The Island Ch. 01

She grinned a little wider, brushing her hands over her tight gray pencil skirt. "Looking forward to it, Sweetie."

Let's face it, there was very little, if any, chance of something happening with this stewardess, and even in the remote possibility that it did, I was rebounding. But given my situation, what harm could it do? Yes, I know, I was getting way ahead of myself. Still, I was grateful for the company. It would be a few hours before I would be tired enough to sleep, and even then, I wasn't entirely convinced that sleeping was something I would enjoy anyway. Tonight's dreams were going to be particularly brutal, so I would be happy to stave them off for as long as possible. If that meant a bit of casual flirting and some interesting conversation with a beautiful woman, all the better.

It's not like I had a wife to think about anymore.

For the briefest flash of a moment, I felt it. I felt those emotions that I knew were coming flare up inside me. The knot tightening in my chest, the lump in my throat, the dry lips, and the tremble in the heavy breath I sucked in. My vision blurred with the tears that gathered on my eyelids. Someone who had been in my life for the past six years was just gone. Excised from my existence with the same surgical contempt shown to a tumor in a cancer patient's body. One moment she was there; the next, she was gone. I was never going to see her again. That thought was immediately and mercilessly followed by the memories of why, the questions, the mental images, the hurt, the betrayal, and... then it was gone. The moment passed as quickly as it had arrived. Fuck, I was not looking forward to the shit storm that was in my future.

My head was not going to be a pretty place to be for a while.

It would seem that grief was the price we pay for love.

I turned my head, leaned against the wall, and stared out of the window.

There is something to be said for watching a sunset from the air. At least when you are flying west. The curvature and rotation of the earth, and the plane flying towards it, has the effect of slowing the sunset down. The sun just hung there, brilliant and vibrant and orange on the distant horizon. It was like a trapeze artist balancing on her tightrope, holding its position for as long as possible before slowly - arduously slowly - starting to drop down into the far-off ocean. It was, in a word, stunning.

It lasted so much longer than a normal sunset; I had spent enough time watching them, sitting on job sites, surveying new ones. One thing that all eco-friendly construction projects had in common was their need to be built in picturesque settings. But there was always a point when the site had been chosen and surveyed, when a shipping container - that would later function as an office - was delivered to the site, and then everyone else would fuck off home until construction started. The only person, sometimes for miles in any direction, would be me, and I would climb up on top of that container and just watch the brisk mid-western sun setting over the horizon. But none of them, not a single one, had anything on this.

As I said... It was stunning.

Eventually, however, the western horizon swallowed the last of the sun, and I watched for another hour or so as the bright oranges of the sky gave way to burning reds, the reds eventually fading into the dull purples of twilight before the darkness of the night crept in to steal the rest of the sky. Soon enough, all I could see in the airplane window was the reflection of the light coming from inside it. Before long, though, those too were dimmed, and I leaned back in my seat to will away the time until sleep took me, or until Hayley decided to pay a return visit.

Look, I know I was a bit of a mess. I know my head was all over the place. I know that thinking about spending time with another woman should have been the last thing on my mind. I know I was teetering on the edge of a precipice of anguish and pain, the likes of which I had never experienced before. I know that being on a plane with little planning afforded to what I was going to do when it landed was probably not the healthiest way to handle this. I know I should be seeking support from family or the few friends I felt like I could trust. I know that Hayley wasn't really flirting. She was just being friendly, she was doing her job to make sure my flight was as comfortable and enjoyable as it could possibly be, and I know that if I was wrong, rebounding this fast was not high on my list of good ideas. But I also knew I didn't care. I didn't have the capacity to consider longer-term consequences because everything in my future was tainted by the pain, the sense of betrayal, and the loss that I knew was coming. And if a moment's comfort with another warm body would alleviate, or distract me from that pain, then I would take it. I knew I was just drained. Not tired, just empty. I had been hollowed out to the core, every shred of love I had felt for Sarah, every ounce of trust in her and in Lewis, every sense of stability I had in my life and in how it was going had been violently ripped out of me, and the jagged edges that had been left behind were searching desperately for something to latch onto, even if it was only for a little while.

