PART TWO
BROKEN BIRDS
Shallow men believe in luck.
Strong men believe in cause and effect.
41
“No!” cried Nix as she shoved past Benny and rushed forward, but he darted out a hand and caught her arm.
“Wait,” he warned in a sharp whisper.
“Let me go,” she said viciously, and tore her arm out of Benny’s grasp, giving him a wild and murderous glare. “Don’t you see what that is?”
“It’s a jet—”
“It’s
Benny pushed back a low-hanging branch and stepped out of the woods so he could see the wreckage. His heart sank in his chest, and his fingertips were ice cold from shock.
Beyond the trees was a plateau. One side dropped away into a crevasse that was choked with tall pines; the other side leveled out into a section of flat forestland. A long trench was cut into the mud of the flatland, stretching back at least half a mile, and the nose of the craft was smashed into a mound of mud. Benny had slid into enough bases in rainy baseball games to understand the physics of that. The plane had not simply crashed; instead the pilot had tried to land it, coming in low and then sliding to a long, messy stop on the forest floor.
Because these woods were part of the Mojave Desert, the soil was loose and sandy, which had probably kept the plane from disintegrating on impact. The fuselage was almost intact, though there were jagged tears all along the side they could see. Both wings had been sheared clean off. One was wrapped like wet tissue around a tall finger of rock two hundred yards down the trench. The other wing had torn off closer to where the craft stopped its fatal slide, and it had twisted into an upright position, looking like the sail of an old-time vessel. The main fuselage was almost a hundred feet long and was cracked in two places, but the plane had not torn itself to pieces. Even so, bits of debris were littered behind it, some blackened from fire, others still gleaming white where they were visible against brown sand and green pinyons and junipers. Creeper vines clung to the metal skin of the plane and to each of the fractured wings. The vines were draped like spiderwebs between the blades of the four big, silent propellers.
The glass windows at the front of the craft were smashed in, and the creepers had intruded there, too. A metal hatch stood open a few yards aft of the crumpled nose, gaping like a black mouth in the whiteness of the plane. Plastic sheeting hung in tatters from the open hatch, and there were old bones in the grass below the ragged ends of the plastic. Benny had seen pictures of inflatable escape ramps that were used for emergency landings, and the plastic looked like it might be the remnants of one.
He pointed it out to Nix as he picked up her fallen bokken. “Look at that. Somebody survived the crash.”
That thought edged down the panic in Nix’s eyes by a couple of degrees. She accepted her wooden sword, but her hands gripped the handle with such white-knuckled force that Benny thought she was going to attack the dead aircraft. She took a couple of quick steps toward the plane.
“Be careful,” he said, keeping his voice low in case there were reapers in the woods.
“I’m going to look,” she said in a voice that was less confident than she probably wanted it to sound.
Benny began to follow and then stopped. He felt a frown pull down the corners of his mouth, but he did not consciously understand why. His eyes roved over the scene again. The trench, the plane, the foliage, the broken wings, the open door. His frown deepened.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Nix, wait,” he said. “Don’t.”
She paused and looked sharply at him. “Why not?”
Benny licked his lips. “I… don’t think that’s our jet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nix, that’s not the jet we saw.”
She looked from the plane to Benny and back again, and there was such fury in her eyes that he made sure he wasn’t in easy swinging range of her bokken. “You’re crazy,” she barked. “Of course it’s the one we saw.”
“No, it isn’t, and keep your voice down.” Benny came and stood beside her. “Look at it, Nix. This thing’s been here for at least a year. Probably more.”
“How would you know?”
Nix’s harshness was beginning to grate on him, and he snapped back.
“Open your eyes,” he said, his own tone growing sharp. He pointed to the small trees that had poked through the bottom of the trench. “Look at those saplings. Come on — they’re at least a year old. At least that, and maybe older. Some of them look two years old.”
“They’re saplings, Benny. Saplings bend. They could have bent over and sprung back up.”
“No way. They’d have been snapped off. Look, there are bigger trees that were torn right out of the ground.”
It was true; the dead trunks of a hundred small pine trees lay in the trench, their limbs snapped, roots torn out of the sandy soil. Many of them were ripped completely apart, and there were dried sticks that could easily have been saplings that were killed during the crash. Benny pulled a few up and brought them over to Nix.
“See?” he said. “These were the saplings the plane hit. Those others could never have survived this big freaking thing crashing down on them.”
“So what?” she demanded. Somehow, with her voice lowered to a whisper, she sounded even angrier and more annoyed with him. “Since when are you an expert on plant growth?”
“I’m not an expert, Nix, but I’m not stupid, either.”
Nix started to say something, then thought better of it and instead said, “It could have crashed after we saw it. That’s eight months. You don’t know how fast juniper saplings grow, Benny. These could be only eight months old.”
“Maybe,” Benny conceded, “but I doubt it.”
They moved forward together, cautiously, eyes searching the dead flying machine.
They were so riveted by the plane that they did not look into the surrounding woods and so did not see the dead zoms sprawled twenty yards down a crooked game trail; or the two bloody spots where a pair of reapers had died from Lilah’s savage attack. Their bodies were gone, and bloody footprints trailed away into the shrubs.
Nix went over and stood by the draped plastic that hung from the open door. Benny continued walking until he was at the base of the upright section of wing, then he stared down the length of the trench at the other wing. He looked at the twisted blades of the propellers. Two six-bladed props had been attached to each wing, and one had fallen off. Benny went over to it and touched the tip of one of the propeller blades.
“I’ll admit that I don’t know everything about planes,” he said, “but after we got back last year, I looked through every book we had in the library and in tons of magazines over at Chong’s. This is definitely not the one we saw. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Why?” she demanded, and there was mingled anger, fear, and hope in her eyes.
He was smiling as he turned.
“Nix, the thing we saw flying over the mountain was a jet… and this thing has propellers,” he said. “Jets don’t have propellers.”
