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I grabbed the belt and got it locked into place just as the pilot turned a latch that opened the door on the side of the plane. The next thing I knew, he was gone, and all that remained was a powerful sucking force trying to grab me out of my seat.
I could feel the plane dropping now. I screamed.
Jake was moving toward the open door. Nonsensically, I feared he was about to throw himself through it after the pilot. He didn’t have a parachute…
Jake grabbed the door. With a roar of effort, he muscled it closed. The suction stopped, and I went limp in my seat.
But my relief was short-lived. The plane tilted forward and went into a full-on nosedive toward the water. Terror welled up in me and wrapped my brain in a fog.
“Stay there!” Jake shouted.
He skidded down the tilted aisle toward the cockpit and wrenched himself into the pilot’s vacated seat. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I could hear him cursing a blue streak.
We’re going to die. We’re going to fucking crash and die…
And then, slowly, the plane leveled out.
Gasping, I undid my seatbelt and ran up to the cockpit. The panic that had taken hold of me began to ebb now that the emergency seemed to have passed.
Jake glanced at me as I came in. “Go sit down,” he said sharply.
I sank into the second seat in the cockpit.
“If you’re going to sit there, wear the safety harness,” he said. “And don’t fucking touch anything.”
“What’s happening?” I grappled with the safety harness, which was more complicated than the seatbelt in my passenger seat.
“We’ve lost the engine. I’m going to try to put us down.”
“The pilot—“
“Is a fucking coward. He bailed out instead of trying to land the plane.”
“Is he okay?”
“You’re worried abouthim?”
“He jumped out of the plane!”
“He had a parachute. There were only two on board.”
My stomach turned over. “There were two?”
“You don’t know how to pull a chute, Olivia. I couldn’t let you take one of them.”
“No, but…you…”
He didn’t look at me. “I wasn’t going to leave you. You couldn’t have put this plane down. It would have crashed.”
I felt sick. “Are we crashing?”
“I think I can land it.”
“You know how to fly?”
“Flew a little in basic training. Not very much. Never flew a plane like this. But I’ve got to try, right? Be quiet, and let me focus.”
I was quiet.
