Lone Star Renegades by Mark Wayne McGinnis

hand. “ Give me a hand, will you? ”
    Using two hands, she pulled until Collin was able to crawl up onto the wing.
    “ Answer me! ”
    “ I don ’ t know. ” He got to his feet. The plane was crushed — at least half of it was. The passenger railcar took up the space where the rear of the plane used to be. Collin and Tink exchanged glances.
    “ They might all be dead, Collin. They may have all moved toward the back of the plane and gotten crushed. ”
    Collin had to duck his head. Above them, an eighteen-wheeler ’ s big aluminum trailer lay on its side. It slanted upward, propped onto the top of what remained of the 777 ’ s fuselage.
    “ Let ’ s see if anyone ’ s home. ” Collin sidestepped a metal file cabinet and moved over to the jetliner ’ s emergency exit. He looked in through the little porthole window. There were still cabin lights on. He pounded his fist against the door … bang bang bang .
    Within seconds there was movement inside. “ I see movement, ” he said. It was still too dim inside to see who was in there. “ It ’ s me … Collin. Open the door! ”
    He heard excited murmuring — elevated voices inside. Then came a series of sounds, like the latch mechanism being worked, and the door, now unsealed, was pushed outward. Collin and Tink stepped backward as the big door swung open. The first person to greet them was Lydia. She rushed into his arms.
     

Chapter 9
     
     
    Lydia pulled away. “Are you the only one left? Did the rest …” Her eyes welled up with tears. “Did Darren … die down there?”
    Collin’s heart sank, but his face gave no indication of his disappointment. “No, Darren’s fine. Same with Humphrey and DiMaggio. As you can see, Tink is fine, too. We lost Tami, though.”
    Lydia brought a hand up to her mouth as if choking on what she had to say. “There were a few back in the tail section. They were getting ready to go below. Bobby Lopez, Ryan Mansfield, and Brianna Gould … all are dead. They’d have to be dead, right?”
    Collin nodded and did the quick math in his head. They’d started out with somewhere around forty-eight kids. About half of those didn’t make it off of the bus. Now, with Tami gone, along with the three in the tail section, there would be twenty kids left. At this rate, it seemed all of them surviving the day would be a stretch.
    Collin noticed that although she had taken a half-step back, her palm was still resting on his chest. She looked so scared and vulnerable, he wanted to pull her in close … tell her everything was going to be all right, even though he knew things couldn’t get much worse.
    “I’m scared, Collin. We’re all scared … I miss my parents. Are we going to die?”
    “Nah … we’ll be fine. Someday you’ll be able to tell your grandkids about your adventures in space.”
    She nodded but clearly didn’t buy the mini pep talk. “What do we do now?”
    “We need to get everyone out of the plane. There’s too much heavy crap on top of it … sooner or later, it’ll cave in, like the tail section. Can you have everyone collect their stuff and gather here on the wing? I have to go back down … help the others come up from below.”
    “You’re going back down there?” she asked, looking somewhat exasperated.
    “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do less.”
     
    * * *
     
    It took the better part of an hour to get Darren, Humphrey, and DiMaggio, as well as the weapons and duffle bags, transferred up to the wing. The latter aspect was pretty much left to Collin and DiMaggio to do on their own, since Darren and Humphrey said they’d rather leave everything behind than take on that extra work. While Collin checked out his still-oozing knee, which had begun to throb, he told DiMaggio what he’d seen—what he thought he’d seen, anyway. At this point he was less and less sure. He was fairly sure the mind played tricks on someone under this kind of stress. Just the same, they both kept an eye out