Brace For Impact. Janice Kay Johnson

      TAT-A-TAT, TAT-A-TAT, TAT-A-TAT.

      Maddy tried to understand the staccato series of rapping sounds followed by silence, then a repeat. Strangely reluctant to open her eyes, she listened hard.

      A harsh call. A trilling.

      Something brushed her face. She jerked, and pain racked her body.

      Have to see, have to see. Somehow she knew she really didn’t want to know what had happened, but...even aside from the pain, so diffused she wasn’t sure what the source of it was, her head felt weird. So she slitted her eyes.

      And let out a shocked cry. She was hanging upside down. And looking at a completely unfamiliar landscape. Ground that was tilted. Rocks, the rough boles of trees and feathery sweeps of green branches.

      Wanting to retreat into darkness again, she squeezed her eyes shut, but a stern inner voice refused to let her go back into hiding. Figure out what’s wrong. Like why I’m hanging upside down like a bat settling for a snooze. She’d have giggled if she hadn’t known instinctively how much that would hurt.

       All right, all right.

      This time when she opened her eyes, she lifted her chin to look upward. It took her way longer than it should have to comprehend. A belt across her lap and shoulder held her in a seat anchored to torn metal. Not a car seat, she thought, puzzled. Was that...? It was... A wing—an airplane wing—was attached, stabbing toward the ground amidst the greenery.

      Airplane seat belt, not car. It was all that held her from falling. A flicker of memory and she knew. That’s why I’m alive, she thought in shock, trying to imagine the force that had torn the plane into pieces.

      The Cessna. In a flood of renewed fear, she listened for voices, cries, anything to indicate one or both of the men were alive.

      “Scott!” she called. “Bill!” Her “Anyone?” trailed off weakly.

      She heard something; she just didn’t know what.

      Getting down had to come before anything else.

      She could open the seat belt, but would drop what had to be eight or ten feet onto her head. Even fuzzy-minded as she was, she knew that wouldn’t be smart.

      She tried to pull herself upward, grabbing a piece of the wreckage. Metal groaned, shifted, and Maddy froze. Her head swam, and she looked to see bright red blood running down her arm. She must have sliced her palm open. In the greater scheme of things, it didn’t seem important. Being fuzzy insulated her. She found a more solid handhold—the side of the cabin, minus the window—took a deep breath and unsnapped the belt.

      Her bloody hand slipped from the wreckage and she fell sooner than she’d planned, twisting to land hard on her butt and side. She skidded, bumping to a stop against a boulder. Pain engulfed her and she gritted her teeth against the need to scream.

      When she was finally able to move, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t lost consciousness again. From the angle of the sun through the trees, it hadn’t been long, though. Unless she’d lost an entire day? No, the blood on her hand and arm still looked fresh.

      Sitting up proved to be an agonizing effort. The left side of her body must have taken the brunt of the damage. Either her arm was broken, or dislocated. Or it could be her collarbone, she supposed. And ribs, and hip. But when she ordered her feet to waggle, they did, and when she experimentally bent her knees, doing so didn’t make her want to pass out.

      Maddy continued to evaluate her condition. She had to wipe blood away from her eyes, which suggested a gash or blow up there somewhere. Her head hurt fiercely, making it hard to think. And yes, she had definitely slashed open her palm, although she was already so bloody, she could hardly tell where this stream was coming from. None of the blood fountained, though, just trickled and left smears, so she wasn’t bleeding to death.

      Or dying at all. She didn’t think.

      With her right hand she clutched the thin bole of a wispy, small evergreen of some kind and used it to pull herself to her feet. Then she turned slowly in search of the rest of the plane. Not the tail—she didn’t care about the tail. The nose. The front seats, the two men. Logically, they had to be...somewhere in front of her.

      Tat-a-tat, tat-a-tat, tat-a-tat.

      Woodpecker, she understood. It kept tapping as she struggled forward, the sound weirdly comforting. Something else was alive, going about its business.

      She glimpsed red and white between the trees, and tried to run even on the steep sideways slope. She fell to her knees and slithered downhill until she came up against a tree solid enough to hold her. As she pushed herself up again, an involuntary whimper escaped her. Her eyes stung—whether from blood or tears, Maddy didn’t know.

      This time she moved more carefully, watching where she put her feet, grabbing branches where she could for support. The rocky side hill didn’t support huge trees. Maybe...maybe these had softened the landing.

      And torn the plane to shreds, too.

      She saw the other wing first. It had slashed raw places in tree trunks and ripped away branches. More metal lay ahead, another thirty or forty feet.

      There she found Bill Potter, still in his seat as she’d been, but the way his head lay on his shoulder—Her teeth chattered as she made herself take a closer look. And then she backed away and bent over puking, snot and tears and blood mixing until she had to use the hem of her shirt to wipe her face again.

      She called for Scott, listened. Did it again, and this time she heard a cry. I’m not alone. Whispering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she half crawled in that direction.

      When she saw him, crumpled and twisted, her teeth started to chatter again. That couldn’t be right. People didn’t bend that way.

      She had to scramble the last bit, the ground cold and sloping even more steeply here.

      His eyes were open when she reached him, but beneath his tan his face was a color she’d never seen. His lips were almost blue.

      “Scott,” she whispered, not letting herself look at his lower body.

      “Maddy.” Her name came out so quietly, she bent close to hear him. Took his hand in hers, but his chilly fingers didn’t tighten in response. Something else she didn’t want to think about.

      “I’ll go for help,” she said, unable to help crying.

      “No.” Suddenly, his fingers convulsed like claws, biting into her hand. His eyes held hers with fierce determination. “Not an accident.”

      That was something she hadn’t yet let herself think. Even though she knew, she knew, Maddy heard herself saying, “What?”

      “Bomb.”