The Prior

POV: Max Jameson

I feel a sense of vibration around me. I open my eyes and realize that I’m on a plane. I sink my fingers into the leather fabric of the armrest. To my left is the window, we’re well into the air by now. I turn to my right, Cass sits in the middle seat beside me and Elliot is on her right.

Cass stirs almost immediately after I do, and sits up, holding her stomach. Her head twirls around. Her feet rock off the ground, but her lapbelt keeps her in place. She quickly reaches into the pocket of the seat and collects a brown paper bag. Proceedingly, she throws up. I try ignore the sounds of her retching, but I’m close enough to smell it, even. Elliot remains asleep for the duration of Cass’s sickness. She blushes, tieing the bag shut, and passing it to a concerned flight attendant.

“Don’t like planes?” I ask.

She shakes her head, “No, I usually am fine. I don’t know what’s wrong.” I nod gently, but privately worry. There’s no way she was exposed to schistosomiasis, right? She closes her eyes and lays her head against the headrest. I can’t recall if vomiting was associated with schistosomiasis or not. Maybe it was.

The plan hits a little turbulence as I fumble with the paper and pull it out of my pocket. The creases are getting worse and worse with every usage. I think I hear Elliot wake up, but I can’t tear my eyes off the paper. My armpits have wettened. All of sudden it’s hot in here.

“Max?” Elliot whispers, “What is it? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

Cass gaps, now looking at me, “9/11?”

“No,” I mutter, “No, there’s two between that.” I clear my throat, as Cass cranes her neck to look at my paper.

She swallows, “Survive.”

I glance at both of them.

“How did we not see this before?” Elliot asks, accusatory. Cass makes a face, but continues to look at me, briefly.

She turns her head to the right, almost smacking me with her hair in the process, “I don’t know, Mr. Congressionalist-recruit. Did they not tell you about this one?”

He furrows his brows, shaking his head, “No, they didn’t.”

Screams erupt from the front of the plane. Elliot unbuckles his seatbelt. Cass reaches over and pushes him back to be seated.

“We need a plan,” she rasps. He nods and remains in his seat.

From the front of a plane, a woman screams in English, “We’re being hijacked!”

I hold my breath, just as Cass re-reads the paper, as if it it’ll help at all. She asks Elliot about Donna –– she had a second rendition of the paper. Maybe something changed on hers. Elliot cringes.

“She stayed,” he says, loudly, over the commotion of the other passengers. Cass and I look at each other, as if sharing a new found understanding of each other.

“What do you mean, ‘stayed?’” Cass asks. I can’t hear what he says over the background noise. She swears, not necessarily at him, but swears.

“We need a plan.” I interrupt, “Are we sure this isn’t 9/11?”

Elliot holds the paper now, his eyes darting left and right, “No, there’s one mission in between. We would have known.”

“It’s 1985,” Cass says, “What happened in 1985?”

The intercom button beeps and the plane goes quiet.

“This is your captain speaking. We will be making a divergence to Lebanon. Please remain in your seats….” The radio cuts and a man speaking another language cuts back on.

Elliot swears under his breath. People around us are making frantic phone calls to their loved ones. Can you even get cell service from the air? A man weilding a gun makes his way down the aisles pulling two soliders in full military garb. He beats them repetitively with a baton.

“Do you have a gun?” I whisper towards Elliot and Cass. Slowly, Elliot reaches into the pocket of his jacket and nods. Cass tells me that she, too, has one. And, so do I.

I glance anxiously at my partners. They whisper to each other. Cass leans in and explains a plot of action. Because she’s unexpected, she’ll shoot the guy with the baton––only after Elliot and I have made our way to the cockpit.

Elliot stands up first, leaving his weapon hidden in the pocket of his suit. The man with the baton holds it up and threatens at Elliot. He puts his hands up in the air and explains that he just needs to go to the bathroom and to please let him. The man begrudgingly agree, to which a mother stands up with her son. The 4-year old toddles along. The mother keeps her hands up, shaking and explaining that he needs to potty too. I see this as my opportunity to join them, making my way down the aisle. I give Cass one short glance, she winks at me. I catch up with Elliot, who ‘kindly’ let the little boy use the latrine first.

“You ready, man?” he asks me, in a hushed whisper. I ignore the beating of my heart, that seems to be coming from my throat. I realize that I’ve been biting the sides of my cheeks when the taste of iron fills my mouth. I glance once more at Cass, who has a new companion sitting next to her. A man. I discretely tap Elliot on the leg. He glances over at Cass, who chats with the man.

“What the fuck?” he mutters. We both stare at her, just as we hear the sounds of water running in the bathroom. They’re almost done. We’re fucked.

She looks up with us, ’Go,” she mouths. Elliot saw it too. He counts to three. 1, 2, 3. He flings himself at the cabin door, bursting it down. It must’ve startled the pilot. I almost fall to the floor, only saved by the wall behind me. Elliot remains stable, his gun pressed against the head of the hijaker. The hijaker holds up his left hand, but keeps his right hand on his gun, pressed aginst the temple of the pilot. The pilot is arguing with air traffic, it seems. I watch Elliot’s back, as the man with the baton has no idea what’s going on. Cass was supposed to have shot him already. What is happening?

“Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on. There’s a hijaker with his gun to my head and a bomb in my lap. There’s some American, I think, with a gun to the hijaker’s head,” he says to the radio.

Elliot directs me to the pin grenade on the pilot’s lap. He yells at me to throw it out the exit door. I reach between the pilot and the hijaker, just to get a gun placed on my own head.

