Casey.” Christine was shaking and frantic, as if she was not in the
least convinced their ordeal was over, as if she thought the earth might
crack open and hot lava spew out, beginning a new chapter of the
nightmare.
“How did we get separated? We were behind one another, then we were
outside, and in the turmoil, somehow you and Casey just weren’t there”
“Holly,” he said impatiently. “Where’d she go?”
“She wanted to go back inside for Casey, but then she realized the cry
was coming from the forward section.” Christine held up a purse and
chattered on: “She carried her purse out of there without realizing she
did it, so she gave it to me and went back, she knew it couldn’t be
Casey, but she went anyway.”
Christine pointed, and for the first time Jim saw that the front of the
DC-10, all the way back through the first-class section, had completely
torn free from the portion in which they had been riding. It was two
hundred feet farther along the field. Though it was burning less
vigorously than the larger mid-section, it was considerably more mangled
than the rest of the craft, including the badly battered rear quarter.
He was appalled to hear that Holly had reentered any part of the
smouldering wreckage. The cockpit and forward section rested in the
Iowa field like a monolith in an alien graveyard on a faraway world,
wildly out of place here, and therefore infinitely strange, huge and
looming, thoroughly ominous.
He ran toward it, calling Holly’s name.
Though she knew it was the very plane in which she had departed Los
Angeles a few hours ago, Holly could barely believe that the forward
section of the DC-10 had actually once been part of a whole and
functioning aircraft. It seemed more like a deeply disturbed sculptor’s
interpretation of a DC-10, welded together from parts of real airliners
but also from junk of every description, from pie pans and cake tins and
garbage cans and old lengths of pipe, from auto fenders and scrap wire
and aluminum siding and pieces of a wrought-iron fence.
Rivets had popped; glass had dissolved; seats had torn loose and piled
up like broken and unwanted armchairs in the corner of an auction barn;
metal had bent and twisted, and in places it had shattered as completely
as crystal met by a hammer Interior fuselage panels had peeled back, and
heavy structural beams had burst inward. The floor had erupted upward
in places, either from this impact or from an explosion below.
Everywhere jagged, gnarled metal objects bristled in profusion, and it
looked like nothing so much as a junkyard for old machines just after a
tornado had passed through.
Trying to track down what sounded like the cries of a frightened child,
Holly could not always proceed erect. She had to crouch and squirm
through pinched spaces, pushing things aside when she could, going over
or around or under whenever an obstacle proved to be immovable. The
neat rows and aisles of the plane had been pulled and hammered into a
maze.
She was shaken when she spotted yellow and red flickers of flame along
the perimeter of the deck and in the starboard front corner by the
bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the cockpit. But the
fire was fitful, unlike the blistering conflagration that she had fled
moments ago. It might abruptly flare up, of course, consuming
everything in its path, although currently it seemed unable to find
sufficiently combustible material or oxygen to do more than barely
sustain itself Smoke curled around her in sinuous tendrils, but it was
more annoying than threatening. Breathable air was in good supply, and
she didn’t even cough much.
More than anything, the corpses were what unnerved her. Though the
crash apparently had been somewhat less severe than it would have been
without Jim Ironheart’s intervention, not everyone had survived, and a
number of fatalities had occurred in the first-class section. She saw a
man pinned to his seat by a foot-long, inch-diameter steel tube that had
pierced his throat; his sightless eyes were wide open in a final
expression of surprise. A woman, nearly decapitated, was on her side,