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.