Page 34 of Burnin' For You

Reuben pressed his hand on his gut, looking white.

Gilly whipped off her headset, her heart thundering. She turned to him, to all of them. “We’ll have to glide it down.”

To a person, they stared at her as if they didn’t comprehend.

“We’ve lost both engines—”

“So we jump.” Reuben unstrapped from his chair. Got up.

What? No—

Cliff wrestled with the door, opened it. The cool air of the slipstream thundered into the plane, and she had to grab the yoke to keep it from unseating, sending them all out in a tumble.

“Close the door! We’re too low! We’re only at twelve hundred. You won’t have time to deploy.”

She turned to look at them again—Jed peering out to the ground, as if to confirm.

She was right, and they knew it. “Sit down—strap in. I’ll get us down, I promise.”

Reuben flopped into the copilot seat. “What can I do?” His voice was calm, albeit dark.

She turned to him. “Have you ever flown before?”

“Yeah. We had a Cessna on the ranch.”

“We need to get to that road.” She pointed toward a forest service road, a trail through the arching, dark pine.

Reuben shook his head. “We’re not going to make that.”

“We are—”

“Do the math, Gilly!”

“Shut up! I’ve got this!”

Reuben’s jaw hardened.

But yeah, she looked at the altimeter. “Okay, change of plan. We’ll put down there, in that creek bed.” After a season without rain, the bed was cracked and rutted, only in use in the spring when the mountains filled it with glacial runoff. Flat and wide, maybe forty feet across, it was littered with gravel and rock, but still, a wide path.

The wind shrilled, whistling as the plane descended, gliding.

She would make it. She had to. The team was her responsibility.

More math, and she realized they were coming in too hot. She’d have to do a forward slip, try to slow them down, get them lower.

“I have to bank into the wind, try and slow us down. I’ll apply the opposite rudder to keep us flying straight.”

“You need help with the yoke?”

Gilly’s arms burned with the effort of holding it straight, the wind wanting to jostle it from her hands. But she shook her head.

“You got this,” Reuben said, and it wasn’t a question. Maybe an indictment—she couldn’t read his tone.

She banked hard, fought for control with the foot pedals.

They’d hit a crosswind, the air gusting across the nose, pushing them east.

“I see the creek,” Reuben said.