We Will Be Crashing Shortly (20 page)

“. . . you are NOT!”

Wait, was that LaVonda’s voice?

“Honey child, you are NOT fallin’ off this plane.”

Then I realized it wasn’t my pant leg that was caught, but my ankle, and it was caught in someone’s grip. “No you are NOT!” LaVonda shouted again. She sounded like she was hollering from a far-off mountaintop. I looked back to see she was wearing the portable breathing unit Flo had taken her. Her face was resolute through the thick yellow plastic that made up the face mask of the inflated helmet.

Look at LaVonda, so serious
. I giggled.

The lack of oxygen had caused me to feel an odd elation. Then giddiness overtook my starved brain, and I became certain that if I flew out of the plane right then I’d land safely on the backs of dolphins or something.

I’ll be fine
, I thought, languidly smacking at LaVonda’s grip on my ankle.
Seriously, I’ll be fine
.

LaVonda grabbed an oxygen mask from the row ahead of me, one that hadn’t been ripped from its ballast by the wind force, and secured it to my face. The cabin pressure was now near equalized, as the aircraft had dropped to within 12,000 feet of the earth’s surface, so the suction from the breach in the fuselage had mercifully ceased, though the oxygen density was still very thin.

“Breathe, sweetie,” LaVonda hollered through her helmet, which had begun to deflate. She pulled it from her head and grabbed another mask for herself. Within seconds my oxygen-starved brain regained rationality, and the terror of our situation returned. I threw my arms around LaVonda and we struggled over the seatbacks in front of us until we found a row with functioning safety belts. We strapped ourselves in. Suddenly, with a massive centrifugal force, the plane righted itself from its lateral dive. The plane was back in parallel position above the earth, or, in this case, the ocean. But for how long? The engines were wailing from the strain of the ailing aircraft.

“Officer Ned!” I shouted, panicked. I struggled to undo my seatbelt. I had to get to him, assess his bullet wound. LaVonda put one hand over mine assuredly, then gestured with the other to draw my attention behind us. Officer Ned was in the aisle seat a few rows behind Malcolm and Anita. He was pale and bleeding, but his eyes were open above the mask around his nose and mouth. Wide open. His lungs heaved in panicked breaths. Clutched to his chest with both bound hands was Captain Beefheart. Officer Ned must have caught the dog as it flew toward the hole along with the loose cabin debris. Panic caught me again.

“Where’s the other dog, Trixi?” I cried.

LaVonda’s eyes were wide and sad as she shrugged her shoulders.

Soon the cabin pressure was fully equalized, making the oxygen masks unnecessary. I tore mine off, undid my seatbelt, and stood. The others remained still, staring at me. The hole in the fuselage still gaped, the sound of the roaring wind was deafening, but with the cabin pressure equalized, we no longer needed to worry about falling off the plane unless we stepped through it. The first to follow my suit was Malcolm. He undid his seatbelt, helped Anita to her feet, and directed her to the forward cabin, as far away from the blown window as possible. I tried to do the same with LaVonda, but she resisted me. Instead we headed back to Officer Ned.

Officer Ned handed Captain Beefheart to LaVonda and she took the seat across the aisle from him. We were still too close to the gaping hole in the fuselage for me to be at all comfortable, but LaVonda was right. Officer Ned needed to be freed from his restraints before we could do anything further. I took out my picks and, with shaking fingers, took about twice as long to release the cuffs as I should have, but still the process was deft. I indicated for him to remove his belt, then I used it to secure the passenger pillow against his bullet wound in order to stave off the bleeding. Thankfully the bullet did not seem to have hit a major artery. Still, Officer Ned looked weak and ashen.

He stood shakily, and just as I hooked myself under his arm to assist him to the front cabin, the plane seemed to hit an air pocket, causing us to drop an additional hundred feet. Officer Ned and I found ourselves first flat against the ceiling and then jackhammered over the seatbacks before the plane righted itself. LaVonda screamed. She turned sideways in her seat, hooked her legs around Officer Ned’s torso, and, with her spare hand still grasping Captain Beefheart, she hooked her other hand into the waistband of my cargo pants. It was a good thing, too, because almost as quickly as we fell, we rose again. I knew air pockets seldom came in single incidents, but we weren’t just falling—we were oscillating. Our plane was nearly nose-up parallel to the earth’s surface, when suddenly we crested and dove nose down again. We repeated the roller-coaster ride a few more times before the plane appeared to stabilize.

