an airstrip to be.
Bella sat next to me, singing freaky little nursery rhymes, refusing to talk.
Listing vaguely to the right, even through the muddy soup of my senses (ironically the pain from my arm had returned to full strength long before my instincts had), I sat grimly prepared for the wingtip to clip the tarmac, shearing off the entire thing and sending us cartwheeling – trailing fuel and smoke – like a colossal Catherine Wheel.
Or maybe the tail would dip, and we'd ricochet up like a throwing knife on the backspin, somersaulting up and over until the cockpit nosed into the rock like a blunt javelin, shattering every surface and filling the cabin with atomised glass.
Or maybe the starboard engine would blow on impact. Maybe we'd know nothing about the crash at all except an exquisite burst of fire; a supernova to shred every window, every seat, and every fragile little bone in our bodies.
Maybe we'd hit a building.
Maybe we'd over-fly the runway and bury ourselves, full tilt, into the mass of service yards and hangars cluttering the distant reaches of LaGuardia. Maybe we'd topple down into the mid-island water, venting bubbles as the dark swarmed up around us.
Maybe we'd…
Oh, fuck.
Having an imagination is never a good thing in a desperate situation.
'…in the tree top… when the wind blows, the cradle will…'
'Bella?'
Distant bushes through the windows at the edge of my vision.
'…when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall…'
'Bella – shut the fuck up…'
The horizon bobbed into view on both sides. The tarmac came up.
'…down will come b…'
Kroom.
Sparks. Alarms screaming like abandoned babies.
Everything shuddered. A backblast of air funnelled down the cabin from ahead, peppered with glass and stone, and my neck twisted so hard I yelped in shock. Grass and distant buildings snickered past outside the window, but not in a straight line. We were curling on the runway, half-deployed landing gear screaming and twisting in protest beneath us, rolling us sideways, careening in a cloud of molten metal and whirligig embers. Spinning off the tarmac.
A sudden moment of weightlessness, and pain all across my midriff as the seatbelt bit. From the corner of my eye I saw Bella rise into the air, pancake-spreadeagle on the ceiling with a cockroach crunch, and then back down, nutting a headrest and flipping, upside down, onto her side.
No seatbelt.
Shit.
A bone jarring shudder, and crippled metal twisting with an operatic screech. Through the window beside me, lost behind a grid of contradictory smoke-trails and fluttering debris, I could make out the arrowhead of the wing tilting backwards and up, shearing itself off as the plane barrel-rolled into its slow skid. It ripped clear with a terrifying lurch, sprayed fuel which ignited immediately, and shattered itself magnificently across the tarmac like a neon waterfall. The metal of the fuselage – four seats in front of me – buckled with a shriek, shattering all the glass down the left side and vomiting smoke into the cabin. Everything went black and toxic, and even through the acrid fog and my own desperate coughing I could hear the battered impacts of the plane's death throes. It snarled and groaned its way across the last of the runway, ripping gouges of rock with an angle-grinder roar, then dipped with another lurch onto the grassy rough. Bella groaned somewhere in the murk.
Time started to return, piece by piece. Sparks drooled.
And – slowly at first, but gathering speed as inertia surrendered to the shifting weight – we rolled. Landing gear comprehensively AWOL, single remaining wing arcing up and over the fuselage like a shark's dorsal, ceiling bowing and sagging then snapping straight as it took the strain. My seat swapped verticality for an abrupt horizontal, lifting the whole cabin like a theme-park ride, sharp-edged seatbelt constricting me again.
The second wing slapped at the ground with a bowlike shudder and snapped off. Like some cylindrical juggernaut the fuselage rolled across it, breaking apart at the seams as it went.
Inside: tumbling chaos.
Debris dropping then lifting, blood rushing to and from eyeballs, hands swapping between lap and forehead.
Bella flapped like a dying fish, thud, thud, thud, off ceiling and floor with each new rotation. If she was still alive, she didn't look it. Nothing much I could do to help.
We seemed to be slowing down.
Then something detonated behind us. The all pervading jet-whine of a long-lost engine maxed out with a painful hiss and – oh fuck oh fuck – striated everything, inside and out, with shrapnel. Metal was punctured. The craft rocked and shunted forwards, heat-blast roiling back from the mangled tail, and hacked at the rags of my bloody clothes. Something stung my knee. My face bled. What few windows remained exploded like froth on a wave, and I had the fleeting impression of singed grass surfing past the shattered porthole as we rolled again. Something sharp and long punched itself through the metal beside me, coming to rest a scant foot from my side: a shattered stanchion from the rough beside the runway, picked up like a thorn.
And finally, like a great engine throbbing itself into dormancy, the airplane came to an appalled halt; listing on its back like a clapped-out whore, waiting for another bout. Smoke plumed on every side, and the quiet crackle of flames tugged at my punch-drunk consciousness.
'Shit.' I said.
And Bella's inert body – half resting on the back of a chair directly above my head – surrendered to gravity, flopped in mid-air with a boneless kick, and impaled itself on the jagged spike in the wall.
I don't think I'll ever forget the sound it made.
The first instinct was to get out.
All that Hollywood bullshit about fuel tanks spontaneously going up like Krakatoa – long after the crash – could be safely ignored. The second engine had fallen silent shortly after the mad tumbling stopped, killing with it any obvious danger of explosion. But the irrational panic remained like an ember in my guts, and the fires already lit were plentiful enough to be scary. With the smoke gradually thickening and the slippery cut across my forehead leaking into my eyes, I thrashed about to get to the seatbelt buckle, finding a sudden unshakeable need to be away from this bastarding plane.
Away from Bella's limp little body. Staring straight at me.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier.
Sir, no sir, etc etc.
It was stealing over me by degrees that I'd done it. I'd got to the States. I'd fucking done it.
And yeah, there had been sacrifices and hardships. Yeah, there had been pain and chaos and untidy scrambling. Yeah, there had been death.
But you don't do what I used to do, for fifteen years, without seeing some or all of that at some point. You don't get to slink like a shadow between the raindrops, killing and cutting behind the scenes of a hundred and one foreign powers, without learning how to bottle it all away. Screw it up into a venomous little ball and dump it, derelict and forgotten, somewhere in the poisonous wastes of the unvisited mind. Anything it took to get-on-with-it. Mental conditioning. Emotional disconnection. Whatever.
I'd got to America. Nothing else mattered.
Though, to be fair, the victory was soured somewhat by the attendant uncertainty of what I'd find out there. Five years ago, before the news-shows stopped broadcasting and the emergency radio fell silent, before the Internet became an unchanging frieze – dying piece by piece as humming servers across the world sputtered out – it had looked like the US had not fared well.
Certainly they'd caught a nuke or two.
Listen: it turns out nothing brings out the aggression in a population like a shared disaster. If you believed the
