Something was wrong.
She could feel heat on one side of her head, but it wasn’t from sunlight. She looked round—
And screamed.
Her parachute’s pack was aflame, ignited by the flare. The wind-fanned fire was rising rapidly up the nylon webbing risers connecting her harness and the cords of the chute itself. She desperately tried to swat out the flames, but they were too big, too hungry, greedily consuming fabric and line.
A twang as one of the cords snapped. The parachute’s edge rippled and flapped. A second line gave way, then another and another…
Sophia’s cry of utter terror was lost in the wind as the chute collapsed and she plummeted towards the ground, trailing smoke as the blaze spread to her clothes and hair.
Body tilted down, arms held back at her sides, Nina was rapidly catching up with Eddie. Steering herself in free fall had proved to be an almost instinctual matter of twisting her body and limbs to direct the airflow; what she would do when she reached her husband was another matter entirely.
He rolled over on to his back, waving his arms. The signal was clear: leave me! She ignored it, guiding herself at him like a missile and arching her back to lift her head and slow down. Her body began to see-saw; she almost panicked before managing to stabilise herself by bringing out her arms and raising her knees.
Eddie was right below her, still gesturing for her to abandon him.
Not a chance—
The collision was like a tackle. They both spun and tumbled before Eddie brought them under control. Nina clutched his jacket, screaming into the wind. ‘Grab on to me!’
He tried to push her away. ‘It’ll kill us both!’
‘No! You and me! Always and for ever!’
Their eyes were locked for a precious moment before he relented. ‘You’ve put this on wrong!’ he cried as he hooked his right arm into one of her chute’s loose leg straps and wound it tight.
‘I was kinda rushed!’
He forced his left arm through her shoulder harness and bent his elbow to trap it, then strained to bring his hands together. A momentary glance down; they were well below two thousand feet, only seconds left before they hit the ground. His fingers interlocked; he gripped as hard as he could. ‘This is gonna hurt, but — pull it!’
Nina yanked the ripcord.
The spring-loaded pilot chute popped out of the pack, snapping open in the airstream — and snatched the main chute out after it with a whump of billowing fabric.
The sudden drag as the parachute deployed wrenched the harness upwards. Nina screamed as it cut deeply into her shoulders, almost slipping loose on one side. Eddie cried out too as the jolt almost ripped his arms from their sockets, but he clung on, holding the backpack in place by sheer force of muscle.
The wind dropped. He looked up. The chute was fully inflated, slowing their fall, but it was designed to carry the weight of only one person, not two. No matter what, they were going to have a painful landing.
A shadow crossed the thin nylon, something falling towards it—
A burning meteor streaked past, missing the parachute by less than a foot as it hurtled towards the ground in a trail of fire. ‘What the hell was that?’ Nina yelled.
It wasn’t part of the helicopter, so that only left— ‘Sophia!’
Despite the flames gnawing at her skin, Sophia was still alive, still conscious, still screaming as she fell.
Something whipped through her pain-racked vision — a parachute, two forms dangling from its lines.
Nina had caught Eddie. They were going to survive.
‘You… bastards!’ she managed to shriek—
The wet thump of her impact on the stony ground was mixed with the horrible crack of shattering bones.
The parachute’s aerofoil design meant Eddie and Nina were now traversing the landscape rather than merely plunging straight at it, but they were still descending too quickly. A hundred feet remained, ninety—
Eddie unclasped his fingers. ‘What’re you doing?’ Nina demanded.
‘Making you lighter,’ he said, painfully slipping his arms out of the harness straps to hang from them by his hands. ‘Just before you land, turn side-on and let it drag you — try to kind of crumple from your feet upwards when you hit. And for Christ’s sake, bend your legs or you’ll break ’em both.’
Fifty feet. ‘What about you?’
‘I haven’t turned forty yet — there might just be a little bit of bounce left in me!’
Thirty. ‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘You’re the one who jumped from a fucking chopper!’
Twenty—
Eddie let go. Even with his legs bent to absorb the impact, he hit hard, rolling uncontrollably before bouncing to a stop in a cloud of dust.
Nina whisked past overhead, wailing ‘Oh shiiiiiit!’ as she was carried helplessly down. At the last moment, she remembered what Eddie had said and twisted sideways. Her feet scraped through the sand — then she slammed down like a toppling tree. The parachute flopped on top of her like a shroud.
Groaning, Eddie slowly tried to get up, discovering numerous new sources of pain throughout his body. No bones seemed to be broken, to his relief, although his already injured leg now hurt worse than ever. Wobbling, he stood and dizzily surveyed his surroundings. The black plume from the volcano rose into the sky on the northwestern horizon; much closer was another, smaller column of smoke.
He knew what it marked, resolving to investigate, but completed his turn. The helicopter was about half a mile away to the west, slowly heading towards him. On the ground, the parachute wobbled in the wind like a beached jellyfish. He limped towards it. ‘Nina? Nina! Are you okay?’
‘No, I’m dead,’ came the weak reply. He pulled the entangling sheet and cords aside to find Nina sprawled face-down in the sand. ‘I must be dead. We couldn’t have survived that. Could we?’
‘Well, I’m alive, more or less — and like you said, we stay together, so you must be too.’ He quickly checked her for obvious signs of injury, finding nothing beyond plentiful cuts and grazes.
She sat up and blew sand off her face, giving him a pained smile. ‘Wow. So we actually made it.’
‘Yeah, we did.’ He kissed her — then they both recoiled.
‘Ow,’ said Nina, putting a hand to her face and finding it bruised and swollen. ‘My lips hurt.’
‘My everything hurts,’ Eddie complained. ‘Think you can stand?’
‘I’ll try.’ Grunting, he helped her up. Nina winced at a sharp pain in her ankles; her touchdown had been far from soft. ‘Oh, crap.’
‘What?’
‘I just realised, we’re still sixty miles from town in the middle of a desert. And I’m really not up to walking all that way.’
Eddie jerked a thumb towards the approaching helicopter. ‘We’ve still got a ride.’
Nina regarded it in relief. ‘I guess Larry’s okay, then — shit!’ She looked round in alarm. ‘What about Sophia?’
He indicated the nearby smoke. ‘I know where she is. Let’s take a gander.’ Supporting each other as best they could, they hobbled towards it.
A little impact crater came into view, the smouldering line rising from the charred remains of a parachute backpack atop a broken, huddled shape within. Jagged spikes of broken bone jutted out from ruptured flesh. Splashed across the surrounding sand was an oozing starburst of dark red. ‘Well,’ said Nina after a long silence. ‘I guess she’s finally dead.’
Eddie had been through the experience of believing his ex-wife to be deceased twice before; this time, he was almost out of sympathy. Almost. He moved closer, pulling what remained of the parachute over the mangled body. ‘Goodbye, Soph,’ he said, then paused for a moment before reaching down.