Melani Blazer

The silence was a dreadful thing. Of course, the sputtering of the engine had taken any fight out of her. The first half of the flight, the small commuter plane had rocked ever so slightly and the hum of the motors nearly lulled her to sleep. Then it lurched, and the engine coughed—as if it was choking on the hot African air. When it died, and there was nothing but silence, she’d all but accepted her fate, slipped her hand into her sister’s and whispered she loved her.

They were going to die.

Outside the window, the night was a pure black hole, like a mouth, ready to swallow them up. And it would, she was certain. The waiting was the hard part.

Her sister prayed ceaselessly. She knew her brother-in-law, seated behind her, was doing the same. Their calm whispers in the otherwise silent night comforted her. She didn’t want to look over and see her sister gripping the arm of her seat with white fingers. It was enough to see the lines of worry on all the other passengers’ faces in the pale emergency lighting system. This was it. She offered up her own plea for mercy as the belly of the plane made its first contact with the wild African turf.

Four passengers, including herself, huddled around a fire. In the light cast off by the barely wavering flames, foreign pieces of metal and debris seemed like a separator wall. And none of them knew what lay beyond.

Julia Haverstock crouched, warming her fingers, staring beyond the flames. The tears in her eyes blurred everything. The pain in her left arm dulled her senses. Her sister and brother-in-law were gone. No one could find the pilot. The other three were passengers, like her. She didn’t know them, they didn’t know her. They could barely communicate.

No one knew if a beacon had gone out. No one knew what to look for in the shattered remains of the cockpit to send one. Where were they? Africa was all she knew. They’d been scheduled to land at a missionary camp in Ethiopia. The airport in Cairo was far behind them.

They were supposed to have been at their destination hours ago. Safe and sound before any hint of dusk. But customs issues had delayed things. She didn’t even know the details, just that they spent nearly five hours in the hot terminal waiting for a thumbs up.

And now this. She shivered and moved closer to the fire. She’d never officially agreed to come along. Her sister, Chelly, had bought the ticket and promised her she could leave in two weeks if she didn’t like it. Julia, a basic science professor at a small community college in Albany, New York, had balked every step of the way.

She didn’t like to fly. Never had. Her preference ran to curling up with a book or on the sofa to watch Discovery channel, not to exploring a wild country in person. Which is why, she had told Chelly, she taught science, not practiced it.

Didn’t matter. Her sister was dead. Science would do nothing to get that plane back up in the air and them on to their destination.

Chelly was dead. Julia’s chin dropped to her chest and she let the sobs take over. She was numb with shock, but it didn’t stop the intense grip of pain in her chest. Why did it have to be Chelly, the gentle woman who gave and asked nothing in return? She rocked on her heels and let her emotions take over.

What if it had been her? What would Chelly have done? Wiping her eyes, she took a deep breath and stared into the flames. Her sister would comfort the others, take inventory of supplies and try to prepare some kind of shelter for them. She’d become a den mother, despite her grief.

Which had made Chelly a hell of a lot stronger woman than Julia was.

She turned away from the fire. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Best thing she could do was find something to lie down on and get through the night. Things would be better in the daylight—the sun would chase the hopelessness away. Search parties could find them. Tomorrow she could deal with her loss and bury her sister.

A deep-throated growl broke the stillness. One of the men screamed. She whirled and let out her own scream. They were surely dead now. Cats, big spotted cats, circled the edge of the firelight. Bile rose in her stomach as she saw two of them fight over the fallen man.

Julia ran. Blindly tripping over pieces of debris and uneven savannah she ran. Any one of these steps could be her last. Her lungs screamed, her body throbbed, but she pushed onward, amazed she hadn’t been knocked down and mauled. It was inevitable; she was going to die—the knowledge thundered in her veins as she waited for that giant leap.

But it never came.

Her feet hit water. She stopped. Over her own ragged breathing and pounding heart, she struggled to hear. Were they behind her, crouched low to the ground and ready to pounce? Or were there other dangers? She knew very little about the workings of Africa’s habitat. What were the dangers this water offered? She’d heard that hippos were deadly, but what of lions, hyenas, snakes, crocs, and others?

The darkness never ended. Behind her she saw no sign of the fire, ahead of her—nothing. Other than to keep the water to her right, she had no way of knowing what direction she was going.

Terrified wasn’t the word. She walked, keeping the water just to her side. She trekked south. At least it felt like south. Her mind rolled over and over: visions of herself and her sister throughout as many of her twenty-six years that she could remember. Then thoughts turned to the god-awful memory of the leopard’s white fangs ripping through her travel-mate’s prone body, the stench of airplane fuel, burnt oil and blood still stung her nostrils.

She stumbled. The ground rose up to meet her hands. A knife-like pain sliced through her left arm, all the way to her head. She cringed against the white-hot streaks that blinded her. But they faded.