Unbelievable

by Callie Harper

  I wasn’t 100 percent happy about it. I was used to sitting firmly on my axis. Feeling so strongly pulled in her direction? The sensation was strange, off-kilter. I didn’t exactly know what to do with it.

  But then it was Saturday and I didn’t have to worry about that any more because I met her in Oregon. My driver pulled up in front of her house and I half expected her to tell me she wasn’t coming after all. But when I rang the bell, she was there in her kitchen with two packed bags. Plus, her pouty sister.

  “Hello, Zoe,” I greeted her. She glared at me. “I’ll be sure to have Caroline send you a photo or two.”

  “Her name is Carrie,” she responded, sourly. What was her deal? Was she jealous? Angry that Caroline was getting this opportunity? With company like that, Caroline wouldn’t get anywhere. They’d keep clipping her wings so she couldn’t fly.

  “Hi Colt!” Caroline seemed breathless, a look I liked on her.

  “You ready?”

  “About.” She patted her pockets, seeming to think through her packing list.

  “You don’t need much,” I reminded her. No panties, I’d been specific on that count. She seemed to remember my instructions because she blushed and looked away.

  “When will you be back again?” Zoe whined. I’d offered to cover the costs of a meal delivery service for Zoe, but Caroline had dismissed the idea.

  “Rubbish,” she’d told me, showing some welcome backbone. She’d certainly had no problem standing up to me and telling me to piss off. With her sister, though, it had seemed as if she let her take full advantage. Until she said, “It’ll be good for Zoe to figure out how to feed herself for a week.”

  “Ten days,” I reminded them both, putting a protective arm around Caroline’s waist. I didn’t like seeing her guilt-tripped.

  “Fiji’s a long way away.” Zoe sounded more wistful. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Absolutely,” I assured her. “Been there countless times.” At least four.

  “Wasn’t there a tsunami there?” she asked, not sounding convinced.

  “Listen, right now there’s someone in Fiji asking about earthquakes along the West Coast of the US. There’s always some danger of natural disaster no matter where you go.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Caroline assured her, giving me a look. What, telling her the truth wasn’t helping? “I’ll call you when we land,” She gave Zoe a hug. “And when you have a minute, can you check on Shelly? I’m not sure—”

  “She’ll be fine,” I jumped in. “The store will be fine.” Getting away would be good for Caroline. Business owners needed to know how to delegate. It only led to exhausted breakdowns if you tried to do everything yourself.

  We took a short flight down to LAX, then started the long leg of our journey. The flight to Fiji took about ten hours. We had movies, magazines, and, of course, each other, though, technically I was the co-pilot on the flight so I knew I shouldn’t get too occupied with other business. Not that I expected I’d need to do anything, but still, it always helped to stay alert. My pilot’s license had come in handy many times, though never because I’d actually had to take over the controls. What it did was open up the possibility of a last-minute trip to a destination like this. It was a lot easier if you only had to find and book one pilot instead of two.

  Caroline fell fast asleep on the plane. It made me chuckle. She’d probably been working herself to the bone to get everything set up for our vacation. She needed one. I planned on making sure she got a good and proper break. She wouldn’t need to lift a finger the whole time we were there. Unless she wanted to.

  She woke after a while. We ate a meal and flipped around between a few movies, but before long she dozed off again, snuggled against me. She felt so good there, the soft weight of her resting against my shoulder. With the rise and fall of her breathing, the caress of her curls against my chest, I eventually dozed off, too.

  I woke when the plane gave a jerk.

  “What’s that?” Caroline asked, sleepy and confused.

  “I’ll go see.” I should have stayed awake. I climbed into the cockpit and instantly saw that the pilot didn’t look so hot. He was sweating profusely and grimacing.

  “How’re you doing?” I asked, remaining calm. The sun was rising above the horizon, but even in the rosy morning light he looked pale and ashen. “Everything all right up here?”

  He didn’t answer, coughing and pounding his chest with his fist. I sat down in the copilot’s chair and buckled my seatbelt. “You all right?” I gave him a close look and didn’t like what I saw.

