A Fantastic Holiday Season 1 by Kevin J. Anderson (ed)

Author:Kevin J. Anderson (ed) [Anderson, Kevin J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, dragons, fantasy, holiday, SF
Amazon: B00FXA7K4Q
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2013-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

One Last Gift

Jerry Oltion

The wreckage lay strewn across a quarter mile of wheat field, smoldering at the edges where snow kept the fire from spreading. The area around the fuselage was still flickering with the sooty orange flames that jet fuel makes when it burns in the open; that and the helicopter’s landing lights provided all the illumination I needed. While the chopper pilot hovered a couple hundred feet up, I studied the crash site.

The plane had come in sideways. The right wing had hit first, digging a long furrow in the field before snapping off and cartwheeling away into the adjacent field. Then the rest of the plane had hit, splitting open almost immediately and spewing bodies out into the snow. I estimated about fifty or so, most of them whole. Good. We wouldn’t have to go through dental records to identify them. The ones who’d been trapped inside, though—they’d be another story.

Thank God it hadn’t come down in a populated area, I thought, or we’d be pulling bodies out of buildings, too. And the plane would’ve been messed up a lot worse. As it was, we had a fairly simple reconstruction job ahead of us. That’s what I and my team did after a crash: put the wreckage back together again to find out what caused it. Sometimes it was almost impossible, but sometimes it could be fairly easy. This one looked easy. By the time we finished I figured we’d know just about anything we wanted to know about it, including what the passengers had eaten for dinner before the flight.

Gift-wrapped packages lay all over the snow. The half-dozen emergency rescue people who’d beat me here were kicking them aside as they went from body to body. Merry Christmas, I thought, checking my watch. It was 3 a.m. on that happiest of holidays.

The left wing lay another hundred yards beyond the fuselage. It was just a glint of reflected firelight until I waved at the pilot to fly over to it, and then in the landing lights I could see what looked like more bodies scattered around it. Eight of ’em—no, nine. One had been tossed quite a ways; I would have missed it if the chopper hadn’t drifted a moment in the updraft from the fires and jiggled the light beam out farther into the snow. In that momentary glimpse, it looked as if he was completely drenched in blood.

I looked back to the wing and the bodies lying around it, curious. The bodies looked strange. And why had they fallen so close together? The wing had undoubtedly tumbled when it ripped free, and bodies would naturally have come out of the plane with it, but the moment they were loose they would have all gone on their own ballistic trajectories. They should have been scattered all over the place, and back by the fuselage they were, but these eight were practically side by side.

A closer look explained why: they’d been tied together. I wondered for

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