The Glaciermen #3: Awake

Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Welcome to the third preview installment of The Glaciermen. If there’s a typo or two (or five), please forgive me—these are early manuscript previews. I usually give them a quick read-through edit after the first draft, but other than that, you are getting raw creative output. (Consider it like extra-fresh sushi right out of the water, or a raw onion straight from the ground… maybe food isn’t the best analogy.)

Hey ho, let’s go.

(Link to previous segment if you missed it, and a link to the beginning, if you’re new).

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Awake

Lee awoke, senses overcome by a pounding throb inside his skull. He groaned, and after fighting back tears from the pain, forced his eyes open. The air was cold, and bright light shone through the cracked window of the airplane to his left. The cabin was strewn with debris. Yellow masks hung from plastic tubes coming out of the panels over seats. Various luggage cases were strewn around, loose clothing hanging on seats after busting out of suitcases.

Lee’s seat was near the back of the plane. The rows of seats angled slightly upward ahead of him. Halfway toward the front of the plane, a great breach in the fuselage streamed light and wind into the cabin, as if the entire aircraft had been cracked in half like a stick. Past the breach the front half of the cabin angled down and away out of view.  Low murmurs of speech rose above the sound of the wind passing through and around the fuselage. Some of the passengers were going through the mess, searching for this or that. Some were not moving at all.

Lee turned to his mother. She was slumped over in the seat next to him. He reached out and shook her shoulder. Her head lolled to the side. There was a grisly gash on her forehead, and dried blood caked down her face. Lifeless eyes looked at Lee, but saw nothing. He turned away and began to cry, his small torso racking with sobs. No one came to comfort him.

After a while, Lee stopped crying. He rubbed a sleeve across his face to wipe away the snot from his tears, then reached down to unclasp his seatbelt. At that moment, a man in a white shirt with three black and gold stripes on the shoulders clambered over the crack toward the front of the plane.

“This is the copilot, is everybody okay back here?” He shouted down the tube. 

Some nodded, some ignored him, but a number immediately began peppering him with questions.

“Hey, one at a time!” He said, then pointing to someone, “You first.”

“Where are we?” one asked.

“Somewhere in southern Greenland. We were passing near it when the electrical storm hit us. It looks like we crash landed on the glacial sheet past the coastal mountains. I think we should be relatively close to Nuuk, the capital.”

“Is there rescue coming?” another voice prompted.

“We sent out a mayday, but the storm was pretty rough, so we didn’t receive any response, and the crash killed the radio,” he said, but seeing the looks on the faces of the passengers, quickly added, “though I’m sure the message got through. They’re probably already on their way now.”

Once again the man was hounded with a dozen questions at once. He had to raise his voice to get them to quiet down enough to be heard.

“Are there any doctors, nurses, or EMTs here? We need to help the wounded, and…” he hesitated, “... account for those who didn’t make it.”

Four hands went up. 

“Good. You two,” he said, pointing to a couple with raised hands, “there’s emergency kits in the lockers at the back. Take these and get them open.” He tossed one of them a set of keys. He turned to the remaining pair.

“And you two, come with me. We’ll go row by row and check everyone.”

Lee watched as they made their way down the aisle, asking questions, checking pulses, and closing eyelids as they went. It was a woman who made it to him first, checking his mother for a pulse, then looking at him with watery eyes above a forced smile.

“Hey there kiddo, can you tell me your name?” 

“Le… Lee.”

“Hi Lee. I’m Sandy.” She paused. “Is this your mom?”

Lee nodded, fresh tears escaping from his eyes.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, holding back her own tears, “Let’s get you up.”

Sandy leaned past Lee’s mother’s body, taking him up in her arms and lifting him from the seat. He nuzzled into the crook of her neck, sobbing once more. She carried him to the back compartment of the plane where the co-pilot had gathered with the others. Lee heard them discussing their predicament, but he was lost amidst his tears. After a few minutes, the woman set him down and Lee was overcome with exhaustion from the crying and headache, collapsing into dreamless slumber once more.

† † †

Lee stirred. Near him in the compartment at the back of the plane were several people conversing in hushed tones. Among them was the woman who had carried him, whose name he had forgotten, the man in the white shirt with gold stripes on the shoulders who had organized everyone, and another man in a similar shirt, but his shoulders had more golden stripes on them. Someone called him captain. He was holding a bloodied cloth to the side of his head. Occasionally he lifted it to gesticulate while speaking. Underneath, there was a long gash splitting his neatly combed white hair like a fissure, and dried blood lined down his neck onto a brown-stained collar.

