Chasing Mercury Read online

  The prickle of something on the back of her neck convinced Nora she could feel, and therefore possibly move. With a concerted effort, she let go of the armrest and lifted her hand and the whisk of fabric over her skin validated that she was alive. She went to rub her eyes and discovered the blindness was a blanket draped over her face and torso. With a terrified grunt, she flung the covering off and squinted into the sudden brightness. The overpowering scent of the perfume of the woman beside her disappeared. When her eyes adjusted, she looked around. She was lying on her back, still strapped into her seat. Above her was a thin swath of blue sky, framed by tall pine trees. To either side of her were smooth gray rocks, standing like sentinels above her. After long moments of struggle, her shaking hands were able to unbuckle her seatbelt, and she tried to roll away from the seat, but her legs would not follow. Panic seized her before she realized it was the straps to her backpack that were still wrapped around her lower legs. She laughed with relief and the sound came out in an unfamiliar bray, the cackle of an insane woman. She untangled her legs and kicked the bag away, rolling from the seat and onto her knees on the pine needle covered earth where anxiety grabbed her. Next to her now was just her seat lying on its back. There were no others. One moment, she was crowded into a small space with too many other people, the next she was all alone. It was impossible to contemplate. All she could think was that Aunt Mace was expecting her home. Nora pulled her pack to her and checked her precious cargo. The plastic bag filled with rapidly dissipating dry ice used to chill the medication that needed to be kept refrigerated was undamaged. She zipped her pack and looked for her phone. Finding it in the front pocket, she switched it out of airplane mode but found she had no signal.

  Nora slid her phone into her back pocket and stood up. With tentative movements, she ran her shaking hands over her body, taking inventory. She didn’t feel any pain. Everything seemed to be intact. The hard square shape of her e-reader slid out from the bottom edge of her shirt and landed at her feet. She stared at it in disbelief, an artifact of normalcy, when she wasn’t sure what normal was anymore.

  Nora picked up the device and stepped around the seat, noticing the torn metal where the adjoining seat had been. A thick layer of dirt and pine needles had collected around the headrest and in the chair, indicating that the seat had slid headfirst before it had come to a stop. She dropped the e-reader into the seat. Her eyes traced the disturbed path of forest debris, and she realized that her seat had skidded at least a hundred feet before it came to rest between two huge rocks. She pulled a handful of pine needles from the collar of her flannel shirt. How had she not been bashed against one of the trees or the large rocks strewn around the immediate vicinity? It was against all logical probability that she wasn’t dead.

  Evidence of the crash surrounded her, a wide swath of plowed up dirt and broken trees. Nora began to walk, and then run, toward where she thought the airplane would be. She couldn’t see the aircraft, but its slide path led her over a slight rise. She looked frantically around her as she raced through the forest, hoping to see other survivors. There was no smoke and little debris aside from the torn up vegetation and disturbed earth. She caught a whiff of airplane fuel, but it was faint, and then it was gone. It was silent save for the sound of her own pulse pounding in her head and her feet hitting the uneven ground. There was no birdsong, no insect noise, not even the sound of the wind in the trees. Nature seemed to hold its breath while she processed the scene. Skirting around a large rock in what had become a full sprint, Nora saw one of the aircraft’s wings propped against some trees. The sight distracted her long enough that she almost didn’t notice the path disappearing into empty air. With open space careening toward her, she sat back hard, grasping at the ground with her hands. She skidded to a stop on her butt, the heel of her foot caught on a root barely a half-inch in diameter dangling in a loop from the edge of the cliff. It was all that stopped her from the forward momentum that would have launched her into the deep abyss below.

