Free June Bug by Chris Fabry Page B

tick-tick of rain on wet leaves. Fire licking the edges of burning engines and the hiss of cold rain on hot metal. In all of that he never heard a voice crying for help. Didn’t hear one person calling out.
    Then the sirens overtook the closer noise of the evening.
    The pungent smell of jet fuel was all around, and he wondered if he weren’t in some kind of rescuers’ no-man’s-land and if the hillside would be engulfed in flames like some napalm run in Vietnam. But there was something more driving him—the heart of a young man who believed he could find a survivor. On a plane that big, somebody had to have made it. It looked like it had clipped trees at the top of the ridge, and if that was true, perhaps the bottom of the plane had been taken out and seats could have been scattered . . .
    Others were coming up the hill, shouting. Preston’d had the presence of mind to grab his long gray flashlight before getting out of the truck. It was on now, scanning the hillside like a beacon of hope. His foot hit a stone, and he cursed as it rolled through the wet leaves. He flashed the light in that direction and was stunned to see a face staring back at him. An older woman. A pearl earring in one ear. He had thought her head was a rock.
    It was at that point that he knew this would not be a rescue. He fell to his knees in the wet grass, the light trained on the woman’s face. Water droplets running down her cheek and down to her neck and to the ground.
    “You see anybody?” someone said nearby. Then silence as the man saw his flashlight beam. “Lord, have mercy,” the man said.
    Preston didn’t know how long he stayed there or how many other rocks he already had stepped on or over.
    Finally an older man put a hand on his shoulder. “You with Civil Defense?”
    He nodded and gave his name. “I heard the engine. It sounded too low. And then this awful noise. I got in my truck down there. My dad gave it to me last year for my birthday. . . .”
    “Hadley, I want you to listen to me,” the man said. “Are you listening?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I want you to go home and change clothes. Get a coat on. A rain slicker. Put on a couple of sweaters. And if you have boots, put them on too and some fresh socks. It’s going to be a long night.”
    It was. The longest of his life. He did as the man said and raced home.
    When he returned to the hillside, there was talk about where the plane had come from and who it might be. A news reporter had found a wallet on the ground and had called the newsroom. Someone recognized the name on the driver’s license. It was somebody from the Marshall football team. That’s when the air got sucked out of the whole hillside. Word passed along one by one. This was the Herd’s plane. Men moved like statues, stiff and aimless when they realized the truth.
    “East Carolina,” someone said. “They were playing East Carolina. Lost their last game.”
    People drove up, gawking, some parking and running through the brush to see what had happened. The team bus sat at the airport above, waiting. And the saddest part was when it left, empty, and snaked down the hill.
    Not one of those people had a chance when the plane clipped the trees on the ridge and flipped. An airplane on approach was probably going a good 200 mph. When it hit the hillside, the violence of the crash had killed all seventy-five instantly.
    Preston wondered what those last moments were like. If they had time to react. Throw their hands up. Say a prayer. Call out a name.
    He spent the rest of that night taking orders from the Civil Defense leader on the ground. Their job was to pick up body parts and bag them. An arm here. A hand there. Legs. Torsos. He didn’t find any bodies intact. None of them were lying in the wet leaves like they were just sleeping. They were torn apart and scattered like a farmer scatters fertilizer. Mixed up. Burned. He had never gotten the smell of seared flesh out of his mind, and he doubted he ever