41
Casey
Klaus had a very nice set up near the beach. The drug company he worked for had really gone all out in supplying him. He and his men had a fancy, roomy tent, a bonafide real toilet, a bunch of gear, a sophisticated radio, and a sea plane. While we chowed down on the fresh fruit and sandwiches that were helpfully stored in their coolers, David gestured to the plane.
“That’s our way out of this mess.” He eyed the plane like he couldn’t wait to press the buttons in it.
“Um, you can’t be serious,” I told him, shaking my head. “Wait… do you know how to fly a seaplane?”
He nodded as if flying seaplanes was a skill that everyone knows how to do. “Sure.”
I frowned. David had a documented tendency to exaggerate at times. “Seriously?”
David shrugged his broad shoulders, lifting the shirt he’d stolen from one of Klaus’ men’s luggage. “Yes. Seriously. My brother is a pilot, remember?”
I nodded. I remembered that David’s brother was a pilot as well as an astronaut. The last time I checked, David was a chef.
“These sandwiches are terrible,” he said as if to reinforce his profession. “Pairing tuna salad with cheese is a fucking war crime.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Who does that?”
“Tastes ok to me.”
I hadn’t noticed the flavor of what I was eating. At the moment I was so hungry I really didn’t care. I’m no health guru, but I’m relatively certain that eating nothing but granola bars for two days is a bad idea. It’s a lot of fiber, sure, but not much else. Besides, I was eating for two—three actually. I was hungry.
“Yeah, but you probably want to eat paint and pickles with ice cream.” David said with a grin. He patted my tummy before I could wriggle away and frown at him. “You’ve got all kinds of crazy hormones telling you to obtain micronutrients for the babies.”
“Micronutrients?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “When did you become an expert on pregnancy nutrition?”
“I’ve been reading a bunch of books on my phone,” he said to my surprise. “Or I was. When we still had reception. When we left the village, I downloaded some audiobooks. I’ve been listening to them.”
I blinked. “Really?” I’d wondered what he was listening to while we walked that first day but hadn’t asked.
“Really truly. I even learned a bunch of stuff.” He handed me a chicken salad sandwich. “You should eat that. You need extra niacin, B5 and B6 vitamins while you’re pregnant. And you need to start taking prenatal vitamins as soon as we get back to the mainland. The babies need that folic acid and calcium. Especially in the first trimester.”
Something in me clenched and bloomed. I felt a big, goofy smile spread over my face. His enthusiasm was real. He was actually committed to this whole pregnancy thing. This whole parenthood thing. Hell, he was ahead of me. I didn’t know shit about prenatal vitamins.
“What else did you learn?”
He looked at me skeptically. “Is this a test?”
I shook my head. “I’m just curious. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t make me an expert on baby development.”
“Well,” he started, but then something he saw behind me caused his face to go white. “Get down!” he yelled, just before a gunshot rang out and impacted the cooler we were standing next to.
We scrambled toward the tent as a second gunshot, and then a third cut through the quiet afternoon of the jungle.
“Klaus,” David mouthed to me, or perhaps he yelled it but the noise from the gunshot had rendered me temporarily deaf. The whole world seemed weirdly muted. Adrenaline made my brain feel like we were moving in slow motion. “We need to get to the plane.”
“Come out with your hands on your heads or I’ll just keep shooting!” Klaus indeed.
He was presumably somewhere in the jungle beyond and must have woken up from his head wound. His idea of paying us back for not murdering me was apparently shooting at us.
“I know you’re in there Breyer. Come out!”
Another bullet ripped through the air and collided with a canteen to David’s left. It had missed him by about a foot. I swallowed hard. David was absolutely correct, we needed to get out of this tent. Immediately. And the only thing on the other side of the tent from Klaus was the beach, and the plane. As another bullet whizzed by and punctured the nylon of the tent to bury itself in a mattress to my right, I nodded and took a deep breath. We would have to run for it.