  He groaned and grit his teeth, the neck of his shirt drenched in sweat. “Fine,” he managed. “Heartburn.”

  “Get your seatbelt on back there,” I called to Caroline. I didn’t want her to panic, but it sure didn’t look like heartburn to me. I had a feeling shit was about to get real.

  “Is everything OK?” she asked, sounding alarmed.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” I assured her, not exactly lying. Everything was not OK, but I would make sure nothing bad happened to her.

  I familiarized myself with the control panel, checking our progress, putting on the extra headset so I could check in with the airport on the main island in Fiji. At first glance, everything looked all right. We were headed where we needed to go, no signs of distress and only about 400 miles away.

  The pilot rubbed his chest with his fist. Taking his left hand off of the controls, he flexed it and stretched his arm out with a pain-filled groan.

  “You relax,” I told him. “Take some deep breaths. I’m going to take over for a while.” I kept my voice level, even and authoritative as I assessed the situation.

  He nodded, groaning and rubbing his left shoulder. Sweat dripped down his cheeks. His breathing sounded labored and shallow. The man was having a heart attack.

  Cursing under my breath, I radioed the control tower. I needed to let them know we were coming in for a landing and would need emergency medical attention immediately upon arrival.

  Then I noticed the yellow light in the corner. Low fuel. How the fuck were we low on fuel? Hadn’t the pilot made sure we were full before we left? Had something gone wrong during our flight?

  “Everything all right?” Caroline called out. She sounded anxious. She should be. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t want you to worry,” I said, calmly, “but the pilot is sick and I’m going to need to land the plane.”

  “What?” Her voice rose an octave.

  “Make sure your seat belt is on,” I repeated. “And why don’t you put on a life jacket just in case?”

  “A life jacket?!” she yelled.

  “Don’t panic,” I reminded her and myself as I turned to the pilot and saw he now had both of his eyes closed and his head tilted to the side. But his hand came back to rest on the control yoke. When he lurched forward, he forced it along with him.

  The plane plunged straight down. I heard Caroline scream as I struggled to wrestle us out of our nose dive.

  “Hang on!” I yelled back. We plunged fast through the clouds, hurtling through to the clear sky beneath. I was finally able to right us, but not before I could see way too much detail in that blue ocean below. I steered us into a steady, straight flight pattern, but the gauges on the control panel were going haywire. The pressure and quantity of hydraulic fluid was falling lower and lower, and now the gas gauge flashed red. We must have a leak, or some kind of failure the pilot hadn’t handled due to his own medical distress. All while I’d been snuggling up with Caroline in back. Fuck!

  I radioed into the control tower at the largest airport in the chain of islands. We hadn’t been planning on heading there, but now we were coming in for an emergency landing. But we were still about 350 miles away. The plane might not make it that far.

  A voice came over the headset, briefing me on the weather, barometric pressure and a compass heading to fly to, but the plane began to shake. We lurched again and I struggled to correct the pitc
h and get us level. The second the engine failure indicators came on, I knew. I was going to have to make a water landing.

  “Life jackets!” I yelled to Caroline, now not concealing the urgency in my voice. Rushing into the cockpit, she slipped one over my head and fastened it around my chest and waist with shaking fingers.

  “Oh fuck, fuck,” she repeated, moving over to the motionless pilot slumped to the side. “What happened?” She fastened a jacket on him as well, though he remained completely, horrifyingly limp.

  “Heart attack,” I explained, keeping my focus. The pilot needed medical attention, but we needed to prepare for a crash landing. “Now get in your seat. Buckle. And put your head between your legs.”

  She paused only a moment in shock before heading back. I struggled with the controls, watching the ocean grow closer and closer still. I tried to slow us down, make it a gentle decline, but the plane kept dipping and all I could do was try to guide the descent.

  “Oh God, Colt!” she screamed.

