by Alana Terry
A man Chelsea hadn’t noticed before raised the air marshal’s gun above his head. “I’m in charge of this airplane now,” he declared. “My name is Bradley Strong, and I suggest you all do exactly as I say.”
CHAPTER 7
Chelsea’s heart couldn’t handle the stress. Any instant, it was going to give out entirely.
Her head was light. Was she even breathing?
“Listen up,” Bradley bellowed. His voice carried and echoed through every crevice and cranny of the cabin. “Let me tell you how it’s gonna go.”
Behind him, the man in the Hawaiian shirt was binding the air marshal and dragging his unconscious body to the back of the cabin. Chelsea thought she saw him make eye contact and give a silent nod to another passenger as well. How many men were in on this plot to take over their plane?
“You have to let us go,” a woman pleaded. “Please, you don’t want to do this.”
“No.” Bradley’s voice was level and eerily controlled. He continued to aim the air marshal’s gun overhead. “The truth is I don’t want to do this, but the Detroit mayor and his crony superintendent have failed our kids. All year, we’ve been complaining about the health hazards of the Brown Elementary School playground. All year, we’ve been calling, petitioning, and demanding that the superintendent move our children to a safer location. And you know what? Nobody’s listened. Until now.”
Chelsea’s brain was struggling to keep up with his rant. It didn’t make sense. What did any of these passengers on board have to do with Brown Elementary School or the Detroit school system?
Another pocket of turbulence shook the cabin. Several passengers screamed. Chelsea was so shocked she couldn’t even be certain if she’d been one of them, but the raw soreness of her throat suggested she was.
A man from the back of the cabin took advantage of the chaos and raced at Bradley. While the plane jerked yet again, the two men grappled, grunting loudly. Chelsea was about to be sick, maybe from the fear or the turbulence. Maybe both.
A single shot rang out. Everything happened so quickly, Chelsea didn’t even realize it was the gun that had fired until she saw the man who attacked Bradley lying in the aisle, a pool of blood forming around him.
Bradley used his foot to push the man to the side, stepped over his body, and addressed the passengers in an eerie monotone.
“Anybody else feel like questioning my authority?”
Chelsea didn’t know what to say or what to do. It was one thing to be a bystander on a flight where a kidnapped girl was rescued from her abductor. Her brain still hadn’t processed that event, and now she was supposed to take in the fact that she was on a hijacked plane, the terrorist had a gun, and one passenger had been shot. She wasn’t sure if the air marshal had survived his attack or not, but he was now bound in the back of the cabin. Even if he wasn’t tied up and unconscious, what could he do now to help them?
The man in the aisle was most definitely dead, however. Chelsea could tell.
When she was a little girl, Chelsea and her parents once stumbled across the scene of an accident. A drunk man had smashed his car straight into a telephone pole on a deserted stretch of road in the middle of the day.
He was still alive when her family pulled up to see if they could offer any help.
“Don’t get out of the car,” Dad ordered. “And keep your eyes shut no matter what.”
Of course, that kind of rule was next to impossible for an inquisitive seven-year-old to follow. Chelsea had stared, her eyes both wide and dry, as her dad pulled the man out of the car and her mom attempted CPR. The entire scene lasted only a few minutes, and her parents insisted the man didn’t die until he was en route to the hospital, but Chelsea knew what she saw. Knew that the life had already left him.
And she immediately understood why her parents had ordered her not to look.
Chelsea mentioned the story to Clark as an aside one day. He wanted to explore the possibility that the helplessness and hopelessness Chelsea experienced as a little girl, forced to stay in her parents’ car while a man literally died in front of her eyes, sparked the passion she now had to speak up for the downtrodden, to use her words to give voice to the voiceless.
She had never thought about the incident in those terms before, but his hypothesis seemed logical.
Since then, Chelsea had been to one funeral wake and avoided looking at the body. Until now, she’d never seen another dead person.
Until now …
The hijacker had ordered the passengers to take out their cell phones and record his tirade.
“My name is Bradley Strong,” he repeated to the cameras. “I reside at 324 Trenton Street in Detroit, Michigan. My children attend Brown Elementary School. If you’ve been paying attention to the news at all, you’ll know what that means.”
Chelsea’s heart was pounding all the way up in her throat, not just because she was on a plane with a murderous terrorist and at least one dead body already, but also because she was so familiar with the controversy at the school Bradley was talking about. For a sickening moment, she feared he must know. Must know that she was a journalist covering the story. Maybe he’d blame her and people like her for not exposing the situation earlier. Plans for the building started over a year ago. Now here it was nearly Christmas, and the poor kids had been attending classes on this toxic wasteland since the fall.
Chelsea understood his frustration. If she had children of her own, she’d rather move to a different state than send them to a place like Brown. Unfortunately, the families served by that school generally lacked the funds to move even to a different neighborhood. The town hall meetings where they could have voiced their complaints were held during working hours when most of them were on the clock, and a significant portion of them didn’t feel comfortable communicating in English, which is how their children’s school ended up being built on a former pharmaceutical sludge pile in the first place.
