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originaldetectivesheep · 7 years

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A Life of Riley Part 3: The Very Last Place On Earth ch 5

Chapter 4

If I had been expecting different, I guess that I was tired, or stressed out, or just didn't know my lab mates well enough: they weren't scared or weirded out by the ancient half-bomb-half-reactor inside this rotting metal cavern, and they all seemed ready to get to work. Maybe they were just glad to get inside for a second, out of the rain; maybe as long as there wasn't the atomic bomb plugged in, they didn't think it was any more dangerous than the stuff like Riley's dislocator that we were up to our elbows in all the time. Or maybe they were on the same page as Riley: that if we got up this far and actually found the nuclear test thing, it'd be a waste not bringing it down.

Riley was still up in the cockpit or wherever, so I organized the rest of us to start doing the plan: Yuping would find the manual crank for the cargo lift, wherever that was, and Remy would clean the rust off the connections in the lift while Sajitha and Simon went to go get pieces of the wings to put under where the lift would be. I wasn't super sure how the lift would work as like a pushing foot, but I could easily see that the plane was a big, heavy chunk of metal, and that if it was pushing down on just a loading gate, we'd end up only digging a hole in the soft jungle dirt under the plane rather than lifting it anywhere. As they got moving, I went forward to go any try and find the hydraulics reservoir for the front ramp; I was a lot less sure than Riley was that this hadn't gotten smashed up when the plane landed, or that it hadn't just ruptured and leaked away after like when they left the plane in a jungle for sixty years, but we had to try.

The ramps were still folded up in the nose, buckled and pressing up at the roof from the hydraulic assembly down in the deck. I had no idea how Riley thought we were going to be able to take those apart without smashing the nose doors off: it looked like the ends that would have gone on the ground were secured to the roof, the cockpit floor, with something, but even if it was just getting the main run of the ramps out of the way, that was steel that was supposed to be able to support like trucks, and to take them apart, we had six college students with some machetes and a shovel. I slid in between the two ramps and inched over the end of the deck, feeling around for where the hydraulics assembly had to be. The metal was bent and buckled, and I went even slower – the last thing I needed was to slash myself open on some rusty edge of something. I shifted my feet onto the nose doors, and the metal creaked and groaned underneath me; the doors were more damaged by, who knew, flying into a mountain covered with trees than maybe Riley thought they were going to be, and it might get to be a real problem to expect to use them as a sled for the Ceiba.

I squatted down just below the lip of the deck, feeling over the pivoting bars that made the hinge for the ramps, looking for the hydraulic actuators, trying to see if I could find a hose that would lead back to a reservoir. In the darkness there, the ramps mostly blocking out the light from the holes in the fuselage where we'd climbed in, my eyes adjusted, picking up from the rays of half-light making it through the rain clouds and then through the seam in the nose doors, and I could see it, the main control box for the hydraulics, just under the deck – stained with some uneven, discolored glop that had pushed out along the top seam and then run down over the sides. The hydraulics were busted and there was nothing usable in the reservoir; what hadn't slopped out into the jungle decades ago would be denatured from the weather and the broken seals. I shook my head and stood up carefully, climbing back up to the deck to go on back to the tail and give people the bad news.

Remy was standing in front of the Ceiba thing, looking around, confused. "Yeah, Carolína?" he asked. "Do you know where Riley got to? Yuping found the crank for the lift, but there's some kind of retaining pin that's going through the armature for it and I wanna know if I can just take it out with the shovel or if it'll break something. But Riley's not around, and nobody else knows shit about planes like this from a million years ago."

I stopped in place, thinking. It wasn't like Riley to just ghost – it especially wasn't like Riley to vanish out of the middle of the jungle when we were supposed to be retrieving something as big and important and technically interesting as a wildcat fusion reactor. "No – no, I didn't hear anything. I was down under the ramp for a bit – let me go check the cockpit real quick." I made my way over to the ladder up, Remy following, and I didn't complain when he had to give me a boost to get all the way up where I could really hang onto something.

When I got up to the flight deck, though – nothing. The glass in all the windows was out – fallen in even where the emergency doors hadn't been kicked away when the crew escaped. The rain was coming in, and there was moss and dead leaves all over everything, the little tremors of bugs and lizards running away through the muck on the floor and the seats, but no Riley. It wasn't a big space – I could turn around right from the cockpit and see over to the pressure door to the cargo hold and there was nowhere, no cabinets or side cubbies or nothing, and no Riley anywhere. I leaned out the biggest door hole, looking around for tracks, and saw nothing, getting pushed back by the pounding rain. Riley was gone – just plain flat disappeared.

