"You're okay back there, right Andy?"
Andy was not alright. Andy was most definitely not alright.
Back when he was five or six years old, when his parents were both still alive and money was flush, the Verner family took a vacation to California. He had a dim recollection of the plane that they had flown on, and to a boy his age it has seemed huge. When Floyd Wilks said that they would be flying west to Nebraska, Andy's mind naturally drew images of his boyhood experience with planes and assumed that this experience would be roughly the same.
He had not even gotten into the back seat of the Cessna when he had already come to the conclusion that this was not going to be the case. They had barely gotten off of the ground when he realized that in a plane this small you can feel every single gust and eddy in the air around you. Every time they passed out of a thermal updraft, the plane would seem to fall for a split second, giving him the same feeling in his stomach as if he had just gone over the first hill on a rollercoaster.
No, Andrew Verner was not alright.
Another thing that he was coming to realize was that he had a fear of heights. Not one that seemed to be particularly sensitive to climbing a thirty-foot tree, but one that became all too obvious when looking out the window at suburban Missouri some five-thousand feet below him. Floyd had told them that they would be in Nebraska in two days flying at a leisurely pace. At this point Andy didn't know if he was going to avoid vomiting for another two hours – and possibly it would happen in a considerably shorter time than that.
"You're okay back there, right Andy?" Samantha repeated, turning around to look at him.
Sam had been having the time of her life. Unlike Andy's family, Sam's had always been a big fan of taking the ever-popular road trip. As such, she had never flown on a plane before; much less sitting in the copilot's like she was now. They had only been up in the sky for about ten minutes when Floyd was already starting to give her lessons on how to fly the plane. She was happily concentrating on the assignment Floyd had given her of keeping them on course by making minute corrections with her feet using the rudder pedals when she realized that she hadn't heard from Andy in a while.
"I'm okay." He croaked. Sounding bad even through the tinny distortion provided by the headsets they were all wearing.
Sam realized that Andy did look a little bit green. His face had taken on a pallid cast and his jaw was clenched in a way that suggested that he was afraid to open his mouth for fear of what might come out of it.
"Holy crap Andy, what's the matter?" Sam asked, alarmed.
"I'm okay." He repeated.
Andy shook his head, immediately regretting doing so. The simple movement sent his stomach reeling again and once more it became a physical battle to prevent their meager breakfast of cold Pop-Tarts and apple juice from coming back at him. He was becoming quite sure that he would rather walk to Nebraska and let it take six months than spend another day and a half inside of this little plane. Give me a big-assed jetliner any day, he thought.
"Floyd" Sam said, pointing to Andy.
Floyd had left the plane under the fearless, if not yet entirely capable, hands of Samantha while he was studying his charts – still learning how to navigate all over again without the aid of global positioning systems and VOR beacons. He was concentrating intently on the airspace charts over Missouri when he turned around, mildly curious, to see what Sam was worried about.
His eyes widened when he saw Andy's face and he immediately bent down and started fishing through a box underneath the seat.
"It's okay Samantha." He said. "You worry about doing what I told you, I'll worry about him."
Floyd fished a plastic medicine bottle out from under his seat, and opened it, sifting a pair of pills into his hand. He handed those back to Andy who looked at them for a moment.
"What are these?" He asked.
"Dramamine." Floyd said. "Go on and take them, they will make you feel better. Though you should have told me as soon as you were starting to feel sick, that way I could have given these to you before you had gotten into the bad shape that you are in now. And in case they don't work in time, here's this…"
Floyd handed Andy a plastic shopping bag. Andy took it gingerly, he really didn't want to throw up. It was something of a screwed up matter of pride to him, his only self-image had been getting gradually better during his time with Amanda, he was a little bit afraid that the image he had created for himself would suffer just a bit when he started barfing his guts out in front of her.
Andy crammed the pills into his mouth and chased it with a drink out of his bottle of water. At this point he didn't care if he was taking cyanide; dead would be a vast improvement on the way the airsickness was making him feel. Samantha cast an occasional worried smile back in his direction, but for the most part she had gone back to watching the altitude and course heading like Floyd had told her. He envied the cast iron stomach that she must have.
