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-ddead
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 wes 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