Till Death Do Us Part
By
Darrel Bird
Copyright 2010 by Darrel Bird
Till Death Do Us Part
Dan Baldwin was minding his own business, sitting in the seat of the company plane, reading a book. His working partner, Gloria Akins, was doing the same. Dan had a sweet job, a nice home, a loving wife, and two beautiful kids; his partner had the same, except she had one kid.
Dan was on the board of deacons at his local church in the “burbs” of Dallas. He was gone a lot, but his was a happy life. When his church asked him to serve on the board, he was glad to get a chance to serve. Gloria had just come on board as a company inspector, but she seemed a nice person; she was outgoing, and she was also a Christian. They were both dedicated to their marriage partners, to their families, and to God.
Dan and Gloria were the only passengers aboard the plane for this trip. Dan noticed she wasn’t beautiful; but she wasn’t ugly by a long shot, and he liked her constant cheerfulness and smile. She wasn’t skinny, but she wasn’t fat; she was just normal. She had long auburn hair that flowed around her shoulders, and her smile lit up her face.
He would normally have preferred a man on this job, but $200 grand a year made him a lot more amiable about whom the company chose, and when his partner retired a month ago, Gloria was chosen. They were the only two ship inspectors the company employed. This was his first trip with her on board.
Life was good and they both knew the direction they wanted to take in life. They were “settled” and that was that. That is, until the plane received a direct hit by a bolt of lightning, killing all power aboard the plane, 15 minutes into the flight over the plains of Tanzania, Africa, and dumping them onto a dry region, killing both pilots.
The plane hit the top of a large tree, dead center, and the branches that skewered the pilots softened the blow just enough to allow Dan and Gloria to come out with only a few injuries. The trees knocked both wings off and left the body of the plane skidding on the rock and sand soil to a halt on its side. Since the fuel tanks were in the wings, the body of the aircraft was in no danger of fire.
Dan heard a moan when he came to and looked across the plane at 16 seats above and to his left. There hung Gloria, still fastened into the seat belt. Blood dripped off the end of her finger, hit the side of the plane and ran down. She appeared unconscious.
Dan moved, and a pain shot down his arm. “Aw.” His voice sounded loud in the silence. He moved again and it didn’t hurt too badly, so he struggled to a sitting position, the rounded sides of the plane now being the floor, and the seats sticking out at 90 degree angles. He crawled over to her; she had been sitting four seats behind him and across the isle. He began to struggle with her seatbelt and finally hit the release button. She tumbled to the floor, moaning loudly. He found an 8-ounce water bottle, and spilled some on his hands to bath her face; her eyes fluttered open.
“Where are we?”
“The plane crashed and we are on the ground. How are you?”
“My hand hurts.”
“Let me look at it.”
He lifted her hand in the dim light and found a fairly deep cut, but it didn’t look too serious. “I have to see to the pilots,” he said, and then crawled to the door of the pilot’s cabin. After a few jerks on the door, it came open.
Both the pilots lay in contorted positions, one pilot's neck was stretched horribly out of shape; a limb had gone through his throat and broken off. The other pilot's arm was twisted behind his back, his shoulder dislocated in the grotesque silence of death. He felt for a pulse, but there was none.
“They’re both dead” he called back, then crawled back the way he had come.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know, Gloria; just deal with it a step at a time, I guess. First we have to take care of that hand.” When he touched her hand again, something like a spark of electricity went through him, as Mother Nature made its age old siren call between a woman and a man. It startled him, but he neither looked at her, nor said anything.
He poured more water over his clean handkerchief and bathed the hand, and then he tied the handkerchief around the wound. He would look for the first aid station later. For now he had to try and get the door open, which was directly overhead. At least the plane was not lying on the door. He climbed on a seat and, bracing his legs on two seats, he managed to swing the latch on the door and unlock it. With a shove, it swung open and flopped back on the plane's skin with a bump.
Dan looked out over the African plain of bunches of grass and stands of trees that stretched as far as he could see in all directions. Everywhere he looked was dry and parched in the African heat. The sun looked to be about an hour high – it was getting close to sundown.
He dropped back down between the seats to the floor. “It looks dry out there, but we are clearly visible from the air, so it won’t be a problem for them to spot us. All we have to do is wait for rescue. I don’t think we can expect them today because the sun is almost down, but I think we should expect a helicopter tomorrow.”
Jed Miller, the pilot, and Hank Fullerton, the copilot, had been flying for Global ten years, and today was just another routine flight to carry two company employees to a small city off the coast of Africa. They would then ferry a load of crew from the drill ship back to Durban, and then head home for two weeks. They both had fresh coffee and sweet rolls as Jed called off the checklist in preparation for takeoff. What he didn’t know was that the compass was off. An hour into the flight, they hit a front that they could not go around. They had been through many of these fronts, and there was not much cause for concern, but this day, a lightning bolt had their name on it.
