by Dan Gutman
“Forget the plan,” David said. “Let’s get the other guy!”
CHAPTER 4:
Fighting Back
I never hit anybody before in my life. Not even in a schoolyard fight. One time this bully told me to meet him in the playground after school, but the gym teacher found out and stopped it before a punch was thrown.
The hijacker I hit with my skateboard was face down on the floor and he didn’t look like he was going to be getting up anytime soon. In a way, I almost felt sorry for him. He was hurt bad. Titanium packs a wallop. I didn’t see any blood.
“Quick, hit him again, Zimmerman.” David told me, “Just to be on the safe side.”
“He’s already unconscious,” I said.
“Here, let me do it,” David said, grabbing my board. He swung it over his head and smacked the guy good. He wasn’t moving.
Well, that sure improved the odds. Now there was just one hijacker guarding us all in the coach section. There were three of us, my sister, Arcadia, and a bunch of very angry knitters.
The plane took another big bump, and everybody screamed. It occurred to me that the hijacker I hit over the head was lucky, in a way. He wouldn’t be awake when we crashed.
“That was a big mistake, little man,” said the other hijacker. He was looking straight at me as he stormed down the aisle. Oh no, this was it.
But he didn’t get within ten feet of me.
“Get him!” one of the old ladies shouted.
At that, they all jumped out of their seats. Every one of those blue-haired ladies. They went after the guy with knitting needles, canes, umbrellas, and their own fists. Punching, hitting, kicking, pummeling. I had never seen anything like it.
“The time of humiliation is over!” the guy yelled as he struggled to fight the old ladies off. “We will kill you in your own homeland! This is a battle for the sake of God! The ground will shake under your feet! Death to America!”
Arcadia had her coffeepot ready. There was steam coming out of it. She was going to throw the boiling water in the guy’s face, but she didn’t have to. The old ladies were all over him. We would have piled on to help, but there was no room.
“Kill him!” one of the old ladies shouted.
The guy didn’t stand a chance. It was not a pretty sight. He and his pal were both unconscious. The old ladies high-fived each other.
“What do we do now?” I asked. I was gasping for breath. “Maybe we should wait for the other hijackers to come back here and go after them, too.”
“They’re not gonna come back here,” David said. “Not if they know what’s good for them. We gotta charge the cockpit. There are probably two of them in there.”
“We can’t all go in,” my sister said.
“I’ll go in,” one of the old ladies said, brandishing a knitting needle. “I’ll kill them both.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, I think we have the best chance,” said Henry.
“Then go do it,” said my friend Mildred, “and hurry!”
She was right. We didn’t know where we were. For all we knew, the plane could have been minutes from Washington or New York.
The old ladies went back to their seats, assigning a few of them to watch over the downed hijackers and hit them if they tried to get up. The four of us grabbed canes, needles, anything we could use as a weapon. Henry took a can of soda from the galley so he could punch somebody with it. I got my skateboard. Arcadia put the pot of boiling water on the food cart and we pushed it up the aisle and through the curtain into first class. There was nobody there. The cockpit door was closed.
“You guys will be heroes,” Arcadia told us. “Dead heroes, most likely,” mumbled David.
Henry put his arms around me and David. I pulled Julia into the huddle.
“We’ve been friends since first grade,” Henry said quietly. “We’ll be Woodpushers forever, no matter what happens.”
“Look, forget the touchy-feely carp,” David said. “We’re probably gonna die. Let’s make it so nobody on the ground does.”
“We’ve only got one thing going for us,” I said.
“What’s that?” Julia asked.
“We don’t want to die, and they do.”
“Go get ’em, kids!” yelled one of the old ladies.
CHAPTER 5:
Out of Our Minds
The cockpit door was locked, of course. Even if it wasn’t, we didn’t want to just walk in there. We needed the element of surprise. Our plan was to take the food cart, ram it against the door as hard as we could, and bust it down. Me and David got into position to push, because we were the biggest and strongest.
“Wait a minute!” Arcadia said. “I just remembered. There’s a key to the cockpit door! We keep it hidden in the galley in case of emergency!”
“I’d say this qualifies as an emergency,” Henry said.
Arcadia rushed back to get the key, stepping over one of the hijackers, who was still out cold. She found it quickly and rushed back.
“Henry, you know a little karate,” David said. “You climb in front. Arcadia, you open the lock and then get out of the way so me and Zimmerman can smash the door. As soon as you see one of them, nail him with the water. Right in his face. Then all four of us will go after them. Okay?”
We got into position. I was glad that David was taking charge. Somebody had to. Arcadia slipped the key in the lock and turned it slowly, like she didn’t want the hijackers to know we were opening it.
“Okay, on three,” David said. “One…two…three!”
David and I pushed the cart as hard as we could, slamming it against the door full force. It made a big crashing sound, but the door didn’t budge.
“Again!” David shouted. “Harder.”
But as we pulled the cart back to take another shot, the cockpit door opened. A guy was standing there. He was wearing a mask like the other hijackers and he was holding up an axe. It was one of those emergency axes like the kind firemen use.
“Get out of here!” he yelled. “Return to your seats!”
