-This could totally fizzle out...or this could work great. We'll see. It'll depend on how many people are willing to participate :) If it doesn't work as a contest I'll still continue it as my own story.
Anyway, all the 'rules' are at the end of the third chapter and the * * aren't jumps in time but sort of checkpoints.
-Disclaimer: The title of the story comes from 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Guns N' Roses, and so does the first chapter's title.
The second chapter's title was taken from 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' by The Token, and the third one in from 'Fever' by Peggy Lee.
Of course, none of this ever happened, and I sort of hope that it won't ever happen...
-A big, big, big thank you to Cranberriez, my beta, for proofreading these 3 chapters. As always, it was more than helpful. :)
PS: a nice thing you can listen to while reading - www.[DELETE THE BRACKETS]youtube[DELETE THE BRACKETS] watch?v=VGEHYY8c8VM
When Dominic woke up, he wished he hadn't. His head was throbbing and it felt like it was on the verge of bursting. He tried to swallow, and noticed right away that it was abnormally difficult to gulp. It was like fighting against gravity. Not mentioning the fact that there wasn't any saliva left to swallow either.
What he didn't know yet was that he was fighting against gravity.
After having opened his eyes with some difficulty, squinting when the feeble light stung them, Dom blinked a few times and the haze gradually drifted before his eyes. When his sight finally focused, it was on some lush vegetation. There was something odd with the picture though. The leaves were shiny with dew, or what looked like dew, but instead of bending under the light weight of the water, they were pointing skywards. As if the tree they were attached to was standing upside down...
Something else was strange too. The scenery was...well, literally framed. Ovally so. It was like looking at the world outside through...a porthole.
Yes, it was a porthole alright. Dom was sure of it now that he examined the outline of the little window. Bolts and screws... Aluminum perhaps? ...A boat?
No.
A cabin.
A plane.
It all flooded back to him then. Muse had been touring in Brazil. Matt had wanted to fly over the Amazon and enjoy a rainforest aerial tour. Just a little tourist flight. And he had dragged Dom along, singing the praises and beauties of the largest forest on earth. But their plane had been caught in a tropical rain...the kind that doesn't call before coming. And the kind that can do damage. A lot of damage.
Dom's eyes swept over his surroundings, this time he wanted to have a full vision of the environment.
The cabin was a wreck. Large pieces of creased junk, crumpled sheet metal, iron bars all littered the ground. There were wide black scars on the ground as well as on what was left of the cabin's wall. It looked like burnt marks, as if tiny fires had been born there and had quickly died, soaked off by the rain.
Dom was still sitting on his seat, but it was only due to the safety belt, which was lacerating his thighs since his whole body's weight was tugging on it. His seat was in the tail of the aircraft, and the aforementioned tail was hovering vertically, a few meters above the ground, entangled in enormous lianas' nodes. So, it hadn't been the tree which had been upside down. It had been Dom. Dom was sitting upside down. Like some sort of big bat hanging from the ceiling.
A strong smell of damp clay soil was mingled to the one of metal. It was so potent that it titillated Dom's tongue and increased his thirst. It wasn't raining anymore, although the light was still gray, and the steady ambient sounds of the rainforest were filling the air.
Dom whimpered as he fully took in the scene of destruction around him. Damn Matt and his crazy ideas!
Wait... Matt. Matthew. Matt. Where the hell was Matt? !
A sudden, overpowering panic took hold of Dom's mind as his eyes frantically searched for his friend. Matt had been sitting between Dom and the porthole during the flight. But there wasn't any seat next to Dom's one right now. Judging by the marks on the cabin's 'floor', Matt seat had been ripped away when they had crashed. Dom craned his neck to inspect the ground under the levitating, shattered cabin.
When he finally spotted his friend, his heart took a large, nasty leap from his chest into his mouth. Matthew was lying flat on his stomach, half blanketed by the aircraft's debris, and he was completely still.
"MATT!" Dom cried, only barely registering the burning pain in his dry throat when he shouted.
