Free Pleasure Island by Anna-Lou Weatherley

terms with the gravity of the situation. ‘Are we going to crash?’
    Rupert didn’t answer her, he was scan-reading the safety card, forced to squint without his glasses.
    â€˜I know we don’t always see eye to eye,’ she said, ‘but I do lo –’
    Ladies and gentlemen.’ Aki’s voice sounded different, lower, as it rang out through the intercom system. ‘The captain has informed me that he has lost control of the aircraft. Please remain seated and adopt the brace position. I said remain seated and adopt the brace position!’
    â€˜Oh, fucking shit. …oh, Jesus fucking holy fucking Christ!’ Billie-Jo’s piercing screams filled the cabin as she crossed her arms in front of her chest. ‘We’re gonna fucking die,’ she wailed, ‘we’re all gonna fucking die!’
    â€˜Where are the oxygen masks?’ Rupert frantically ran his hands on the ceiling above him. He looked at Angelika as he gave up and buckled himself in his seat, engulfed by a terrible sense of fait accompli. ‘God, Ange,’ he said, his voice despairing, ‘there aren’t any oxygen masks.’ He hadn’t called her Ange in years.
    Helpless, he looked out of the window but saw only darkness.
    â€˜Are we above the sea?’ Angelika enquired. ‘Should we look for life jackets?’
    â€˜Somebody help us!’ Billie-Jo wailed in despair. ‘We’ll be eaten alive by sharks … no … no … God make it stop … get me off this plane … Nate … please … get me off … I don’t wanna die.’
    â€˜For goodness sakes, shut her up, will you? I’m trying to concentrate here,’ Rupert shouted as Nate attempted to console his wife’s burgeoning hysterics.
    â€˜Can’t you see she’s terrified?’ Angelika said just as the lights in the aircraft failed, plunging them all into total darkness.
    The plane lunged with such brute force that it violently threw them all forward. Billie-Jo’s face impacted with the seat in front of her, silencing her immediately. Instinctively she brought her hand up to her face, it felt wet but she was still alive. Oh thank god, thank God .
    Suspended from her seat, practically upside down, Mia groaned. This was it. Her time was up. Her number called. She thought about Richard, her darling Dickie. How she’d loved that man, how she still did. At least she would have her revenge this way; dying a brutal death befitting of a world-famous singer. He would mourn her, she felt sure of it, weep over her grave while begging her forgiveness for ever having deserted her, for trading in all those precious years in exchange for a young bit of strange. In that moment Mia fleetingly forgave her husband’s betrayal, wanting only to feel his arms around her one last time. An eerie calm had descended upon the cabin now, a dark silence of the condemned. She hoped she would be forgiven for her sins when she met her maker; more than anything she hoped Richard would forgive her for her futile attempts at making him jealous, for being too self-absorbed to realise her marriage was disintegrating around her, but above all, she wanted to be forgiven by him .
    â€˜Forgive me, baby,’ Mia said as she felt the tears, or perhaps it was blood, drip from her face. ‘Wherever you are, please forgive me.’
    The final explosion, when it came, was louder and sounded more alien than anything any of the cabin’s occupants had ever heard before. The diabolical crunch of metal ripping, the smell of burning, of fire, and the shrieks and cries of human pain and terror, felt as if they had gone on for eternity.
    After that … silence.

8
    â€˜ A ngelika ! Angelika!’
    Rupert Deyton had come to with such a start that he’d audibly gasped, a sound he so rarely emanated that he couldn’t be sure it had come from him. Once he’d established that he was both alive