16 Souls

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Present Day — August 14^th, 7:05pm

Summit of Longs Peak

Like a moviegoer struggling to reconnect to reality moments after a gripping film has ended, Marty Mitchell looked up and around, blinking, momentarily confused at the lengthening shadows on the mountaintop around him, and the incredible contrast to a 757 cockpit.

He was aware of being slightly cold, but that reality was fighting the high definition memory of his first hour with Judith Winston months before, that moment when he’d told the story of Regal 12 in such stomach-churning detail. With the National Transportation Safety Board investigators, it had been clinical and technical. With her, it had been emotional, and to a far greater extent than he’d planned.

Marty’s physical presence on the mountaintop and what he’d come here to do were mere footnotes to the intensity of that memory. It had been incredibly important to make her understand — to make her see — and he felt the burning intensity of that desperate need again as his sight returned inward.

She had tried to keep her composure, Marty recalled, but clearly the flint-hard lawyer had been shaken by his words. He could tell by the way she had shifted uncomfortably in her plush boardroom chair, her hand tugging absently at a tendril of hair as she asked with feigned detachment, “So, what were your options?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. I was in denial, y’know? The jet was still flying… and both engines were running… but I had this… this thing on my right wing and there was no precedent, no training for what to do about that. My jet, the 757, was sluggish and yawing to the right… I could essentially feel the presence of that fuselage in my controls.”

“Did the airline help? You called them for help, right?”

“They were trying, but they’re only set up for routine emergencies, and this was anything but routine. And to make matters worse, the captain of the aircraft we rammed pulls out a cell phone to talk to the controllers, and then… then, goddammit, she calls me!”

“What’s wrong with that?” Judith Winston had asked.

He’d paused, grasping for the words.

“How can I make you understand? One moment it’s a thing out there, a problem I can deal with almost in the abstract, even if my mistake created that problem. I can deal with numbers and abstracts and emergencies. But then her damned voice was in my ear.”

“Pardon?”

“The other pilot. The controller asked for my cell phone. He should have asked me if it was okay to pass it on, but he didn’t, and suddenly it rings with a frightened woman on the other end, a fellow pilot stranded on my right wing with fifteen others. Suddenly her life is a personal albatross around my neck. She’s totally dependent on what I do, what I decide, and worse, I got her into this by ramming her! I didn’t need that level of pressure! It was hard to even think, the magnitude and gravity of all of it was so profound already. But the moment that happened… the moment a live person invaded my command space… it made it personal and unbearable.”

“But… why? I’m struggling to grasp why it made a difference?”

“Because, dammit, that could have been me out there, terrified and barely hanging on and totally out of control! I couldn’t keep from being an empath! I felt her terror, and I caused it.”

“So, you’re saying that affected your ability to make the right decision?”

Marty had met the lawyer’s eyes, uncaring that his were probably glistening with tears as he shook with anger.

“There was no right decision. That’s the goddamned point! But even if there had been, who am I to decide, y’know? Who am I to decide who lives and dies? Those people on my wing, they have names and families and… and suddenly it wasn’t just a number. It wasn’t just souls on board anymore. And I couldn’t un-ring that bell.”

He had let himself submerge back into the narrative of that horror.

“Okay, where was I?”

“You were talking to your company and trying to figure out how to land,” she offered.