Floyd had been right though. Despite a really bad half hour or so where Andy wasn't sure if he was going to make it without spewing the contents of his stomach all over the back of the plane, he gradually began to feel better and even enjoy the flight a bit. They were deep into Missouri and with the airsickness behind them as well as the thermal turbulence of the early morning, they all became a great deal more talkative.
"What was it that you were flying in the Air Force?" Andy asked Floyd.
"I started with F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam." Floyd said. "I flew a few different planes, but mostly just them. After the war was over they started training me on F-15 Eagles. I flew those on through Desert Storm and up until I retired."
"That must have been exciting, to fly in two different wars." Samantha noted, a little distracted. She had been noticing a wall of black clouds moving in from the west. Floyd didn't seem all that concerned by them though, and she didn't see any reason she should be if he wasn't – but they worried her all the same.
"Well." Floyd said, shrugging as his Cheshire Cat grin faded a bit. "A war is a war. I wouldn't call it all that exciting. I enjoy flying, but really I'm not all that keen on killing people if I don't have to."
In fact, Floyd was more than aware of the thunderstorm that was moving in against them as they flew roughly northwest. He was a little bit concerned by them, because they were moving fast and he had no automated weather to tell him exactly how big or how severe that particular storm system was. However, Samantha would have been put even more at ease to know that Floyd already had charted out a couple of airports nearby to make a run for should the storm turn out to be something that they could not navigate.
"You've been in real dogfights?" Andy asked, almost in awe.
"Yep." Floyd said, not elaborating. He thought back to Vietnam for a moment and the convoy that he had nearly given his life to protect. It had felt good to be given the tag of "hero" but at the time he wasn't even thinking of being a hero, all he was doing was…
"Floyd?" Sam asked, troubled.
"What do you need kid?" He asked.
"Those clouds, aren't they moving pretty fast?" Sam asked, pointing at the storm moving in.
Floyd looked over and frowned, a sense of unease slowly starting to work its way into his gut. The clouds were moving in pretty fast; far faster than he had expected them to move. He didn't feel any turbulence in the air where they were right now to suggest that a fast-moving storm was coming. All the same, the storm front was frighteningly quick and appeared to be moving right in their direction.
"I have the controls." Floyd said. Samantha let go of the flight yoke as though it had burned her hands.
Floyd turned the plane to the north, resetting their course for Farmington Regional Airport, fifty or so miles south of Saint Louis. He could just barely feel the slight resistance of the wind moving in their direction as he turned perpendicular to the storm itself. But even this gave him a cold chill, as close as the storm was and as fast as it was moving, he should have been fighting with the controls to keep the plane on course – the plane's natural tendency being to turn into the direction with the least wind resistance. But in this case there was almost no wind at all.
"Is everything okay Floyd?" Sam asked, sounding a little shaken.
To be honest, Floyd was not all that sure that everyone was okay. He had never seen a storm that moved quite like this one did. He had heard all the old stories about the Bermuda Triangle and such, but he had always just dismissed them outright as superstitious hogwash. This was different though, it was almost as if some force was pushing those clouds directly across his path.
"Yeah, everything's okay." He lied. "I just don't want to take any chances without being able to have someone tell me exactly how bad this storm is. I'm going to take us down at an airport about fifteen minutes from here; I just want to get her on the ground and tied down in case it turns out that this is going to be a bad one."
Floyd pulled out the throttle a little bit and simultaneously nudged the nose of the plane down, trying to bleed off some of his altitude so he would (hopefully) be able to coast right down onto the runway rather than spend any more time in the air than absolutely necessary.
They talked very little over the next few minutes, Sam was getting uneasy as she watched the storm move. In only ten minutes or so, it had grown two, then four, the eight times bigger out the left side windows. Floyd hummed a few bars of some song, but even that was half-hearted and quickly stopped.
