Getting Air Read online

  Soon I’d wake up, go downstairs to get a glass of orange juice and say hi to my mom and dad. Maybe one of them would be able to give me a ride to the skatepark at the mall if they didn’t have too many errands to run. If not, I’d just get together with the guys and we’d skate the ledges over by the middle school.

  I was lost in these thoughts when a squirrel jumped over my legs. I screamed. This was not my bedroom. I wouldn’t be going skating today. I was in the woods. It wasn’t a dream.

  There was no sound of helicopters waiting to take us home. There were no friendly rescuers with food and water and clean clothes for us. No news media to interview us about the ordeal we had been through. There were just the six of us lying in the dirt in the middle of the forest. David was already awake, fussing off to the side of our little campsite with some sticks. The others were opening their eyes and stretching, probably only awake because I screamed. Julia got up and hobbled around despite the splint on her leg.

  “Zimmerman, you scared him away!” David complained. “I was gonna eat that squirrel for breakfast.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked David.

  “I call it the Deathtrap,” he said. “I dug this hole in the ground and covered it with leaves. If an animal runs over the leaves he falls in. There are even sharp sticks at the bottom to stab him.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said. The thought of killing and eating a squirrel for breakfast made me feel sick to my stomach.

  “Any sign of a plane or rescue team?” asked Arcadia as she got up and brushed the dust and twigs from her flight attendant’s uniform.

  “No,” David said, “and I’ve been up for over an hour. Arcadia, grab some of those branches from that tree, will you? We need to build some kind of a shelter. Henry, maybe you can see if there’s a brook or stream or source of water nearby. And Julia, why don’t you and Jimmy look around for nuts or something we can eat? We’ve got a lot to do. Am I the only one who’s starved?”

  “What shall I do?” Mrs. Herschel asked. “Would you like me to make a rocking chair out of sticks and sit in it?”

  David stopped fussing with the branches and stared at Mrs. Herschel, as if he wasn’t sure if she was goofing on him or not.

  “You can—” David started.

  “Don’t you tell me what I should do!” Mrs. Herschel scolded. “Who made you king of the forest? Why don’t you sit down and put a sock in it?”

  Whoa! David sat down right where he was, almost falling into his Deathtrap. He does have a tendency to boss people around. There have been more than a few times when Henry and I got into arguments with David and he walked out on us when he didn’t get his way. But he always comes back. I was glad that David took charge when we were on the plane. I guess he decided that one of us had to be the leader on the ground too, and it should be him.

  “Sonny,” Mrs. Herschel continued. “I grew up during the 1930s. We had the Depression in England too. I worked in a factory putting together airplanes during World War II. I lived through Hitler and the Nazis and the Cold War. What have you done in your bleeding life? Roll down the street on a piece of wood with wheels on it?”

  “Hey, no problem,” David said. “You can be in charge if you want.”

  “I don’t want to be in charge!” Mrs. Herschel replied. “But a kilometer away are a bunch of my closest friends. I think that before we fuss with eating and drinking and building shelters, we should give them a proper burial. You show respect for the dead. That’s the least we can do for them.”

  “She’s right,” Arcadia said.

  It was a long walk through the woods to find the rest of the plane. I told my sister to sit and rest her leg, but she insisted on coming with us. There were skid marks on the ground showing where our section of the plane had slid. It was amazing to think that we could slide so far through the woods.

  Finally, we reached the back part of the plane. Or what was left of it, anyway. My guess had been right. The force of hitting two thick trees must have caused the front part of the plane to break off and slide forward. That’s what saved our lives.

  Even though we had run out of fuel, there must have been enough left in the wings to ignite the back of the plane. We were lucky it didn’t burn down the whole forest. The metal frame was twisted and blackened. It was a miracle that Mrs. Herschel got out before the fire destroyed the back of the plane.