Suddenly, as if waiting for the right moment, it washed over me. The emotional weight of the day just landed on my shoulders, an insurmountable tiredness. It was like the adrenaline of the last handful of hours that had been keeping me going had just worn off, and I was crashing... hard. I was exhausted; sleep was going to take me whether I wanted it to or not. I surrendered to it. I allowed the weight of my eyes to pull them closed, leaned against the wall to the side of me, and slept alone for the first time in years.

*******

I had no idea how long I was asleep, just that it was not long enough, but I was violently and rudely awakened by the feeling of the plane dropping out from under me, and then the jolt of my ass catching up to it. I frowned and tried to blink the tiredness out of my eyes as the cabin lights rose back to their full brightness and a soft ding drew my attention to the "fasten seatbelts'' sign flicking on. I let out a soft groan, stretching the muscles in my back for a moment before letting my hands reach behind me and pull the seat belt straps from under my ass and loop them over my lap. The buckle clicked into place just as Hayley passed my seat, heading for the forward galley.

She picked up the phone for the tannoy system and spoke into it. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we will be passing through an area of... um... heavy turbulence. The Captain has asked all passengers to return to their seats, fasten their seatbelts and return their tray tables and seat backs to their locked, upright position..." Another jolt of the aircraft interrupted her, causing her to stumble a little before she caught herself and continued. "The bathrooms, the duty-free, and the drinks services will be closed while the seatbelt sign is illuminated. The aircraft will be turning shortly to avoid the worst of the turbulent air..." another jolt interrupted her. "...Please try to remain calm. Thank you."

That last part was said a little too quickly for my liking, and I became aware of the worried murmurs running through the rest of the plane as drinks and Ipads were put away and seatbelts were clicked into place.

A flash of light caught my eye from the window. Then another. I frowned and leaned forward to look out, cupping my hands around my face to block out the light from the cabin and peer into the darkness. I felt my jaw almost land in my lap.

Well, it seems we are flying into the ACTUAL apocalypse.

I am not going to pretend to be an expert on meteorological physics; I knew that storms over land and storms over water were very different things, but I was pretty sure that thunderstorms were never supposed to be that big. The clear skies of the sunset a few hours earlier had been filled with a deathly, inky blackness. It was night, it was dark, I hadn't expected to see much and would have been perfectly content and comfortable with seeing nothing. But the lightning had other plans.

Towering banks of ominous-looking clouds loomed as far as the eye could see, flashing and illuminated by thousands - and I really do mean thousands - of bolts of lightning. Some of it forked between one cloud and another, some of it just flashed within the clouds themselves, and some of it seemed to snake and spread along the surface of the clouds like blood vessels under the skin, but there were so many of them that it gave off an almost strobe-light effect. Bright flashes of brilliant whites, of electric blues, yellows, reds, even some with a tinge of green. All of them gave a combined sense of terrifying foreboding. And they stretched for as far as the eye could see, in every direction.

Far from being able to see nothing, as I now wish I had, the light show put on by the uncountable flashes of lightning made even the most meteorologically uneducated person very conscious that this was NOT the ideal place for an aircraft to be.

I could see the spray of the torrential rain bouncing off the wings as they flexed and trembled, buffeted by what I imagined to be unbelievably strong winds. Those trembles translated into a steady yet unnerving vibration that ran through the entire plane. I could feel the aircraft being moved by the wind, with the pilots fighting to keep her steady. Lightning forked down beneath us, striking the barely visible surface of the Pacific Ocean, flash boiling a tiny section of water which in turn gave off steam, which rose into the terrifying storm, strengthening it just that little more. It was a violent, vicious cycle, and our tiny little airplane was stuck right in the middle of it.

This looked like the sort of storms that bible stories were made of.