With frenzied, uncoordinated movements, he tugged at his seatbelt buckle, swearing when it didn't want to open. If Dominic had been more composed, it probably would have been much easier for him to deal with his buckle; but the heart-freezing sight of Matt lying there, broken, just a few meters below had drained all common sense out of him.
The seatbelt eventually let go, and Dominic had to face some consequences which he hadn't anticipated.
His free fall, of almost four meters high, sent him hitting the ground with enough force to steal all breath out of his lungs. Gasping for air, he rolled on his side and held his belly. Luckily, he hadn't fallen on Matt.
Once the little black spots stopped blurring his sight, Dom got onto his knees and crawled next to Matt's unmoving figure. He pushed the fragments up and away from Matt's body and, little by little, got his friend out of the rubbles.
"Matt! Matt, wake up!" Dom instructed, laying a hand on Matthew's back but without shaking him, because some distant part of his mind knew one shouldn't jolt an injured body.
When Matt didn't react a bit, Dom began imploring the air around him. "Please, I'm begging you... I'm supplicating... If anything's up there... Please, make sure that he's not dead. I swear I'll go the church every fucking sunday, just please, let him be alive!"
Matt was still as motionless as a corpse and Dom suddenly couldn't take it anymore. "MATTHEW!" he shouted in the frontman's ear, adding a big slap of Matt's shoulder to his sobbing cry.
Matt coughed and Dom felt a gratitude so full that he thought his heart was going to melt out of it. Immediately after his cough, Matt leaned up on both his elbows, his chest rising a few inches up above the muddy ground, and he threw up. But the drummer didn't mind, and while a huge smile crossed his face, he dropped backwards and plonked his arse on the soil.
"You're alive!" he half-exclaimed, half-laughed.
But his sentence had been entirely covered by a howl of pain which had torn free from Matt's throat. Because when Dom had sat, he'd involuntarily brushed against Matt's left leg and an excruciating pain had shot up Matt's entire body.
"OW! FUCK!" Matt bawled as he reflexively extended his arms toward the source of the pain, without reaching it. Then he collapsed onto his back, panting.
Relief was replaced by a new sort of worry in Dom's mind and he carefully moved closer to Matt again and squatted down. "What's wrong? Are you hurt?" Of course he'd known the answer to his question beforehand, since he'd already started to tear Matt's left pants leg.
"Shin's broken," Matt spluttered with a husky voice, sure of what he was saying. Only a bone fracture could be that painful.
The middle of the frontman's leg was swollen and had turned purple.
"Here?" Dom asked as his fingers scarcely skimmed the darkest spot on Matt's skin.
Matt inhaled sharply and winced. "Yes. Here," he uttered through gritted teeth, looking daggers at Dom.
Now that Dom had the confirmation that the bone was indeed broken, he didn't really know what to do of this information. "Well...at least it's not a compound fracture..." he murmured.
"What a relief," Matt answered sarcastically, his voice strained because of the pain.
Dom remained silent, for he didn't know what to say to that, nor how to help Matt. The latter didn't talk either, but he broke the silence between them when he clicked his tongue against his palate, trying to salivate a bit.
"Yeah, I know. I'm so bloody thirsty too," Dominic told him.
Matt raised his arm and pointed at something beyond Dom, overhead. "There're water bottles in that thing."
The drummer twisted his head around in order to see what his friend was trying to show him. It looked like a built-in, office sized fridge, embedded in the cabin wall, at the very end of the plane's tail. And so high above their head right now... Out of reach.
Of course Matt's seat had to get ripped off and result in Matt breaking his leg, but the fridge door just couldn't have opened in the crash for the bottles to drop onto the floor and be accessible to them. No, no...they would have been too lucky if it had been the case.
They both realised that at the same time and sighed, defeated.
"What about the pilot?" Matt asked out of the blue, as he tried to shift into a more upright position.
Holy crow! How could have Dom forgotten about him? ! He'd been so centered on Matt's shape that he had completely neglected the poor bugger who'd agreed on taking them for a little flyover...
