I'm Just A Kid

Chapter 17: What Remains

By the time we reached the crash site, I wished I could have stayed in camp. The thought made me feel awful almost immediately. My dad could have been here. He could have been somewhere beneath the rubble, injured and waiting for someone to find him while we searched through the wreckage only metres away. I had spent the entire night telling myself that there had to be survivors and that there had to be another explanation for what we had seen. I couldn't allow myself to believe anything else. If I did, then I would have to consider the possibility that Dad was really gone, and I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't sure I ever would be.

So I kept walking, even when every part of me wanted to turn around and run back towards the safety of camp. Harper stayed beside me, unusually quiet since we'd left that morning. Normally, Harper always had something to say. She would make a sarcastic comment, complain about how far we had to walk, or find something ridiculous to laugh about when nobody else was in the mood. Today, however, she didn't make a single joke. Instead, she stayed close enough that our shoulders occasionally brushed as we walked, as though she was silently making sure I didn't disappear into my own thoughts or wander too far away from everyone else. I was grateful for it, although I couldn't bring myself to tell her.

The forest was gone. That was the first thing I noticed when we finally reached the crash site. It had simply disappeared beneath the destruction. Trees that had once stood tall around us were scattered across the ground or broken into jagged pieces, their trunks torn apart by the force of the crash. The earth itself had been ripped open, leaving behind a massive crater surrounded by twisted wreckage. Smoke still curled through the air, carrying the bitter smell of fire and burning metal, while small flames flickered between pieces of debris. The entire place looked as though something enormous and violent had reached down from the sky and torn the world apart.

But it wasn't the destruction that finally made me stop walking. It was what had been left behind among the wreckage. People. Or, at least, what remained of them. My stomach immediately turned, and Harper moved closer to me without saying anything. I could feel her looking at me, probably waiting for me to say something or react somehow, but I couldn't. My eyes moved desperately across the destruction instead, searching for anything that would tell me Dad hadn't been here. A familiar piece of clothing. A face I recognised. His voice calling for help. Someone alive. Anything that would give me a reason to believe he was still out there somewhere.

The further we walked, however, the more difficult it became to keep looking. I carefully stepped around a twisted piece of metal and crouched beside a particularly large section of rubble. Maybe someone was underneath it. Maybe Dad was underneath it. The thought alone gave me enough strength to reach forward despite the fear twisting through my stomach.

"Emmy," Harper said quietly when she noticed what I was doing.

"I have to look."

My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. I positioned my good hand beneath the edge of the rubble while keeping my broken arm carefully against my side. Even crouching this close to the ground made it ache, and Harper's eyes briefly moved towards the injury before she looked back at me.

"Let me help."

I didn't argue with her. Together, we carefully lifted the piece of rubble just enough for me to look beneath it. For one horrible moment, I didn't understand what I was seeing. Then my heart seemed to sink somewhere deep inside my chest. There was a hand beneath the wreckage, or at least what appeared to be the remains of one. I immediately let go, and the rubble fell back against the ground with a heavy thud. I stumbled backwards, my legs suddenly weak, and Harper caught my good arm before I could completely lose my balance.

"Emmy."

I couldn't speak. My throat had closed completely, and I wasn't sure whether I was more afraid that I was going to cry or scream. I just stared at the ground as one thought continued circling through my mind. Dad. Was that Dad? No. I didn't know. That was somehow the worst part of everything. There was no way to know, and I could only imagine the possibilities without ever receiving an answer.