Straying From the Path

“Cook, get to the radio and belt in,” I said. I secured my own harness. “Evie, flaps aren’t down.”

“They don’t like you taking control. They don’t want to land,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Would they prefer a nose-dive? We gotta land if we’re going to get out of this.”

“Come on, baby. Let me put the flaps down.” She shook her head. Nothing.

Evie had sided with the plane. It had changed her somehow, like it had the other pilots. They didn’t want to touch the ground anymore.

I grabbed her and pulled her away from the yoke. She grunted, fell out of the light and collapsed into my bubble of darkness. I surprised them both and stole back control from whatever soul inhabited the bomber. I pulled on the yoke, lifting the nose, and lowered the flaps. Fifty, forty. We were still too slow. And for spite, the other engine cut out. We sailed in silence, plunging toward the earth like a bomb. I could only hope that we hit belly first and slid to a halt before we flipped.

“Hold on!”

I don’t remember what happened after the first impact. There was a jolt, the world through the canopy lurched, and we skidded. We skimmed on our belly like a rock on water, turning slightly so the port wing led. Must have crossed the whole two hundred acres like that. We didn’t flip. Eventually, we stopped. The monster came to rest at the end of a long furrow.

Smoke and dust filled the cockpit. I took slow breaths and the world came back into focus as I realized I could feel again. I was sore where the straps had held me. My heart pounded like a piston. But I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t broken. I laughed with relief; the sound made me light-headed.

“Evie?”

She lay across the instrument panel. There was a crack in the canopy right above her head. Blood matted her dark hair. The canopy, the glass fronts of the instruments, shone with blood. She hadn’t secured her harness.

I undid my belt and touched her neck. I didn’t want to turn her

over. I didn’t want to see her face, to see what she looked like with her skull smashed in.

Cook came up through the hatch. Apart from a cut on his brow, he looked fine. He saw Evie and didn’t say a word. He helped me pick her up and take her to the top hatch. Together we carefully lowered her to the wing, then to the ground, and carried her away from the plane.

The bomber’s skin was metal, dull gray. It had a faint, lifeless sheen in the predawn light.

I held Evie on my lap and stared at the bomber.

“You knew this would happen.”

“No. No, I—” Cook sat among dead cornstalks and stared at the wreck. He held his notepad, but didn’t write. I think he lost his pencil. He shrugged, and I wanted to hit him. “Sure, we lost Boyd and Olsen, but it shouldn’t have happened to—”

“To what?”

“To women.”

“Why not?”

“It—it’s classified.”

“Cook, tell me what that thing was,” I said, my voice tight with anger. “Tell me why it killed Evie.” Never mind that she had known what she was doing and if I hadn’t grabbed her . . . if she had belted in properly. If . . . if . . .

He shook his head. “I—I can’t. It’s on a need to know basis—”

I lunged at him and grabbed the collar of his jacket. I twisted the leather in my hands and pulled him so his face was inches from mine.

“Cook? I need to know.”

He pushed away, scrambling awkwardly until he collapsed. He rubbed the cut on his forehead.

He took a breath, then spoke evenly, as if lecturing. “It was an experiment in pilot-aircraft interface. We were examining methods to increase pilot reaction speed—hypnosis, electrodes, pharmaceuticals—and aircraft responsiveness to control. We hit on a method of translating nerve impulses into electrical impulses which could be transmitted directly to the aircraft controls.” The cables, the sockets, yes. “But something happened. On the first flight, the plane landed empty. The crew was just gone, and the plane’s skin started glowing. We didn’t know what happened, except that maybe the experiment worked too well. There are studies being done now by another research group, advanced physics and mathematics describing the conversion of mass into energy—” He waved the explanation away, like he was swatting at a fly. “We sent the plane up again, just a test flight without using the linking apparatus. The same thing happened. Then we thought something about the pilots, their ability and sensitivity to the aircraft, the responsiveness of the B-26, caused a link-up to form without the apparatus. We were at Harlingen because it’s isolated, not as susceptible to security breaches. After the—anomalies—Avery wanted to send the plane to Wright, where the engineers could examine it more closely. We believed—” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “—that female pilots weren’t as sensitive as male pilots and that therefore they would not form a connection with the plane.”

Evie and I being at Harlingen to ferry that plane probably hadn’t been a coincidence. Avery must have pulled strings to get us there. Of the WASP, we had the most hours in the B-26. Whatever else Cook and Avery thought about women pilots, they must have thought we at least had the experience to successfully ferry their precious experiment.

“How do you know anything about women pilots? You said yourself, you haven’t bothered studying them.” My hands clenched in my lap. I said softly, “Evie was every bit as good as your best. You weren’t expecting that, were you?”