``I tease him about never stopping to ask directions,'' Brosnan said. ``This time he said, `You know we all need to go forward. He got us all into line. He said, `Right, just keep moving forward.''
They walked past passengers hanging from their seats, their seatbelts still buckled.
``They were like bats,'' Brosnan said. ``We tried to get them down, but they didn't want to get down. Most of them were just frozen.''
They reached a bulkhead, which they had to climb over, then squeezed out through a hole in the fuselage into howling winds, driving rain and pitch darkness.
Running across some grass, they nearly fell into a culvert. They had to climb down into it, wade across a waist-deep torrent of water, and climb out the other side. In the distance they saw a white airport bus. When they called to it, the bus turned around and picked them up. Brosnan and Courtney helped other survivors get on board.
Inside the terminal, Brosnan asked a person behind the first counter she came to if she could use the phone, but was told she could not unless she had a calling card.
Then the people at the nearby UPS counter ushered them into their offices and covered them with blankets and spare shirts.
While Courtney was treated for burns in a local hospital, Brosnan arranged for them to fly home. When she looked at the ticket Singapore Airlines had given her, and where her name was supposed to be, it said, ``Survivor.''
``I looked at that, and thought, `Well, that's either survivor as in somebody who's in a bad state, or survivor: somebody who made it out. We did survive through luck and good fortune and somebody looking out for us.''
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