Now or never.
David and I had the notebook and one backpack—mine—left. Everything else had been jettisoned along the way, including the camera (although I’d retained the memory card) and the radio. So at least we weren’t burdened with gear as we sprinted across the sharp, lava beach. Klaus, who probably didn’t expect us to make for the sea plane and didn’t see us slip out the back, continued shooting at the tent as we ran.
I’ve never run so quickly. Being shot at did wonders for my motivation. David was still faster, courtesy of his much longer stride, but I must have covered half a mile in less than two minutes. Usain Bolt would have been impressed by how fast I was moving. And I had absolutely no muscle fatigue as I was doing it, probably because I was completely hopped up on every flight response my body had to offer.
We reached the shiny blue and white side of the sea plane and climbed into the cabin above the two hydrofoil floats. I sunk into the floor of the plane like it was my salvation. Inside, David immediately moved to the cockpit and started pressing buttons and flipping switches like he actually knew what he was doing.
“Casey, you need to buckle yourself in,” he said. The plane’s engines roared to life.
“You really know how to fly this?” I pushed the words out with the last of my endurance. As soon as I was out of immediate danger, my body had decided to remind me that I wasn’t Wonder Woman.
David nodded. “Yeah mostly.”
I gulped air into my lungs before I was able to reply. “Mostly?”
The sound of another gunshot, this time much closer, squelched my resistance. I climbed up into a chair and put on the four-point harness. David started to ease the plane forward. In the distance, I could hear Klaus screaming something, but his words were lost to the wind and the rumble of the engine. This plane was incredibly loud.
David’s concentration was totally on his task. He looked at the dials in front of him and deftly accelerated the plane across the bumpy water. We didn’t seem to be moving very quickly. This plane was not a very efficient boat.
“Oh fuck, the anchor,” he said, slapping his forehead. He pushed a level and the plane lurched forward, accelerating suddenly and sending me back into the padding of my chair.
“Shit, David, please don’t kill us,” I pleaded, holding onto the armrests for dear life. “I don’t want to die.”
“I’ve never flown a seaplane before,” he confessed as we got airborne in a bumpy, splashing takeoff. “I didn’t realize they had anchors.”
My terrified silence was the only response I could muster. This was probably safer than on the ground with Klaus and his gun, but not by much.
“How much experience do you have piloting?” I finally managed. David looked over at me sheepishly.
“About twenty hours. Actually, I’ve never flown a plane by myself before. I’ve seen Nathan do it a million times though. If he can do it, I can do it.”
That did not make me feel much better, but we were flying through the air. I looked down at the island below, getting smaller by the second. We were really high up in the air.
“Where are you taking us? Don’t we just need to get back to the village? Do we really need to be so high up?”
David shook his head. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed. It’s two p.m. The ferry is long gone. Unless you want to spend the storm in that village, we need to get away from this storm.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Panic was rising in my chest. I prayed David knew what he was doing.
He t
apped the instrument panel like the answer was obvious. “The radio. We’re going to call and ask for help.”
Oh, right. Modern technology. I forgot about that. After only forty-eight hours alone in the wilderness, I’d become surprisingly alienated from the outside world. Of course, we should call for help now. Thank god we could.
Somehow, against all odds, the hum of the airplane lulled me into complacency. I knew it was probably a bad idea, but I let my eyes slip shut for just a second. It was a shock reaction. I just needed a minute to be sure I was alive. I took slow, deep breaths and tried to tell myself that we’d done it, and that we were safe. Klaus was gone, far behind us now. We’d won. When I zoned back into my surroundings, the island was gone, and we were flying over open water.
David, unexpectedly, had left me to suffer through my panic attack alone, which I appreciated greatly whether it was intentional or not. He was now talking to someone on the radio. It took a few minutes of extremely confusing radio conversation and David repeatedly saying “mayday”, but eventually a helpful person from the Manila airport got on with David. I fidgeted through the one-sided conversation until David noticed. He gestured for me to come up to sit next to him and handed me the other headset. I slipped the headphones over my ears while David reached over to re-buckle me in.
