The Island Ch. 01

My eyes tracked what was left of the plane as it kept moving through the night sky, highlighted by the fire on the wing. For reasons that I may never understand, my brain was in full engineer mode. Yes, I was scared, I was terrified, but my mind seemed to be more interested in what was happening to the plane than it was in what would eventually happen to us when our free-fall ended.

The structural integrity of the aircraft had essentially been reduced to nil. It was clear from the subtle alterations in its flight path that the pilot was still wrestling with the controls, but any hope of saving it had vanished along with the wing. The air being forced into the fuselage had grown to far exceed the structural limitations designed to maintain cabin pressure, and I watched as, first, one of the rear doors exploded outwards, tearing another hole in the skin of the aircraft, before, with another sickening crunch, the tail of the plane along with several rows of seats and a few dozen passengers broke away from the rest of the aircraft and fell into the sky. The air inside needed somewhere to go, the airframe weakened more and more with every passing second, and the tail of the plane was in its way... until it wasn't.

What was left of the main body started spiraling toward the Ocean like a wounded bird. We were still falling when - accelerated by its single still-operational engine - the remainder of the plane smashed into the sea and exploded into a massive fireball barely a mile or two away from us.

I didn't have time to find the tail section in the dark sky before the ocean came rushing up to meet us. With a crash, a whip of my head, and a loud thud, my world went dark.

********

Under almost any other circumstances, the fall would have killed us. In fact, the only reason it didn't kill us this time was due to a combination of factors that physics students could earn a Ph.D. in analyzing.

So... physics of a falling aircraft seat 101

By a complete fluke of design, the heaviest part of the seat, into which Hayley, myself, and our unknown fiends behind us were strapped to, was not our bodies but the metal work that anchored the seats to the rest of the plane. That part of the seat fell the fastest due to its weight, which had the effect of rotating the seats so that the bottom rear corner was pulled downward. Essentially, we were falling ass first.

Normally, that would have turned the entire wreckage into a downward-facing arrow, with our legs forming one angle and our backs forming the other... the most aerodynamic shape it was capable of achieving. Again, that would normally have sped up our fall, but there was a storm blowing. With buffeting winds hitting us from different angles, including blowing upwards at us at immeasurable speeds, it caused the wreckage to basically wobble. That wobble increased the air resistance, and the air resistance slowed us down... not much, but just enough.

Lastly, those same storm winds had turned the ocean into a choppy tempest of breaking waves. It is said that hitting standing water at speeds over thirty miles per hour is, in physical terms, no different than hitting concrete. No amount of factors on earth could have saved us if this was a clear and calm day. But the water wasn't standing. The water was acting in much the same way as you would expect it to act in the middle of a Typhoon. The choppy waves undermined the tensile strength of the surface just enough for the wreckage to plunge into it rather than smash against it. The sudden stop at the end of the fall, which almost always kills the person falling, was not quite sudden enough to kill us. The impact that we did suffer was, in turn, mostly mitigated by the soft cushions we were still sitting on.

That and the fact that if you ever need to fall out of a plane without a parachute, ass first is the way to go.

Whiplash, yes. Pain, oh abso-fucking-lutely. Broken legs, possibly... but death? Not quite.

Look, miracles don't happen very often, and when they do, it isn't always wise to over-analyze them, but speaking as an engineer....

It was pretty fucking cool.

***********

I couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few seconds before my head jerked up, and my eyes snapped open. I couldn't tell you if it was some form of primal instinct or just a staggering level of subconscious forethought, but I was holding my breath. What's more, I could tell I hadn't been holding it for a particularly long time.

The wreckage of the seats was being pulled down into the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean, but my still-buoyant body was being folded in half with my torso and legs both trying to float back up to the surface. This decidedly uncomfortable position was causing my body to bend around the seatbelt like I was reaching for my toes. I blinked against the saltiness of the water, suddenly becoming aware of not only a human-looking shape hovering in the water next to me but also that the human shape was desperately trying to straighten me out to reach for my belt. My head jerked to the side; Hayley was still in her seat, still unconscious, and apparently trying out the same contortionist routine as I was.

