He was running out of time. Lucia might not even be there. She might have got out – he’d told her to, hadn’t he? Made her promise.
He should get the hell out too.
He had to check.
This time he chanced half rising so he could feel further. He banged his head on another hard head hanging down. Found two more arms – one wearing a man’s watch – the other in wool.
A hand grabbed at his hair and he put up his own to feel it. A man’s hand. He grimaced as he tore his own hair out to get away, and groped blindly, his chest burning.
Then a naked arm, a woman’s small hand.
Tom guided himself up the arm until he touched the face. He went further up to the cotton-covered breast that fitted neatly in the palm of his hand.
‘Lucia!’
He shouldn’t have spoken. It took the last of his air. His head started to hurt.
He grappled with her belt. Ripped the buckle open, and she fell onto him. As he went down under her, Tom desperately tried to keep his sense of direction. He thought he had it.
Somewhere he could hear vague sirens but inside it was still so quiet. Eerily so.
On his knees, he gripped Lucia’s arm and started to drag her.
A choking, whining sound approached fast, like a ghoul in the mist, and a dark shape trampled over Lucia and fell onto Tom, flattening him with one leg twisted awkwardly.
‘Shit!’
The man lay on him, struggling, crying, his feet kicking at Tom’s hips for purchase as he tried to get up again. Tom shoved him up and forward.
‘Keep going!’ he croaked, and the man was gone.
Tom turned his face to breathe close to the new floor but this time there was little more than thick smoke, and his lungs started to burn. He put his hands round his mouth and gulped again, but it didn’t work. The air he’d breathed what seemed like hours ago was all he was going to get.
And Lucia hadn’t even had that.
His chest screaming from lack of oxygen, his eyes and nose streaming, Tom got to his feet, grabbed Lucia’s wrists again, and ran backwards with her, not caring about turning right for the door, or left, or wherever the fuck it was, just running and dragging her through the blazing horror of his juddering lungs until there was no floor, no ceiling, just a swift, airy nothingness, during which he dug his nails into Lucia’s wrists to keep her with him, then an odd squishy thump that made him think of throwing himself onto his couch at home. After that, blackness.
*
Major incident teams who’d rushed to the University of Kentucky Medical Center were sadly under-utilized. Hoping with stupid optimism for 127 casualties, they finally saw only fifty-two, ranging from the walking wounded to DOAs.
But it was fifty-two more than they would ever have seen if the starboard engine had disintegrated at 30,000 feet.
Lucia was one of thirteen passengers who arrived not breathing, paramedics keeping them alive in nearly pointless hope.
The paramedics who hitched Tom Patrick onto the ER gurney were confident he’d be okay, though. Despite smoke inhalation and concussion, they’d got him breathing fine in the rig on the way from Blue Grass. Other than that, he didn’t even have a break that they could find. He’d dropped out of the ruptured plane straight on top of some guy who’d obviously jumped out right before him. That guy – whose driver’s licence ID’d him as Lamarr Sweeter of Falls Church, Virginia – might have been killed by his own fall, or by Tom Patrick’s. They figured a coroner would eventually be able to tell but until then they went with the second option, as it was a far better bar-room anecdote.
43
TOM WOKE TO what he assumed must be a hallucination of Lucia’s mother sitting beside his bed in her white gloves, her head bent over a big old hardback copy of Little Women. He closed his eyes again, then forced them open more fully, and she was still there. He meant to say ‘hello’ but his throat wouldn’t co-operate, so he just grunted. She looked up from the book on her lap, stood up and came over to him.
He tried to say, ‘Where’s Lucia?’ but it didn’t sound right even in his own head. Still, it seemed Lucia’s mother understood him just fine, because she slapped him so hard in the face that Tom thought she’d broken his jaw. ‘Mr Patrick,’ she said politely, ‘if you ever come near my daughter again, I’ll kill you.’
Then she picked up her book and walked out.
Tom blinked at the fire-retardant ceiling tiles and felt a burning in his eyes that heralded tears of relief.
If Mrs Holmes never wanted him near her daughter again, that meant Lucia was alive. Her mother had answered his question with a killer right, but he’d take that news any way he could get it.
*
He woke again hours later to the much more welcome, though just as surprising, sight of Halo Jackson and Pete LaBello playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.
‘Hi,’ he managed, with far more clarity this time.
Pete raised a peace sign, which Tom surmised was Scissors, and came over.
‘How’re you doing?’
‘Okay.’
‘You want some water?’
Tom nodded, then dribbled most of it round the back of his neck. He looked at Halo. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Nice to see you too,’ said Halo.
‘How long have I been out?’