Like we were really going to do what he said! Arcadia chucked the boiling water and nailed him good, right in the kisser. He screamed and dropped the axe while he covered his eyes with his hands.
“Get him!” David shouted.
All four of us charged the guy and beat him with fists, cans, anything we had. He went down fast. His legs were in the cockpit doorway now, so it couldn’t have been closed no matter what. We should have grabbed the axe off the floor before we hit him, because the other hijacker who was inside the cockpit picked it up and held it up menacingly.
Behind that guy, I could see that the pilot and copilot were both slumped over at the controls. I couldn’t tell if they were alive or not.
“Sit down,” the guy ordered us. “Now!”
“I don’t think so,” David said. He grabbed my skateboard out of my hands and swung it at the guy. The guy blocked it with the axe handle. But that gave us an opening. Me and Henry and Julia went after him with everything we had. It was a blur. Confusion. Arms and legs flying. Screaming. Somebody was cut. I saw blood, but I didn’t know who it belonged to. I was out of my mind. We all were. We were fighting for our lives.
“The gardens of paradise await!” the guy was screaming as he fought. “The hour of reality approaches! We welcome death and we will all meet in heaven! Eternal bliss will be ours!”
He was nuts. I think it was Henry who hit him with a fire extinguisher, which had been attached to the cockpit wall. He dropped the axe. Then we grabbed him and slammed his head against the wall. He went down, just like his friends.
I was crazy with rage. I couldn’t believe what we had done. It was like professional wrestling, but for real. Something instinctive had taken over our minds and compelled us to go crazy for our own survival. I wanted to hit somebody else, but there was nobody else left to hit. We had beaten all four of them.
“Get them out of here!” David yelled. Julia and I dragged the two hijacker
s out of the cockpit area and onto the floor in first class. The old ladies saw what was going on, and they were cheering.
Were they dead? I wasn’t sure. Ordinarily, I would be creeped out touching a dead person. But under the circumstances, I just did what needed to be done and didn’t think about it. They were limp and heavy. I had never even seen a dead body before. I guess I was experiencing a lot of firsts on this flight. I didn’t look at their faces as we dragged them out of the cockpit.
Arcadia said she’d keep an eye on the hijackers and slam them over the head with the coffeepot if any of them woke up. Julia and I rushed back to the cockpit, where Henry and David were.
“He’s dead,” Henry said, his finger touching the neck of one of the pilots. “No pulse.”
Alarms were beeping and nobody was working the controls, but the plane was still flying level. It must have been on autopilot, I guessed. On the floor of the cockpit I noticed an airplane flight manual and a diagram of the cockpit instruments. I wasn’t sure if the pilots kept that in the plane or if the hijackers brought it with them to help them fly it.
“What about the other one?” I asked, unsure of which man was the pilot and which was the copilot.
The one who was still slumped over the controls groaned and moved his head a little to look toward us. He was alive! He would be able to land the plane! We were going to live!
“Any of you fellas…know how to fly?” the pilot grunted. He was laboring to speak.
“I took a lesson once,” Henry said.
“That’s gonna have to do,” the pilot said softly.
And then his eyes rolled back. He went limp and fell off the seat.
CHAPTER 6:
Final Approach
For a moment, David, Henry, Julia, and I just looked at each other. The pilot was dead. The copilot was dead. All four hijackers were either dead or close to it, laid out on the floor in the cabin behind us. The only people who knew how to fly an airplane were out of commission.
“Do you know anything about flying?” I asked Arcadia. I figured a flight attendant might have picked up a thing or two in her work.
“No!” she replied. Then she called out to the old ladies, “Does anybody know anything about flying?”
“Goodness, no!” one of them said.
A few of the others started praying again. Nobody jumped up and offered to take the controls.
“We gotta land this thing!” David said. “Henry, sit here! Zimmerman, help me drag these guys outta here.”
“B-but I just took one lesson!” Henry protested.
His mother always complains that Henry never sticks with anything. He’s one of those kids who takes one lesson of something and drops out. Then he takes a lesson of something else and drops out. The good thing is, Henry knows at least a little bit about everything.
“This is Greek to me!” Henry said, his voice rising in panic. He was just sitting there staring at the controls.
“You must have learned something,” David begged Henry. “Think!”
“I know there’s an electrical system, fuel system, navigational system, communications system, fire-detection system, hydraulic system, cabin-pressurization system. But I don’t know how to work them!”
I couldn’t blame Henry for freaking out. The dashboard or control panel or whatever it was called had dozens of dials and gauges and switches all over it. How could anyone know what they all did? Some of the glass covering the dials and gauges had been broken in the fight. Some had blood on them. You couldn’t even see through them.
“Okay, calm down, Henry,” David said. “Do you remember any of the basics, like how to make the plane go up and down, left and right?”
“Yeah,” Henry said, taking a deep breath. “The plane flies straight and level if you don’t do anything. You pull on the yoke to go up, and you push it forward to go down. Same with left and right.”
I didn’t even know what a yoke was, but Henry pulled on some doohickey in front of him that looked like a video game joystick and I could feel the plane tilt up a little.
