by Paul Knox
Reece slid her GLOCK from its concealed carry holster and raised it. “Call air traffic control and tell them I just pulled a firearm.”
Neither he nor the pilot made any attempt to use the radio. Reece leaned forward with her gun inches from the copilot’s face. “Turn the plane around.”
“Reece, put that thing away, please!” Chang pleaded.
He reached for Reece's arm, swatting at it like he’d somehow downplay her actions and find a diplomatic solution to her outburst.
In the instant her eyes diverted to Chang’s intrusive gesture, the copilot knocked her gun sideways and then had his own gun out. Reece instinctually fired, and the bullet shattered the primary flight display screen. It flickered once or twice and then shorted out. The pilot scrambled for the other controls.
In the next moment, the copilot had his gun pressed to the side of Chang’s head. For a moment the three of them all looked at each other, waiting for someone to make a move.
“Sorry,” Chang mouthed to Reece.
Reece felt the cabin pressure begin to change. The bullet must have passed straight through the plane. The cold, high-altitude air was turning the cabin into a refrigerator.
She noticed goose bumps erupt over Chang’s arms.
For a split second she flashbacked to a decade prior in their old home together. He had frequently worked late into the night for his law firm. One of those nights she’d found him in his favorite recliner with an open computer on his lap. Their den had been ice cold, and he was shivering, fast asleep.
There were goose bumps on his arms then. She had slipped the computer off his lap and draped a blanket over him, hoping he’d warm up during that winter night.
It was amazing how times had changed. Instead of being worried about him working too much, she was staring at a gun pressed against his head.
“Get them!” the pilot yelled, still flipping switches and frantically pressing buttons.
“Give me your gun,” the copilot enunciated, still angled sideways from the front seat. “Slowly.”
“Okay. You win.” Reece relaxed her hold and began to hand it over.
He reached for it.
Then she drove a swiping kick into Chang, knocking him away from the gun while locking onto the copilot’s arm. She jammed her right shoulder into his armpit, her back now turned to the pilots.
He fired, but Chang was safely aside. The bullet drilled straight through one of the windows. Reece instantly twisted his arm clockwise, his elbow now facing down and hyperextended.
She yanked down on his wrist and jumped up with her body. The crunching sound of his elbow cracking could barely be heard over the air whooshing violently through the broken window into the inside of the plane.
The copilot dropped the gun and screamed. Reece twisted around and raised her GLOCK—at the same instant the pilot also spun around. Reece watched in slow motion as his fingers began squeezing the trigger of a SIG Sauer he must’ve had ready.
Reece fired while lunging sideways. The pilot also fired. Neither of the bullets hit anybody, but Reece’s bullet punctured right into the flight instruments again.
The copilot was still yelling in pain, temporarily out of commission. But the pilot lunged over the seats for a clear shot. It was then that Reece noticed a flash of sunlight from around his neck. Light glistened off of a gold necklace popping out from under his shirt.
After jumping over the seats, he went for Chang, who was now huddled against the back of the plane, white as a ghost.
“Drop it!” she commanded.
She really didn’t want to shoot him. Neither she nor Chang knew how to operate an aircraft.
But the pilot didn’t slow. He pressed his gun into Chang’s belly and said, “How long do you think he’ll live with a hole through his middle?”
Reece noticed that the plane seemed to be veering off course, slanted sideways.
She studied the pilot’s face. “We’re all going to die if you don’t fly this thing.”
3
“DON’T SHOOT!” Chang shot his hands up, his eyes locked on the gun pushing into his stomach.
The pilot slowly kneeled down, his gaze still on Reece, and the gun still on Chang. He picked up the copilot’s gun and tossed it over, landing in his lap.
The copilot picked it up with his left hand, still trying to recover from the pain of the elbow break. His circular swaying, clenched jaw, and sweat-drenched brow betrayed him, however. His right arm hung limp beside him, forearm angled back unnaturally and turning black and blue.
“Lie down and keep your hands where I can see them!” the pilot threatened to Reece. “Now!”
Reece knew how these things went. She and Chang were being taken somewhere to be questioned and tortured. And once the kidnappers were done with them, there was no chance they’d be let free with their lives. She wasn’t about to surrender.
“I don’t think so,” she said coldly.
“Then he dies!”
The pilot pressed his gun deeper into Chang’s middle, causing the poor guy to exhale sharply.
CLACK! CLACK!
Reece fired first, taking him out with a double tap to the chest. Then she swiftly swung around and fired at the copilot, milliseconds from being shot by him. His head jerked backwards and he slumped against the controls.
“Holy mother, Reece! What are we supposed to do now?” Chang quickly glanced from left to right, up and down, freaking out.
Reece leaned over the cockpit seats and checked the radio. She tried to get it working but it was dead. It probably shorted when the instrument panel did.
She faced Chang and cleared her throat. “I have bad news and good news. Which do you want first?”
Chang’s chaotic looks came to rest on Reece, and his face blanked. “Bad news?” he mumbled.
“This plane is going down. The instruments are shot—literally. And looking through that window—” Reece pointed— “we’re about to dive through the clouds and slam into that rainforest-covered volcano.”
