Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

We hit hard. I heard some kind of debris slam against the ceiling. I didn’t look up to see what it might be. The plane bounced. We hit again. The fuselage screamed with the voice of aluminum tearing. Luggage exploded out of the overhead rack — and then the fuselage cracked apart.

It broke right in front of me. Darkness swept in, and a howling wind. Fluid sprayed in my face — though whether it was blood or hydraulics or the ocean itself, I couldn’t tell because we were tumbling, swirling, cartwheeling on a long chaotic fall into the arms of death.

Or was it life?

We assume it’s easy to tell the difference.

Clawing at consciousness, I awoke to a low, rumbling assault of sound, and a raw awareness of pain. Everything hurt. My skull, my face, my back, my hips … every muscle along my sides. I blinked, and found myself gazing at black smoke roiling across a starry sky. I was lying on my back, still belted in my seat. The wall of the fuselage was still beside me. The little window framed a fiery light, but the seats that had been in front of me were gone. The fuselage had split right at my feet, and the front of the plane had torn away.

A hysterical little laugh escaped my throat as I remembered my promise to do whatever it took to reach the exit.

The exit was wide open now.

A soft whump startled me. A nearby roar of rushing water followed it. My seat shuddered. Rain pelted my face — salty rain, ocean water. The sound I heard was the sound of a breaking wave … sweeping around the fuselage? As the wave retreated it left behind a steady, bold roar unlike any ocean sound I’d heard before.

Braced for pain, I turned my head, peering through the window at a lurid light, blurred and refracted by a layer of water droplets clinging to the outside of the window. Something was burning out there, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough to know what it might be.

White water surged up and slapped hard against the plastic pane. Instinctively, I jerked back, while the fuselage trembled around me, and more salty water rained down.

A child wailed.

I gasped, realizing this was the first voice I’d heard since waking. The only voice. In the seconds since I’d opened my eyes there had been no screaming, no crying, no pleas for help, no reassurances … just the rumble of the ocean, the roar of the fire, and now, one child’s despairing wail.

That cry made me move.

“I’m coming,” I called out in a rusty croak, groping at my seatbelt until I got it undone. “I’m coming. Don’t be afraid.” A stupid thing to say.

I squiggled and shifted and found that my body still worked. I got my feet under me and turned to climb out of my seat — only to discover Anita in my way. Refracted firelight shimmered in her eyes as she lay blinking up at me. Water swirled behind her head. I looked past her, in a direction that was now down, toward what had been the back of the plane. Everything back there belonged to the ocean now. I thought I saw drowned faces beneath the water’s unquiet, dark surface but the light was poor. It was hard to be sure.

The child cried again.

Across the aisle, only one other seat remained above the water. The seats that should have completed the row weren’t there. I had to assume that, like the front of the plane, they’d been ripped away in the crash.

The child huddled in the sanctuary of that one seat, a boy maybe seven years old. He’d gotten out of his seatbelt; he’d even remembered to inflate his life vest. It looked like a huge yellow pillow strapped to his chest. He clung to the vertical seat cushion, weeping as water rose and fell around his feet, soaking his shoes and his pants.

“I’m coming,” I told him.

I told myself, Go!

But Anita was in the way. She hadn’t moved at all; I needed to know if she could. “Are you hurt?” I asked her, all too aware of currents of hot air moving past my face, missives from the roaring fire just outside.

As Anita opened her mouth to answer, another wave hit. The torn fuselage shuddered, the seat shifted beneath me, and I almost fell on top of her. I caught myself with a hand against her seatback. My fingers came away sticky, smelling of blood.

“Leave me,” she said, in a high half-shriek. “Save yourself. Live.”

She was right. Injured, helpless, likely with hours to go before rescue came, her prospects were slim. The smart thing to do would be to abandon her and focus on the child.

“Go,” she pleaded. “Before you can’t get out.”

I started to go; I tried to go — what did I care for her life? I hardly knew her. We’d sat together, we’d shared a few words — but then we’d held hands, and our abstract acquaintance had become personal. I couldn’t leave her.

I felt for her seatbelt and popped it open, telling myself I was strong enough to help her and the child too. “Come on! We’re getting out of here. Put your arm around my shoulder.”

She was delirious. She tried to push me away. I grabbed the red tabs dangling from her vest and pulled them. I pulled my own. Both vests inflated and I pushed her into the water that flooded the aisle.

We bobbed at the surface.

I turned her onto her back, gripped the straps at her shoulder, and dragged her with me as I worked my way around the boy’s seat. Beyond him, firelight glimmered on open water. That’s where I wanted to be. That light was hope glimmering — the desperate hope of not being drowned when the wreckage around us finally pitched over.

I cleared the seat and felt a strong pull of ocean current. Holding one arm out to the boy, I called to him, “Come! Jump!”

He didn’t hesitate. He threw himself at me, a skinny little thing strapped into a vest so big he looked like he might levitate. A rumbling growl warned me that a wave was coming. I got an arm around him. He got an arm around me. “Deep breath!” I yelled as a mountain of white water plunged over us.

Like the plane crash, there was nothing I could do except hold on. We tumbled. My head hit against a sandy bottom. I felt the boy thrash. I felt Anita flail, prying at my fingers, trying to get me to let go. Her elbow struck my ribs, but I held on, my fingers locked around the straps of her life vest. I swore to myself we would survive, that we would all three survive together.

The wave let us go.

I rolled onto my back and gasped for air, letting the life vest hold me up. I made sure the boy’s face was out of the water, and then Anita. “It’s okay,” I murmured to them, my voice pitched so high it frightened me. “We’re doing okay.” The boy had his arm around my neck, so tight it was painful. I was glad. It told me he was strong, not like Anita. She drifted beside us, nearly unconscious.

The wave had carried us maybe fifty feet from the broken fuselage. A fire still shimmered beyond it, though it was less than it had seemed through the window. A yellow fragment of moon floated low above the horizon, illuminating a line of white water that must surely mark a distant reef … and I realized then that the fuselage must have been resting on a reef, with waves breaking around it … but it made no sense. The north Pacific is vast and nearly empty, and while I could believe our pilot had hoped to come down near some patch of reef or on some spot of an island — Johnston Atoll maybe? Palmyra? — to imagine that he had succeeded was more than I could accept.

With my charges in tow, I swiveled around, where I was presented with more evidence of the impossible.

Visible in the moon’s light, not a hundred feet away, was a sand beach, rising steeply to a line of brush and skeletal trees. Water sloshed into my open mouth. I spit it out, sure I was suffering a hallucination, seeing a mirage. Reality had slipped. We had come to a place where the odds did not allow us to be.