It might take all her strength just to survive. She hoped coming here wasn’t going to turn out to be a mistake.
The plane continued to drop lower in the sky and Emma felt the undercarriage of the plane open as the pilot prepared to lower the wheels, but a minute later the plane was levelling out and she heard the flaps close again. She looked out of the window at the red dirt and the greenish-grey, almost leafless trees and stunted bushes. They weren’t getting any closer.
The plane’s undercarriage opened a second time, before closing again just as rapidly. Emma frowned and watched as the plane began to circle. As the plane turned she could see the airport buildings below them. At least she knew now that there was civilisation out here. That was comforting. But the next words she heard, however, were not.
‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ The pilot’s voice came through the plane’s audio system. ‘Due to an unforeseen technical problem with the landing gear, I would like to inform you that we will be carrying out an emergency landing.’ He paused momentarily and there was complete silence in the plane as every passenger waited to hear what he had to say next.
‘However, there is no need to be alarmed. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts tightly fastened. Your cabin crew will pass through the cabin, demonstrating the brace position and landing procedures.’
His tone suggested this was more of an inconvenience than a problem but Emma did wonder how he intended to land the plane. She could only assume he’d been trained for this sort of thing. In her experience pilots were trained for all sorts of emergencies but the pilots she knew flew for the air force, and she had no idea what experience pilots in Outback Australia had. Surely they’d have to return to Sydney? But even as she waited for the pilot to make that announcement she realised it was ridiculous.
Returning to Sydney wouldn’t miraculously resolve the problem. The landing gear would still be stuck. It couldn’t be fixed in mid-air. So what was he going to do? They couldn’t fly around indefinitely. At some stage they’d run out of fuel and then they’d drop out of the sky.
As her fellow passengers also put two and two together she could feel fear building up around her. Like a living breathing presence in the air it moved from one person to the next, wrapping its icy tentacles around each and every one of them, binding them together in a potential tragedy.
Everyone was silent. Were they thinking about crashing or were they too terrified to utter a sound? Whatever the reason for the silence it was there and it was complete and there was nothing to distract anyone from the pilot’s next words.
‘This is going to make landing difficult but not impossible. The airport has a dirt landing strip, which we can use in this situation, but I ask you all to assume the crash position as directed by our cabin crew.’
His last sentence succeeded in breaking the silence. There was yelling, there were tears and there was screaming. It seemed as though everyone had found their voices at once and the cabin reverberated with noise. Emma’s heart leapt in her chest and she felt it seem to lodge at the base of her throat. Nausea filled the empty space in her ribcage where moments before her heart had been.
In the commotion the crew moved calmly through the cabin. They opened the window shades and instructed the passengers to put their heads into their laps or brace themselves on the seat in front of them. Surely they couldn’t be as calm as they sounded?
But gradually, as the plane continued to circle, the cabin crew managed to quieten the passengers and the noise was reduced to a less frightening level.
Emma put her head in her lap. She knew the plane was circling in order to give the emergency crews on the ground time to get into position. She could picture the fire engines and ambulances racing to the edge of the runway and she wondered whose services would be required most.
This was crazy, she thought as she hugged her knees. She’d flown halfway around the world searching for peace but she hadn’t expected it to come in the form of mortality. This was why she should never make plans. They always went wrong. She was going to die at twenty-seven years of age. Just like her mother had.
No. Thinking like that wasn’t helpful. She had to believe that the pilot was as confident as he sounded. She took a deep breath and crossed her fingers as the overhead lights were switched off and the cabin was plunged into semi-darkness. The afternoon light bouncing off the desert and coming through the windows was only just bright enough to take the edge off the gloom.
Emma closed her eyes and waited for the moment that everyone talked about. She wasn’t waiting for her life to flash before her eyes but for the moment of regret for things she hadn’t yet done. But it wasn’t things left undone that sprang to mind. It was things she’d lost. Her mother had died when Emma had been a toddler and she barely remembered her, but her father had died recently and Emma felt his loss keenly. She and her father had shared a close bond. For many years it had been just the two of them, and she wished more than anything that he was still part of her life.
She’d tried to fill the void left by her father’s death with other relationships but her choice of Jeremy, her last boyfriend, had been disastrous costing her both a place to live and her job.
That was something else she missed, she realised. Her job as a nurse, which she loved. But maybe it was time to put that behind her. Jeremy had said and done some cruel things that had made her question her nursing skills but she shouldn’t let him dictate her path. Not any more. She wasn’t about to ask for her old job back, she knew she’d never want to work with Jeremy again, but that didn’t prevent her from nursing altogether. There were plenty of other hospitals that would love to have her.
Her career was something worth living for and she promised herself that if she survived this landing she would set about returning to nursing.
She had just started running through a mental list of which hospitals she should apply to when her head bounced and her chin slammed against her knees, jarring her teeth as the plane hit the ground and slid on its belly. The collision with the earth took her by surprise as she hadn’t realised they were that close.
She could hear the screech of metal as the fuselage complained about being thrown at the ground and she waited for the sound of metal tearing as the plane was ripped apart, waited for the smell of fuel, the roaring heat of flames.
Around her people were screaming, including the girl beside her. Emma opened her eyes. The girl was cradling her left arm and her hand was twisted and lying at an unnatural angle relative to her forearm. She couldn’t have been in the brace position properly and she must have slammed into the back of the seat in front of her on impact and fractured her wrist. The break looked painful and, considering their circumstances, there was every chance she’d go into shock. But what could Emma do?
She could feel the plane sliding sideways before it came to a halt. She looked along the aisle. Some of the overhead lockers had sprung open with the impact and contents had fallen out, but incredibly the plane appeared to be in one piece. There were no explosions, no gaping holes, no fires. People were crying but she couldn’t see any movement, not from either the crew or the passengers. There was no one to assist them, not yet. What could she do?
Over the sound of crying passengers Emma could hear the sirens of the emergency vehicles. She looked out the window but the view was completely obscured by a curtain of red dust that billowed around them. The red haze swirled as the emergency vehicles raced through it and the cloud pulsed as the emergency lights bounced off the dust particles. Help was on the way but she couldn’t tell how long it would be before they’d be reached.
The girl had stopped screaming but was still cradling
