“Open your eyes,” he said, his own tone growing sharp. He pointed to the small trees that had poked through the bottom of the trench. “Look at those saplings. Come on—they’re at least a year old. At least that, and maybe older. Some of them look two years old.”
“They’re saplings, Benny. Saplings bend. They could have bent over and sprung back up.”
“No way. They’d have been snapped off. Look, there are bigger trees that were torn right out of the ground.”
It was true; the dead trunks of a hundred small pine trees lay in the trench, their limbs snapped, roots torn out of the sandy soil. Many of them were ripped completely apart, and there were dried sticks that could easily have been saplings that were killed during the crash. Benny pulled a few up and brought them over to Nix.
“See?” he said. “These were the saplings the plane hit. Those others could never have survived this big freaking thing crashing down on them.”
“So what?” she demanded. Somehow, with her voice lowered to a whisper, she sounded even angrier and more annoyed with him. “Since when are you an expert on plant growth?”
“I’m not an expert, Nix, but I’m not stupid, either.”
Nix started to say something, then thought better of it and instead said, “It could have crashed after we saw it. That’s eight months. You don’t know how fast juniper saplings grow, Benny. These could be only eight months old.”
“Maybe,” Benny conceded, “but I doubt it.”
They moved forward together, cautiously, eyes searching the dead flying machine.
They were so riveted by the plane that they did not look into the surrounding woods and so did not see the dead zoms sprawled twenty yards down a crooked game trail; or the two bloody spots where a pair of reapers had died from Lilah’s savage attack. Their bodies were gone, and bloody footprints trailed away into the shrubs.
Nix went over and stood by the draped plastic that hung from the open door. Benny continued walking until he was at the base of the upright section of wing, then he stared down the length of the trench at the other wing. He looked at the twisted blades of the propellers. Two six-bladed props had been attached to each wing, and one had fallen off. Benny went over to it and touched the tip of one of the propeller blades.
“I’ll admit that I don’t know everything about planes,” he said, “but after we got back last year, I looked through every book we had in the library and in tons of magazines over at Chong’s. This is definitely not the one we saw. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Why?” she demanded, and there was mingled anger, fear, and hope in her eyes.
He was smiling as he turned.
“Nix, the thing we saw flying over the mountain was a jet . . . and this thing has propellers,” he said. “Jets don’t have propellers.”
Nix’s eyes flared and her mouth opened, but for the moment she was totally incapable of speech. Her eyes cut instantly from Benny’s face to the blades of the massive propeller that lay in the dirt behind him.
“And that opens up a whole new can of worms,” he added. He patted the wing lightly. “Because no matter which one of us is right about when this crashed, it definitely crashed more than a dozen years after all the lights went out.”
“God . . . ,” breathed Nix.
“That means there were at least two planes in the air. And if there were two . . . how many more might be out there?”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Just after Christmas I had a big fight with Benny. He found one of my notebooks. He swore that he didn’t mean to read it. He said it was on the porch lying open, faceup. He saw what I’d written, and he flipped through the pages.
He had no right to do that. He had no right to make a big deal about it. So what if I wrote “We have to find the jet” a hundred times on every page? I told him it was a way to focus my mind and help me get ready for leaving town.
He didn’t believe me, and we had a really bad fight.
I am NOT obsessed. Benny’s a jerk sometimes.
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