Turbulence-2-10
2020 Words
And then she’d tell Willow about the Lord. That was the bargain she’d make with God. If he got both of them out of this alive, she’d spend the next year if necessary preaching the gospel to Willow every hour of the day.
If they survived.
General was walking up the aisle next to Kennedy when his timer beeped in his pocket. He raised his eyebrows and stared at his phone.
“That’s five minutes,” he declared. “Time’s up.”
CHAPTER 13Nobody talked. Kennedy kept her eyes on the ground as General passed her by. He wore faded Nikes, with the sole of one shoe starting to peel away. She couldn’t explain why it struck her as strange. Here he was, ready to kill over a hundred civilians while an entire nation watched, and he was wearing shabby shoes.
Maybe he wasn’t so scary after all.
Or maybe that was the cognitive dissonance talking.
He strolled the aisle slowly, his gun swinging low in his hand. Why didn’t someone grab it?
“Are you recording?” he asked the man in the Hawaiian shirt. Kennedy wondered what news source his camera fed. Were people watching this in real time? What if he had a bomb? What if the plane exploded? They wouldn’t really air that live on network television, would they?
At least while General addressed the camera his focus was diverted from the rest of the passengers on the plane. Five minutes had come and gone, and nobody called. Kennedy would have never guessed a school zoning issue could lead to terrorism.
No, not terrorism. That was the wrong word. General wasn’t a terrorist. He was psychotic. He didn’t have any political connections to any other organizations. He was working on his own, just him and Lieutenant who jumped in to kidnap girls or take out air marshals as the need arose. That didn’t make General a terrorist. To be a terrorist, he had to have some umbrella organization sending him out, pumping his brain full of propaganda and then sanctioning this suicide mission.
He wasn’t a terrorist. He was just insane.
“Mr. Weston,” General’s voice boomed throughout the otherwise still cabin. “You’ve had five and a half minutes to respond to my request to talk. You’ve sat at the negotiating table with your teachers’ union. You know how this goes. If I don’t stand by my threat, my word means nothing anymore. I just want you to remember, Mr. Weston, that everything that happens from this moment on is your fault.”
There was a malicious sort of coyness in his tone that sent pinpricks zinging up and down Kennedy’s spine.
“Entirely your fault,” he repeated. He marched the aisle slowly, staring at each passenger in turn. His eyes landed on Kennedy for a brief second, and her blood chilled the same way Scrooge’s must have when his door knocker revealed the face of his long-dead partner.
He kept walking. Slowly. Deliberately. All the way to the back of the plane. Not to Willow ...
Kennedy’s stomach flipped in her gut as he smiled gallantly at the flight attendant. “Come here, darling.”
She hesitated for only a minute and then stepped toward him.
“What’s your name?” he asked, his voice purring like a cat’s.
“Tracy.”
He held her by the arm, positioning her slightly in front of himself. “Tell me, Tracy, do you have children?”
She was shaking. She bit her lip and nodded once.
“How charming,” General answered. “How many?”
“Two.” Her voice was hardly above a whisper. She squeezed her eyes shut.
General pouted into the camera. “I assume you’d like to see them again, wouldn’t you?” He raised the gun toward her temple.
She nodded once more. Her teeth chattered until she clamped down on her jaw. Kennedy saw the strain in the muscles of her neck.
General let out a dramatic sigh. “Mr. Weston, you have two new orphans on your conscience.”
The shot deafened Kennedy’s ears and reverberated throughout the cabin.
CHAPTER 14Kennedy hid her face in her arms as General addressed the superintendent of the Detroit School District once more. “You have another five minutes, Mr. Weston. I’m sure you’re getting the picture by now. The plane’s fully loaded, and I’ve got all the time in the world. You know how to reach me.”
Ray wrapped an arm around Kennedy’s shoulder. “It’s going to be ok,” he whispered. It was a lie but a compassionate one.
She didn’t bother replying.
Five minutes. And then the terror would begin anew. Who this time? And how could any of the passengers on board survive this horror? This uncertainty?
Kennedy’s teeth chattered. Just like the flight attendant’s had before ...
Would she ever get that image out of her brain? Could she ever erase the memory of the day? If she survived at all ...
A nice trip to Alaska. That’s all this was supposed to be. Her chance to see the northern lights for the first time. Spend a few weeks with Willow, get to know her family, try her first taste of roadkill moose. Why did she have to be on this flight? Why did she have to be so far away from home?
She wanted to call her parents. Wanted to hear her dad’s strong, comforting voice. She’d even take the inevitable ten-minute interrogation from her mom about everything from Kennedy’s dating life to her personal hygiene habits. Why had she ever left home in the first place?
In the 1800s, missionaries would take months getting from one destination to another. Sometimes they died in the process. Shipwrecks, illnesses at sea were very real dangers these men and women knew about when they set out. For a long time, missionaries to China would pack their belongings in coffins since many of them expected to die on foreign soil.
But that wasn’t the world Kennedy had been born into. People traveled across the world every day of the week. Kennedy had probably circumnavigated the globe half a dozen times by now, all without event. Flying was safe. You were more likely to get mauled by a bear than get killed in a plane crash.
What had gone so horrifically wrong?
General still paced the aisles, and Kennedy’s body tensed every time he walked past. How many minutes had already gone by? When would his timer beep again?
She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to open them and realize she was still in her dorm, waking up from a nightmare. She and Willow would laugh about it, and then they’d walk to the L’Aroma Bakery in Harvard Square and share a quiet breakfast together before Dominic drove them to the airport to enjoy a safe, quiet Christmas break.