“You shoot, I shoot,” Elliot says. The hijaker laughs. I freeze with the grenade in my hand. The pilot argues some more with air traffic.

Cass can’t shoot now, she’ll spook this guy into blowing my brains out. Fuck. Elliot’s swearing under his breath. We’re locked in an impossible situation that not even Cass can get us out of. I feel the plane gears shift as the pilot hits some buttons. We are decending onto the airport.

A gunshot blazes. My ears begin to ring, just as it sails through the glass in front of me. The sound of shatter glass ruptures my ringing ears. The man behind me falls to his knees, firing his own gun once in the process. The bullet lodges itslef into the ceiling of the plane. I feel free enough to move my head and see the damage of the first bullet wound. The glass of the windshield is completely shattered, but remains in tact. We’re absolutely flying towards the ground.

I look over and see Cass and Elliot wrapped in a hug. She extends an arm, but I shake my head.

“Oh my god, is that a grenade?” she shrieks. I nod. Elliot’s jaw opens, as if he had forgotten about the grenade.

“Go, go,” she mutters, pushing me towards the aisle. My feet fly down the aisle as passengers both applaud and scream. The man that was sitting with Cass pins down the other hijaker in a seat across from the aisle. A third man, outfitted in a Navy uniform wheels open the emergency exit door. He grabs my shoulder with one hand and extend his other.

I gently pass him the grenade, “You have to be careful with these. You can’t just drop it. We have to angle it in the right direction, so that it doesn’t just fly back in here or hit the wing of the plane.”

Cass comes padding down the aisle, “Wait, we’re about to land the plan. Does that help?”

The Navy Seal shakes his head, “No, not really.” he flings the grenade out the window, just as the plane descents a bit more.

“Bud, can you help me close this door?” he asks. The man Cass was speaking to hauls the hijaker closer.

He grunts, “First, I got a deposit.” he karate kicks the hijaker out the window of the plane. He helps the Navy Seal and I pull the door closed. I shake my left hand, trying to relax the cramp that developed in my hand. The intercom beeps once.

Elliot’s voice comes on, “Brace for landing.”

I quickly grab onto the seat next to me. My feet fly up off the ground, as the loud sound of a landing plane echo around me. I fall back down, onto the ground, right next to a haggle of blonde hair. Cass. My fall knocks the wind out of me, pain ricocheting through my chest cavity. I take three scraping breaths before I’m able to roll over and push myself up. Cass still lays on the ground next to me. For the first time, I notice a patch of blood across the back of her head. I scoop her up, her eyes closed.

“Elliot!” I scream, at the top of my lungs. He flies out of the cockpit, shoving through the crowds of people standing up to get off the airplane. He stops dead in his tracks, staring at Cass.

He bends down, getting closer to us. I think about the inscription on the paper for this. Survive. We were going to follow this one. Oh, Cass. I hold her head as Elliot checks for a pulse. I look at her. I don’t have any interest to seeing his face if there isn’t one.

“She’s alive,” he mutters. I release the breath I wasn’t consciously holding in. My navy seal friend jumps back with a first aid kit that the flight attendants provided. Elliot and I step back, allowing him to work his magic.

Most of the others have gotten off the plane and exiting into the airport, where hundreds of reporters await. I move to the side of the plane where Elliot stands. He doesn’t acknowledge me. I look towards him and notice his strained jaw. His eyes water. His nostrils flare in and out. His eyes don’t leave Cass.

I put a hand on his shoulder, “She’s going to be ok.”

He breaks his stare, to glance at me for a moment, “I just love her so fucking much, you know?” His voice cracks with every syllable. Watching the tears in his eyes bring water to my own.

I squeeze his shoulder, “I know you do. I know you do, man.”

The navy seal barks an order at the last remaining flight attendant. She rushes out and collects an EMT. The man comes in, but speaks no English. Together, they load her onto a gurney and carry her to the ambulance that awaits out front.

We’re both bombarded with press as we exit the plane. A reporter screeches at us, “How’s it feel to be a hero?”

I drag Elliot with me. He keeps it together for the cameras. The EMT lets us ride with her to the hospital. Elliot chews on his fingers, staring at Cass on the gurney.

By the time they take Cass up to the emergency room, Elliot is absolutely bawling. The EMT tells me in broken English to take Elliot outside and let him calm down. I do.

“I just love her so much. You don’t understand. I didn’t think I was capable of loving a girl so much,” he sobs. I pull him into an awkward hug. He grips the back of my shirt, sobbing into it. Maybe the hug is only awkward for me. I mull over what to say.

“She loves you, you know,” I say, at last. This makes him sob harder, if that was somehow possible.

He heaves into my chest, “No, she doesn’t. She never said it back.” I try not to laugh. It’s a little funny. I control my face and pull away from the hug.

I look into his eyes, “She doesn’t need to say it, because she’s Cass. Cass shows her love. And, everyone can see that she loves you.”

He falls back into my arms and sobs some more.

NEWS: Hijacked plane saved by five American passengers.

Flight T.W.A. 847 was hijacked by two men this morning. Their identities have not yet been released. Pilot Captain Testrake has stated publicly that was a terrorist attack. All crew members, including Captain Testrake, are unharmed. The flight was rescued by a band of five American passengers. The names of four of these passengers have not yet been released. US Navy Diver Robert Stethem has been interviewed by our station, “We took them down. There were five of us. Four men and a woman. The woman has been injuried.” Stethem declined to comment on the nationality or motives of these hijakers.