Crash of Hearts

Chapter Two

We finally made it to the exit. I pushed him down the slide and looked back into the cabin, whispering a prayer to them all. I hated leaving them to die in a fire coffin, but this plane wasn’t going to last much longer. The gas was becoming stronger.

When I got to the bottom, my first thought was how I was supposed to move them both by myself to safety before something bad happened. It felt good to be out in the open with a warm but gentle breeze. It reminded me of the airport in New Mexico and what it was like there, almost normal. Sadly, now wasn’t that time.

First was Sammy. There was a lone tree about one hundred yards away from us, so I figured it would be a safe distance right now. I picked him up the same way I did in the plane, half running to the destination. There was some pain in my right ankle, but the adrenaline was going too fast for me to really think about it.

Setting him down and giving him a soft kiss on his forehead, I turned around and rushed to the plane again. Chills ran down my spine at the sight of the plane. Everything was right in front of me.

The plane was on fire, already deteriorating from the jet fuel feeding it. Once it hit the main fuel chambers, it would be a disaster. The wing of the plane was missing just like it hadn’t been assembled.

People were on that plane suffering, dying, or dead already, which gave me every impulse to rush faster to the guy lying next to the slide.

I wrapped my arms under his armpits, trying to drag him that way. I was about twenty yards away from the plane and it had already taken me several minutes. The plane didn’t have that much longer.

There was no use. My strength was already running out, along with the adrenaline that was getting me going earlier. If this guy didn’t wake up and get him out of there himself, I was just going to have to leave him. With that, I bent down and started smacking him on the cheeks.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up, please!” I said, my voice growing in volume with every slap. The tears started running down my cheeks, making my words catch a little in the back of my throat.

All hope seemed lost when I heard a tiny groan. The man’s eyebrows squeezed together as he moaned again, opening his bright gray eyes to slits. He looked just as confused as I was.

“Get up and run. Come on!” My voice was urgent as I grabbed his hand, trying to pull him up and along to the tree where Sammy still laid. “Please, the plane is going to blow!”

Once the words generated in his mind, he got up, gazing at the plane. He was absolutely mesmerized by the sight before him, but I tugged with all my body weight and started to get him moving. When he learned what I was doing, he started running himself toward the tree, catching up past me for a second.

We were knocked off our feet, landing face first into the grassy plain from the shockwave of the blast. It was almost deafening in our ears, but we covered our heads nonetheless, protecting what little we had. I was screaming, I knew I was, but I couldn’t hear anything but a ringing in my ears.

God, if I’m going to die, please don’t let it be painful, I thought when I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I felt heat approach us, but it receded almost instantly.

The ringing started going down in my ears. Slowly, I flipped onto my back and propped myself up on my elbows, searching for the plane. It was a miracle, just like Mom and Dad surviving, because debris was every where around us, but never landing on top. Sammy seemed to be unharmed, along with the tree still standing above him.

“What happened?” I heard a deep gravelly voice say. It took me a second to realize it was the man talking, staring at me with lost eyes. They were so deep that I felt like I could melt into them and never come out. “I fell asleep on the plane… did we get hijacked?”

Hijacked… I never even considered that possibility, but it seemed like a weird interpretation. They had taken control of the plane even before we took off. I don’t even think the pilots knew they were even being sabotaged.

“I don’t know… We crashed into that hill. I think we’re the only survivors,” was my reply to him.

We both walked over to Sammy who was still unconscious. I hoped there wasn’t any damage done to his brain, because after all that happened, he still hadn’t woken up. There was the jostling of me carrying him, there was the blast, and now the stench of burning oil, burning fuel, and burning bodies.

“Don’t worry, he should be fine,” the man said after looking at Sammy’s eyes. “He’s probably just more of a deep sleeper than us. I’m sure if we tried waking him up it would work, but his brain, I assume, is still recuperating after this… incident.”

He noticed my bewildered expression and gave me a smile. “I’m in medical school, training to be an ER doctor. And how are you feeling? You’ve got a nasty cut on your forehead.”

My hand instinctively reached for the cut, but he grabbed my arm. “Best not to touch it and be at risk for an infection. After being in something like that-” he said, pointing to where the plane used to be, “-there’s a lot of nasty bacteria.”

There was a pause as I took in what he said. My brain was processing things too slow. “Who are you?” I asked.

“David.”

“Well, David… Do you normally talk this much or is that nasty cut on your arm bothering you?” I tried to smile but every move seemed dizzying.

“Just when my adrenaline gets pumping,” he said, looking down at Sammy. It didn’t look like he was checking on him; I think David needed something to distract him. “And your name?”

“Arianna. You can call me Ari if you want,” I said to him. The minutes ticked on as we sat next to Sammy, staring at the remains of the plane. It seemed like an unreal reaction. Shouldn’t we be searching for help or looking for other survivors?

But both didn’t seem possible. All we could see were rolling plains and a clear blue sky around us. There was the smell of fresh outdoors and jet fuel mixed with it. Some flowers were sprouting from the green grass.

And the explosion seemed too powerful for there to be any survivors. There were body parts around us, some of them unidentifiable. It was a sickening, gut wrenching sight to see.

“What do we do now?” I heard myself asking. The words came out slow, and seemed foreign to my lips.

“I guess we wait for your little brother to wake up.”