Flesh & Bone by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-09-11T07:51:28+00:00

PART TWO

BROKEN BIRDS

Shallow men believe in luck.

Strong men believe in cause and effect.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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 the jet.” Tears broke and fell down Nix’s freckled cheeks. “Look at it. Everything’s ruined. Oh God, Benny . . . everything’s ruined.”

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.

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