beyond the doorway, then stopped entirely. The door slammed shut, flew back open, and the copilot reappeared. “Hang on,” he yelled over the storm and the creaking metal and the groans of the sick and wounded. “Little trouble, nothing to worry about … wind’s got us off course.” He pointed at the sick prisoner. “He’s okay, is he?” The pilot’s voice came from the cockpit, loud, unintelligible, angry, and the pale copilot disappeared again. The guard lurched forward, tugging at the deadweight of the doped man, trying to get him back into his seat. Challis strained to see beyond the blowing snow, but it was useless. How far had they dropped? It was impossible to guess. He leaned back, feeling nauseated. He tried to swallow, but he was too dry: his throat opened, closed, and he began to cough.
“Goddamn toy airplane,” the guard growled, wedging himself back into the seat. “Can you believe it? They never should of let us off the ground in this thing … you all right? Your head?”
“Scared,” Challis said.
“Bet your ass, scared—”
The plane plummeted again, more severe than the drops that had come before. Challis’ breath left him; he looked out the window again and felt his eyes widen. They had fallen beneath the clouds and through the thick blowing snow which mixed with drifting bubbles of vapor hanging between the mountaintops, and he saw that they were flying in a valley with densely forested slopes on either side of them. His view wobbled as the winds whacked at the stubborn little plane. Off to the side he saw a blue-gray flatness of lake, murky behind the snowstorm. The thick fir trees seemed almost black, and he couldn’t see the tops of the mountains: just the blackish menace of the cliff walls. The engines throbbed and the plane struggled upward, desperately trying to vault whatever lay ahead. They slid off sideways and turned slowly, back toward the lake and crosswise against the wind, which was trapped and capricious in the valley. The guard stared out the window, knuckles whitened against the back of the seat ahead of him. Challis was frightened, couldn’t speak. A downdraft swept them at the lake, a great paw of wind swiping at them, and he closed his eyes again. When he opened them they seemed to be skimming across the water, fighting for altitude against the great hand pressing them down, pushing them into the lake. Whitecaps rose like a bed of sawblades, whirring.
Finally the pressure relaxed and they were pushed upward, flung ahead, speed increasing as they swung toward the hillside. Challis couldn’t estimate air speed, but the tops of the fir trees were flickering darkly thirty feet below as they grabbed for enough height to keep them alive. It took forever. Where, where was the top of the mountain? At the next glance the treetops seemed closer, and then he heard a cry from the cockpit: “We ain’t gonna make it, Charlie … we ain’t gonna make it .”
The last thing he saw before turning himself into a huddled ball wedged as tightly as possible between the seats was the guard’s gray face, turned toward him, mouth open in a soundless scream, eyes round like black pinpoints of terror.
The sound of the engines cut out.
The weight of the plane whisked them through the first few treetops, but in a matter of three or four seconds they began plowing into heavy branchwork and thicker trunks, and the wings flickered away like large silver birds and the fuselage tipped sideways, seemed to roll glidingly down the dense green boughs slowly, bouncing almost softly. Perhaps the feeling of gentleness was entirely in Challis’ head: the evidence, which included the decapitation of the leathery-skinned pilot by the sheared glass of the windshield, the breaking of the copilot’s neck, the fatal concussing of the guard, who bounced around the cabin’s interior like a puppet whose master was suffering a conniption fit, and the strangulation of the doped prisoner, who somehow slid