I hung down at the end of the ladder and dropped, trying to flex myself so that it wouldn't hurt when I landed; by now everyone was gathered up inside. Simon and Sajitha had probably just lugged their latest piece of the wing over, and Remy'd obviously checked with them too – which meant that they hadn't seen Riley either. Everyone was looking at me, and I shook my head. "No. No trace. The cabin's empty – the whole flight deck is empty."

"Well?" Sajitha asked. "What? What now? What do we do now?"

I shook my head. "I – I don't know. Last thing I heard from Riley, we were supposed to move this thing" – I pointed through the crowd at the Ceiba device – "and get it to fall out through the doors. Now, there's a lot of crap in the way and it's not gonna be easy, not with no grease, but I didn't hear about a change to the plan, and if it was gonna change, I'd think Riley'd tell someone what it was."

"Sure, but what if that's not the deal – what if Riley's in trouble? I don't wanna waste my time hand-cranking a friggin elevator if one of my friends is like bleeding out somewhere." Remy was strident, almost hurt.

"In trouble from what? We've got to be the only people on this mountain – everyone smart is inside somewhere where they're not getting rained on." I could see his point, but hadn't Riley led us up here? We'd all trusted Riley coming up into the jungle, and if that was a mistake, then we were all in deep trouble.

"From what – Carolína, we're in the middle of the jungle – Riley's just from like Toledo, right? None of us have ever been somewhere like this before. I know you're trying to hold it down, trying to keep everyone stable, but what if this is a problem – what if Riley really is hurt out there? What do we do?" Sajitha had her hand on Remy's arm, supporting him with more than just her words, but this wasn't the time. She had a point, but I could still trust Riley – I guess we had to.

I sat down, folding up, pulling out my machete to stick down at the deck; the point ground and squeaked against the water-worn aluminum rails. "All right. If any of you thinks you know enough about the jungle to go and try and find Riley, you can go on ahead. For me, I don' think I can. This is my first time in the jungle too: I don' think that I can find my way back to this place, if I go out and go look for someone. Anyone who thinks they can, really thinks they can, I'm not gonna stop them." I looked around, and there were no takers; everyone was thinking back about how hard it had been, going across without a trail – how Riley directed us through Red Light Green Light, how hopeless they'd felt not knowing what was in front of them, where anyone else was.

"For now, because we'd get lost ourselves and I can't believe that Riley would walk into the jungle without a plan, I say we keep going – keep doing the plan like we got it. We're not gonna be able to take off the ramps ourselves, just the five of us, today anyway. But we keep doing it until tonight, sleep in the plane where it don' rain so much, and then tomorrow morning if Riley isn't back, we leave this place and go down and try to get a rescue. We can go if we don' got to get back: this is a mountain on an island, so any way we can go down, that way is out – and then when we get to the beach, any way we go around, we'll find the town sooner or later. We can give Riley till tonight to come back, but after that, there isn't enough coconuts around here to stay eating them. After that, we got to save ourselves." Everyone was looking at me, and I felt a little embarrassed: like I was the boss, like they thought of me like the boss, like those few words when Riley first pulled me and just me into the plane had passed something on. Then I realized I was sitting on the floor cross-legged leaning on a machete like I was Genghis Khan or somebody, and that I looked ridiculous – and maybe, hanging out with Riley so long, sober plans out of the most stupid ridiculous poses was what everyone was conditioned to think of as leadership.

I scrabbled up and quickly put my machete back in its sheath; what the hell I had taken that thing out for, I didn't even exactly know myself. "So, we can have someone stand up in the cockpit and yell," I said, "or set it on fire if it's even gonna catch in this rain so that Riley knows where the plane is. But yeah, I don' think we're gonna want to go too far from the plane – and if we're gonna stay here, we might as well work on moving the reactor, or we're probably gonna all get our butts kicked when Riley comes back."

"True," Yuping said. "It doesn't feel right, but it's better trust." "If you say so," Simon seconded, hand on his shoulder. Remy nodded, accepting, and Sajitha squeezed his hand, then nodded as well.

"But – Carolína, I just want to make sure we're okay. It's – it's hard for me too, like I said; I mean, I'm just from Hackensack and not like the Ghats. It – it's hard, and I shouldn't've gone in on you just because I'm stressed." Sajitha took a deep breath; this was bothering her a lot more than it was bothering me, and I could guess why.

I stepped in and gave her a hug, brushing Remy's arm away and pressing my head against her chest. At times like this it would really help to be able to put my head on her shoulder without a stepstool, but what are you gonna do? "It's okay," I said, "it's okay. We're all cool, and we're all gonna get through this together. All of us – and Riley too." I squeezed again for a beat, and then pulled back. "So, you wanna go up and yell first, or do we get back to work? Together."

