Wings of Fate: The Lost Ones

Austin slept through dinner but Bael promised more food in the morning. Raven shoveled food into her mouth before clutching her purse against her chest and lying down next to Austin. Lying behind him, it occurred to her she might put an arm around his little body for warmth or comfort, but she couldn’t figure out where to put her arm and abandoned the idea.

Silence settled heavily over their camp with only the buzzing cicadas and musical crickets to comfort them. The fire was put out several hours ago but no matter which way she turned, or how she covered her nose, the stifling smell of bar-b-qued rabbit lingered. Focusing on the smell distracted Raven from the stiffness of the ground beneath her, though she spent ten minutes flipping from one side to the other in search of comfort.

Falling asleep was impossible in the middle of the forest. In the middle of nowhere, she amended, turning onto her back. Somewhere beyond the canopy of leaves was a moon with its obligatory white light revealing all it touched. But the moonlight couldn’t pass the leaves above them, and their camp remained shrouded in night.

The two men sent to guard the perimeter had yet to return to camp and, she assumed, they probably wouldn’t. Raven held her breath, listening for the tell-tale crackling of leaves to reveal their locations, but the men were quiet. The other men fell asleep after Bael banked the fire, leaving small burning embers to provide some lingering warmth in the cool evening. The three men lay close to the fire, absorbing what heat they could before it radiated toward her and Austin.

It was going to be a long night of waiting for morning. What answers would they find in the village? Bael’s responses to her questions were vague. He hadn’t seemed shocked about the crash and, instead, behaved as though plane crashes were an every day occurrence. Why wouldn’t he tell her the name of the island? Some niggling voice in her head whispered a response -- maybe this isn’t an island at all, Raven.

If she went to sleep, morning would come much sooner, Raven thought, rolling to her side. She would have her answers as soon as they made it to the village. And she would have a phone. Mom has to be so distraught. It was years since her adoptive father died but the memory was still fresh, and mom would probably fall apart if Raven wasn’t found soon.

Perhaps emergency personnel already located the plane and were there looking for survivors. They would find nothing. Would searchers find their tracks leading away from the plane? No, she mulled, it’s too dark to see tracks. It wouldn’t hurt to see if anyone was looking for them -- if she went now she could meet them and forgo the trip to the village. After telling the searchers where they could find Austin, the people would come for him and they would be taken home. Why was she just lying here?

Decision made, Raven quietly rose to her feet, freezing and staring hard at the sleeping men as she watched for movement. Austin rolled over at her feet, draping an arm across his chest as he moved, but his breathing remained even and she knew he still slept. Raven stepped towards the forest and, with each step she took, glanced back at the men -- terrified they would wake and -- and what? Exactly what do you think those men will do to you Raven? She needed to go, though, to see if anyone came for them.

The forest branched in all directions around her, each corner just as dark as the next, and there was no determining which path would lead her back. Getting lost was not just a high probability, it was likelihood.

“What are you doing?”

Raven jumped. The familiar voice came from behind her and, in the stillness of the night, was as though he shouted the question. Whirling around, she searched for his face in the dark. Bael stood several feet away, almost lost in the shadows, but the outline of his body was unmistakable. Glancing toward camp, she counted three huddled bodies around the fire. The two men watching the perimeter hadn’t returned, Bael hadn’t left camp, and she hadn’t fallen asleep, so who was the third body?

“Where are you going?” He repeated, emphasizing each syllable as though she were the village idiot.

“I -- uh,” There are many reasons for wanting to see the plane, she thought. To prove she wasn’t hallucinating, to prove she wasn’t truly dead and now wandering the afterlife, and to see if anyone came for them. The key was somewhere in the middle of the mass blackness before her.

Being dead would explain how she and Austin were the only bodies on the plane; it would explain why her internet never worked; it would explain why everything seemed wrong. Was she fighting death? There was no way this place was heaven -- where was the bright light? Her mom and dad? Was she stranded in some in-between world? Was that possible??

Sighing deeply, Raven returned her attention to Bael. “I was going back to the plane for a quick look. I -- I didn’t want to disturb anyone. I just needed to go alone without the distraction of the boy.” Austin was still curled up on the ground, a yard away from where she stood ready to head into the forest. He would, hopefully, sleep until she, or rescue workers, returned for him. Leaving him alone with strangers seemed wrong.

