Brace Yourselves

The one and only church left in Jerusalem was burning. Towering flames lit the sky and illuminated crowds of people in the street. Most were celebrating the inferno. I walked into a nearby museum and into its massive marble floored lobby. Dozens of cameras mounted on the walls snapped photos of me from every angle, checking to see if I was a terrorist. Luckily, I was not.

I passed through the museum and out the back to a large, mostly vacant airfield. My favorite professor was giving a lecture on warfare and today the class was being held inside a Learjet parked out on the airstrip. Kevin, Lucas, and Melissa were attending the class with me. We filed into the jet and I made my way through the small group of other students to take a seat in the back, buckling myself into the leather chair. I could see a small river flowing by the airfield outside my window.

We watched with growing concern as the banks overflowed and water started flooding into the airfield and under our plane.

The professor stood at the front of the jet but hadn’t started his lecture yet. Not many of the students seemed interested anyway, as they were all talking about the dam upstream on the  river. A large flow of water was scheduled to be released down the river and was predicted to flood a local baseball field. We all though that was a terrible idea, as it would probably ruin the game scheduled to be played that night. As if on cue, the river began to rise and was soon flooding much more severely than we had predicted. We watched with growing concern as the banks overflowed and water started flooding into the airfield and under our plane.

It became apparent that the water wasn’t going to carry us away, so we kept calm. That calm was soon sundered as one of the students pointed out the window. “Oh no, the dam!” The river’s water level surged and headed straight for the airfield.  The current swept under the jet and began to carry it away. I reacted quickly, rushing to the front of the jet and shutting the door just as it was about to be inundated. The jet bobbed up and down in the water as we headed down what was now a massive river. A light sprinkle of rain started, quickly turning into a constant downpour. Waves began to grow larger with each passing moment.

Lucas decided this was a perfect time to start messing around and jump up and down on the plane, seeing if he could get it to flip over. “Stop being stupid and fucking around,” I yelled at him. “You’re going to make us tip over and drown!”

The jet bobbed up and down in the water as we headed down what was now a massive river.

The flood current turned and we started heading straight for a giant air hanger on the edge of the field. Tower walls of water rose before the jet, dwarfing our makeshift boat. I grabbed the controls and somehow managed to force the jet around to hit the waves head on. It was our only chance to prevent capsizing. A tall chain link fence stuck out of the water in front of us and I called out to the rest of those on board.

“Brace yourselves!”

“Brace yourselves!” The plane plowed through the fence without even a jostle.

“Did you just say brace yourselves?” Melissa asked incredulously. She thought it was a truly ridiculous thing to say.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied. I decided to embrace it and took it to the next level, shouting out like a pirate. “All right me ‘arties! This be it! This storm be rougher’n your mother’s arse!”

Everyone laughed.

Note: Hey, only 4 months between posts this time. Progress. I’ve got tons of dreams recorded in a backlog, it’s just a measure of typing them up.