I was looking out of the port side window - the left of the plane - and I was still looking out of it when the pilot started to bank starboard, elevating the left wing and my eyeline upwards. It didn't help the view in the slightest.

I had seen a faraday cage once while in college. Arcs of lethal electricity snapping around the room and hitting the cage with only a quirk of physics keeping the people inside safe. The lightning storm above and around our plane - dwarfed to an almost laughably pathetic degree by the scale of the storm around us - flashed and arced with such a furious intensity that I would have sold my soul to be inside one of those cages right now.

My attention was pulled away from the window as Hayley started making her way up the aisle, stopping at every populated seat to check that her instructions had been followed. She was, of course, the picture of professional calmness, but her white knuckle grip on the back of every headrest did not go unnoticed. She finally reached my seat, her eyes glancing down at my lap to check my belt before smiling up at me. "Raincheck on that chat?" she said, an edge of nervousness in her voice.

"Called on account of weather, huh?" I tried to joke back, significantly more than an edge in mine.

The plane jolted again, causing her to stumble forward and onto my seat. I lifted my hands and caught her before she fell properly, holding her until she steadied herself on the seat next to me. Neither of us commented on the fact that my hand had, for more than a few seconds, been cupped around her breast. She smiled, blowing another stray lock of hair from her face as she laughed politely. "I knew I should have worn my sensible shoes."

It was at that moment her eyes glanced past me and out of the window.

There is a look. You see it in Doctors when they are trying to be delicate in delivering bad news. When they say things like "you are very sick," when what they really mean is "you are fucked!" They don't want to cause any undue distress, they are trying to be professional, and they are trying to avoid the sort of questions that can only be answered by a circus tent and a crystal ball, but there is always a look. That was the look that washed over Hayley's face as she gazed out at the storm. I have no shame in saying that it probably matched the look of abject terror that had been on mine a few moments earlier.

She blinked and pulled her eyes away, clearing her throat and forcing that professional, calming smile back onto her face, despite the fact that her fingers were playing with the seatbelt of the unoccupied chair. "I need to... Um... I need to check on the other passengers." She stood as the plane started to level out, the Captain apparently being satisfied that this new heading would take us around the worst of the storm rather than directly through it. I wholeheartedly endorsed his decision.

Hayley flashed one more glance out of the window, gave another professional smile, and then stood back up and made her way further back into the plane. I turned in my seat to watch her. Most people, by this point, had realized that the instruction to fasten seatbelts was not one to be ignored and that the crew was not messing around. But even with the passengers having done most of the work already, Hayley was moving noticeably faster. She met the pretty brunette stewardess about halfway down the aisle, leaning in and whispering something into her ear. The Brunette bent forward over one of the seats and looked out of the window for herself.

If I wasn't worried before, I sure as shit was now. The look of pure dread that paled her face was one that I felt in the very pit of my stomach as that persistent vibration being felt throughout the plane had turned into a full-blown rattle.

Of all the fucking days for this to happen.

It all happened in slow motion. Hayley was just passing my seat, heading for her own in the galley, as the first cracks appeared in the hull of the plane a few rows In front of me. I launched myself as far forward as I was able to while still buckled into my seat and grabbed hold of her wrist just as the skin of the plane started to peel back. The immediate rush of wind was deafening, a loud roar as the pressurized air in the cabin raced to escape through the hole in the fuselage, trying its hardest to drag Hayley out with it. A section of the plane's skin, four or five seats long, sheared away from the rest of the aircraft's body and shot out into the storm. There was the briefest scream as the now exposed seats were ripped from their moorings and out of the plane, taking their occupants with them.

Hayley's eyes were on mine, a look of terrified desperation in them as I held her wrist with a vice-like grip, and she clung onto mine for dear life.

Unlike what Hollywood would have you believe, explosive decompression in an aircraft is exactly that... Explosive. The sudden rush of air that sucks people out of the plane doesn't last for minutes at a time. It is over in seconds as the air pressure inside the cabin equalizes with the ambient air pressure outside of it. The screams from other passengers are drowned out by the deafening roar of hurricane-force winds. You can barely keep your eyes open against the force of it. My eyes were straining against the wind, and only one thought was on my mind... Don't. Let. Go.

