We are unable to operate the landing gear properly and an in-flight refueling can’t be performed at this late juncture. Therefore, we’ll be touching down in a water-landing on Lake Erie. When we hit the water, use your seat cushions as flotation devices. Slide the straps over your shoulders and activate the light beacon located on the left-hand side. Please secure your own flotation devices before attempting to help out children or fellow passengers. Exits are clearly marked and located at the front, middle and back of the plane. Please try to stay as calm as you possibly can. The Coast Guard is standing by. May God have mercy on our souls.’
The intercom clicked off and Dana’s breath hitched in her throat. She looked out her window again and felt her heartbeat notch up another fifty levels in her chest. In the distance, two Coast Guard cutters were steaming full-speed ahead toward an undetermined rendezvous point somewhere out on the menacing, gray-blue expanse of Lake Erie. Choppy waters threw around the massive cutters like toy boats bobbing up and down in the bathtub wake of a giggling, squirming child.
A massive adrenalin dump flooded into Dana’s veins and left her arms and legs tingling and feeling weak as a flight attendant in her mid-twenties charged down the aisle checking seatbelts; glancing first to her right and then to her left with a look of absolute terror etched into her pretty face. Thirty seconds later, the plane angled sharply downward and began its stomach-turning descent.
Dana’s heart did a quick series of quick somersaults in her chest as they went down, back-flipping across her ribcage like a highly trained Olympic gymnast springing handstands across cushioned mats. A moment later, an oxygen mask dropped down in front of her from a hidden compartment in the ceiling and dangled before her eyes. Reaching out with shaking hands, Dana fastened the plastic cup over her mouth and nose with the elastic drawstring while her mind flashed back to the story of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the former Air Force fighter pilot who’d been hailed as a hero for crash-landing his plane in the Hudson River in 2009 without incurring any fatalities or major injuries to the one hundred fifty-five souls aboard US Airways Flight 1549, Charlotte to New York City. Dana only prayed that the passengers onboard Continental Flight 942, nonstop LA to Cleveland, would prove every bit as fortunate.
They didn’t.
When the plane slammed down into the water fifty seconds later, it did so with enough force to rearrange Dana’s insides as though they’d been crammed into a gigantic blender turned up full-speed. A sickening rollercoaster feeling stabbed her deep in the gut. Unearthly sounds filled her ears: the screams of her fellow passengers; the rumble of an unimaginably powerful earthquake, as though some unseen giant had torn the Earth off its axis and was now shaking the world like an insignificant snow-globe he’d idly plucked off a big-city department store’s pristine shelf. The unbearable screech of twisting metal as the interior walls of the plane bowed and moaned and sagged. The whine and pop of rivets that suddenly transformed into deadly projectiles that whistled and shot through the confined space of the cabin like bullets fired from a gun.
Dana gripped her armrests with all her might, digging her fingernails into the plastic hard enough to draw blood. A sliding, disorienting sense of movement racked her body as the plane plowed even deeper into the murky water. The very last thing she remembered hearing was little Bradley’s terrified yelp of fear in front of her.
That’s when everything around Dana went pitch-black and dead silent. There were no more screams in her ears. No more rumbling in her belly. No more screeching of metal as the plane came apart at the seams. No more whimpering from little Bradley in the seat in front of her as Dana’s head slammed violently into the window out of which she’d been staring during various parts of the long flight. Just an unfamiliar sense of weightlessness in her limbs and head and torso as she floated away softly on a black cloud into a dark place she’d never before visited – and damn sure never wanted to visit again.
CHAPTER 4
Claire Bishop moaned groggily as the date-rape drug she’d been given wore off and she came to, but her moans sure as hell weren’t coming from sexual anticipation this time. Not even close. After all, it was pretty hard to feel horny