Where We Landed

Ian Wilkerson was transfixed.  The vibrant purple blended together gorgeously with the orange that reminded him of the creamsicles that he used to have as a child, in the sky.  The gentle ebb and flow of the crystal-clear tide lapped at his lower half as he sat in the damp sand.  It was like a scene out of a movie, even worthy of being a prospective traveler’s wallpaper, he thought.  It should’ve been perfect.

The prospective traveler would sleep easy at night, thinking that this scene before Ian’s eyes was a paradise; nothing less.  To Ian, however, this scene was nothing but salt in a wound.  An indescribably large wound that was still burning behind him, even hours after the incident.

Ian wiped the tears from his face with a shirt he found lying next to him in the sand, making sure that he used a dry spot to do so.  This wasn’t Brazil, he knew that for sure.  Through all of the screaming, he paid enough attention to the view outside of his window to see that where they landed was a small island.  Rylee would be able to tell exactly which island this was, using her giant maps, he thought.  This was the type of place that he had wanted to take his girlfriend, Rylee, after he finally got the balls to pop the big question.  Someday, he told himself, he would get that opportunity.  

Don’t give up, he thought.  She’s here somewhere.  She’s not dead.

Reluctantly, he sat up and turned his head to face the horror of the carnage left by the crash.  The right wing was completely detached from the body of the plane, with half of it submerged at the edge of the water-line.  He could feel the heat of the burning end of the wing from where he sat, some 30 feet away.  The body of the plane was broken into a few sections, each still burning.  Different articles of clothing littered the beach, the tops of the tropical plants and trees, and the ground.

Then, there were the bodies.  The plane was full when they boarded but now, it seemed that at least half of the passengers were missing completely.  Ian assumed that the missing had been ejected upon impact and were probably spread across the island or the bottom of the ocean.  The other half of the passengers left no mystery; they were dead.  The bodies that he had all met horrible fates.  Some were horribly dismembered; their arms and legs scattered like the clothes they brought along for the flight.  The others went the way of the plane; burning to crisps.  Ian thanked the Lord for the fact that his allergies had been acting up lately and he couldn’t smell anything.

Ian wasn’t sure how he had survived.  The whole thing was so traumatic that he didn’t even remember what he had been doing when the plane crashed.  However he had positioned himself, it seemed to have worked.  He had woken up on the beach, after the tide had hit his face.  He had bolted up and immediately went to find Rylee, fighting the worst headache of his life and a shooting pain in his left shoulder.  He had screamed until his throat hurt as well, but to no avail.  The mental images of the burned bodies would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life, but he had to make sure that none of them were Rylee.

According to his watch, it had been 8 hours since he had woken up from being blacked out.  He couldn’t have been out for long; when he woke up, the plane wasn’t even scheduled to land yet.  He hadn’t slept at all since then.  He had been searching the carnage for Rylee for hours before having to lay down, the pain too much to handle.

He had wanted to sleep and he almost succeeded in doing so, despite the pain.  The noises were what kept him awake.  The noises were unlike anything he had ever experienced before.  Horrible screeching sounds like something scraping metal, followed by a haunting clicking sound.  His curiosity told him to investigate the noises but common sense prevailed.  Those were not the sounds of anything human, nor any animal Rylee had babbled about to him.  He decided to stay put, building a little hut out of fallen tree branches and wreckage from the crash.

The noises had stopped since the sun had begun to paint the sky with the breathtaking colors that were now to Ian’s back.  He had made an executive decision; it was time to find Rylee.

*****

After trekking through the tropical  nature, searching any wreckage he could find for his girlfriend, Ian decided that he needed to eat.  He hadn’t eaten since they had gotten to the airport in Buffalo and his stomach was making it a point to remind him of this.  He reminded himself that he couldn’t starve himself looking for Rylee, or he wouldn’t live to travel to an island like this on their own terms.  Plus, if he survived, he’d make a killing writing a book about this.  

