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.
It wasn’t empty. Inside, nestled among a few wool blankets, was a box. And inside the box were at least two dozen high-energy protein bars and several large bottles of electrolyte water. The good stuff. A private stash. Enough to give a few people a significant advantage. The hypocrisy was so profound it almost made me laugh. Julian, the preacher of shared faith and collective survival, was running a secret, privileged economy. The question now was what to do about it. To expose him would be to shatter the fragile peace. To stay silent felt like complicity.
A Crack in the Facade
A public confrontation would be a disaster. He’d twist it, turn them against me. I decided on a different approach, a quiet inquiry. I waited until he was alone, gazing out at the endless snow as if expecting the rescue helicopters to appear on the horizon.
“Julian,” I began, my voice even. “I was looking for more blankets last night. I found the extra supplies in the first-class bin.”
He didn’t flinch. He turned to me, his expression not of guilt, but of mild disappointment, as if I were a slow student who couldn’t grasp a simple concept. “Ah, the strategic reserve,” he said, nodding. “I was wondering when your diligence would lead you there.”
“Strategic reserve?”
“Of course,” he said, his voice smooth as silk. “A leader has to make difficult decisions, Eleanor. The core of this group—myself, Marcus, who provides security, Chloe, who maintains morale—we need to stay strong. For everyone. It’s a burden, believe me. But it’s a necessary one. I’m glad you understand.” He patted my shoulder, a gesture of patronizing praise. He was trying to recruit me, to make me a co-conspirator in his lie.
Before I could respond, a low rumble echoed from high up the mountain. It grew rapidly, a deep, guttural roar that shook the very ground beneath us. We both looked up. It wasn’t a helicopter. A wave of white, a cascade of snow and ice, was breaking loose from the peak above, hurtling down toward our camp. An avalanche.
We scrambled for the shelter, Julian shouting orders that were lost in the deafening roar. We dove inside just as the wave hit, a colossal impact that felt like being struck by a freight train. The world went dark, filled with the sound of groaning, twisting metal and the terrifying, suffocating rush of snow.
The Visualization
The impact threw me across the cabin. When the violent motion stopped, the darkness was absolute, the silence punctuated by terrified whimpers. Snow had poured in through the rear of the fuselage, burying half of our living space.
“Is everyone okay?” David’s voice, close by.
“I think so,” I managed, pushing a chunk of debris off my legs.
Slowly, a few lighters flickered to life, casting dancing, desperate shadows on the scene. The back third of the shelter had collapsed under the weight of the snow. A woman named Anne, a quiet librarian who usually sat by herself, was gone. Buried.
Panic began to set in. “We have to dig her out!” someone shouted.
“Everyone, stop!” Julian’s voice boomed, overriding the chaos. He was already on his feet, brushing snow from his jacket. “Panic is our enemy. Rushing blindly is what causes more tragedy. We need to calm ourselves. Center our energy.”
He was serious. While a woman lay dying just feet away, he wanted to hold a meeting. “Close your eyes,” he commanded. “Breathe. I want you to visualize the snow melting away. Visualize the shelter, strong and whole. Visualize Anne, safe and sound. Your belief can make it real.”
I stared at him in utter disbelief. He was insane. Ignoring him, I grabbed the hand of a young woman nearby—Sarah, I thought her name was. “Help me,” I mouthed. We began clawing at the compacted snow, our bare hands quickly going numb. We had to try.
The others followed Julian’s lead. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their voices rising in a low, desperate chant. I dug, my nails breaking against the ice, my lungs burning in the thin air. And across the ruined space, I saw Anne’s husband, Ben. He wasn’t chanting. He was standing perfectly still, his eyes wide open, staring at Julian’s back. And in that stare, I saw a hatred so pure, so absolute, it was more terrifying than the avalanche itself. His hands were opening and closing, flexing into fists, again and again and again.
Cracks in the Ice: The Unmasking
The chant died in a collective gasp. Ben moved like an animal, a blur of grief-fueled rage. He crossed the space in three long strides and slammed into Julian, his wordless scream echoing off the metal walls. “You killed her! You were chanting while she was dying!”
It took Marcus and two other men to drag him off. Julian stumbled backward, a trickle of blood running from his lip. For the first time, his mask of serene confidence was gone, replaced by raw, naked shock. He looked vulnerable. The spell was broken. You could feel the shift in the air, the fragile bonds of their collective faith snapping one by one.
The atmosphere in the camp turned toxic. The forced unity evaporated, replaced by whispered conversations and suspicious glances. Julian tried to recover, to rally them, but his words felt hollow now. His charisma had curdled into something ugly. He started demanding public affirmations of loyalty, his speeches taking on the desperate, hectoring tone of a deposed king.
“You are either with us, or you are against us!” he declared the next evening, his eyes scanning the faces of the survivors, searching for dissent. “There is no middle ground when survival is on the line!” He wasn’t offering salvation anymore. He was issuing a threat.
