UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

No seatbelts, no seats. No way to brace themselves for a crash landing. “Lock your elbows together! Hook your legs around each other,” Starkey tells them. “We’ll be one another’s seatbelts.”

The storks obey, huddling, locking limbs, turning themselves into a tangled colony of flesh and bone. Sitting on the floorboards, no one can see out the windows to know how close the lake is—but then Trace comes on the intercom. “About twenty seconds,” he says. Then the angle of their descent changes as he pulls up the nose of the jet.

“See you on the other side,” Starkey says, then realizes once more that it’s something you say when you’re about to die.

Starkey counts down the last twenty seconds in his head, but nothing happens. Was he counting too fast? Did Trace misjudge? If this is twenty seconds, then they’re the longest of his life. Then it finally comes—a jarring jolt, followed by calm.

“Was that it?” someone says. “Is it over?”

There’s another jolt, then another and another, each one coming closer together, and Starkey realizes the plane is skimming like a stone. On the fifth skim, a wing dips, acting like a rudder that pivots the plane to a diagonal, and suddenly it’s the end of the world. The Dreamliner begins to flip end over end, turning cartwheels against the unforgiving surface of the lake.

Inside, the mob of kids is launched from the floorboards and pulled apart by centrifugal force, thrown in two separate clusters to either end of the main cabin. The hooking of arms actually saves many of them, as they’re cushioned by the bodies around them, but those on the outside of the tumbling crush of kids—those acting as the cushions—become the sacrifices. Many of them are killed as they’re slammed against the hard surfaces of the Dreamliner.

The cache of weapons, which had been stowed in the overhead compartments, flies free as well, as those compartments tear loose and burst open. Pistols and rifles and machine guns and grenades become ballistic, creating casualties without ever having to go off.

Wrapped in the forward twist of bodies, Starkey feels his head hit something hard, leaving a gash on his forehead, but that’s nothing compared to the exploding pain in his battered hand.

Finally the tumbling jet comes to rest. The cries and wails sound like silence compared to the noise of the crash. Then somewhere toward the back of the cabin there’s an explosion: a grenade that lost its pin. It blows a hole in the side of the jet, and water begins to pour in. That’s when the electrical system fails, and they’re plunged into darkness.

“Over here!” Bam calls. She pulls a huge lever and opens the cabin’s front port-side door. A life raft automatically inflates and detaches, then drops to the water, and with a “Sayonara,” Bam leaps right out after it.

Starkey’s instinct is to get out now . . . but if he’s going to be seen as the protector of the storks, then he must be their protector in action, not just words. He waits, shooing kids out the door, making it clear he is not the first one out—but neither does he plan on being the last.

Farther back in the foundering jet, kids pull open wing exits and a midship hatch—but only on the left side. On the right, a slick of jet fuel has ignited in the water and burns beyond the windows.

“The weapons!” Starkey shouts. “Take the weapons! We still have to defend ourselves!” And so kids pick up any and all weapons they can find, throwing them out onto the rafts before jumping out themselves.

The fire outside provides enough light for Starkey to see to the far recesses of the main cabin, and he wishes he hadn’t looked. The dead are everywhere. Blood is smeared on every surface, sticky and thick. But there are more living than dead, and more kids running than crawling. Starkey determines right then and there to save only those who can make it out on their own. The critically injured are just liabilities.

The angle of the floor has quickly changed as the jet begins to sink tail-first. The rear cabin is already flooded, and the water level rises in a steady, relentless surge past the central bulkhead. Then Starkey hears a muffled voice from the front of the jet.

“I need help here!”

Starkey makes his way to the cockpit door and pulls it open. The windshield is shattered, and the entire cockpit is a mess of smashed gauges, open panels, and exposed wires. The pilot’s chair has jammed forward, and Trace is pinned.

Which leaves Starkey in an interesting position.

“Starkey!” says Trace, relieved. “I need you to pull me out of here. I can’t do it by myself.”

“Yes, that’s a problem,” Starkey says. But is it his problem? They needed Trace to get them this far, but they don’t need a pilot anymore—and didn’t Trace already threaten to kill him? If Trace survives, from this moment on he’ll be nothing but a threat—and a dangerous one, at that.

“I never had the guts to try the great water escape,” says Starkey. “It killed Houdini, but I’m sure it’ll be easy for a big boeuf like you.” Then he backs out of the cockpit and closes the door.

“Starkey!” Trace yells. “Starkey, you son of a bitch!”

But Starkey’s decision is final, and as he returns to the main hatch, Trace’s muffled voice is drowned out by the sounds of panicking storks. There are about a dozen kids left—the slow ones, the injured ones, the ones afraid to jump because they can’t swim.

“What’s that awful smell?” one of them whines. “What is that out there?”

He’s right—there’s a stench to this lake like a fish tank left to putrify, but it’s the least of their problems. Water’s already pooling at their feet, and the floor is at a thirty-degree tilt.

Starkey pushes past the lingering kids. “Jump or drown, you’ve got no other choice, and I’m not waiting for stragglers.” Then he hurls himself out the door and into the foul-smelling brine of the Salton Sea.

78 - Trace

Trace’s calls for help go unanswered, and in furious frustration he pounds the console and bucks in the chair, but it doesn’t give. He’s so tightly wedged in by the accordioned cockpit, not even a boeuf of his strength can get out. He forces himself to calm down and review his options. All he can hear now are the diminishing moans and wails of kids too injured to escape, and of course the relentless rush of water. That’s when he realizes there are no options left to him anymore. Starkey made certain of that.

The lake begins to pour in through the broken cockpit window so quickly there’s no time to prepare himself. Trace cranes his neck, trying to keep his head above water as long as he can. Then he takes one deep gulp of air, holds it, and he’s underwater. Suddenly there’s silence all around him except for the metallic complaints of the sinking jet.