  Unfortunately, there weren’t any people left for us to find. We looked all over for survivors. None of us said a word until we were finished combing the area. A few of us stopped in the middle to go off to the side and cry, be sick, whatever.

  “I hope your friends didn’t suffer much,” Arcadia said, putting an arm around Mrs. Herschel.

  David found a piece of metal from the plane that was shaped a little bit like a cross. He stuck it in the ground and said a prayer. We were all shaken. Even Henry bowed his head. I’ll never think of people the same way again.

  We searched for any food, water, or supplies that we could salvage from the wreck, but there was nothing. Everything had burned. Scattered behind the plane were some suitcases that must have fallen out of the cargo hold before the plane exploded.

  “Would it be disrespectful for us to take this luggage?” I asked Mrs. Herschel. “There might be something inside we can use.”

  “I’m sure my friends would be honored if we made use of anything they had,” she replied.

  “We’ll need to make a few trips to carry it all,” Julia said.

  “No,” replied Mrs. Herschel. “Let’s take everything now. I don’t want to come back here ever again.”

  Each of us grabbed a couple of suitcases and lugged them back to the campsite with us.

  CHAPTER 10:

  Priorities

  The suitcases were heavy. What do old ladies bring with them when they go to conventions, I wondered. Weights? When we finally made it back to our campsite, Mrs. Herschel suggested we open the suitcases right away. She thought there might be food or water in there that could hold us over until we got rescued.

  There wasn’t. Mostly, the suitcases were filled with clothing—those funny-looking patterned dresses that old ladies wear all the time. We took out some nail clippers that might come in handy down the line, but we didn’t have much use for cotton balls, soap, cameras, dental floss, or jars of Vaseline. Our hopes soared when Julia found a cell phone, but it wouldn’t get a signal. None of our cell phones worked. That confirmed our suspicion that we were out of the United States. We were probably in Canada.

  It felt strange, going through the luggage of a person who was no longer alive. It felt like an invasion of their privacy. But we had to do it. There was always the chance that we might find something that would keep us alive.

  “Hey, check it out!” Henry shouted as he went through one of the pocketbooks. “Jackpot!”

  Henry held up a hundred-dollar bill.

  “We’re rich!” said Julia.

  “There are ten of them in here,” Henry said. “A thousand bucks.”

  “A lot of good that’ll do us,” said Arcadia. “I’d rather find a cell phone that works.”

  Mrs. Herschel looked at the name tag attached to the suitcase that had money in it. It said “Ann Constantine” on it.

  “Annie was planning to spend a few days in Las Vegas after the convention was over,” she said sadly. “She loved playing those beastly slot machines.”

  Henry gave Mrs. Herschel the money to hold and repacked the bag neatly. We put the suitcases in a pile under a big piece of metal so they wouldn’t get wet. That’s when I noticed David was chewing something.

  Maybe it was a leaf, I figured. But then he slipped his hand in his pocket, took something out, and put it in his mouth. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

  “Hey, put that down!” Arcadia told him. Everybody looked at David.

  “What are you eating?” Julia asked him.

  “Pretzels,” he admitted. “They were in one of the suitcases. What’s the big d
eal?”

  “If it’s no big deal, why were you hiding them?” demanded Arcadia.

  “I wasn’t hiding them!” David insisted.

  “There are six of us here!” Mrs. Herschel said to him. “We’re all hungry! What makes you decide that you should get the only food we have?”

  “Man!” David said. “You people need to lighten up. We’re not stranded on some desert island. Lots of people are looking for us. We’ll probably be rescued any minute. Here, take the stupid bag of pretzels if you want ’em so badly.”

  He flipped the bag to Arcadia, but she dropped it. A few of the pretzels fell in the dirt. Ordinarily, any of us would have thrown them away. Arcadia scooped the loose pretzels up and put them back in the bag.

  “Are you daft?” Mrs. Herschel said to David. “What if we’re not rescued right away? What if it takes weeks for anyone to find us? What if it takes months? You don’t know what’s going to happen. We might need these pretzels to save one of us who is dying from starvation.”

