Crash and Burn

The lights of the emergency vehicles painted the forest with a mixture of reds, blues, and purples. Ashley sat on the edge of the ambulance, wrapped in a warm blanket, and taking small sips from a bottle of water. The EMT was still trying to coax her into going to a real hospital, but she refused, just as she had before. The EMT sterilized her leg and wrapped it. Even after he had walked away, the alcohol still bubbled deep within the tender muscle of Ashley’s calf.

All along the borders, between the tree line and the yellow police tape, cameras flashed and pulsed. People, no more than vague shadows caught between the light of the moon and the light of the cameras chattered away. A little piece of civilization had moved into the woods, invading and corrupting it with their noise pollution. She couldn’t wholly blame them though, they went where the story went, and tonight Ashley was the biggest story in the state.

“Ma’am.” A gruff voice broke through her thoughts. She looked up and saw the sheriff dressed in his big tan Smokey cap and uniform. Ashley didn’t think they had sheriffs who looked like that anymore, he was dressed the way she might have imagined a sheriff as a child. Somehow it made the whole thing seem less real. “Mr. Fuller is asking to see you again.”

“Do I have to?” She asked.

“Not at all.” He said, smiling at her through his full moustache, “but he’s getting belligerent with my officers, if you don’t see him now, you probably won’t until after you’ve given your statement.”

“Belligerent is Mark’s default mode…” Ashley said, it was not a joke, but the sheriff laughed as if it were, “No, I don’t want to see him. Not yet,”

The Sherriff nodded and turned to walk away. Ashley reached a hand towards the officer. “But tell him that I’m okay.”

The sheriff nodded again and walked off. Ashley leaned her head against the ambulance doors and closed her eyes. How long since this had begun? At least a day. It was all swimming through her mind, being untangled only to find that some memories seemed too long to even fit in a single day. Through her eyelids she could still see the flashing lights, she could still hear the chittering reporters, but slowly everything faded into a gentle dark sleep.

In the woods, her leg throbbed, as if it had developed its own heart that was slowly being torn in half. She’d managed to stop some of the bleeding, but the freshwater stream was the only viable option for cleaning the wound. It didn’t help that the terrain by the river was rocky and uneven. Every now and then she’d slip on one of the smooth river rocks, her ankle would twist and the open gash would be pulled a little tighter.

Keep going, she thought, just keep moving. It was all she could think of now. Those words had become her religion in these primitive little woods, where the only commandment was to survive. It was the rope that kept her from trailing off into the black depths of insanity. As she approached the ridge, she tightened her grip on the branch she used as a walking stick. The ridge, at least 15 feet high, seemed like the only way up for miles.

“Fuck!” she said, slumping against her stick. She carried herself to the base of a nearby tree and sat. She was exhausted. The sun had just come up when she’d started and now it hung over her like a demented little god. Probably one with a small pecker, she thought, and giggled. The heat of this summer day and the complete absurdity of her situation had driven her halfway to madness, the giggle erupted into teary-eyed laughter.

“Hello?” a voice said. She thought nothing of it at first, a distant illusion. This was the end of her, or so she’d thought, then the voice called out again, a little closer this time.

“Help!” she called. “I’m over here, help!”

A burly man peaked his head over the ridge. She saw him, and when he saw her, his eyes went wide. Late,r he would tell the press that if she hadn’t waved to him, he would have thought she was a corpse. He wasn’t completely wrong. Across the stretch of time she’d spent in the woods, she’d been dragged through every substance imaginable, her hair had been matted by thick mud and washed in the rain, bruises ran up and down her body, blood and puss oozed from her leg like an infected bed sore.

The sun rose through the window of the hospital room. The light was soft and dreamy, the sun warmed her skin and mixed with the coolness of the air-conditioned room. She felt unnaturally woozy, the doctors must have given her some type of pain medicine along with the antibiotics and fluids that hung from her IV drip. The door to the room clicked open.

“Oh my, good morning!” a nurse said moving from the door to her bedside, picking up the hanging clipboard that hung from the edge of her bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Like a bag of stepped on shit.” She said, again it had not been a joke, but still the nurse chuckled.

“Do you know the year, Hon?”

“2021.”

“What about your name?”

“Ashley Fuller.”

“Correct again.” The nurse jotted something down on her chart and then set it in the nook at the foot of her bed. “The police will be in in a moment.”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” Ashley said, as if it had even been a question. The nurse replaced the clipboard, fiddled for a moment with the IV bags, then she took Ashley’s hand in hers. Her hands were too clammy and cold, Ashley wanted to pull away, but she didn’t.

