Even though my arms trembled in harmony with the plane, I managed to push myself to my knees. I wondered if the captain was attempting a landing manoeuvre. Had we reached Kiruna yet? If so, why no announcement? Was he just too busy keeping us steady? I tried to stave off the implications of those answers while listening for the familiar sound of landing gear lowering under my feet—which never came.
I pressed a palm against the lavvy’s walls to pull myself up. I had managed to get one foot under me when another sideways lurch reacquainted me with the light-blue partition. Seconds before I faceplanted like a starfish, a strong hand caught my coat collar, stopping my nose inches from being pulverised.
The hand yanked me to my feet and pushed me to the back of the plane. Amid the screams, my insistent rescuer was shouting something at me while half-dragging me back to the jump seats. I looked over my shoulder to catch the words. I saw a young, curly-haired woman latched to my collar. No matter how much I strained, there was no understanding her. The turbulence and rumbling were just too loud.
Her next words became a scream as the moan of torn metal accompanied a booming blow to the craft that sent us both flying into the jump seats. Now we were officially crashing. It sounded like a wing had been torn off.
Neither me nor the girl wasted time unfolding the seats and strapping ourselves in. I had just buckled the last strap when the emergency lights went out altogether.
Our plane had been turned into a floating washing machine program. My screams mingled with the rest as we shook, spun and rolled erratically. In the dim light, I saw the silhouette of passengers flying out of their seats, hitting the ceiling, becoming the targets of loose luggage.
The plane hit something right before deep yawns of protesting metal drowned out everything else. The seat’s straps dug deep into my flesh while they tried keeping me in place on this rollercoaster ride to hell.
As we were thrown left and right, the acrid smell of smoke and burned wires engulfed us. I fought not to pass out, but it was a losing battle from the start. My last conscious thought was how something had to be seriously wrong for me to feel fresh air and rain hitting me in the face.
3. BLOOD AND RAIN
Everything hurt.
Everything, everywhere hurt.
I barely had the strength to moan about it. Even moaning hurt. The simple act of thinking—that hurt too. My entire body ached, its youthfulness absent. I felt as if I’d been turned into a grandmother overnight.
It took time for things to start to make sense, time for me to remember I had limbs and could move them. When I tried to move them, I instantly regretted it. A hot flash of pain tore through my left leg, ripping a scream out of me. I scrunched my eyes closed harder, made myself take a few deep breaths. In… out… in… out…
I had no idea where I was. Outdoors was a dead certainty, but that was as far as I got. The air was crisp and cold, smelling of earthy moss. Twigs cracked underneath me as I attempted to unfold. Careful not to move my leg again, I pushed myself up on my forearms and blinked my eyes open, peering through a curtain of long brown hair and the odd blade of grass.
Above me, a pale midday sun was trying hard to shine through low-hanging clouds. I looked down to the sight of rain-covered green moss. It felt cold and wet on my hands. A little more to the right, there was a triangular piece of metal. All three edges looked sharp, like it was torn free of something larger. It had little brothers and sisters protruding from the moss here and there, all around me. The little silvery debris caught and reflected the sunlight at odd angles. There was stone debris as well, little and not-so-little pieces of rock that had been torn free, as though they’d been caught in an explosion. Like the surrounding moss, they were covered in rain. As a shiver ran through me, reverberating in every single one of my vertebrae, I realised I was too. What had happened? Where was I?
I pushed myself harder off the muddy ground. Twisting my hips just the right way, I got myself into a sitting position. My pelvis felt sore and I stayed mindful of my injured leg. If the pain was any indication of the extent of the injury, then my leg was torn up something fierce. But I hadn’t glanced at it yet; I was afraid to. Pushing back the unavoidable, I kept looking at my surroundings instead.
This clearing didn’t look familiar; I was certain I’d never been here before. I saw more debris and a few sparse birch trees in the distance. It was a tree line demarcating the edge of a wooded area. Behind me, stones and boulders dotted the landscape, culminating in a large rock formation that hid the horizon. As mountain ranges went, it was a small one, the type that was so ragged with sharp edges that it was impossible to climb. Moss covered its base while the rest of the stone had been eaten away by time and wind. The only exception was the very top, showing some recent clean, crisp cuts.
The glint of something metallic in the distance caught my eye. Whatever it was, it was trapped in a fresh-looking fissure. The sight of that kicked my brain into gear. Something big had crashed into that mountain top recently. But what? It took me longer than it should have to come up with the answer. My head felt cottony, too heavy. My poor brain felt as sore and unaccustomed to whatever was happening as the rest of me. I had just come to the conclusion that I had a concussion—God it hurt when the thoughts came rushing back in—when the answer finally came. I’d been on a plane, hadn’t I? I wasn’t any more—because we’d crashed.
Memories collided with each other at that realisation. The blue and yellow interior of the cabin, the rain beating down on the windows. The multiple lightning strikes, the cabin lights going out. The turbulence so violent it’d thrown an elderly man to the floor next to me. The fear that gripped me as the plane started to shake and lean on the right side. The impulse to help that I hadn’t been able to fight when I saw that fellow passenger not able to get back to his feet on his own.
I know that I’d helped him make it to the crew seats in the back. But then what?
“Think, Anne-Marie, think,” I muttered to myself. But nothing came. The tape in my head had no more footage to share.
Even though my mind was drawing a blank, it wasn’t hard to guess what had followed. I’d been on a plane. I wasn’t anymore. The plane had crashed. It was never getting back up. End of story. As my mum would say, there was no sense looking for noon when it was 2 pm.
Right now, I was alone and out in the open. I needed to get moving, find some shelter from the rain, maybe some help. The plane and the other passengers, they couldn’t be that far from me. I had to get up and find them. Judging by the way my body felt, that was not going to be an easy task. In fact, it felt like it was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
When I looked down at my injured leg, the source of my discomfort was obvious. There was a large gash on my thigh, about twenty centimetres long. All around the tear, my blue jeans were soaked in blood. The wound was raw and seemed to flare as my gaze settled on it.
I took off my sweater and fastened it around the wound, binding it as tightly as I could. I had a T-shirt underneath, the cold air on my bare forearms a welcome distraction from the pain.
With nothing to grab onto as leverage, I screamed as I got to my feet. I was forced to put pressure on both legs to steady myself. When the left one protested the action, I screamed again.