Getting Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

few of them on the lower part of the instrument panel. I guess they have more than one fuel tank. The needles were close to empty.
    “Oh, great!” David moaned.
    That didn’t make sense. The plane was heading for Chicago. How could it be low on fuel?
    “Maybe the hijackers dumped the fuel,” Arcadia said. “You can do that in case you need to get the weight down in an emergency.”
    “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would they want to dump fuel?”
    “Maybe the pilot dumped the fuel as soon as the plane was hijacked,” Henry suggested. “That way, the hijackers wouldn’t be able to reach their target.”
    “It doesn’t matter who dumped the fuel,” David said urgently. “We gotta land this thing soon or we’re just gonna run out of gas and go down wherever we are.”
    He was right. And right after he said that, it suddenly got quieter in the cockpit and the nose started to dip even though Henry hadn’t pushed on the yoke.
    “What’s happened?” I asked.
    Henry looked out the left side.
    “One of the engines is out!” he shouted.
    David cursed.
    “Maybe the trees will cushion our fall,” Julia said. “Like shock absorbers.”
    “Yeah, hitting a tree should be real gentle,” David said.
    “The other engine stopped!” Arcadia shouted, looking out the right side.
    We didn’t need her to tell us. There was a strange and eerie quiet suddenly. After a while you don’t notice the constant hum of an airplane’s engine. But when it stops, it’s like you’re alone in the woods in the middle of the night. It felt like we were moving more slowly.
    The nose tilted down a little more. The treetops were suddenly bigger in the window.
    “Pull it up, Henry!” David shouted, tapping the fuel gauge with his finger. “We’re losing altitude!”
    Henry pulled the yoke back and the nose went up a little, but not all the way to level.
    “It won’t go any higher!” he yelled. “We’re out of fuel. We’re gliding!”
    “So can you glide it down?” David yelled. “Try to steer it between the trees!”
    “It’s so heavy!” Henry said, still pulling on the yoke like he was in a tug-of-war.
    The trees were getting bigger and bigger, rushing past us. There were trees everywhere. It didn’t look like there was any room between them. We had to hit them. We were going awfully fast.
    “Hold on!”
    “This is it!”
    “Brace yourselves against something!” Arcadia yelled.
    We probably should have gotten out of the cockpit. We should have run to the back, let the front of the plane hit the trees, and hoped to get out alive after the plane broke apart. That would have been smart. But there was no time. We weren’t thinking straight. And we couldn’t stop looking at the trees coming at us. It was hypnotizing. We were frozen.
    The tops of the trees licked the underside of the plane and there was a scraping noise as they bent against it. Somebody screamed. We were falling into the forest. I saw the nose ram right through the middle of two thick trees. There was a jolt, then a crash. The sound of metal ripping apart. A rush of air. More screams. The smell of something burning. Tree trunks flying past us. Getting knocked off my feet. My head hitting something.
    And that was the last thing I remembered.

CHAPTER 7:
Better than the Alternative
    I didn’t die. I thought I had died. How could I have survived? I thought that maybe I was in heaven. That would have been nice, a pleasant way to die. But then I opened my eyes. Heaven probably didn’t have the smell of burning rubber. Heaven probably didn’t have the wreckage of a small jet plane. That’s what I was looking at.
    My skateboard was clutched to my chest. Where did that come from? I didn’t remember picking it up. But I must have. It was like I was holding on to it for dear life. Maybe it had saved my life. Maybe, like a bulletproof shield, it had stopped whatever I crashed into when the plane hit the trees. I would never know for sure, but I