The conditions in the cloud front became just right at the right moment to release pent up electrical energy, which penetrated the plane's electronics and knocked out all power to the plane, and what turned out to be a routine flight propelled it far from routine. Jed tried to let the two passengers know, but the call speaker was dead, and a few minutes later, he was dead.
Dan lay down on the curved floor and tried to get comfortable on the hard skin of the plane. His shoulder hurt and his back hurt. He looked at Gloria, a few feet away, and saw the discomfort on her face. A reinforcement in the skin of the plane dug into his other shoulder; he did not quite fit between the close reinforcement in the skin. They lay there in the now sweltering heat inside the fuselage with the door open to the sky.
Soon it began to cool, as the sun sank below the horizon. Dan crawled forward again and found the first aid station, which was almost to the roof. The case was attached to the fuselage with bolts, he opened the door to the box and retrieved all the items in the box and crawled back to where Gloria lay.
“Give me your hand.” She extended her hand, and he cleaned the cut with alcohol swabs, then applied antiseptic and bandaged the hand. Again that something shot through him, leaving him feeling like a teenager working on his first kiss, and he began to see Gloria with new eyes. It wasn’t something he chose to do – it just was.
They dozed until about nine o’clock, and that was when the lions and hyenas came. The roar of a lion’s call sounded loud in the stillness, and Gloria jumped to her knees. “What was that?”
“A lion, I think. I heard one in a zoo once. I don’t think they can climb the nose of the plane; it’s too slick.” As he said that, he remembered seeing a rock outcropping near the nose of the plane, and no sooner than he thought of it, he heard a thump of paws hit the nose of the plane, and then a softer thud and a “ruff!” He knew the lion had fallen off on the other side.
“Oh my God!” G
loria said.
“He fell off the nose cone,” Dan said. He also knew that it would only be a matter of time until the lion or lions would figure it out and jump for the cock pit from the rock outcropping, but he said nothing. He took his shoe off and beat on the side of the plane's skin, but the smell of blood overcame a lion's caution, and about ten minutes later he heard the thud of the lion's paws and scratching, as the lion's nails got a perch on the edge of the cockpit windshield; immediately he was in the cockpit, tearing at a body.
Gloria landed on top of him and held on to him as the lion growled and fought to drag a body out of the harness. Then he heard the screech of a hyena as it leaped into the cockpit with the lion; then another, and pandemonium broke loose as the lions and hyenas fought over the pilots’ bodies. They could hear the tearing of flesh as the animals tore them out of the safety harness and dragged them to the ground.
Gloria hung on to him, shivering, “Can they get through the door?” she asked.
He shushed her, “I don’t know.” He whispered in her ear, “Don’t make any noise,” he said, as she held him tightly. After about 30 minutes of this it grew silent in the plane again. He put his hand over her mouth to signal her to remain quiet. Toward two o’clock in the morning, they both slept a bit.
When the sun rose again, Dan crawled forward and gently unlatched the cockpit door. The bodies were both gone, and the cockpit was an unspeakable mess of hair and blood. He closed the door and crawled back. “They’re both gone, the bodies, I mean. I don’t know where the animals are.”
Gloria wept silently, “Oh my Lord, those men’s families, what will we tell them?”
“I don’t know, Gloria, the truth I guess; what other choices do we have? Gloria, until rescue does come, we need to plan every move we make.”
“What do you mean?” she said, looking startled at him.
“We haven’t heard even a search plane.” Dan just decided to give it to her straight. “We have three bottles of water to last us until help arrives. If we don’t get help by tomorrow night, we will have to find water. We can do without food, but we can’t do without water, and we will have to go look for some.”
“You mean we have to leave the plane?”
“Yes.”
“No, I don’t want to do that.”
He said nothing, but he felt strongly that something, he didn’t know for sure what, had gone very wrong for them besides the crash, as if that’s not enough, he thought. But he still said nothing.
They spent the day in the heat, drinking up what bottles of water remained, and listening for the sound of search planes that did not come. Then they spent another night on the uncomfortable ribs of the plane’s fuselage. About eleven o’clock they heard the roar of a lion that had come close to the plane; the lions were again hunting on the plains of the African savanna.
“Dan, can I lay by you?”
“Sure, come on over.” And Gloria came next to him and lay down.
“I’m scared, Dan.”
“I know, try to get some rest. If there is no sign of rescue, we have to walk in the morning.”
“I’m not leaving the plane,” she said flatly.
“Look Gloria, we can’t stay here without water. I think the plane was off course. We should have at least heard a search plane.”
