Then I looked at Malcolm. My best friend. He was such a good friend, in fact, that he reliably made me reconsider my lack of faith in humanity. If not for Malcolm I’d have probably been found face-down in a bathtub years ago. We were so different, the two of us—me the progeny of blue-collars, him of blue bloods—yet life without him would be inconceivable. He looked back at me with an expression weighted with guilt. Tears poured down his cheeks, and his shoulders shook. Anita patted his chest in an attempt to be comforting. Following her suit, I tried to smile at him upliftingly, but a sob caught in my throat instead.
Suddenly Flo appeared before me. “Kid,” she said, embracing me briefly, “it’s go time.” She took her jumpseat, secured her safety straps, and began calling out her crash commands. “Brace! Brace! Heads down! Stay low!”
I hurriedly slipped into the captain’s seat and strapped myself in. We were mere feet from the ocean. An odd thought entered my mind at that moment: Wow, look how blue it is. It was literally the color of my mother’s eyes. Otis let out another hoot like this was fun for him, then turned to me and laughed, “You’re my left eye, Crash!”
I felt the saltwater mist hit me through the opening in the cockpit window. Otis began the countdown. “Impact in minus five seconds . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
CHAPTER 23
The left wing was the first to break off. It hit a wave and took with it a large part of the starboard side of the aircraft. The sound was monstrous as the plane tore in half. Then the right wing sank into the sea like a keel at the bottom of a ship, briefly upending the remainder of the fuselage so that we hovered cruelly above the ocean before crashing back into it with the might of two planets colliding. I was alarmed by the sound of screaming until I realized it was my own.
“Brace! Brace! Heads down! Stay low!”
Then came the water. It gushed through the cockpit window with the force of a fire hose. I released my seatbelts and stood, only to have my feet slip out from beneath me as the flood of water carried me out of the cockpit and down the aisle.
“Release seatbelts! Get up! Get out!” I kept screaming. Flo was already out of her jumpseat opening the aircraft door. The slide raft should have been deployed as soon as the girt bar separated from the door bustle. That was the point. It should have been automatic. But things rarely go as they should. Instead, water gushed through the opening, pushing the flaccid slide raft aside like it was a vertical window blind.
“Get up! Get out!” I couldn’t even tell anymore if it was me or Flo screaming the commands, or perhaps it was the two of us now, one voice in unison. LaVonda sailed past me down the aisle, still clutching Trixibelle. I grabbed the collar of her life vest and held on. My foot gained purchase against a seat rail and I used my body to block the flow of any more people down the aisle. The point was to exit through the front forward door and into the raft, but I began to question this logic since the last I saw the raft didn’t inflate.
An explosion deafened me even further. I realized it was the sound of the CO2 canisters detonating the air into the raft. Flo must have found the manual inflation handle that is present on all slide rafts in the event they didn’t deploy automatically. I felt a moment of relief only to be crushed again by the sound of LaVonda screaming.
“Trixi!” she wailed. The explosion had unnerved LaVonda and caused her grip to slip on the dog. Trixi yelped as she washed away from us and out the torn opening of the aircraft. “Trixi!” LaVonda cried again, reaching away from me toward the dog’s direction.
“LaVonda, no!” I screamed. She was trying to extricate herself from my grip, trying to go after Trixi. “Please, don’t.” But it was no use. Within seconds she had writhed herself free and was washed out into the ocean after Trixi. I cried her name as I heard Anita and Malcolm cry mine. The force of the water was crushing. It pounded me like a ton of gravel as it washed through the fuselage. It was impossible to struggle against it to make my way toward the others, and just as impossible to keep my grip on the seat railing.
Suddenly I felt someone beside me. It was Officer Ned sliding past me down the aisle. He grabbed onto my waist with both arms. The weight of him forced loose my grip on the seat rail, and my fingers opened like reluctant flower petals. Soon we were both awash in the rushing water. It startled me that the cabin was completely submerged now, and here I’d forgotten to take a last gulp of air before going under. My lungs screamed in pain as we passed through the torn aircraft and into the open sea. When I looked above me I realized I didn’t have near enough air in my lungs to last me to the surface. Even though Officer Ned gripped my vest with his injured arm and flailed toward the surface with the other, I knew I wouldn’t make it. The last thing I remembered before feeling the water begin to fill my chest was the sight of the bottom of the raft as it floated what seemed like a mile above us.
