As the voices of the survivors hiking out for help dwindled away, 35-year-old Nancy Hill strained to see in the pitch black wreckage of the small, twin-engine turboprop. With her left foot wedged in a hole in the floor and her left arm pinned above her, Nancy was trapped. Later she was to learn her arm, leg, and shoulder were broken, her chest punctured, her hand smashed, and her face so badly cut it would require ninety stitches.
For the time being, though, she concentrated on the sounds of fellow passengers. The man next to her groaned: "I can't get my seat belt loose…" Nancy tried to release the belt with her free hand, but couldn't reach far enough. "My seat belt, my seatbelt," he moaned. Again, Nancy stretched toward him but it was no use. She couldn't quite reach. The man suddenly topped talking and seemed to be unconscious.
Nancy could hear another passenger's labored breathing somewhere in the wreckage. Peering into the inky blackness, all she could see was the door's exit sign, which was now on the floor of the plane. The air reeked of gasoline. She fought down her nausea. Then a new voice called out like a lifeline in the darkness. Someone to talk to! For about an hour, she and Anne-Marie Falsone encouraged each other while they waited for rescue.
Numbing cold crept through Nancy's aching body. How long would it take the other survivors to struggle through the deep, January snow surrounding the wreckage? With her watch on the arm snared above her head, she could not check the time. She called back to Anne-Marie again. "You okay?"
"Yeah, I'm still here," the woman answered weakly, "I hear them coming."
"I don't hear anything," Nancy replied, trying to detect the slightest sound coming from outside.
"Hold on, honey. They're coming…."
Silence enveloped the smashed plane, deeper and more chilling then before. With dread certainty, Nancy felt her last conscious companion had just died.
"Please don't let me die, God," she prayed. "It would kill my father." With cruel clarity she recalled how he had looked when she had last seen him several hours ago in an intensive care unit in Denver's University Hospital. His eyes were so sunken, his skin so pale. Ever since his sudden heart attack on Christmas day four weeks ago, his health had preoccupied her. When he'd had another attack last week after open heart surgery, she had flown to Denver from Cortez, Colorado, leaving her husband and their four children at home. Reluctantly, she had left her mother at his bedside this evening to return to her family--and now this disaster! She had to be tough and survive for her father's sake. Again, she began to pray.
For what seemed like the hundredth time, Nancy reached back with her free right hand to pull her coat around her shoulders. But the pressure of her arm pinned above her still wouldn't let her move forward to release the coat. Her bare arms were freezing. That morning, she was out of clean turtlenecks. With long hours at her father's beside, they had not taken time to visit a Laundromat. "Just wear two
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