Christian Thrillers Box Set

Chapter 6

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.