Unforgettable journey to other planets

Debby sat up out of bed and looked around. She recognized Sango’s apartment in Tokyo. Everything was exactly as it had been on her last visit. A bright room with a large window and a bed that transformed into a dresser. A beautiful tree in the corner. Sango sat on the edge of the bed, looking frightened, as if she hadn’t been able to wake Debby up for a long time.

“God, Carol!” Debby threw herself into Sango’s arms. “I had a terrible dream. I was on an airplane and it started falling. Then a young man tried to save me, but…” she recoiled from Sango, “how can you possibly save somebody in a plane crash? And then we were falling. I felt weightless. And then the terrible impact and everything was spinning around. I felt like it was better to just die.”

“Debby,” Sango looked at her with compassion.

“М?” Debby mumbled through her tears. “God, I was so scared.”

“Debby,” Sango repeated, “open your eyes.”

The room began to darken and fill with cold. Debby felt her body grow heavy and aching with terrible pain. Sango was moving away from her. She pulled her arms toward her friend to hold her again, but her hands didn’t obey. Everything in front of her eyes blurred. Debby opened her eyes.

Jean-Pierre was in front of her. His face and hands were bruised, but he was looking at Debby frightened. He exhaled with relief when he found Debby awake.

“Debby,” Jean-Pierre said with relief, “how do you feel? Can you move your arms and legs? You didn’t breathe for a couple of minutes.”

Debby tried to say that she felt fine, but realized that it wouldn’t be true. She couldn’t utter a word.

“Aaah!” she let out a semblance of a scream instead of words.

“Debby, you have a broken hip and a lot of bruises. Don’t be afraid. We need to see if I can move you. Try to lift your head.”

Debby lifted her head and felt a wild pain. She moaned again.

“I know it hurts, but we need to check the whole body. The neck is fine. Move your arms,” Jean-Pierre commanded as if he were a doctor.

A few more orders from Jean-Pierre brought a huge dose of pain to Debby, and she couldn’t move with exhaustion. The fingers on her hands were moving, though her hands themselves were bruised and bruised. Her right leg did not move; Jean-Pierre asked Debby not to look down for the moment. This startled her, but he immediately turned her attention to the pain in her left leg. It was normal, though it hurt as much as anything else. Debby’s consciousness wandered around the small room, and she had no clue how she fit, lying on the floor, in an airplane lavatory.

“Okay,” Jean-Pierre concluded, “I’m going out to get someone to help us.”

Jean-Pierre disappeared from sight. A coldness entered the room. A second later, Jean-Pierre returned with a strange – either surprised or frightened – expression on his face.

“Debby,” he paused for a long moment before he continued speaking. “Debby, we survived the plane crash. We’re in the mountains,” Jean-Pierre swallowed his saliva to continue. “You need help. I’ll have to go away for a while, look for people. A village or perhaps climbers. I know…”

Jean-Pierre couldn’t finish his difficult reasoning. Debby took his hand and cried. Jean-Pierre lowered his head and imagined for a moment what his wounded companion was feeling right now. What pain she was feeling, knowing that they might not be able to survive. Jean-Pierre made a mental effort and decided inside, “I’ll do everything I can to save this American woman. Even if it means sacrificing my life.”

“I’m sorry,” Debby said through her tears.

Jean-Pierre looked up at her and asked stunned:

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You’re here because of me, God, it’s all my fault,” she began to squeeze his hand in despair. “Where are we? I don’t understand why I’m always hurting everyone.”

“Look at me,” Jean-Pierre said, trying to get in Debby’s field of vision. “It’s going to be okay. Do you know why?”

Debby looked at him with surprise, the tears stopped.

“We’re still alive, so we can do something.”

Jean-Pierre pulled out all the paper towels from the box above the sink and put them under Debby’s head. He ran his fingernail across the bottom of her right leg, but Debby felt nothing.

“We must hurry,” Jean-Pierre said to himself as he walked out of the small room.

Only a few pieces remained of the plane’s tail. The door of the toilet dangled. The second toilet in front had been swept away completely. From the outside, the keel and lateral stabilizers could be seen to have been pinched off the rocks, leaving holes. By some miracle, the small piece of iron around the toilet room was still intact and frozen between two low rocks.

Jean-Pierre stepped away from the tail of the plane and looked around. Pieces of hull plaster were hanging from the scratched body in bits. Wires, insulation, iron, and plastic had all turned to junk. Jean-Pierre looked around. To his right was a small hill that obscured the horizon. To his left, mountains covered the entire surface of the earth up to the sky with a crumpled cloth. He gazed into the distance and decided to go uphill. “Maybe behind this ridge I can see something.” He began to climb up, looking back.

Debby’s breathing short, she looked around, trying to figure out how to get up. She lifted her torso slightly and leaned against the wall. Seeing her feet, she felt dizzy with fear. Nausea rose to her throat.

Her hip bone was clearly broken. Even through the jeans, you could see it sticking unnaturally out of her hip. There was no blood; it was a closed fracture. Debby tried to move her leg again, but nothing worked. She grabbed her jeans and moved the right leg slightly. A sharp stabbing pain stopped her. Debby closed her eyes and her lips quivered. She wanted to burst into tears, but she didn’t even have the strength to do that. The plane crash, Carol, the leg, the cold – it was all mixed up in her head, and Debby covered her face with hands.

Suddenly she heard Jean-Pierre screaming somewhere in the distance. It was a scream, and there was joy in the sound of it.

“He’s found people!” Debby exhaled and fell to the floor.

Part 2 – Chapter 21

Bernard Bajolet was frantically scrolling letters on his phone, and his mind was jumping from the titles of those letters to the words in the hall. “Maybe write ‘flight’” thought Monsieur Bajolet. “No, it doesn’t come out. When was it? In the basket, perhaps?” Bernard made a few more attempts and found one. He saw a letter from the HR department about Jean-Pierre Biro’s business trip. He opened the letter and jumped at the flight number with his eyes. “Oh my God, it’s his flight,” Monsieur Bajolet put the phone aside.

He put his left hand to his lips and looked around the hall. He glanced once more at the young specialist from Charles de Gaulle airport. The man continued to speak. Bernard Bajolet switched on his microphone.

“Excuse me,” he interrupted the young man’s five-minute report.

The tense gazes of the seated generals and officials began to search the hall for the one who was asking the question.

“I understand correctly that we have no specifics. We understand that the plane disappeared from radar in the same place where we lost the Nepalese helicopter a few hours ago. Anything else?”

The Indian general turned on the microphone:

“Absolutely correct. No information on the helicopter or the plane. The weather’s getting worse.”

“We have no communication with the crew. We tried to contact the airliner for almost an hour, and then it went off the radar. It started veering off course, and my colleagues tried to relay a message.”

“Is it a fact or an assumption that it crashed?” Bernard Bajolet couldn’t stand it.

“Almost a fact,” the young man reported.

The screen showed a map of Asia and two routes, one marked in gray for the planned course, the other in red for the actual course. A cross marked the point of the proposed crash.

Suggestions came from the audience:

“Drones?”

“Strong electromagnetic radiation. We already lost two,” the Chinese general said.

“Satellites?”

“Working on it!”