FicWad

Day 1: A Horrific Flight

There is so much pain. A ringing through my ears hides the noise around me. It's very hot. I clutch the back of my head and feel the wet and heat of what I assume is blood. Then I remember: the plane. It broke apart in mid-air. It must have crashed. Am I in the water? No. There's no water and the sunlight is clear through the brake in the plane. I feel woozy. The ringing is beginning to clear and I hear so many awful things.

"WALT!" a man shouts.

There is a constant screaming from a woman. Is she hurt?

I'm still in my seat with the belt fastened. The man and woman that were beside me are gone. I undo the belt and try to stand. The fuselage is on its side and it's hard to keep my balance on the uneven ground with this wound on my head. There is a blanket on the seat next to mine. I grab it and rip a part off, applying pressure to my head. It hurts, but steadies my balance. The sunlight outside of the fuselage shines bright and I squint my eyes. The scene outside is horrific. People screaming, looking for lost ones, trapped by giant pieces of plane. There's the woman screaming. I'm about to step out of the plane when…

BOOM!

The heat is so intense and I am thrown back into the fuselage which tilts farther onto its side. Luckily I crash into stray cushions that only slightly soften the blow. I painfully get my feet again as I realize that a huge burn from the blast has appeared on my left arm. I grit through the pain, and walk out of the fuselage.

A man looks right at me before he falls onto a suitcase and begins rummaging through it. Then someone grabs the burn on my arm.

"Do you have a pen?"

"Ow!" I exclaim. It's like a white hot iron on my skin. The man quickly drops my arm, with a worried look on his face.

"I'm sorry, are you hurt? Of course you're hurt. Let me help you," he puts a handful of pens in his pocket and tries to help steady me. I'm still favoring my arm when he does this, and I'm taken aback by his abruptness.

"I'm fine. I don't have a pen."

"But your head is bleeding! You need to sit down."

The smell of gas and smoke is too much with the added pain of my head and arm. I lose my step, and the man grabs my other arm.

"Whoa, you really need to sit down. Here," and he sets me beside a large piece of metal where I am thankful to be off my feet. The next thing I know, the man has vanished and I try my best to stay conscious through the pain and smoke.

Things died down after a few minutes. Eventually the blonde woman stopped screaming. Cries of pain were silenced; some forever. I can walk again, but my arm is very tender. The back of my head has stopped throbbing. Despite the fact I'm on a tropical island the night has become very cool. Many people have started building fires. I make my way over to the largest one.

"Hey you. What's your name?" a man asks with an accent.

"Me? Charlie."

"Charlie. We need help with the fire. No one will see it if it isn't big."

Ahh, that's why it's the largest. They're trying to make a signal fire. I sit down and stare into the flame. I amvery tired, and can feel my eyes sinking, when there's a tap on my shoulder.

"Hey, dude. You hungry?" A very large man with long curly hair and a kind face offers me a plane mean wrapped in tin foil.

"Oh, thank you. I didn't even realize I was hungry." I take the food.

"Yeah, that's what most people have been telling me. Total shock of the day will take the appetite right out of you," looking at this man, I found it hard to believe his appetite ever got away from him.

He offers me plastic utensils from inside his breast pocket. "Yeah, well, goodnight I guess."

I smile and take the utensils and he walks away. Inside the foil is airline lasagna. Gross, but not the worst thing I've ever eaten. I take the salt packet from inside my utensil plastic and drown the Italian mush in flavor. I feel like my gran, who always asked for the salt no matter what we were eating. I wish she was here, and at the same time, I'm glad I refused to let her travel to Los Angeles with me. I doubt she would have survived today.

"You'll have a heart attack if you eat that much salt," says a voice above me. It's the man from earlier who was looking for pens.

"I think a heart attack is the last thing I need to worry about right now,"

He laughs, "Yeah, probably. Mind if I sit?"

I gesture to the sand beside me. He offers me a hand. "I'm Boone. And I'm sorry about earlier, during the chaos. I probably should have stayed with you. You were bleeding a lot."

I shake his hand. "I'm Tia. And don't worry about it. If you had stayed I might have shoved one of those pens down your throat. I'm not big on being saved by strangers."

"Well, we're not strangers anymore. You don't strike me as a girl who needs saving anyway. Plus those pens were a stupid idea. They would have been useless."

"What were you trying to do?"

"There was a woman who was unconscious. I was trying CPR, but it wasn't working. Some ass came and took over, but I didn't think he could do any better. So I thought I'd try one of those 'pen in the throat' things,"

"You were gonna makeshift a trache on an island in the Pacific ocean during a plane crash? You do realize that might have killed her, if she wasn't already dead."

"She's not dead. She's over there." He points to a black woman in the distance who was fingering what looked like a necklace. "What do you know about pens in throats anyways?"

"I'm a paramedic. And the probability of using a pen to resuscitate someone is highly unlikely. You probably would have missed and she would have bled to death."

"Wow, you sure are realistic."

"I've just survived a plane crash over the middle of the ocean and landed on an island, I think reality is a little out of the question in our current state of being."

We laugh. He shifts his position, "Well, Tia, it was very nice to meet you, but I've got to go check on my sister. You should find me on the rescue boat."

"If they ever come," I stare into the black abyss of the sea out on the beach and Boone walks away.

I start continue eating the pasty lasagna. What I wouldn't give for a piece of chicken right now. Then, there's a noise. Everyone is on their feet. In the distance I can see trees falling down in the jungle. There is something big out there. I put down my dinner and walk over to the other side of the fire, closer to the jungle. Everyone is asking questions. "What was that?" "Did anybody see that?" I can't imagine what it could be. It must be very large to tear down trees like that.

"Terrific," says the guy named Charlie.