The Blue (The Complete Novel) (18 page)

Out of here! I tell Voley as I walk into a million floating particles of dust that ride the light beams cutting through the dim tunnel’s portholes. Voley looks up  at me for just a second, and then drops back down to the body. Ignoring me. And before I can convince myself that from the corner of my eye it looks like he’s starting to nibble, to test how frozen the flesh of the dead man is, I turn away. My eyes scan the darkness in the back where the light beams don’t reach. The closed compartments that must be hiding Russell’s treasures. The two plastic cases on the floor, one with the first aid symbol on it. The other a mystery. Get to work Tanner, I tell myself over and over as I step around Voley and the body. And as much as the sound that comes when I reach the back of the plane sounds like the deep rumbling thunder I fear most, I tell myself it’s just the plane settling, just the steel under my weight, and I ignore it, fixed on the plastic boxes. I bend down and lift the lid, and before I can even see inside, I’m sure I hear a different noise altogether—not the plane settling, or the sound of the floe splitting. I take a moment to make sure, to register it properly, because I can’t tell how it makes me feel. And I’m sure. It’s the ripping of flesh coming from just behind me.

   Part 4

Chapter 19

I carry the box to the front of the crumpled plane to catch a shaft of light. It’s the black one. The first thing I see inside it is more black. The dull sheen of a rectangular plastic box. This one has knobs on it, and buttons, and a dial. The corner says 2-Meter Band in tiny print. And then, wedged in against dark Styrofoam padding is a hand receiver. I wiggle it free and see that a long spiraling cord connects it to the plastic box. There’s a small, thin screen, light silver, dead, on the box. A radio.

My first instinct is to mash every button. To play with the thing until it turns on. But I can’t. I have to put it down. Because now it’s become clear what’s happening—Voley has managed to start eating the body of the man. I finally look over and there he is—his head down, biting right along the neck. I think there will be a sign of blood, that everything must have warmed up too much in this metal oven and his fluids won’t be frozen any more. But there’s no sign of red. And I don’t take a step in for a better angle, and I don’t shoo him away either. I turn my eyes toward the other box, the red first-aid kit. And then up to the overhead compartments. Many of them still closed. I try to distract myself with everything else in the plane—everything but what Voley’s doing. Finally, it’s all too much. I step outside the shell and sit down on the ice with the open black box.

The entire radio slides right out. In the sun, hitting down directly from the wide stretch of open sky above, the thin screen glints sharply. I have to close my eyes because for a second the glare is almost as bright as when I stared directly at the sun. I reposition the weight of the radio and the glare dies off and I start to hit the buttons on the thing. Almost right away, the second knob I push in, the screen turns yellow. Not a sound comes out, but in my excitement that the thing’s not dead, I start twisting the bigger knobs. Finally, one of them seems to change the volume. I turn that one all the way up, waiting for salvation. But the noise is familiar—it’s the same static I heard on the
Resilience.
Nothing but white noise.

A series of numbers stares back at me on the sliver of yellow screen. 146.800. They mean nothing to me until I start turning the other big knob. The numbers start to shift. 146.810, then 146.820. I spin the knob faster and the numbers jump faster. 147—148—149. A million numbers. Each one a lifeline. And suddenly I’m lost, wishing for Dusty, checking every single station I can, knowing I’ll never have enough time.

            I start to turn the knob slower again, waiting for the sign of broken static, the sound of a voice—even a recording like Nuke Town’s. Something to let me know where the hell I am. If I’m even in Colorado still. But nothing ever comes. Just white noise. And I realize that I’ve completely lost track of time, even though I had no real track in the first place, because now a line of shade is hitting me, the sunlight traveling behind the tip of the plane’s tail.

For everything I’m worth, I try to ignore my stomach. To ignore the pains of hunger that are driving through me. But even the adrenaline of finding the good-for-nothing radio begins to fade. And I have to eat. The conversation in my head starts out slowly—
that was the one thing you were holding on to.
I repeat the idea over and over. As if it was the trophy Russell and I were carrying around with us. Not eating people.
Or was it? Was it just his piece of the veneer?
And it comes through my head that we all pick and choose which things to keep and which to leave behind. Ernest talks to me, reminding me about what his own stance had been:
I’d only do it if I had to.
And then it makes sense. I’ve been carrying this piece of the veneer for all this time for Russell. And I’ll keep carrying it if I survive. But I’m not going to survive if I lose all my strength and die from starvation first. And before the vision of cutting flesh slips through my imagination, I return to the plane and take the red first aid kit. Hoping for a lighter. When I pass by Voley, all I hear is the chewing, the tearing. I don’t even look.

In the half-light by the wing I open the red first-aid kit. It’s stocked: bandages, cream tubes, pill bottles, gauze, a couple syringes, an empty plastic jug, small bottles with clear liquid in them, and then, a tiny lighter. Lying right on top of everything else, not even sealed in, like someone added it as an afterthought. The afterthought to save our lives. I grab the lighter and drop the box and flick the wheel. It lights on the first try. The flame leaps up and dances in front of me, then settles into one line, telling me I’m going to live a little while longer. At least until the floe breaks apart and sinks us. Because then, as much as I want the metal wings to float, and become rafts for us, I know they won’t. And even though the ice will crack apart at any moment, maybe with us inside the plane when it happens, trapping us the whole way down, I walk back inside. I need something to light on fire.