The rush of air had ripped open some of the overhead compartments, and pieces of luggage and loose debris shot through the air, along with the compartment doors that had been pulled off their hinges and carried on the hundred-mile-per-hour wind. It was only by pure chance that nothing hit Hayley as she was held in the air, her legs kicking frantically towards the hole she was being pulled towards, but something hard smacked into the back of my head. My stomach lurched, but I refused to release my grip as I felt a warm liquid start to trickle down my neck.

The plane lurched downward as the pilot pushed the stick forward to dive the floundering aircraft, bleeding off altitude as fast as possible. The air at this height was too thin to be breathable. The rush of escaping air stopped almost as quickly as it had started, replaced by air being forced into the cabin from the speeds at which we were traveling. Hayley slumped into the seat in front of us before I forcefully dragged her over it and sat her next to me. Her hands were trembling violently as she quickly buckled her seatbelt. Bruises were already starting to form on her arms from where I had held her. As soon as it was fastened, her closest hand gripped back onto mine, squeezing it hard and clinging onto the armrest with the other.

She flashed a quick, terrified look into my eyes as the oxygen masks fell from above us. All professional decorum had gone as she grabbed wildly at it, caught it, and pulled it over her head. I did the same with mine, feeling the cooler air being fed onto my face before releasing the breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

The air was now rushing into the cabin; the pressure being forced in by the speed of the plane had the potential to do as much damage as the air rushing out. The pilot was trying desperately to slow the aircraft after leveling the descent, but we were still in the middle of a brutally violent storm, and our change in direction didn't seem to have done much to improve our chances...

As if to illustrate this point and highlight how much trouble we were in, the hole in the side of the plane was getting bigger.

I spotted a woman's face, wide-eyed in panic, peering back at us from her place two rows ahead... A man was in the aisle, trying desperately to get to her, fighting against the bracing wind as he pulled himself forward one headrest at a time. He was only a few seats behind ours when a sheet of aluminum from the plane's outer skin was launched through the hole and scythed through the middle of his head. His lifeless body slumped to the ground, blood arcing into the air as the top of his head disappeared in the wind. The rest of him crumpled to the floor before rolling backward under the force of the air. The woman's eyes just widened in horror before, with another soul-shredding scream, she was gone. Her seat, and the one behind it... The one in front of us... broke away from the plane. The force of it ripped out a large section of the floor with it too, and all of them were tossed out into the storm, hitting the wing with a power that sheared the seats, and their passengers, in two. The damage to the wing was immediately obvious, the aluminum hull around the dent starting to peel away, flakes of metal the size of a Honda being ripped off the surface before the wing started to buckle.

With a crunch, and the groan of metal, it snapped off.

The fuel inside the wing immediately ignited and started to burn. The bright fireball seemed to be held onto the edge of the wing by the force of the passing air. Only the fact that most of the fuel had fallen away with the rest of the wing had stopped the whole aircraft from exploding.

The plane started to roll immediately, and the nose dipped towards the tempestuous ocean. The stress on what was left of the hull jumped immeasurably. I could only flash a look at Hayley, her hand squeezing mine as her eyes fixed on her feet, hanging limply over the yawning hole beneath us where the floor had once been.

And then the plane was gone. With a stomach turning lurch, a jolting burst of motion, and a sudden change in the direction of the wind, we were falling. Our seats had been ripped from the plane and out into the night, completely at the mercy of the storm... and gravity.

Hayley's hand tightened onto mine, her eyes firmly clamped close. Whatever she thought was coming next, her eyes wanted no part in it. She just held her breath and held my hand. Despite the storm, despite the rush of wind, it was eerily quiet as we fell, at least compared to the deafening noise there had been in the plane. The only sound was the heavy, panicked breathing of someone behind us. Apparently, ours were not the only seats to have been torn from the cabin.