  “Not cool, Dave,” Henry said.

  None of us had much to say after that, and we puttered around trying to look busy, but mostly trying not to look at each other.

  “What’s taking them so long?” Arcadia finally said, peering up through the trees.

  “Yeah, it’s been about twenty-four hours since the crash,” Henry said.

  “It could be longer than that,” Julia pointed out. “We might have been unconscious for a while.”

  “They should have found us by now,” Arcadia said.

  They were right. The sky was blue. Not a cloud up there. There was no reason why we couldn’t have been rescued.

  “We might have flown way off course,” I guessed. “That’s probably why they’re having trouble finding us.”

  “Are you kidding me?” David asked. “This is the twenty-first century. They’ve got GPS, emergency-locator transmitters, position-indicating radio beacons. They’ve got satellites with cameras that are so powerful they can read license plates from outer space. They’ve got night-vision goggles. Search and rescue teams with 4 x 4s, dogs, ground trackers, and guys on horseback. They can find anybody if they want to.”

  “Every plane has a black box,” Arcadia said. “It would tell exactly where the plane is, and the box is so strong it can survive any crash.”

  “I saw this comedian on TV once,” Henry said. “He said that if the metal they use to make those black boxes is so strong, why don’t they just make planes out of them?”

  Nobody was in the mood to laugh. Henry only made things worse by explaining that if a plane was made of really strong stuff, it wouldn’t crash. Nothing kills a joke more than explaining it.

  “Under the circumstances, I don’t find that very amusing,” Mrs. Herschel said.

  “Y’know, maybe the roads around here are so bad, they just can’t get to the crash site,” I said. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Maybe we should go look for help,” Henry suggested. “If they don’t come to us, we should go to them. Who knows, maybe there’s a gas station a few miles up the road.”

  “Road? What are you guys talking about?” David said. “There aren’t any roads around here! We’re in the middle of a forest. There might be not be a gas station for a hundred miles.”

  “Well, we may be here for a while,” Mrs. Herschel said. “We might as well get used to it.”

  “I say we set our priorities,” David said. “There are three basic human needs to survive, right? Food, water, and shelter. First, we should look for food. I’m starved.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  We all looked at my sister. Julia had been mostly quiet during this discussion. She’s a very smart kid, but she tries not to show it when she’s around people who are older than she is. She kind of lies back and keeps her mouth shut.

  “Go for it, Squirt,” Henry said.

  “I was thinking that maybe our first priority should be to make a fire.”

  David busted out laughing.

  “No offense, Squirt, but that’s probably the dumbest idea I ever heard,” he told my sister. “What do we need a fire for? We’ve got nothing to cook. It’s not cold out, so we don’t need the warmth. It’s not nighttime, so we don’t need the light. What do you want to do, sing campfire songs and make s’mores? If you ask me, we should be out hunting for food right now before we starve to death. That should be the priority.”

  “But if we had a fire—,” Julia began.

  “Besides,” David interrupted, “we don’t have matches or lighters or anything.”

  Julia didn’t argue. She’s not the confrontational type. She just shrugged and put up her hands.

  “It was just an idea,” she said.

  At that moment, I heard something in the distance. I couldn’t place the sound at first, but after a few seconds, it got louder and more obvious—it was a plane! They were coming for us! We were going to be rescued!

  Looking up through the trees, I could see it. It was one of those little single engine Cessnas. Everybody realized what it was at the same moment.

  Well, you never heard such yelling and screaming. We were all jumping up and down and waving our arms. I picked a piece of the plane’s windshield off the ground and tried to catch a ray of sunlight and reflect it toward the sky.

  Nothing was happening. I kept looking for the plane to turn around or wiggle its wings, maybe shoot off a flare or something to let us know they’d seen us. But it just kept going in a straight line. We were still shouting, but no longer jumping.

  “How can they not see our plane?” Henry said.

