mattered, at least not at the moment. The inferno was advancing, gaining momentum, racing toward Shane and the crash victims like an out-of-control demon. The intensity of the heat was excruciating. The flames greedily consumed the oxygen, making it nearly impossible to breathe.
He ducked his head, kept his body as low as possible to avoid breathing toxic fumes. He turned toward the two victims still strapped into their seats. He already knew the woman was alive, so he quickly reached across her body and pressed his fingers under the man’s ear, feeling for a pulse.
There was none.
He tried again, his fingers smearing sticky, half-dried blood around the man’s neck. Still nothing. Time was running out. He could feel his hair beginning to singe and his skin felt as though it might burst into flames at any moment.
And the fire was still coming, passing over the body of the crash victim who had become wedged into the wreckage. Shane knew the inferno was being fed by oxygen entering through the smashed windshield. The very damage which had made it possible for him to access the cabin was now turning a foolhardy rescue attempt into a suicide mission.
Shane stood and thrust his head through the broken windshield, breathing deeply of the fresh northern Maine late-spring air. He took several deep gulps of it, finally holding his breath and turning back inside the fetid, foul, superheated air of the wreckage. He bent and fumbled with the buckle on the woman’s safety harness, finally releasing the mechanism allowing the belts to spring free.