Sajitha raised an eyebrow and looked over at Remy. "I don't trust that ladder – Remy can go and yell or light the cockpit on fire or whatever. I'm cool down here." She smiled as Remy shook his head – and then started for the ladder anyway.

Remy got bored and stir-crazy and thirsty pretty quick, though, and changed with Simon so that he could go help Sajitha drag in more wing pieces while Yuping worked on the crank. And then Simon changed with Yuping because he didn't see the point, and Sajitha worked on fixing the crank because, you know, we'd been all of us together for so long that she still needed space even with how it was with them, and Yuping started some kind of electrical fire in the cockpit, I don't even know how, and moved back by the ladder to watch it and make sure there wasn't weird alloys in the frame that would set the whole plane on fire. And through all this, I was working on taking the ramp apart: I got the main run pieces disconnected off the feet that were clipped to the ceiling, but we'd need like a sledgehammer to knock out the connecting bars and really get free – there was no room to like pound with the handle of the shovel – and then there was the frigging ramp bars underneath them that I still hadn't disconnected from the hydraulic extender assemblies. The day was moving on despite us, and I was getting tired and hungry – and if I was feeling worn out, everyone else who'd been dragging slabs of aluminum through the jungle while I was turning screws had to be dead beat.

I was climbing down one of the ramps to get to work on the bottom connections – might as well – when a pounding, thudding noise knocked through the fuselage. I looked up at it – everybody else looked up from where they were taking turns futilely turning the crank to extend the cargo elevator by hand. It was Riley leaning in through the hole over the wing – Riley and what had to be the sounds of like a rescue expedition or a work detail out of the village close behind.

"Hey, yo; holding up?" Riley asked, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. "Sorry for ghosting, and yeah, Carolína, I really shoulda planned better about those damn ramps. But I've picked up a couple dudes who are gonna help us as long as they can salvage everything else – they didn't think there was much left of the plane way back when it crashed – and I brought lunch. Soup's on, pitch in." Riley climbed through the hole and took off a metal backpack, setting it on the cargo deck with a clunk. As soon as the latches popped, the heady smells of sticky-boiled rice, crisp fried pork, and warm wet banana leaves swelled out through the jungle stink that was all through the fuselage, and if I didn't get to it first out of the rest of us five ganging the canister, it wasn't by much.

"Eat up," Riley said, staying clear as we dove in, tossing the banana-wrapped packets hand to hand to keep from getting scalded as we opened them up and tore into the spam musubi like we'd never seen food before; "You've got to be hungry, and the guys are fresh. Pick up when you're done; we'll try and get those ramps taken down while you eat, then maybe put a couple tubes of bearing grease under the Ceiba if we can get shit cleared out to the doors."

Maybe, when you got a choice, or you're just seeing it in the store, you turn up your nose at spam, or you mock how islanders make it into sushi. But after most of a day working hard in a soaking-wet jungle, you need calories and salt and protein, and Riley couldn't've done better for morale if that bucket had back-home fast food takeout and bottled rum and cokes in it. The food vanished too fast for us to even argue about who got more than their share; we sat around dazed for a couple minutes, digesting, and then back we went, shoulders to the wheel. Remy and Simon cranked on the elevator; Sajitha and Yuping worked out the grease applications under the Ceiba where it was needed and where it wasn't while people were still working on getting the ramps out of the way; and I got myself up on the nose doors, helping Riley take apart the hinges.

"So, if you don't mind," I asked at last, "what was the deal? Why run out?" I pried my machete under a hinge and twisted, splitting and splintering the plate away from the fuselage.

Riley shrugged, spinning a screwdriver to disconnect one on the other door. "Things. Up in the cockpit, when I was thinking, I could see out under the storm and guess from how the light was running that if we tried to do this solo we'd be at it all day. I forgot how the ramps were stowed in these bastards. So I had to go get help, and if I knew you guys, you'd work straight through lunch and then just pass out and then we're dying of starvation for nothing. So I had to get some food too, and I had to go quick if I was gonna do that on island time and get back in time to get the sled moving before dusk." The hinge fell away, and Riley reached out for the next rib, to climb a little higher into the nose to the next connection point.

"I'm surprised," I said, "that you could just bomb off into the jungle like that – this was the first time for us, wasn't it? Weren't you from like Toledo or something, right?"

Riley turned and gave me a look, raising an eyebrow. "Dayton, actually. And that was just my last port – don't underestimate service brats. Sometimes we're pasted to the same six bases in Cali, Texas, and North Carolina, but some of us do get around." I nodded, and pulled myself on up to the next piece; I hadn't known. But if Riley's parents were in the military, that made a lot of things – like how a physics lab lead could know enough about how old cargo planes went together to "forget" how the ramps folded – make a lot more sense. Of course, there were a lot of other things that it didn't help with at all, but that was Riley for you.