What the hell is going on in the cockpit?
I thought. This effect was called “porpoising,” after how a porpoise dives up and down, in and out of the water—or the more technical term, “pilot-induced oscillation.” Miraculously, the three of us (four, if you count Captain Beefheart) were kept from being tossed around like rag dolls thanks to LaVonda and her single seatbelt.

Once LaVonda was sure the plane was finished with its yo-yo tricks, she let go and we resumed our progress to the front cabin. LaVonda handed Beefheart to Malcolm, who cried out gratefully. Anita sat next to them in the row directly behind the front bulkhead, closest to the door. Their faces were white with fear, but still they rose to help us with Officer Ned. We strapped him in a center seat, where I changed the bandage I’d fashioned for him earlier with a fresh pillow. I opened the overhead bin to get the emergency medical kit all commercial aircraft are supposed to have onboard, only to find one that had been half depleted from a prior use. Was there nothing on this plane compliant with the safety standards of the Federal Aviation Administration? Even the bustle containing the emergency escape raft was missing from the left-front door.

Damn it, I worried. Where’s Flo? Her pockets were probably packing a few painkillers that Officer Ned could use right now. I looked around the small galley for anything I could use. I opened the liquor kit to grab some bottles of alcohol as an impromptu disinfectant. I blindly grabbed at the minis, shoved them into my cargo pockets, and continued rummaging. Just then the cockpit door opened, flooding the cabin with sunlight from the front windshield. I expected Ash to be standing there, or perhaps the captain—neither of whom had been seen or heard from since the breach in the fuselage—but no.

“Hey, kid, we’re out of vodka. Believe me, I looked.”

“Flo!” I yelled. I would have hugged her but there wasn’t time. She stepped aside so I could enter the cockpit. Otis was in the copilot’s seat, doing his best to control the aircraft.
Why isn’t he in the captain’s seat?
I wondered.
And what’s that noise?
Then it occurred to me. On the captain’s side of the flight deck, the windshield was missing. That noise was the wind roaring through the opening—that and Uncle Otis, who was hooting and howling like a crazed wolf.

Where’s Ash?
I thought.
Where’s the copilot?

“I don’t know,” Flo answered me. I didn’t even realize I’d spoken aloud. “It was like this when we got here.”

Flo and Otis had ascended to the flight deck through the hatch in the floor, which they’d accessed from the avionics section from beneath. The floor-hatch lock had long been broken, I know, because I was the one who broke it last year. Again, WorldAir did everything they were obligated to do in order to bring the interior of this plane to FAA safety standards for this trip to transition its sale to Peacock Airways—which is nearly nothing. A flight-deck floor hatch with a broken lock would literally never fly if this was a regular revenue route.

I was still confused over the disappearance of the cockpit crew, until Otis looked at me knowingly, then cocked his head toward the opening in the windshield. Suddenly it occurred to me. The two inertia reels—a system of cables and carabineers normally tucked inside the window frame—had been unwound and were streaming outside the aircraft. So the window had not been broken after all, it had been
deployed
. This was an emergency exit. The flight crew had bailed on the aircraft. This also explained the terrifying porpoising earlier, as a compromised aircraft would be expected to oscillate if the pilots did the unthinkable and just up and abandoned the wheel.

“But how . . .” I began. Otis shrugged his shoulders. Passenger airplane cockpits were normally not equipped with parachutes, but in this case, who knew. Though it would explain the curious descent I’d been noticing since soon after take off, before the gunshot caused the rapid decompression. That and the missing emergency raft from first class. If it was Ash’s plan all along to parachute out of the airplane, he would have needed it to be at an altitude low enough for it to be safe to jump. I looked around the cockpit and, sure enough, the aircraft’s positioning beacon was missing.

I donned the spare headphones and crouched behind Otis, as far from the open window as possible. “What’s air traffic control telling us?” I tapped my headphones. All I heard was static.

“Nothing,” Otis replied. “We lost contact with them awhile ago.”

“What? How?”

