Chapter 6
6
JACOB
C atherine tries to scream, but instead she makes a pained begging sound that tears into my mind and buries itself there. I’ll hear it for the rest of my life.
The rest of my life might be the sum total of a minute.
Maybe less.
My wife jerks upright, forgetting to brace herself. I try to push her back down, but she won’t go. Catherine curls sideways into my arms.
The plane hasn’t become a fireball. It’s still moving, with more hits toward the nose. Trees, maybe. Outside Catherine’s window, there’s nothing but varying shades of dark. I can’t remember what the first impact felt like with the plane vibrating, high-pitched noises coming from one side?—
Both sides.
The engines?
A shadow flies through the pale, barely there emergency lights. I jerk my head out of the way at the last second.
It’s not enough. Whatever it was—something metal—smashes into my forehead and bounces off. I can’t hear where it lands. I only know that it doesn’t come down on us again. My teeth click together as the plane hurtles over uneven ground. Did he put the landing gear down? Does landing gear matter when you’re flying into a forest?
Whatever we’re hitting moves us in a sharp zig-zag, or else the plane has come alive and is pursuing prey through a thickly forested area. Both options seem equally plausible. Logical. I wouldn’t be surprised to glance out the window and find my father sitting at a card table, though, so that’s probably a clue to my general state of mind.
A hot, tickling sensation slides down one of my eyebrows. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that’s irritating . I can’t wipe it away without letting go of Catherine, so I do my best to guide whatever it is away from my eyeball by blinking.
Something scrapes against the bottom of the plane. I imagine aluminum peeling off in a jagged curl of metal to expose a fleshy heart pumping jet fuel through smooth-muscle valves.
The front of the plane bumps anticlimactically against one last thing, and then it lists to the left, and lists, and lists, and it occurs to me that we could be on the side of a cliff. We could be about to plummet upside-down to our rocky, waterlogged deaths.
But then the plane gives a final metallic creak and rocks to a halt.
It takes a second or two to understand that the plane has stopped. Catherine shivers in my arms, her teeth chattering, her head pressed tight to my best.
“Are you—” The plane makes a creaking whine. “Are you all right, kitten?”
“Did we stop?” she asks, her voice muffled in my sweatshirt and her oxygen mask.
“Yes.” The noise isn’t coming from the plane anymore, and it seems both deathly quiet and deafeningly loud at the same time.I find the strap of her mask and pull it off her head, then pull mine off. A humid breeze that smells like wet dirt and growing things is seeping into what’s left of the filtered air.
Okay. Controlled breathing. I can’t hear a damn thing over that pounding heartbeat, and I need to be able to hear, because we’re on a plane lit only by the emergency lights and the moon outside, and so is Raymond Harris. The other oxygen masks have bloomed out of their compartments and list in the direction of the left wing.
It’s creepy.
I rub Catherine’s back, her racing pulse fluttering through her skin. “Are you hurt?”
“My neck is sore, but I don’t think it’s, like, an actual injury.” Catherine pushes herself bravely upright, turning her head from side to side. “I think it’ll be okay. What about you?”
Now that we’re on the ground, I now realize that the inhuman calm I felt when we started plummeting out of the sky was probably from an unbelievable surge of adrenaline.
I’m fine, I plan to tell Catherine. I’ll be fine.
Instead, my head throbs like the plane is belatedly collapsing, crushing my skull in the process. My temples scream. I can’t see out of my right eye. It’s completely black and burns. Everything out of my left eye blurs. Jesus—why is my head so heavy? I lean against the headrest and breathe, though breathing makes my stomach turn.
Who says ?
The whisper comes from directly behind me, but I don’t move. If I’m in bed, I won’t move until the sun comes up. I’ll let the nightmare stand over me and watch me pretend to sleep, but I won’t give it the satisfaction of scaring me off.
It’s not my bed. I don’t sleep on leather pillowcases. When I force my eyes open, the stinging ratchets up.