  Heart in her throat, she immediately switched course, performing a frantic crab-crawl backward until she was several feet from the edge. On solid footing, she leaned back on her hands while sweat streamed down her face, instantly chilling her in the cool autumn air. She tried to catch her breath, her respiration and heart rate careening, the sound of her raspy inhalations stark in the otherwise eerie quiet. Light-headed, the sense of surrealism she had felt in her exhaustion on the plane was a total contrast to the complete sense of hyper-awareness she felt now. The ravine in front of her was the width of a football field, with the thick forest picking up on the other side, stretching into the visible horizon. From where she sat, she couldn’t see to the bottom of the ravine and she wasn’t very keen on getting too close to the edge to check it out. But she was pretty sure the plane was down there, and she needed to see. Although it terrified her, she crawled over to a nearby tree that jutted out over the crevice. Summoning her courage, she stood on shaky legs, hooked her arm around the trunk, and leaned over. Instant vertigo made her head swim, but Nora shut her eyes and took a deep breath to control herself. When she felt a little better, she slowly opened her eyes. Five hundred feet below, the hull of the airplane littered the ravine floor in one large piece and a thousand smaller ones. The other wing rested several feet away. Little else was recognizable.

  She needed to get down there to look for survivors. She searched for a way to descend. The bottom of the ravine narrowed to what looked to be no more than two hundred feet across, with nearly vertical walls going straight down. Looking to her right, the icy façade of a glacier filled the narrower end of the ravine. To the left, it bent out of sight. Aside from a small stream of water worming away from the glacier, there was no movement, except for a thin black stream of smoke snaking up from one of the larger sections of the plane, threading its way upward before hitting open space and blowing in the opposite direction. Nora searched up and down the narrow canyon for a path that would take her down. As she was looking away from the crash, she heard the first explosion, and she turned toward the sound just in time to see a second, much larger, explosion. A ball of heat raced past her, forcing her backward, and she instinctively rolled into a ball behind the trunk of the tree she’d been holding on to and covered her head with her arms. Several smaller bangs and thuds continued to sound, and Nora imagined the fuselage blown to bits, with the metal raining down.

  When the explosions ceased, Nora tentatively peered around the tree and leaned over to look into the now thicker smoke billowing from the space below. It was difficult to see, but between clouds of smoke, she was able to discern the largest section of plane, which had flames coming from each end. The smell of jet fuel and burning electrical components filled the air.

  She sank to her knees, hugging the tree, and stared at the burning wreckage with a leaden weight filling her chest. How many people were still in the airplane? She felt helpless as she watched the conflagration burn uncontested. Her limbs were useless, hanging heavily from her body, and even if there had been a convenient way down into the ravine, she knew her body wouldn’t take her. The heat that reached her from the distance told her it wasn’t safe anyway. She’d have to wait until the fire burned down before she could get close enough to look for survivors.

  Nora tore her eyes from the flames and shook her head to clear the fogginess trying to block her thoughts—thoughts too painful to contemplate but too important to ignore. Images of the people she had seen on the flight flashed through her mind: the smiling pilot, the woman sitting next to her, another woman with green eyes and a dazzling smile, a laughing baby girl. A hand seemed to reach into her chest and squeeze her heart the tightest at the thought of the baby. Abruptly, she was back at the airport in Anchorage.

  A frazzled mother was sitting in a seat across from her at the gate, surrounded by a diaper bag, a carry on, her purse, and a sippy cup, while watching a baby pull herself up on the seat next to her. The woman glanced at Nora and smiled, a look on her face se
eming to apologize for contributing to the already frenetic energy bustling through the boarding area. Nora loved kids but was exhausted on the last leg of a frustrating and extended trip. Normally, she’d play peek a boo with the baby to distract it to give the young mother a little break. But just watching them made her more tired. So she’d returned the smile, but leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, blocking out the noise and activity all around her.

  Snapping back to her new reality, standing above a canyon with the heat of an inferno blowing toward her, she wondered if the mother and baby were down there. She pushed the thought away. It was an unfamiliar response for her. She was used to dealing with difficult situations with a determined and practiced calm. Her composure had helped her in countless situations. This time was different, though. This was too close, too much to deal with all at once. She let her mind shut down. She’d deal with the unthinkable later, when she didn’t have to worry about survival. For now, she would do what she needed to do to help herself and any victims she found.

