The Deadly Desert
HKUGA College, Ip Long Ching, Fiction Group 3
T
he plane was going down. Everyone knew it. Even those who slept had been awoken by
the smoke and the screams and the howls of the desperate people. A part of the plane
was already burning. The flight attendants tried to calm people down but they sounded
terrified themselves. The plane was spinning and gradually falling. Then it crashed into
the cold barren desert…
The fire burned with rage around the blackened metal scrapes, as if the desert was enraged
by the plane’s intrusion. In the middle of the wreck laid the plane’s main body. Its top was gone,
exposing all the passengers’ seats into the cold dry desert. On two of the seats were a middle-aged
woman and a dull-eyed boy who was patting the woman vigorously.
“What’s wrong, Blade?” The woman asked tenderly, rubbing her eyes and sitting up.
The boy continued his actions. He seemed to be unaware of his surroundings.
A man stepped in from outside. “Hello, ma’am. As you may or may not have noticed, our plane
crashed in the middle of, I believe, the Gobi desert.”
The boy stopped. He shivered instead.
“Did you just say desert? Why is it so cold then?” The middle-aged woman asked.
“Ah, that is a common misconception. Most deserts are cold at night. The Gobi, however, is one
of the coldest and most extreme. Its temperature can get up to 50°C in the Summer but down to
-40°C in the Winter.” A woman stepped in and stood next to the man. They seemed to be a couple.
“So, are we gonna stay here till the rescue team comes?” A Japanese man came from inside
the plane.
“No way. Chinese are so inefficient.” A flight attendant holding pillows and blankets came in.
Her badge read Joanna. The people were so tired they just took the things and slept.
The next day, the couple, who introduced themselves as Mr and Mrs Jones showed them a
frozen dead body and two people who were huddled together, barely alive.
“He could have lived if we found him earlier,” Mrs Jones sobbed. “Can we at least do
something for these two?”
“Sorry. We haven’t even got enough for our own.” Her husband said coldly, as cold as the
merciless desert. “I love fossils but I don’t want to be one here.”
They packed all the stuff they could still use and left the plane that afternoon. It turned out
that Mr Jones was a palaeontologist, who was originally going to study some dinosaur fossils in
the Gobi desert with others, and, since now his co-workers were all dead, the clothes they brought
for surviving in the Gobi could be used by the survivors. They walked from the rocky part of
the desert to the sandy part. It was even worse than the rocky part as the weather was still very
extreme and the sand would sink when stepped upon. What’s more, the fossils and skulls that they
passed by reminded them of death every second…
“When’s the rescue team coming?” The middle-aged woman mumbled. They were really short
of food and water.
“Never rely on the Chinese to save you, Ms Grim. They are really unreliable.” Joanna answered.
Just then, the boy freaked out, jumping up and down, waving his hands, hollering
something undecipherable.
