Author: Pyun
Title: She Didn't Get Off the Plane
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Rating: R- I'm rating this chapter R mostly as a safety net. It contains some very disturbing images, but nothing I feel is terribly offensive or gratuitous. It's just very unsettling. I felt nauseous writing it, so please be forewarned.
Chapter 10
The past couple of days were a blur; a long, excruciating blur. Rachel spent a lot of time sleeping because, not having eaten in well over a week, she hadn't the energy to do anything else. In truth, she suspected that some of her naps were actually starvation-induced spells of unconsciousness. In some strange way these lapses were a welcome phenomenon, a distraction from the fact that she was gradually dying now, her fate sealed by the fact that no air or sea crafts had so much as grazed the horizon of this far-off locale. The idea of having to face this morbid horror without anyone she loved by her side made her incredibly lonely and sad. Sad seemed such an awfully generic term but Rachel found the genuine simplicity of it perfectly fitting. She had seen sad movies, but they usually were either over-sentimentalized or outright maudlin. She had heard sad songs but they could've more appropriately been described as forlorn ballads then minimized to the three-letter adjective that she was now using to describe her predicament. Never on film or on the radio had there been captured a state of such totally pure and unadulterated sadness.
For a while after they'd bonded on the beach, Rachel had started to take real comfort in having Tim around, but he had become increasingly distant over the last couple of days, probably losing his sanity to the same grave contemplations, Rachel thought. They had managed to get a fire going a couple of days ago and thanks to the huge mass of tree limbs, sticks, and dried chunks of shrubbery the island had yielded upon exploration, they'd been able to keep it burning constantly for several hours. The hope was that a passing vessel or aircraft would see the fire and investigate. So far that hope had gone completely unanswered. The pile of kindling was starting to diminish noticeably as well, a grim parallel to the castaways' dwindling time on Earth.
Rachel placed the last branch on the surface of the beach and took a step back to admire her handiwork. In a crooked wooden conglomeration were the letters "S.O.S." She worried about having wasted sticks that could have been used for fire wood, but also figured that there was plenty of unexplored terrain left on the island, areas that would no doubt turn up more timber if the need arose. To that end, and looking for something to occupy her frazzled mind, Rachel set out on her tired, wobbly legs into the remote emerald jungle.
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At first, she had retraced the steps of she and Tim's original trek for firewood, but shortly realized that the area had been picked mostly clean of anything accessible already and decided to head for the uncharted terrain to the east. As Rachel's feet traversed the muddy surface of the forest, it occurred to her that Tim had been strangely opposed to taking this direction when they came here the first time. He hadn't offered an explanation, nor had she demanded one at the time, but now she was intrigued. It wasn't long before her curiosity got the best of her, causing her to forgot why she had come out here and only became concerned with uncovering whatever Tim had kept from her before.
The trees thickened to almost an impasse at some spots as she pushed further eastward. The terrain grew rougher, cluttered with detritus that chafed Rachel's bare feet with each step. The ground began to slope slightly uphill, an indicator that she was nearing the precipice of the island. Rachel stopped for a moment and leaned against a tree to rest. The journey would not have been unusually long or strenuous to the normal human being, but to one as starved and tired as she was, it was like a decathlon. Gazing up from her place of repose, she saw what appeared to be a clearing in the trees a few hundred yards away. She immediately wondered what was contained within it. Perhaps it was an orchard of wild grapes or berries. Perhaps it was a fresh water pond in which she could bathe herself. Perhaps it was both! Rachel pictured herself as if in a classic movie scene for a moment, bathing nude in the stream and eating fresh fruit straight off the vine. It was so clichéd, yet it sounded more wonderful right now than she had ever imagined it before. No longer being able to contain her interest, her tired legs churned again towards the clearing.
As she got closer, she started to notice a smell- check that- a stench. "So much for fresh fruit," she thought. Not deterred by the odor, she continued onward and as the number trees between her and the clearing diminished, she thought she saw a chunk of silver protruding from the ground, but it disappeared as the ground in front of her shot up again. The contour of the land turned downhill sharply as she got within 150 yards of the clearing and as she reached the top of the hill and looked down, the silver chunk reappeared again. From her current distance, it looked to be a twisted hunk of metal. She descended the hill for a closer look. Reaching the front of it, she began to strafe around its side, wondering what it was concealing behind its massive, ominous frame. As she finished circumventing the giant metallic obstacle, a waft of the previous stench assaulted her nostrils and she almost vomited, save the fact that there was nothing left in her stomach. And suddenly, she saw where the stench was coming from. Her heart descended into her toes as her eyes shot wide in horror and a frigid paralysis gripped her entire body.
The scene of accident. A terrible, terrible, accident.
The metallic hunk was a shred of a plane's tattered exterior.
And in its shadow…
Bodies.
Dead bodies.
Rachel was too numb to count but she surmised that there were at least a dozen of them.
No wonder Tim didn't want her to go this way! Why couldn't she have listened?
It was too late. Her stomach clenched and she fell upon her hands and knees and dry-heaved. Then, her mortified body listed to one side and she fainted, becoming one with the motionless assembly of lifeless human bodies.
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"Echo Six to base," the pilot of the Coast Guard Search & Rescue chopper barked into his radio, his eyes fixed on something beyond his windshield. He had seen this before, and while it was usually either bad news or no news at all, they had been searching for over a week now and this was as close as they'd come to turning up anything.
"Go ahead, Echo Six," affirmed a robotic-sounding voice that was clouded by static.
"This is Echo Six, reporting from 25 degrees west by 27 degrees north, just miles south of Ponta Delgada," the pilot confirmed.
"Ponta Delgada?" asked the static voice quizzically. "What in hell are you boys doing that far south?"
"It was a hunch," responded the pilot, looking back at his two passengers. "A very persistent hunch," he continued, redirecting his attention forward and grimacing a little.
"Echo Six, do you have anything to report?" the crackly, static voice resumed, this interaction sounding much more official than the last outburst had.
"Yes sir" announced the pilot, hungrily eyeing a faint grey plume of smoke on the horizon.
"We found something."