The engine sputtered a few times…and stopped.
The silence was sudden, and complete. In wordless shock she watched the blur of the propeller slow, become distinct blades, and then it…stopped.
5
“SHIT!”
Captain Justice spat the word through clenched teeth; his hands moved swiftly as he tried to restart the engine, tried to keep the nose up. They were so close to the mountains that if the nose dropped, they would go straight in. The landscape below was a study of stark, inhospitable contrasts: snow-covered crags and boulders, the snow so white it was almost blue, the shadows so dark they were black. The slopes were steep and jagged, dropping away in sharp, almost vertical angles. There was nowhere to land, nowhere even remotely flat.
Bailey didn’t move, didn’t breathe. She couldn’t. The awful paralysis of absolute terror and helplessness seized her body, her voice. There was nothing she could do to help, nothing she could do to change the outcome. She couldn’t even scream a protest; all she could do was watch, and wait to die. They were going to die; she saw no way out of it. In a few minutes, maybe even a few seconds, they were going to crash on the rocky, snow-covered top of this mountain. For now, for a precious frozen moment, they seemed to float in place, as if the plane hadn’t quite given in to the laws of gravity—or the mountains were playing cat-and-mouse games with them, letting her feel a faint, unreasonable hope before snatching it away.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!”
Dimly she heard Justice on the radio, calling out the distress signal, their plane designation, and current location, then he cursed viciously and fell silent as he fought the inevitable. The plane dropped suddenly, a move that sent her stomach climbing into her throat, and she squeezed her eyes shut so she couldn’t see the rocky peaks rushing at them. Then the left wing rose as the right one dipped and they rolled to the right, a nauseating maneuver that made her swallow convulsively. A few seconds later the right wing rose and for a brief—very brief—time they were level. Then the left wing dipped and they swung to the left.
Her eyes popped open. For a moment she couldn’t focus on anything; her vision was narrowed, dim, and her chest hurt. Distantly she realized she was holding her breath, and with an effort she exhaled, then sucked in oxygen. Another breath, and her vision cleared a little, enough to let her see him. He was all she could see, as if his image were magnified and everything else remained lost in the fog. She could see his right jaw, see the clenched muscles working, the sheen of sweat, even the curl of his eyelashes and the faint shadow of newly shaved whiskers.
An agonized thought shot through her brain: he was the last person she would see! She caught another breath, pulling it deep. She would die with him, this man who didn’t even like her; a person should at least die with someone around who cared. The same could be said of him, though, and she felt a deep sadness for both of them. He was…he was…The thought splintered, her attention caught. What the hell was he doing? Realization dawned, sharp and incredulous. He was guiding the plane, with the rudder and skill and ruthless determination, and also every prayer he knew, probably. The engine was dead, but he was still flying the damn plane, somehow keeping it under rudimentary control.
“Hold on,” he said harshly. “I’m trying to get down to the tree line, but we might not make it.”
Bailey’s brain felt like sludge, barely able to move, to function. Tree line? What did that matter? But she shook off the terror-induced brain fog enough to pull her seat belt tighter, press her head against the back of the leather seat, and hold on tight to the sides of the bottom cushion.
She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the sight of oncoming death, but she could feel the plane tilt first one way, then the other. Thermals, she thought, the single word swimming into focus. He was using the movement of the air currents to give them some lift, buy them precious seconds. The plane was too heavy to function like a glider, but the layers of air were slowing their descent somewhat; whether it would be enough to make a difference, she didn’t know, but Captain Justice must have something in mind, mustn’t he? Why else would he be fighting so hard to control the plane? If the end result was the same, then why bother?
With a sense of doom she waited for the overwhelming crush of impact, the last split-second of awareness. She hoped dying wouldn’t hurt much. She hoped their bodies were found fast, so her family wouldn’t suffer through a long search. She wished…she wished for a lot of things, none of which would happen now.
She felt as if an hour had passed since the engine stopped, though logically she knew mere minutes had gone by…no, not even minutes. Less than a minute, surely, though that minute seemed endless.
What was taking this damn plane so long to crash?
Him. Justice. He was the reason this was dragging out. He was still fighting the laws of gravity, refusing to give in. She felt an irrational urge to punch him, to say “Stop prolonging this!” How much terror was she supposed to take before her heart gave out under the strain? Not that it made any difference, under the circumstances—
WHAP!
The jolt jarred her teeth; it was followed instantaneously by a horrendous, deafening roar of screeching metal and thunderous cracks, more of those weird whapping sounds, and an impact so hard everything went black. The seat’s shoulder strap jerked almost unbearably tight. On some level she was aware of tilting to the right, then dropping, falling; the seat belt held her in place though her arms and legs were flopping like those of a broken doll. Then the right side of her head cracked against something rigid, and she was swallowed by darkness.