Page 106 of Flight of Dreams

THE NAVIGATOR

Max struggles onto the chart table but has little control over where his body goes as the room jerks and trembles and tilts around him. He is a pebble inside a can, tossed around at the whim of a belligerent child. Finally he kneels near the window, shoving the glass aside with fingers that are stiff with fear. The ground is twenty feet below—maybe fifteen—he can’t accurately measure the distance with the fire and the smoke and the screams blurring his senses.

Max means to jump feetfirst, to control his fall, but the tail of the airship hits the ground and the control car jerks sideways. He goes out the window in a frantic tumble, his foot catching on the sill and his arms splayed. He tries to scream, but a scream requires breath and his lungs are filled with smoke; all he can see is the burning, coiling mass of searing grass and the fleeing ground crew. There is no one to catch him. There is nothing to break his fall. Max drops headfirst into the inferno below.

THE CABIN BOY

Werner Franz prepares to be consumed. He can feel the heat now, so close that it singes his hair. He can smell the burning fabric and melting steel. His fingernails are hot. The boy closes his eyes. He wants to be a man, but he cannot find the courage to watch himself die.

But it is not fire that washes over him. It is water. And it is cold. It takes his breath away. The cabin boy gasps and sputters and cranes his neck to see a torrent rushing from the water ballast above the walkway forty feet in front of him. The impact of the ship hitting the ground has knocked it loose from its moorings, and the contents are cascading over the boy and down the walkway.

Sudden deliverance and bone-chilling cold return Werner to his senses, and he looks around frantically for a means of escape. There is only one option: go out the provisioning hatch to his right. Werner does not trust his trembling legs to carry him, so he crawls the six feet and kicks at the latch with the heel of his boot.

THE JOURNALIST

There is fire in the lounge. It licks the walls. It rakes its tongue across the floor. The flames are a liquid, spilling thing, and Gertrud feels the heat of it in her eyes as it crawls toward them. Dryness. Burning. A shudder that runs the length of the ship, pitching the floor forward and almost level again. This threat is all Leonhard needs to gain his composure.

“Through the windows!” It’s not a scream or a shout but an order roared so loudly that every person in the lounge looks at him, blinks, and then scrambles toward the row of observation windows.

Leonhard drags her. Four long steps and they are at the glass and Leonhard shoves it aside. She can feel him bend beside her, one arm already looping beneath her knees. He plans to throw her out the window. But she sees Matilde Doehner wrestling her boys toward the window alone, as she reaches for her daughter with one hand. Irene stands there, stupefied, screaming for her father over and over and over until the crazed pitch of her voice rises above that of snapping metal and shattered glass. It is the sound of a breaking heart, and the look on Matilde’s face alone could destroy Gertrud.

She wriggles out of Leonhard’s arms. “We need to help them.”

They have to get out of the ship. She can see that written on his face. This might be their only chance. The windows are crowded with people waiting to jump, shoving one another out of the way. Smoke swirls across the floor in boiling waves and Gertrud can no longer see her shoes. Her ankles. Her calves.

The children are not hers, but they are children, no less innocent than Egon, and she cannot leave them to the fire any more than she would be able to leave her own son.

“Clear the window,” she tells Leonhard, then runs back to Matilde Doehner.

THE NAVIGATOR

Max hits the ground—whether by miracle or willpower he isn’t sure—roughly on his feet. But the impact sends him staggering forward wildly and he crashes onto his hands and knees, then farther forward onto his chin. He is stunned. His head is ringing. There is blood in his mouth and grass in his nose. He has bitten his tongue and the side of his cheek. He tastes iron and dread. With his arms pinned beneath him and his kneecaps throbbing, he can turn his head only a few inches to the side to see the entire flaming mass of the airship falling all around him. On top of him.

Max pitches forward. Rolls. Stumbles to his knees and then his feet, despite the fact that forty different places on his body are protesting the sudden movement.

He runs. And just as he does he can feel the middle of the ship hit the ground behind him. Sparks fall in a shower on his hair and his jacket and the toes of his shoes. One of them burns a deep black hole into the back of his hand. He feels it. He ignores it. He runs.

And then the ship does the impossible. It rebounds, driven back into the air a dozen or more feet by the impact of the landing wheel crashing into the ground. It is the only thing that stopped the structure from coming down on top of him. That extra twist he gave to lock the wheel in place. His thoroughness has given him the chance to stumble out from beneath the flaming debris.

Max’s foot hits fresh soil and then the airship descends a second time. It shatters into ochre and flame.

THE CABIN BOY

Werner kicks at the provisioning hatch with water dripping in his eyes even as everything around him is obliterated by flames. The flat, inset door is four feet wide and four feet long and Werner is afraid to touch the handle and burn his bare hand, so he kicks and kicks until it unlatches. The hatch swings upward three inches and he forces it the rest of the way open with his foot.

The cabin boy slides forward on his stomach and looks over the edge to find that the ground is rising toward him rapidly. Ten feet. He takes a deep breath and scrambles into a crouched position at the lip of the opening. Five feet.

He jumps.

Werner hits the ground at the same time as the airship, and he is certain that it will crush him. There is an explosion of sparks. The sickening, shattering crunch of metal. The sound of a structure collapsing upon itself.

But then the ship rebounds upward, bizarrely, miraculously off the forward landing wheel, and Werner sees a path forward beneath the wreckage.

He runs.

THE JOURNALIST

Walter Doehner is heavier than he looks. He screams and reaches for his mother, so Gertrud drags him bodily to the window. He thrashes, arms and legs flailing in terror. Matilde is right behind her, little Werner tucked beneath one arm like a bag of oats.