You know that delicate place between consciousness, when you're not fully awake, but you know you're not asleep? When everything connects and disconnects and time is just so disorderly? When you're too dizzy to have full vision, and everything is still dark and you seem so... detached from your surroundings? Everything is kind of funny then. So close, but so far out of reach. So mismatched and nonsensical. I hated that feeling because I couldn't tell what was real and what was just my imagination.
What I could tell, was that my vision was cloudy. It was like a smoky haze that crept over a battlefield in the silent, deadly aftermath of a violent war. Like the early morning fog that drifts through a ghost town before the sun comes up. I couldn't see anything but shades of grey and the rough, indistinct silhouettes of what almost looked like chairs in front of me. Were they chairs?
The only sound I was able to hear was a sharp, agonizing ringing noise, but it was muffled. It sounded far away and enveloped by the opaque layer of uncertainty that clouded my consciousness, but slowly, it began to seem as if it was moving closer, becoming clearer with each passing second. I could only relate it to the ringing in one's ears that they would hear after a flash bang or other loud explosion went off.
When my mind came to, I realized that my body was still frozen; paralyzed. I couldn't move. I couldn't even feel my limbs. the most I could do was move my eyes, but no matter where I looked, everything looked the same. Cloudy and grey. Blurry and disfigured. Then my mind brought me to focus on the smell around me. Smoke. Heavy smoke.
In a split second, my lungs broke free from the paralysis my body was trapped in, and forced the thick smoky air out of my body. My attention was brought to my feet and my hands, which were holding onto something soft, almost like a cushion. It was a cushion, and it belonged to the grey chair I was sitting next to.
I didn't completely regain full consciousness until I heard the petrified sound of my little sister screaming my name from somewhere not too far away. That was when my memory returned. We were on a plane.
Slowly, my vision came back to me, revealing to me the disastrous, dismantled interior of the passenger plane we were in. I sat in the aisle with chairs on either side of me. Some of the chairs were ripped out and missing. Many of the overhead luggage compartments were open, and people's belongings were scattered across the plane. The light blue metal floor of the aisle was scratched and dented and broken. Ahead of me, towards the rear of the plane, was my sister.
"Hold on Journei, I'm coming!" I mustered all the strength I had to grab the chairs on either side of the aisle in front of me, and pull myself closer to my sister. With every movement I made, through the ringing in my ears, I could hear the creaking of the fragile, damaged, metal plane floor. I could feel the way it moved beneath the weight of my body, and I knew any moment it could give way and my life would be left in fate's hands while I plummeted to the ground that was who knew how many feet below me.
"Dezzy!" The pain in my 13 year old sister's voice hit me like a train.
I gripped the chairs harder and pulled myself closer. My sister's leg was stuck in the seats towards the back of the plane. We were the only two left on the plane. Behind me, at the front of the plane was a giant hole where the plane crashed into what looked like a mountain, but I wasn't sure. The only thing I could recall from before I came to was people screaming as they were ripped from their seats, right out through the hole in the front of the aircraft.
I reached for the next chair with my left hand. My body seemed to move on its own, with no actual effort or assistance from me. I felt like a puppet. Like a person trapped inside of a body that was being controlled by a larger force, and I had no say in what I did.
"Dezzy, it hurts!" My sister sobbed.
"I know Journei, can you move your toes? Can you try for me?" I looked up at her.
She was crying and shaking her head no. The tears streamed down her face.
"Please Journei, just try it, please," I begged.
"Okay," she quickly nodded, "okay," she gripped her leg and a distressed expression formed on her face while she attempted to wiggle her toes.
At first, nothing happened so Journei cried harder and gave up, "I can't!"
I sighed, grabbed the next two chairs, and pulled myself one step closer, "try again."
"I can't!"
"Journei...."
A moment of silence passed. Again, she attempted to wiggle her toes. The tears kept coming. I could feel her pain like a hot fire burning through my veins. "Come on..." I whispered hopefully.
Then, just as I started losing hope, I saw it. I saw one of her toes move. I gasped.
"What?" My sister asked.
A smile formed on my face, "do it again!"
She tried harder and her toes moved again. It was hardly anything, but it was enough to give me the hope and reassurance I needed.
I grabbed the next two chairs and took one step closer to Journei, and the floor beneath me broke open. I screamed and grabbed onto the arm rest of the chair next to me, holding on for dear life while my feet dangled in the air. About 15 feet below me was the steep, rugged side of a mountain, and way at the bottom was a valley, filled with small, jagged edged rocks. My sister screamed for me once again.
I had to get up. Using the upper body strength I never knew I had, I pulled myself back into the plane, got to my feet, and ran to my sister who was working on freeing her leg from the two seats it was stuck between. When I got there, the only part of her leg that was still stuck was her ankle. "Alright, lets get your leg free."
