Tracklist:
My City Was Gone – The Pretenders
Head Over Heels – Tears For Fears
Call Me – Go West
15
Dean dreamed of a party where nothing went wrong. Neighbors and kids from his high school packed the house. Even though most people had to stand, nobody got into a fight or tossed a cat through a plate-glass window. The music stayed at a pleasant level, loud enough to allow Phil Collins to create the mood but soft enough that you could still talk. All of Dean’s relatives were happily chatting away for once, and nobody had spiked the punch or the cat, spiked the punch with the cat, or even punched the cat.
Dean squeezed through the crowd, moving from room to room, searching for something. Not his mother––she was in the kitchen using a spatula to lob white grenades of frosting onto a massive ten-layer cake. The lights turned red and began to pulse in and out with the music. Dean’s father burst from the top of the cake, naked apart from elbow-length satin gloves and tassels on his new implants.
“Happy birthday, son!”
The crowd cheered wildly. A few of his uncles attempted to hoist Dean onto their shoulders, a laudable expression of joy which unfortunately caused Dean’s head to smash through a ceiling panel and two fluorescent lights.
“Wake up!”
Dean opened his eyes to the crimson light of the bomber’s interior and Emerson pulling at the fabric of his jumpsuit.
“Wake up, Dean!”
“Okay, I’m awake.”
The engines of the B-25 hummed at a lower pitch than Dean remembered and the fuselage shook with an irregular vibration.
“I think the plane has a problem,” said Emerson.
Dean pulled Emerson’s hands from the front of his jumpsuit and gave them a short squeeze.
“Stay here and don’t worry.”
He crawled through the access tunnel to the cockpit, where the sky outside was as black as coal. Small crimson bulbs illuminated the instrument panels, where several indicators flashed yellow. In the pilot’s seat, Tony strained to hold the vibrating control yoke with both hands.
“We lost the port engine,” he yelled. “Not really a problem unless you lose the other one. Soaring Dove is a steady girl when it comes to flying.”
Dean looked to port and gasped. “Good gravy!”
The propeller was visible in the intermittent flash of navigation lights. The blades had stopped and were “feathered,” or turned ninety degrees to face the airstream and reduce drag.
“This leads to the second problem,” said Tony. “I think we’re going to lose the starboard engine.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“It’s completely my fault. Somehow I strayed over the river that Kichimanetowa, the snake monster, calls his home. He will bring us down to the water and drink our blood in anger. Even worse, we’re over Kentucky.”
“Pray to another god or call the Air Force or something!”
“I can’t call for help. I have three tons of cocai––three tons of illegal baking powder on board. When I land they will take everything, and my family will go to prison. You’ve met two of my brothers, and you know they won’t survive!”
“What do we do?”
Tony pulled a large blue backpack from behind his seat and shoved it at Dean.
“To appease Kichimanetowa, you must fill his belly.”
“You have got to be joking, Tony. This is a parachute!”
“I am as far from joking as the never-smiling face of Wisaka himself. You can die when we crash into the muddy Ohio, or jump from the plane.”
“But what about Emerson?”
Tony waved to the rear of the plane. “Another parachute is stowed in the radio operator’s compartment. Wait! Do not jump until I reduce airspeed. The light will change to green.”
Dean pushed the parachute pack ahead of him through the access tunnel, vowing to never again fly in a converted bomber from the Pacific unless it had four engines. Probably not even then.
He dropped the parachute next to a wide-eyed Emerson and opened the scratched metal doors of cabinets one after another. He found a second olive-green parachute and slid his arms through the straps and buckles.
“What’s wrong?” asked Emerson.
“Put this on. We don’t have time for questions.”
Dean helped her buckle on the heavy pack, but the crotch strap that looped between her legs gave him pause.
“Wait,” said Emerson.
She pulled up the hem of her dress and stepped out of a ruffled taffeta petticoat. Dean looked away as she buckled the crotch strap over the now much-slimmer skirt of her silk dress.
The light in the compartment changed from crimson to bright green. Dean led Emerson through the bomb compartment packed with duct-taped bricks of baking powder to a door at the aft of the plane.
He pointed at a silver ring on her shoulder strap. “Count to five and pull that one! If it doesn’t work, pull the one on the left side!”
Emerson shook her head and tears rolled down her face. “I can’t! I really can’t!”
Dean grabbed her shoulders. “Listen! I’ve done this before, and it’s very easy. Count to five and pull. The plane is going to crash, so we have to jump.”
He’d never used a parachute in his life so that part was a lie, but Dean considered dying in a ball of fire more of a sin at this point. He used his fingers to wipe away the tears on Emerson’s cheeks, and she nodded.
