John Frum The Reluctant Messiah

I Got This! Nope.

He pulled himself up into the captain's seat, strapped himself in, all the while fighting the mounting fog that was rolling over his brain. He shook his head and screamed to startle himself awake. Even the simple act of opening the jaws of the vice grips now took a monumental effort. He managed to attach them to where the yoke used to be. It worked, sort of.

Struggling, he was able to bring her nose up, leveling out into a slow, 180-degree arc that positioned him in line with a distant land mass barely visible on the horizon. What he was going to do once he got there was uncertain. But whatever happened, he figured it had to be better than having it happen in the middle of the Pacific.

"Tank, I need a pilot program for a B212 helicopter- hurry." If only, he thought. He laughed out loud and finished it. "Trinity, The Matrix."

"That would have been obvious," he said to himself. "Ethan would have gotten tha..." He was drifting.

"Concentrate!" he shouted to no one while shaking his head.

There were trees ahead, coming at him way too fast and dangerously close. Off in the distance, John could see his only hope for a landing. It was a long, wide, unobstructed stretch of white sand beach on the opposite side of the island. With his vision impaired it was hard for him to tell how far that was, but one thing was for sure- he needed to clear the trees first or he'd never make it.

He struggled to stay conscious, pep-talking his way through each action he took. "Come on!! Get it together, just pull the stick back, you can do this!" he shouted, shaking his head to keep his own pilot light lit.

What John had failed to realize was that ever since Tattoo had jumped out with yoke in hand, he had been slowly losing altitude and was now left with a mere 185 feet between him and the water.

The product of a prehistoric volcano, the island he was attempting to vault rose dramatically at the shoreline- nearly a hundred feet from the seafloor. Add to that the jungle that carpeted it, John had officially run out of room.

"Shit! Too low!" he suddenly realized.

At 210 knots, the trees were now racing towards him. Marshalling every adrenaline-fueled ounce of strength he had left, he wrapped both hands around the stick, arched his back and using his body weight, threw himself against the seat back. In the midst of all this he somehow remembered what Aiden had said to him about lift.

"Planes are like giant teeter-totters. Put some weight in the back and the bloody nose will go right up."

In a last-ditch effort, he grabbed Aiden's old surplus radio and threw it towards the rear of the aircraft. He laughed as it succeeded in nudging Miss Edna's nose up a bit. He continued pulling back as the constant sound of alarm bells and a badly misfiring engine were replaced by the thunderous noise of branches breaking against aluminum. But Miss Edna, God bless her, refused to give up. She somehow managed to clear the first hilltop and actually gained a bit of clearance as the small, natural valley dipped below her. But her hedge clipping had cost her. Her remaining engine's shroud had been pierced by an errant branch and was now pouring out thick, black smoke.

"Ugh! What next?" thought John out loud.

Fate took no time in answering as a loud, slapping sound against the fuselage filled the cockpit. The scraping branches had not only damaged his remaining good engine, but they had also severed the cabling whose purpose was controlling the rudder and were now dangerously flailing about.

Fighting back the panic at this new problem, he welcomed the sight of the expansive beach a short 2 miles directly ahead of him. Just two miles, that's all he needed.

"Ok, we can't go left, we can't go right but we're level," he said trying to put a positive spin on it. "We still have power-"

He hadn't so much as finished his sentence when the left engine coughed, wheezed, and died. The propeller didn't even slow to stop. It made a high-pitched metal on metal grinding squeal and simply seized.

"We still have some power." His speech was now beginning to slur.

In his heart of hearts, he knew that some power was probably not enough power. Ever the optimist however...

"We can glide," he told himself.

That would have been true were if not for the tops of the taller trees that began to pop and scrape on Miss Edna's underbelly causing her to lose what precious little altitude she had left. Unbeknownst to John, his hearing by this time had ceased to be a reliable source of information and without it, he determined that NOW was a good time to drop the landing gear.

"Ladies and gentlemen, as we begin our final descent, please return your seat backs to.... your tray tables... to their full... upright....positions..." He was delirious at this point and fading fast.

The decision to lower his gear was a fateful one. Up ahead, rising above any other tree in the entire jungle canopy, stood a lone, vine-covered tree that was easily a good 15 feet taller than the rest. It stood as a beacon, drawing Miss Edna in and her lowered gear was a grappling hook in search of something to latch onto. A perfect loop in an enormous vine caught her nose gear and true to the law of physics, when the front suddenly stopped, the back kept going, flipping her on her back.

After a metal-on-metal groan or two, it was suddenly eerily quiet as Miss Edna came to rest upside down, lodged in the thick, green canopy high above the jungle floor. John was enjoying his own sudden serenity in the form of unconsciousness. Seems the drug had finally taken its full effect, and this was as good a place as any to take a much-needed nap.