  “I’ve got this, Caroline!” I yelled, hoping like hell I actually did. “I’m going to land us on the water. Don’t panic. And don’t inflate your life jacket until we’re out of the plane.” She might not fit through whatever small escape route we had if she did. But she didn’t need to worry about that. Yet.

  The water rushing up to meet us, I desperately tried once again to slow our descent, maneuvering into a high wing position. With the cockpit low, I’d hit first and Caroline would remain above water. I could swim out if I had to.

  “We’re going down!” I yelled into the headset, giving the air traffic controllers our exact location.

  I could see a small patch of land ahead. It didn’t look inhabited, just one of the hundreds of small islands that made up the archipelago of Fiji. If I could get us close enough, if I could manage a gentle water landing, and if the plane had a life raft, we might be able to make it to that island. There were way too many ifs in that sentence for my comfort. But even in the comparatively warm South Pacific, we wouldn’t last long in open water. Hypothermia set in quick. We needed to make it to land.

  I set the flaps down below 20 degrees, leveled out the wings, and prepared for landing.

  “Head down! Hold on!” I yelled back to Caroline. Barely above stall speed, I slowed us down as much as I could, but it still wasn’t as slow as I wanted.

  “Do you have our location?” I yelled into the headset for confirmation. The last thing I heard before impact was their answer. Yes, they had us on their radar.

  First the cockpit smashed into the water. I stayed buckled but jolted violently up then down. The tail hit next. From up above, the water had looked glassy smooth and calm. Down on the surface, the swells tossed us, big and rough.

  “Caroline!” I roared, unbuckling and turning to find her.

  “I’m OK!” she yelled, her eyes wide, shaken and pale. A trickle of blood ran along her jaw. Contents from an overhead compartment were strewn all around us. The plane lay at a tilt and water seeped in from a broken window pane.

  “We have five minutes,” I yelled, the water already lapping, sucking at us. I didn’t know how much damage the landing had caused, but I could tell we weren’t going to stay afloat for long.

  “What do we do?” she screamed, grabbing onto my arm, disoriented and terrified.

  “Stay calm.” I spoke loud and level. She had every reason to panic, but needed very much not to. Danger closed in all around us, the ocean waters open, wide and unforgiving. The only way we’d make it through was if we stayed focused and functioned as a team. “We’ve made a water landing. I need you to open that container and get out the life raft.”

  I pointed down to a black plastic bin behind the cockpit. She looked at me for another couple seconds, stunned, but then moved toward it. Quickly, I grabbed the transponder and set it to the emergency code. It took a minute we really didn’t have, but getting a swift rescue was our best chance at survival now.

  Ducking back into the cockpit, already filling with water, I grabbed the pilot’s arm. “Hey!” I yelled, trying to revive him with a shake. “Can you hear me?” He made no response. He’d turned a grayish blue color, all signs of life gone.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, keeping my panic at bay but facing a moment of indecision. The plane lurched, the metal groaning as a wing dipped lower. We were getting sucked down, inevitably sinking into the watery depths. We had to act fast. I dove across his unconscious body to try to unbuckle him, struggling with the clasp.

  “Is he conscious?” Caroline called from behind me.

  “No!” I yelled. Unbuckled, he rolled against the side of the plane. Even on land, I wasn’t sure he could be revived. And we were about to try to escape a sinking plane into a life raft on the open ocean. Water already rushed in up to our shins.

  I had a responsibility to Caroline. I needed to get her out safely and keep her alive. I wasn’t sure I could rescue them both.

  Hating the call I knew I had to make, I turned swiftly away and took the compact, folded life raft from Caroline’s arms. God help us if it didn’t inflate.

  Grabbing Caroline’s arm, I looked into her eyes. “You stay with me, Caroline. Do you understand? Stay with me.”

  “Wait, what are you doing?” Panic and fear laced her words, and her fingers dug into my arm. “We can’t leave him!”

  “He’s dead, Caroline. We have to make sure we don’t end up the same way.”