I climb over the center aisle where for the moment Voley has stopped making his chewing noises. Instead he’s watching me, as if he wants to know why I’m not eating too. I tell myself I will have to check the plane, make sure there’s no food first. It’s still only a last resort. But then, something in me already knows there won’t be food, even as I open the first overhead compartment. It clicks and the shelf rises up to the ceiling, and it’s empty. I move along to the next one of the three in the row. Click, rise, empty. Over and over. Finally, in the last compartment, I see something. A duffel bag. I pull it from the ceiling and it crashes off the seat’s head and then lands in the center aisle. I kneel down, turn it over, and unzip it. Inside are clothes. Piles and piles of clothes, all packed in tightly. Sweaters and socks and underwear and pants. I pull one sweater out and hold it up. It’s twice my size. And then, on the bottom, there’s a black rain suit. I scatter everything on the floor. Will this burn? I ask Voley, holding up one of the shirts. He flaps his ears back and then lowers them, and his attention returns to the body.

I take one last look through the plane—behind the seats, on the floor, and through the compartments. No food. And so the process of what I have to do starts to become clear. I quickly sort through the clothes, leaving everything I’ll be able to wear on top of what I already have. And then, in two trips, I carry the rest over to the metal platform of the broken plane wing where it lies on the ice. I pile the clothes up there. And my first instinct is to light them, but then I realize, the fire might be finished by the time I get the body to it. It passes through me with a shudder that I have to cut the man up first. The knife slides out of my pocket. I hold it up to the light, watching the edge of the blade, and then I feel it with my finger. Razor sharp. It won’t be hard to do.

When I return to the plane, I have to tell Voley to back off twice before he moves away. What I see makes me turn away. There’s a line of ooze, like it’s only half-liquid, running from the man’s neck. But his face is mostly gone. I see bits of white covered mostly with red and pink, all of it dressed in slobber. The only parts Voley could get to. I look down at the body and ignore the face. My hands work on finding the zipper to undo his jacket. Once I find it and pull it down, I dip the edge of the knife into the first layer of his shirt. At first it won’t go through, so I angle the blade toward me and strike harder, poking a hole. I push the blade away from me. It’s like I have no strength left and I hardly make a tear in the fabric. I keep going though, and once I find a rhythm, and the repeated pulling and pushing starts to slit the sweater in half, I see the next layer. Another shirt. Finally I open the sweater wide enough to start a cut in the next shirt. But it’s when I get through that, and see a bare white stomach that I freeze. What the hell am I doing? I ask myself in a dead voice. And I realize I can’t cut into his stomach. Because there’s nothing in there to eat. I have to restart everything, and this time, work on the leg. That’s where there’re muscles and no intestines. That’s where I can carve out something to eat.

            I slide back a few feet on my knees and position myself over the kneecap. I glance back and see that Voley’s patiently watching me from the door, lying down, waiting his turn. The front half of his body is inside the plane and the other half is out of sight, catching sunlight outside. For a moment I think of the deepening cracks, and listen for the rumble of a split, but there’s nothing. No sign that we’re going down yet. I push the notion to get up and check from my mind, reminding myself it’s now or never. Eat or die. And even if the ice never cracks apart, I may never be able to work up the nerve to do this again.

The knife has trouble slicing through the tough fabric of the pants, and by the time I work through the two layers of the stuff he’s wearing, I’m sweating. Not stopping to gather some melt to drink from outside, I grab both sides of the slits I’ve cut and begin to pull them apart. With a loud rip, the fabric tears wide open. And there, white and hairy, is the leg. But it’s not a leg anymore, I remind myself. Over and over, I tell myself it’s nothing now. Nothing that belongs to a person. And for some reason, that helps me as I finally work up the nerve to stab down. When it happens, and the knife barely goes in an inch, I realize it’s going to take a lot more pressure than I thought. He doesn’t feel it, I tell myself. And that half-thawed or not, I have to put everything I have into this. I pull up, wiggling to work the knife free, and see the stain of blood on the silver. It’s so dark it looks black, not red. And as much as I expect the blood to start shooting out from the cut, streaking and pulsing everywhere, nothing happens. No heartbeat and nothing to move the blood anymore. Just hardening gel. So I take aim and stab down again. This time, I tell myself it’s a piece of wood, and not somebody’s leg. No one feels what you’re doing to them, I keep reminding myself as I stab. And the knife does its job, sliding in almost three inches this time.

It gets easier as I work myself into a routine—up and down, wiggle, and then move just an inch along a line, and stab in again. I start to carve out a shape. A long rectangle that I have no idea how I will pull out from the body. Finally, once I’ve got the shape cut out in the leg, and the color of the skin has started to darken, I stab down on a slant from the top, trying to wedge it out. Over and over I beat down, sweating, pushing the blade through the muscle of the thigh, until a part of the leg starts to come loose. Voley wanders up, sniffing around, wanting to know if I have something for him. A treat. I tell him to back up, and then I have it in my hand. A piece of skin and muscle about five inches long. Without thinking twice, I stuff it into my pocket and out of sight, and then begin searching for something I can use to hang it over the fire. Any kind of metal rod or tray. It dawns on me that Russell’s fishing rod would finally be put to good use if I had it still, but it’s long gone. And I leave the plane and walk over the crack by the nose, hardly paying any attention to it, in a frenzy over the food I’ll soon be eating. I start to pick through the rubble.

Near the good wing there’s a jagged metal rod half buried in the snow. After I wiggle it back and forth for a minute, it’s free enough that I can kneel down and start to dig around the base of ice it’s locked into. Finally, it pulls out, and then, without thinking, the meat comes out of my pocket and I use the hooked end of the sharp metal to pierce the meat. Voley follows at my heels until I reach the clothes pile on the broken wing, but as soon as I tell him
no
when he goes after the meat on the spear where I lay it down, he retreats back to the plane. I know he’ll get into the man’s leg now that it’s opened up, but I don’t care. I just want the fire going.