THE SLIDE Part 4

Chapter 44: Flying Blind (part 1)

Fantasy: Airplanes and Lightning

Recap

The pilot cut engines at 600 feet and extended the wings into a glide configuration. The navigator made a thumbs up to Zed.

Lightning from below sheared off the nose and forward cabin. Another bolt of dry lightning came from above. Two of the six occupants were jettisoned from the disintegrating plane.

Everything happened so fast.

Pieces of the plane fell. There was no fire — only smoldering.

Zed fell, tumbling…

Below and Behind

“I think what you are doing might actually be having an effect,” said an observant SS Guard.

Tem had stood up and spread his arms out as if he were the glider plane and its wings. When he moved his arms, the wings wobbled in sync with his arms. When the lightning began, he seemed to avoid the strikes by inches. Or so it seemed to the guard. The guard repeated his observation, and Tem giggled.

And Then

Zed straightened out from his tumble and dove for the plane below, releasing his webbed wings between his arms and legs and body. It was a webbed gliding suit. It slowed his descent. He angled himself towards the plane, calculating the distance. His descent was slowed but not enough. When he landed, he bounced over the fuselage, slid down to the tail section, slipped, and fell onto the guy-wired bundle attached to the glider plane behind and below in tow.

“What was that?” Tem voiced what the others were wondering. The noise of the collision of something hitting the plane. Tem ran aft through a crawlspace and released a small hatch beneath the tail section. Unhinged, it was ripped off the plane. He angled his head, right shoulder, and arm through the small opening.

“Zed,” Tem roared over the din of the engines and over the icy chilled wind shear. “Zed!”

Zed’s arms and legs were wrapped around the descending angle of the tow cable. He looked up through his goggles at Tem.

“Take my hand,” Tem shouted.

“I can’t reach, fool!” Zed yelled back.

“Inch up!” Tem shouted back.

Indecisive

“We need to rescue Tem,” Farha said. Kuzma agreed.

“Hrez? Sophia?” Farha wondered.

“I am examining all the options,” Herz said with gravity.

“The timing of the plan is crucial. There may be time for that later,” Sophia was firm and added: “Maybe.”

“Sheep, sheep, sheep,” it was a whisper from nowhere.

“Did everybody hear that?” Farha asked, a quiver in her voice.

“What?” Sophia asked while Herz and Kuzma nodded in the affirmative.

Amenhotep IV

Ra woke in Amenhotep’s body and was disoriented. His twin sons were gone.

“Your elder brother is coming. You must leave this body and go back with the others. Back to your world,” the male voice said.

“Who are you? Where are you?”

“That is not important. Your influence has been felt by this Pharaoh. You must return to your people or at least to Marie.”

He remembered her, Marie — like a long-forgotten dream rising. He remembered Marie and rocketed out of Amenhotep’s body in a narrow beam of fierce sunlight.

Planes in a Lightning Corridor / Scents of a Forest

Zed had wrapped his legs and arms around the knot near the top of the cable while the wind had ripped the cap from his head. Tem’s right shoulder protruded from the small opening, and his arm and hand extended towards Zed.

“Reach for my hand, man,” Tem shouted with all the volume he could muster. He shouted again.

Ivanovich Papadopoulos/ Nikos the Greek was compelled to walk out of the safety of the low tubes to the east edge of the Slide, where the balloon sphere had crashed many moons past. He refused Louie’s companionship but was convinced to carry a rifle. He found it strange that the Slide was devoid of the zombies that he had expected to see.

He found the sphere. It had been righted.

“How odd,” he mumbled to himself, flashing on the sphere's lopsided angle when it crashed. He worked the combination levers on the main side hatch and opened it.

He had expected to have been assaulted with noxious odors from within. Instead, the aroma was one of humus, rich earth, and a cedar forest, awakening the memories he had never had before. It scents like a lush green forest.

Zed was screaming and moaning. His olive-green flak jacket bulged from within, bursting the snaps: “No, no. no…” But he had inched up towards Tem’s outstretched hand. It seemed to go well enough until the disruptions inside his jacket.

The lightning abated along the path of the remaining two planes and three drones. Zed inched up the cable. His free hand tickled the ends of Tem’s fingers.

“Not much further,” Tem shouted. “You’re doing good!”

Zed lunged forward, and his hand clasped Tem’s forearm and Tem his forearm, at which point the flak jacket burst open. A mist of black wet particles was sucked up through the small hatch and disoriented Tem, but his grip remained. But Zed slipped, and his hand was covered in slime. He lost his grip and slid several feet down the cable back into the turbulence behind the plane.

Two bolts of lightning from nowhere sliced vertically — one from the north-west and one from the southeast. The two bolts left the air around the plane saturated with electrostatic energies. Zed hung on with his knees, legs twisted and upside-down.

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