Final Destination: Death's Design

The Premonition

CoLLoC

It was the dead of night. Thunder, lightning, and rain came down on the Browning household. For all Alex Browning knew, the 'dead' of night would soon become quite literal…

Alex was packing for his school trip. He sighed as he picked through his things for what he wanted to bring on the trip. He first went through his dresser, making sure he had the necessities for the trip. Like his passport, and his driver's license. And his ticket, which read that he was leaving to Paris on Flight 180, May 13th at 9:25 PM.

His next stop was his rack of books. He grabbed the one in front, a travel guide for France, and tossed it on his bed. He was oblivious for the time being, and didn't see his fan blowing the page open to a picture of a guillotine.

He was wearing a faded blue t-shirt with the word Nike on the front. He wore a pair of tan cargo shorts, and his brown hair was waved up at the front.

"Alex?" His mother asked, walking into his room with some clothes. "Tod and George's dad just called. He's picking you up at three-thirty tomorrow, and the bus leaves the high school for the airport around five."

His dad walked in and stood in the doorway. "How's my suitcase working out for you?"

Alex looked at his suitcase as his mom was about to rip off a tag around the handle of his suitcase. "Mom, you gotta leave that on. Yeah, it's like, you know…tell you when the last flight went up in a plane crash, so I figure…it's gotta be on the bag, or at least with the bag." He looked at his dad, who gave him an agreeing nod. "For luck."

"Where would you get a nutball idea like that?" His mom looked at him strangely and ripped the tag. His dad shrugged.

"I'm still here." Alex's mom gave him a dirty look. "So. Seventeen, on the loose, seeing a trip with your friends in Paris, ten days in the spring time. Live it up, Alex. You got your whole life ahead of you."

The irony of that last statement would soon come to Alex Browning. Alex slept soundly that night, happily unaware that his life would soon change. He woke only once when the wind in his window chilled him. He turned over and went back to sleep.

His clock glitched and read 1:80.

CoLLoC

The next night, Alex walked towards the airport alongside his best friend, Tod, and his brother George. Tod, as usual, was hitting on girls while the local bully, Carter, was bullying the local nerd, Billy.

One of the French teachers, a man wearing a brown suit, said something in French and waved his hand.

"What does that mean, go?" Tod's dad asked. They turned around to look at him.

"Don't know." Tod laughed. Tod's dad grinned and gave a small wad of cash to George. "This is for both of you." Tod smiled, thanked him, and he, Alex, and George walked into the airport. As they went up the escalator, Tod grimaced at his passport photo. "Didn't think anything could look worse than my yearbook photo."

"Yeah, thank god they don't have to look at you all the time." Alex quipped.

The French teacher stopped them all at the top of the escalator and made an announcement in French. Carter, looking quite confused, asked, "What the fuck does he want?" His girlfriend, who was clutching his arm, shoved him.

"The airport does not endorse solicitors." A girl quietly reading Tropic of Cancer and wearing black clothes said with an annoyed sigh. The teacher nodded, said something else in French, and moved on towards the waiting area. A man with a white symbol on his head stopped Alex.

"Death is not the end." He said. He handed Alex a colorful flyer, and the second French teacher, Valerie Lewton, moved Alex on and gave the man a dirty look.

"Yeah, but it will be for you if you harass my students."

Alex stopped at the front of the line for his luggage and turned around him to look at the large board that showed the status of the flights. Many, as he noticed, had been canceled or delayed due to the storm. He was barely listening when the woman taking his luggage asked him a question.

"Oh…yeah." He said. He turned around once again and saw that Flight 180 was on time. The woman once again asked him a question, and he simply held up the flyer the strange man had given him. The woman put a tag around the handle, similar to the one that had been on it the day before.

"There you go. Same as your birthday."

"Huh?" Alex gave her a confused look.

"September twenty-five, nine twenty-five. Same as your departure time." Alex gave her a blank nod and turned around once again. He saw several signs flipping, but didn't seem to notice a wire on one of them snapping.

