“Oh, OK.” She grabbed them, the type he’d seen demonstrated on airline flights countless times. “I was thinking of those fat life jackets. Not the inflatable ones.” She handed one to Alden and put another around her neck.
“Do you want one, Sebastian?” she called.
“Busy right now,” he growled in the headset.
The surface of the lagoon still rushed toward them, but the rate of approach slowed slightly. The flaps doing their work, Alden thought. He had a dim sense of the distant shorelines on either side as a blur in his peripheral vision.
Sebastian, to his astonishment, turned the lever on his door and cracked it open. “Crack open your door if you can.”
Alden did as he was told, the open doors adding a new rattle to the rushing noise of their descent. Alden’s mind worked over Sebastian’s reasoning. The plane was going to crash-land in the water. He supposed it was like a car that drives into a lake. When a car goes under, water pressure can keep the occupants from opening the doors. So they were opening them in advance. That had to be it.
Also, this is madness.
The water was so close now. The plane’s angle tilted up as Sebastian flared the wings a bit, then leveled them, and the Cessna leveled too.
With a bone-shaking shudder, the plane half skimmed, half plowed into the water.
Water felt soft when you swam around in it. But when you slammed into it at highway speeds, it felt more like half-dry concrete.
The force of impact threw Alden forward against the belts, then backward as the plane’s nose tipped up. There were a couple of breathtaking moments when he wondered if it would keep going and somersault forward, or flip to its back on the rebound. But to his relief, when the plane rocked back, it stayed right side up as it settled in the water.
Which rushed in the open doors, swarming around his feet.
The headrest, the harness—both had kept him from launching. But now they had a deluge to contend with.
He took a second to look back. Roz seemed shaken but OK. She gave him a thumbs-up. In her other hand, she still carried her camera, the strap wrapped tightly around her wrist. Fear flashed in her eyes as she took in the water swirling around their legs.
First thought: She’s alive. We’re alive!
Second thought: I should’ve recorded this on my phone for the paper.
Third: This water isn’t good, is it?
“We have to get out.” Sebastian, already free of his harness, spoke in fast, clipped tones as he grabbed a GoPro camera off its overhead mount and stuffed it and his tablet computer into a small bag. “The water’s pretty shallow here, but I’m not exactly sure how deep. We don’t want to be in here if the plane sinks.” Alden got out of his restraint fast, too—past experience—and reached back to help Roz, but she managed to release hers a second later without his help. The rising water was a strong motivator.
He yanked off his headset and started pushing on his door. It resisted.
Roz, who’d also shed her headset, tried to help Sebastian fully open the port-side door while keeping her camera above the water.
“What are you doing with that stupid camera?” said Alden, who could now about wedge himself through the door.
“It’s practically brand new! I don’t want to lose it to the river.”
“Just get out!” Sebastian said, and he plunged through the door and into the river proper.
“Please!” Alden added.
She squeezed through the door after their pilot, and then she was out the other side, so Alden half fell out his, stumbling in the water.
Stumbling. Yes! His feet touched the silty floor of the Indian River Lagoon. The cool water sloshed around his chest. At least they weren’t in over their heads, and there wasn’t a current to speak of. He didn’t even have to inflate his life vest.
Not yet.
“Roz?” he called out.
“Over here with Sebastian!”
Alden took a few steps and looked around, getting his bearings. Roz and Sebastian were angling east in the river, away from the plane, Roz still with her camera hand in the air. He laughed to himself. That was so Roz.
