a/n: Okay, so I didn't know whether to merge this chapter with the next or not, and to be honest I found fitting an OC into the 'plane ride to Hamunaptra' scene weird. But I did my best.
Oh, and also (as Brunette kindly pointed out) Beni was speaking Hebrew in the last chapter, not Ancient Egyptian. Duh. I made a mistake, please ignore it. Gracias.
CHAPTER 21
"Morning, Winston! Uh, a word?"
When Rick and Jonathan told Perry and Ardeth that they would be seeking the help of a Mr. Winston Havelock, celebrated war hero and member of His Majesty's Royal Air Force, Perry had expected they be faced with a ruggedly handsome, well-aged gentleman with all the traits of a heroic medal-wearer.
Upon meeting Winston, she took a mental note to lower her expectations from now on.
A heavyset old man with a grey walrus moustache and green officer's cap was whom they came to face in a sorry excuse for an airfield, and Perry could have sworn he was drunk.
"So what's your little problem got to do with His Majesty's Royal Air Corps?" the old pilot asked Rick and Jonathan.
O'Connell aroused Winston's attention by telling him that he probably wouldn't live through it— a psychological route that Perry didn't quite understand, but one that seemed to work.
"Everybody else we've bumped into has died— why not you?" Jonathan told the man, causing Perry to roll her eyes.
She was stood beside Ardeth, eyeing the gramophone beside Winston with a vengeance. The tinny music reminded her of Myrtle, an English woman who Jonathan had dated a few years ago.
Myrtle would play music by Paul Whiteman and dance the Charleston— or whatever that ridiculous toe-tapping, leg twisting jive was called— all day, something that had aggravated Perry greatly.
Flailing her limbs around like that, Myrtle had looked so gangly and silly. And the gramophone never stopped playing.
But Winston's music did no harm. She was just in a bad mood today. The tangled, dark locks of her hair were freely blowing all over the place in the wind, only further reminding her that her hijab had been torn by Imhotep's slaves, and her al-Amira discarded during their journey out of Cairo's underground.
Neither Ardeth nor the other men seemed to mind, but the loss of her best hijab just made her feel out of sorts.
Although, Daniels, Henderson, Burns and Dr. Bey had lost their lives, and now Jonathan and Rick had lost Evie...
So that sort of put things into perspective and made her stop sulking.
"Let's see, uh, what's the challenge then?" plump, moustached Winston asked Rick, getting to his feet.
"Rescue the damsel in distress. Kill the bad guy. Save the world." he replied.
Perry scoffed. The men around glanced at her.
"You make it sound like a fairytale, Mr. O'Connell," she droned. "Funny, I don't remember reading any fairytales with mummies and plagues and people dying at every turn..."
Normally, she wouldn't have spoken to Rick- or anybody, for that matter- in such a rude manner, but with near-death-experiences around every corner, her upkeep of modesty seemed largely unimportant.
Jonathan snickered at her remark, but it was overtaken by Winston's loud laugh.
"Ah, ha ha ha ha! Winston Havelock, at your service, sir! Ha ha!"
He saluted Rick, apparently confirming his allegiance with them.
Perry cleared her throat, and spoke just low enough so that Jonathan and Ardeth could hear her.
"Uh, what exactly do his services... Consist of?"
Much to her great dismay, she soon found out.
XxXxXx
Winston's plane— a rickety old fighter from the Great War— made so much noise, Perry was certain she wouldn't hear their inevitable fiery deaths over her newfound deafness.
As if their situation couldn't have been worse, it turned out that there was room for only the pilot and a gunman in the plane's body.
Ardeth, Jonathan and she were forced to resort to... extreme measures for transportation.
"I'm not getting on a wing," she had told O'Connell before they took off.
Rick had looked between she and the plane with little care before slapping a set of aviator's goggles into her hands.
"Choose who you're flying with, Perry."
And he had trudged away.
Jonathan had been lying on his wing, watching Winston uneasily as he strapped him down. Ardeth was sat on the other, not yet tied down and fiddling with the cap he had been given.
"So, are you getting on here with me, or what?" Jonathan had asked her.
She had looked from Jonathan— thin, clumsy Jonathan— to Ardeth— the big, strong swordsman— and bit her lip. Were her harness to break loose, one man would certainly be better at keeping her from death than the other.
"Umm... I might go with Ardeth." she had said.
Ardeth looked up at the mention of his name, and gave her a nod. Jonathan, however, had been less than pleased.
"Why him?" he'd shrieked. "You know what, fine. Go with him, then. Bloody woman..."
She had dismissed his angry mumbling and allowed Ardeth to help her up onto his wing.
"Well, I'm not sure this is the smartest thing I've ever participated in," she mumbled, reluctantly putting her aviator's goggles on.
They were huge, and covered most of her face. When Ardeth turned to say something to her, he stopped and smiled in amusement at how comical she looked.
Perry hadn't seen him smile up until now.
If it was possible, the fact that any displays of Ardeth's humanity were few and far between made his smile seem even nicer.
"What's so funny?" she'd asked.
He had paused, as if to find the right word, and then said,
"...You look like a jerboa."
And so Perry had ended up on Ardeth's wing, with big jerboa eyes and the inability to share his joy in their first experience of flight.
If Ardeth's smiles had been rare before, they weren't now: he was having a fantastic time as they soared through the air, grinning widely as the plane looped and twirled above the sands below.