Chelsea had never experienced anything like what the families at Brown Elementary had, at least not firsthand. Growing up in Worcester, she’d been smack dab in the center of middle class. Comfortable suburbs. Involved parents. Quiet cul de sac. Sometimes she felt guilty. What right did she have trying to speak up for the oppressed when her entire life had been so comfortable?
Clark told her that instead of resenting her privileged existence, she should leverage her position as a relatively attractive, reasonably articulate white female college graduate in order to raise awareness for those who were more easily overlooked. His words even coincided with a Bible verse Brie liked to quote: From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.
Chelsea sometimes wondered why matters of faith came so much simpler to her friend. Brie had grown up with an alcoholic father and an enabling mother. Her older brother had been in and out of jail on multiple drug charges, and her family had always struggled to make ends meet. Even now, Brie was living in a studio apartment in a neighborhood rough enough that Chelsea begged her to get a smart security system, or at least a second deadbolt for the door that she could fasten from the inside.
As a minority, as a young adult from a not-so-idyllic family background, Brie had every reason to be anxious, depressed, and maladjusted. But she was the most put-together person Chelsea knew, which only made Chelsea feel even more guilty for the personal struggles she’d been wrestling with since her early teens.
Bradley continued his tirade against the state of Michigan, the Detroit mayor, the nation who sat back and did nothing while helpless children were being poisoned day in and day out. The majority of his rant was directed at the superintendent of the Detroit school district.
“Charles Weston has failed our kids,” he spat out. It was a name Chelsea was quite familiar with. In her preliminary research on the Brown scandal, Charles Weston stood out as the primary culprit, which was why she’d been working so hard to try to get a
hold of him before she’d made this trip.
The fact that the terrorist holding her plane hostage was protesting the very story Chelsea was flying out to Detroit to cover was unnerving. It was bad enough sitting here with an armed gunman who’d already killed at least one passenger. But the fact that she and Bradley were somehow both concerned about the same travesty impacting the kids of Detroit made her feel squeamish and alarmed. Airplane hijackers were supposed to be greedy, monstrous villains. Was it possible that Bradley was nothing more than a desperate father, doing anything and everything in his power to make it so his kids didn’t get lead and arsenic poisoning when they played four-square outside after lunch?
No, that didn’t make sense. Chelsea cared about the students at Brown Elementary School, which was why she was on this plane. Never in her wildest dreams would she consider hijacking one.
Maybe there was something deeper to it than this. Maybe Brown was just a smokescreen. Maybe Bradley would have turned toward murder and terrorism no matter what school his children went to, and his frustration with the mayor of the Detroit and the school district superintendent was simply an easy excuse.
It certainly was an easier explanation to accept.
“By the way,” Bradley was saying. “If Charles Weston is looking for his precious little girl, I want you to know I’ve been keeping Selena in good hands.” He grabbed the wide-eyed teenager the air marshal had been trying to protect. Lifting her up by the collar of her T-shirt, he shoved her in front of a passenger’s phone.
“Say hello to your daddy,” Bradley told her, his voice taunting and full of spite.
Selena Weston was shaking so hard she could barely stand. Overcome with compassion and pity, Chelsea resisted the urge to jump out of her seat and race to the girl’s side.
Just stay calm, Chelsea told herself. Stay calm, stay quiet, and you just might get through this ordeal alive.
CHAPTER 8
Chelsea had never considered herself that gifted in prayer. Her mom could sit for hours with her Bible and a cup of coffee and pour out her heart to God while highlighting passages of Scripture and jotting down notes in the margins. Chelsea, on the other hand, found her mind wandering when her dad said grace before the evening meal.
Even now, Chelsea realized, she was no better at praying than when she wasn’t being held hostage thirty-thousand feet above ground by an insane murderer intent on kidnapping, hijacking, and terrorism.
Her mind wanted to pray, but she couldn’t slow down the racing of her heart long enough to focus on anything. There was nothing in her soul, no pleas for protection, no comforting passages of Scripture brought to mind at just the right time.
There was only uncertainty and fear.
Bradley was pacing up and down the aisle. Each and every time he came close to first class, Chelsea willed herself to grow even smaller. When his steps receded and he headed toward the back of the cabin, Chelsea experienced a surge of relief that left her head light and her body cold. A surge of relief that also left her feeling incredibly guilty, because it just meant his attentions were focused on some other helpless, terrorized passenger.
“I’m going to give Charles Weston five minutes to call me,” Bradley declared. “Five minutes for a little heart-to-heart with the city’s good old superintendent. We can talk about anything you like. About the elementary school you built on poison, about the grown men on the construction crew who landed in the hospital. Or maybe you’d like to talk about something else. Your daughter, maybe? I don’t want to hurt her, but I assure you I will.”
Chelsea couldn’t bring herself to look at the kidnapped teen who’d returned to her seat after being paraded in front of the cameras. From somewhere behind her, Chelsea heard muffled whimpering, but she had no idea if it was from Selena Weston or any of the other hundreds of passengers on the flight. They were all here, all captive. They had all seen Bradley shoot his first victim. And yet Chelsea felt incredibly alone in the horror of it, as if nobody else in the world could imagine the terror she was experiencing at this exact moment in time.
