“Are you fucking high?” she shouted, fury bubbling in her veins.
“About twenty thousand feet,” he responded, a small smile on his lips.
She narrowed her eyes and took a step forward, shoving him back angrily. “Now is not the time to joke, you jackass! I’m not leaving you on this thing.” She looked at him with hard eyes.
“Don’t lament a man like me, Victoria. Just go,” he said calmly, putting a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have much time.”
“There has got to be another way,” she said stubbornly as the tears began to sting the back of her eyes. “We can get out of this.”
“The dead bodies say otherwise,” he pointed out. “There has been enough death today.”
“Let’s both use the last chute. I’m not losing you!” she said hotly.
“It won’t carry the both of us. We’ll both just end up dead or seriously wounded,” he countered.
“Better than you going down in a blaze of glory!” she exclaimed angrily.
“I can’t chance it. I’m sorry Victoria,” he said darkly as he took a step forward.
He moved so quickly that she wasn’t able to react. In an instant he had spun her around and slipped the chute onto one shoulder. She struggled against him, but he was too strong. His arm snaked around her neck, choking the life from her until she was too weak to move. She tried to struggle against him, to remember her kickboxing training, but he had taken her by surprise and was impossibly strong.
Blackness invaded her vision.
The second strap slid onto her shoulder as the air returned to her lungs and she felt a sense of weightlessness. “Malcolm?” she gasped out.
“I’m sorry, my treasure. It’s the only way you’ll do what I need you to do,” he said sadly as he carried her to the exit of the plane.
It took her a moment to realize what had happened and panic ripped through her whole body. “No! You can’t be serious.” He was.
His free hand reached for the door, and he pulled it open. The air rushed out of the cabin, and he had to brace them to prevent from being vacuumed out as the cabin depressurized.
“Count to ten and pull the tab,” he said calmly.
She struggled against him, trying to make him drop her, but she felt so weak. “Malcolm, I’m staying with you.”
“Live, my treasure,” he said over the thunderous noise. “Find my daughter!” He shoved her out of the plane.
Time stopped as she felt gravity drag her down.
She watched as the plane grew further and further away. It seemed like slow motion. This had to be a bad dream. In a moment, she would wake up and be in Malcolm’s arms. She would tell him how much she really loved him, because this dream made her realize how important it was to be honest.
An updraft of wind shook her from her stupor. It turned her toward the ground and she saw the rapidly approaching surface of the planet.
This wasn’t a dream.
“Malcolm!” she wailed. Tears flowed from her eyes freely, ripped away by the wind. It was so tempting to just let herself fall to the ground. To die and join him in his death. If there was an afterlife, she was bound to meet him. She would be at peace.
Live! His voice echoed in her mind, and her hand involuntarily tugged at the tab to release her chute. The air was captured in the Kevlar hammock of the chute, yanking on her shoulders violently as it rapidly slowed her fall.
Her mind raced with a thousand images of Malcolm’s death, each one of them more horrible than the last. I should have fought harder! I shouldn’t have let him just throw me out. I should be up there with him right now, she mentally screamed over and over again as she fell.
The ground below was flat. The plane had flown over the rainforest, and would allow for a smooth landing. It was a bitter thought, knowing there was nothing that could go wrong at this point, the irony being that she desperately wanted something to happen. I’ll carry out your wish, Malcolm, she vowed within her mind. But you’re going to be there to help me!
Slowly, but surely she approached the ground and readied herself for landing. She remembered hearing somewhere that she needed to hit the ground running in order to avoid broken legs. The last thing she needed right now was to be stranded in the middle of nothing with her shin jutting out from the skin in a bloody mess. She was already on her own, with nothing except the summer dress on her back and whatever might be in the parachute.
From high in the sky it seemed like it would take forever to reach the ground, but once she had dropped to about two hundred feet of altitude, it seemed the ground was approaching much faster than she would have liked. She pumped her legs, angled her sail to catch the wind and slow her fall a little more.
The impact was sudden, and jarring, but she managed to land safely. She rolled on the ground, avoiding any major injury and struggled with the strings of the chute as they had tangled around her. With bitter dismay she looked up into the sky, trying to find some kind of sign of Malcolm’s plane.
She first found a smoke trail, miles long across the sky. Frantically she looked around to find any sign of the craft. Hoping against hope that it hadn’t exploded or something while flying. A mixture of relief and sorrow swept over her body as she finally spotted the burning craft in the sky. It was in the one place she hadn’t thought to look; right above her.
It burned brightly as it flew overhead. The sound reached her ears and all she could imagine was Malcolm smashing into the ground at full speed. Please find a way to survive, champ. You’re a goddamn superhero, and you can’t let something like this take you down! She felt her heart sink as she watched the infernal aircraft falling apart in the air, threatening to destroy the amazing man she had grown to admire and even somewhat understand. Now that she could clearly see that his life was in danger, she could feel in her heart that he was a good man. In their short time together, he had changed her life and opened her eyes in so many ways. He couldn’t be gone! Not like this.
“I love you, Malcolm,” she sobbed as she fell to her knees on the foreign land. Her hands knotted in the coarse, straw-like grass as her shoulders shook with tears. “Please come back to me.”