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direction.
    “Pull up!” Phillip shouts from the back, his voice nearly drowned by the propeller. I can’t see him, but it sounds like he’s crying. Not that I blame him. We’re now rushing straight toward a wall of darkness that, though lifeless, appears like a hungry beast, ready to devour us.
    But I don’t pull up. Not yet. We’re not moving fast enough.
    “Abe!” Holly is gripping her seat, still not strapped in. She looks as mortified as Phillip sounds.
    “Buckle up!” I shout at her. The plane shakes around us, the din garbling my voice, but she gets the message. She flinches and looks down, and then fumbles with her belt for a moment before clipping it in place.
    I pull back on the control stick gently, lifting the plane’s nose off the ground. The wings and tail follow, lifted up while g-forces pull my stomach down, twisting my gut and reminding me why I stopped flying in planes this small. The shaking stops, granting a momentary peace, until I see the wall of mud rushing toward us.
    We’re not high enough yet.
    Grinding my teeth, I yank the control stick back, putting us into a steep climb. The engine whines, but doesn’t stop. A giant boulder rolls toward and then beneath us, bringing back memories of Han Solo in the asteroid field. Then we’re above the flood and rising, approaching the mile-high ash cloud.
    Part of my brain registers voices in the cockpit, but the words are filtered out by my intense focus. We’re rising at a seventy-degree angle, still headed directly toward the ash, but gaining altitude. I’m sure someone is telling me to turn, but I’m no stunt pilot. To turn around without crashing, I’m going to have to level out first, and that means getting above the plume.
    With one hand still gripping the control stick, I reach down and push the throttle. It only moves a little, but the slight jolt of speed pushes me back into my seat.
    People are still shouting, and it still just sounds like noise, but now it’s irritating me. “Just hold on and shut up!” I shout, leaning forward and gazing straight up. We’re headed toward a precipice of gray, above which is a broad open swath of sky with a ceiling of dark volcanic smoke high above.
    “We’re not going to make it,” I say, as the clouds close in.
    Diego starts whispering in Spanish, perhaps cussing me out, perhaps saying a prayer. There’re no atheists in foxholes, they say. Maybe the same thing is true for scientists in airplanes about to fly into a volcanic dust cloud? I consider this for a moment and quickly dismiss it. The only person, living, dead or deity who can help me right now, is me.
    “What!” Phillip pulls on my chair, as he leans forward to shout at me. The seat tilts back from the added weight, pulling me and the control stick with it. Phillip falls back when the plane tilts up at a sharper angle. My equilibrium struggles to make sense of the tilted world, and I have the strangest sense that I’m about to fall backward.
    Darkness envelopes us. Tiny particles hiss against the metal body. I imagine the engine’s air intake, sucking the stuff down, and right on time, it coughs.
    And then, like the baptized rising from the water, we spring free of the cloud and rise into the orange light of the setting sun once more. I feel reborn. Elated. Light. As I level out the Cessna, cheers surround me. The doubtful Phillip pats my shoulder. “Good show. Good show.”
    “Gracias, Abe,” Diego says. “Muchas gracias.”
    Holly gives me a grin and shakes her head. The look in her eyes says that a hero’s reward awaits me when we land, but my life is complicated enough already. Holly is smart, pretty and fun to be with, but I’m a two-woman man.
    Exuberance turns to stunned silence. The view through the windshield is apocalyptic. Hell on Earth. The land, for as far as I can see, is covered by the thick ash cloud, which has raced away from the volcano in every direction, chasing a flood of water scouring the terrain