still belted into her seat, which had torn free of the deck plates to
which it had been bolted.
Where other seats had broken free and slammed together, she saw injured
passengers and cadavers heaped on one another, and the only way to tell
the quick from the dead was to listen closely to determine which of them
was groaning.
She blanked out the horror. She was aware of the blood, but she looked
through it rather than at it. She averted her eyes from the most
grievous wounds, refused to dwell on the nightmare images of the
shattered passengers whom she kept confronting. Human bodies became
abstract forms to her, as if they were not real but only blocks of shape
and color put down on canvas by a cubist imitating Picasso. If she
allowed herself to think about what she was seeing, she would either
have to retrace the route she had taken and get out, or curl into a
fetal ball and weep.
She encountered a dozen people who needed to be extracted from the
wreckage and given immediate medical treatment, but they were all either
too large or too tightly wedged in the rubble for her to be of any
assistance.
Besides, she was drawn forward by the haunting cries of the child,
driven by that instinctive understanding that children were always to be
saved first: one of the major clauses of nature’s genetically programmed
triage policy.
Sirens rose in the distance. She had never paused to think that
professional rescuers would be on their way. It didn’t matter. She
couldn’t O back and wait for them to handle this. What if reaching the
child a minute or two sooner made all the difference between death and
survival?
As Holly inched forward, now and then glimpsing anemic but worrisome
flames through gaps in the web of destruction, she heard Jim Ironheart
behind her, calling her name at the opening where the fore part of the
plane had been amputated from the rest of it. In the chaos falling from
the mid-section of the DC-10, they had apparently emerged from the smoke
at different places, heading in opposite directions, for she had not
been able to find him even though he should have been right behind her.
She had been pretty sure that he and Casey had survived, only because he
obviously had a talent for survival; but it was good to hear his voice.
“In here!” she shouted, although the tangle of devastation prevented
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’
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
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 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