Read Falling for Free Online

couldn’t.
    Tom stopped, pulled up short because there was simply nowhere further to run. Eyes searching for form, anything that you could point to and say “that, I recognise that”. There was no cockpit, no seats, no wings. No jump seat. Ran his gaze up the mountainside, along the trail of fire. How could this have happened? Was it the snow, the whipping wind? Ice?
    How does a plane just fall from the sky?
    He leaned forward hands on his knees, chest screaming with cold. Breathe. Think.
    “Tom.” Dan’s arm was around his shoulder, thick biceps steering him away. He was saying something, words lost to the roar of the fire and the thrumming of blood through his head.
    And all Tom could think about was Ben. He was two. He was only two. How could this be right? How could this be the way life was? Two years old and losing his mother twice in one day. And even though his thoughts seemed to have fragmented into a thousand pieces, already in his head Tom was planning the lie. How his mother had adored him. How she would have done anything for him. How tragic it was that she had been snatched away, because she would never, never have left him willingly.
    “Tom.”
    He felt himself being pivoted, away from the gawking on-lookers, the firemen with their futile hoses, the paramedics with nothing to do. Felt Dan’s dinner plate hands on his shoulders, forcing Tom to look at him.
    “Did you hear me? Tom?”
    Shaking his head.
    “The plane split. They said there’s another site. A couple of miles away. They say there are survivors.”
    The hospital smelt of fear. Fear and antiseptic and sweat.
    They had found the survivors in a field, halfway up the mountain, the tail of the plane blazing like a beacon. Had taken them to the hospital. Morriston. Oh, so you just came from Swansea? You’ll know the way then. Back to the car, trying to push back a growing sense of the ridiculous. Back along the iced winding roads, going too fast.
    The queue stretched out to the doors of the hospital waiting area and beyond. Dense heat, of overcoats and scarves and bodies, punctured by a bitter cold as the doors slid open and closed. The crowds behind him and beside him and in front of him, all with a single goal. That window and that desk and that hapless receptionist with alarm written plain across her face. Beneath the voices, the steady background hum of crying.
    Ben had gone to bed already, Tom’s mother’s voice a whisper, taut as piano wire on the phone. He doesn’t know anything. Don’t worry about him. You just go and see…Hadn’t said what he was to see. Likely that neither of them knew where to go from here.
    “Isn’t there anyone you could ask?” The man was crying openly now, not even trying to hide it any more.
    “I’m so sorry. I’m really, really sorry. Look, have a seat. Just until we find out some more.”
    Then it was Tom’s turn. He stared at the receptionist, eighteen if she was a day, looking for all the world like she wanted to cry too. Knowing what he had to say. My wife. Is she alive? But then stuck on the words, because this right here couldn’t possibly be his life.
    “Sir?”
    “Cecilia Allison.” But it wasn’t, was it. She had never taken his name. “Sorry.” His voice was shaking. “Cecilia Williams. She’s a stewardess.”
    There was dejection on the receptionist’s face, shaking her head, but typing the name in anyway because that was her job. Then suddenly sitting up straighter. A smile of dazzling relief.
    “She’s here.” A laugh as if she couldn’t believe it. “She’s here.”
    People looking at him, faces ugly with jealousy that it’s him who gets the prize; he who couldn’t even be bothered to shake or to cry. Then he was walking through the crowds, them parting for him like the red sea for Moses, and the doors to the treatment area swinging open. And the noise. The noise was deafening here, as nurses ran from cubicle to cubicle, all with that same look of focus. Cries of pain