His attention diverted from looking for people (though, he did still keep an eye out) to searching for any source of food he could find.  With little knowledge of where exactly he was, let alone the plants that inhabited the island, this took longer than he would have hoped.  In his search for food, his eyes kept falling upon the animals of the island, as well.  He quickly realized that, even if he wanted to hunt them, he had no weapons to do so.  He wasn’t even sure of what exactly most of them were.  He left this kind of information for Rylee, it’s what she studied and still researched.  It was the reason that they were going to Brazil in the first place.  He did recognize some iguanas, though.  Rylee had shown him pictures of an iguana she found on one of her trips.

After what seemed like forever, he emerged from an area of the island that was densely covered in exotic-looking plants.  Not fifty yards ahead of him, he finally saw a safe source of food; banana trees.  He sighed with relief and said a silent “Thank God.”  Before he could start on his way towards the bananas, he was frozen by a noise.  He wasn’t sure exactly what he heard the first time.  He stayed completely still and listened intently.  The noise came again, his eyes widened upon hearing it the second time.  It wasn’t the noise he had been hearing last night, no.  This noise came from a human.

His body started moving before he could even think of doing so.  The sound was faint but became more audible as Ian’s steps approached the source.  He started to realize it wasn’t just a noise, it was speech.  Still faint, he could hear a woman struggling to get out, “Help… me.”  

His steps quickened as he started to recognize the voice speaking these words.  The voice that had proven capable of comforting him on even his worst days.  His steps became a run as he shouted: “Rylee!  Rylee!” His shouts became louder and louder as he got closer. 

He swung his arms in front of him, smacking low branches and leaves out of his way as he trudged through another densely covered area.  When he arrived on the other side, he caught his breath.  There she was, lying back against a banana tree.  She looked rough, as one might expect after someone has survived a plane crash.  Her hair was sticking out every which way, her clothes were covered in an array of differently colored stains.  She had blood caked on her arms and chest.  Ian thought that seeing Rylee like this might have been even worse than seeing all of the victims of the crash who hadn’t survived.  

He broke out in tears, ecstatic to see his lover once again; to see her alive.  He began walking toward her, preparing some stupid joke that would make her giggle like she always did when he made his jokes.  Something to the effect of: “Now what’s a pretty lady like you doing in a place like this?”  

Before he got close enough to even consider dropping his cheesy line, she waved for him to stop.  He did.  She coughed as she tried to say something to him.  He didn’t understand any of it.  He thought he heard the word ‘white’ at the end, though.  

“Try to speak up, baby.  I can’t hear you,”  Ian said.

Rylee waved even more aggressively, her eyes widening, face tensing.  She coughed again, this time turning into a fit.  She finally got out what she wanted to say, trying to force herself to be a tad louder; “You need to be quie-”

Her voice was interrupted by a horrible sound.  The ear-piercing sound of something scraping against metal.  The sound he had heard last night.  It was much closer this time.  The metallic sound blended into the demonic clicking.  Ian’s tears really started to stream now.  He was so close, Rylee was right here.  He just wanted to go to her.

Rylee looked at him and seemed to sense his sadness.  The waterworks started to break loose in her eyes as well.  She let out a whimper.  Then the bushes started rustling.  Rustling louder than any of the animals he had seen on the island could cause.  From the shadow-covered bush emerged something unlike anything Ian had ever seen in his life.  It’s head was exceptionally long and where it’s eyes should’ve been, there was nothing.  He only had a split second to look at it before something else emerged from the bush; a massive pincer.  Before he could even get out a scream, the pincer was plunged with incredible speed into Rylee’s torso.

Ian watched with horror, unable to speak a word, as the monstrous creature tore the love of his life to shreds.  He saw the light leave her eyes as the pincer gouged a hole in her chest.  In just a few short seconds, she became unrecognizable.  The scene looked remarkably like that of the wreckage of the plane and all of the horrific things that he knew would haunt him forever.

Ian’s mind caught up to his eyes and he let out an unintelligible scream.  He stared through his tears at the death of the girl of his dreams.  The girl that he wanted to take to a gorgeous island where there were no horrors.  The girl that he wanted to marry.  

Before he could let out another scream, the monster snapped it’s head toward him.  

The last words spoken by anyone who boarded Flight 237 were: “I love you, Rylee.”