2
Little Toy Bikers and a Woman on the Run
Chapter 149 Flight
Louise was nervous about flying. To soothe her nerves, she watched a marathon of TV documentaries on why planes crash. She thought it would help her understand that crashes were rare and air travel was perfectly safe. It had the exact opposite effect.
It didn't help either that a pilot and his co-pilot were arrested a few days ago when they showed up drunk to fly their large commercial jet. An employee of Homeland Security smelled alcohol on the breath of the pilot possibly saving the lives of a plane load of people.
Drunk pilots, poorly maintained aircraft, defective instruments, there were just so many ways for things to go wrong resulting in a crash. Louise hoped that if the plane crashed, it would do it over land. Her biggest nightmare would be to be in a plane crash over water. She could imagine the impact, struggling to get out of a dark flooded plane and then realizing she wasn't going to get out alive.
Thanks to all the documentaries about plane crashes, she knew that most people killed in crashes died from blunt force trauma. That was a nice way to say the impact of the crash tore the bodies apart. She shouldn't have to worry about crashing over water and being trapped in the plane. She would be dead her body torn to pieces on impact. That thought also didn't cheer her up.
As the flight attendants went through safety procedures, Louise felt her anxiety rise. The more she looked at the number of the flight, the more she felt sure it was an unlucky number. She needed to get off the flight.
Casey had given her a couple of Xanax tablets she'd stolen from her mother. Louise normally didn't touch drugs, but she normally didn't fly on a plane. She swallowed the tablet dry. By the time the plane went tearing down the runway to take off, Louise didn't understand why she'd been so afraid to fly.