  She turned to retrace her steps, searching carefully for survivors among the trees on either side of the churned earth left in the wake of the crashed airplane, expecting to see others like her who had been thrown out above the ravine. She couldn’t be the only one left.

  She saw no evidence of other people and there was less airplane debris than she would have thought in the path of destruction that led away from the edge of the cliff. There was the wing she’d seen leaning against a group of trees and an engine lying not too far from it. Not far from that was what looked like a section of plastic from the inside of the airplane cabin with a space where a window should have been. Further away was a piece of fabric attached to something partially buried in pine needles. A nearly intact and upright beverage cart with all of the drawers still in it sat against tree. She stopped and stared at it. The cart looked like it had been set there on purpose, as if beverage service was a natural event in the Alaskan wild. Away from the flames and most of the carnage, she was surrounded by an eerie quiet.

  She was alone.

  A surge of pent up anxiety clapped around her. Her head throbbed. She began to feel light-headed. She sat down and dangled her head between her knees.

  When she felt better, she got back up and walked back to where she had left the airplane seat, nestled between the boulders. She stared at the seat for a long time, her mind unable to process what had happened. A jumble of emotions railed through her, but she couldn’t form a coherent train of thought. She righted the airplane seat and leaned it against the rock. Ripped from the adjacent seat and its mooring, the chair only had one arm and part of one metal leg attached to its bottom. It leaned to one side when Nora tried to set it upright, so Nora propped it up on a low, flat rock, and then carefully dropped down into it. Energy coursed through her, and she tapped her foot on the pine needle strewn ground.

  Where was she?

  She looked at her wrist, which sported a mountaineer watch she had worn since her days in the Air National Guard. In addition to the time, which was just before noon, it told her she was at an elevation of 1,986 feet, and it was 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Her analytical brain kicked in. The longitude and latitude displayed were interesting but provided her with no real understanding of where she was, since she wasn’t familiar with the area. Based on the time they had spent in flight, she guessed they had come down somewhere near Valdez, Alaska, in the Chugach Mountains. Unless the flight plan had taken a less than direct path from Anchorage to Juneau, it had flown along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, and she pondered how lucky she was they hadn’t had to make a water landing. Would it have been smoother than landing in the rough terrain of the Chugach range? Did the pilot make a choice, or was the choice made for her? She ignored the what-ifs and wondered how long it would take for help to arrive. It was a heavily wooded area, but they weren’t too far from Anchorage, so hopefully it would be soon. Surely the airplane had some sort of homing beacon on it, and the pilot would have called in their location as they went down. She couldn’t see the plane or the smoke from the fire through the dense forest from where she sat, but she could smell it, and she figured the smoke would also guide search and rescue toward their location.

  Nora looked up at the cloudy sky, thankful it wasn’t raining here as it had been in Anchorage.

  She heard Aunt Mace’s voice in her head. It was the last conversation she had with her before boarding the flight in Anchorage.

  “The flight’s delayed so I’ll be a little later than I told you last time,” Nora had explained.

  “Another delay? I’ll bet it’s a set up between the airline and the airport. If they trap you there they force you to buy their overpriced food,” huffed Aunt Mace.

  Nora heard one of Aunt Mace’s friends, Elphie, in the background: “She should have packed sandwiches. They’d have been better than that Styrofoam crap they try to pass off as food in those places!”

  “I don’t know about that,” Nora said with a laugh. “It’s just raining pretty hard and I heard one of the gate attendants tell someone they were finishing up some scheduled maintenance.”

  “I wouldn’t get on one of those sardine cans if you paid me! Are you keeping dry?”

  “I’m safe inside the building, Aunt Mace. I’m fine.”

  “Well, trust your gut, Eleanor. You hear? If it doesn’t feel right, don’t get on that plane.”

  “It’s just a little rain.”

