THERE’S A RUSH of heat. The skin on the back of my neck singes. I smell something that can only be burning hair. Charlie, Gabe, and I are thrown forward, more shrapnel zipping over and around us. A piece of something slices across my calf, splitting it open. I feel liquid rolling down my ankle that feels cool compared to the heat of the explosion. But I know what it is, and I know what’ll happen if I look at it. I can’t do that. I can’t leave my friends alone while I’m crashed out in the dirt, fainted from the sight of my own blood.
Fire crackles all around me now. There’s a new kind of heat pulsing through the clearing. Not the sun, but the plane, the trees, the grass. I’m flat on my face, my body still reeling from the blast. I’m trying to get my legs under me, but they’re so shaky. And my calf is burning where it was cut. When I suck in a breath, my lungs fill with something harsh and choking. It stings along the inside of my chest until I start hacking it back up.
“Charlie,” I say in a gasp between coughs. “Gabe. Kim?”
I’m answered by the snap of a tree coming down nearby, accompanied by the moan of twisting metal. Flames pop and sizzle all around the clearing. My eyes are watering, my lungs burning. I can’t get my bearings.
At this point, I’m just waiting for the moment when I get to wake up and realize this was all some horrible nightmare.
“Sone?”
It’s Charlie. To my left. When I glance that way, though, I can’t see him. There’s too much smoke swirling through the clearing, blown by the wind of the storm that’s still lashing across the sky above Dagger Hill. It’s going to start raining any minute now. The fires will go out. The smoke will die down. As long as nothing else explodes, we might just be able to stay put and ride it out. Wait for help to get here. Already, from down in Windale, I can hear the sirens at the firehouse wailing.
“Charlie,” I say, reaching out for him. “Charlie, I’m right here. Can you hear me? Follow my voice.”
“I … I can’t see you.” His voice is full of so much pain, so much fear. He sounds so different from the Charlie who was standing on top of his boulder only half an hour ago, making us promise not to forget about each other. “Sone, where are you?” He coughs. “I can’t find you—”
“I’m here, I’m here—”
“Guys?” Gabe’s voice floats out of the smoke toward me, a blistered wheeze. “Sonya? Tell me you guys are okay—”
“Kimberly?” I hear myself cry, yelling as much as I can. “Kimberly?”
Nothing.
I blink back tears. All I can see through the stinging smoke are hazes of orange light, cut every so often by flickers of blue. If my eyes and chest and leg didn’t hurt so bad, if I didn’t think I might die in the next few minutes, the blur of colors might be beautiful. Instead, it’s disorienting, and I can feel the cold grip of panic closing around my throat. Afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. Afraid to see the wreck of the plane or what it’s done to my friends.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about her.
It’s the mantra I’ve been repeating to myself for months, trying and failing to push all the inevitability of this last summer out of my head. College is the furthest thing from my mind right now, but the same rules still apply. If I keep pretending it’s not real, then it’s not.
“We have to—” Gabe stops to cough, a dense, mucus-filled sound—he could be drowning out there in the haze. “—get back to the car.”
He’s so far away, and it feels like he just keeps going farther.
“You’re right,” I say to the ground. I’m on my hands and knees. The grass is poking up between my fingers in vivid tufts. My arms are heavy. I try to lift one, try to pull myself up onto my feet. I’m full of cement. The curls of smoke billowing around my head are getting thicker, darker. Or maybe that’s just my vision.
“Sone,” Charlie whimpers from a place right next to me and a thousand miles away. “Please don’t leave me. Please.”
My voice erupts like thunder in my ears when I yell back. Who knows if he understands what I’m saying. With a massive effort, I lift my head, lift my arm, lift my knee. I take one shaking, wobbly lurch forward. Then another. Along the edges of the clearing, I can make out gnarled chunks of the aircraft. Burning, smoldering, hissing with steam. Something pops nearby, and hot red sparks rain across the grass.
I’m fading even as I’m crawling in the direction of Charlie’s voice. Or what I hope is the right direction. Every movement is a battle against myself. My muscles are shivering, the cut on my leg throbs, my head is beating like a heart.
Something shifts behind me. A scraping metal sound. I fight against the throb in my shoulders to turn my head and look back, hoping to see Gabe or Kimberly. Oh please god let it be Kimberly. Let her be all right.
At first, I see nothing. Just that constant, smoggy curtain. But then there’s a figure. The shape of a man stalking through the new terrain of debris. He looks too tall and hunched to be Gabe. In fact, he looks too tall to be human.
I think of Gabe’s dad, the chief, and all his stories about Dagger Hill. Legends mostly. Folktales about murders and ghosts and monsters. As I watch the man take one long-reaching step after another, I also watch him shift before my eyes, shrinking to a reasonable six-foot height, with broad shoulders and a longish neck. He’s still just a silhouette, backlit by fire and obscured by smoke, but it’s definitely not Gabe. Not Kimberly, either. Maybe my eyes are just going funny, and it’s help, here to rescue us.
I slump down to my elbows, then tip over onto my side. I can’t go for Charlie, and I can’t call out to the person crossing the clearing, moving through the flames in gangly strides. The last of my vision is falling down a deep well, collapsing into blackness. The volume in my ears goes all the way down, replaced by a thin ringing. I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t breathe.
Then my entire world is smudged out.