“Will I suffice?” Bael asked.

“Wh -- what?” Raven asked, shifting her attention again. Bael seemed safe enough in the light of day but at night -- there was no telling who he really was or what his goals truly were. Who was he to be escorting her through the forest? Was he a cannibal? She glanced at Austin again, frozen with indecision. Desire to return to the plane was overwhelming her caution; she needed to go.

“I can’t let you go into the forest alone in the daytime, much less at night, you’ll get lost or worse.” He paused, allowing her to absorb his words and she wondered what else lurked in the darkness. “Your options are to go lay back down and get some sleep, or I can accompany you to the Crash Site.” His shadowed outline shifted as he moved his arms, crossing them over his chest while he waited silently for her decision.

Not wanting to go back to bed, and not wanting to travel through the forest alone anyhow, made the decision easy for her. She nodded determinedly and turned towards the trees. As they moved through the night, the ground shifted beneath her feet. Rocks of varying sizes, easy to pick out during the day, were invisible now, and when the ground shifted slightly in an incline or decline, the first step always jarred her.

Their march through the trees that morning was difficult, being as it was mostly uphill, but now they traveled back the way they had come and the path was in full decline. She followed Bael’s footsteps more than she followed his shadow, the crackling of leaves acted like a homing beacon and she trailed after the sound. On occasion their path would widen enough to walk side by side, but the trail would soon become over-crowded with bushes and trees, and Bael would move ahead of her again.

The island experience was somewhat less than what she hoped for, having believed them to have waterfalls, glittering beaches, and exotic life -- human, animal, and plant. So far, the island offered nothing but trees, trees, and more trees, and she wondered how small the island was. Was it small enough for only trees and one village? Perhaps that was why the local wise woman had a telephone -- there being nowhere else to house a line. She had many questions and as Bael moved ahead of her again, she stared at the shadows of his back, considering.

Earlier, it took them over an hour to get to the campsite from where the plane crashed, and she figured they had been walking for half an hour already. Another thirty minutes and they would be there, staring at the singular proof she wasn’t insane. What would she find? If necessary, could she shimmy up the blanket rope, climb into the plane, and see if they had mentally blocked out all the bodies?

Bael halted and moved to the side, allowing her to catch up with him. He stopped in an unfamiliar clearing, which was aglow from the moonlight allowed to shine into an area where dozens of trees were cut down.

“Are we lost?” She asked, looking up at him and frowning at the ironic laughter in his hooded eyes.

“Lost?” he asked, crossing his arms against his chest.

Raven gestured toward the clearing. “Yes, I don’t remember any of this from the walk this morning, are we lost?”

“This is the area where I found you -- the Crash Site.”

Ignoring the serious expression on his face, Raven turned her attention to the flattened grass covering the football field sized clearing. At the area’s perimeter the forest resumed and, what lay beyond the trees was submerged in shadows once again. Though the clearing was brilliant with moonlight, it only stressed to illuminate what was missing. “There’s no airplane here, Bael.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Bael looked out at the field with her, his eyes passing silently from one end of the clearing to the next. His expression seemed unconcerned, though, and she frowned again. She needed that plane.

“You remember when we met this morning there was a large metal thing impaled in the ground?”

“Yes, I remember that.” He said, meeting her eyes straight on.

“So, you agree we’re in the wrong place?” She asked, trying hard not to grit her teeth. He moved away from her, unhurried, and she followed several feet behind. A fallen red tree, three or four persons wide, lay at the edge of the clearing, providing Bael with a place to rest. The trunk stood some several feet above his head and the darkness of his clothing near blended in with the rotting bark behind him.

Leaning next to him against the tree, Raven waited impatiently for him to explain himself. He took his time -- lighting a cigarette with a match and waiting for the sulfuric ash to dissipate in the wind before he began.

The moon climbed high in the sky, cresting the tree tops while he told her a hundred-year old story about mysterious planes and boats. He referred to the clearing before them as the Crash Site, a place where, year after year, things crashed -- vessels coming from somewhere else. Planes and boats at random, with no particular pattern to their arrivals, crashed in the same place -- the field before them.

