And you only open them again when you hear the humming.
FORTY-FIVE
At first you think it’s in your dreams. It reminds you of the soft murmur of the bus’s engine on the freeway when you first left for this trip. But when your eyes fully open to a sunrise just as pink as that first one, you are not on a bus. And you do not appear to be dead. You are sitting right where you nodded off, and the sound you hear is not coming from below you; it’s coming from above. Somewhere above the blackened trees. You shield your eyes against the new morning sun and look up into the sky. The smoke has thinned, and only a light haze hangs in the air. The noise grows louder, until it sounds less like a hum and more like the box fan you used to keep in your window as a child.
You haven’t even looked at the others yet. You just keep your eyes to the sky, and when you see a white-and-yellow blur slip slowly into focus, you wonder if you are really awake after all. It has two propellers and long rectangular wings, and it is buzzing lazily through the sky. It’s an aircraft, but one you’ve never seen before—some kind of firefighting plane if you had to guess—and it is not that far from you.
You stumble to your feet, and you immediately start shouting and waving your arms before you even really know what you’re doing. You follow beneath it as far as you can through the destroyed woods, even climbing up a small hill to watch as it divesdown like a raptor and releases what must be at least a thousand gallons of water into the air from its tank. Then it ascends again, makes a tight turn, and disappears off into the distance.
“NO!” you shout. “NO! COME BACK! WE’RE HERE!”
You’re not sure how long you’re shouting, but eventually you’re interrupted by a voice from down the hill.
“Case, what the hell is going on?”
When you look down, you see Diana standing with a hand shielding her eyes. She looks genuinely concerned about you. You motion for her to come up, but by the time she gets there, and you start rambling about what you saw, the plane is long gone. Still, you have her stand quietly and listen in case she can still hear its engine.
“Are you sure you haven’t lost it?” she asks.
She puts a hand on your side, and for the first time in a while, you don’t feel the urge to slip away.
“I’m not sure,” you say. “It’s a possibility, but I think it was real. It looked really real. And it was dumping water on the fire, which means it’s likely to come back.”
Fran and Will find their way to you and grumble as they climb the hill.
“What is it?” asks Will.
“Case hallucinated a plane,” says Diana. “But on the off chance it’s real, we need to figure out a way to signal to it.”
The two of them stare back and forth from you to Diana. Their eyes are red rimmed, and it’s hard to say what they think of all this.
“Okay,” says Will. “What do we do?”
Will looks back down the hill to the burnt-out forest, and the resting body of his friend.
“Damn, man,” he says, “Troy would know. There’s probably a stupid Anarchist Vagabond episode about it.”
Everyone quiets for a minute. Will is still looking at Troy, and he seems like he’s going to cry. Somehow, he pulls himself together.
“Hey. The plane could come back soon,” you say. “So what do they do in movies?”
The answers come quickly, without much thought. Send an SOS message (not possible; no radio). Build a fire for smoke signals (not the best strategy when everything else is on fire). Spell outHELPin rocks and branches (not bad, but there isn’t an open space nearby). Scream and wave your arms (already tried). It’s starting to look bleak, when suddenly Fran stares at something, and then walks over to Diana. She reaches for her pants, and without speaking, rips the belt out of Diana’s belt loops.
“Fran!” says Diana. “What are you doing?”
Fran holds the belt buckle to the light. It’s made of metal, and she toys with it in her hands. You can’t really tell what she’s doing until she steps into an opening between the dead trees and angles it a certain way. Then suddenly there’s a small bead of light reflecting on her shirt. You remember playing a similar game with your dad’s digital watch when you were a kid, making the reflected light bounce around the ceiling like a spaceship.
“Okay, look,” says Fran. “I don’t know if this will work, but maybe we can send a flash or something.”
“Will the light go all the way up there?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe?”
She holds the buckle to her eye and aims it at the top of a burnt tree. It takes her maybe five minutes or so to get the light to land on the spot she wants, but it’s barely visible.
“We need something shinier,” says Fran.
She hands the belt back to Diana. From a distance, the hum comes again, and this time, you’re not the only one who hears it.
