The impact tore the world apart with apocalyptic fury.
Metal shrieked as the plane's belly ripped open against ancient tree trunks. My harness straps snapped taut, cracking ribs as we plowed through the emerald hell. Through the cracked porthole, I watched the left wing shear off in a shower of sparks, taking half the emergency exit with it. The oxygen masks dropped like hanged men as we hit the swamp with a liquid explosion of mud and aviation fuel.
When the world stopped spinning, my ears rang with a silence more terrible than the crash.
"Status check!" Insha's voice cut through the smoke. Blood sheeted down her forehead from a gash above her right eye.
Aaron spat out a tooth. "Define 'alive.'"
Zayn groaned beside me, clutching his ruined side. The bandage had torn away during impact, revealing angry red flesh beneath. His pistol lay in the muck between us, its barrel still warm from the terminal.
We crawled from the wreckage into a nightmare.
The jungle swallowed the plane whole. Vines already snaked through shattered windows, their tendrils probing the dead. The air hung thick with the stench of rotting vegetation and something darker - a coppery tang that made my gums ache. The swamp water, black as crude oil, bubbled where the fuselage bled fuel.
Then the water moved.
Figures emerged from the mist.
Not infected. Not human.
Their skin had taken on the jungle's palette - mottled greens and browns shifting like living camouflage. One turned its head 180 degrees, vertebrae clicking like a clock winding backward. When it opened its mouth, the sound that emerged was Flight 1-Zeta's final mayday call, distorted beyond recognition.
"Back to the plane," I whispered.
Too late.
The thing wearing a pilot's uniform lunged.
Zayn's pistol roared.
The bullet tore through the creature's throat. Black sap spurted from the wound - not blood, but something viscous and shimmering. The creature didn't stop. It kept coming, its limbs elongating like taffy as it scrambled over the wreckage.
Then the jungle answered.
From the canopy above, a rain of chittering forms dropped onto the fuselage. Their bodies blurred at the edges, skin cycling through leaf patterns and bark textures. One landed inches from my face, its features resolving into a grotesque parody of Captain Wang.
"Welcome," it rasped in the captain's voice, "to the evolution."
Aaron grabbed the fire axe from the emergency panel. "New rules: we don't wait to see what they do."
The first swing split the creature's skull like rotten fruit. The thing inside wasn't brain matter, but a squirming mass of black tendrils that shrieked in radio static. All around us, the jungle shuddered in response, vines whipping like angry serpents.
Insha dragged a fuel line from the wreck. "Fire. We need fire."
As Zayn's pistol barked again and again, I fumbled for the dead co-pilot's lighter. The flame caught the fuel with a whoomp that sent heat blistering across my face. The creatures recoiled as one, their forms flickering like bad transmissions.
For a moment, we had the upper hand.
Then the trees began to move.