The oldest record of a crash was more than a hundred-years old, back when the arriving objects were smaller. Sometime since then Bael and his men were recruited to investigate the phenomenon but had been unsuccessful in determining what prompted the events. He, himself, had seen the crafts appear out of thin air -- the planes shooting through the clouds -- one moment the sky was empty and in the next, the sky was besieged by the high pitched wail of something speeding through the air.

Time after time the planes would crash in the exact same spot as though an arrow drawn to a target. The planes landed nose down every time, the front of the plane crumpling against the packed surface of the ground, shuddering to a halt and then pausing in retrospective silence. The boats appeared as though swimming along the surface of an ocean, though they never scraped the trees -- as though the boats were there, but not there.

Sometimes craft passengers survived the crash, usually only one passenger, in rare instances two or more arrived together. And from time to time there were no survivors at all. The crashes were random -- going months, years even, between arrivals. However, all of the crashes had one thing in common -- each of the vessels would disappear within twenty-four hours of its arrival.

“What do you mean it disappears? Like someone comes to get it and takes it away?” Raven asked, annoyed when he chuckled.

“Can you imagine trying to haul away your airplane?”

“I can’t imagine a lot of the things in my head right now!” she bellowed, coming to her feet and moving into the field. Pale moonlight danced across the blades of grass as they bent beneath her shoes where she paced. “Let me ask you something,” she continued, “yesterday afternoon I boarded a plane in New York, headed to Puerto Rico and during my flight the plane plummeted to the ground and apparently crashed.” she sucked in a deep breath. “I awake in total darkness with no one other than Austin. Hours later, we wake again to find no other passengers but there is a group of some uniform-wearing men sitting outside enjoying the breeze. Since the moment our feet touched ground I have not been able to access my phone service or internet, we are camping in the middle of nowhere and now, the plane, which I flew in on, is gone. Disappeared, and you are telling me this is normal.

How am I supposed to feel Bael? What am I supposed to think? How would you react? I don’t even know...” Raven’s voice trailed off. She had been about to say if I am alive. Instead she stared unseeingly into the gloom behind them, pushing all thought away in order to just breathe.

Bael was silent for a moment longer and when she didn’t say anymore, he continued. “Since it was realized these vessels were disappearing,” he went on, “they have sent an emissary, such as our group, back to the Crash Site once a day.” If his men discovered no waiting vessel, they returned to Nicaru Village. Within twenty-four hours of the crash, the vessel would flicker and fade into nothingness and where they went -- no one knew. The soldiers never boarded the vessels simply because the disappearances were a mystery and no one was willing to disappear along with it.

But if a vessel was there, the men were instructed to wait for survivors because, in the beginning, the passengers would walk away in search of help. Before the emissary soldiers were regularly sent, dozens of passengers disappeared, leaving nothing more than days-old prints in the forest. Because of the unnatural events occurring in the Crash Site, the events were kept secret so others would not learn of it.

“How come?” Raven asked.

Bael thought about his response for a moment, delaying the answer before he replied. “People -- do not respond well to things they do not understand. Do you take my meaning?”

“Like a witch hunt?” She asked, understanding, and now there was something else to fear. Everything Bael said was odd. How could planes disappear over the ocean and land on an island no one knew about? Unless it was a secret island...she thought. “How come I haven’t heard about this before? Wouldn’t it have been in the papers somewhere?”

“Papers?”

“Yes, Bael, papers, you know -- news articles, pictures of current events,” when he remained silent, she continued, “...sales ads? Is anything striking a chord with you?”

Finally he said, “I do not know how much I am to tell you.”

“Well...” she answered, considering. “Is it something I would eventually find out?”

He hesitated. “Yes, from Ruth.”

“Which is what, tomorrow? One day sooner won’t hurt.” Raven leaned her head back to gaze up at the night-time sky. The familiarity of stars comforted her -- no matter what, the stars were always there. “Where are we, some kind of secret NASA island?”

“No, this is not some ‘secret nasa island’.” He answered, a bit impatiently. “This is DeSolar.”

