Newton’s Fire

IV

The seawater was already up to Luke’s chest. He put his hands above his head and fumbled through the deflating life jackets for the sliding end panel. He’d been twisted around so much that he couldn’t be sure which way was up, which way to push. Panic got to him; he kept trying different directions, hoping one might work. None did. Maybe the impact had jammed it. Maybe he was only making it worse. He forced himself to calm down, to think. He felt around and quickly found the hole in the chest’s floor. Now at least he could orient himself with confidence. The end panel slid upwards. He pushed it hard. Nothing.

Water reached his throat. He had to lift up Rachel’s face so she could breathe. He remembered Jay finding this chest earlier, how he’d struggled to open it until he’d tried pushing the panel inwards and then lifting it. There was nothing on the inside for Luke to pull towards him. He tried to grip its edges with his fingernails, but it was useless. Water rose above his mouth. The pressure was building on his sinuses too. As the chest had enough air in it to float, the implication had to be that they were still trapped inside the fuselage, and sinking with it.

He let go of Rachel. The only thing he could do for her was to get them both out. He took a deep breath from the small pocket of air, fitted his right foot through the hole in the floor, felt fuselage. He pushed the chest along until something outside stopped him. He took another breath then pushed as hard as he could, using whatever obstacle he’d encountered outside to depress the end panel. It yielded and slid upwards, but only a little way. And it let out the last of the air, so that the urge to breathe became almost irresistible. He pushed against the chest’s wall until it tipped onto its side, allowing him finally to slide the panel free.

Luke hauled himself out, dragging Rachel with him. They were already deep enough underwater for it to be almost dark. His eyes were so blurry that he could only gain the vaguest impression of his surroundings. The tube of the passenger cabin, a carnage of dead bodies strapped into white leather seats in a doomed effort to survive the impact; but also a jagged-edged ring of lighter blue above him, where the jet had sheared in two, offering a glimpse of surface high above.

He kicked towards it, fighting the screaming of his lungs, and finally he breached the surface and opened his mouth and gasped the air and kept on gasping until his need was sated. He turned belatedly to Rachel, lifted up her head. He’d never had CPR training, had only seen it in the movies, but he understood the principles: chest compressions and assisted breathing. He couldn’t lay her down on her back to press on her chest, so he hugged her tight three times instead, pinched her nostrils, put his mouth to hers, breathed into her. He hugged her again. On the second hug her mouth opened and she coughed and choked and spluttered and then vomited out a small stream of discoloured seawater, and then she gasped and began breathing by herself, replenishing her oxygen-starved body.

Life jackets were bobbing all around them, rubber ducks in a giant bath. Luke grabbed the nearest. It was a struggle to fit it around Rachel’s neck and clip in the straps. He cursed himself for all those safety demonstrations he’d ignored over the years. But finally she was in. He blew into the intake valves to inflate it as far as it would go then he found a life jacket for himself. His right arm was growing increasingly numb from some blow he couldn’t even remember having taken. But finally he had it on. Blood was streaming from a cut in Rachel’s scalp. He wiped it away just as she opened her eyes. She looked pale and groggy, but she raised an eyebrow even so, making it instantly clear that she recognized him, that she was going to be okay, and the relief was so intense that it wasn’t just the sting of salt water that made his eyes tear up.

She tried to say something, but it was beyond her for the moment. He put a finger to her lips. A slick of oil was spreading on the sea, calming it like the proverb, creating an iridescent haze all around them. Its vapour was somehow reassuring, like hospital disinfectant. The sun was rising on the horizon, a new day dawning. And Luke was suddenly suffused by an extraordinary and unexpected gladness to realize that now it would merely be another in the usual sequence. Not the End of Days. Not Armageddon. Just Tuesday.

‘Is it over?’ murmured Rachel.

‘It’s over,’ he said.

As if to underline his words, the noise of a boat’s engine reached them at that moment, rising and fading with the swell. They had to be closer to the coast than he’d realized. Its white fibreglass bow slapped water as it slowed for the debris field. He called out and waved to it and it picked its way carefully through the flotsam, looking in vain for other survivors, then cut its engine and let momentum bring it alongside.

Friendly hands reached down to take hold of him and Rachel and haul them aboard. And then there was the sound of jubilant, relieved laughter; his, Rachel’s or the crew of the boat, he simply couldn’t tell.