Sole Survivor

He rejected the prescription. He wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had.
        Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove to regain control of himself, but the catastrophe continued to unfold around him. The sense of falling intensified. The smell of smoke thickened. The screams of phantom passengers grew louder.
        Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls. The ceiling. Horrendous rattling and twanging and banging and gong-like clanging accompanied the shaking, shaking, shaking.
        “Please,” he pleaded.
        Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face. They lay fisted at his sides.
        After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched at his hands, and he held them tightly.
        The children were not in the car, of course, but in their seats in the doomed airliner. Joe was flashing back to the crash of Flight 353. For the duration of this seizure, he would be in two places at once: in the real world of the Honda and in the Nationwide Air 747 as it found its way down from the serenity of the stratosphere, through overcast night sky, into a meadow as unforgiving as iron.
        Michelle had been sitting between the kids. Her hands, not Joe's, were those that Chrissie and Nina gripped in their last long minutes of unimaginable dread.
        As the shaking grew worse, the air was filled with projectiles. Paperback books, laptop computers, pocket calculators, flatware and dishes-because a few passengers had not yet finished dinner when disaster struck-plastic drinking glasses, single-serving bottles of liquor, pencils and pens ricocheted through the cabin.
        Coughing because of the smoke, Michelle would have urged the girls to keep their heads down. Heads down . Protect your faces .
        Such faces. Beloved faces. Seven-year-old Chrissie had her mother's high cheekbones and clear green eyes. Joe would never forget the flush of joy that suffused Chrissie's face when she was taking a ballet lesson, or the squint-eyed concentration with which she approached home plate to take her turn at bat in Little League baseball games. Nina, only four, the pug-nosed munchkin with eyes as blue as sapphires, had a way of crinkling her sweet face in pure delight at the sight of a dog or cat. Animals were drawn to her-and she to them-as though she were the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi, which was not a far-fetched idea when one saw her gazing with wonder and love upon even an ugly garden lizard cupped in her small, careful hands.
         Heads down . Protect your faces .
        In that advice was hope, the implication that they would all survive and that the worst thing that might happen to them would be a face-disfiguring encounter with a hurtling laptop or broken glass.
        The fearsome turbulence increased. The angle of descent grew more severe, pinning Joe to his seat, so that he couldn't easily bend forward and protect his face.
        Maybe the oxygen masks dropped from overhead, or maybe damage to the craft had resulted in a systems failure, with the consequence that masks had not been deployed at every seat. He didn't know if Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina had been able to breathe or if, choking on the billowing soot, they had struggled futilely to find fresh air.
        Smoke surged more thickly through the passenger compartment. The cabin became as claustrophobic as any coal mine deep beneath the surface of the earth.
        In the blinding blackdamp, unseen sinuosities of fire uncoiled like snakes. The wrenching terror of the aircraft's uncontrolled descent was equalled by the terror of not knowing where those flames were or when they might flash with greater vigour through the 747.
        As the stress on the airliner increased to all but intolerable levels, thunderous vibrations shuddered through the fuselage. The giant wings thrummed as though they would tear loose. The steel frame groaned like a living beast in mortal agony, and perhaps minor welds broke with sounds as loud and sharp as gunshots. A few rivets sheered off, each with a piercing screeeeek .
        To Michelle and Chrissie and little Nina, perhaps it seemed that the plane would disintegrate in flight and that they would be cast into the black sky, be spun away from one another, plummeting in their separate seats to three separate deaths, each abjectly alone at the instant of impact.
        The huge 747-400,