and she made a huge effort to surface from sleep and that lingering dream. To open her eyes and reach out to push the weight away.
Something was terribly wrong.
Jennifer couldn’t move. And what she could see only inches from her face had to be an illusion. Part of a dream that wouldn’t quit. The hand dangling in mid-air with the fingers an inch or two from the floor was that of a woman. The one that had screamed so piercingly perhaps? The skin texture was that of someone a generation older than herself and the rings that the hand displayed on its fourth finger included a beautiful eternity band of diamonds and sapphires.
The ring seemed oddly familiar and Jennifer could feel herself frowning. The whole hand was familiar, in fact. She had seen it—reaching out for another hand. An older man, with tufty grey hair and a cheeky grin was helping the woman climb into a small plane. Jennifer had already climbed in. She had the tiny back seat of the five-seater plane all to herself and she had been fastening her seat belt and watching the other passengers embark.
‘Mayday…Mayday…’
The realisation that the ‘dream’ had been a replay of reality, if not reality itself, hit Jennifer in a single blow. The cold was real. They had been travelling above the bush line over mountainous country. It had been a gloriously sunny spring day, but that was meaningless at an altitude that could collect snow all year round.
The hand was lifeless. Jennifer knew that as instantly as she understood the significance of the ambient temperature. The woman’s chest was the object weighing her down and there was not even a flutter of movement that might suggest the woman was still breathing.
Panic clawed at her throat. She had survived a plane crash and now she was trapped beneath a body that probably weighed twice as much as she did. How long ago had they hit the ground? Jennifer had no memory of the impact and she might have only been unconscious for a very short period of time. What had felt like a deep sleep and a drawn-out dream could have been only seconds.
Small planes carried a lot of fuel in their wings. Any moment now and something could ignite and explode.
Jennifer wasn’t about to survive a crash landing only to be burned alive, trapped in the tail section of a tiny aircraft, thank you very much. She twisted and pushed, trying to find purchase for her feet.
‘Aah-h!’ Her cry was one of frustration, pain and a not inconsiderable amount of fear.
‘Who’s that?’
Jennifer’s breath caught in a gasp as a mixture of relief and hope surged through her. She wasn’t the only survivor.
‘I’m Jennifer Allen,’ she called back. She couldn’t see anything past the body on top of her. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Guy Knight.’
‘Are you the pilot?’
‘No.’ The tone was slightly dry, suggesting either that being a pilot was not something he would have aspired to—or that Jennifer should have known who he was. Now that she had ruled out the person in charge of the plane, of course, she did know.
Guy Knight was the solid, younger man who had been seated beside the pilot in the front and, yes, she had seen this man before—had heard the name. He’d stood up to ask a quite intelligent question at the end of her presentation on managing cardiac tamponade yesterday. But he couldn’t really expect her to have remembered the name of one small town or rural GP out of the hundreds who had been attending the weekend conference on emergency medicine, could he? They had all seemed to want to talk to her. To ask questions. To pick the brain of one of the conference’s keynote speakers.
‘I need some help here.’ Fear sharpened Jennifer’s tone. ‘I’ve got a dead body on top of me and I can’t move.’
‘Are you injured?’’
‘I won’t be able to tell until I’ve got out of here. I feel like I’ve got an elephant sitting on my chest.’
‘Shirley always did have a bit of a struggle with her weight.’
A wild desire to point out who was doing the struggling now occurred to Jennifer, but the bubble of hysterical laughter remained trapped, and suffocated as quickly as it had arisen. The reminder that ‘the body’ was another person was unwelcome. Jennifer needed to focus on her own survival right now. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by empathy for any less fortunate people around her. She couldn’t help anyone else if she wasn’t OK herself, could she?
Dr Guy Knight didn’t seem to be in any hurry to live up to his name and offer assistance to a damsel in distress.
‘Bill, can you hear me? Bill?’
His voice was close and Jennifer remembered just how small the cabin of this tiny plane was. If a fire started, it would take no time at all for them all to suffocate. Or cook.
‘Who the hell is Bill?’
‘Shirley’s husband. He’s a GP in Te Anau. Always loved flying has Bill. He takes any opportunity to get his feet off the ground. I can’t get past this…Damn!’
Jennifer felt the crushing weight on her chest ease a fraction as she tipped sideways. She also felt the rocks on the other side of the thin metal skin of the fuselage scraping as the tail section of the small plane started sliding. For all Jennifer knew, she was about to go careening down a scree-covered slope and probably into some crevasse, thanks to the idiotic attempts of a wannabe hero to reach someone called Bill.
A tiny part of Jennifer’s brain was proud that even such extreme circumstances couldn’t push her past the point of self-control into a futile exercise such as screaming in sheer terror. Instead, she swore vehemently and proceeded to let Dr Guy Knight know precisely what she thought of him and his actions that were about to send her plunging to her doom.
‘For God’s sake,’ he snapped at last. ‘Will you shut up?’
A split second of astonished silence followed the interruption.
‘You’ve moved a whole six inches at the most,’ Dr Knight continued. ‘The tail is now wedged against a rock that’s not going anywhere for another million years or so.’
He was right, Jennifer realised. The terrifying movement had ceased completely. Her heart was still thumping erratically, however, and her breathing was a series of painful gasps. Shutting up was probably very sensible.
Guy Knight wasn’t shutting up. He also seemed to be attacking the plane wreckage in some fashion. Jerks and thumps reverberated through the surface Jennifer lay on.
‘I’ve only managed to get Digger out so far and he’s not looking too flash right now. You’ve got two people on top of you and if Bill was conscious he might be able to help me get him out.’
No wonder the weight was so restricting. Jennifer concentrated on her breathing. Slow and deep, she repeated over and over to herself. Hyperventilating wasn’t going to help and might already be responsible for the pins and needles now evident in her fingertips as well as her foot.
‘But he can’t help.’ Dr Knight sounded angry now and his tone was underscored by the harsh scrape of metal on rock. ‘Because he’s dead.’
Dragging sounds could