  Back in the forest, beneath the dense canopy, it was relatively dry. The clouds above were interspersed with patches of blue she could see through the small gaps between the treetops. The clouds had dark gray centers, though, and there was a heavy feeling in the air. The daylight held the silver-gray tinge that signaled pending rain to Nora. Living in Alaska for the last four years had taught her that a weather system was rolling in. Nora hoped she was wrong. She didn’t need a storm to compound her already dire situation. Even so, she should probably find somewhere to stay dry if it rained.

  Glad to have a problem to solve to keep her mind busy, Nora wondered what she could use for shelter. A panel from the plane, one of the few pieces of debris she’d seen that hadn’t landed at the bottom of the ravine, seemed like the best immediate possibility. She could use branches from the broken foliage, too. A cave would be better. It didn’t have to be huge, just big enough to keep her dry. Unless there were others. There had to be others.

  She pushed herself up from the chair and decided to search in the opposite direction from the ravine. The woods were less damaged in that direction, and she tried to envision how the airplane had come down. Examining the path of broken vegetation and upturned earth before her, it looked like the plane had touched down just feet beyond the rock formation where she had come to rest. Her seat must have been thrown from the plane just before it landed, which didn’t make sense because airplanes didn’t just open up and disgorge passengers like that. But, then again, as brilliant as she was at software design, she had to admit she didn’t know thing one about the physics of aerodynamics or crash analytics. That didn’t keep Nora’s mind from trying to piece together the puzzle of how she had survived, though. Maybe the plane had cracked in half somehow, or had fallen apart due to the mysterious forces of velocity as it tumbled from the sky. Maybe the jolts she had felt were an act of terrorism and a bomb had gone off, ripping a hole in the structure. Maybe the plane had first touched down somewhere above her and had bounced down the mountainside. Maybe it was a mix of those ideas. Maybe it was something entirely different. Maybe she would never know.

  She walked the path of her seat’s long slide, disturbed pine needles and tortured earth providing a visual guide. She guessed the thick layer of leaves that covered the forest floor probably cushioned her fall and slowed the speed of the slide. Observing the density of the tree growth and the scattering of large boulders all around, she shuddered. That her seat hadn’t tumbled and banged her up in the process seemed improbable. That she hadn’t suffered so much as
a scratch in the ordeal seemed like an impossible feat. That she wasn’t still in the plane, at the bottom of the gorge, burning alive in the fire, seemed like a miracle.

  All of this went through her mind with an emotional register of zero. Observations and facts were all that computed.

  She was grateful for the hiking boots she wore as she stepped around rocks and strode through countless years’ worth of fallen leaves and trees. Picking her way around the rough barked columns of evergreens, she walked until she came to a wall of smooth rock about a hundred feet high. She had a moderate amount of rock climbing under her belt, but she wasn’t a free-climber. The wall before her, with its almost completely smooth façade and gentle inward sway, was well beyond her skill level, even if she had all the equipment she was used to.

  She looked along the wall’s base in both directions and didn’t see a way up or around it. Picking her way along the base of the cliff to the right, she found it soon came to a sharp drop-off into a deep crevice, an offshoot of the ravine behind her. It was narrow, just several feet across, but too wide to jump. She retraced her path the other way and found the wall swooped around in an arc until it hit the edge of the main ravine that the airplane had fallen into. This gave her a wider view of the area she had just traversed. The face of the glacier she had seen sloped up and back. It appeared she had landed on a pie slice-shaped ledge on the side of a steep mountain, and from what she saw, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for her to climb higher to see what was above her.

  Below where she was standing, there was a steep game trail leading down into the ravine where the airplane rested. From where she stood, she couldn’t see the aircraft around the curve of the ledge, but the smoke from the fire billowed toward her. Thick and acrid, the smoke stung her eyes and burned her lungs. She pulled the neck of the t-shirt she wore from under her flannel shirt over her nose and mouth to filter some of the dense smoke. She coughed, feeling impotent. Her earlier assessment still held, it was too dangerous to make the descent—at least for now.