The roar of the silence
that entangled dad rang from the depths of him and was accompanied by dull
throbbing sensations from all over his body, canceling out all other sound as
if he was in a vacuum. Every piston-like pulsation initiated blunt undulations
through his head, each pulse radiating down his neck through his torso and out into
every limb. Each was emphasized by
various stabs, various tweaks, various pinches and various thuds. Every neuron
was inundated as the impulses jolted him through ragged nerves, flowing from so
many spots that they were indistinguishable in their midst. Their sum total was a swirling, beating
numbness that held his body fast in a haze.
He couldn’t tell where to hurt first, so he didn’t hurt at all.
He knew he was breathing, so he wasn’t dead.
That was a start.
The right side of his face was resting against the planes control wheel and
his cheek and head on that side felt numb and wet. Very slowly, he reached the dead weight of
his arm up and ran his hand across his face, smearing sticky oozing goo that pulsed
from a gash in his head. His side
throbbed numbly causing the dark behind his clenched eyes to flash with each pulsation
of his heart.
He tasted acrid blood in his mouth and gritted his teeth, aware of the
welling of potential pain that surged just on the other side of the thin veil
of black numbness. By force of will, he pulled
himself through it to emerge into the cold, dark reality beyond.
With all of his might, he opened his eyes.
The darkness beyond was infinite. Bright
pulsing flashes of light swirled on the surface of his eyeballs dancing upon the
flat black of space. The world had lost
all dimensions. He was effectively
blind. He waited for a long time until the
flashing subsided, gradually breaking up into glowing dots that drifted in the blackness
before him every time he blinked or moved.
He became aware of a loud, high pitched hum in his ears, and wondered
what part of the plane would make that noise before realizing its source was
from deep inside his own brain. It
resonated in his skull with an intensity that shut out all other sound. His head swam. He closed his eyes again.
He slowly took a deep and ragged
breath, as deep as he could be it for the stabbing that shot through his side,
cutting it short. Very slowly he pulled
his leaden arms up to rest his hands against the control wheel. The action took way more effort than it
should have. He gripped the wheel for a
moment, wrapping his trembling fingers around it.
With what seemed like all his strength, he gritted his teeth again and
slowly lifted his face off of the wheel, then pushed his body back into the
seat. The jolt of settling back wracked
him and caused him to freeze in a grimace while the sharpness flared up, then
slowly dulled to numbness again. Once it
subsided enough he opened his eyes again, again to a shroud of total darkness.
He wasn’t really sure what the nature of the reality he now found himself
in was. All he knew for sure at that
moment was that he was in the plane, and the plane was on the ground.
How?
He racked his frazzled brain, but could not make sense of the jumbled memory
of the chaos that had just occurred and whose violent and flashing images were still
splashing randomly across his mind. He
couldn’t remember how this had happened.
It now seemed almost like a dream.
He lolled his head to the side and tried to wake up to some different
version of reality, but he stayed right there.
His other senses began to resolve around him and he became aware of the
smell of the plane, and other things, too.
The fabric, the cold air drifting in from somewhere, the faint waft of
fuel…
His eyes shot open. Fuel!
FIRE!!
Panic gripped him with the realization that he was about to be burned to
death. His heart began to pound and he
clawed for his seat belt. In his mind, he
could clearly smell the acrid and choking smoke as it began to waft up from
behind him, becoming thicker and thicker.
His heart raced and his head screamed as he finally got the lever to
operate, releasing the canvas strap across his waist. He jerked himself forward.
He could almost feel the fire began to lap at him and the smoke burn his
eyes as he clawed at random objects to pull himself instinctively to the right toward
where the cabin door used to be. He lurched
through the opening, stumbling and wracking his ravaged body with every
movement, casting himself from the wreckage and into the darkness - to safety.
Suddenly he stumbled over the right
engine and dropped forward, falling towards the ground. But his fall was cut short as he was whipped
across his face by a sharp thread suspended in the darkness. The pain and surprise of the impact flashed
explosively through his head as the thread wrapped around his face and dug into
his torn flesh. He rebounded from it and was then flung backwards, drawing the
breath from him with a ragged snort. He
dropped on his back against the buckled engine, and sprawled out across the
jagged stump where the wing used to be, clutching his face. He sat stunned and shocked, completely caught
off guard. The sensation erased all
other thought. He waited as the pain
slowly faded and the darkness resolved around him before he could even move.
Holding one hand on his face he used the other to claw the darkness until
he swatted the impediment. A thin strand
of barbed wire hung suspended invisibly in the black air in front of him, and
bounced off of his fingers. He grabbed
it with both hands and stared at the dark space it occupied unseen for a second
as the stun left him before suddenly becoming succinctly aware of the lack of
the plane exploding behind him.
Realizing that it hadn’t, he turned to peer at the plane disbelieving and
gazed into its darkened interior. There
really was no fire. Nothing had changed. It had been in his head.
He was losing it.
He slumped over and closed his eyes.
“Jesus Styner, get a hold of yourself..!” he muttered, but his brain was
very fuzzy. The pieces were still slowly
dropping into place.
He pulled himself upright a little more and rubbed his left
shoulder. He had injured it skiing a few
weeks earlier and it had since frozen up.
He was going to get it looked at when they got back to Lincoln after the trip, but now it was not
too useful. He had over extended it as he
got out and now it was throbbing and immobile.
He could hardly lift his arm at all.
With his other hand, he reached up and grabbed the wire again. He couldn’t see anything beyond a few feet
and his vision was getting progressively worse due to the blood that oozed into
his eyes from what seemed to be everywhere.
He wiped it away as best he
could. Hues of grey began to emerge from the darkness in his left eye. He was completely blind in the other. He probed at it and in feeling the puffy skin
that squeezed around it figured it was destroyed and useless.
He tugged at the wire again and could feel that it ran around and away
from where he was and there was a lot of it.
It seemed like it was tangled all around the plane, giving it it’s own metal
crown of thorns. Apparently the plane
had picked it up at some point as it slid.
He was still reeling from the shock of the enormous magnitude of the
whole crazy thing and wasn’t quite sure what to do next. In his wildest imagination he had never
pictured himself there, like that. The
reality now quite overloaded his senses.
He just couldn’t quite get his head around it yet. His brain seemed to have seized up.
He moved his hand from the barbed wire to his forehead and gingerly felt
around the flap of skin that hung loosely down, slowly spewing thick and sticky blood. It oozed over his head and face randomly, and
made his head feel as if a bucket of oil had been splashed across it. It was most uncomfortable.
He picked at the wound absently for a moment as he tried to get his
brain to work, then suddenly he was shaken like a whip by the realization of a
small voice coming from the still and inky darkness of the plane. He recognized it immediately.
No comments:
Post a Comment