Afterwards: The Airplane

An old bush plane is determined to make one last delivery.

The Airplane

The airplane squatted on flat tires in its ramshackle hangar; oxidized tin lining a frame of bare timber posts drawn from the forest by a team of horses in days gone by, when such things still happened. It was younger than the west-facing shack, but only just; having been knocked together by French engineers in prosperous post-war years to serve as a mechanical workhorse itself.

Its youth passed with the seasons, carrying supplies to isolated northern communities congealing about the Pacific coast; travelling the rivers and estuaries in the wilderness of the Canadian north like a blood cell to the furthest capillaries. It had been old when The Company sold it at auction to a hunting guide, but still sound, and game for terrible winters when it was hailed for food, fuel, and life-saving medicine.

Self-interest had made its various operators attentive to its needs, and whenever parts wore down or tears appeared on its yellow-painted canvas, the work had been attended to. Its engine had been swapped twice like transplanted hearts, and cataract-clouded windshields revived with artificial new lenses, but endless canvas skin grafts and a gaudy new metal propeller could never hide the proud skeleton of the airplane as it had been laid down.

It was the radio, however, that was the soul of the craft.

As much as the plane accepted the role it had been created for, and as content in its service as it was, there was no denying the lonesome nature of the work. It was the voices on the radio that made the endless struggle against time and nature bearable, the feeling of belonging as a thread on a wider tapestry stretching far beyond the horizon. There were few better able to appreciate the value of an elevated perspective, and the plane allowed for a broader connectivity to which it was entwined with the world during ponderous months of rest on wind-polished ice.

The song on the airwaves grew over long decades as more voices joined. Settlements widened and defined themselves over time, but the tune had been consistent with familiar verses and unforgettable rounds of chorus… until last winter.

The music changed abruptly, becoming panicked and desperate with feral voices, dwindling in number. The airplane had begun to believe that it was truly alone as static dominated the air during the normally lively spring thaw and no pilot came to operate it.

The guide never left his cabin to purge dirty mechanical blood and tighten loosened bolts, not even as vegetation browned and brittled with the next winter’s first whisper. The airplane accepted eternity gracefully, not resenting the deprivation of final proud years of service and dignity; and prepared to fade away—until the day a raft sailed into the cove.

Crudely-hewn timber platformed a thin mast bowing under the strain of a billowing poly sail as the ungainly vessel bucked in choppy waters. The airplane wished the craft well, and watched as the wretched figure of a man tumbled to the rocky shore. Sharp tombstones shaved splinters from the bobbing hull until the craft hove-over with the rising insistence of a falling barometer, and stood fast on the land upside down.

The man dragged himself by inches down the beach towards the guide’s shack, disappearing within and reappearing to pull an emaciated corpse into the cool air some time later. The door stayed shut for days afterwards, but a faint glow in the windows gave the airplane cause for hope.

The man came down to inspect the hangar once before the first snows came to blanket the land, a rough, rugged composite of all that came before: self-reliant, capable and determined. He seemed satisfied at their meeting and the plane dared to dream of one last flight.

The aircraft saw the man on occasion through the winter, searching always for something or another in the untidy assortment of cast-off machinery and appliances filling creaking outbuildings. Some days he fished the cove, traversing the jagged sheets of abstract waves radiating winter’s twilight in frozen prisms; other days the man sang into the static, voicing the airplane’s own wordless isolation.

The spring came as it always did—slowly, and then all at once. The sculpted landscape shattered in growing days, and the cove roared again with crashing surf. The song on the radio was faint now, feedback and eerie echoes in the ringing silence.

But the man seemed to have a plan.

The airplane was thrilled with the rejuvenation of oil dialysis, and the satisfaction of out-of-reach itches finally scratched as seized parts were freed. Weeks passed before the man seemed content with the servicing, and thick skeins of numberless geese chorused motivation in the skies during their great return migration.

The day finally came when the man started the engine, laughing and whooping after it roared into motion following several hours of muttering and tinkering. By the next sunset, the plane was strapped with spare jerry cans of fuel, and two small duffels had found a place in the spartan cabin on the co-pilot’s ragged seat. The man passed the final night by the cove singing his lonesome tune to an indifferent ocean of airwaves broken by echoing static surf.

They were airborne to meet the dawn, and the man set their course confidently south—running them parallel with, and above the waterfowl rising to carry on with their pilgrimage. Soft light illuminated a landscape of spring’s green blossom, touched here and there by fading fingers of snow; the topography broken everywhere with inland lakes glowing in a spectrum of gold and crimson. The airplane vibrated with the excitement of a fresh journey.

The plane didn’t know where it was going, but it knew where it had been untold times before; and the man kept them to a heading leading to a well-travelled station serving as a fuelling stop, so the old workhorse focused on the familiar two-step through the turbulence and enjoyed the ride. The silent airwaves wore on its spirit, but the craft remained hopeful as they closed the distance to the oasis.

The outpost was still as they circled, and no notes answered the inquiring man over the radio as they broke the inlets’s placid surface with aluminum skids. The engine spooled down while they drifted to a floating dock of milled timber stretching out over the water. The man steered them clear of a lone mast standing proud of the surface, hosting a dozen squabbling seagulls screaming dominance of the perch. The ship’s hull revealed itself as they passed, a hideous rotting yellow through the murky water, lurking in the shallows like a predator. The airplane’s oil pressure spiked as it waited for the inevitable attack; but none came, and they moored under the gulls’ endless cry.

The man walked out of sight somewhere among the cluster of cabins, hangars, and storehouses while the plane cooled under the wind’s frigid caress, shuddering in its aluminum bones at the emptiness of the place. A haunting feeling of greater loss elsewhere on the tapestry sent a tingle down its antenna, and the airplane desired to leave.