She tried to think of what Clark might tell her in a situation like this, but her coach’s voice in her mind was silent.
She tried to guess what her mother would do if she were stuck here on this flight. Pray. That was probably it. Mom and Dad always talked about heaven, and they were both certain about their future in the afterlife. Chelsea believed the exact same things they did, but that didn’t mean she was anywhere near ready to die.
Please, God. Chelsea couldn’t think of anything else even remotely appropriate to say.
“Five minutes,” Bradley repeated, making a show of checking on the time. “Five minutes before another hostage dies.”
Please, God. It was the only prayer Chelsea could muster.
She just hoped it would be enough.
CHAPTER 9
Bradley’s timer beeped. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned off the alarm.
The silence was terrifying.
“That’s five minutes,” he declared in a monotone. “Time’s up.”
Chelsea held her breath. Any doubts she had about Bradley’s willingness to use the air marshal’s gun had already vanished when he shot the first passenger. Now it wasn’t a question of whether or not he was going to kill. The only question was who would end up in the aisle next, collapsed in a puddle of blood.
For a brief stint during her tenth-grade year, Chelsea had entertained thoughts of going into the medical field. Nursing, maybe labor and delivery, she wasn’t sure. Plans changed one night in youth group when they were playing a raucous game of sardines in the dark. Brie tripped over a stair on the sanctuary platform, cracking her forehead open on the baptistry. While they waited for Brie’s mother to pick her up and take her to the ER, Chelsea sat beside her best friend, terrified that Brie was about to bleed to death by her side.
It was that night when Chelsea realized she could never handle blood or trauma or basically any type of emergency.
Brie was fine. She didn’t even need stitches. It didn’t matter how many adults and experts assured Chelsea that the amount of blood from head injuries almost always made them appear worse than they were. She’d spent ten terrible minutes convinced her best friend was going to die, just like the man in that car accident when she was a kid, and given how her body still shook the next morning when she woke up, Chelsea realized she just wasn’t built to handle emergency situations.
A lot changed that night.
Brie now had a permanent scar above her left eyebrow. The teens from youth group weren’t allowed to run in the sanctuary anymore. And Chelsea gave up her plans for nursing.
Maybe if Chelsea had continued down that career path, things would be different right now. She’d have no reason to be on this flight to Detroit, for one thing.
There was a verse Chelsea and Brie had memorized when they were on the Bible quiz team together in middle school. Chelsea still remembered it verbatim: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. It was the kind of passage meant to encourage Christians to persevere during hard times, knowing that good would eventually come from their trials.
But how would you tell that to the man Bradley had just killed?
How would you tell that to the next victim he shot?
“Mr. Weston,” Bradley boomed. He spoke into the cameras that were pointed at him as if he’d hosted his own YouTube talk show for decades. Chelsea couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if he’d put this same amount of energy that he spent on hijacking this airplane into actually campaigning or raising awareness for the students of Brown Elementary.
“I’ve been patient with you, Mr. Weston,” Bradley announced. “I’ve given you five minutes to call me. More than five minutes, actually. And you know what I’ve gotten from you? Nothing. Nada. I thought that if I made this personal, if I actually had your daughter o
n board this flight with me, that you’d be willing to negotiate. I guess I was wrong.”
He paused, stared at the camera, and glowered. “You’ve had ample time,” he said, “and plenty of warning. I just want you to rest assured that everything that happens from this moment forward is entirely your fault.”
Chelsea turned around in her seat as Bradley’s resumed pacing brought him closer to the front of the plane. She couldn’t look at him, didn’t dare to breathe for fear of drawing attention to herself. Was it fair? Was it right? If she made herself little, if she hoped that Bradley would pass her by, did that mean she was actively wishing for someone else to die?
She tried to picture Clark’s face. Tried to guess what her coach would tell her now to help her calm down. Help her regain her composure.
But when she pictured Clark here on this plane with her, he was just as terrified as she was.
God, help us.
There was no way over the roar of the airplane engines that Chelsea should be able to hear Bradley’s boots as he stomped up and down the aisle, but her senses were heightened exponentially, and each step he took sent shivers of panic and terror racing up her spine.
“This is your fault, Mr. Weston,” Bradley repeated then reached out and grabbed a flight attendant by the elbow.
“Get over here,” he growled at her.
Chelsea hated herself for feeling even a hint of relief. Is this what terrorism did to you? It made you happy when somebody else was about to get killed because at least you yourself had the chance to survive. Chelsea already carried around enough guilt in her life. Guilt for not being happier, more thankful. Guilt for being depressed when she’d been blessed with such a privileged upbringing. And now she was supposed to live with survivor’s guilt on top of that?
She hated herself. Hated how she’d never appreciated life until this exact moment. How sick and twisted was it that it took an act of terrorism for her to finally feel thankful for everything she’d been given?