  She cried out in distress as I unlatched the door, now at an angle, and kicked it open forcefully with my foot. Tilted up, the exit was above water but waves crashed against and now inside the plane. I made sure the cord attached to the life raft held tight, then fastened the other end around a metal latch inside the plane. With a hard toss I launched it out, praying it would deploy. It filled quickly with air as it landed on the waves. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “We’re going to get into this raft and reach land,” I yelled to Caroline over the chaos, looking into her panicked face. “We’re going to be fine.”

  “We’re going to be fine,” she repeated, her eyes wild with terror.

  Standing at the entrance, bracing ourselves, I held her hand tight. We’d have to jump into it. The raft was only a foot or two away, but the waves and wind whipped at us. The plane gave another lurch.

  “Now!” I yelled, “Jump!” We threw ourselves out of the plane, landing with a roll into the raft. I grabbed her to me, pulling her into the middle of the black raft, away from the threatening waves. She was not getting away from me. I would keep her safe.

  The plane gave another great, metallic groan and a lurch, the tail seeming to break completely off. Water poured into the body.

  “Colt!” she screamed. I sat up and moved as quickly as I could over to the cord fastening us to the plane, working to untie it before we were sucked under. I got it unfastened, setting us free. Into the open water.

  “Inflate your jacket,” I called to her, pulling on mine and looking around, trying to get our bearings. There, in the distance. Land, I could see a patch of it, with trees. We needed to get there. Fast.

  “Oh, God! The pilot!” Caroline screamed as the cockpit filled with water. She covered her face.

  “We have to focus, Caroline!” I didn’t want to frighten her any more than she already was, but our fate might easily become the same. Turning my attention to the raft, I did a quick search. Emergency pack secure and water tight, fastened to one end. Who knew what it contained, but it would be something. Two paddles attached to the sides in the interior. I pulled one out, lengthening the aluminum tube. Still short and not exactly powerful, but better than our hands.

  “Take a paddle!” I yelled, handing her one. “We need to get there.” I pointed to the island. She followed my gaze. Fixed on our destination, she got a determined look on her face. That’s my girl.

  I settled in the stern of the boat, putting all of my strength into my strokes, my focus never wavering from the patch of land
before us. That white stretch of sand could be the difference between us living or dying. We would live.

  Caroline worked as hard as me, focused, driven, paddling with all her might. The water was choppy, swells tossing our raft, but we were lucky. We had daylight. And as rough as it was, the waves weren’t anything like they would be in a storm.

  My arms burned, hands blistered on the paddle but I kept at it, pushing harder and then harder still until I could see us getting closer. But I could also see us drifting further to the left. And the island wasn’t that long.

  “Pull right!” I yelled and Caroline began devoting all her effort to keeping us straight, forcing us to not pass by our best, maybe only chance at survival.

  “Almost there!” I called out, before we were almost there. But I knew she needed to hear it. We both did. The pain, exertion and force we needed to push us forward seemed pathetic against the mighty ocean. I could feel our insignificance, lapping all around us. How quick and easy it would be to miss this one chance if we let up.

  But we didn’t let up. Caroline pulled with every ounce of force she had and I pushed and propelled us forward and somehow, someway we made it into the calmer waters around the shoreline. Finally close enough, I jumped out and my feet hit the sandy bottom. Land. I strained and pulled the raft the rest of the way in, fighting the current with all my strength, saying a prayer of gratitude we’d hit a sandy inlet. A rocky one could have torn us and our life raft to pieces.

  Gasping, spluttering water, I fell to the shore and it was Caroline who leapt out and pulled our raft up to safer, high land. Then she fell by my side, arms around me, panting and crying.

  “We’re OK,” I used the last of my strength to drape an arm across her back. “We’re OK.” I managed again before I faded to black.

  §

  “Come on, Colt!” I heard Caroline’s voice pleading with me, but it sounded as if she were talking from very far away, through a thick layer of cotton. “Colt!” She sounded so sad and I didn’t want her to feel that way, not ever, but somehow my limbs felt impossibly heavy and I could barely move my lips.