“Fuck.” I swipe at my right eye with my sleeve. Even in this light, I can see the fabric’s come away dark. “Joseph and Jesus. I don’t have time for this. I need to get to Raymond Harris’s house before it’s too late.”
“Jacob?” Catherine’s voice is soft and distant. Maybe she’s waiting for me on the steps of the plane.
“Coming.”
“Jacob, you have to wake up. You’re bleeding.” Her hand is on my arm, then my knee, and then all I can see is her hair at a strange angle. Catherine comes up with a flash of white in her hands. A first-aid kit. She pops it open and pulls out a smaller white square. Gauze. It floats unsteadily over to my forehead, and Catherine presses it to the cut. The torn skin beats along with my heart. “Sorry! Sorry. But you’re still bleeding, and we?—”
“Have to go.”
“Yes, but not to Raymond Harris’s house. We’re not in New York. Come on, Jacob. You can’t pass out right now. I don’t think I can carry you.”
I blink again, and the plane’s cabin slides begrudgingly into focus. All the cream-colored leather gives a ghostly impression in the semi-darkness. More blood gets in my eye.
“How did that happen ?” Charlotte’s not pleased, and she’s doing her best to keep her voice pitched low.
“Head wounds bleed a lot.”
“How did you get a head wound?”
“I don’t know what it was. Flew through the air. Didn’t see—I didn’t see where it landed, Catherine. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to be sorry.”
“I am. I should have been watching.”
Catherine shushes me. Shadows fall over her face. I’m almost certain they can’t be real. There’s not enough light for them to be so stark. The angle still doesn’t seem right. It changes every time I blink, but Catherine isn’t moving.
Is she?
She takes a deep breath, lets it out, looks into her bag again. I didn’t know she kept a first-aid kit in her bag. While Catherine takes inventory, I guide her hand off my forehead and hold my bloodied sleeve over the gauze. It would be nice if I wasn’t actively bleeding for whatever comes next, but I suppose we can’t have everything.
“Okay.” Catherine looks into my eyes, her face swinging close. I hold perfectly still to avoid knocking my head into hers. It might be overkill. She seems to have decent control over her head and neck. Good for her. “It’s time to get off the plane.”
“You have directions?”
Catherine furrows her eyebrows. “No. Definitely not. I have no idea where we are or where we’re supposed to go, but I know we can’t stay here. There’s a murderer on board who hates you. And he hates me, which is completely unfair. I didn’t do anything to him.”
“My theory is that he’s been driven mad with grief.”
“Probably, yeah.” Catherine sticks her hand into her bag again and comes up with an elastic. She sweeps her hair into an artfully messy bun—chic, effortless, her. “ They can get into that when they make the movie. I’m more concerned with not getting murdered.”
“We might have to come back, you know. This might be our only shelter.”
Catherine lowers her hands from her hair. She’s trembling, and my heart fills up like it’s the thing breathing and not my lungs. I want to protect her from all this. I want to have protected her from all this. But now we’re on a plane that was not landed appropriately and I have a head wound.
Those things won’t stop me from protecting her, but they could make it more difficult.
Interesting. They’ll make it more interesting.
“It seems warm outside,” Catherine says after a few beats. “We’re not somewhere freezing. We should at least, like, get out and see how the plane is. If this is our only shelter, we have to know how bad the damage is.”
She glances toward the cockpit.
We also need to know if Raymond Harris is dead.
There’s always the option of approaching the cockpit from inside the plane, but I have no interest in doing that. I can’t imagine Catherine does, either.
“And,” she continues, “he’d probably hear if we made a phone call from in here, so let’s…not do that.”
“Let’s not,” I agree.
The plane’s usual exit is tilted toward the ground, so Catherine and I go with the emergency exit on our side of the plane. It’s over the wing, and we’re in the back, so I take our bags and put them on a closer seat. We each take one of the steak knives. Catherine goes to check on the kettle with the boiled water, using the other seats to balance. The angle of the plane seems even steeper now.
“Ugh,” she whispers. “I’m heating it up again. You get the window open.”
