The Grey

at bigger pieces to see if one’s a better shelter than where we are.  One looks better than the others, leaned into the snow so it almost has a door, but it’s a small space inside and I don’t know if we’d have enough room or enough air or be able to tend a fire.  It’s the one with the most dead inside, anyway.

We come up on the cockpit, finally, it looks like a crushed boiled-egg.  I duck under a hole, shove my way in.  The door-frame’s bent and almost folded in on itself but I can squeeze through it.  As I shove in Henrick’s coming through the hole behind me.  I wriggle and push the rest of the way in.

Not a lot of light.  No sign of the pilots, no bodies, no pieces of uniform like I found outside.  Henrick gets through the door, we look and mostly fumble around in the dark for anything that looks like survival stuff, or signal stuff, some kind of transponder thing or something, but neither of us has any idea what we’re looking for.

For some reason we expect to find a flare gun or an emergency kit, tents or rations or something.  No such things.  We try to make sense of any of the piles of twisted wires and ripped metal in there, try to find whatever switches would have anything to do with the radio, but nothing’s powering on anyway no matter how many switches we flip, everything’s fucked.  We look at each other.

“You see any sign of the pilots out there?”  Henrick asks.  I nod.

“Half of one.”  It strikes Henrick as funny, I didn’t mean it to be.

“The other half’s probably fucking hiding in shame,” he says.  I nod.  We fall quiet.

“Better move,” I say.  We crawl back out.

Outside I see Luttinger and the others waiting for us, they’ve slogged ahead a little, and they’re jumping around.  Too cold to stand still.  Back at the our piece of plane I see flames going up, higher.  It looks like they’re throwing more seat cushions on.  It roars up, must be fifteen feet of flame.

“We better hurry with the wood or that’ll be gone in five minutes.” I say.

Henrick nods, we huff up to catch the others.  Luttinger falls in alongside us, when he get to him, saying nothing, the rest of the guys are already tromping ahead in the cold, strung out on the snow, staring out into the dark to where the broken trees are.

I keep looking out to either side of us, at every little dark clump we pass, to see if any of them is moving.  None of them is.  Like before I can’t get all the way out to check every one of them, or I’ll die doing it, the others will too.  So I hope they’re dead, and I’m not leaving anybody alive we could have helped.  You hope funny things.

We go and keep going until we start to see pieces of broken branches trailing back from the trail of the crash, dozens of chunks of wood, big and little branches, some big boughs and refrigerator-sized pieces of trunk too big to pick up.  We’re still what looks like a few football fields or more from the trees behind us, it’s hard to tell distances, but pieces of tree must have gotten thrown here as we came through.   I’m trying to imagine it and I can’t, but here they are.

Everybody starts gathering wood up, dumping it in the blankets and jackets or just loading up their arms.  I lay a blanket out, start loading it.  Henrick and some of the others take their jackets off to bundle wood in, which is brave in this cold.   It doesn’t take long, we can’t carry much.   Henrick heads off, dragging what looks like a big load for him.  He isn’t the biggest of us, but off he goes.  Tlingit and Luttinger and the others fall in behind him, start heading back for the orange pinprick of the fire in the distance.

I find myself staring at the snow, getting breath, as they go.  I almost see the shape of the pieces of the plane from here, like I could put it together.  I look another half a minute, maybe and I see them getting ahead of me and I get going, dragging my load of wood.  After a minute or two more I feel like I’ve been walking in snow for a year, added to the haul I did before, added to falling out of a plane, maybe, and now I’ve got a blanket full of wood that weighs more the further I drag it.  Far from the fire like this, even with the wind getting up, it’s surprisingly peaceful.  Snow is coming in still heavier and more clouds are coming over too I think, we’re on a giant white slab, getting buried by the hour, all new snow.  Sounds hopeful.

I pass a dead guy, a little ways off, and another, I don’t know if I passed them on the way out, my eyes are adjusting more.  I look further out to the sides, I see a big flat shadow of cloud moving away across the snow letting more moon down, and I see more and more dark clumps, more dead, a field of dead, even more than I’d seen before.

I stop walking, again, for a moment, looking at the bodies.  Without my footsteps in the snow or the others’ it’s incredibly silent, somehow, even with the wind.  The buzzing’s gone from my ears, I realize, the pounding too, or I think it is.

I think I hear snow moving behind me.  I turn, look back, I don’t see anything, just dark dead dots in the snow, but I keep looking back, another second, a little further into the dark.  One of the dead is moving, it looks like, now, trying to get up or worse, shaking, he looks bad.  I let go of the load of wood and start walking back to him.  Then I start running.

“Hey!” I’m shouting, “I’m coming—I’m coming!“

I shout and run, as hard as I can, because he’s shivering, convulsing, it looks like, some kind of spasm.  He’s dying his last, maybe, but he still looks like he’s trying to get up, it’s hard to see, just this dark clump shaking in the snow, the sight’s frightening, I don’t know why, but for some reason I want to get to him before he dies, if that’s what he’s doing, so I keep lunging and huffing through the snow, yelling to him, and he keeps shuddering, retching or something, fighting to stand, convulsing, I can’t tell.

“Hey—” I yell again.

Then he seems to split in two, or I see something jumps off him, half a second, looks up, then jumps back on him.  Some fucking thing, an animal.

“Hey!”  I yell as loud as I can, as if this guy, who I realize is dead, probably, cares.  But I yell, and run faster.

“Get the fuck off him!” I yell.

Its head comes up, looks at me.  It’s a wolf, ripping at the guy, and I see, now I’m closer, the guy is dead, if he was alive at all.  It was the wolf I saw moving.  The wolf just stares at me.

I charge at it, screaming.  I don’t know why I’m charging, but the wolf looks up and stares at me and just watches me come at him.  I’m thinking he killed him, he was alive and this fucker killed him, or he was dead and he’s got food on him, or he’s at his guts, I don’t know, but I’m charging, yelling, and expecting him to twitch or flinch and turn tail and jump off but he isn’t fucking moving, he’s just watching me.