“Approach the coastline,” the disembodied voice was directing David as I shook him off and buckled my new seatbelt. He needed to concentrate on getting us landed. “Level off at an intermediate altitude and continue left heading one-eight zero you'll be ah off the coast in about ah fifteen miles…”
“We’re headed to a resort off the coast of Luzon,” David told me when he had a chance. “The storm has turned due north, but the area was already evacuated as a precaution. We’ll be alone until someone can come to get us.”
I shrugged. “Ok.” As long as no one else was going to shoot us, I didn’t have to chase any monkeys or escape any caves, I was good. An abandoned resort sounded just fucking fine to me. In fact, it almost sounded better than a populated resort. “A resort sounds much better than riding out the storm in a cave.”
David grinned at me, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “That was the good news.”
“You mean there’s bad news?”
I wasn’t sure I had the emotional reserves for any bad news. I’d been shot at today. Even saying the words in my head made it seem surreal, although the memories were still stark in my short-term memory.
Not one to sugar coat things, David pointed at one of the gauges on the airplane’s dash. “See that little red dial there?”
I squinted. It was a dial, much like the fuel dial on a car. It showed less than one-eighth of a ‘tank’. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It’s exactly what you think it is. We’re going to run out of fuel. We’re going to have to wing it the last few miles.”
It wasn’t ten seconds after he said it that the engines sputtered, and the plane gave a little hiccup. I fought down a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with my pregnancy.
“Oh god, oh god, oh god,” I hissed, gripping the armrests again and shaking my head back and forth like I could keep us aloft with the force of panic. “We’re going to crash.”
David shook his head and reached over to grab my hand. “There’s no way I’m letting that happen.” He sounded determined, but I wanted to throw up. “We’re going to glide into the harbor. It’s going to be fine.”
I looked at him with a glare so powerful that I was surprised I couldn’t see into his skull. His return glance was mild and affectionate. He really was an infuriating man sometimes.
“How can we possibly be fine if we’re running out of fuel?”
I looked around the cabin as if there was some extra lying around with the emergency raft and the lifesavers.
“Just trust me.” David told me. “These things can glide for miles.”
The engines hiccupped again, and again. The left engine went out. The right one was fine for about a minute where I held my breath. Then it, too sputtered like it had pneumonia. And then… nothing.
We didn’t fall. At least not immediately. But no force in the world could distract from the deafening absence of engine noise.
The total lack of sound was the most terrifying noise I’d ever heard. You never want to hear silence on an airplane. The only thing we could hear was the rush of air over the wings. The pounding of my heartbeat. Below us, the rich, blue water slowly began to approach. Gravity was now our enemy, and gravity always wins.
“There,” David said excitedly. He was pointing to the thin line of green and white of a distant beach. “We’re going there. See?”
What I saw was a lot of water between us and that white strip of safety.
“We’re not going to make it,” I heard myself saying. A truly hysterical edge had crept into my voice. “We’re going to hit the water.” I squeezed my eyelids shut but couldn’t keep them closed. I didn’t have the self-control. I needed to see my impending doom.
David shook his head and I seriously wanted to punch him. “This boat is designed to hit the water. We’re going to glide all the way down to the beach.”
“Promise?”
“I promise I’ve never once fucked up a landing in the simulators.”
That was a promise, but it was not the promise I’d asked him to make. He smiled at me, and it was the same smile that he aimed at the camera during the opening shot of Out to Lunch. A rakish, scoundrel’s smile. Even now, when we were hanging in the air by pure inertia, I couldn’t quite be angry at him.
“I hope so.”
That water looked deep. And potentially full of man-eating sharks.
David grinned. “Would I ever let you down?”