A tap on my shoulder refocused my attention. The shape, a man by the looks of it, was waving something orange at me. It took me a few seconds before I realized what he was trying to say before I nodded and pressed myself back into the seat, and unbuckled my belt. The man-shape slipped a life vest over my head and reached around my waist to snap it into place. He must have been one of the people in the seats behind us.

I floated upwards, turning back to look at the wreckage. There were three rows of seats on top of the ones that we had been sitting in, but Hayley appeared to be the only one still strapped to them. I immediately swam down and started to try and push her into the seat while the shape rummaged around under it to pull out another life vest and then, after slipping it over her head, unbuckled her belt, snapped the waist straps around the unconscious stewardess, and pulled the cord.

The life vest inflated in a heartbeat, and Hayley was launched towards the surface. The shape, still holding himself level in the water, looked at me, looked back at the wreckage, nodded, and then pulled his own cord. By now, I was starting to feel the strain of holding my breath and felt around my chest for my own cord. I found it and yanked hard.

The ascent to the surface could only have lasted a few seconds, but every single one of them seemed to stretch out to an eternity. My head was craned upwards, watching the churning, chopping surface getting closer and closer, highlighted and illuminated by the still-raging storm above it. In the flashes of light, I could make out a handful of kicking legs, their bodies capped by the oranges of their own life vests and the life vests themselves, each giving off its own glow from those silly little lights that hung off them.

I burst through the surface of the water like something out of a Bond movie, sucking in a deep, desperate, gasping breath of air, only to be immediately swallowed by a towering wave. Coughing, spluttering, and half-drowned, I looked around frantically for Hayley. I spotted her a few dozen feet away. Two other women were holding her still-unconscious body and keeping her head above the water as much as they could. I started kicking my legs toward them.

The familiarly shaped man was next to them, waving me closer to them. "So..." I coughed out another lung full of salty water. "It seems the sky is... broken."

The man coughed out a laugh, apparently as surprised by my calmness as I was, grabbing hold of me and pulling me towards the group. Of the twelve seats that had plummeted into the Ocean, it appeared that five of them had been occupied, the guy who had pulled Hayley and me from our seats and two other women. Given how he was acting, this man seemed to know what he was doing. "We need to stay together," he panted, "For collective buoyancy. And we need to start making our way to the tail section, there may be more survivors, and that is where all the rafts are kept..." He turned his head to his right, "It's over there."

I could barely tell which way was up, let alone orient myself in a specific direction. But with no better options, and in the company of a man who seemed to be better at this whole surviving-in-the-middle-of-the-Ocean thing than I was, I saw no need to argue.

"Can you hold her?" One of the women asked me, nodding to the still unconscious Hayley. "I saw you.. I saw you hold her when the plane decompressed." She shouted over the wind after I nodded and moved to her side, wrapping my arm under Hayley's armpits and resting the back of her head on my shoulder.

"I did too," the man said as he coaxed the group into something of a circle. "That was impressive. I don't think many people could have done that. You probably saved her life." I looked down at her seemingly lifeless face and then back up to him with an arched, unconvinced eyebrow. He noticed. "She took a hard hit to the head, but she is alive. If we can get out of this water and to dry land, she should be fine."

"Land?" We were all shouting over the wind and constantly interrupted by the swell of the waves washing over us. Almost every other breath was a spluttered cough, trying to get the spray out of our lungs, the whole conversation was still being yelled over the howling wind, and the flashes of lightning overhead provided an ominous illumination to our efforts as the whole group followed the man's lead and started kicking in the direction he was leading us.

He looked at me with something of a shrug, although it was hard to tell with the effort of swimming. "We just survived falling the better part of a mile out of the sky, if there was ever a time to be optimistic...."

Flawless logic, I liked it.

"How do you know all this?" I shouted back.

"I'm a Captain in the Coast Guard." He yelled back.

"Well, that's... convenient."

