The engine exploded midair—flames tearing past the window, metal screaming like it was trying to rip itself in half—and while people were screaming, praying, or frozen stiff, I was already counting the seconds between falling and dying.
We hit the Andes hard, and those of us still breathing dragged ourselves from the wreck, straight into something worse: a survival cult run by a smooth-talking fraud who turned trauma into power and let a boy die to keep control.
But I didn’t survive a crash just to play along. And before it was over, every lie he built would snap under the weight of cold, hard proof—and someone like him would finally answer for what he did.
A Thin, Cold Silence: The Unraveling Sky
The groan of the wings was the first thing that felt wrong. It wasn’t the familiar, reassuring hum of a machine doing its job. It was a sound of protest, of metal under a strain it was never meant to bear. I’m an archivist. My world is one of carefully preserved paper, of cataloged history and the quiet, predictable decay of organic materials. I understand stress points. The sound vibrating through the floor and up my spine was a stress point.
David, my husband, was asleep beside me, his head resting against the cool plastic of the window. His mouth was slightly open, a picture of serene trust in the physics of flight. I envied him. My own hands were clenched around the armrests, my knuckles white. I stared at the back of the seat in front of me, at the small, pixelated map showing our little airplane icon suspended impossibly over the jagged peaks of the Andes.
Then came the lurch. It wasn’t turbulence. It was a fall. A sickening, stomach-climbing drop that stole the breath from one hundred and twenty passengers in a single, unified gasp. David snapped awake, his hand immediately finding mine. His eyes were wide with a question I couldn’t answer. The lights flickered, died, then came back on, casting the cabin in a sickly yellow emergency glow.
A flight attendant, her face a mask of practiced calm that didn’t quite reach her eyes, was gripping the back of a seat. “Please remain calm,” she said, her voice a thin thread against the rising tapestry of fear. But the groaning had become a shriek, a high-pitched scream of shearing metal. Outside David’s window, I saw it. The engine, engulfed in a ball of angry orange flame, trailing black smoke like a bleeding wound in the brilliant blue sky.
My archivist’s mind, the part that craves order and documentation, started a frantic, useless inventory. One failing engine. A rapid descent. The Andes mountains. These were the facts. The rest was just noise—the babble of prayers, the sharp cry of a child, the frantic scrabbling for oxygen masks that hadn’t dropped. I squeezed David’s hand, the simple, solid feel of it the only data point that mattered. The world tilted violently, and the screaming of the metal became the only sound on earth.
The White Nothing
Silence. A thick, profound silence that was somehow heavier than the noise that came before it. Cold was the first sensation. A deep, penetrating cold that seeped through my coat and jeans, making my teeth ache. I opened my eyes to a world of impossible white. Snow had burst through a rupture in the fuselage, blanketing everything in a clean, soft layer that belied the horror beneath.
“David?” My voice was a croak. I pushed myself up, my ribs screaming in protest. A jagged piece of metal was sticking through the seat where I’d been sitting. Had I not been thrown forward, it would have gone right through me.
He was a few feet away, half-buried in snow and debris, a dark gash on his forehead. But he was breathing. The relief was so sharp, so absolute, it felt like a second impact. I crawled to him, my hands shaking as I brushed the snow from his face.
Around us, the silence was slowly being replaced by the sounds of survival. Moans. Cries. A man’s voice, clear and commanding, cutting through the haze of shock. “Everyone who can move, get over here! We need to help the others! Stay positive! We are alive!”
I looked toward the voice. A man in an expensive-looking ski jacket stood near a large, torn section of the plane’s belly. He was handsome, with the kind of practiced charisma you see on corporate retreat posters. He was already gathering the walking wounded, his words a balm on their raw nerves.
My focus remained narrow. David first. Then, inventory. My training took over, a strange, cold comfort in the midst of chaos. The galley must have survived; emergency supplies. The cockpit; the radio, the black box. I started to mentally catalog the wreckage, my eyes scanning the mangled metal not as a tomb, but as a potential archive of life-saving materials. While the charismatic man was building a congregation, I was planning to build a shelter.
The First Law
We were lucky. If you can call plummeting from the sky and slamming into a mountain lucky. A large section of the fuselage had remained mostly intact, a broken metal tube that could, with work, become a shield against the wind. I had found it, my mind automatically seeking the most structurally sound piece of wreckage. I had helped David, who was conscious but dazed, and a few others drag the injured inside before the sun began to sink and the true, brutal cold of the Andes night descended.
Then, he appeared. The man from before. His name was Julian. He strode into our makeshift shelter as if he owned it, his smile bright and incongruous in the gathering gloom.
“Excellent work, everyone!” he boomed, his voice echoing in the confined space. “I had a vision of this very spot, a place of safety for us. Our collective positive energy led us right here!”
A few people nodded, their faces full of a desperate, searching hope. I said nothing, focusing on the small stack of supplies I’d salvaged: a handful of water bottles, some bags of peanuts, and a precious first-aid kit. I was already calculating rations, my mind a quiet abacus of calories versus survivors.