Thank God somebody made it, I thought. Then the world went white.
CHAPTER 24
Southern Times
“Airline Heiress, Unofficial Mascot Among the Missing in Disappeared Jet”
April 4, 2014
by Clay Roundtree
It’s either official or far from it. Whatever the case, the ongoing mystery surrounding WorldAir’s disappearing airplanes took a new twist today when WorldAir spokesperson Rand Appleton confirmed reports that April Mae Manning, the temporarily deposed heiress to controlling stock in the company, along with the service dog Captain Beefheart, the airline’s beloved unofficial mascot, is among those missing aboard WorldAir flight 9000 (also codeshared as Peacock Airways flight 0001), which disappeared over the Caribbean Sea two days ago after departing Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport for Grand Cayman. This brings the list of those passengers missing on WorldAir flights in the past year to a grand total of 272, a number that includes flight 0392, a 747 that vanished off the coast of Australia November 18.
This list remains frustratingly unofficial, though, due to the fact that one name on the passenger manifest—Morton Colgate—was discovered to belong to a body at the North Fulton County coroner’s office that had been dead for days prior to the plane’s disappearance. Another person on the departure report, crew member Teddy LaVista, was found to be alive and well and incarcerated at the Fulton County prison on drunk driving charges.
Appleton also confirmed that Ash Manning, April’s adoptive father and the airplane’s pilot, who had been in a raft off the coast of Cancún, claimed in his statement to the NTSB that he was the sole survivor of the L-1011 wreckage.
“His statement reads, ‘Everyone else died on impact,’” Appleton said of Captain Manning’s statement. “That is a verbatim quote.”
Copilot John Dyer, a Grand Cayman national, was found floating in a life vest a half a mile away from the raft. He remains in a hospital in Cancún, Mexico, recovering from exposure and deep lacerations along his left thigh. Peacock Airways spokesperson Paul Packard reports that Dyer is unavailable to provide either a statement to the NTSB or a comment to the media at this time—other than what Dyer was recorded saying when the Mexican coast guard pulled him into the rescue vessel: “That prick Manning tried to feed me to the sharks!”
Dyer is not the only one skeptical of Mr. Manning’s integrity, or his assertions regarding the survivors of the flight. The most vocal is Elizabeth Coleman, April’s mother and Ash Manning’s ex-wife. “Don’t believe a word that bastard says,” she insists of Mr. Manning. “Don’t you dare stop searching the ocean for that plane! I know my daughter. I know she’s alive.”
The L-1011 aircraft, at the time of its disappearance, was being ferried to its new base in Grand Cayman after its sale by WorldAir to Peacock Airways. It vanished from the radar thirty-seven minutes after takeoff. At the same time all cockpit communication ceased. Search vessels from several countries were dispatched to an expanse of the Caribbean Sea between Cancún, Mexico, Nueva Gerona, Cuba and the Cayman Islands. The area was triangulated according to a radar blip believed to be the last captured from the
injured aircraft.
Update: “Former WorldAir Pilot Ash Manning an FBI Informant”
5:16 P.M.
Ash Manning, the former WorldAir pilot pulled from the sea yesterday after losing control of the L-1011 passenger jet he was piloting, was revealed to be an FBI informant after documents and intercompany emails leaked to the media surfaced this afternoon. The emails detail Manning’s FBI-sanctioned involvement with a suspected counterfeit airplane-parts smuggling operation headquartered in Atlanta in which a network of airline and airport employees were involved. The emails reference Manning’s release from detainment after the crash of WorldAir’s flight 1021 in Albuquerque last year, a condition of which was that he turn State’s witness against those involved in the hijacking and further assist in the agency’s investigation into the Atlanta-based smuggling ring.
