The crew and passengers had gotten all the doors open, and from them hung the deflated remains of the emergency slides.
“I bet there’s something still in that one,” Cooper said. “If the crew was sticking to protocol, they wouldn’t have let people take any luggage off.”
“Should we try to break into the luggage hold?” the Warlock asked.
Cooper shook his head. “Probably any bottled water would be in the passenger compartment.” He looked at me and then at the limp yellow slide. “That thing looks hard to climb. If we boosted you up high enough to grab the edge of the door, do you think you could pull yourself in there one-handed?”
I nodded. My stump didn’t hurt and was actually feeling a bit numb for a change, so I thought I could use my elbow for leverage if necessary.
Cooper looked at Pal. “Do you mind if we stood on you to get some extra height?”
Pal blew a chord that I took as a sigh. “I suppose there’s not another way for you to get up there. Please don’t stand directly on my vertebral crests, because that hurts.”
“He says it’s okay,” I told Cooper. “Stay off his spine bones if you can.”
My familiar knelt and Cooper and I got on his back. Pal stood and moved directly beneath the airplane’s main door. After some awkward false starts, Cooper was able to balance on Pal’s thorax and I was able to climb up on Cooper’s shoulders and sit on him like we were preparing for a chicken fight.
“Okay, steady,” Cooper said. “Step onto my hands and I’ll push you up.”
Clutching his head for balance, I gathered my feet under me and stepped out onto his outstretched palms. He grunted as he pressed me upward; Cooper’s wiry but he’s plenty strong. I grabbed at the lip of the open hatch with my flesh hand and swung my other elbow up onto the edge and pulled myself inside.
The short blue carpet covering the aluminum floor smelled like dirt, cleaning chemicals, and stale coffee. I quickly got to my feet and surveyed the passenger compartment. No corpses here, which I was very glad to see; the overhead luggage compartments were mostly open, and I could see bags and other items still inside.
“Looks like we’re in business, guys!” I called down to the others.
I rummaged through the galley compartments first. They had been ransacked pretty thoroughly already, but I found four unopened water bottles in an overlooked bottom bin along with some packets of shortbread cookies and pretzels. Someone had left a tote bag filled with beach towels on her seat; I emptied it out, keeping the SPF 45 lotion at the bottom, and loaded it with the water and snacks. Upon checking the rest of the luggage compartments, I found a bone-colored straw cowboy hat I snagged for myself, a gray felt cowboy hat I thought might fit the Warlock, and an olive-drab boonie hat for Cooper.
I went back to the hatch and dropped the bag of loot down to Cooper. “I think I can get myself down on the remains of the slide.”
I sat down, swung my legs over, and awkwardly lowered myself so I could grab the slide. I nearly lost my grip, and half slid, half fell the fifteen feet or so to the sandy earth, landing on my back.
“Are you okay?” Cooper stepped toward me, looking concerned.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” If I’d learned one thing in the year I’d gone to hapkido with Mother Karen, it was how to make nice with the ground during sudden encounters.
We traded the bottle of sunscreen around and slathered it on. Cooper and the Warlock briefly argued over who got to wear the gray cowboy hat but rebuffed my offer to go back into the plane to find another one.
“Well, let’s get moving; maybe we can find some help over there,” Cooper said, his cheer sounding only slightly forced. He tried a couple of other old words for random simple charms, with no effect. “But I have to say, this magic block worries me. Someone went to a lot of trouble to set it up. It’s taking a whole lot of power, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it except try to figure out what’s happened here,” the Warlock replied.
We walked out across the scrubby field toward the red-and-white sign.
“We need to find a phone to let Mother Karen know what happened,” I said.