Page 56 of Red Boar's Baby

“What’s your plan for us?” Diana demanded.

The pilot was too rattled to lie. “Question you and throw you out if we had to.”

The words hit her and bounced off; they were too shocking.They really do plan to kill us.

Taking one hand off the controls, Farley reached under his jacket. He clearly didn’t consider a naked woman in his copilot seat too much of a threat.Well, he’s about to find out different,Diana thought grimly as the gleam of a gun emerged from beneath the jacket.

She shifted, leaped into his lap with wings spread, and shifted human again. Suddenly he had a naked woman not in his copilot seat, but materializing on top of him, her ass on the control yoke of the plane, grimly slamming both her elbows into his face.

Elbows, she had found, were extremely effective in discouraging unwanted attention from drunks in bars, and it turned out that they were just as useful at making a would-be killer decide that pointing a gun at her was a bad idea. She heard a clatter as he dropped the gun with a yell of pain, blood spurting from his nose. Flailing, he shoved her away, and her bare butt pushed the yoke all the way forward.

Suddenly the plane was tilted steeply forward, diving toward the ground.

Nowthat’sthe opposite of positive pitch, she thought half-hysterically.

There were more yells from the back as Costa and Jim tumbled in a new direction.

“Get out of the seat!” Diana screamed, thrashing as she tried to turn around.

“Get out of my lap, you crazy broad!”

She heard a man’s panicked yell from the back, fading rapidly. Someone had fallen out, and she didn’t know who. Fury gave her new strength, and she threw herself off the edge of the seat, attempting to drag Farley out of his seat as the plane nosedived.

Suddenly she had help. Costa was there, reaching around to unfasten Farley’s seat belt while he flailed at them; Diana had completely forgotten he would be belted in. Costa dragged him out of his sea, flinging him bodily on the floor.

“Get us back in the air,” he yelled at Diana over the screaming wind tearing through the plane.

During their struggles, Farley had gotten the plane more or less straightened out, but when Diana dropped into the pilot’s seat, she discovered that they were still wobbling wildly out of control. She glimpsed a wall of rock through the windshield. They were in the mountains, and they were much too low!

Diana grabbed for the controls, and managed to tilt the wings before they slammed into a wall of solid rock. But she felt the entire plane, tilted to the side, jolt with a grinding, shuddering impact as some part of the machine—the undercarriage, she was fairly sure—ripped across the exposed boulders.

They were still going much, much too fast. As they tore down rocky valleys, Diana gave up on looking for a place to land. She didn’t think the landing gear would drop anyway after that last impact, and there was nothing even remotely long or flat enough for a runway.

Instead she decided to try to belly-flop the plane on something,anythingthat wasn’t rocks. Grass, sand, trees if there was nothing else.

Unfortunately there was little of the kind in this remote, rocky country. She found her chance as they sped across a sandy expanse that might have been an old dried-up lake bottom.

“Brace for impact!” she shouted at Costa.

The plane smacked the ground, leaped, and smacked again like a rock skipping on water. Control was impossible. Diana clung to the yoke desperately, but she felt it wrench in her hands as the plane slewed around. They hit something buried in the sand with a tremendous bang, which flung them wildly to the side, and out of the cockpit window she saw half the wing ripped off by a collision with another boulder buried in sand. She had the flaps fully deployed to try to slow them down, but they were still going too fast. Her greatest fear was that they’d flip and douse the entire structure in aviation fuel.

The end of the sandy area was speeding toward them in the form of a jumbled field of boulders and cactus. Flight was impossible; they didn’t have enough of their wings left to fly with. The brakes only worked on the wheels and, as she’d feared, the landing gear was stuck in the up position. They had no way to stop.

Diana did the only thing she could think of and intentionally whipped the plane around so they would hit tail-first instead of nose-first—or at least she tried. The flaps no longer responded properly either, and all she managed to do was dig a wing into the sand again and pivot them wildly in a big arc.

The nose hit first, but glancingly. The cockpit canopy exploded in a galaxy of cracks but didn’t fully burst inward. Then the side hit, there was a great rending of tearing metal, and finally, joltingly, the plane ground to a halt.

Diana threw the switches to turn everything off, although the wrecked engines were sputtering out on their own by this point. She collapsed forward on the control yoke and sprawled there for a short, quiet time as it gradually sank in that they were no longer moving and she was alive.

Then she sat up swiftly.

“Quinn? Quinn!”

CHAPTER19

Costa pickedhimself up from the position he had ended up in, flung behind the copilot’s seat and curled up in a ball against the bulkhead. It wasn’t what he had been trying to do, but as it turned out it hadn’t been a bad way to go through a crash.

“Di—” he began frantically, and then he had a double armful of naked, clinging Diana.

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