When she opened her eyes, General had stopped just a foot or two away from her. She tried to keep her breathing as quiet as possible, which was hard to do on account of the panicked spasms in her lungs.
“That’s five minutes,” he told his lieutenant. “Let’s roll.”
Kennedy turned so the cameras wouldn’t catch her face. Did her parents know what was happening by now? Were they as freaked out as she was?
General positioned himself in front of Lieutenant’s camera. “Mr. Weston, you’ve had five more minutes to do something about the situation at Brown. I’m a little disappointed I haven’t heard from you yet. I wasn’t hoping to have to do this, but you’ve left me with very few options.”
General walked toward the front of the plane, and Kennedy’s body relaxed just a little the farther away from her he got.
“Mr. Weston, you’re a family man. You have kids of your own. Kids you would hate to see hurt, so I know you can empathize with my situation here.” He grabbed Selena, the girl who’d been kidnapped, and pulled her up from her first-class seat. “Say hello to Papa,” he told her.
Selena’s voice trembled. “Daddy?”
General grimaced. “Daddy?” he repeated in a grating falsetto and chuckled into the camera. “I expect I’ll be hearing from you soon. As a show of good will, you’ve got two extra minutes.”
His cell phone rang less than ten seconds later. He grinned and pulled it out of his pocket slowly and deliberately before tapping a button.
“Hello, you’re on speaker phone.”
“Great, that’s great. You should know how much I appreciate ...”
“Who’s this?” General’s face darkened into an ugly scowl. “I want to talk to Charles Weston.”
“I know. Believe me, I understand your concerns.” The voice was smooth. Silky even in its digitized form.
“Who are you?” General demanded again.
“This is Franklin, but all my friends call me Frank. Come to think of it, you had a brother named Frank, didn’t you, Bradley?”
“I don’t care who you are,” General snarled. “I didn’t ask to talk to some negotiator shrink. If I don’t get Charles Weston on the phone in five seconds, his daughter bites it.”
Selena’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t tremble or make any noise.
“I can only guess how tense things are up there, Bradley,” the buttery voice said. “Listen, I’ve got Mr. Weston on the way right now to chat with you about his daughter, and while we wait for him, how about you take me off speaker phone and we have a little man-to-man chat, just you and me in private?”
General was so tense, it looked as if his eyes might burst out of his skull without warning. “You’re staying on speaker.”
“Hey, that’s cool,” Frank went on, “but I want to ask you something. I know you’ve had some trouble up there. Is there anything you need? Are any of the passengers hurt? We’ve got a doctor down here. He can talk you through any first aid you might require.”
“Just shut up and get me Weston,” General snarled.
There was a long pause before the voice came back. “Ok, I just heard from your man. He says he’s real concerned for his daughter and wants to patch up this little misunderstanding you two have as soon as possible.”
“Great. Put him on the phone.”
“Yeah, that’s not feasible right at this moment, but I’ll tell you what we can ...”
“No,” General interrupted, “I’ll tell you what. You get Weston on the phone with me in three more minutes, or I kill his daughter.”
Selena didn’t cringe. Kennedy wondered if she knew what was going on or if her brain had shut down completely because of all the trauma.
Frank’s voice on the other line was just as even and calm. “Hmm, I don’t think you want to do that. Sounds to me like Selena’s your biggest bargaining chip right now, wouldn’t you say? Let’s think about another way to settle these differences you two men are experiencing or ...”
“Fine,” General spat. “Three minutes to talk to Weston, or another hostage dies.” He punched his phone off so hard Kennedy would have been surprised if his screen survived the ordeal.
“Set the timer,” General snapped at Lieutenant. “Three more minutes.”
The entire cabin was silent except for the droning of the engines. A numbness akin to Selena’s psychological coma seemed to have settled into the collective psyche of the passengers. Nobody was crying. Nobody was carrying on whispered conversations. Most, like Kennedy, stared blankly ahead.
Waiting.
Three more minutes. Kennedy found herself thinking about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Technically, since they were on an airplane, wouldn’t three minutes up here pass more slowly than on the ground? Too bad the difference was miniscule. If this were a sci-fi book, maybe they could take advantage of the time distortion, but this wasn’t speculative fiction, and the grating squeal from Lieutenant’s timer pounded in Kennedy’s brain like a siren when it went off.
“Time’s up.” General started his slow march to the back of the plane.
Past Kennedy and Ray. Past the rows of passengers who were too tired or shocked to even cringe.
All the way to the back of the cabin.
No. Kennedy’s heart screamed the word. No. No. No. Was God listening? Could he hear?
General stopped when he reached the last aisle. Kennedy couldn’t watch. Why didn’t her body turn away? Why didn’t her eyes close?
No.
It couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t happening. There was no way to wrap her mind around any of this. Her brain was begging her for answers, pleading with her to come up with some sort of mental contortion that could explain away this sort of terror, this sort of unfathomable reality. Every joule of energy was focused on that one word. That one thought. That one prayer.
No.
“Stand up.”
This wasn’t real. This wasn’t true. But it was. She couldn’t deny it. Couldn’t twist reality any other way as General yanked Willow to her feet by a clump of her striking blue hair.
CHAPTER 15Kennedy was about to spring out from her seat, but Ray held her back.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he hissed in her ear.
That wasn’t true either. He was lying. Her eyes were lying, too. That wasn’t Willow who stood with her hands covering her face. That wasn’t Willow lifting up one soft request for her life. That wasn’t Willow cowering just a foot away from General’s gun.
- Writer