I grabbed her leg gently and wiggled it until it slid out of the cushioned trap that held it.
"Yes! Dezzy!" The young, tired, scared, 13 year old girl wrapped her arms around my stomach and buried her face in my chest.
I wasn't sure if the sounds that came out of her mouth were sounds of sadness, laughter, or something else, but I just held her close and didn't let go.
Once again, it went silent and I took the time to soak it up because I didn't know how long we would've had it. "Let's get out of here, huh?" I whispered.
So many questions flooded my mind. What happened? How did the plane crash? Where were we? I knew we wouldn't find any of the answers if we stayed in the plane.
Journei nodded and I let her go to start looking for a way out. Upon examination, when the plane crashed, it got stuck right between two large mountains and was beginning to slip. There was a 15 foot drop to the ground that we could get to using a rope we found in someone's carry-on bag.
The weirdest thing about the situation however, was the fact that none of the passengers who attended the flight with us were anywhere to be seen. I tapped Journei's shoulder and she stopped tying the rope around one of the chairs to look at me.
"Come look," I waved her over and she followed me to the front of the plane and took a look at the ground below us.
"Where is everyone else?"
"I don't know," I replied as I looked out at the expansive forest just beyond the mountains, "is the rope ready?"
"Yeah it is... almost," Journei nodded and quickly finished tying the knot she was working on.
When she finally pulled it tight, I walked over to her and knelt down next to the rope.
"Alright, I'll go down first," I grabbed the rope, threw myself over the edge, and slowly lowered myself to the ground, looking down the whole time.
I held onto the rope with my life and once I reached the bottom, I stretched my feet out and made contact with the solid ground. I looked up at Journei and waved, "okay your turn, you got this," I encouraged her.
Journei grabbed the rope and slowly got over the edge of the hole in the plane. My heart pounded in my ears while she made her way down the rope. Each time she lowered herself closer to me. My muscles tensed, anticipating something -anything- to go wrong. When her feet touched the ground safely, I felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest.
"Okay, lets see if we can find anyone to help us," I thought aloud and a light breeze brushed past us and the trees below.
"Find someone where? We are literally in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to help us, Dezzy," Journei began to panic.
"Calm down, we have to try. We won't go anywhere if we don't move."
"What if we go back in the plane? Someone must know it crashed and could be coming out here to rescue survivors."
"You don't know that," I shook my head doubtfully.
"You also don't know they aren't," she countered.
She was right, but we had to be smart. "Look. Let's go down to the wood line where we can see the plane, and hide out there and watch for anyone who can help us?"
Journei puckered here lips and averted her gaze to the ground for a couple seconds before returning her attention to me, "okay."
I smiled, "alright, lets go."
We began our journey to the bottom, carefully treading along the rugged ridges of the mountain. About halfway down, my legs started burning and by time we reached the bottom, they were jello. Journei ran ahead of me to the wood line while I paused to catch my breath and ease my lungs and legs from the burning pain that rippled through them.
"So we need food..."
"Yeah, and shelter because the sun is going down."
I looked up at the sky. The light blue horizon had started to turn shades of yellow and orange, "fuck."
"So do we make a fire?" Journei asked.
I looked around. In the area was a bunch of pine trees, a couple fallen branches, a large boulder, and some patches of dirt with bushes growing in them. It wasn't much to make a shelter out of. "I mean, we can try," I shrugged and nodded.
Journei began a hunt for sticks to use for fire while i rummaged around by the boulder for rocks. Within the hours the sun had gone down and Journei and I were gathered around a fire we had managed to start and looked at the sky for any sign of other aircrafts. We hadn't had any luck.
"What should we do to make a tent?"
"I don't know," I pursued my lips and stared at the night sky.
"Do we go back to the plane and look through people's suitcases?"
I glanced at the mountain and made the quickest decision I had ever made in my life, "no."
"Then what do we do?"
"Find stuff to make shelter with from the woods. I don't wanna walk back up to that plane."
"Okay," Journei sighed.
The two of us got up, walked past the tree line into the dark, thick, wooded forest, and searched for materials to build shelter out of. We scavenged through the forest for a while, picking up whatever we could find, like bushes and fallen branches and viney plants and put them in piles near the fire. The crisp, fall air brushed against my skin, making my hair stand on end like a cat being threatened. The breeze was threatening my body temperature. We needed to get back to the fire to warm up.
"How much more stuff do we need?" Journei set down a leafy branch to catch her breath.
"I don't know," silence fell between us while I stared hopelessly at the fire in front of me.
The silence didn't last long because the breeze brought with it something that smelled like food. "Do you smell that?"
