DN - Plane Landing

Metal crumples around my shoulders. I fight and kick and push as hard as I can upward. We’re dropping like a rock, and barely slowing.

Fifty yards.

The aluminum skin gives way with a shriek and I crunch six inches up into the guts of the plane, my legs dangling free. A huge support strut is pressing into my back.

Thirty yards.

I’ve stopped breathing, I’ve stopped blinking. Everything goes to pushing.

Ten yards.

In my head, I can see the lattice—

—there’s the tangle of the jet, and the trailing, unraveling threads of its momentum—

—grab it, grab it all—

—I can pull—

—but I’ll have to pull it through myself—

—I pull.

Pain rips through every muscle in my back. I cry out in scarlet agony. Pain is everywhere. It fills me, packs every part of me tight. My legs spasm, and my fingers go slack. Something loud and wet snaps in my chest, and a lance of fire pierces me. It doesn’t stop. It gets worse. I can feel my body breaking, tearing, ripping.

But we should have hit by now.

I force an eye open, and I see the ground rushing past me, and falling away. The final threads of our downward momentum pass through the fingers of my mind, transformed by channeling them through my body to momentum that carries us up and forward. We sail over the signal lights at the end of the runway, and begin sinking toward ground again. Finally, finally, the suffocating pain begins to recede back to something I can think through. There’s a sharp grinding somewhere along my flank, and my body is alive with sprains and tears.

I grit my teeth and push up and forward as hard as I can. The metal around me groans and buckles. Without so much momentum forcing us down, I can delay us long enough to slip over the runway’s edge. The landing gear to the left of me unfolds and locks in position, but the nose and right side wheels stay folded up. The plane begins to wobble and tip, balanced imperfectly on a single point, the uneven thrust from the single engine trying to spin the whole thing off of me.

The runway is zipping beneath us at highway speeds. Just a few more yards.

My feet hit the ground with a jarring impact I feel hard in my pelvis. We bounce once, twice, and then I’m running, great bounding strides that cover a dozen yards at a time, but the steps start to catch up with me, and just before I slip I set my legs and skid along the ground on my boots. My knees lock and almost instantly my feet start digging furrows in the concrete. A spray of gravel explodes up, fast and hard enough to dimple and dent all the metal skin around me. It’s like getting sandblasted in the face by a machine gun. The airliner’s nose pitches up into the air, and the tail slams into the ground. We skid for another seventy yards. My legs clench and tremble, sharp little bolts of jagged ice cutting through the broader ache of everything below my thighs.

Finally, we come to a sliding stop. With one last great heave of effort, I let the plane down gently on its right side and scramble out from underneath the fuselage on my hands and knees. I am unspeakably weary. My stomach suggests it might throw up. The pain is everywhere. When I try to get to my feet, I stumble and have to try again.

One last effort. I can do this. I fly, wobbly at first, and land on the stubby remains of the right wing. The emergency door comes off quick in my hands, and I huck it away into the darkness. A terrified man is looking out at me.

“Leave your bags and get out on the wing,” I say. “You’re going to want to slide off the front; the broken side is too jagged.”

- Dreadnought, Chapter 11