"Stay here," Dom said, "I'm gonna check on him, see if he needs help." Then he stood and headed towards the cockpit, which was lying on its side, at the end of a long trench it had dug when they'd crashed.
"Don't think I'm gonna go anywhere," Matt muttered just before grimacing at the sorry sight of his left leg.
But Dominic hadn't heard, he was too preoccupied. Why hadn't the pilot called out to them already? Had he left? It was possible after all, Dom didn't know for how long he'd been unconscious... Perhaps the pilot had gone searching for help. Or perhaps he had abandoned them... This version narrowed Dom's throat, and his stomach was turning.
The drummer's thoughts were naive, however. And far from reality.
It was when he climbed into the ruined cockpit that Matthew started calling him.
Dom had to stride over various obstacles in order to reach the pilot's seat: an overturned toolbox, a black electricity cable with some wires showing here and there...
"Dom?"
"Yes, Matt. I'm not there yet... Just give me a sec-"
The end of Dom's answer died in his mouth when he reached the pilot.
The pilot's head was lolling sideways, and for just a second, Dominic thought that he might be sleeping, or passed out. But then he noticed the thin trails of blood dripping on each corner of the pilot's mouth. And how could he have missed the head of the thick metallic bar, red with blood, and sticking out of the man's chest?
This time, Dom's stomach dropped. "Good Lord..." he breathed.
"Dom!"
The drummer attempted to swallow again. "I don't think there's anything left we can do for him..." he said, too low for Matt to be able to hear.
Trying to overcome his mixed feelings, guilt, revulsion, fear, Dom dipped over the dead body of the pilot and examined what once must have been the plane's dashboard. Maybe there was some sort of radio equipment there that they could use...but Dom was such a simpleton when it came to mechanics...
"DOMINIC HOWARD!"
Because he'd been so tense, Dom jumped out of his skin when Matt shouted. He stumbled backwards, tripped on the toolbox and fell arse over teakettle in the mud, just out of the cockpit. When he got to his feet again, his heart was pounding in his temples.
"What is it? !" Dominic exclaimed, once Matt was in sight again, torn between irritation and worry. Matthew was still lying on his back, staring overhead, and Dom couldn't see any big anaconda in the vicinity.
"I think we should get out of here," Matt stated with an agitated tone.
"...What?" Dom asked after a couple of seconds, sounding like a moron to his own ears.
"We should get out of here," Matt repeated, more and more stressed, "like, right now."
As if to illustrate his words, one of the lianas above Dom's head snapped and the cabin dropped about twenty inches, before being stopped by the rest of the vegetation again.
Both of the musicians froze, barely allowing themselves to breathe. Dom's eyes slowly slid up to glance at the metal beast above. Two tons of aluminium, heavily swaying over their heads.
Dom couldn't hold it back: "crap."
A second liana gave way, the cabin fell a short distance again with a loud grinding as a result. That got Dom into action. He was crouching next to Matt in a flash and started to slip an arm under the singer's frail shoulders.
"Can you stand?"
Matthew wrapped his arms around Dom, "I- I don't know..." He was scared of the pain and he didn't want to take the risk to lean on his bad leg by mistake, but the idea of being trapped in an aluminium prison for...well, possibly for ever, wasn't very appealing. Especially when it occurred to him that this prison would turn into a walk-in oven once the skies cleared up.
The metal heavily creaked for the third time and Dominic's heart kicked into overdrive. He lifted his friend to his feet roughly, without wasting any more time. Matt hadn't expected it and when his left foot involuntarily planted itself on the ground, the agony it plunged him in seized his lungs, preventing any protest from escaping his lips, and drained all strength from his knees.
The drummer didn't try to decipher Matt's body language, his attention was entirely focused on the looming threat overhead. He hefted Matt half on to his shoulder, ready to carry all his weight if necessary. It was a good thing he'd been travelling with small-Matt and not big-Chris...
The two of them, tightly entwined, started forward, but before they could take their second, limping step towards the jungle around the wreckage, their 'safety net' broke.