Eventually, we got all the hinges off that we needed to – Riley's plan was that the Ceiba would slide down and crash into the door, and tear off the couple hinges left on the sides rather than burst the locks through the seam in the middle – and the village guys had dismantled and salvaged out the steel-alloy ramps and dragged them out of the hole over the wing, so that we could even think about shoving the reactor down at the nose. The plane was getting more stubborn – the old wing panels under the down-cranked elevator were bending up at the ends rather than pressing down any further into the dirt – but you couldn't deny that the cargo bed was tilted more down at the nose now than when we started. As dumb as this plan was, as hard as all the work that went into it had been, this was going to work. Or at least, it looked like it was going to work, and hadn't failed yet – but with Riley on the scene, you could take your 'at least' and chuck it off a bridge.

"Ernest, Maynard, you better get clear; get your guys outside to watch for when the doors are gonna pop," Riley was saying, pointing out instructions for the guys from the village. "I think there are still some dead trees in front of the plane; if not, you guys might wanna drag a trunk or two around. Just tearing the hinges out of the frame is going to help with moment of inertia, but this Ceiba here is a heavy mother and I don't have a level with me to calculate the exact expected force that we're gonna be putting into the doors. No – outside, you all can stay outside, it's us who's gonna be shoving the thing, that way we're sure we're not gonna put anything extra into it over overcoming coefficient of friction. We gotta get this out, but we're not gonna get shit if it rips the doors in half and plops through them into the jungle." Maybe for the guys, hearing this wasn't so good, but I didn't mind – and really, if you wanted to make sure you didn't put more than the minimum possible force into something, you ought to use the half-dozen college students instead of the ten farmers and fishermen. I moved back into position at the back end of the Ceiba thing as Yuping and Sajitha doped up the last parts of the deck with the grease and smeared the rest of it under the reactor, ready to shove and get it moving.

At first, it was like leaning into the rock of the mountain itself. But then, the six of us working together, it nudged – it nudged just a little, and then a little more, and then the grease was spreading itself under the metal block, and every inch was easier than the last. It still wasn't easy, not next to anything normal, but by the time the giant reactor coffin tipped forward, and fell into the doors, and tore them out of the nose to fall down into them, sledding into the local guys' bulwark of rotten trees with a skgronch and a thumping crunch, it was at least moving of its own accord. It wasn't landsliding – it didn't tear the doors apart – it didn't turn them into a toboggan sled to go crashing off down the mountain and running everybody over – but it did what Riley thought it would do and ripped the front doors out of the plane, turned them into something useful, and sat in them in a way that almost balanced. We were out – we were free – and now the hard part, to get this down the slope to the beach without losing control or breaking it up, was barely started.

"All right – all right," Riley called out, crab-walking around the side of the improvised accidental sled. "Everyone, everybody, bring it in here. We're going to have to take this real careful – everybody put a hand on the metal, we're gonna have to all work this together to get it downhill. Careful, careful – you don't wanna get run over by this thing, trust me. It doesn't have to go anywhere; all it has to go is down, as soon as we can get it onto a beach – and it's probably going to be a beach instead of somebody's floodplain from here – we're good and you all can go up here after those ramps and go try and find the superchargers off the engines. Careful – careful – nice and easy."

I brought it in, too, and ended up on one of the door edges next to Ernest; one of our neighbors, the guy we'd borrowed a hatchet from before going up the mountain. I thanked him for it, and promised to get it back as soon as we could – and then, because Riley was ahead a little piece, working out just how the sled would have to fall and slide, I asked him the question that had been burning on my mind since last night. He was like my dad's age, so he would have had to have been around to know.

"So Ernest," I said, "when the government came to find this plane, they ran the bulldozers all over the wrong side of the mountain. But people were here, and they knew what side the plane was on, even if they thought it was in little pieces they couldn't salvage. Why didn't they tell them, tell the Department of Energy they were on the wrong side?"

Ernest shrugged. "If the government wanted to dig up the wrong side of the mountain, then, as long's they're paying people to drive the dozers, who cares? When they started on the wrong side, we thought they'd keep going; maybe they do the east side next, or maybe they do the north side, and people get paid three times instead of two. So the people kept shut up, y'know? And when they packed up, well, then, it was too late; couldn't tell em or they'd get mad we worked em and then we'd get a raw deal off some other end."

I shook my head, and concentrated on keeping my feet under me. Of course; it had to be something like that. Little things, the littlest things: and now here was Riley about to take a thermonuclear fusion engine home because we paid attention to those littlest things.

#nanowrimo #alifeofriley #fiction

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