An Alliance of Quiet
Later that night, as I was documenting the day’s events in my logbook by the faint light of a dwindling lighter, a figure knelt beside me. It was Sarah, the young woman who had helped me dig for Anne.
“He’s losing it,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the wind whistling through the cracks in our shelter. “People are scared. They’re starting to see.”
She glanced at my journal. “I saw them,” she confessed, her words a rush of pent-up guilt. “Julian and Chloe. Taking extra food. I saw it days ago but I was too afraid to say anything. I feel… responsible.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said, my voice low. “He’s an expert at making people feel afraid.”
“What you’re doing,” she said, nodding at the book. “That’s the only thing that’s real. The numbers. The events. Everything else is just… a story he’s telling.” She looked at me, her eyes clear and resolute in the flickering light. “It’s not just a record, Eleanor. It’s proof. If we ever get out of here, that book is the only thing that will matter.”
Her words solidified something in my own mind. She was right. This wasn’t just an archivist’s habit anymore. It was an act of defiance. It was a weapon, forged in ink and fact. Sarah had given me more than her confession; she had given me a new sense of purpose. We were no longer just survivors. We were witnesses.
The Great Hunt
Julian needed a win. He needed to reclaim his narrative, to perform a miracle so grand it would erase the memory of Ben’s attack and Anne’s death. So he announced The Great Hunt.
“There is life in these mountains!” he proclaimed, his old fire returning. “I can feel it! We will bring back a feast!”
I tried to reason with him. “You have no gear, Julian. No experience. The terrain is treacherous. You’ll burn more calories than you could ever hope to find.”
He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Your negativity is noted, Eleanor. The rest of us will be feasting on the power of belief.”
He gathered his five most loyal followers, including a sullen Marcus and a shivering Chloe, and set off at dawn. They were a pathetic-looking expedition, armed with sharpened sticks and boundless, baseless optimism.
They were gone all day. While they were away, I worked on a project of my own. I had stripped some electrical wiring from a panel in the cockpit. Remembering a diagram from a survival show David and I had once watched, I carefully fashioned a series of simple snares. It was a long shot, but it was based on mechanics, not magic. I set them in a thicket of scrubby bushes I’d noticed a few hundred yards from the camp, where I’d seen small bird tracks in the snow.
Julian’s hunting party returned long after dusk, a tableau of utter failure. They were empty-handed, exhausted, their faces etched with frostbite and defeat. Chloe was sobbing, her fingers a mottled blue-white. The grand gesture had failed. The silence in the camp was damning.
An hour later, I went to check my snares. Under the light of the moon, I saw them. Two small, ptarmigan-like birds, their necks caught clean in the wire loops. It wasn’t a feast. But it was real.
The Accusation
The smell of roasting meat, however meager, filled the fuselage. I had given David and Sarah the first small pieces, then shared the rest, giving an extra portion to the failed hunting party. It was a purely practical decision—they had expended the most energy. But in the theater of our small society, the act was freighted with meaning. My quiet competence had produced food. Julian’s loud arrogance had produced frostbite.
He saw the shifting allegiances, felt his power slipping away completely. He was a cornered animal. And like a cornered animal, he lashed out.
He waited until everyone was gathered, huddled together for warmth. He stood up, and pointed a trembling, accusatory finger directly at me.
“She has been working against us from the beginning!” he shouted, his voice cracking with manufactured rage. “This ‘rationing’?” He spat the word. “It was hoarding! This ‘journal’?” He gestured toward my bag. “A list of grievances to turn you against each other! And this food”—he gestured at the picked-clean bird bones—”where did it come from? She has had a secret stash all along, waiting for us to grow weak!”
He was projecting his own crimes onto me, twisting every practical action I had taken into an act of sabotage. His remaining loyalists, Marcus and Chloe and a few others, began to stir, their faces hardening as they looked at me.
“She is the source of the negativity! She is the reason for our struggle! She does not believe!” Julian’s voice rose to a fever pitch. “We must purge the poison! For the good of the group, she must be exiled! Now!”
His followers began to stand up, their expressions menacing. They took a step toward me, then another. David moved to stand in front of me, his hands raised. I clutched the bag with my journal, my heart pounding against my ribs. This was it. This was how it ended.
And then we heard it. Faint at first, then growing steadily louder. A rhythmic, percussive thump-thump-thump that was not the wind and not the beating of my own heart. It was the sound of helicopter blades, cutting through the thin mountain air.
The Weight of a Feather: The Sound of Salvation
The sound sliced through the tension like a knife. Every head, including those of the men advancing on me, snapped upward. The mob dissolved instantly, its righteous fury replaced by a collective, breathless awe.
“I told you!” Julian screamed, his voice raw with triumph. He threw his arms toward the sky, a prophet greeting his chariot. “I told you if we believed, they would come! Our faith has been rewarded!”
He immediately pivoted from accuser to savior, the architect of their deliverance. The whiplash was staggering. I felt David’s arm around me, holding me steady as a wave of relief so powerful it buckled my knees washed over me. Tears streamed down my face, freezing on my cheeks. We were saved. The nightmare was over.
