The Blue (The Complete Novel) by Turkot Joseph

Author:Turkot, Joseph [Turkot, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Apocalyptic/Dystopian
Published: 2014-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

The aisle is cramped and narrow and runs up like a hill. The air smells stale. Everything is much darker than the storm-gray skies dimming the pack outside. And there, three rows of chairs high and deep is the man, wedged against the glass. I glance behind me and see the cockpit. Or what’s left of it. The entire front of the plane is buried under the ice, and all I can make out is the top of one of the pilot chairs and the broken glass of a windshield that merged into the ceiling metal. And then the ice blends with the snow and the frost and the metal and the glass and it all becomes one thing. But the hand. I see it raised out, just a bit of a forearm. The rest of the body submerged. I turn away, and even as I take my first uphill step, grabbing the back of a chair to pull myself while Voley watches, the dreams of Russell rush through my head.

I hear him talking—the plane will have food. A raft. Fuel. Maybe a map. Supplies—maybe another gun. He talked for hours about the plane, and all that time, I’d thought I’d tuned him out. Pushed away his delirium, thinking we were only marching to die under the blue. And now I’m in the plane. The taps of the rain overhead remind me that the blue isn’t even here to die under anymore, replaced by the return of the rain and the waves and the wind and a complete steel sky. And as I pull myself, one limb after the next, up the slippery center aisle, looking at the overhead compartments and the burnt seats and the floor, searching for something, anything but the body, I see nothing. Like someone ransacked every one of Russell’s dreams before the fire in the plane even went out. Someone else must have survived and stripped the thing. And then, right before the body, I stop to the sound of a loud creaking.

It sounds like the whole raised part of the plane is going to crash back down to the ice, and then there’ll be ripping metal, and it will cut me open and leave me here, buried next to the stranger until the great floe melts into the sea, and we’ll all go down together, a shared tomb, somewhere down in the silent and watery towns and roadways far below. All of this a reef. But my feet still feel sturdy, and the plane doesn’t even budge, and my mind turns sharply to the man. For some reason, now that I know the plane’s stable, I expect the loud creaking to wake him up. As if I’ve forgotten he’s dead. And I wait, strangely, with the knife drawn and pointed out, ready to slash his face if he moves. But there’s no movement, and after a long spell of fear, I decide to turn his head around.

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