As if on cue, the plane’s axis twisted and Chang stumbled forward, falling into Reece, knocking them both into the side wall. The body of the pilot somersaulted past them, smacking against the exit door.
Reece pushed Chang sideways and rolled out from underneath him. She leaped to the side and grabbed the spare parachute she had handed him earlier.
“I said you’d need this.” She shoved the device into his hands. “Put it on. Remember how?”
“Barely. That was ten years or so ago.”
Reece remembered the one time she had convinced Chang to skydive with her—his first and last time. Actually, his second-to-last time if this stunt was successful.
He slid the harness around his back and fumbled with the clips and thick straps that wrapped around his legs and shoulders. Reece grabbed her specialized parachute and had it on in no time.
The plane hit some turbulence, bounced them up and down, and then tilted downwards, sending them tumbling forward.
As soon as Reece righted herself, she double-checked Chang’s straps and quickly adjusted them.
Chang scrambled to the exit door and unlatched it. He tried to open it. Then he yanked and struggled. It didn’t budge.
“It’s no use,” Reece called out, moving to the side window. “The wind speed is too strong. Opening that door is impossible right now.”
Chang’s desperate face hung low. His silence and dropped jaw said everything.
“This window is for emergency egress,” Reece called, twisting a latch, removing a cover component, and then rotating a lever over and over. “It opens to the inside.” She motioned for him.
Chang slid-stumbled near and waited for her to pop the window and railing.
The wind from the bullet holes was already loud, but once the emergency window was open, it sounded like a freight train going by.
Reece had to yell at the top of her lungs to make her voice heard. “We jump together. Grab ahold of my waist. And we have
to push away from the plane as hard as we can.” She turned back toward the window. “On the count of three. One! Two! Jump!”
Reece and Chang launched off the side of the plane moments before they and the plane disappeared into the wispy white cloud cover dividing the sky from the forest. Reece couldn’t see five feet in front of her face, and Chang was squeezing her so hard she could barely breathe.
“Pull the ripcord!” she called.
“Where is it!?” he yelled back, looking directly at it.
Reece didn’t have time for this. She grabbed it and pulled for him. It immediately opened and they slowed—but not enough.
“Let go of me,” she commanded.
“I can’t see anything!” he cried.
“Your parachute isn’t strong enough for both of us. Let go of me, now!”
Reluctantly he did, and Reece pushed away from him, immediately dropping and watching him disappear above her into the mist.
She yanked her cord and prayed she was still higher than five hundred feet or so, the bare minimum she’d need for survival.
Just as her chute opened, Reece broke through the clouds and witnessed the grandeur of the rainforest all around her. If she had been one or two thousand feet farther north, she would already be dead, splattered across the volcano’s side.
But even where she now floated, she had opened her chute with only seconds to spare. She saw the plane pummel into the forest and disappear under the canopy about a hundred yards away.
Reece used her specialized ‘wing’ to glide in a circular manner, waiting for Chang to come down into eyesight. Soon she spotted him falling through the clouds, and she glided to whereabouts he would land.
There was a creek running through the forest below them, the only opening in the trees she saw. After removing her phone from her jeans pocket, she landed directly in the middle of the water and pulled the toggles hard, flaring to a stop. Unfortunately, the nylon was damaged on the surrounding trees. But her phone stayed dry.
The cool water felt refreshing, about mid-thigh deep.
She watched Chang fall straight into the trees, crashing through foliage, then hanging about twenty feet off the ground, his parachute completely destroyed and caught in the branches.
Reece called out, “Hang on.”
“That won’t be an issue,” he called back.
She climbed the tree Chang was caught in until finding a stable branch above him. She began hoisting him up by the parachute cords until he reached a branch thick enough to maneuver to the main trunk.
“There’re ants all over this tree!” Chang complained. “Ow-ouch!”
“Then we better hurry.”
Once on the ground, they caught their breath and stared at each other for a moment before anyone spoke. Reece’s breathing slowed but Chang’s didn’t.
Reece checked her phone. No service.
She motioned north. “The plane crashed that way. I think we should find it and retrieve any supplies that survived the crash. If we want to get out of this jungle alive, we need more clothes and a way to start a fire.”
Chang glanced around at the thick walls of greenery surrounding them. Exotic birds chirped and called, seemingly undisturbed by their presence. There were no defined paths. Going north appeared difficult and dangerous.
“I don’t know, Reece. Maybe we should wait for someone to find us. There might be twenty-foot-long snakes out there that can swallow a man whole. And jaguars live in these parts.” Chang began to breathe even harder.
Reece noticed and spoke soothingly. “Don’t worry, Chang. I have a gun and I’m a pretty good shot. I won’t let you out of my sight.”
“But what if we get lost?” His voice rose in pitch. “I don’t want to die out here, Reece.” He ran his hands through his hair and held the back of his neck. “This can’t be happening.”
Die—out here? Reece thought back seven years ago when she held his dying body. Better than a gas station with three bullets in your back.