“I’m not leaving.”
Dan again felt something go through him that shouldn’t have been there as she lay beside him, his arm behind her back and across her shoulder. He was all too aware of the smell of her and the feel of her soft body lying against him.
Morning came, and he gently extricated his arm from behind her back. His arm had gone to sleep, but he was still very aware of the smell of her and the softness of her body. He rubbed his arm vigorously to get the circulation back. He felt the needle-like effect as the circulation returned.
He began to gather the empty water bottles. He found two more empties in the cockpit, and three more in the little galley. There was no electricity to run the pumps, and no way to get to the water in the tanks. He rose and climbed up and tossed them through the door, which was open to the sky, and they rolled to the ground.
He searched through his suitcase and found the spool of fishing leader he always carried with him. He usually liked to throw a line over the side of whatever ship he was on to see what he would catch. They would normally be aboard ship for several days. The crews treated inspectors like outsiders, and there was plenty of time to be bored.
He took the fishing leader and the few hooks in his fishing kit and stuffed them in the oversized pockets. He took the scissors and the bandages and stuffed them in various pockets. He found the fire axe and removed that from its holder.
“What are you doing?” Gloria asked, but he said nothing. Dan Baldwin was a man who made decisions, and thereafter carried them out. It was his ability to do that that had made him into a good ship inspector.
He took the two white shirts out of his suitcase and stuffed that into his waistband then reached up for the rim of the plane's door and pulled himself up and over the edge. He slid down the skin of the plane, his feet hitting the ground lightly. Hunger pangs had begun to gnaw at him, and he took the bloody candy bar he had found in the cockpit and squirreled it away, out of Gloria’s sight. He knew what the blood was from. He broke the chewy bar into two pieces, and began to chew on the one piece.
Gloria came sliding down the plane’s skin, almost tipping forward on her face as she hit the ground. He handed her the other piece of the candy bar, “Eat.”
She said nothing as she took it, looked at it, and started chewing hungrily. “What’s with you?” she gazed up into his face as she saw the set look.
“I told you we have to leave the plane to look for water.”
He took out the spool of fishing line, gathered together the eight plastic water bottles, and then began tying the fishing line around the necks of the bottles tightly and close together. Soon he had a gaggle of water bottles, which he slung over his shoulder. He began walking, following the groove the plane's fuselage had left, back to one of the engines, which lay on the ground. Gloria followed him, watching.
Dan looked around until he found what he was looking for – a sharp broken piece of metal that had broken off the engine. He took the dull fire axe and began to rub it on a stone. He rubbed until the axe took on a sharp edge, then he proceeded to find a straight bush. He hacked the bush off about a foot off the ground, stripping the limbs off. He cut the bush at about six feet. Gloria followed him, looking on.
“I’m not going to leave the plane,” she repeated.
He turned to her with a hard look in his eyes, which scared her. “Look, Gloria, you do what you want, but I am going to try to live. It may be the wrong decision to leave the plane, but I have made my decision. At best, I have but a fool’s chance to find water out here. It could be five miles, ten miles, or a hundred miles to the nearest water. I may miss water even if I come near it, and die of thirst anyway.”
He looked at her fiercely as he spoke in his usual honest and straightforward manner. “I know I am in a difficult situation here. I have a wife and two kids who love me, and I owe it to them to try and live…In addition to that, I think I am falling in love with you. Now if that isn’t just something…here I am in the middle of the damned Gobi desert of nowhere, full of lions and hyenas who want to eat me, and snakes who want to poison me, and no telling what else, but I’ll be damned if I am going to just lay down and die, and I’ll leave your ass right here, so you choose."
Gloria looked at Dan with shock on her face as she heard out his tirade. She knew that nothing in the world besides a rescue helicopter or plane would turn this man. She thought of what he said, “I think I am falling in love with you.” His honesty brought to the fore her own feelings, and she knew that she was feeling the same thing.
What is this? she thought. I am a happily married woman with a husband who loves me; how can this be? She was even more attracted to him as s
he prepared herself to submit to this man she hardly even knew. But she knew she would submit; that was just the way of it. She also had qualities that made her a ship inspector, and that was to see things the way they were and to quickly identify something out of place.
Dan knelt down on the ground, again took out the roll of fishing leader, and began tightly wrapping the sharp iron piece to the split head of the pole. He held the leader in one hand and turned the pole in the other to get a tight wrap on the device. He eventually got up and hefted the make shift spear. He threw it at a sand hill, and the spear made a satisfactory thud as it buried itself up over the hilt of the makeshift spear head.
He walked out and retrieved it. He began wrapping the white shirt around his head in a sort of turban, tossed the water bottles over his shoulder, and walked back toward the fuselage. “What will it be, Gloria?” He looked at her with unrelenting and unmerciful eyes.