Journei sniffed the air, "yeah, I think so! Where is it coming from?"
I looked around and pursed my lips. After a few moments of wracking my brain for ideas, my eyes lit up, "we should follow the wind."
In theory, if we went against the wind, we'd be able to find the source of the smell because the wind brought it to us.
"I like that idea," Journei nodded.
I smiled, and finally, a little bit of hope crept its way into my heart and mind, "lets go!"
We headed into the forest, into the wind, following the smell that reminded me of pulled pork. I could hardly see anything through the trees and bushes, but when I saw a pillar of smoke rising from within the foliage, I ducked behind a tree to investigate.
Journei came up behind me and crouched down by my side, "what's that?" She whispered.
"Smoke. A fire, maybe?" I sniffed the air, "something is cooking," I could smell the pulled pork aroma very clearly from behind the tree, "lets move closer."
Careful to avoid attracting any possible unwanted attention from whoever the fire belonged to, we moved forward. A large berry bush blocked my view so I moved up to it to see more clearly by sneaking a peek from the side.
What I saw, I wish I could forget.
Just past the bush, about 15 meters away, was a group of people gathered around a large fire pit. In the pit were two burning human corpses, their skin blackened and charred like a roast pig. Just outside the first group was a smaller group of children who tore pieces of human flesh and meat off of another corpse with their own hands and devoured it.
I felt the acid rise in my stomach and suddenly felt the world spin a little bit. I was going to throw up, "oh my god," I choked.
"Look," my thirteen year old sister pointed out yet another dead body.
This one wasn't cooked, but the victim's face and body was covered in deep, bloody lacerations. Even though the corpse was torn apart, I was able to recognize the face of the person. She had been one of the flight attendants on our airplane. I gagged, trying so hard to refrain from spilling my guts right there in the grass behind the berry bush.
"That's the-"
"I know," I cut Journei off mid-sentence, "we have to get out of here."
"But-"
"Come on, Journei!" I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me, hurrying away from the people as fast as I could.
That's when I knew something wasn't right. Even the cool evening air felt wrong. And why were those people even doing eating other human beings? I realized how quiet the forest was at that moment. No sounds of wildlife at all. It was silent.
A stick broke behind me and I felt my sister's hand get ripped away from mine. In a panic, I spun around to see Journei on the ground, grabbing her ankle and rocking in pain.
"What happened?"
"I fell, I tripped on something," she cried.
My eyes scanned the area. I was paranoid. My heart was beating hard in my chest, preparing my fight of flight instincts in case we had to get up and run away from anything. Knowing we weren't alone didn't help at all. I hoped the people hadn't heard us.
"Alright, come on, lets go," I ran back to help her up.
She grabbed my hands and I pulled her to her feet, "are you okay?" I asked.
She nodded, "yeah, let's go."
The two of us ran to our camp and built our fort for the night. It took us some time, but we worked quietly and quickly so we could go to sleep and hopefully go unnoticed by the people we had seen earlier.
I crawled into our TP after using the bathroom, sighing heavily in pain before sitting next to my sister, "those people were cannibals... like actual ones."
Journei nodded and stared absently out the entrance of the TP, her long brown hair falling out of its bun.
"They could kill us...."
Journei nodded again, still staring out at the mountains.
"Where are we?
She shrugged.
Before the crash, Journei and I had been headed to Dubai from California for a couple of weeks of vacation to see our father and his family. Being 21 and working my ass off at the restaurant I worked at for months, I could finally afford to take my sister with me.
"What do we do?"
Journei laid down in the grass and sighed, "I don't know!"
I laid down as well and thought of what we would've done if the plane hadn't crashed and we'd made it to Dubai like we were supposed to.
"What do you think dad is thinking about right now?" I heard the defeated voice of my younger sister ask.
The silence loomed over us for ages while I thought, picking at our sense of sanity with its overwhelming, heavy presence. I had no words. I knew my father, but not well enough to know what he could've been thinking at that moment in time. I shook my head, "we should get some sleep," I changed the subject quickly.
Both of us were exhausted enough as it was. We didn't need to spend the night exhausting our minds by worrying about what our father was thinking. We needed that energy to figure out how to get off the island and away from the crazy cannibalistic people we had stumbled across in the woods.
"Yeah, that's a good idea," Journei said with some hesitation.
I could hear the curiosity in her response and knew she was wondering why I had changed the subject.
I said goodnight and took one last look out at the damaged plane that was stuck out in the mountains before giving into the heaviness of my eyelids and falling asleep, not knowing what we would do, or where we would start in the morning. It was odd how easy it was to fall asleep despite knowing that we could've been found at any point in time by those cannibals. I still don't know how they never managed to find us that night.