“We’ll jump together,” shouted Dean.
He pushed up on a red emergency bar and slid the door to the side. A torrent of freezing air blasted him in the face with bitterly cold force, a force to possibly rival that of falling twelve stories into an ice cream truck. A patchwork of dark forest and cleared farmland lay far below, with only a few scattered lights as clues that humanity still existed.
Never the bravest of souls, Dean panicked and turned back, intending to hide under a box somewhere, but the starboard engine chattered loudly and the old bomber tilted to port. Dean lost his balance at the edge of the door, felt himself falling backwards, and frantically grabbed Emerson’s hand, pulling her out of the plane with him. The old bomber shrank into the night sky and turned slightly to port, navigation lights blinking red-green, red-green.
As they tumbled together, Dean’s fingers caught on the silver hoop of Emerson’s chute-release ring and she flew out of his arms. He twisted to face the earth and air blasted across his skin like water from a fire hose. He thought you were supposed to count to ten in these situations but made it only as far as ‘eight’ before he grabbed the ring on his shoulder strap and pulled. A monstrous force jerked his arms and crotch upwards, and he floated in peace and silence, a circular white umbrella above his head. A river curved like a gray ribbon into the distance, and as he swayed on the cables of his parachute, Dean smelled thick fungal air full of rotting bark and crushed leaves, of copper mud and barges piled high with brittle chunks of coal.
He missed a barbed-wire fence at the last minute by pulling up his knees and landed in a cow pasture. The parachute floated down and covered him like a white shroud. Dean spent a few anxious moments freeing himself from the tangle of flimsy material and nylon cords. He scanned the star-filled backdrop of the night sky and spotted the pale blob of another parachute floating over a nearby forest.
Branches tore at the hem of Emerson’s red dress and her feet cracked through limbs at the treetops. Dean tripped over roots as he ran through the forest and tried to keep her in sight. A body of water sparkled with star-shine as the forest thinned to the edge of a shore, but the floating girl would not escape the claws of the forest so easily. She smashed through the crown of an oak tree and tumbled into the silver water like a dying fairy, if the fairy wore a parachute and was unlucky enough to have it shredded by branches.
Dean splashed through neck-deep water to the floating mound of white fabric. He pulled Emerson’s limp body to the shore and touched his lips to hers, ready to perform mouth-to-mouth, wh
en she threw up.
Dean wiped his chin and held Emerson sideways on his lap while she coughed and spat up more lake water.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say between coughs.
“Having a girl vomit in my mouth is not the greatest experience, but I’m happy you’re alive. That’s better than the opposite.”
“The opposite? What’s the opposite of throwing up?”
“Diarrhea, but that’s not what I meant.”
Emerson cleared her throat and spat into the mud.
“Did the plane crash?”
Dean waved a hand at the lakeshore and the dark horizon. “I didn’t see or hear anything, but I was more worried about the whole falling-from-the-sky and staying-alive thing.”
Her veil had disappeared and wet strands of hair covered her face, but Emerson smiled and that was enough to make Dean feel better.
“Thank you,” she said.
Dean turned red. His mouth and nose were still covered in regurgitated lake water, but the dangerously cute female in his lap trumped all other sensations. He desperately tried to remember why Canadian-rules football is called Canadian-rules football.
“Are you okay?” whispered Emerson.
“I’m perfectly fine,” stammered Dean. “Your thanks are appreciated, but not necessary. I can’t let my paper-wife drown in a lake, can I? At least not until we’ve had a proper paper-divorce. After that you’ll have to save yourself, missy. Preferably not on paper.”
Emerson stared at him, her pupils wide and black. “Dean, I must tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“I have never said this before, but ...” Emerson paused for a second, and her smile of contentment instantly changed to a frown. “What’s that horrible smell?”
“That’s a strange thing to have never said before.”
“You smell like the back yard of Burger Chef, where the cattle live before dinner.”
“I ... uh ... landed in a pasture. There may have been a few encounters with cow pies on my part.”
Emerson wrinkled her nose. “This is not a pie for eating. Please jump in the lake.”
“Women have said that many times in my life. This is the first time I think it’s a good idea.”
Emerson sat up and watched as Dean waded into the lake and rubbed the worst bits of his clothing with water. She began to shiver, and crossed her arms tightly.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
Dean splashed at a brown stain on the leg of his jumpsuit. “The pasture had a fence. Where there are fences, there are farms, and where there are farms, there are roads. We’ll have no trouble finding a ride into town.”