“Could you make me something to go on my head?”
His eyes softened a little. “Sure.”
He walked back to the plane, climbed into the cabin and came out with another white dress shirt. He slid to the ground and began tying another turban-like affair around her head. She stood still and looked up at him as he worked.
“Look straight forward. I can’t work on this thing with you looking up.”
She obeyed, saying nothing as he finished the job and gave it an appraisal. He was satisfied. It looked ridiculous, and the head band came to just over her eyes, covering her forehead. She giggled at him; here they were in the middle of nowhere with shirts tied to their heads. His faced softened and he laughed; then they both laughed loudly and long as the tension broke in the laughter. “You Tarzan, me Jane.” She poked him in the stomach and the laughter broke out again.
They looked around at the patches of trees, patches of tall dry grass, and clearings that seemed to stretch to infinity, and they both sobered at once. “Which direction?” he said. “Pick one.”
Gloria turned slowly, her gaze on the horizon. She pointed her finger. “That a way.”
“Ok Jane, let's go.”
Dan led off in the general westerly direction she had indicated. The sun was getting high by now, and he knew they would only be able to walk a short way in the full sun, but at least they had started. They walked steadily for two hours. It was not too difficult because of the sparseness of the patches of trees; and thorn bushes grew everywhere, it seemed. Random bunches of tall dry grass blew in the breeze. It was a weird landscape, with thicket and open spaces alternating to dry grass.
In the shade of a tree, Dan stopped and sat down, his back against the bole of the tree. Gloria flopped down beside him. Sweat beaded her face, and she was white around the mouth. He pulled out two pennies and gave one to her. “Suck on this. It will help.” He plopped one in his own mouth, and immediately the sharp copper taste began to bring saliva to his dry mouth.
“How long are we going to stay here?” she asked.
“Until the sun gets low; then we’ll walk some more.”
He looked at the water bottle and saw a couple of drops had formed on the bottom of each one, and began to gently unscrew the cap. “Open your mouth.” She opened her mouth, and he watched the drops of water hit her tongue. She swallowed. He did the same with the rest of the bottles, and then screwed the lids back on.
She looked at him in wonder, “You didn’t drink; why? Where did you learn all this stuff?” She looked at him tenderly.
“Why, I was a Boy Scout, didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“When you said you thought you were falling in love with me, did you mean that?”
“Yes, I meant it. No more questions; we have to try and get some rest.” She laid her head on his shoulder and pensively slipped her hand into his, and they soon fell asleep in the humid tropical heat.
Dan awoke suddenly an hour later to the sound of a horn; he looked around to see three elephants, off in the distance. That was the horn he had heard. Gloria stirred. “What was that?” she asked, as she extricated her hand from his.
“Elephants, three of them, see?” he said, pointing. She looked in awe at the huge animals as one of them pushed over a tall sapling to get at the green vegetation at the very top. The others began stripping leaves; then they proceeded to do the same thing again.
“There may be water nearby. When it gets late we’ll circle around that area and see.”
About three hours before sundown, they started off in the direction in which the elephants were grazing. They circled until near sundown, when they came upon a dry stream bed. They followed that about a mile, and came upon deep holes dug in the sand. Elephant tracks and dung were there aplenty. There were about six inches of water at the bottom of one of the holes.
Dan gently lowered himself down, and taking the water bottles, began filling them one by one with the cool water. He handed the water up to Gloria, who drank two of them before stopping. He drank two, himself, while he waited for the water to fill the seep again. Then he refilled the six spent bottles.
“We have to find a place to bed down for the night, and we don’t have much time,” he said, leading the way up an elephant trail and out of the dry streambed. He walked a few yards until he came to a lone tree in a small clearing, and gently laid the water bottles down.
“You get wood; I want to gather thorn trees to make a shelter from the animals.”
“Ok.”
“And watch for snakes; be careful where you put your hands.”
“Yes, Bwana.” Gloria smiled at him and started off to gather dead wood.”
Dan worked for an hour, dragging thorn trees to the single tree, and arranging them in a circle to the bole of the lone tree. The thorns in this area were all of two inches long, some even longer, and they were stiff and sharp like thousands of long needles. There was some blood on his hands, but not a lot, as he was as careful as he could be with the thorns.
Gloria had a respectable pile of dead wood by the time he was finished, and he drew the last thorn bushes around the small enclosure. “Are you going to tell me you learned that in Boy Scouts?” She smiled up at him.
“Saw it on National Geographic. I really don’t know if it works or not.”
“Oh thanks a lot!” she feigned a frown.
“You're welcome, my queen; I am at your service.” He bowed deeply, and she slapped him on