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Fetching the lifejacket from the seat next to him, he slung it over his shoulders and strapped in while trying to maintain a semblance of steadiness with his hands gripping the control yoke.
The winds became more insistent, the white caps multiplying.
The ceiling of cloud slid closer; the sky spectacularly foreboding.
“Where the fuck did all that come from? The forecast was supposed to be clear for days,” he muttered.
Craning his head, the sky closed in from behind, while the sea opposite was blinding as the sun glittered and shimmered over the writhing surface. He eased the plane around, so the storm was at his tail. As he did so, a spot broke the horizon.
“Land,” he breathed.
Snowstorms on Everest, pumas in the jungle, kodiaks in the northern wilds and sandstorms in the desert.
He had this.
He watched the storm closing in and glanced at the picture stuck to the control panel; his boyish self, squeezing faces with his mother.
“Is this what happened to you?”
His fingers curled around the control yoke, breath slow and steady to clear his mind. His ears were filled with the grind of the plane’s engine and the growing roar of the winds. “Let’s find a place to land.”
As the first spatters of rain struck the plane, Jori ensured he was belted in place.
The Cessna was no longer skipping over the turbulence, it was stumbling as it was being thrust erratically by the storm clouds which crowded his plane, over taking him. In moments, the world had turned to slate.
The little patch of land disappeared. When he looked up, a crack of lightning blinded him. His vision cleared in time to see something massive and dark on a collision route with his propeller.
He jerked the control yoke, instinctively turning away from the threat. But it was too late. The plane bounced with a crack as the strut holding the wing next to him snapped. The wing cracked and was gone, and he was tumbling sickly through the air toward the maw of the sea.
I guess I don’t have this.
Then Jori waited, bracing himself as the plane spun out of control, his gut in his throat.
I’m going to die.
His father’s disapproving voice wormed into his thoughts.
“Campus definitely would have been safer.” He gritted his teeth, hands strangling the yoke for control.
The plane bounced hard and he felt as though he changed direction. It happened again and again, the metal of the plane crunching with each impact. Belted to the seat as he was, he felt like a rag doll being jerked through the sky. He didn’t know what he was hitting, but he kept expecting the sea to crash over his plane, swallowing both of them.
Finally, the Cessna made contact with the ocean surface, but instead of diving into the waves, they crashed along the surface, water spraying up and over the windshield and in through the open windows, rocks and mud striking the glass.
He hit something solid and then everything went black.
All he could hear was the rage of his pulse rushing in his ears.
He was no longer moving; the engine roar had gone silent. The cockpit was dark.
Holy. Fuck.
Was he dead?
Was he alive?
Jori wasn’t in the pilot seat.
He had the sense that he was lying on an uneven surface.
