Falling by T.J. Newman
For my parents, Ken and Denise Newman
What hath God wrought!
—Numbers 23:23
WHEN THE SHOE DROPPED INTO her lap the foot was still in it.
She flung it into the air with a shriek. The bloodied mass hung in weightless suspension before being sucked out of the massive hole in the side of the aircraft. On the floor next to her seat, a flight attendant crawled up the aisle screaming for the passengers to put their oxygen masks on.
From the back of the airplane, Bill observed it all.
The passenger with the shoe clearly couldn’t hear what the young flight attendant was yelling. She probably hadn’t heard a thing since the explosion. Thin lines of blood trickled out of both ears.
The blast had thrown the flight attendant’s body into the air and then back down, her head of curly brown hair hitting the floor with a thwack. She lay motionless for a second before the plane went into a steep nosedive. Sliding down the aisle, the flight attendant grabbed at the metal rungs beneath the passenger seats. Clutching on to one, her arms shook as she tried to pull herself up against the plane’s downward pitch. As she flipped onto her side, her feet floated and dangled in the air. Debris flew all around the plane; paper and clothing, a laptop, a soda can. A baby’s blanket. It was like the inside of a tornado.
Bill followed her gaze down the plane—and saw sky.
Sunlight shone in on them from a wide opening that had been the over-wing emergency exit not thirty seconds ago. The other flight attendant had just stopped there to collect trash.
Bill had watched the older, redheaded flight attendant smile, take the empty cup in her gloved hand, drop it in the plastic bag—and then in one explosive moment she was gone. The whole row was gone. The side of the aircraft was gone. Bill widened his stance as the plane yawed left to right, seemingly unable to keep a straight path. Of course, the rudder, he thought. The whole tail was probably damaged.
A crack came from above the brunette flight attendant’s head as several overhead bins burst open. Luggage tumbled out, tossed violently about the cabin. A large pink suitcase with wheels shot forward, sucked toward the opening. It hit the side of the fuselage as it went out, a chunk of the aircraft’s skin ripped off with it. Exposed frames and stringers created a lattice of human engineering against the heavens. Beyond the whipping wires hissing orange and yellow sparks, clouds dotted the view. Bill squinted against the sun.
The plane leveled off enough that the flight attendant on the floor could get to her knees. Bill watched her struggle against a body that wouldn’t cooperate. She managed to pull her leg forward only to find her femur sticking out of her thigh. She blinked at the bloody wound a few times and then kept crawling.
“Masks!” she screamed, dragging herself up the aisle toward the back of the plane, her voice barely audible above the deafening roar of wind. She looked over to a man grabbing at the oxygen masks. He caught one and went to put it over his face but a gust ripped it out of his fingers, plastic and elastic straps flailing.
Gray fog choked the cabin in a swirling haze of debris and chaos. A metal water bottle went flying through the air, smacking into the crawling flight attendant’s face. Blood began to pour from her nose.
“He’s been shot! My husband! Help!”
Bill looked to the woman pounding her fists against her husband’s lifeless torso. Two small circles in his forehead streamed red over his eyes and down his cheeks. The flight attendant brushed the curls out of her face as she pulled herself up on the armrests for a closer look.
They weren’t bullets. They were rivets from the plane.
The plane vibrated violently and the floor began to buckle. Bill could feel everything shifting beneath him. He wondered if the airframe would hold. He wondered how much time they had.
The flight attendant continued on, placing her hand in a dark spot on the carpet at the same moment Bill smelled the urine. The flight attendant looked up at the man in the aisle seat. He stared off in a state of shock, the puddle spreading at his feet.
“Ice,” someone moaned.
The flight attendant turned. Bill watched the passenger on the other side of the aisle extend her hands to the young woman, holding out a fleshy chunk of something. The flight attendant recoiled. Looking up, the passenger’s chin and neck were painted crimson.
“Ice,” she repeated, a wave of blood gushing out of her mouth.
It was her tongue.
Bill glanced over his shoulder to the back wall, watching the cord of the interphone thrash in the wind as the flight attendant crawled toward it. He looked to the other side of the galley. The third flight attendant lay crumpled on the floor, a toppled carton of juice next to her. Bill turned his head to the side, watching the glugs of orange mix with the pool of red around her body.
The brunette dragged herself at last to the end of the aisle, packets of sugar and mini creamers crunching against her uniform. She reached a hand forward but yanked it back.
A pair of black dress shoes blocked her path.
The flight attendant looked up. Lying at Bill’s feet, broken and bloodied, her jaw hung open but no words came. Bill’s tie flapped in the wind. The sound of the engines screamed at them both, willing something, anything, to happen.
“But… if you’re…” the flight attendant stammered, looking up at Bill, betrayal written across her face. “Who has control of the plane, Captain Hoffman?”