“That’s good, Henry,” David said, putting a hand on his shoulder. I knew he was trying to be positive and comforting. Henry was going to need our support.
“It’s not like the Cessna I took my lesson in,” Henry said. “It’s bigger. Heavy. Slow.”
“Can you land it?” David asked.
“How should I know?” Henry said, his voice rising again.
“Okay, calm down,” David said.
“Where would I land it, anyway?” Henry asked.
It was a good question. We all looked out the window. The plane was pretty low. There was nothing but trees and lakes down there. If there was a highway, maybe we could land on it. But there wasn’t. Maybe we were wrong when we thought we had turned back toward the East Coast. Maybe we were flying over Canada.
“The sun is to the right of us,” Julia said. “That means we’re heading north, toward Canada.”
“How do you know?” asked David.
“Girl Scouts,” she replied. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.” Julia has been a scout since she was five. I dropped out of Boy Scouts as soon as I took up skateboarding.
Arcadia came back into the cockpit to check up on us.
“Did you figure out how to make the radio work?” she asked.
The radio! Of course! We could radio somebody and they could “talk us down.” I saw somebody do that in a movie once. It hadn’t even occurred to me. Henry picked up a headset. He fiddled with it and yelled “Mayday! Mayday!”
“It’s busted,” he said, “and I think they disabled the transponder.”
“The transwhat?” I asked.
“It’s like a receiver that tells the air traffic controllers where we are,” Arcadia told me.
“So we’re not a blip on some air traffic controller’s radar screen?” David asked.
“Possibly not,” Arcadia said. “What about fuel? Maybe we can keep flying until we find a better place to land.”
We hunted all over for a fuel gauge. There were a few of them on the lower part of the instrument panel. I guess they have more than one fuel tank. The needles were close to empty.
“Oh, great!” David moaned.
That didn’t make sense. The plane was heading for Chicago. How could it be low on fuel?
“Maybe the hijackers dumped the fuel,” Arcadia said. “You can do that in case you need to get the weight down in an emergency.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would they want to dump fuel?”
“Maybe the pilot dumped the fuel as soon as the plane was hijacked,” Henry suggested. “That way, the hijackers wouldn’t be able to reach their target.”
“It doesn’t matter who dumped the fuel,” David said urgently. “We gotta land this thing soon or we’re just gonna run out of gas and go down wherever we are.”
He was right. And right after he said that, it suddenly got quieter in the cockpit and the nose started to dip even though Henry hadn’t pushed on the yoke.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
Henry looked out the left side.
“One of the engines is out!” he shouted.
David cursed.
“Maybe the trees will cushion our fall,” Julia said. “Like shock absorbers.”
“Yeah, hitting a tree should be real gentle,” David said.
“The other engine stopped!” Arcadia shouted, looking out the right side.
We didn’t need her to tell us. There was a strange and eerie quiet suddenly. After a while you don’t notice the constant hum of an airplane’s engine. But when it stops, it’s like you’re alone in the woods in the middle of the night. It felt like we were moving more slowly.
The nose tilted down a little more. The treetops were suddenly bigger in the window.
“Pull it up, Henry!” David shouted, tapping the fuel gauge with his finger. “We’re losing altitude!”
Henry pulled the yoke back and the
nose went up a little, but not all the way to level.
“It won’t go any higher!” he yelled. “We’re out of fuel. We’re gliding!”
“So can you glide it down?” David yelled. “Try to steer it between the trees!”
“It’s so heavy!” Henry said, still pulling on the yoke like he was in a tug-of-war.
The trees were getting bigger and bigger, rushing past us. There were trees everywhere. It didn’t look like there was any room between them. We had to hit them. We were going awfully fast.
“Hold on!”
“This is it!”
“Brace yourselves against something!” Arcadia yelled.
We probably should have gotten out of the cockpit. We should have run to the back, let the front of the plane hit the trees, and hoped to get out alive after the plane broke apart. That would have been smart. But there was no time. We weren’t thinking straight. And we couldn’t stop looking at the trees coming at us. It was hypnotizing. We were frozen.
The tops of the trees licked the underside of the plane and there was a scraping noise as they bent against it. Somebody screamed. We were falling into the forest. I saw the nose ram right through the middle of two thick trees. There was a jolt, then a crash. The sound of metal ripping apart. A rush of air. More screams. The smell of something burning. Tree trunks flying past us. Getting knocked off my feet. My head hitting something.
And that was the last thing I remembered.
CHAPTER 7:
Better than the Alternative
I didn’t die. I thought I had died. How could I have survived? I thought that maybe I was in heaven. That would have been nice, a pleasant way to die. But then I opened my eyes. Heaven probably didn’t have the smell of burning rubber. Heaven probably didn’t have the wreckage of a small jet plane. That’s what I was looking at.
My skateboard was clutched to my chest. Where did that come from? I didn’t remember picking it up. But I must have. It was like I was holding on to it for dear life. Maybe it had saved my life. Maybe, like a bulletproof shield, it had stopped whatever I crashed into when the plane hit the trees. I would never know for sure, but I was glad I had it. The best thing that ever happened to me was that my skateboard didn’t fit in the overhead bin.
