Terror in the Skies

by Alana Terry

  Terror in the Skies

  by Alana Terry

  Note: The views of the characters in this novel do not necessarily reflect the views of the author, nor is their behavior necessarily condoned.

  The characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form (electronic, audio, print, film, etc.) without the author’s written consent.

  Copyright © 2019 Alana Terry

  Scriptures quoted from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

  www.alanaterry.com

  CHAPTER 1

  If you were to look at me in passing and see my bright blue hair, you might guess I was some kind of art major with a decided bleeding-heart complex. Well, you’d actually be pretty close. Except instead of art, it’s theater.

  My name is Willow Winters, which if you had any reservations before about my slightly bohemian tendencies earlier, you can assure yourself that your first impression wasn’t mistaken. With me it’s what you see is what you get. Promise.

  It’s kind of funny, really. I’m an only child, and so you’d think I’d be more used to being the center of attention, except I’m not. If I had friends who were of marrying age or inclination at this stage in my life, I’d definitely be the twice a bridesmaid type or however that saying goes. In fact, even in my theater roles I’m almost always thrown into a critically important albeit nevertheless supporting part.

  Fine by me. Fewer people to let down if you mess anything up.

  I’m just the blue-haired second fiddle. That could be the name of my autobiography, I swear. Except now I’m stepping into the spotlight. Because it’s time for me to tell my own story. My own way.

  Are you ready?

  Let’s go.

  It’s so funny. Until I moved out here to the East Coast, I didn’t think that being from Alaska was any different than being from, oh, say Montana or Georgia or any of the other forty-nine states in the union. But people kind of geek out here when I tell them where I’m from, so I guess I’ll go ahead and start there.

  Yes, I’m from Alaska. No, I don’t ski cross-country to travel from one town to another, nor have I ever seen or spent the night in an igloo. I live an hour away from the nearest grocery store, and my town only has about three hundred people living in it. (Drop that down to a hundred and fifty in the winters if you count the snowbirds.)

  Because I’m from Alaska, I’m going to say a few things differently than you. When I talk about going outside, I’m talking about leaving the wonderful beauty of Alaska and venturing out to the Lower 48. (That’s the contiguous United States if you’re not familiar with the phrase.) A snow machine is what everyone else in the States insists on calling a snowmobile, and breakup season has nothing to do with romantic relationships and everything to do with melted ice and snow.

  Because I’m an Alaskan, I’m more than comfortable processing a moose (even though I’m most decidedly vegan), snowshoeing for five or ten miles a day, and using an outhouse. No, I don’t drive a team of sled dogs around (although my nearest neighbors do). Yes, I have running water at home (although we have to haul it in on the back of my dad’s truck). Yes, I’ve seen the northern lights, made fireweed jelly, and driven over potholes big enough to drown a beluga.

  So, now that we’ve gotten those preliminaries out of the way, it’s time for me to tell you about my most recent trip back home. It’s time for me to tell you about the closest I’ve ever come to dying, and how that experience ultimately saved my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  I never had siblings growing up (yes, I know I mentioned that before, but bear with me). Mom and Dad were already fairly old by the time I came around. Having both come from academic lifestyles in the past, they were ready to retire rural, and they brought me along for the ride.

  I didn’t feel lonely growing up. We had goats, sheep, several dozen chickens, and acres of woods to explore. There was never a shortage of things to do, since my parents were one-hundred percent devoted to subsistence living. By that I mean summers were spent growing all the food we’d need for the winter; falls were filled with canning, blanching, and freezing; and if we couldn’t buy or make or grow it local, we learned to do without.

  Books were the only exception, and after years of conscience wrangling, my dad even bought himself an e-reader when I was in high school.

  Life was simple. Organic. Predictable.

  And then I moved to the East for college. It wasn’t a surprise, really. Even though nobody from my hometown had ever been accepted to a school like Harvard before, it was tacitly understood I’d be heading toward the Ivy League. My summers spent at camps and enrichment programs all across the country were meant to broaden my horizons and puff up my resumé. Harvard was happy to have me, and as excited as I was to taste the freedom of city living, Alaska has always been and always will be home.

  Don’t get me wrong. College is fine. I like my classes, I have some awesome friends in the theater department, and I’ve been cast in quite a few interesting productions already. I’ve got a great roommate, if you can handle living with a neat-freak bookworm. Seriously, though, Kennedy’s amazing. It’s kind of an unlikely friendship if you ask me, and since she’s going to end up playing a decent part in my near-death experience, I suppose you should get used to hearing about her now.

  Kennedy’s one of those people you just don’t forget. If I’m second fiddle, she’s sitting pretty in first chair. Super smart, studious, classic type-A personality. It’s a small wonder we shared a dorm room our first year of college without killing each other. But that’s just what we did, and we managed not to kill each other with such alarming talent that we decided to go ahead and do the same thing all over again for our sophomore year.

  Which brings me to the present.

  Or actually to about three months ago.