Alex walked upstairs to the waiting area for his flight, barely noticing that Carter and his girlfriend Terry were making out in one of the chairs. Clear, the only person, it seemed, who knew French on the trip, sat down near them and dropped her stuff on a chair next to her, accidentally dropping a travel guide on the floor. Someone picked it up and handed it to her on the page it had fallen.

"Thanks…"

"Welcome."

Clear looked at the page. It showed a picture of a car that had been crushed from the front end, as if it had driven into a pole. She looked to her right and saw Alex walking towards the window to look at the plane they would be taking. He furrowed his brow as he tried to make out the song somebody was playing on a radio nearby.

"Rocky Mountain High…" He mused. "John Denver…guy died in a plane crash."

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. At this time we would like to begin pre-boarding of Flight 180 to Paris through gate 46." The announcement came over the speakers above. Alex got in line in front of Tod and stared through the doorway that led to the plane as his ticket was ripped in half by the woman behind the counter. Tod gave him a shove to bring him back to reality, and he walked down to the plane. He walked into the plane, noticing some slight damage on the side. When he looked down to see the luggage cart, he shuddered slightly. The number on the cart read "666".

Alex walked towards his row at the end of the plane. "Good sign." Tod said, referring to a woman whose baby was crying in the middle row. "It'd take a fucked-up god to take down this plane." Alex looked at the row across from him, where somebody was on oxygen. "A really fucked-up god."

Alex walked to the end of the plane and sat down in his seat, row 25. Tod was currently bargaining a seat change with two other girls. Alex looked out the window to see the air brakes retracting into the plane. There were some very noticeable long black marks on them.

"Um, Alex?" Two girls came to his row. "Could you and Blake switch seats so we can sit together? We asked Tod, but he said he had some kind of medical condition." Alex looked at Tod's seat, where he was making several obvious motions that said he shouldn't switch seats.

"Yeah." Alex unbuckled his seatbelt as Tod rolled his eyes, annoyed, and turned around. Alex walked up to Tod's seat, expecting some sort of verbal punishment.

"Because of you, I have to sit here and watch fucking Stuart Little." Tod said. Alex's tray dropped down, and when he tried to lock it again, the screw came off and it dropped again.

Alex started sweating as the plane rolled into motion and backed out of the gate. It slowly made its way towards the runway. The lights were flickering as the plane picked up speed. Alex looked out the side and saw the same black marks again, which weren't helping his nervousness about riding on a plane. He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself. It wasn't working.

The French teacher in front announced something to the rest of the class in French, and put his arms in the air. The rest of the class cheered and did the same. Obviously, they had re-learned French rather quickly after they had first arrived.

Things went downhill from there. The plane started shaking, and the sound of metal creaking and whirring could be heard. The shaking soon stopped, probably a side-effect of the takeoff or from the damage.

More loud noises came and the shaking came back, now more intense than ever. Bags started falling out of the overhead compartments and people started screaming. All hell was literally breaking loose. The lights flickered like crazy, going out for seconds at a time. Oxygen masks dropped out from above, and everybody grabbed one and put it on.

Something sparked, and something overhead came crashing down. There were several explosions from the upper left corner, the opposite area from where Alex would have been sitting. Chaos ensued as a large chunk of the plane's siding ripped itself off. A row went rocketing out the open hole. Someone went flying from the back row to the front, and a stereo (Presumably the same one that had been playing Rocky Mountain High earlier) hit another person in the head.

An explosion ripped through the airline, burning everything, and killing all aboard. Alex, in some sort of cruel irony, would be the last one to die, burned to death by the flames of the doomed aircraft.

CoLLoC

"Alex?"

Alex gasped several times as he heard a girl say his name. He opened his eyes and looked around wildly. He was still on the plane. The entire thing exploding had been a dream.

"Could you trade seats with Blake so she and I could sit together?"

Strange…he remembered that. "She asked Tod, but he said he had some sort of medical condition."

