Lilly edges closer. The smoke, already clearing, begins to part like a curtain to reveal the soft, scorched ground around the crash site. It dawns on Lilly that the pilot must have aimed for the soft ground of the stream bed, the surrounding leaf-matted earth now torn up by the violence of the crash. The main rotor, detached and lying on the ground twenty feet away, looks as though it’s tied in a knot.
“Gus! Austin! Keep your eyes on the periphery!” Martinez indicates the adjacent wall of white pines higher up the bank. “Noise is gonna draw a swarm!”
Gus and Austin whirl toward the woods and raise their muzzles at the darkness behind the trees.
Lilly feels the heat on her face as she approaches the wreckage. The fuselage lies on its right side, the tail fin and rear rotor horribly bent. One skid is torn off as though from the force of a giant can opener. The canopy and hatch windows are cracked and either steamed up from hyperventilating passengers or clouded over from the smoke. Regardless of the causes, though, it’s impossible to see inside the cockpit. The soot has covered most of the markings on the bulwark and chassis, but Lilly sees a series of letters along the tail boom. She sees a W and maybe an R … and that’s about it.
Martinez raises his hand suddenly as the noise of the fire dies down enough for them to hear the muffled cries coming from inside the cockpit. Martinez duckwalks closer.
Lilly moves in with her Rugers up, cocked and ready to rock. “Just be careful!”
Martinez takes a deep breath, and then climbs onto the side of the fuselage. Lilly moves closer, aiming her twin .22s at the hatch. Balancing on the battered steel frame, Martinez pulls his bandanna off and wraps it around the release handle. Lilly hears a high-pitched voice. “—outta here—!”
Martinez yanks.
The door snaps, squeaking open on shrieking hinges, releasing a puff of smoke and the tattered form of a frantic woman. Clad in a torn down jacket and scarf, stippled in blood, she bursts out of the cockpit, coughing and screaming, “—GET ME OUTTA HERE—!!”
Lilly lowers her guns, realizing that the woman has not yet turned. Martinez pulls the victim out of the death trap. The woman writhes in his arms, her bloodless face a mask of agony. One of her legs is badly burned, the fabric of her jeans blackened to a crisp, glistening with pus and blood. She holds her left arm against her tummy, the fracture at the elbow bulging through the sleeve of her sweater.
“Gimme a hand, Lilly!”
They carry the woman away from the wreckage and lower her to the ground. She looks to be in her late thirties, maybe early forties. Fair skinned, dishwater-blond hair, squirming in pain, her face wet with tears, she babbles hysterically, “You don’t understand! We have to—!”
“It’s okay, it’s all right,” Lilly says to her, gently brushing her damp hair from her face. “We can help you, we have a doctor not far from here.”
“Mike—! He’s still—!” Her eyelids flutter, her body spasming from the pain, her eyes rolling back in her head from the shock. “We can’t leave—we have to—have to get him out—we have to—!!”
Lilly touches her cheek, the flesh as clammy and slimy as an oyster. “Try to stay calm.”
“—we have to bury him … it’s something I … before he—” The woman’s head lolls to the side, and she sinks into unconsciousness with the suddenness of a candle flame snuffing out.
Lilly looks up at Martinez.
“The pilot,” Martinez utters, meeting Lilly’s gaze with a hard look.
By now the smoke has cleared and the heat has dwindled, and both Gus and Austin have returned to gaze over their shoulders. Martinez rises to his feet, and he goes back to the wreck. Lilly follows. They climb up onto one of the mangled skids and boost themselves up enough to see into the open hatchway. The odor of charred meat assaults their senses as they gaze inside.
The pilot is dead. In the hazy, sparking enclosure, the man named Mike sits slumped in his scorched leather bomber jacket—still harnessed to his seat—the entire left side of his body blackened and disfigured from the in-flight fire. The fingers of one gloved hand have melted and fused to the control stick. And just for an instant, staring into that hellish cockpit, Lilly gets the feeling this guy was a hero. He brought the craft down in the spongy cleavage of the creek, saving the life of his passenger—his wife, his girlfriend?
“Too late to do anything for this guy,” Martinez murmurs next to her.
“Obviously,” she says, lowering herself back to the ground. She glances across the clearing, where Austin now kneels by the unconscious woman, feeling her neck for a pulse. Gus nervously keeps an eye on the woods. Lilly wipes her face. “But we should probably honor her request, right?”
Martinez climbs down and looks around the clearing, the smoke wafting away on the wind. He wipes his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Boss!” Gus calls out from the edge of the woods. Troubling sounds from the surrounding forest drift on the wind. “We ought to be thinking about gettin’ the hell outta here pretty soon.”
“We’re coming!” Martinez turns to Lilly. “We’ll take the woman back.”
“But what about—?”
Martinez lowers his voice. “You know what the Governor’s gonna do with this guy, right?”
Lilly’s spine tingles with rage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Governor.”
“Lilly—”
“This guy saved this woman’s life.”
“Listen to me. We’re gonna have a hell of a time just getting her back through these woods.”
Lilly lets out an anguished sigh. “And you don’t think the Governor’s gonna find out we left the pilot?”
Martinez turns away from her and spits angrily. Wipes his mouth. Thinks it over.
“Boss!” Gus calls out again, sounding exceedingly nervous.
“I said we’re coming, goddamnit!” Martinez stares at the scorched ground, thinking and agonizing … until the whole issue becomes a foregone conclusion.
SIX