“I think it’s amazing, what you went through, and you’re still with us. You should thank god to be alive.”

God doesn’t live in the woods, lady. Ashley thought, but the nurse was sweet and old, she was just trying to say something nice. So, Ashley just smiled at her and nodded her head.

Satisfied, the nurse gave her a pat on her hand then turned to leave the room.

Amazing isn’t what Ashley would have called the experience. She looked out the window, past the restaurant chains and the shopping centers, there were the mountains, tall enough to cut through the clouds. Someone who didn’t know what Ashley knew might have called it serene, but Ashley couldn’t be fooled by the pretty picture anymore. Nature was a violent place, that was the real truth.

A mountain lion peered out from between the trees, only twenty feet ahead of her. Its eyes burned into her like two scalding emeralds. Inside her, Ashley’s fear was taking control, before she had even realized it, she was running down the mountain. Behind her she could hear the soft rustle of the lion’s paws giving chase, it growled as it inched closer. She’d never realize how close she’d come to being pounced on because her foot caught on a raised tree root and sent her tumbling down the mountain. She rolled and tossed, her whole world spinning around. The ground fell out from beneath her and just as she realized she’d been thrown off a ledge, she slammed hard against the ground and skittered to a stop. The impact made her dizzy enough that she could hardly stand up, leaves and dirt stuck to the sweat on her arms and legs.

Above her a low rattle hung, the lion had stopped on one of the rocks jutting out of the mountain. She put her head back down in the dirt, hoping that she could play dead long enough for it to lose interest. She tried to settle her breathing and waited. The mountain lion came down from the rock with a great thud that shuddered the earth beside her. The heat of its great stinking breath burned on her skin, as it sniffed her limp body. Her heart pumped as if it might explode out of fear. Then deep pain rushed up from her leg as the creature bit down and dragged Ashley towards the bushes.

“No!” She screamed, scrambling to pull away. The jaws of the mountain lion clamped down harder, her skin tore and hot blood boiled from the wound, The creature let out a growl that vibrated through her bones as it dragged her deeper into the woods. Ashley flailed, kicking at the creature’s head, reaching for anything she could use, her fingertips brushed along the edge of a tree branch, she stretched for it. The creature swung her violently back and forth, she steered past the tree branch once, but as the creature flung her back in the other direction, she grabbed the branch and smashed down as hard as she could on the top of the creature’s head.

The jaws released and Ashley scooted backward on the forest floor. The creature yowled and glared at her, but it did not inch closer, it seemed to wobble a bit, and its eyes were not as focused as they had once been. Ashley brandished the stick like an ancient tribesman, smacking it against the forest floor, trying to intimidate the creature. It watched her as it slunk back into the bushes.

Ashley backed herself against a nearby tree and leaned there, never letting go of the stick. The wound was a big bloody, slobbery, mess. The true pain, no longer dulled by her waning adrenaline was coming to a head. Ashley reached into the little sack that she had stolen out of the plane and pulled out two little travel sized bottles of vodka. She downed one, her breath roared out of her like gasoline fumes then she uncapped the second and poured it slowly over the wound on her leg. The blood turned pink and bubbled as it was flushed out of the wound. She tore a piece of fabric from the knapsack and tied it over her leg wound in a makeshift tourniquet.

The forest was so quiet, it was still early, and she had planned on walking all day, but her bearings were completely shot. She was still dizzy from her tumble down the mountain and wasn’t sure where she should go. Then something caught her ear, the sound of trickling water. She took a deep breath and used the branch to lift herself off the ground.

The police told Ashley that she’d only gone missing for 24 hours and yet it seemed to her that she’d lived a lifetime out in those woods. Before they left, they’d told her that Mark was outside, and she’d refused again. She wasn’t ready. More than that, he wasn’t ready. Mark knew the “before” Ashley, and the “before” Ashley was long gone. In a way, she had died too along with all the other passengers of flight…

“262. Mayday! I repeat, Mayday! Flight 262 going down!” The pilot had been yelling so loud that she could hear him from first class through the closed cockpit door.

The stewardess tried to calm the passengers in the cabin fruitlessly, some people got on their cellphones and were trying to dial loved ones, some raged at the stewardess, most just wept. Ashley sat frozen, this was supposed to be her fresh start, she thought not of Mark, or her friends, or even her parents, but of all of the things that would never be. Panic was born with a loud boom from their left side, it grew when the right-side engine blew, and it would die in a heap of burning metal and flesh.

