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He was appalled to hear that Holly had reentered any part of the se The cockpit and forward section rested in the Iowa field like a raveyard on a faraorld, wildly out of place here, and therefore infinitely strange, huge and loo Holly’s nah she kneas the very plane in which she had departed Los Angeles a few hours ago, Holly could barely believe that the forward section of the DC-10 had actually once been part of a whole and functioning aircraft It seemed more like a deeply disturbed sculptor’s interpretation of a DC-10, welded together from parts of real airliners but also froarbage cans and old lengths of pipe, fro and pieces of a wrought-iron fence

Rivets had popped; glass had dissolved; seats had torn loose and piled up like broken and unwanted armchairs in the corner of an auction barn; metal had bent and twisted, and in places it had shattered as coe panels had peeled back, and heavy structural beams had burst inward The floor had erupted upward in places, either froed, gnarled metal objects bristled in profusion, and it looked like nothing so much as a junkyard for oldto track dohat sounded like the cries of a frightened child, Holly could not always proceed erect She had to crouch and squirs aside when she could, going over or around or under whenever an obstacle proved to be immovable The neat rows and aisles of the plane had been pulled and hammered into a maze

She was shaken when she spotted yellow and red flickers of fla the perimeter of the deck and in the starboard front corner by the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin fro conflagration that she had fledeverything in its path, although currently it seeen to do more than barely sustain itself Smoke curled around her in sinuous tendrils, but it was ood supply, and she didn’t even cough , the corpses hat unnerved her Though the crash apparently had been somewhat less severe than it would have been without Jim Ironheart’s intervention, not everyone had survived, and a number of fatalities had occurred in the first-class section She saw a , inch-diahtless eyes ide open in a final expression of surprise A woman, nearly decapitated, was on her side, still belted into her seat, which had torn free of the deck plates to which it had been bolted

Where other seats had broken free and slaers and cadavers heaped on one another, and the only way to tell the quick from the dead was to listen closely to deter

She blanked out the horror She are of the blood, but she looked through it rather than at it She averted her eyes frohters who Human bodies became abstract forms to her, as if they were not real but only blocks of shape and color put down on canvas by a cubist i Picasso If she allowed herself to think about what she was seeing, she would either have to retrace the route she had taken and get out, or curl into a fetal ball and weep

She encountered a dozen people who needed to be extracted froiven ie or too tightly wedged in the rubble for her to be of any assistance

Besides, she was drawn forward by the haunting cries of the child, driven by that instinctive understanding that children were always to be saved first: one of the e policy

Sirens rose in the distance She had never paused to think that professional rescuers would be on their way It didn’t matter She couldn’t O back and wait for the the child a minute or two sooner made all the difference between death and survival? As Holly inched forward, now and then gliaps in the web of destruction, she heard Ji where the fore part of the plane had been a froed fro in opposite directions, for she had not been able to find hiht behind her

She had been pretty sure that he and Casey had survived, only because he obviously had a talent for survival; but it was good to hear his voice

"In here!" she shouted, although the tangle of devastation prevented fro for a little boy," she called back "I hear hi closer, but I can’t see hily loud wail of approaching eency vehicles "Paramedics are on the way, they’ trained for this"

"Co forward "There’re other people in here who need help now!" Holly was nearing the front of the first-class section, where the steel of the fuselage had broken inward but not in such profusion as in the area behind her Detached seats, carry-on luggage, and other detritus had flown forward on i up deeper there than anywhere More people had wound up in that pile, too, both dead and alive

When she shoved a broken and eet her breath, she heard Ji on her side, she squire and into a pocket of open space, co face to face with the boy whose cries she had been following He was about five years old, with enormous dark eyes

He blinked at her in amazement and sed a sob, as if he had never really expected anyone to reach him

He was under an inverted bank of five seats, in a peaked space for on his belly, looking out, and it seeht to be able to slither into the open easy enough

"Soot eably so He had cast off the greater part of his terror the moment he had seen her Whether you were five years old or fifty, the worst thing alas being alone "Got et you out, honey You’ll be okay"

Holly looked up and saw another row of seats piled atop the lower bank

Both edged in by a , and she wondered if the forward section had rolled once before coertips she wiped the tears off his cheeks "What’s your name, honey?" "Norwood Kids call lad to hear that

But then, as she studied the wreckage around hiure out what to do, he said, "I can’t feel it"

"Feel what, Norby?" "My foot It’s funny, like soet loose, but then I can’t feel my foot-you know?-like it e his words conjured in her mind

Maybe it wasn’t that bad Maybe his foot was only pinched between two surfaces, just nuht be losing blood at an alar rate

The space in which he lay was too cramped for her to squeeze in past hile it Instead, she rolled onto her back, bent her legs, and braced the soles of her shoes against the seats that peaked over his, try to shove this up a little, just a couple inches When it starts lifting, try to pull your foot out of there"

As a snake of thin gray smoke slipped from the dark space behind Norby and coiled in front of his face, he wheezed and said, "There’s d-ddead people in here with s, flexing the to lever off hi"

"My seat, then an empty seat, then dead people," Norby said shakily

She wondered how long the trauhtoes," she said

She pressed upith both feet The pile of seats and junk and bodies was heavy enough, but the half collapsed section of the ceiling, pushing down on everything else, did not seeive in it