In one email exchange between Manning and WorldAir CEO Vernon Wadley, Manning discloses that his ex-wife, mother of April Mae Manning, the teenager set to inherit controlling stock in the airline, had confided to him during their marriage that April was conceived via in vitro fertilization using donated sperm. This email is dated two days before April Manning was forcibly removed from the airline’s executive offices pending confirmation of her lineage to late engineer/inventor Roy Coleman.
CHAPTER 25
The world was still white, and I still floated in it, but in a different way than when I was floating in the ocean. This world was warmer, for one, and so bright. I felt a familiar hand caress my face. I kept my eyes closed and smiled.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, Goldie,” he said. I felt him shake me gently. “Time to open your eyes.”
I furrowed my brow. I didn’t want to break this beautiful spell. It was bad enough I could already feel myself begin to sink back into the coldness that came before this moment. “No,” I objected, “please let me stay.”
He shook me a tad more firmly. His voice was sweet just like I remembered. “Time to wake up.”
The shaking became frantic, the voice louder. “Wake up! Wake up! April, please! WAKE UP!”
I opened my eyes and the entire harsh, cold world seemed to empty back into me through my lungs. “Wake up,” Malcolm sobbed as he performed chest compressions over me, “please, April!”
Flo stopped him—“She’s back, Malcolm”—and turned me on my side. I coughed so violently it felt like I’d see my own socks fly out of my mouth any second. Once they were sure I’d expelled all the sea water out of my lungs, Flo and Malcolm helped me sit upright. I winced in pain. Malcolm probably cracked a rib or two. He was good at CPR; I knew because I taught him myself right out of the flight attendant handbook. Anita sat across from us in the raft, tending to Captain Beefheart, who was still strapped in his life vest contraption, and an exhausted Officer Ned. He caught sight of me, smiled, and in that second fell unconscious again. I felt bad he was always getting shot because of me.
“He’ll be okay,” Anita folded herself across his body to keep him warm and lessen his chances of going into shock. “He’s breathing, he’ll be fine. Yes,” she continued, rubbing his forearms briskly, careful to avoid his bullet wound.
My throat felt like I’d swallowed a basket of sea urchins. “Where’s LaVonda?” I craned my neck in a panic. Malcolm sat behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and pulled me to him. Flo sat in front of me and I wrapped my arms around her. There the three of us sat, front-to-back, like a shivering toboggan team. They still hadn’t answered me.
“Where’s LaVonda?” I repeated. “And where’s Otis?”
CHAPTER 26
Southern Times
“WorldAir Flight 9000, Bodies Identified”
April 4, 9:11 A.M.
by Clay Roundtree
Three bodies found floating in the Caribbean Sea were discovered by passengers on the Carnival cruise ship Exclamation! earlier today. “I was showing my new bride how to flick bottle caps off the front of the ship and all of a sudden I says to myself, I says, ‘What the hell is that out there floating in the ocean?’” passenger Mike Hammond recalls. “So I pointed it out to the cocktail waitress and she set out screaming for the captain.”
Floating in the ocean were three travel caskets containing human remains, each marked with stickers identifying them as cargo from WorldAir flight 9000, which crashed into the ocean two days ago. At a press conference held just minutes ago, search and rescue agency chief Fernando Montillo had this to say:
“The caskets contained the remains of three WorldAir employees, the identities of whom we were able to recover because of their work badges. Those identities are: Bus driver Whitney Smith, security officer John Parkerson and someone we believe to be a WorldAir mechanic. We actually found several different ID badges on that last one, so we picked the name with a picture to match his face: Otis Blodgett.”
It was unclear if the victims perished as a result of the crash or had been in the cargo area being transported as human remains. “Well, since they were in caskets,” Montillo said, “logic leads us to believe they’d been boarded that way, as human remains.” Just then Montillo was taken aside by his assistant. When he returned to the microphone, Montillo said, “Ah, we have a survivor.”
After the uproar quieted, questions arose as to where the search team found the survivor, to which Montillo answered, “I didn’t say we found one. I said we have one.”
Update EXCLUSIVE: “Body from WorldAir Flight 9000 Suddenly Springs Back to Life”
12:32 P.M.