Echoes of sharp hammering reverberated around the sheltered bay, noticed absently by the plane only by virtue of being the only unnatural noise at all. It took a moment for the venerable craft to recognize the gunshots for what they were, as it had never heard so many so close together.

The dock trembled under the running footfalls of the man, and then he was dropping an armload of fuel canisters along the airplane’s battered aluminum float in a pitiful cluster.

The people of the outpost streamed towards the pilot as he cut the rope binding the aircraft in place, and bracing himself between the metal and the wood, he squatted down to press his back against the airframe. The dock swayed as the first of a score of residents stumbled onto the boards, bobbing on the calm water as more followed.

The aircraft could see now a terrible affliction among their kind that it had only ever witnessed in its mechanical peers: tattered skin hanging in ribbons, critical parts missing, and all manner of lubricants dripping from countless leaks. The man scrabbled to avoid the others, leaping over the growing gap of open water between them and the dock, and clinging to a strut whilst he caught his breath.

The crowd pressed on relentlessly—tumbling from the wood into the water without hesitation, to be dragged under the surface by the weight of their shredded clothing. Some bloated bodies floundered without going down—but none were able to make their way over to the float.

The man emptied the canisters into the tank as the afflicted milled about the beach; stumbling out of the lake aimlessly and then turning to walk straight back in when they noticed the craft as if for the first time. The airplane shifted as one of them managed to reach the aluminum skid from below, hauling itself up towards the man; but the pilot saw the danger and stove the intruder’s skull in with a wrench. A ragged moan rose from the strangers as they pursued the drifting floatplane, then gurgling as water filled lungs.

The airplane gauged the level of fuel sloshing in the tank and dreaded the next leg of their journey, if indeed they were going where it thought. Maybe an engine swap ago, or even the autumn prior. Now, with calcified veins, rusty valves and brittle bones? The man had done what he could to prepare the craft, but he couldn’t turn back the hands of time.

They sat together for a while, with the man in the cabin watching the beach, waiting maybe, for it to clear. The sand swarmed with the afflicted. No matter how many lost themselves in the inlet, enough would find their way out again.

The man dropped an anchor as the sun set to keep the breeze from carrying them out into deeper waters and stronger winds. He tried the radio a few times during the night between instances of fending off the odd rabid human that found their tenuous chain to the void below, but there was no reply. Dawn revealed the same circuitous movement of the crowd and the man wasted no more time there.

The fuel in the tank lasted them through the short day, gone seemingly in an instant to the airplane as a sickly lightheadedness settled over it. The man urged them ever higher with the controls as the craft flashed its warning lights to him. Higher, higher yet. The airplane fought for focus, straining itself in answer to the pilot’s commands.

The air was thin and cold. The old workhorse flared its intakes—desperate for the right mix of oxygen and fuel. High-pitched ringing filled the radio, fading as the airplane snuffled the last of the fuel from the tank. The engine pumped on bravely for several moments before it stalled, silencing its stuttering roar.

Wind screeched over tired wings as they glided onwards. The plane’s body chilled without its heartbeat, but it refused to accept defeat as long as it was airborne.

A note pierced the airwaves, heard by the aircraft as if from a great distance as it focused on maintaining the best attitude of its flaps. The man answered, and the airplane soared with hope. It focused its antenna, bringing the distant music onto the correct channel and orienting itself to the source; closer than the plane had first thought.

The man sang into the radio as he and the airplane fought gravity, each helping the other to adjust the trim of the craft as they fell through weeping clouds. The voice answered, louder and clearer every moment. The landscape reappeared, darkening with sunset’s deep shadows. A steel cable snapped, and the plane shuddered with the effort of catching enough air under its sagging wings.

The music insisted, calling to them from any of the hundred shrouded coves along the coast, but the airplane couldn’t pinpoint it. The man shouted as a lick of light burst into the sky below them, and he pedalled the rudder to shift their course.

They fell faster, stretching every foot on the altimeter. There would be no circling and landing against the wind this time—they would have only one run at it. Another flare launched skywards, now almost level with the plummeting craft.

The sun hesitated on the horizon, as if to witness the moment the airplane struck the waves.

The roiling surf was nothing like the sheltered bays the airplane had made a career of landing in, but it felt no fear as it was caught in the unrelenting arms of the ocean, and its aluminum floats were sheared away. The man struggled within the cabin, stunned perhaps by the crash, and the plane gauged the distance to the fading beach. The pilot would never make it.

The airplane surged its fuel system with every ounce of spirit it had left, spiking its oil pressure, and filling dry chambers with fresh blood. The engine spat seawater and roared fury into its bent propeller, raising the airplane’s nose free of the waves, and righting the craft in the battering surf.

The man cracked open his door with bloody hands and braced himself as the aircraft rushed towards the sand on the back of a crashing wave, managing to spill himself out of the cabin as the plane’s frame dragged along the bottom and the engine cut out.

The same wave pulled the craft back into the embrace of the next, knocking loose a wing and pushing the fuselage deeper. The man dragged himself out of the water as another rush bent the tail section free of the aircraft, floating away now that it was detached.

Air gurgled out of the fuselage like a death-rattle as the plane slipped below the surface, pushed and pulled by swirling currents for long minutes until it settled into its final resting place on the plush sea-floor sand.

All that remained of the airplane was the cabin, the still engine, and the radio; drowning as water forced itself into aged circuits. The old workhorse prided itself on its final effort, and eased into sleep as the mournful tune of a pod of whales vibrated down its antenna.

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The following link is the short story of the initial attack that collapses society, creating the ‘Afterwards’ timeline.