It had happened…he looked to see Tod making the same motions as before. Alex, now very freaked out, jumped up and practically ran to Tod's seat. Several people turned around and gave him dirty looks. Alex leapt over Tod and grabbed the tray screw. It came out in his hands, and he realized that it wasn't a dream. It was real.

"Is there a problem, sir?" A flight attendant asked. Carter gave Alex a look and roughly translated the attendant's words.

"What's your fucking problem?" The teacher walked back and said something in French just as Alex jumped back into the aisle.

"The fucking plane's gonna explode!" He shouted. He would stop the airline from leaving if it killed him. He winced at his bad choice of thoughts.

"Shut up, Browning."

"You're so not funny." Carter and Terry, respectively, said.

"If this is your idea of a joke…" The flight attendant began.

"It's not a joke!" Alex interrupted. "It's not a joke!"

"Alex! Take it easy!" Tod said, trying to calm Alex down, and failing miserably.

"Sit down, Alex." Carter said coldly, getting up.

"This plane is going down!" Alex yelled.

"We will remove you from this aircraft!" The attendant threatened.

"I'll remove him. Fuck you, I'll remove him myself!" Carter growled. He struggled out of the hold of Terry and threw a punch at Alex. Several attendants grabbed both Alex and Carter and dragged them out of the plane.

"Everyone in the aisle, off this plane!" One of them yelled. Billy, who was in the bathroom and was coming out just as Carter was being pulled out, was pushed along with them.

"Everyone, stay where you are, just sit tight." Ms. Lewton said, as she ran out with them.

"Go check him out, see how he's doing." George said to Tod. Tod nodded and ran out. Clear unbelted herself and quickly came with him.

When they were back in the waiting room, one of the attendants announced, "No one gets back on that plane, that's my call."

Carter and Alex were still trying to duke it out, while some security guards were called to hold them back. Ms. Lewton was talking with the man who had said that nobody was getting back on about letting either her or the other teacher back on.

"Larry, the airline's not taking this very well, they said one of us could get back on and the rest of us can take an 11 ten flight, it gets in three hours later…"

"I'll stay." Larry said, the first thing he had said in English since the trip started.

"No, no, you know the whole French thing, it's fine."

"Ah." Billy walked to the door, reasoning with Larry. "See, I was in the bathroom, and the lock was stuck." Larry ignored him and walked into the plane. "But I didn't fight with anyone!" The woman behind the counter shut and locked the door.

Tod ran up the stairs, having gone to use a phone. "I called your parents, they're on their way."

"Alex, talk to me, what happened?" Ms. Lewton was holding an ice pack to Alex's neck, and trying to calm him down.

"Uh…I saw it. Like…I don't know, I saw it. I saw it on the runway, I saw it take off. Out my window I saw the ground, and then, and then…the cabin, it starts to shake. Right? And the left side blows up and then the whole plane just explodes. And it was so real, like how everything happened."

"You been on a lot of planes that blew up?" Tod asked jokingly.

"You must've fallen asleep." Valerie said soothingly.

"Whoa – whoa, wait. We get thrown off the plane, and we lose half a day in Paris, all because Browning has a bad fucking dream?" Alex shot him a look. "But wait, wait, the plane! It's gonna blow up! It's gonna blow up!"

"Hey, fuck you." Tod yelled at Carter.

"You should be taken to the fucking hospital!" Alex shouted. He jumped at Carter, who was then thrown to the floor. The security guards, Valerie, and Terry all tried to break them up. Billy, meanwhile, was watching the flight sadly.

"There they go…and here we stay." Alex and Carter argued a bit more, but they were stopped short by Billy's loud scream of "Oh, shit!"

They both looked to the window, where the plane had just blown up. The windows soon shattered with a deafening blow. Terry screamed and the security guards immediately dialed in for assistance. Everybody who had gotten off the plane stared in awestruck horror at the sight. Alex had been right, and saved all their lives.

Flight 180 had gone down.