Her hands rose in front of her chest and she raised both middle fingers in the direction of the jet. Even through the wind, we could just make it out when she shouted, “Now you can hold that empty plane hostage, Anorak!”
She dropped her hands fast, though. Probably because like us, she had just noticed that her jet was still banking around and down into a dive—one that put it on a collision course with her falling parachute.
“Oh shit!” I shouted. “He’s going to ram her!”
We watched helplessly as the jet rapidly closed the distance between them. As the jet’s nose filled her POV, we saw a jolt on Samantha’s feed—she had cut her primary chute loose and was in free fall, just in time for the jet to soar by harmlessly above her. She continued to dive for several more seconds, even though the warning lights on her altimeter were already flashing red.
Finally, she pulled her reserve chute and slowed her rapid descent. She came in, still falling far too fast, landing in a small, heavily wooded park just a few miles east of downtown, and we watched as the chute dragged through the tree branches on its way to the ground.
Then she touched down with a jolt that made every bone in my body ache—and her phone’s vidfeed cut to black.
“Is she all right?” I asked Faisal with a shaky voice. “Did she make it to the ground safely?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to call her back, but she isn’t answering.”
My eyes shifted back to the viewscreen, which still displayed the live vidfeed from Samantha’s commandeered jet. It hadn’t pulled out of its dive. Instead it had increased its angle of descent, so that now it was hurtling straight toward the ground like a missile.
“Oh my God,” Faisal said. “He’s gonna crash into her landing site!”
By the time he’d finished saying it out loud, it was already happening.
But as the jet was about to crash, it pulled up sharply, so instead of hitting her landing site dead-on it made impact a few hundred feet away, in the middle of a deserted picnic area.
As it hit, our remaining vidfeed cut to black.
We stared at the blank viewscreen in silence for a moment. Then Faisal had the presence of mind to check the local Columbus newsfeeds, and in less than a minute we were watching high-definition drone footage of the crash site. The just-refueled jet had detonated like a fuel-air bomb. The immediate area surrounding its crash site had been razed to nothing by the awesome force of the initial explosion. If Samantha or anyone else had been within that radius, they would have been incinerated.
The real problem now was the fuel, which had been flung far beyond the initial blast zone, like a botched napalm strike. A dozen different fires now raged across the entire park and several of the office buildings adjacent to it. It looked like a war zone down there.
With the flames still raging, it was impossible to see how many people had been engulfed by the sudden inferno. Anyone who had would be a charred corpse by now.
And I knew that any one of those burned bodies might belong to Samantha.
Minutes passed, but to me it felt as though time had completely stopped.
I stared at the images on the viewscreen in shock as an aching hollowness spread across my limbs and torso and slowly made its way to my heart.
My mind played a montage of every moment I’d ever spent with Samantha, both in the OASIS and in reality, while I tallied up the long list of stupid things I’d said and done to her in the years since our breakup. And all of the apologies I’d never made.
Aech was the first one to break the silence. “If anyone could figure out a way to survive that, it’d be Arty. We don’t know for sure…maybe she found cover before it hit…”
“There’s no way, Aech,” Shoto said, still in shock. “Did you see that fireball? There’s no way she had enough time to get clear of it…”
We had already rewatched the footage of the crash several times, frame-by-frame. We couldn’t see what had happened to Samantha. But I was still inclined to agree with Shoto. She’d only had a split second to get clear before Anorak crashed the jet and a giant ball of flame exploded across the landscape.
I didn’t want to believe she was dead. But I wasn’t going to delude myself either. Despite how Samantha Cook was often depicted in movies and cartoons, she wasn’t a superhero. Here in the real world, she was just a regular person—a geeky Canadian gamer girl from the suburbs of Vancouver. She couldn’t outrun giant explosions on foot like Rambo.