Julian stepped onto a piece of bent metal, creating a small stage. “Listen to me,” he said, his voice dropping to a confidential, compelling tone. “We survived for a reason. But survival from here on out is a choice. We must choose to be positive. We must choose to believe. Therefore, I am establishing the first law of our new community: Negativity is the enemy. Doubt is a poison. We will not allow it. We will live, or we will die, based on the strength of our belief.”
He looked directly at me, at my quiet corner of supplies and my silent calculations. His eyes held a challenge. I was the counter-argument to his sermon, the quiet pragmatist in a room he was trying to turn into a church. The conflict was immediate. He was selling hope. I was dealing in the grim mathematics of reality.
A Question of Faith
His name was Leo. A college kid, no older than my son, with a compound fracture in his lower leg. The bone had pushed through the skin, and in the three days since the crash, the wound had become a swollen, angry purple. He was burning with fever, his eyes glassy with delirium.
I had the first-aid manual. It was a flimsy, water-stained booklet, but its instructions were clear and terrifying. Sepsis. The word itself felt toxic. The manual prescribed a brutal course of action: debridement. Cutting away the dead and infected tissue. It would be agonizing, a medieval procedure with a pocketknife I had sterilized in the flame of a lighter, but it was Leo’s only chance.
“We have to do it,” I said to the small group huddled around him. “We have to clean it out. Now.”
“Absolutely not,” Julian’s voice cut in, sharp and final. He pushed through the circle, placing a gentle hand on Leo’s forehead. “We do not invite that kind of barbaric, negative energy into our sanctuary. This is a test of faith.”
He looked at Leo, then at the rest of us. “Leo’s body knows how to heal. We just have to help it. We will focus our collective energy, our unified belief, on his recovery. We will visualize his leg, whole and healthy. Fear is what’s making him sick. Not the wound.”
He began to lead them in a low chant, a repetitive mantra of “healing” and “wholeness.” David looked at me, his face tight with concern. He trusted my judgment, but Julian’s hold on the others was hypnotic. They were terrified, and he was offering them a miracle, an escape from the horrifying choice I had laid before them.
I stood there, holding the little booklet, its clinical, practical advice feeling a world away from the strange, faith-healing ritual unfolding in the wreckage. I looked down at Leo’s leg. Unseen by the chanting believers, a dark red line, thin as a thread, was beginning to snake its way up from the wound, a clear, deadly sign that the poison was already spreading.
The Gospel of Julian: The Inevitable Price
Leo died before dawn. The fever took him in his sleep, a quiet, merciful end to an agony we had refused to treat. The silence in the fuselage that morning was different. It wasn’t shock anymore. It was laced with something new. Guilt.
Julian stood over the body, his face a mask of solemn sorrow. I expected him to be chastened, for his certainty to finally crack. I was naive.
“Leo has left us,” he said, his voice soft but carrying to every corner of our cold metal tube. “His fight is over. But we must learn from this. We must understand why it happened.” He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. “His fear was too strong. The negativity he held onto, the doubt… it became a poison that his body could not fight. He didn’t believe enough.”
He made it Leo’s fault. He twisted his own catastrophic failure of leadership into a cautionary tale, a spiritual lesson. And the most terrifying part was that they believed him. I could see it in their faces—the fear of not being positive enough, of harboring some secret doubt that would make them the next victim. He wasn’t just their leader anymore; he was their high priest, and he had just defined heresy.
My rage was a cold, hard knot in my stomach. It wasn’t loud or explosive. It was quiet and methodical. That day, I started the journal. I found a mostly undamaged flight logbook in the cockpit and a pen that still worked. This would not be a diary of my feelings. It would be an archive. I opened to the first page and wrote the date. I documented Leo’s symptoms, my recommendation based on the first-aid manual, and Julian’s response. I recorded our meager food supplies and my rationing plan: 400 calories per person, per day. I would be the keeper of the facts. In a world of dangerous fantasy, I would preserve the truth.
The Strategic Reserve
Life settled into a grim rhythm. By day, I oversaw the grim necessities—melting snow for water, doling out the day’s handful of peanuts and fraction of a granola bar, tending to the other injuries with what little we had. The survivors worked, reinforcing the shelter, gathering wood. By evening, we had Julian’s mandatory “Positivity Rallies,” sessions where he would praise their work and spin tales of imminent rescue, all powered by their collective good thoughts.
I noticed the discrepancies. Small things, at first. Chloe, a woman who had attached herself to Julian like a remora, seemed a little less gaunt than the others. Marcus, a big man who acted as Julian’s enforcer, had more energy for his tasks. It was a faint, nagging inconsistency, the kind of detail an archivist can’t ignore.
The nights were the worst. The cold was a physical entity, a predator that stalked us in the dark. David’s breathing next to me was a comfort, but it couldn’t stop my mind from working. One night, I couldn’t sleep. A thought had taken root, a question about the overhead bins in the first-class section, which Julian had declared off-limits, a place for “meditation.”
I slipped out of my sleeping bag, my movements silent. Under the pale light of a sliver of moon filtering through a crack in the fuselage, I made my way to the front. The bin was latched. I used the blade of my pocketknife to jimmy it open.
About the Author