Otis tossed me one of the counterfeit circuit breakers I’d handed him earlier. “It’s a shortcut design, and faulty,” he explained. “When the circuit pops it can’t be reset, which not only blows out the communication system, but causes the cockpit to slowly depressurize.”

My eyes widened with realization, and Otis nodded as if reading my mind. “What do we do?” I asked him.

“Not much we can do,” he answered, and explained that debris from the aircraft cabin had been caught in two of the three engines, blowing them out, rendering them useless. The final engine was failing under the stress of the compromised aircraft, not to mention the porpoising we’d experienced earlier. As if on cue, another warning beep began blaring from the instrument panel, indicating we were about to lose the only engine we had left.

“Prepare the cabin,” he directed me and Flo. Suddenly I cried out, remembering something.

“Wait! What about Grampa Roy?”

Otis shook his head. “I did what I could.”

“What do you mean by that? How’re they going to prove he’s my grandfather?”

He nodded to Flo, who put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Kid, he’s not your grandfather.”

“What?” I screamed. But I’d heard her clearly, and there was no time for questions. Otis grabbed the microphone for the cabin PA system and spoke into it. “Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats and secure your seatbelts,” he intoned with the perfect public-announcement inflection of the seasoned pilot he never got to become. “We will be crashing shortly.”

Flo left the cockpit to brief the others, while I asked Otis how much time we had until impact. We were flying a few hundred feet above the ocean, which appeared calm, but from this distance a ten-foot wave would look like a ripple. Otis surmised we had six minutes until we ditched into the ocean. That might not sound like a lot of time, but it was enough time to categorize our situation as an “anticipated emergency”—which meant we could at least prepare ourselves somewhat for what was in store—as opposed to an “unanticipated emergency,” which was a euphemistic-sounding category used for bombings and midair collisions and such. So, yeah, at least we had that going for us.

I returned to the cabin to tend to the others. Flo was briefing Malcolm and Anita, who had already donned their life vests, so I focused my attention on LaVonda and Officer Ned. LaVonda had not only donned her life vest, but she had inflated it as well. I instructed her to take that one off and replace it with another.

“Why the hell I gotta take off a perfectly good life vest? At least I know this one here works fine. Look,” she beat her fists against the vest, which bounced but stood up sturdily to the blows. I was hesitant to tell her why, but then figured this wasn’t the time to coddle anyone.

“You can’t inflate the vest until you’re about to step out of the aircraft,” I instructed her, “because otherwise, you know, if there’s water inside the cabin, and your vest is inflated, you’ll be floating up near the ceiling, making it harder to swim out.”

Her eyes rounded with fear. I could see the seriousness of the situation sink into her. In my life, which admittedly was on the cusp of being a short one, I’d found that there are two levels of behavior in which people engage when it comes to panic. The first is that level you reach when you’re afraid of heights or spiders or airplanes or whatever—sure, it’s not illogical to be afraid of these things, but the odds are you’re not gonna die by them. So my theory is that, at this level, people panic less out of real fear than they fear appearing like a fool for being afraid—the fear that, when all this is over, all that embarrassing loss of self-control was for nothing.

Then there’s the next level, that level at which you finally understand, without a doubt, the direness of your situation. I assume, but I can’t be certain, that soldiers experience this when they’re about to charge into battle—the certainty that a percentage of them won’t make it out the other side. At this level I think the panic is tamped down inside them, where it hardens like a fist, and instead of a loss of self-control there is the opposite—the resolute determination to focus forward, to make every move a concise one, to make it through.

I reached into the pouch under a nearby seat to grab a replacement vest for LaVonda, but to my surprise I felt something soft and furry instead. “Trixi!” I yelped, and pulled the shivering dog to my chest to give her a quick hug. LaVonda’s face softened at the sight of the tiny pooch. I found another life vest and handed it to her. She put it on and left it uninflated.

Since Trixi was too small to actually wear the life vest, I inflated just one chamber of hers, placed a pillow in the center, and then put Trixi on top of that. I then wrapped the long straps of the vest around both the dog and the vest. The goal was to nestle her in the middle of a little flotation-device-like dog bed. I handed the whole lot to LaVonda, and I didn’t know whether to be assured or worried in the knowledge that this woman would protect that sweet little creature with her life if she had to.