“DeSolar?” she said, trying the word. “Never heard of it.”

“That is not surprising, you would not have.”

“Because it’s some secret NASA thing?”

“What is this ‘secret nasa’?” he bellowed.

Raven leaned away from him. “Well I’m sorry if I offended you. Okay so this has nothing to do with NASA, what is DeSolar then?”

“It’s a planet far, far removed from any others.”

Raven was silent, considering his words -- the absolute ridiculousness of his words. “A planet? DeSolar is a planet?”

“Yes.” He confirmed, turning his head away.

He’s insane.

“Okay, assuming I buy into this, you’re saying our plane crashed onto a planet named DeSolar, which I’ve never heard of. You’re saying my plane disappeared, which happens frequently, and you and your men collect the people who land here. Did I get that right?”

Bael nodded jerkily.

“So, what do you do with people like me, like us? Do they stay in the village we are going to?”

“No, they are sent to another place to live.”

“Home?”

“No, we cannot send you home.”

“So, somewhere other than DeSolar, like we are shipped to some other planet?” This was stupid.

“No, not some other planet, you remain on DeSolar.”

“Ah, okay, so, this other place you take people like me, is that where Austin and I are going?”

Bael rose to his feet, signaling the end of their conversation as he moved towards the forest. “I do not know. You and the boy are special, but I cannot tell you why or for what reason. In the morning we will finish this leg of the journey and go visit Ruth, who will have more answers.”

Raven stayed close on his heels as she followed him into the shadows. He probably wouldn’t leave her behind but she didn’t want to chance it -- and now there was no plane to return to. That morning when they walked away from the plane, she had taken one last glance over her shoulder at the remnants of her flight -- that last glimpse really had been the last.

Raven now knew no one would come for them; no one could come for them. Whatever explanation existed for the disappearance of the plane, it would not change what wasn’t there. Getting onboard to ensure the passenger bodies existed was impossible now. Waiting for rescue workers to hone in on the homing beacon would be pointless without the plane.

If Bael wasn’t crazy, then she and Austin crash landed on an alien planet. DeSolar. But Bael was crazy, she reminded herself with a mental shake. What he was suggesting was impossible. The village wise woman would most likely be just as crazy as he was. Or would she? “What kind of answers will Ruth have?” she asked.

“I do not know what she will speak about. I know you and Austin are special, and I know this because Ruth does not summon me for specific individuals, but in this she mentioned you particularly.”

Nearly stumbling in the dark, she grabbed Bael’s arm to steady herself. “She knew my name?”

“Not your name -- she said a woman would arrive soon on a plane such as the one we found you in.”

“Just ‘a woman’? What about Austin?”

“She did not mention him to me.”

“Is that odd?”

“I do not know, Raven, perhaps it is but also -- perhaps it is not.” He moved along some unimagined path, able to see without any difficulty, though she tripped over every leaf, twig, and rock.

“How many people have you made this trip with, Bael?” Raven asked as he moved ahead of her. When he responded, she sensed a smile in his voice.

“You and Austin are the seventy-sixth and seventy-seventh travelers.”

“How long have you been an emissary for the Crash Site?”

“Hmmm, that is a good question.” He grew quiet while thinking of the answer but several minutes passed and he still did not respond.

“Were you planning on answering the good question?” she asked, struggling up the hill.

He chuckled. “I did not think you would appreciate my answer, with your low tolerance for the information you are getting from me.”

“Yeah well that’s probably not all your fault.” She admitted.

“One hundred and seven.” He called back over his shoulder. Raven closed the distance between them, staring at the back of his shaded head as they drew closer to the camp site. He turned toward her, giving the impression he was looking down at her.

“One hundred and seven trips and only seventy-seven of them had survivors?” Those were bad odds, she thought, they were luckier than she’d thought.

When he responded to her question Raven stumbled. Bael flung his hand out quickly to keep her from falling. Stopping, she stared at him and wished for some light so she could see. “I’m sorry,” she blurted incredulously, “what did you say?”

White teeth flashed in the dark. “I said no, there have not been one hundred and seven trips. I have been an emissary for one hundred and seven years.”