She stands, bangs her head against the metal top of the gondola, yells out in pain. Sits back down. He clutches at her, drowning. “Mary!” he screams, as loud as he can, because now the world is nothing but that sound. That engine, so loud her teeth chatter.
IN THE CESSNA, the cabin rattles. Wind whips through the open vent window. Frank makes one last effort to steer the plane. His only thought: Toward the lights. His soused mind tells him the lights are the runway. The lights are safety.
His mind flickers, goes out. Passes out. A mercy. He lurches forward. His body – never buckled – gives up, slumps forward. His chest flops into the controlling wheel, slams it down.
He dreams of the life he’d hoped to have as a child. Those hazy thoughts of a bright future while playing baseball with friends. Girls strolling through the outfield. A summer day. Nothing but hope in the grass beneath his worn sneakers.
In Frank’s dream, the sun explodes like a nuclear bomb. His teeth fall out, then his eyes. He grabs at his face, catches bits of himself like falling debris. He has no time for fear. A flash of light wipes him from the fantasy like a bug from a windshield.
MARY SCREAMS. SCREAMS until her throat goes raw. The plane consumes the sky, only seconds from smashing into the giant wheel. As she claws at her cheeks, she sees other riders climbing from the gondolas in front and below them. One guy jumps toward the ocean from thirty feet up. She has time to watch him fall short. Crash into the pier. His body seems to snap in half. He flops into an ‘L’ shape upon the planks, unmoving. A woman in a yellow dress dangles from one of the lower ones, half-in, half-out, crying. She drops with a shriek.
Rob grabs Mary, pulls her away. He’s yelling at her: “Get down! Get down!” She’s thick-headed. Confused. Rob’s on the floor of the gondola. Weeping. Pulling at her. She understands but casts one more look toward the plane. She stares, transfixed. The plane whines ever louder, screeching like a banshee falling on its prey. Mary waits to die.
Suddenly, the propeller of the plane dives downward, as if slapped away by God. No longer coming right at them, it’s shooting down like an arrow toward the pier.
It’s going to miss us.
She grabs Rob, yanks at his arm. “It’s turning!” she screams at him. His wide eyes flicker, register her words. He shoots to his feet, eyes searching. He sees it cutting down and away. A boulder dropped from the sky.
He looks down. The plane so close as it cuts away they can feel the heat from the engine wash over them. The smell of oil. They watch as the plane crashes into the back of the restaurant next to the Ferris Wheel. Flames erupt from the point of impact. They hold on as the whole wheel shakes. Shrieks of horror and pain and death fill the night.
Mary has a split-second to think how lucky they are. They had just been in that restaurant eating fried shrimp, not an hour ago. Now the building is decimated. Caved-in. Burning.
The second and third explosions steal her relief. Twists it into fresh terror.
THE CESSNA SLAMS into the rear of Buddy Tub’s. The fuel of the plane does not immediately erupt upon impact. The kitchen crew and approximately a dozen patrons are killed instantly. As the plane spins and rips apart, one wing swings like a massive machete, tearing through the midsections of two line cooks and the steel of an industrial stove. Gas hisses into the air from a cut line, catching a spark from the engine and blowing the cockpit. A ball of fire disintegrates the plane interior – including Frank – before blowing out the glass of the surrounding windows.
Located within a mesh cage at the rear of Buddy Tub’s are two industrial 420-pound propane tanks which feed into the main gas line of the restaurant. Each tank is a couple feet shorter but just as wide as those blue porta-potties you often see at construction sites. The plane’s propeller, spinning free after the cabin’s explosion in a blur of sparks and chipped metal, slices through the head of one of these tanks – essentially decapitating it – before planting itself into the second, bending it inward at the waist. This creates enough pressure for the gas to punch outward, where it meets the gushing flames of the Cessna’s burning engine. Tank number one erupts with a violence that immediately triggers a second explosion to tank number two, blasting the entire structure which once accommodated Buddy Tub’s shrimp house, along with the near-capacity 136 souls inside, into nothing but a mushroom cloud of spattered metal, wood, bones and meat. The fuel tank of the plane absorbs the heat of the fire, catches, and blows the Cessna apart. The plane’s bellyful of gasoline detonates eastward, spraying liquid fire toward the main body of the pier, engulfing the base of the Ferris Wheel, the adjacent roller coaster, and the crowds that had yet to flee.
Within ten seconds of the plane’s impact, nearly five-hundred square feet of the Santa Monica pier has been obliterated, transformed into dust and fire flying high into the air like a massive geyser of death before raining down to earth, littering the surrounding ocean and beaches for hundreds of feet in every direction. Nearly a third of the remaining pier is engulfed in hungry flames that devour the dry wooden planks like kindling. Fuel and oil spill into the water, still aflame, coating the surrounding sea in a blanket of fire.
Jeremiah, who had remained stuck to the ground in shock as the plane exploded (along with over three hundred other equally stupefied locals, tourists and employees), was incinerated by the secondary blast. His ponytail and flesh turned instantly to ash, his eyeballs and brain liquefied inside his skull, his corpse blown free of his shoes to land, ungracefully, near a vendor selling mugs, T-shirts, and other assorted such shit.
As the survivors scream and run for the mainland, or leap over the edge of the pier into the waves or onto the forgiving sand of the beach below by the dozens, the riders of the Ferris Wheel (other than those nearest the bottom, who were instantly broiled within their metal confines by the intense heat of surrounding flames), can only cry for help and pray as they watch the crowd stampede toward safety.
Thick smoke fogs their surrounding view, the mural of horror clouded by black billows. The heat from below grows in intensity as the great wheel itself catches fire and begins to burn.
7
ROB’S HEAD IS propped through the opening of the gondola. He pulls himself back in, shifts to the other side, repeats the action.
“I can’t see shit,” he says, voice shaking.
Ash-filled smoke billows thick all around them, the heat from below palpable. The whole world is screaming. The whole world is on fire.
“We can jump!” Mary says, her leather jacket tossed to the ground. Red sleeve covering her face like a bloody bandage, a worthless attempt to keep from inhaling the smoke.
Rob shakes his head. “No way. We’re like fifty feet in the air.”
“No, the ocean. We can jump for the water.”
Rob shakes his head again. Stands on his toes, looks desperately toward the water. The smoke, a misty gray veil, clears on and off enough for him to see the lights of the coast, pieces of beach, a patch of black ocean. Below them, there’s nothing but flames and death. “It’s too far, Mary. We won’t make it. You know that. We’ve seen people trying… I don’t want to die like that.”
Mary thinks about the first guy who jumped. How he’d landed on the deck, crushed like a stepped-on beer can. More people had jumped. Rob was right, they’d both seen them. They had watched two, then three people leap from the gondolas. Into the floor of hellish fire. Or jump toward the water, fall short. Scream as they burned. It reminds her horribly of 9/11, and the poor souls of the Twin Towers, who chose to leap rather than burn alive. Now it’s happening to them. Irrational as it is, she wants to try. The whole fucking wheel is beginning to burn. She feels like a marshmallow rammed through with a stick, heating over a campfire. Getting too hot. They’ll soon be dead either way.
There is a loud CRACK. And a SNAP that vibrates the gondola.
The wheel shudders. And begins to lean.
Rob and Mary look at each other, stunned.
