The Accidental Pilot

The screaming started about twenty minutes later.

Not passenger screaming — that, Clive could've handled. This was crew screaming, which was worse, because crew aren't supposed to scream. They're supposed to smile and hand you pretzels and pretend turbulence is normal. When they scream, something has gone properly wrong.

A flight attendant came sprinting down the aisle, her face the colour of old paper. She was scanning the passengers with the wild eyes of someone looking for a very specific thing and not finding it.

Her gaze landed on Clive.

"You!" She grabbed him by the wool. "You're the new pilot, right? The one they radioed about?"

"I am absolutely not—"

"The captain's unconscious! The co-pilot's having a panic attack! We need you in the cockpit NOW!"

She was already dragging him forward. Clive's hooves skidded on the carpet as he tried to resist, but the flight attendant had the grip strength of someone who'd spent years wrestling overhead bins, and she was not taking no for an answer.

The cockpit door swung open. The captain was slumped over the controls like a man who'd decided to take a nap in the worst possible location. The co-pilot was in the corner, rocking slightly, muttering numbers that didn't seem to correspond to anything useful.

The flight attendant shoved Clive into the captain's seat. "Fix this," she said, and slammed the door behind her.

Clive stared at the controls.

There were so many buttons. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Buttons and switches and dials and screens showing numbers and lines and symbols that meant nothing to him. A yoke that looked like a steering wheel designed by someone who hated drivers. Warning lights blinking in colours he didn't know warnings came in.

"Okay," Clive said. "Okay. I drove a forklift. This is just... a big forklift. That flies. In the sky. With people in it."

He grabbed the yoke. The plane immediately banked hard left. Passengers screamed. Clive yanked it the other way. The plane banked hard right. More screaming.

"Okay, gentle, gentle—"

He hit a red button. Every alarm in the cockpit went off simultaneously. The co-pilot, who had briefly stopped muttering, started again with renewed intensity.

"What does this do?" Clive asked, pulling a lever.

The engines roared to full power. The plane shot forward like it had been kicked. Clive was thrown back in his seat, his hooves leaving the controls entirely, which somehow made the plane fly straighter than anything he'd done on purpose.

Through the windshield, he could see the ground. It was much closer than it should have been. Also, it was getting closer.

"Landing!" Clive announced to no one. "We're landing! Probably!"

He grabbed the yoke again and pulled back. The plane's nose came up. Then it came up too much. Then Clive pushed it down. Then too much down. The plane was basically doing a very slow, very terrifying wave through the sky.

A runway appeared in the distance. Small. Very small. Surrounded by what looked like open grassland.

"That'll do," Clive said, and aimed for it with the confidence of someone who had no idea what they were doing but had fully committed to finding out.

The wheels hit the tarmac with a bang that Clive felt in his skeleton. The plane bounced. Actually left the ground again, briefly, then came back down harder. It veered left. Then right. Then left again. Clive was stamping on pedals he didn't understand, yanking on things that may or may not have been brakes.

The plane skidded off the runway and onto grass, plowing through the field like the world's most expensive lawnmower. It spun — a full, lazy rotation — and finally, mercifully, stopped.

Silence.

Then, from the corner, the co-pilot's voice: "Are we dead?"

"No," Clive said, his hooves still locked on the yoke, his wool standing straight out in every direction. "No, we're fine. Everything's fine."

He looked out the window. A herd of elephants stood about two hundred metres away, watching the plane with the calm disinterest of animals who'd seen worse.

Clive unbuckled his seatbelt.

"Right," he said. "Where exactly are we?"