…stared back at me for a moment before I grabbed the dog, two paws in each hand, and threw him around my neck. I glanced up for a fraction of a moment before I turned to run; no one in the room was moving. They all just stared at me, none so coldly as the man in the middle of the room. I booked it back to the front of the plane in half the time it took me to traverse the distance going the other direction, the weight of my canine passenger non-withstanding.
Upon reaching the open hatch next to the cockpit I found that my vantage was significantly lower compared to the hatch of the plane parked opposite. What had been a relatively dangerous yet possible jump from one passenger jet to another over the choppy waves of a stormy sea had become an almost impossible leap. I yelled for someone in the other plane to help me. A face appeared and I hurled the frightened dog over my head into the man’s waiting arms. Before I jumped myself I looked down to see the front landing gear slipping into the inky black sea. I took three steps back, and propelled myself forward with every muscle in my legs, out of the hatchway, out over the deadly water…
…and barely grabbed hold of the bottom of the frame of the hatch of the adjacent aircraft. As I screamed for help I could feel my fingers slipping from the rain-slicked metal. Almost instantly arms appeared over my head and I was hoisted inside, out of the rain, and out of immediate harms way. I stood in the doorway and watch as what could have turned out to be a long metal coffin for me and the recently saved passengers roll off the end of the runway, into the cold black waters. At the end of the plane was an over-sized window, whose placement was wrong. It should not have been there. A yellow light burned inside that window, and a face stared back at me as the plane continued its descent into the depths. My face.
I turned to the pilots, whose questioning faces were still pointed out the hatch.
“Start the engines. We need to get out of here.” It took a second for my words to register, then the co-pilot said something about unsafe flying conditions.
“Get us the fuck out of here NOW. That was not a version of me we want to deal with. Now MOVE!”