  Winter break.

  Kennedy, my oh-so-studious roommate, was coming home with me for the semester holiday. Meet the family. Learn to milk goats, all that fun stuff. Kennedy’s a typical city girl, so I thought it would be a blast to offer her that very first taste of rural living.

  Fast-forward to day one of winter break. Kennedy had been studying herself sleepless (like normal) to get through all her finals. As for me, two of my classes just had final projects. The others were papers, not all that different than the ones I’d been writing all semester. So basically, Kennedy and I had both made it through another term. It’s just that I managed to do it without aging myself a decade and losing a cumulative total of three days of sleep in the process. But that’s neither here nor there.

  Our first flight to get home was going to take us from Boston to Detroit. Fairly standard, I suppose, as far as airplane trips go. From Detroit on to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage … Yeah, getting anywhere when you’re from Alaska is a royal pain. Not to mention the fact that even once we landed in Anchorage, we’d still have a five-hour drive ahead of us to get home to Copper Lake. Kennedy’s a pretty seasoned traveler. City girl, like I said, all that jazz. Between the two of us, we’ve probably circumnavigated the world a good number of times if you were to throw our miles together. All that is to say that neither of us was green when it came to flying.

  Which is why neither of us had any clue when we boarded that plane how close we were about to come to death.

  CHAPTER 3

  Have you ever seen someone die before? I know, I know. Morbid question. Too disturbing. I grew up on a farm. I already told you that. So you can guess that I’m not too squeamish when it comes to blood, birth, the circle of life, all that jazz.
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br />   Except I’d never seen a human die. Not until I got on that flight with Kennedy.

  I’d certainly never seen anyone murdered. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Let’s see … This is the first time I’ve tried to lay out any of the things that happened to me in any kind of logical order. It’s a lot harder than I imagined. I guess I should just start at the beginning.

  Kennedy and I were seated in the back of the plane. I mean the very back. And a few weird things happened right at the start. Well, maybe not totally weird as far as traveling goes, but looking back, they all added up.

  So first of all, this Mennonite family got on board. You wouldn’t know it if you’ve never lived here, but Alaska has quite a lot of Mennonites, especially when you get toward Palmer and Wasilla. Most people know the area because that’s where Sarah Palin’s from. You’ve heard of her maybe? Fun fact: Jewel is also from Alaska, but that’s a less well-known piece of trivia unless you’re one of her fans.

  So anyway, this Mennonite family came on board. Nothing all that surprising about that, at least to me. If I remember right, this guy in front of me had some kind of problem with them. Made a joke about the Amish not being allowed to fly in airplanes, something ignorant like that. Sadly, not too different than what you might expect.

  They seemed like a really nice family too. Quiet kids. Mom was reading to the younger ones if I remember right. But then these two men with Middle Eastern clothing and features came on board. They were sitting toward the front of the plane, but I watched the Mennonite husband and wife exchange a look. I don’t have to describe it to you exactly, do I? You know what I mean don’t you?

  The look.

  And then the wife told her husband she had a bad feeling about the flight, and she wanted to get off. I was expecting him to tell her everything was fine. Maybe she hadn’t flown much in the past and got nervous. Maybe she’d just watched a documentary recently on 9-11 and hadn’t read the memo that not all people of Middle Eastern descent are terrorists. Who knows?

  But instead of calming his wife down, the husband called over the flight attendant. Her name was Tracy. Now, think about how many flights you’ve been on. Not just this year or this decade even, but over your whole life. On a single one of them, can you remember any of the flight attendants’ names?

  I didn’t think so.

  But Tracy is a woman I will never forget.

  Never.

  Except I’m getting ahead of myself again. First we need to go back to the Mennonites. The husband told Tracy he and his wife were uncomfortable and wanted to get their family off the plane. At this point, I expected Tracy to say something like, “Oh, we’re perfectly safe here, you have nothing to worry about. Is this your first time flying with us?” If we were ten or fifteen years in the past, she’d probably have offered to give all the kids little wing pins. You remember those, don’t you?

  Well, that’s not what Tracy said. She was very polite and very professional and told them that if they wanted to get off the plane, that was totally their right. So of course that obnoxious man in front of me started complaining about delays, but it happened very quickly and smoothly. One minute they were on the plane. The next minute they were off.

  At the time, I’ll go ahead and admit it, I thought it had everything to do with racism and xenophobia and that Mennonite woman not wanting to be on a plane with two dark-skinned men wearing turbans. Looking back, I wonder if it was God’s way of warning them. I think about that family sometimes. Think about those kids. Did their parents tell them what almost happened?

  And what about the parents? Do they feel survivor’s guilt? Or maybe some sort of arrogant smugness that they had the good sense to get off that plane? I’ll probably never know, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wonder.

  There’s a lot of things I wonder about the other victims on that flight. Like Tracy. What did she think about helping that family deboard the plane? Did she think they were being paranoid? Did she begrudge them the extra few minutes of time it took to get them and their luggage back to the terminal? Was she thinking about paperwork she’d have to fill out to explain the change in the passenger list?