The emergency masks dropped down, desperate mothers ignored the guidelines, fitting the masks around their children’s faces. Others ignored them entirely. Outside, the slow zipping sound of wind against the hull grew louder. One man simply abandoned the mask, opting to vomit into as many of the small baggies that came standard in all the seat pockets as he could find. Ashley was finding it hard to breath, even through her mask, a familiar weight settled on her chest, a panic attack, she tried to breath deeper and slower, but could not contain her fear. She passed out before they ever hit the ground.

When she awoke, hell greeted her. Hazy, she struggled to unfasten her seatbelt. The smoke hung over her legs and she felt a pull to sit straight up. No, not up. She unfastened the belt and toppled to the roof of the cabin. The bodies hung upside down and bloody. The hands of the passengers were all raised over their heads, like riders of a hellish rollercoaster. Beyond the forest of arms, she could see an opening in the plane, blue sky, and the tips of trees. She climbed up the aisle until she reached the opening, and then she leapt out. It was only a four-foot drop, but still she stumbled to the ground hacking out smoke as she crawled away from the wreckage. She stood there watching the flames engulf the half plane, and cried, wondering why she had lived when so many others had died.

She watched the flames until the first glimpse of sunrise, then she came to an impasse. She could no longer afford to stay looking at dead things. She needed to go somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t here. Ashley started by following the line of debris back to the other half of the plane. She went inside, this side had not suffered the same fiery end as the other half, but there were no other survivors. Ashley went to the back of the plane and found that the beverage cart was almost completely untouched. She grabbed a knapsack off the cabin floor and dumped out the crayons and coloring books and the handheld gaming console and filled the sack with supplies. Cans of water, peanuts, a few travel sized bottles of vodka, and then she climbed back out of the plane.

One of the only the things Ashley did know about the woods was that moss grew on the north side of trees, so she found the nearest tree, looked for the moss, and started to walk. Her entire body ached, but she knew that if she had survived this horror, that she could survive nearly anything.

After several hours of modulating between restless sleep and contemplation, Ashley let Mark into the room. The door opened and there he stood, looking the same as ever. His shaved head, the thick-rimmed cool guy glasses, the dress shirt, the slacks, these were the things that, put together, made up Mark. In his hand he held a bouquet, no doubt purchased from the store in the lobby of the hospital. He was giving her this strange look, and she thought for a moment that maybe he really didn’t recognize her.

“How are you feeling?” he said not moving towards her bed at all.

“Better than ever.” She huffed, blowing a strand of hair out of her face.

“They told me you didn’t want to see me.” He said, he looked sad, but it wasn’t a look that she hadn’t seen before. It was a mask he’d regularly donned when things hadn’t gone the way he wanted them to.

“I didn’t.” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t. I still don’t know if I do.”

He smirked, a little snort puffed from his nose. “Unbelievable, you survived a fucking plane crash, and you’re still mad at me.”

“I’m not mad, I was never mad. I just-” She paused, searching for the words. He cut her off before she could find them.

“Look, I want to start things over, I… I don’t want to do this. I love you, I’ve always loved you. When you walked out, I thought I was never going to see you again. Then, the plane and the search, I thought…” He didn’t finish his thought. ”Don’t you see that this is a second chance for us?”

Ashley turned away from him, she thought about all the things they’d said to each other over the years, the little ways that they’d hurt each other, the big ways that they’d hurt each other. He still didn’t understand, and maybe it wasn’t even his fault. Everything that had ever happened to her had happened, in one way or another, for him, to him. Even the plane crash, the search, it wasn’t about her at all, not in his eyes.

“I don’t love you anymore.” She was back in the apartment; she’d just thrown his award for Madison High School Teacher of the Year against the ground and smashed it to pieces. He’d just hit her for the first time in their fifteen years of marriage.

“You have never loved me the way that I loved you.” He said, his eyes burned, he wouldn’t hit her again, that was an involuntary reaction, but there is always more than one way to hurt someone you love. “Why are you such a robot? Why do you have to keep things from me? I may be a fuck up, but at least I live.”

“No, Mark, you live to fuck up. Stop blaming me for your squandered potential.” He reached for her arm, and she snapped, white hot anger boiled inside her. “Don’t you ever touch me again!”

She slammed her shoulder into his chest. He dropped to the floor. She walked to the counter, grabbed her things and then walked out the door, slamming it shut behind her. Tears of anger filled her eyes as her friend picked her up down the street. She’d finally had enough, she was done, as she watched the planes fly into the airport, she thought that this was going to be her second chance at the life that she wanted to live.