We hit a brick wall and I became a projectile, my seat belt punching my stomach as my limbs went limp, flinging forward without instruction.
We hurtled to the left, and pain erupted in my side. Then we were weightless for a breath of a heartbeat before ramming the earth again like a stone that had been skipped on an unforgiving lake.
Every bone in my body jarred loose.
My head bounced off the tray table.
Something heavy pressed against my back as we barreled forward through unreceptive terrain to the soundtrack of screeching metal and screams. The very ground beneath us roared and the world went dark.
We . . . stopped.
My vision blurred as I lifted my head, the seat in front of me barely discernible in the murky darkness.
Was this it? Was this death? No singing angels or waves of energy . . . just . . . this? Whatever this was? It felt like being rocked to sleep, rising and falling a little with each breath.
Green lights flickered, illuminating the cabin just as the darkness fell away from the windows in a wave.
I blinked, trying to force my eyes to focus.
A woman across the aisle opened her mouth, but the ringing in my ears eclipsed any sound she tried to make. There was a baby in her arms, and it, too, appeared to be caught in a soundless scream.
Warmth surrounded the side of my face as my head was turned.
Nathaniel.
He was alive . . . and so was I.
His mouth opened and closed, his eyes searching mine as a stream of blood ran down the side of his face from a source somewhere above his left eye.
“What are you trying to say?” I called out. “You’re hurt!” I lifted a trembling hand to his face.
His mouth moved again, and suddenly there was another sound competing with the high-pitched roar in my ears. The intercom?
“We have to move!” Nate shouted, his voice breaking through. “Izzy! We have to move!”
As though someone had hit unmute on the TV remote, sounds of panicked cries and wailing came rushing in.
“Evacuate! Evacuate!” The command came over the intercom.
We’d somehow managed to survive, but for how long?
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I have to get the door!” Nate gave my hand a squeeze and then unlaced our fingers, unbuckling my seat belt before unlatching his own. “Can you get yours?” he yelled across the aisle.
“I’m on it!” a voice answered.
Nate stood, his enormous back blocking the view of the emergency exit as he worked the handle.
Something ice cold rushed from the floor, chilling my feet instantaneously.
“Oh God, we’re in the water,” I said to myself. The river.
People stumbled into the aisles in a flurry of movement.
Nate dislodged the door, then threw it outside the plane using both hands.
“Evacuate! Evacuate!”
I fumbled under my seat, then his, grabbing the inflatable life jackets and shoving them inside my vest before yanking the zipper up. There’d be time for those later.
The baby cried as a man across the aisle cursed, grappling with his door.
“Izzy!” Nate reached back and took my hand, pulling me to my feet as the water rushed up over my ankles, my lower shins.
Someone shoved into my shoulder as the cabin-wide panic pitched higher in tone.
Nate climbed out of the emergency door, never letting go of my hand, tugging me behind him and up through the doorway, onto the icy wing.
We were in the middle of the Missouri River.
“Take that side!” I shouted at him as the water licked over the front of the wing.
His jaw clenched and he started to shake his head, but he let my hand slip from his as we each flanked a side of the doorway.
“Give me your hand!” I thrust mine toward the woman struggling at the exit, and she lifted up her hands. Nate and I each took one, lifting her onto the wing.
“Leave the damned suitcase!” Nate yelled into the cabin before helping the next guy out.
“They just got the other door open,” one woman cried as she emerged, her feet slipping on the iced-over metal.
“Careful!” I shouted, steadying her.
Again and again, we lifted passenger after passenger.
“Give me the baby!” I reached for an infant cradled in another woman’s arms and held the pink bundle of screaming, insulted baby girl to my chest as Nate pulled the mom out.
“Thank you!” She took the little girl and cleared the path.
The water crested over the wing, and I moved sideways to see the front of the aircraft as Nate helped another passenger out. The front exit doors were open, rafts deployed, as attendants helped passengers into the water . . . water that surged inside the doors, up to their knees as one man trudged into the rapidly filling raft.
“We’re sinking.”
Nate nodded.
How many passengers were there? How long did we have until the water filled the fuselage?
A man. A woman. Another man. A scared child. We pulled them all out of the cabin until the wing was full and no one else called out for help from inside.
“Is that all?” Nate yelled into the cabin.
No one answered back as the water soaked the seat cushions.
A splash turned my head, and I saw a few of the passengers jumping into the river. We were fifty yards from shore.
Nate moved across the doorway and took my hand.
“We have to swim,” I said as calmly as I could manage. There would be no pretty little rescue-on-the-Hudson for us.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t swim!” a kid next to me cried out, burying his face in his father’s jacket.
The life jackets.
“Here.” I reached into my vest and pulled out a plastic packet, ripping it open with my teeth before handing it to the father.
His startled eyes met mine. “I didn’t grab ours.”
“Take mine. I’m fine.” I gave him a reassuring smile and nod before grabbing the other packet from my vest. “I grabbed yours too,” I told Nate, pushing the packet at his chest.
He blinked down at the vest and shook his head. “Put it on.”
“I don’t need it,” I assured him. “Six years on the swim team.”
He looked from me to the vest a couple of times and then looked over the passengers. “Where is the mom with the baby?” he called out.
Her hand flew up from somewhere midway down the wing.
“Give this to her,” Nate instructed the dad next to us, and he passed it down the line until the woman received it.
Splotches of bright yellow filled my peripherals as a few other passengers slipped the vests on and started blowing them up.
Water covered the edges of the wing, and we all shuffled back, not that our weight was going to balance the aircraft or keep it from sinking to the riverbed.
The plane dipped, and a simultaneous cry of panic ripped through the crowded wing as two passengers slipped into the water.
“Look at me,” Nate demanded, tipping my chin up with his thumb and forefingers.
Had he always been this blurry?
“Shit, your pupils are huge,” he muttered, his fingers ghosting over my forehead with a wince. “And that’s one hell of a goose egg. Ringing in your ears? Blurry vision?”