Free Survive by Alex Morel Page B

once seamlessly attached to the main cabin. The metal surrounding it is distressed; I imagine it having a voice and screaming from the pain of being ruthlessly torn from its body. Crooked and slightly indented at the middle, the door represents the flimsy line of protection between the wilderness and us.
    Paul pushes open the bathroom door and starts arranging all the stuff we found inside. I walk behind the tail of the plane and am hit by a toxic wall of spilled jet fuel. The snow is saturated with a bluish-green hue that streaks back from behind the plane. The winds, I think, must have pushed the fumes away from our cabin. I quickly cover my mouth and nose, but the stench is strong, and the combination of hunger and dehydration and the fumes overwhelms me. I begin to wobble, and Paul’s hand suddenly grabs my forearm.
    “Whoa—you can’t inhale that stuff at all. It’ll kill you.”
    “Sorry,” I mumble.
    “That’s one of the reasons we can’t stay here. If the winds shift, we’ll be inhaling jet fuel all day and night.”
    I nod, but I’m too weak to process the phrase “can’t stay here.” It rings in my mind, but I can’t quite bring myself to confront it or Paul.
    Paul walks me back and opens the door.
    “You first,” he says.
    I step in, and Paul has organized things like a little nest for us. It makes my heart warm. He climbs in behind me, and it is snugger than before. He’s so big and the tail so tilted and cramped that all we can do is lean against the wall together, in a semi-lying-standing position.
    We get settled in our bag and then Paul hands me the coffee mug filled with snow. We look at the rest of our loot, which I’ve laid out on the floor: basically candy bars, which I could eat by myself for one lunch, but that’s all we have and we’ll have to make it last.
    “Hold up the mug,” he says.
    He takes his tiny lantern, breaks the glass around the flame and lights it. It provides almost no heat, but Paul places the cup directly onto the flame and melts the snow.
    “Why don’t we just eat the snow?”
    “Like I said before, you’ll die. We’re already at risk for hypothermia. Eating snow will drop your body temperature even more. Eventually, we will use our bodies to melt the snow in these soda bottles, but we need water now. That’s more important than food by a long shot.”
    We wait silently for a long time as snow turns to slush and slush to water. I sip the warm water as it crests to the top. It is heaven in the form of water. I’ve never tasted anything as sweet in my life. I look at Paul as he takes his first sip and I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am, which is that I’ve never been truly thirsty before. I’ve never, by turn, ever appreciated how wonderful water is. I laugh, thinking there were days in the institution when I was so depressed that the thought of drinking or eating something depressed me more. That seems unimaginable to me now.
    We wait for more to melt. It is agonizingly slow. But each warm mouthful feels like a cup of heaven in your mouth and throat. We look at each other, understanding that each sip is sacred, not to be taken for granted.
    Then the light flickers for a few minutes and it dies.
Fuck
is all I can think. Paul’s face looks grave.
    “How long?” I say, my eyes cast downward on our last cup of water.
    “Who knows?”
    “Best guess?”
    “After the weather breaks, and not before then. I’d bet two to three weeks minimum.”
    I think of all the news stories about crashed planes and can’t help but wonder about the black box and GPS.
    “Shouldn’t they be able to find us with some kind of scanner or something?”
    “Like on TV? It doesn’t work that way. We are in the mountains and it’s snowing. There’s probably three hundred miles between us and what we’d call civilization.”
    “But still,” I respond. “They can find anything.”
    “Last year, a twin engine crashed somewhere I reckon was not far from here