AncilI had no idea where the jetpack was carrying me but all I knew was that I was being haphazardly thrust all over the sky while I bellowed an awkward scream. I played around with the controls while I was spiraling until I managed to get a hold of things with the jetpack. I hovered miles in the air and looked down and saw all the objects falling and among them were Megan and the other soldiers. They were probably only a couple seconds from landing. The guilt was killing me. I would have landed safely on the ground while the others wouldn’t. I couldn’t have saved them all but I could have at least tried to save Megan. I would have hated to see her splattered all over the Tobago floor. I kept straight as I rocketed down towards her. It didn’t take me too long to actually reach at Megan before she hit the ground. I grabbed hold of her hand and she scrambled up my arm until we were huddled together face to face in the air. I rocketed as far upwards towards the clouds as I could have possibly got. There was a sense of relief running through my entire body as we broke through the clouds. However, as soon as I was about to head downwards again the jetpack automatically shut off for itself. It seemed as though it was out of fuel. Poor management of military supplies left some of the jetpacks with low fuel.
“SHIT!!” I said to myself as I almost shit my pants. We were, for the second time, plummeting to the ground. As we were falling I heard a computerized voice that sounded a lot like Siri-us Maximus say. “You should probably pull the parachute now.”
Siri-us Maximus is a natural language user interface that answers questions and makes recommendations. In its early days it was mostly only used on mobile phones but it evolved and it was now used on every single electronic device. Because of how difficult devices are to use sometimes, Siri-us Maximus is usually there to help out. I kept my grip firmly around Megan and told her to pull the parachute under the pack straps that I hadn’t noticed before. She did and when she did the chute ejected out and carried us safely down into the water.
The water around us was so disgusting that my skin started to itch as soon as I entered. The water felt like slush on my skin, and not the good type. I felt something hit me in the back and I thought it was just some garbage but as I turned around in the water I saw a floating corpse jammed on my back. I let out a loud yelp as I quickly pushed it away from me. As I looked around I could have seen more dead bodies floating in the water. All the soldiers were dead, every single one of them but the bodies weren’t only that of the soldiers but of other people who were probably there before. There were even some skeletal remains, dead animals and random body parts in the water.
“Why are we always the ones alive when everybody’s dead?” Megan sounded annoyed as she tried her best to shake off all the goo from her hair.
“Like God’s on our side,” I said.
“Seems so,” Megan said. “So what are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I honestly didn’t plan this.”
“Well let’s at least get out of this stink water. I think that should be the first thing,” Megan said.
I agreed and we both started swimming but soon after a loud roaring noise echoed through the air. It was the hovercraft falling from the sky at a million miles per second.
“If that only lands in the water we’re dead,” I said while eyeing down the large piece of metal plummeting to earth.
It didn’t land in the water however. It plummeted from the sky somewhere in the Tobago soil. The sea shook a bit as it did but thank goodness there wasn’t a Tsunami. Imagining what would have been the case if the hovercraft had landed in the water brought shivers to my spine. The vessel was so huge. The crashing sound that it made as it hit the ground was scary enough. But what made it even scarier was the fact that there was now a towering plume of black smoke rising from the island. There was no chance of anyone on the ship surviving that impact. I was beginning to doubt if going into the island would have been a wise thing to do. If the Masqueraders didn’t catch us, the fire that engulfed part of the forest would have definitely done the job. But that didn’t seem to hinder Megan one bit. She just continued swimming to the island in a hurry. Her main goal was just to get out of the water. I let out a long and loud sigh then followed her all the way to shore.
