'You hungry?'
Con snorted at the question. 'What do you think?'
'No point in waiting for sunrise to eat.'
'Shouldn't we wait for Joe?'
'That meat will probably spoil before we can eat it all. We should eat as much of it as possible before it does.'
'You don't need to ask me twice. My only problem is finding the food in the dark.'
'Why don't you use a flashlight?' said Joe.
'Did we wake you?' asked Con: 'I'm sorry if we did.'
'That's okay,' Joe replied. 'The walls in these rooms are paper thin. Think about that before you try any hanky- panky.'
'Rick mentioned breakfast. . .' said Con.
Joe laughed. 'Back on your favorite subject. Breakfast sounds good to me.' He felt around until he located a flashlight, then turned it on.. The light made everyone squint. He found the meat and handed a strip to Rick and two strips to Con before taking one for himself.
'That's not fair,' said Con.
'I know,' said Joe. 'You can have more when you finish that.'
'You know what I mean,' said Con.
'It seems to me,' said Joe, 'that 'fair' means everyone gets what they need. Would it be fair to give the same portions to an adult and a child?'
'I'm not a child,' said Con.
'You're missing my point,' replied Joe. 'In terms of our food requirements, Rick and I are children, and you're an adult. I know I kid you about your appetite, but I'm serious now. In the lean times to come, you'll' need to get more if we're all to suffer equally.' He saw Con's eyes were beginning to tear up and turned off the flashlight. 'We should save the batteries.'
'Joe . . .'
'We need to take care of each other,' said Joe. 'To do that, we have to understand each other.' Con swallowed with difficulty. 'Thanks, Joe.'
'Don't think about it. I only hope someone would do the same for Nicole.' Rick, Con, and Joe ate in silence for a while, each absorbed in private thoughts. Rick eventually broke the quiet by asking Joe for the flashlight. 'I need to step outside for a moment.' Con quickly wiped her wet face before the light went on. Rick pressed the button on the wall, and the opening appeared. The air that came into the plane was slightly cooler than earlier, but now it was humid. Rick walked out of view, then returned in a min-ute to shine the light into the holes around the plane. One of the holes around a landing leg was filled with a rock.
'Is this the rock you were talking about, Con?'
'Yeah, I couldn't get it up.'
'No wonder. It looks like most of it is still buried.'
From inside the plane Rick could hear Joe moan, 'Oh God, I hate digging.'
'Then let's get it over with,' said Con.
Joe turned on another flashlight and searched for their digging implements. He supplemented them with a table knife and a fork. 'I thought we'd get high-tech,' he said, showing them to Rick and Con. When they went outside to resume digging, their flash-lights illuminated a landscape of gray ash enveloped in darkness. All the fires were gone, and no orange glow relieved the perfect blackness of the sky. For all they could see, they could have been lost in a cave. The effect of the burnt landscape was equally oppressive. Joe at-tacked the ground with his spoon. 'I want out of here.' They dug methodically, aware of the danger of pushing their bodies in humidity that had more than made up for the drop in temperature. Con made her hole wider and wider, trying to find the edges of the rock. Rick, lying on his stomach, finally scraped the foot at the end of the landing leg. Only the front part of the leg was uncovered; the rest was still encased in dirt. Joe's hole was the larg-est, but he had the largest area to uncover.
