Bite

The mountainside curved gently away from the plane as it lay on its belly, listing to one side. The engines were intact, although not functioning, and partially buried in the ground. The emergency chutes had been deployed and now the hundreds of passengers that had been on the trans Atlantic flight from London to New York were spread, dazed and disorganised, across a dazzling white landscape. Huge rock formations, larger than the plane itself, were scattered all around. There was something incredibly odd about this hillside. The ground reflected the brilliant and hot sun like snow, but it was not cold. Neither was it granular like soil or solid like rock. Instead it was smooth and it was almost tacky, if not quite sticky. The plane had seemed to sink into it. The scattered rock formations were not grey but brown and red. They seemed to be in a bowl or a crater, with the opposite side a mirror of their own, the world beyond the lip not quite visible. The air smelt… sweet.

Suddenly there was a lurch and people were thrown to the ground. The wind seemed to pick up and distant shapes in the sky seemed to move. It was as if the landscape was flying. Then darkness filled the sky behind the plane. Like a vast mountain or a bank of clouds, it filled the horizon, and then the sky. Huge slabs of ivory white began to slide overhead like a glacier sheering off at the sea, except that behind them as not a mountainside, but a cave. The sky was so dark in there and a humid gale blew from within it that smelt of… mint?

Within moments the bright sunlight was a memory and the plane and her passengers were plunged into the shade of the cave. The slabs of ivory fell to the earth destroying the landscape in an instant. Thick, slow coils of liquid both descended from above and rose from beneath them as the ground disintegrated around them and rocks, ice, passengers, plane, all mingled into one.

*

BA flight 173 disappeared shortly before arrival into New York JFK. The flight disappeared from radar and sight in clear skies after an uneventful flight. The aircraft, passengers, and crew all remain unaccounted for.