An Instant - To sleep, perchance to dream by Alicia

To sleep, perchance to dream

It would be cliché to say that it was all a blur; to say that all the instruments seemed to flare to life at once; to say that he, Richard Finn, could not respond.  

His hands were before his eyes, fluctuating in and out of focus as he pulled his screaming spine backward. Heavy grey shapes clung to the windows, pressing down, leering at the two men. The darkness clogged his eyelids as Richard tried to eliminate the echoing flash of lightning that blinded him. Everything was drained of its correct colour, the flashing emergency lights an eerie pink, the four stripe epaulettes upon his sleeve a diminishing vanilla. He sank against the cool hard leather back of his pilot’s seat, and tried to breathe through his nostrils.

The distant echo of his daughter’s laughter tangled with the muffled silence in his ears. Nothing connected.

Faintly, the flickering altimeters reminded him of something he saw in a textbook once.

He felt the soft smile of his wife lingering in the sunshine as she chattered to the neighbours, the Almantises from Florence. Nothing connected.

Faintly, he could see the strained face of his first officer, a freshly qualified young man called Stephen, speaking to ATC. But Richard could not hear the words beyond a blur of sound.

He smelt the memory of an Irish tea, sweet, with a dash of skim milk, the faint press of flush crimson lipstick painted on the lip of the teacup. But that didn’t connect either.

‘…one.’ Something from a textbook.

‘Captain…’ A textbook about aeroplanes, ‘…hear me?’

The other man’s hands were everywhere, assessing the damage, his lips moving silently but rapidly. Another blinking red light winked into existence, and Stephen swallowed, taking a deep breath, as Richard watched, and his lips moved slower than before. Slow, but fast - URGENT.

‘Cabin crew prepare…emergency...’  Richard closed his eyes tightly, wincing at the exhausted pain behind them. A faint green echo shone in the blackness. His heartbeat quickened. There was a dull ache in his forehead. Richard’s hands crept forward reflexively.

‘I have control, Stephen.’

The darkening clouds rumbled, the deep resonance rolling a depression in the atmosphere. Richard watched as the carburettor indicator fired into action, joining the cacophony of recorded warnings. They were rapidly losing altitude.

‘Sir, we’re flying one-engine.’ Plummeting. Yet the clouds did not thin.

Richard pushed the A318 into preparations for emergency landing, cursing the two useless turbine engines dragging them down hard. He needed to see the ground. Chaotic sensors screamed. But even on the ground, Richard was not in control. The clouds wouldn't move.

A cyclone battered mercilessly against the hull of the smallest Airbus member. The yoke jerked beneath his white knuckles, shuddering. The jolts ran along his body, rooting to his toes, forcing him to struggle, to scream, to MOVE.

“Get out of my house, Richard.” She turned her back on him, as if equal and opposite forces would push him away, out the door.

No, no, it didn’t connect to anything.

The recorded warning was no longer intelligible above the noise of the jet’s shuddering. Stephen had gone pale beside him, frantically requesting weather reports, weather reports, weather reports on approach. ATC, a bloke named Kevin, his voice was quiet. He calmly told them about the 58 mph crosswinds on approach.

“Look out, mate, she’s gusting to ten. Sure you want to brave this storm?” Carl was saying, standing in the driveway with his car keys hanging loosely from his index finger where it swung back and forth like a pendulum. Hypnotic in its deceptive uselessness.

An instant in the wind, suspected multiple bird strikes, hydraulics malfunction, multiple engine failure, carburettor failure, altimeter failure, anti-icing failure, failure, failure…failure… fail…ure…

“Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.” The recorded warning announced cheerily, carelessly.

An image of a sharp woman with a clipboard, sighing, as he stared at a point above her head, vanished. It seemed to connect, but then it didn’t.

‘Flaps 30, full reverse throttle, Stephen.’

‘Roger.’

The runway was too far left. The ground reared up like a snake poised for attack, wondering if it would allow the pathetic little white mouse to touch it before it struck. A heaviness caught Richard unawares, his grip faltering.

‘Landing gear, sir?’

Of course, bloody landing gear. He nodded drowsily, hoping his FO’s frightened, intense staring at the senior pilot-in-command was paying off.  

Concussion - another failure. The 34L loomed slightly off centre as he slumped heavily. The rain drummed on the metal casing of the flight deck, hollow like the cavity in his chest…low…quieting…darkening…  

‘SIR…’ The first officer’s protest fizzled out with the last lights in the cabin.

Richard’s hands slipped from the yoke.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

***

Flight 8122 smashed into the tarmac, but Richard Finn was already senseless in the darkness. The gentle smattering applause of a drizzling rain resounded in the emptiness, trailing after the last spindles of that instant. The wind was still.  

~OvO~

Author's Note: 831 words. I wrote for 50 minutes, sorry! I have been damned waiting to write about planes! A lot of this is probably wrong though, in terms of emergency procedures, plane malfunctions etc. At first, I had about 300 words written like a disaster movie, and then I remembered it had to relate to belonging hahaha that's why it's sort of terrible.

Definitions & technical terms:

• Epaulettes for pilots are stripes that you wear on your uniform to show what qualifications/rank you hold - four stripes is Captain. I hope that explains a lot, Maggie. 
• Altimeters measure the altitude of the plane. 
• ATC is Air Traffic Control, it's the dude that sits in the cool towers at the airport and direct planes, give permission for landing etc. 
• Carburettor - I think our engineers might know what this is? :) It determines the amount of fuel drawn into the airstream based on speed and pressure of airflow. For engines. I think.
• A318 - the smallest member of the Airbus family. I was so proud to have remembered this random fact, but I checked it up just in case. 
• Airbus is a big airline company, like Boeing. 
• Yoke is the new modern term for joystick basically. 
• A crosswind is any wind that has a perpendicular component to the line or direction of travel. In aviation, a crosswind is the component of wind that is blowing across the runway making landings and take-offs more difficult than if the wind were blowing straight down the runway. (copied from Wikipedia)
• Hydraulics control the plane. Engineers, take over for me for this one. 
• Anti-icing is basically that; it anti-ices. It's this liquid that's put on the plane to prevent it from icing over - different to de-icing which is used to get rid of ice. 
• Flaps 30, full reverse throttle - Creative licence. I sort of stole this from a book about Qantas' failures, and I'm definitely not sure if I'm using it right. It's a type of prep for landing. 
• FO is First Officer 
• 34L is one of the main runways (the East-West) at Charles Kingsford Smith airport - not sure if it would actually be used for emergency Airbus landings... creative licence! 

If anyone's curious about the intertextual references or just plain fandom references in this story (which I doubt is any of you at all), I'll put them up on the Alicia page. 

Please criticise my story. No one's been criticising my stories lately. :(