42
David
I didn’t quite make it the whole way to the beach, but we didn’t have to swim, and most importantly, we didn’t die. We just sort of floated up to the dock. Our landing was… not my best. It was also my first. It’s a lot harder to land a plane in real life than it is to watch your brother land it. The plane was probably never going to fly again since the tail took some damage. Casey threw up on the beach as soon as we got out. But we made it.
Two hours later and I was drinking a beer in a longue chair in an abandoned five-star resort. To my left, Casey had an entire pint of chocolate ice cream in her lap and a virgin daiquiri in her hand. She was irritated again at me, but now that I knew her better, I also knew it was fleeting.
“So, when you told me that you knew how to fly a plane what you really meant was that you’d watched someone else fly a plane several times and just decided that was good enough?” Casey was exhausted enough that she’d lost the will to be angry, but she wasn’t above teasing me.
I smirked. “I didn’t lie to you. Nathan’s been teaching me to fly. But, you know, I’m not exactly a great student. You know me. I’m easily distracted. But I’ve done the takeoff before. And I’ve taken the controls before. I’m not a total beginner. Sometimes I practice on a simulator.”
“But you’ve never landed a plane before in your life,” she asserted. I shrugged. “Your confidence in your abilities is… well I would almost say impressive, but I’m going to go with dangerous.”
“I got us here,” I argued, gesturing to the ridiculously perfect vista. This island made Nico look like Long Island. It was a tiny slice of heaven on earth.
“You did,” she conceded. She took another bite of her ice cream, savoring it, and the view. “This is pretty nice.”
We’d explored the resort and claimed the honeymoon suite for ourselves. This was sort-of our honeymoon. In a way.
“My brother is going to lose his shit when I tell him I landed a plane by myself,” I remarked.
“What about the fact that you located a long-lost medicinal herb?”
“What about the fact that I almost got blown up in a cave?”
“And got shot at by a mercenary.”
“And tromped around in the ju
ngle.”
“And climbed a volcano.”
“And got kidnapped.”
“And got freed by your badass producer-slash-girlfriend.”
“And found the woman of my dreams.”
Casey smiled.
“And got her pregnant with twins.”
I laughed. Nathan was definitely in for an earful when I finally got a working phone. I’d gone through some seriously life-changing shit in the last few days.
“So, have you given any thought to marrying me?” I asked Casey, looking at her sideways and hoping that her answer was yes.
Her lips parted in surprise. “I… David, honestly, after the last couple of days, I think I need to take things one step at a time.”
I nodded and reached out to hold her hand. Casey had definitely proved she was tough enough for anything the world could throw at her. That being said, she’d earned a break. “As long as you let me take those steps right next to you, I’m totally fine with that.”
She smiled. “Then you’ve got yourself a deal.”
Epilogue - Casey
Stockholm was a beautiful city, especially at Christmas. I would have enjoyed it a lot more, however, if I didn’t have two ten-month old babies trying to crawl their way out of every enclosure I could find to put them in. Scarlett and Stella had recently discovered that they could assist one another in their escape attempts and were quickly becoming an unstoppable force of adorable baby crime. Of course, they would go through a mischievous phase when we needed to travel.
“Ready?” David asked me, holding Scarlett in one hand and Stella in the other. They were both trying to get at his bow tie. Their chubby little arms weren’t quite long enough to grab it, but that wasn’t stopping them from trying.
“Are we ever ready for anything these days?” I grabbed Stella from his arms, and she cooed and went for my dangly earrings instead. David leaned over to kiss me, and then Stella. Stella, momentarily distracted by a kiss from her daddy, gave me enough time to pull my lace sleeves back into place. The long, black dress I was wearing covered all of my tattoos but boasted a deep v in the front and back. Aside from being goth-y and dramatic, I liked the dress because I didn’t want to see the tattoos in the photos.
Lost and Found (Scions of Sin Book 4) Page 22