Page 3 of Shade

Then it hit me. Russ was dead.

I kept seeing it. His knees going. That puzzled look on his face, like he was waiting for me to explain what had just happened to him. The heavy man putting his gun away and turning to me like I was the next thing on his list.

“Fuck,” I said. My voice came out high and wobbly. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

My hands were shaking on the controls, and the plane wobbled right along with them. I gripped tighter.

“Okay.” I sucked in a breath that hurt. “Okay. Come on, Mya. Pull it together. You can scream about this later. Right now you land this thing.”

I had to say it twice more before I believed it.

My left sleeve was soaked from the shoulder to the elbow, warm, dark and sticky. I tucked my arm against my side and flew with my right hand. Wind howled in through the broken window and whipped my hair loose from its pins.

I couldn’t make it home to Las Cruces. Maybe I could make a real airport, but a real airport meant people. Somebody would see the bullet holes and call the cops, and the cops would open the back of my plane and find a load of rifles with my name all over the paperwork. Then the men who’d shot Russ would know exactly where to find me.

So I started looking for somewhere nobody would be.

There was an old dirt airstrip north of the border, out by a mine that had closed down years ago. I’d flown over it on every trip and wondered who’d ever used it. Beside it was a little town that was barely a town at all, and on my map it was called Salvation.

I’d always laughed at that name. Now I pointed the plane straight at it and hoped it would be my own salvation.

The airstrip came up out of the haze looking worse than I remembered. The dirt had split into big cracked chunks, weeds grew up through the middle and the far end crumbled away into the scrub. A bare pole stood at one end where a windsock used to hang. Nobody had landed there in twenty years, maybe longer.

I came around wide and lined up. My left arm had gone numb past the elbow.

I was almost there when the engine coughed.

It caught again right away, and that scared me more than if it had quit, because now I knew how close it was. I had one shot at this.

I came in low over the end of the strip and cut the power. The plane dropped and hit the dirt so hard it jarred every bone in my body. We bounced. When we came down the second time, the front wheel caught one of those cracks and snapped clean off. The nose slammed down, the propeller chewed into the dirt with a scream of metal, and the whole plane spun sideways in a cloud of dust. I stood on the brakes and hung on.

She skidded, tipped up onto one wing, crashed back down and stopped.

Dust drifted in through the broken window and settled over everything.

I turned off the fuel. I turned off the power. I did everything I was supposed to do, with my hands moving like they belonged to somebody braver than me.

Then I sat there and shook.

It started in my knees and took over the rest of me, so hard I had to grab the seat. My teeth chattered. Blood ran down my arm and dripped off my fingertips onto the floor while the engine ticked as it cooled. I was alive, and in the middle of nowhere.

When my legs would hold me, I climbed between the seats into the back.

I had to know what I was dealing with.

It was too dark back there to see much, so I shoved the cargo door open and let the daylight in. The crates sat in their rows where Russ had strapped them down at dawn. I dragged the nearest one to the edge of the doorway and down into the dirt where I could see it properly, then flipped the catches with my good hand and opened it.

Rifles. Four of them, packed in the foam.

I climbed back in and opened the next crate. Bullets, box after box of them.

The next one was more rifles. So was the one after that.

I’d flown this trip a dozen times since spring. I’d watched Russ load every one of those crates, and I’d sung along to the radio all the way to the Bootheel.

I sat there on the floor of the plane until the cold crept in through the open door. Until I understood that those men would be on the phone by now, and somebody would be wondering where a shot-up plane leaking fuel could have come down.

I climbed back down into the dirt beside that first crate, because I couldn’t stand being inside with the rest of them.