The helicopter, a sleek, modern bird of prey painted in rescue orange and white, circled once before skillfully setting down on a relatively flat expanse of snow a hundred yards from our wreckage. The side door slid open, and two figures in heavy winter gear jumped out, their movements efficient and sure.
The ordeal was over. But as I watched Julian stride confidently toward them, his hand outstretched, a new kind of dread began to settle in my stomach. The fight for survival had ended. The fight for the truth was just beginning.
The Final Deception
Julian met the rescuers like a dignitary greeting a foreign delegation. His voice was smooth, controlled, a perfect blend of authority and relieved gratitude.
“Thank God you’re here,” he said, shaking the lead rescuer’s hand. “I’m Julian. I’ve been trying to keep everyone together. It’s been… difficult.”
He gestured to the small group of his most loyal followers, who were huddled behind him. “My core team here,” he said, his voice dropping conspiratorially. “They’re in a fragile emotional state. I think it’s best if they go on the first flight out. We need to get them to safety immediately.”
The lead rescuer, a man with a weathered face and weary, intelligent eyes, nodded. “We can only take five on the first trip.”
“Of course,” Julian said. Then he pulled the rescuer a few steps aside, lowering his voice further, but not so low that I couldn’t hear him. “One more thing. The woman over there. Eleanor.” He nodded in my direction. “And her husband. You need to be careful. She’s… unstable. Extremely paranoid. She’s had a complete break from reality. For everyone’s safety, I strongly suggest you leave her for the second trip, with sedation if necessary.”
It was the most audacious, venomous lie yet. He was trying to erase me from the story, to paint me as the crazy woman in the attic while he flew away the hero. And the rescuer was listening, his gaze flicking over to me with a new, professional assessment. For a horrifying moment, I saw it in his eyes: he believed him.
The Archivist’s Gambit
They were moving toward the helicopter. Chloe, leaning on Marcus, gave me a look of pure, triumphant malice over her shoulder. Julian was winning. He was going to get away with it all. All the lies, the negligence, the deaths of Leo and Anne—they would be buried under the official story of the charismatic leader who held everyone together through sheer force of will.
My heart hammered against my ribs. This was the last second of the last minute. The truth was about to be airlifted away and lost forever. I looked at Sarah. She met my gaze from across the snow and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. It was all the courage I needed.
I walked forward. I didn’t run, I didn’t shout. I walked with a deliberate calm I did not feel, directly toward the lead rescuer as he was about to herd Julian’s chosen ones aboard. He turned, his expression wary, ready for the hysterical outburst Julian had primed him for.
I stopped in front of him and opened my worn canvas bag. I pulled out the tattered flight logbook. It felt impossibly heavy.
“My name is Eleanor Vance,” I said, my voice clear and steady, cutting through the thumping of the rotor wash. “I’m a professional archivist. Before you make any decisions about who goes on this helicopter, you should see the primary source material.”
I held out the journal. “I kept a complete record of our time here. Rations, events, casualties. Everything.”
He looked from my face to the book, then back again. He hesitated. It was just a dirty notebook. But in my eyes, he must have seen something other than the madness Julian had described. Slowly, he reached out and took it.
The Unraveling
The rescuer flipped open the journal. His thumb moved quickly through the pages, his eyes scanning the neat, methodical entries. I watched his face. I saw the moment his professional weariness was replaced by sharp, focused interest.
He saw the columns, the neat logs of caloric distribution—400 calories per person, with names and dates. He saw the entry for Leo, with my clinical description of the septic wound, right next to a direct, dated quote from Julian: “Fear is what’s making him sick. Not the wound.” He saw the log of the avalanche, the time it hit, and the notation of my and Sarah’s attempt to dig for Anne while Julian led a group visualization exercise. He saw the list of who went on the failed hunt and the record of their frostbite, contrasted with the entry about the two birds caught in my snares.
The facts were plain, unadorned, and undeniable. They formed a narrative more powerful than any speech Julian could ever give.
The rescuer’s expression hardened into a mask of cold fury. He snapped the book shut. He looked at Julian, who was smiling his confident, serene smile. Then he looked at me, at David leaning on my arm, and at Sarah standing behind us.
He strode over to Julian. The helicopter’s blades whipped the snow around their feet. In a voice that wasn’t loud, but that cut through the noise with absolute authority, he held up the journal.
“I think you and I are going to have a long talk about this when we get down the mountain,” he said. His eyes were like chips of ice.
He then turned away from the stunned leader and pointed directly at me. “Eleanor. David. You’re on the first flight out.”
Julian’s mouth fell open. His face, for the first time, was a canvas of pure, undiluted panic. His followers stared, their expressions shifting from adoration to confusion, then to a dawning, horrified comprehension. The entire, elaborate structure of his lies, the cult of personality he had built in this frozen wasteland, crumbled to dust in a single, silent, humiliating moment of exposure. The weight of the truth, recorded on flimsy paper, had brought the mountain crashing down
About the Author