The two women laughed. The man just chuckled and nodded. "Not the way I'd choose to use my experience, but yeah. We need to stop talking, though. We need to save our strength, just keep kicking... Slow and steady wins the race."

I am not going to try to guess how long we swam for - not only did I have no point of reference, but every minute seemed to stretch out for hours - nor could I tell you how far we had traveled. Every wave washed us high above the average water height, letting our Coast Guard leader reorientate himself, his head locked onto some fixed point in the distance before it dumped us back into the swell. Most of the waves simply crashed onto us. I felt like I had spent considerably more energy holding onto Hayley and staying attached to the group than I had exerted with kicking my legs. For all I knew, though, each wave was carrying us in a different direction from the one we were supposed to be moving. To my untrained eye, there was simply no way to tell.

And then the wreckage started appearing.

Hollywood has done an injustice to the art of crashing a plane. Aircraft that hit the water almost always break up on impact. That is one of the reasons why the Miracle on the Hudson was such a big deal. Captain Sullenberger landing an aircraft onto a river, with the pinpoint accuracy needed to keep it intact and keep all the passengers alive. was a feat accomplished against truly mind-boggling odds. The sections that manage to stay intact in an ocean crash may fill up with water and sink, but the vast majority of a plane will simply disintegrate.

Engines are heavy, they would sink like a stone, but the rest of the plane is made out of surprisingly thin sheets of aluminum. Even heavier constructions like the doors are designed to be light, they need to be to get airborne. But this also means that a very large portion of a plane's component parts float.

And there are a LOT of component parts, even when you are only looking at what was left of the tail section.

A section of the hull was the first piece to be spotted, bobbing lazily in the swell and seemingly unperturbed by the rise and fall of the storm swells. A door was next. Then a few pieces of luggage.

Then a body.

Face down, the lifeless corpse was wearing the tattered remains of a white shirt, most of the back of which had been stained a deep red. One of its arms was missing, and the long, black female hair was fanned out in the water around it. We passed her in silence, each of us aware that we had escaped the same fate by pure luck.

The next body was more interesting, at least to the Coast Guard. He was face up and seemed to only be as unconscious as Hayley. What was most interesting, however, was that he was wearing a life vest. The coast guard directed us closer, checking for a pulse before a disheartened look washed onto his face, and he shook his head. "He's gone." He said sadly. "But..." He frowned a little, appearing to my admittedly untrained eye to start rifling under his clothes. "I think he survived the crash. He's still warm, I'm not a doctor, but I think he died of internal bleeding."

One of the women spoke up hopefully, "Do you... Do you think there could be more? Survivors, I mean?"

The Coast Guard looked around. "If one did, there could be others. We need to keep...." His voice trailed off as he squinted into the night. My eyes followed his, trying to work out what he was looking at.

"HEYYY!!!" He suddenly yelled out. "OVER HERE!!!"

The rest of the group strained our necks anxiously, all of us squinting against the wind and the hammering rain to see what he was now waving at, his hands grabbing the whistle on his vest and blowing into it frantically.

Then I saw it.

A simple, flashing orange light; It was gone as quickly as it appeared, my view obstructed by a wave for a few moments as I grabbed hold of Hayley's whistle - unable to reach my own - and joined in the quickly growing chorus. The next wave lifted us higher, giving me the perfect view of the object that had excited the Coast Guard so much.

Then through the driving rain and howling wind, beneath the ominous, towering, deathly dark clouds, still rippling and flashing with sheets of lightning, was a single, blinking orange light. Beneath that light, however, was a large, round, orange life raft.

And peeking through the opening in the canopy that covered that life raft was a very alive, very human face, squinting through the darkness in our direction.

The Coast Guard literally ripped the light off his vest and started swinging it by its string around his head, breaking the link of our circle and allowing us to drift apart a little, still linked, but now forming something of a line. The move seemed to have worked, however, as the man in the raft started pointing in our direction.

Suddenly he jumped out of the raft, another equally alive-looking woman following him into the water a few seconds later. Both of them grabbing the rope that hung around the circumference of the craft and started pulling it in our direction.