  “It’s on the floor of the forest,” Mrs. Herschel said. “They can’t see it through the treetops.”

  I tracked the Cessna a few more seconds until it passed behind the trees and out of my field of view.

  “Where is it?” Henry yelled.

  The engine sound got quieter and quieter until we couldn’t hear it. Nobody was shouting anymore. The plane was gone.

  One by one, we all looked at Julia.

  “That’s why we need a fire,” she said.

  CHAPTER 11:

  Fire

  A fire. Of course! Fire not only cooks food, warms you up, and creates light, it can also be a distress signal. If we had a fire, it would have produced smoke and that plane would have seen it. We would have been rescued. It was so obvious now. My little sister was the only one who realized it.

  “How are we going to make a bloody fire?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

  I looked at Julia. She probably has every ribbon, badge, and award the Girl Scouts give out. She must know all about fires. But she kept her mouth shut.

  “Did anyone come across a book of matches in the suitcases?” Arcadia asked. “A lighter?”

  Everybody shook their heads.

  “This is one situation where not smoking can be hazardous to your health,” Henry said.

  “I know how to start a fire,” David said.

  David had kept his mouth shut ever since the plane flew overhead. He knew he’d made an idiot of himself saying we didn’t need a fire, and must have been working very hard to keep quiet. But David is just not the kind of person who can sit back and let other people take charge.

  “I saw this in a movie once,” he said. “Somebody get me a smooth, straight stick, about a foot and a half long.”

  David had us run around the woods to get him all the stuff he needed—firewood, a little chunk of wood, a bigger piece he could use as a base, and a shoelace, which Henry contributed. David peeled the smooth stick until it had a point at one end. Then he wrapped the shoelace around the middle of that stick once, and put it pointy end down against the base. He had me hold the wood chunk against the top of the stick to press it down against the base.

  “When I pull on each end of the shoelace,” he said as he demonstrated, “it spins the stick. See? That creates friction. Friction makes heat. Heat produces sparks. Sparks give us fire.”

  It made sense,
I suppose. I pushed the block down on top of the stick and David began pulling on the two ends of the shoelace one at a time to spin the stick. It was a pretty ingenious little machine, I had to admit.

  The only problem was, it didn’t make any heat, sparks, or fire. After five minutes of furious spinning, the point of the stick was barely warm. At this rate, it might take a week to make a spark.

  “What was the name of that movie you saw this in?” I asked.

  David ignored the remark and went back to work, pulling the shoelace back and forth even faster. I could see the sweat beading up on his forehead. He stopped, panting.

  “Wow, that’s some inferno,” Henry said. “We might have to call the fire department to put out the blaze.”

  “How about you take over for a while?” David suggested to Henry. “My arms are tired.”

  “I’m tired just from watching you do that,” Henry said.

  I sure didn’t want to do it. The girls weren’t volunteering either.

  “You got a better idea?” David asked.

  “It’s not gonna work, David,” I told him. I have to admit that in some weird way, I was happy to see him fail.

  “It will too work!” David insisted. “You’ve got to be patient, Zimmerman!”

  “Can I try?” Julia asked timidly.

  “Knock yourself out, Squirt,” David said, handing her the stick and shoelace.

  “Thanks,” Julia said, “but I’d like to try something else.”

  Julia hobbled over to the suitcases we had found near the back of the plane. She opened one up and came back with a bag of cotton balls and a jar of Vaseline.

  “What are you gonna do, Squirt?” David asked. “Put on your makeup?”

  Julia ripped open the bag and took out a few cotton balls. Then she opened the Vaseline and smeared some on a cotton ball. I had no idea what she was trying to accomplish.

  She asked me to take the sticks we had gathered and separate them into four piles: skinny sticks, really skinny sticks, fat sticks, and fatter sticks. She picked up a few of the skinniest sticks and broke them into tiny pieces. Then she mashed them into the cotton ball.