It’s darker by the transitional kitchen, but Catherine’s outfit glows. She’s a bride on her honeymoon. Flawless.
Catherine glances at me and makes the most encouraging hurry the fuck up gesture I have ever seen from anyone.
I return her gesture with one that she’ll hopefully understand to mean getting this exit open is going to make some noise, so we should be prepared with the boiling water.
My wife blinks at me.
All I can do is smile at her, which is an accomplishment. The gauze came off the cut on my head, and it stings, pain thumping out from the wound and all around my head. The healing scratches on my sides sting, too. A larger headache rolls over the top of my skull and falls out the side of the plane.
Finally, Catherine returns with the kettle and puts it down on the floor. She puts her steak knife, along with one of the butter knives, into her bag, then slings it over her head. The strap settles on her chest. My bag goes on the seat in front of me.
“Do you know how to open this thing?” she asks.
“Of course I do. I’ve read the safety brochure many times.”
“Okay. Do it.”
“Okay.”
The door is almost above me. I’ve imagined plenty of emergency exits over the years, but in an incredible oversight, I always imagined the plane being flat on a runway or a conveniently cleared field.
At least I imagined the process itself.
First, I open the window shade and remove the cover over the red T-handle and let it drop silently to the floor.
Next, it’s a matter of pulling down on the handle.
A final glance at Catherine. She’s staring at the window, her jaw set, poised like she’s ready to run.
At least one of us is.
The last step is to pull the window into the plane. There are two handles specifically for this purpose, and I wrap a hand around each one of them and pull.
Nothing happens.
“Is it broken?” Catherine whispers. The silence has thickened since the plane stopped moving, and her whisper hits me like a shout.
“No.” I give it a firmer tug.
Nothing.
The pressure in my skull doesn’t appreciate this activity. Neither do the scratches on my sides. Neither do my abs, which have begun to ache.
I’m getting her off this fucking plane. The only positive at this moment is that the engines aren’t running. I can’t remember when they stopped, but it means we can hear.
It might mean Raymond Harris can hear, too.
I use all my weight against the handles and yank .
The window pulls free. If Catherine’s whisper was a shout, the window coming loose is a bullet. I maneuver it into a different row, my heart pounding.
“You first, kitten.”
I boost Catherine up to the exit. She pulls herself out onto the wing and looks back at me with wide eyes.
“It’s not too far to the ground. You can do it. I’m right behind you.”
“I hate this,” she whispers.
“Me, too.”
Catherine climbs over the empty panel, her hand sliding against the skin. She murmurs something to herself, and a few seconds later there’s a muffled thud .
“Oh my God. Okay. Okay. I’m down here,” she whisper-shouts. “Are you coming?”
“Yes,” I whisper back. I don’t think she hears me. It’s not the time to chat, anyway. It’s time to climb.
I get the handles of my bag over my shoulder and climb onto the chair. The angle is miserable. All the angles of this situation is miserable. Gravity wants to pull me to the other side of the plane, but I summon my strength and start to hoist myself out.
The cockpit door opens.
Jesus and fucking Mary and fucking Joseph .
I can’t see Raymond Harris with my head through the exit, but I can hear him breathing. It’s a wet, labored sound. I pull one leg out and get it onto the wing.
His footsteps get closer, thudding on the floor of the plane.
If the whole thing tips over because of this asshole, I’ll kill him.
My bag is still stuck, but I can’t leave it. I get it free of the panel with a wrench to my shoulder that I’ll probably pay for later and throw it out onto the wing. It slides off, and Catherine gasps.
“Jacob?”
My blood pressure is so high that a needle could explode my skull, but I heave myself out onto the wing.
Fingers lock around my ankle.
I look down into a face that’s barely a face. It’s mostly blood and two narrow eyes, glowing like a ghost’s.
“Let go ,” I snap at him, sounding like a righteously indignant prick, and kick at Raymond Harris’s face.
Then I hurl myself onto the wing.
There’s no time to readjust. Like my luggage before me, I slide off the edge and plummet toward my wife and the ground below.