"To hell with slow and steady." The Coast Guard yelled excitedly over the wind. "Everybody swim!"

**********

I feel I am safe in saying that I had never, in my entire life before that moment, been that happy to see another human being. The sense of relief when another woman appeared in the canopy opening, reaching down to hook her arms underneath Hayley, was beyond my ability to express. I helped her as much as I could, but with nothing but my tired, kicking legs for leverage, I had nothing to push against. The woman did all the heavy lifting as she dragged the still unconscious air stewardess onto the raft. The other two women managed to pull themselves in, followed by the woman who had jumped in to help pull the raft.

Ladies first; Apparently, chivalry wasn't dead.

I was next. Hooking my arms over the edge, I didn't realize how exhausted they had become from keeping myself and Hayley afloat for what seemed like hours, but with some help, I managed to pull myself inside. The others had dragged Hayley into the middle of the raft, laying her out next to another unconscious-looking man. The three women who had been in the water with me had joined the group of people already in the raft, a lot more of them than I expected, and the majority were huddled around the edges. One of them, another woman whose wet blonde hair clung to her face, seemed to be checking Hayley over carefully while another woman, the pretty brunette I almost didn't recognize as the other flight attendant, tried to cover her up.

With her legs having been underwater this entire time, I hadn't noticed that Hayley's pencil skirt seemed to have been torn from her body under the force of the impact. Leaving her in a delicate pair of black French-looking lace panties and what was left of her tattered shirt. I quickly looked down to check my own body. One of the legs had been ripped from the rest of my pants just above the knee, and my shoes were gone, so was one sock. But aside from a little bit of blood on the remaining sock, I seemed to be doing okay.

I pulled off my shirt and tossed it over to Hayley's friend. She caught it with a grateful smile, wringing it out and laying it over Hayley's exposed body as I turned my attention back to the gap in the canopy, reaching out to grab the Coast Guard's hand and helping to haul him into the raft.

Panting, heaving, and utterly exhausted, we both returned to the opening to help the last man out of the storm, the man who had jumped in to pull the raft to us, the man arguably responsible for saving our lives.

The Coast Guard reached out and grabbed his hand just as a wave started to lift us higher. The man grabbed it, his other hand reaching out to mine... I was inches away from reaching it when he turned his head to the side, his eyes widening in sudden horror before the wave washed over him. A piece of wreckage, a beige piece of metal that could have substituted as a barn door, smashed into him, the full weight of it landing squarely onto his head. The sickening crunch was followed by the feeling of a hot spray on my face.... When I opened my eyes, he was gone.

Just like that... he was gone.

My eyes scanned desperately for him. It was only at that moment that I realized that he hadn't been wearing a life vest. I turned to the Coast Guard. His face was almost as white as a sheet if it wasn't for the blood splatter coating his skin. "I..." he gulped, swallowing hard, his hands rubbing absently at the blood on his face. I couldn't bring myself to do the same "I... I had him... He was right there. I..." He slumped back into the raft, drawing his legs up to his chest and hugging them tightly.

The others in the raft looked over, their faces falling at the blood spatter on ours. I looked back at them and just shook my head. All of us, the whole group, were in too much shock to process anything more than what was in front of us. For me and the two women around Hayley, that was checking on her, for everyone else, all they could think about was surviving the night.

"Is she going to be okay?" The brunette asked the blonde as both of them knelt over Hayley.

Just as the Coast had earlier, the blonde woman seemed to know what she was doing, there was some obvious medical training evident in the way her finger felt around her neck, then moving over her shoulders, down her ribs, and onto her abdomen. "There doesn't seem to be any breaks and there is no sign of internal bleeding. You were sucked out of the plane?" She looked over to the women who had fallen with me, and both of them nodded softly. "Well, then she is a very lucky girl, you all are." Her bright blue eyes flashed across the raft to me. "She's taken a knock to the head, but I can't feel any fractures or contusions in her skull. We are lucky it is summer otherwise, we would all be worried about Hypothermia. Is anyone else hurt?"