Perry wasn't doing as well. She had never ridden in an aeroplane before, or a blimp, or a hot air balloon, or any of the other mechanical flying devices Jonathan had described to her.
She never intended to fly in the others, and she certainly didn't want to hitch a ride on this particular plane ever again.
Things only grew worse when she heard Winston and O'Connell having a worried conversation centred around a massive funnel of sand that was swivelling across the desert plains.
"Do you think there's something odd about that thing?" she shouted to Ardeth, who just stared at it with suspicion.
Much to their surprise, the twister of sand died down and disappeared entirely as they flew further.
I guess this might not end in disaster after all, she thought.
"Oh my God..." Rick's voice said.
There was a massive billowing noise, and a snapping, cracking sound, like the earth being ripped in two. To their horror, the funnel was replaced by a gigantic wall of sand that rose up from the desert floor like it had just been shoved out of Hell.
I guess I spoke too soon. This will definitely end in disaster.
O'Connell began yelling at Winston to peddle faster.
The wall was heading straight for them. Their little plane was going to be wiped out.
"Hang on, men!" the pilot shouted.
This was not how Perry had imagined her first plane ride to be.
She let out a blood-curdling scream, certain that death awaited, as the jet took a nose-dive over the edge of a cliff.
From behind the canyon, the massive storm swept up and followed them, crashing onto the earth and making the world quake as it tried to swallow their tiny jet.
Rick started firing the machine gun, although Perry didn't understand what good that would do. Yes, this was clearly the work of Imhotep... But he was shooting at sand, and sand didn't care about bullets.
Or, as she found, it did. The sand wall— now with the creature's face protruding from it's core— became angry at Rick's retaliation, and lurched forward, open-mouthed, to eat the plane.
The jet was swept up in the sand. It spun around and around; everybody was yelling, holding on for dear life. Jonathan was screaming the loudest. Perry wanted to tell him to shut up, but was forced to keep her mouth shut or get a lung full of sand.
"Here I come, laddies!" Winston yelled. He sounded ecstatic about his own doom, chuckling madly as the plane flipped upside down.
Just as Pyrrah said her goodbyes to the cruel world, the sand disappeared entirely. Everything fell quiet, spare the racket of the engine. The plane flipped to an upright position. Jonathan stopped screaming.
But then the smell of smoke filled the air, and flames started crackling nearby.
The plane began to drop.
All Perry could do was shut her eyes as it plummeted and crashed into a sand dune.
Something exploded. There was the unmistakable clang of metal hitting metal, and then pain as metal hit skull. The air smelled of smoke. She could hear coughing, but see nothing.
"Owww..." she moaned.
Fingers finding the strap of her now broken aviator's goggles, she tugged until her eyes were uncovered. Initially, the sunlight hurt, but then the yellow sand and blue sky and black smoke all shifted into place.
There was something heavy on her back, and only when she felt movement did she realise it was another body. Ardeth rolled away from her, and she felt him kicking as he stood to regain his balance.
Deciding she should join him and assess the damage— perhaps check that Jonathan wasn't completely dead— Perry shot to her feet.
However, the action was premature: her legs went limp as the blood was drained from her head, and the desert became a multitude of kaleidoscopic colours whilst she found herself fainting.
She landed with a thud.
Strong hands grasped her arms and lifted her to her feet again. Ardeth was unbalanced too, which made it a rather tricky feat, but eventually she found herself supported in his arms.
Usually, it was Evelyn who ended up in the heroic embrace of a strong man after some sort of calamity, but it seemed the tables had turned drastically.
Not that Perry minded, of course.
O'Connell climbed out of the wreckage just beside them.
Perry gazed up at Ardeth, although her vision was distorted with the last traces of bright colours and starry spots.
"Thank you," she breathed.
He looked down at the small woman he held securely, and nodded. They were so close that she could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her hands.
The moment, though— like any interesting moment in Perry's life— was interrupted by a familiar, attention-seeking English voice.
"Excuse me," Jonathan called. "A little help would be useful, if it's NOT TOO MUCH TROUBLE!"
She grit her teeth, took a calming breath, and snapped, "I'm coming!"
A little reluctantly, Ardeth let his arms fall from around her, and she did her best not to stumble as she climbed off the wing and stormed in the direction of Jonathan's tantrum.
"Oh, Mr. Carnahan, you'll be alright..."
Soon enough, her employer was on his own two feet and she was dusting sand off his jacket. But more bad news joined the picture when O'Connell shouted their pilot's name in panic.
"Winston!"
Perry dashed over to the remains of the cockpit. Slouched in his seat, still as a statue, was Winston Havelock, the barmy RAF soldier.
A smile was fixed beneath his moustache, but it was certainly not brought about by his unseeing eyes.
Rick checked his pulse, and then looked back at she and Jonathan with sorrow. Old Winston Havelock had run his course.
Mourning would wait, however, because the wreckage of the plane suddenly jolted.
O'Connell stumbled away from Winston's corpse, pushing back Perry and Jonathan as he fled the plane's body. "Get back, it's quicksand!"
Perry felt herself being yanked to safe ground by Ardeth, who had apparently grown accustomed to pulling her away from danger by her wrists.
The Medjai seemed to have salvaged the machine gun from the wreckage, she noticed; a change from swords and scimitars and traditional weapons, she quickly decided that it suited him.
The plane— or rather, it's massacred bits and pieces— sunk into the sandy floor. Watching with solemnity, Rick saluted brave Winston one last time before leading them off into the desert again.