Lee did not know how long he had been sleeping, but as the voices went on, he realized he did not feel sad anymore. He did not feel much of anything in fact, even if he thought of his mother, or the way her eyes had looked at him, cold and empty. He was cold too now, and shivered as he inhaled chilly air. Snow was fluttering down through the gap in the fuselage near the front of the plane. Occasional gusts of wind would blast by, sucking more snow into the break.

When Lee exhaled, he saw wisps of white vapor coming from his mouth. He pursed his lips and blew out, making a small plume of vapor shoot upward. He stuck two fingers to his lips, pulled in a breath, then blew out again, miming the smoking of the cowboys in the westerns he used to watch when he visited his grandfather.

Soon tiring of the play, he turned his attention to the conversation, which was now transitioning from muted whispers to harsh tones, the words being thrown like knives. The man with fewer gold stripes, the copilot, was speaking urgently and with a bitter tone.

“But we can’t stay, Captain. Rescue would have been here by now if they heard our initial mayday. We’re completely exposed out here, the hull is breached, and the sun is already starting to go down. We will freeze to death if we try to stick out the night. Plus, the bodies are freaking some people out, me included.”

The captain looked frustrated, and crossed his arms before saying, “I’m not leaving my aircraft, Reynolds. Somebody’s got to get the radio working and get a distress call going out. If that doesn’t happen it won’t matter if we’re in here or in that ice cave.”

The copilot, a burly man identified as Reynolds, retorted, “We wouldn’t need to if you’d let me take the stick. Fine pilot you are, crashing us into the middle of nowhere when we could have glided down toward the city to the north.”

Several of the others looked questingly at the captain.

“Watch it, Reynolds! You know as well as I we’d never have made it there—it was too many miles—and the controls were fried and I was flying manual. Attempting a sea landing would have been suicide, much less the mountainous terrain at the coast. The flat plane of the glacier was the only option.”

Reynolds, feeling the diminishing confidence in the captain among the small band around them, took advantage of the moment to seize control of the situation.

“Whatever, captain,” he spat, “You stay here, work the radio if you like. I’m gathering up everyone who wants to live and we’re taking shelter in the ice cave. At least we can start a few fires in there. Don’t worry, I’ll come back in the morning to thaw out your corpse.”

The older man glared at Reynolds. “You’re right, I am the captain, and I am ordering you to stand down.”
“An order? Ha!” Reynolds quipped, “What is this, the military? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway—I’m not dying in here. And I’m not gonna let these people die over the pride of one old man. Consider this my resignation—”

The copilot grabbed hold of one of his shoulder stripes and jerked hard. It came loose with the sound of tearing fabric. He tore the second one off, then tossed them at the captain’s feet.

The captain, glaring, said, “You’re gonna regret that.”

“At least I’ll be alive to do so,” Reynolds said. He turned to the others. “C’mon. Let the old man go down with the ship. Help me gather the survivors. Tell them to bring their luggage and any cold weather gear they’ve got.”

He looked to one of the flight attendants, “There should be flare guns in these emergency kits. Leave one for the captain, and take the rest. We can use them to start fires.”

The authoritative tone of his voice was enough—the others began to go about their ordered tasks, submitting to a new authority. The captain stood back, ignored, fuming but unwilling to escalate the conflict further. The flight attendant had opened the emergency kits and, avoiding his gaze, handed him a flare gun. He snatched it from her grasp. She then sheepishly turned and followed down the aisle after the copilot, who was now directing the surviving passengers.

Sandy, who had chosen to avoid engaging in the power struggle, came back over to Lee. She crouched next to him and offered a forced smile. He looked back at her. She was middle aged, with a round, friendly face and brown hair that was just starting to grey, and there was a pair of glasses resting atop a small nose. She reminded him of one of the teachers from school.

“Hey kiddo, the people in charge have a plan. You up for a little adventure?”

Lee nodded.

“It’s going to get too cold to stay here in the plane soon, but the good news is someone found a cave in the ice right nearby, so we’re moving over there and will start up some fires and get all warm and toasty, okay? It’ll be like camping. You like camping, right?” she said, smiling again, though her eyes betrayed a deep anxiety.

 Lee, who had never been camping, nodded again none the less.

“Great! Now let’s get you bundled up. You look freezing.”

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And that’s it for now folks

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