Intra Muros

von Marcus Krug

Walls are diverse; they can be inside, as well as outside.

The outside walls are made of aluminium. They are riveted onto elegant but robust frames forged from sturdy steel. Walls in general are meant to protect the inside from the dangers of the outside.

The temperature inside the cabin feels like the equivalent of twenty-one degrees Celsius. The outside temperature, as displayed on the little screens in the dividing walls or on the overhead TVs, is minus sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

The safety instructions turn out to be surprisingly useful for the passengers when suddenly – with an enormous roar – sheets of aluminium are being ripped out of the wall in the back of the cabin. The hole in the hull is getting bigger with every precious second that passes.

The people – still tied to their seats by their seat belts – are screaming. The screams, however, drown in the savage cacophony of aluminium getting peeled off steel frames and bolts being wrenched out of floors and walls. The interior panelling is getting shredded into chunks of freely and slowly moving debris, due to reduced cabin pressure and expanding vacuum, as the tortured body of sturdy steel frames, holey lightweight metal walls and remaining rows of seats is nose-diving with rapid velocity.

Entire seating rows are being sucked out into the icy open, like pieces of Lego through a tube into a vacuum cleaner. The scared screams of those passengers simply fade away when being eventually consumed by the outside.

A flight attendant – unable to cope with an event with this unusual a magnitude – is wide-eyedly watching the spectacle unfold, while trying to stiffly tie herself tighter onto the narrow spare seat in the flight attendant area, quite close to the hole in the hull in the back of the cabin.

Decompression in the cabin has progressed significantly. The air is getting thinner and thinner, the people can barely extract enough oxygen from the thin and gaseous mixture. Hence, they grab the yellow masks dangling in front of their faces and press them hard onto their mouths and noses.

They follow the rules.

An exceedingly apprehensive passenger is making many signs of the cross in rapid successions, then slumps down and continues with thoughts and prayers, oblivious of the rather hideous fact that he, inside the cabin, is already – to some extent – in heaven.

The hole in the hull in the back of the cabin is expanding at an extraordinary rate. The seating rows twenty-nine to twenty-five have already disappeared through the vortex in the wall.

Walled up inside myself, I have – all this time – been sitting on seat twenty-four C.