Page 18 of Forced Proximity
Steel tore like tinfoil.
The ground came up closer and closer until it wasn’t just “close” anymore, it was right upon us.
I didn’t remember the crash.
I only remembered the pain.
Then nothing.
When I woke up, I could see the sky—it was still dark and black, letting me know that it looked just as bad from the ground as it did from the sky—and I could hear water dripping.
I twisted, turning my head so that I could see to the right of me almost on reflex, and froze.
I was still strapped into my seat, but the seat next to me was gone.
Hell, the entire plane was gone.
I was in my seat, but there were no other seats around me any longer.
There was a bunch of twisted steel and broken trees, though.
The trees were all bent at awkward angles, and it took me a second for my brain to comprehend that the kind of damage that was done here wouldn’t have been caused by just a plane hitting the ground.
Everything that I could see for what felt like forever was nothing but emulsified trees.
Trees were uprooted. Ripped in half. Split down the middle.
A tornado.
Not only had we been in a plane crash, but we’d also been in a tornado?
What the hell were the odds?
“Finnian.”
Finnian.
I swallowed hard and turned the other direction, ignoring the screaming pain in my neck, and found her lying on my left.
Still strapped in.
That’s when I realized that there was a twisted bar of metal that was curled around and over my legs, suspending her in midair on my left side about a foot off the ground.
“What the fuck,” I breathed.
“We went through a tornado…”
“We survived a plane crash,” I finished for her.
She nodded, her necklace slipping free from underneath her shirt and falling to suspend in the air between us.
It was a silver chain with a soccer ball charm on the end.
“You play soccer?” I rasped.
“Co-ed.” She nodded her head.
“Are you any good?” I wondered.