Andy too, was getting a little uneasy. He was the only person to no take his eyes off of the storm since Sam had first alerted him to it. It looked less like a thunderstorm than it did an actual living thing. It seemed to writhe and undulate as it moved steadily closer. And move closer it did, with a pace that seemed to defy logic. It was as if the storm had the singular goal of hunting them down and devouring them within its massive form.
He could see flashes of lighting emanate from within the clouds themselves and the landscape underneath them was completely obscured by the torrential rains that fell from them. And there they were, in a tiny single-engine plane with the end-all answer to thunderstorms bearing down upon them. All Andy could think about was his dreams and the crow that had been in his house the night that Samantha had stayed over. He knew that he was being ridiculous, but it was almost like there was a palpable sense of evil coming from the storm itself.
All at once, the sky around them had grown dark and sinister. The fast-moving storm had blotted out the early-morning sun and plunged them into an unnatural twilight. At the same time the entire plane shuddered violently, Samantha let out a small scream at the feeling as though an invisible hand had shoved them violently from the west.
"We're in trouble." Both Andy and Floyd said at the same time. From Andy it was a question, from Floyd it was a stated absolute.
"Get us down." Andy said as the plane started to shudder violently, his words sounding hollow and toneless through the headset back into his ears. He didn't know where the hell they were even supposed to go. By Floyd's earlier estimate, they were still at least five minutes away from the airport and at the rate they were going, the storm was going to overtake them in less than a minute.
Fortunately, Floyd did know where they were supposed to go, although the knowledge would have done more to frighten the two teens in his care than it would have to reassure them. He spotted a clearing off to the east and made a sharp banking turn toward it. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Samantha's expression; she was wide eyed and gripping the armrests in terror with both hands, her nails almost puncturing the old vinyl.
He had just pulled out of the turn when the storm broke over them, the entire plane seemed to be pulled in all directions at once as the turbulence tried to throw them from the sky. Both of the teens cried out. Andy, who was not buckled in, flew up out of his seat for a moment as though someone had given him a firm kick in the ass.
The only person who was not scared witless was Floyd; and even he was more shaken than he had been in a good many years. Certainly he was more concerned with crashing than he had been during the Gulf War. More concerned than he ever had been, in fact; except for the one time he DID crash his Phantom into the jungles of Vietnam.
The rain did not so much as spray across the windshield as is gushed. The clearing that had been easy to see a moment earlier was almost completely obscured in a matter of seconds. The plane still pitched about violently, the loud screech of the stall alarm tearing through their headphones every few seconds, telling the pilot that the winds were preventing the wings from generating the necessary lift to stay aloft; and without that the plane was little more than a paperweight.
But if that registered with Floyd, it certainly didn't show on his face. Everything faded to black around him except for the clearing and the instrument panel. No more did he hear the thunderstorm, nor did he hear the franticness of Andy and Samantha talking to each other as Sam turned around in her seat to claps her hands together with the boy's as they waited for the end to come. The only thing he saw was the altimeter, his airspeed and his intended landing site. He rode out each gust of wind and even stopped trying to think about how quickly the storm had attacked them. In the mind of Floyd Wilks, it was a clear and calm day and this was nothing more than an emergency landing drill.
He leisurely reached over and pushed the flaps lever straight down. The plane tried to nose up, but he held it steady, guiding the plane in closer and closer – just off from the center of the clearing. The readings on the gauges were flawed, the wind causing the air speed to jump back and forth wildly, but all of this didn't affect him in one way or another; he saw through the false readings and in the last few moments before the plane touched the grassy field; Floyd knew that whatever happened next, he had just made the best landing he was capable of delivering.
And then the plane touched down.
There was immediately an ear-splitting shriek of shearing metal. Samantha screamed, almost drowning out the sound. All three of them felt as though they had been thrust into the middle of awashing machine on a spin cycle. The world seemed to whirl around them. The plane yawed about and Andy saw the wing dig a long elliptical gouge through the earth, sending a spray of dirt and stones flying through the air just before the wing itself tore free of the fuselage.
And then he blacked out.
