A Fountain Filled With Blood

He dived for his seat and yanked the restraint across himself. The helicopter tilted abruptly, and his inner ear sloshed sickeningly out of balance. Through the windows, he saw nothing but colorless sky, but his stomach and head felt as if they were spinning down in a spiral. Another roar. They jerked up so violently, Waxman lifted off the floor a few inches at the apogee, then slammed back down. The machine seemed to wheeze. “Come on, come on,” Clare was urging.

“Clare? How bad is this?”

“Bad.” Her voice was short, clipped, professional. “Something’s keeping the gas from getting to the engine.” She hissed, then resumed speaking in the same matter-of-fact way. “I’m going to do something called an autorotation. I’m going to plunge the ship nose down while cutting power to the rotors. They’ll spin on their own, giving us lift and slowing our descent. It’ll be a controlled crash.”

Thirty years on, and he was still going to die in a helicopter crash. Linda, his mom, and his sister flashed through his mind, but it was Mac he fixed on, Mac laughing and smoking and drumming out a rhythm on a helmet with his hands. God, he thought, just kill me quick. Don’t hang me up and make me linger.

“Here we go,” Clare said.

The floor under his feet tilted farther and farther. Waxman, still strapped tightly to his makeshift frame, slid toward the seats, ramming into Russ’s feet. His backpack rolled and bounced against Russ’s legs. The safety webbing flapped and the bungee cords clattered wildly against the window. They were balanced on the chopper’s nose when the sound cut off just like that. The sudden silence was like the sound of the grave. Then he could hear his heart beating. He could hear the rotors overhead whistling and whirring. He could hear Clare praying. They were going down so fast, his body strained against the belt strapping him in.

He heard Clare saying, “Hold on hold onholdon…”

Then they hit.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Metal screamed. There was an impossibly loud noise as the rotors chopped into wood and dirt and stone and broke off. One knife-edged blade sliced through the tail boom, the machine eviscerating itself in its death throes. Another blade shattered into shrapnel, peppering the fuselage with a hailstorm of metallic fire. One heaved away into the dirt, still trying to do its job, and lifted and turned the body of the helicopter so that it rolled downhill once, twice, landing gear snapping off like fragile bird bones, pieces of steel sheeting peeling off like an orange rind.

A last shudder and creak. Clare, dangling from her harness, opened her eyes to find she was surprisingly still alive. Her first thought was Thank you, God. Her second was that more people die from explosion than impact when helicopters go down.

“Russ?”

There was a groan behind her. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “We need to get out and away from the ship. Can you move?”

There was another groan.

“Russ!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m going to need some help.”

She braced her feet on the twisted pieces of metal, glass, and plastic that had been the front of the cockpit and unclipped her safety belt. She sagged, lost her balance, and fell heavily against the passenger-side door, which was buckled and stained with green and brown from the forest floor. She twisted around and looked over the partial bulkhead.

“Holy God in heaven,” she said. The force of the impact had driven the tail boom into the cabin as they’d somersaulted downhill. The cargo area had imploded around the boom, the metal bunched like wet papier-mâché. The sawed-off end had come to rest less than a hand’s width away from where Russ was hanging in his seat; it looked like a steel-mouthed shark waiting to slice into his chest.

“Okay,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her terror. “Stay put.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, then coughed.

“Can you see Waxman?”

“Yeah. He’s on the floor underneath me. Well, now it’s the floor. It used to be a big window.”

“How’s he look?”

“Not great.”

She pressed up against the door on the pilot’s side and pushed hard. It popped open like a hatch and just kept going, banging and clanging its way off the nose. She looked at the edge as she levered herself carefully through. The hinges had come clean off. She perched on the door frame and took her bearings. They had come to rest on a forested slope, wedged against several thick maples. The ship was resting on its right side, its nose angled forward. They had scraped a raw gash in the hillside when they’d landed, and the remains of what looked like several young pines were ground into the freshly exposed dirt.

She shivered in the muggy air. She felt cold, light-headed, and so overwhelmed that she just wanted to lie down and wait for someone to take this disaster off her hands. But there wasn’t anyone else. She pressed one spread-fingered hand over her eyes and breathed deeply. “God,” she said, “hold me up. I can’t do this on my own.”