Doctors, medical personnel and two passengers aboard the Carnival cruise ship Exclamation! were startled speechless today when—after their ship was commandeered by an international search task force to temporarily store occupied caskets recovered from the wreckage of WorldAir flight 9000—a body inside one of the caskets suddenly sat upright and began howling like a wolf. Two nurses, an orderly and two passengers in the clinic waiting room immediately fainted, reportedly.
“I could have sworn he was dead when he got here,” says Dr. Veronica Li, communicating via her cellphone from the ship’s hospital, where the formerly dead man had instructed her to call me. She reiterated, “That man looked pretty dead.”
That man is Otis Blodgett, a WorldAir mechanic whose presence on board the doomed airplane was not documented on the passenger manifest and still needs to be explained. Blodgett tells this reporter, “Not dead, just rebooting.”
Blodgett informs that he was in the cockpit at the time the plane crashed into the sea, at which point he got flushed through a break in the fuselage and out into the open water. “I just grabbed onto any flotation device I could find, and lo and behold”—his laughter does sound much like a wolf howling—“this casket knocks against me in the water. It’s a perfectly sized little life boat, if you ask me.”
Update: “WorldAir Flight 9000; Five Survivors, Plus One Dog, Found”
3:24 P.M.
Guided by airline mechanic Otis Blodgett, who earlier had been mistaken for a dead body rather than a survivor of the wreckage of WorldAir flight 9000, search and rescue task force members spotted a large yellow raft eight miles off the coast of Cuba just moments ago. Inside the raft were five more survivors of the crash: Malcolm Colgate, 15, Anita Washington, 42, WorldAir shareholder April Mae Manning, 16, WorldAir head of security Ned Rockwell, 41, and WorldAir flight attendant Flo Davenport, 67. All but Davenport’s name were absent from the doomed plane’s departure report. Their presence on the aircraft has yet to be explained and constitutes a major security breach in the company.
“How should I know?” an exasperated Vernon Wadley, the recently appointed CEO of WorldAir, says of the security breach. “My head of security is on a raft in the middle of the ocean right now.”
Also on the raft was Captain Beefheart, the beloved mascot of WorldAir, shown here in a picture with rescue workers appearing on naval helicopter pilot Tyrone Bradley’s Instagram account.
“Look who we found floating in the ocean! #CaptainBeefheart,” the ca
ption read. The update has received over 700,000 hits in the last half hour alone.
Southern Times
UPDATE: “WorldAir Mechanic’s Head Found, America’s Most Wanted Molly Marichino (aka Molly Hackman, aka Molly Martindale, aka Molly Taguchi) Among Perished in WorldAir Crash of Flight 9000”
April 6, 2014
by Clay Roundtree
Molly Marichino, or Molly Hackman as she’s been called of late, was known to collect men. At the time of her death, which occurred horribly and accidentally by her own hand when she shot out the window of a WorldAir jet during flight and was sucked though the hole and into the airplane’s engine, she had been married five times. Not five consecutive times, mind you, but five times concurrently.
“To pigeonhole her as just a bigamist would be like saying O.J. was just a football player,” says Detective Jeffrey Wilson of the Beaumont Police Department. (For the purpose of combining all her aliases, she will be referred to as “Molly” from this point forward.) In 2000, Molly had escaped the Beaumont prison system by murdering and then impersonating the prison nurse, whom she’d befriended. She’s been on the run ever since. “Whenever the police got close, she seemed to disappear again,” Wilson observed. “It’s like she was smoke.”
Molly’s fourth marriage was to Archibald Hackman, a mechanic for WorldAir whose severed head was among the items recovered from a rescue raft containing five survivors of the crash into the sea of WorldAir flight 9000. The head was discovered wrapped in plastic inside a rucksack said to have belonged to Molly. No one on board the raft is responding to requests for an interview.
“It was all part of one of her scams,” Wilson explained. In this case the scam reportedly involved a half-million-dollar insurance policy that Hackman was due to collect. The policy centered on a woman clinging to life at the hospital, and if Hackman was discovered to have died before she did, the insurance company would not be obligated to pay out a settlement, leaving Molly unable to access the funds herself. “I knew she was evil, but to chop off someone’s head? That’s despicable.”
We Will Be Crashing Shortly Page 17