“Listen to me, Chang. Panic is counterproductive. It causes fatigue. I understand it’s frightening to feel lost. But it’s important to act calmly and be as objective as possible. Every decision we make is critical.” Reece placed her hands on his shoulders and held on, squeezing firmly. “I got you this far, didn’t I?”
Chang peered into her eyes and seemed to calm down. A moment or two passed. Finally he took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m okay. I’ll be fine. And thanks.”
Reece let their eye contact linger a second longer than she should have. The unknown depths in his dark eyes still called to her in ways she wished didn’t.
“The wind is getting strong,” Chang said. “I felt it blowing me all over the place up there.”
Reece looked up at the skies. She didn’t want to say what she was really thinking about the weather.
“Yeah,” she muttered.
She picked up a couple walking stick-sized dry branches and handed one to Chang.
“I don’t need one,” he said.
“It’s not for walking. It’s for pushing the vegetation out of the way. Don’t grab anything with your hands. A cut could quickly lead to an infection here.
They began their trek by following the creek uphill and to the north. Only five or six minutes later they came upon a thirty-foot waterfall, splashing into a scenic pool, surrounded by mist and mossy boulders.
“That’s right out of National Geographic,” Chang remarked.
“It’s beautiful.” Reece listened to the sound of the water splashing against the rocks.
“We’ve seen a lot of sights together, Reece.” Chang brushed against her arm. “I’m not trying to pry, but…you and Duke are pretty new, right?—still testing the waters with him?”
A gust of wind rushed down the waterfall and around Reece, giving her the chills. The tops of the trees were swaying harder and more chaotically. The clouds above seemed to be increasing in number and size.
A storm was coming. And if it did, there was no telling how menacing it would be, or what she would have to do to keep them both alive.
But she didn’t want to alarm Chang, so she kept her observations quiet for now.
Returning her thoughts to his question, she simply said, “Duke has never lied to me.”
She led the way trudging through the rainforest again.
4
A LARGE THORN SCRATCHED REECE as she brushed by. She tried to ignore the sting.
Hope it wasn’t poisonous.
She had avoided rubbing against the branches and bracken the best she could, but it was too thick to avoid everything. By the time they reached the plane wreckage, her arms were marked up. And Chang’s looked even worse.
The right wing of the plane was completely ripped off. It had crashed nose first. However, the plane wasn’t completely destroyed and there hadn’t been a fire. The supplies were probably accessible.
“I’m going to check it out,” Reece said.
While Chang waited, she crawled in through the emergency egress window she had popped open earlier, while thousands of feet in the sky. The gruesome sight inside the plane immediately caused her to take pause.
It’s good he didn’t come in.
Flies had found the corpses, and the bodies had been mangled in the crash.
But something stuck out, something she had glimpsed in the air. The pilot’s necklace.
It wasn’t made entirely of gold. A single black band held a square gold pendant about one inch in height, with a strange marking on the front. It looked oddly like a three-pointed maze, like the kind a child would complete in a coloring or activity book.
Reece winced at the gore and held her nose while removing the necklace from the body. She quickly pocketed it. After that, she rounded up the other two guns and found some extra ammunition in a storage compartment. She reloaded all the guns, putting hers in her holster and tucking one into her waist behind her back.
And then she grabbed her and Chang’s bags. She stored the th
ird gun inside hers, and tossed them out of the window to Chang before climbing back down.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I need to find Sandy as soon as possible.”
“If that means getting out of this godforsaken jungle, then fantastic. I’m all for it. Please, lead the way.”
“First, we need to change.”
Chang looked at Reece’s pants. “Well you do; you’re still soaked.”
Reece pointed at his knee-length shorts. “I hope you brought pants. And we need long sleeves.”
“I did bring pants…but not any long sleeves. The low is supposed to be, like, eighty degrees, Reece. It’s hot.”
“Look at your exposed skin.”
“Sure,” Chang admitted, “the thorns are annoying, but I don’t want to overheat.”
“In warm weather,” Reece stated, “long sleeves will keep you cooler than short. And the thorns aren’t the only thing we need to watch out for.”
“Jaguars?” Chang asked, looking around.
“No. Most of the big cats native to this part of the world are extinct in El Salvador. Vipers, though, we do need to watch for. But mostly, we need to protect ourselves from the insects. Some of the parasites here will enjoy burrowing into your skin. And mosquitoes spread diseases like malaria, dengue, and yellow fever.”
“What about indigenous people? Don’t they survive just fine?”
“We’re not accustomed to navigating through here. And we don’t have the specialized techniques natives use.”
Chang began rummaging through his backpack for pants. “But I don’t have a long sleeve,” he repeated.
“I brought an extra,” Reece said, tossing him a black, long sleeve T-shirt. “It’ll be tight. Try to make it work.”
She walked a few yards away, behind a tree, and began stripping down, removing all of her wet clothes.
Chang called out playfully, “It’s not like I’ve never seen you before. I distinctly remember a couple nights…well, you know.”
Reece smirked and shook her head. But she didn’t say anything.
When she emerged, Chang asked, “Why do you have a shirt tied around your head?”