  Or maybe she wasn’t thinking about them at all. Maybe she was thinking about her two children back home. Or where she’d spend the night once we landed in Detroit. I’ve read everything I could find about Tracy online, but it still doesn’t give a good sense of who she really was. But I think about her escorting that family off the flight. Wonder if she herself had any sort of inkling. Any sort of intuition.

  What does a flight attendant do when they don’t feel safe on a flight? They still have to do their job, right?

  Which is exactly what Tracy did. Exactly what she’d still be doing right now in fact if things hadn’t taken such a terrible, terrifying turn.

  CHAPTER 4

  So I’m going to come right out and say it. I met a guy on the plane. Nothing serious. Nothing that would’ve led to anything. But I guess now’s just a good a time as any to explain to you where I was spiritually when I got on that flight.

  Which was dead.

  Spiritually dead, I mean.

  My roommate Kennedy was really the first Christian I’d met who wasn’t entirely mean-spirited, hypocritical, and judgmental. In fact, her faith made a really positive impression on me. Not that I was looking for a new religion to try on. I was quite comfortable at the time with my blend of agnostic spiritualism with a few borrowings from Eastern thought, meditation, enlightenment, all that jazz. I was adamantly against organized religion, and other than that I was quite happy to live and let live.

  Kennedy was the best kind of Christian friend to have because she wasn’t ever shoving her beliefs down my throat. I’d come home on the weekends drunk or high or whatever, and she wouldn’t give me a sermon. I asked her about it later, and she said her dad always told her it was wrong to expect non-Christians to act like Christians, which is smart advice if you ask me.

  Anyway, back to the flight and this guy I met. He was a teacher. Math, if I remember right, and we got to flirting. We even did a little chair hopping. Kennedy moved over so he and I could sit together. It was really nice of her, now that I think about it, and kind of rude of me. But anyway, I spent a while talking to Mr. Math Babe (not that he was a total babe; I just forget his name at the moment). Which goes to show you what I said before, that this was a typical flight. We were all doing our thing, waiting to eventually land in Detroit. When you think of how much traveling Kennedy and I still had to do to get all the way out to Copper Lake, we’d really just started our trip.

  And things were pretty uneventful for the first couple hours. Math Dude was making jokes. Suggesting we get some drinks during my layover in Detroit. The guy in front of us continued to be rude and obnoxious. Kennedy struck up a conversation with this old white-haired retired missionary lady … It was about as typical as flights get, if not a little chattier than normal.

  And then I saw something.

  No, it wasn’t the two Middle-Easterners. But wouldn’t that be a fine setback for the case against racial profiling? It was this big guy in a Hawaiian shirt sitting toward the front of the cabin. Now that I think about it, I couldn’t even tell you what it was about him that got my attention. I’m a people-watcher, I guess. Comes from all my time in the theater. Studying people’s quirks, memorizing their body language, all that jazz. But there was something about this guy that made me uneasy right from the start.

  Maybe it was that gaudy Hawaiian shirt, but there was more to it than that. He was on the flight with this teen girl. I suppose if you were to glance at them real quickly you would have assumed it was a dad traveling with his daughter. And hey, it wasn’t too long since I was that age myself. I totally get not wanting to buddy up to your old man, especially in public.

  But this was different.

  When I looked at them together, I sort of knew they weren’t the right fit. Has that ever happened to you?
Like once my dad totally embarrassed everybody involved when he starting chatting it up with this middle-aged man at the Anchorage theater. And yes, striking up a conversation with a complete stranger is totally something my dad would do. As would assuming that the young, pretty woman sitting beside him was his daughter and not only making that assumption but saying so out loud.

  Hello?

  They were obviously a couple, and I knew that from the start, but I couldn’t explain to you how I figured it out right away and good old Dad didn’t. Well, it was the same thing on the plane. I looked at that middle-aged, balding man, looked at the teen girl he was traveling with, and I knew they weren’t right. I kept watching them, kept trying to figure out what it was about the way they were sitting together that creeped me out.

  Knowing what I know now, I almost wish I’d said something sooner. But who could tell if that would have helped? Anyway, I kept watching this couple that certainly wasn’t a romantic couple and almost certainly wasn’t related if I were to trust my instincts. But what was I supposed to do? Just walk up to the flight attendant and tell her that some old guy on the plane was weirding me out?

  So I was keeping half of my attention on those two and half of my attention on my roommate. Mr. Math Babe had moved back to his old seat to work on grading papers or something, so it was just Kennedy and me. Talking about what?

  They say that when you’re in the midst of intense danger, your brain focuses in on the smallest, sometimes most random details. A kind of protective measure so that you can avoid that particular danger again, I suppose. Honestly, you’d have to ask my roommate about that. She’s the science nerd. But you’d think, given everything that was about to happen, my conversation then with Kennedy would somehow be forever seared into my memory.