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.
Holly jumped, landed on her feet.
“You his mother?” the man asked.
“No. I just heard him crying, went in after him. He’s got a broken
ankle there.”
“I was with my Uncle Frank,” Norby said.
“Okay,” the rescue worker said, trying to strike a cheerful note, “then
let’s find Uncle Frank.”
Norby said flatly, “Uncle Frank’s dead.”
The man looked at Holly, as if she might know what to say.
Holly was mute and shaken, filled with despair that a boy of five should
have to experience such an ordeal. She wanted to hold him, rock him in
her arms, and tell him that everything would be right with the world.
But nothing is right with the world, she thought, because Death is part
of it. Adam disobeyed and ate the apple, gobbled up the fruit of
knowledge, so God decided to let him know all sorts of things, both
light and dark. Adam’s children learned to hunt, to farm, to thwart the
winter and cook their food with fire, make tools, build shelters. And
God, wanting to give them a well-rounded education, let them learn, oh,
maybe a million ways to suffer and die. He encouraged them to learn
language, reading and writing, biology, chemistry, physics, the secrets
of the genetic code. And He taught them the exquisite horrors of brain
tumors, muscular dystrophy, bubonic plague, cancer run amok in their
bodies-and not least of all airplane crashes. You wanted knowledge, God
was happy to oblige, He was an enthusiastic teacher, a demon for
knowledge, piling it on in such weight and exotic detail that sometimes
you felt you were going to be crushed under it.
By the time the rescue worker turned away and carried Norby across the
field toward a white ambulance parked on the edge of the runway, Holly
had gone from despair to anger. It was a useless rage, for there was no
one but God against whom she could direct it, and the expression of it
could change nothing. God would not free the human race from the curse
of death just because Holly Thorne thought it was a gross injustice.