raised by wolves

I’m going to take this time to tell you a story about when I was a little boy, four or five. My parents decided it was time I learn to swim and took me to the pool. I looked into the deep end of the pool and it seemed to have no bottom. I looked over the pool and refused to believe the people in it were not fighting to survive as they splashed around. I imagined a monster in the bottom of the pool, swift and silent and alien to the surface, cutting through the water terrorizing the swimmers. I refused to get in, a simple child’s stubbornness to try something new. My father, doing what any good father would have, simply threw me in when I came to cry in his arms.

I sank like a stone. Sometime later, after a long dark stretch of nothing, I was pulled out and given CPR. I lived.

Later, I found my father taking a bath and in childish clumsiness caused the small radio next to the tub to fall into the soapy water and my father was electrocuted. He did not live.

I never swam again.

This is my last thought before being flung at the ceiling and nearly deafened by the unmistakable sound of the planes left engine exploding. Ha.

“This is Dole, we have definitely got a problem here.”

“No shit!” Goober yells to the pilot.

“What happened?” Weston says. “Dole, what happened?” he corrects himself before Goober can chime in. Some people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

“Uh, left engine failure…Critical failure,” Dole says.

“No shit!” yells Weston. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he demands.

“We’re going down!” Dole helpfully informs us.

We’re going down flashes in my mind in big block letters and I think, tell me something I don’t know.

“What. HAPPENED.” Weston says.

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“This is going nowhere,” Yolita says. Verne nods, and grabs a hold of one of the straps on my back pack.

“Hey man,” I yell, “Get off my fucking ‘chute!”

“Use it,” he hisses and pulls himself passed me towards the cargo door. It opens, but upside down, and this is when I realize we’re upside down. I see the sky spinning away, away, away below us and almost get sick in my mask. Verne throws himself out, and I do get sick.

“We’re gonna hit the boat! Bail out bail out bail out!” Dole shrieks and comes diving sideways into the cargo room.

“The BOAT?”

Dole is desperately searching for his emergency ‘chute, but can’t seem to find it. He leverages a bowie knife, sinister as fuck with his mask on, like some Mad Max ninja type. He’s decided he wants mine, which is a mistake. I bring a knife down on his foot and roll to my feet. With puke sloshing back against my face and up my nose, I puke again when my feet leave the floor…which is actually the roof, I think.

“Charming, Parks,” Weston says. “Bail out! Bail out!” and he bails out. The others follow suit, even Dole, who is handed an emergency ‘chute and manages to pull the knife out of his foot and—more importantly—the floor before the plane goes down. But man, would I have liked to have had more time. The sound of vomiting en masse fills my earpiece and I vomit again as I float, almost weightless, gliding along on my ‘chute as the plane falls dead below me. Heading right for the boat. Five black seeds blossom into parachute flowers at varying distances between me and the boat, some of them not nearly close enough to me. We call that a “rough landing” in this business.

We float soundless towards the screaming chaos below. The plane and the boat predictably collide, and event expected by exactly zero of the passengers or crew. Explosion, explosion, screaming, screeching, explosion, a few passengers even leap to certain death over the side of the boat that wasn’t even hit.

“Alright people. Stick to the plan,” Weston. Always sticking to the plan.

“Aside from the plane, and Dole on the boat with us, this is exactly what we were supposed to do.”

“That’s a pretty big ‘aside,’ Weston, even if the plane wasn’t burning along with the boat,” I point out. Silence, then, a moment later:

“I can’t believe you stabbed me, Parks,” says Dole.

“Shouldn’ta come after my ‘chute, Dole.”

Silence the rest of the way down.