by Alana Terry
The more I think about it, the more I hate the thought that God wanted the plane to crash just so my soul could be saved. I mean, I’m already dealing with enough survivor’s guilt as it is. I’m just going to leave it at I have absolutely no idea. Maybe I’ll ask Kennedy’s pastor or something. He seems to have all the answers, which is just fine because I’m still so brand new to this whole Christian thing and can’t be expected to know it all.
So then. We’ve covered the somewhat uneventful beginning of the flight. I’ve told you about Hawaiian Shirt and his partner beating up the air marshal and knocking him out. I’ve given you my thoughts on the politics that led up to the terrorist attack.
So now I guess it’s time to dive into all the details of what happened next.
CHAPTER 8
General had the air marshal’s gun. And I have no idea why he took to calling himself General, but he did. His name’s not what’s important. What mattered is he had the gun. Which meant from that moment on, he was the one calling all the shots.
I’ll go back to that first minute or two. It’s hard to describe the absolute chaos in the cabin. Like you could literally feel the fear and confusion in the air. I think that’s what he was counting on. Because seriously. Let’s do the math. One gun. How many bullets could that be, right? I mean, it wasn’t like it was this big automatic assault rifle or anything. It was just your ordinary, run of the mill pistol. What’s that, like six bullets? And how many of us passengers? Several hundred, right? It’s not like he could have killed us all.
But what do you do when someone starts yelling and calling himself General and waving a gun around in a crowded airplane cabin? You freeze up, you turn off your brain except the one tiny fraction of it that’s necessary for your survival, and you do whatever he tells you to do.
Which is exactly what we did.
General ordered us to get out our phones. He wanted us recording everything he had to say, his big manifesto. And maybe it doesn’t come as a surprise to you after my tirade a little bit earlier, but General was a dad concerned about his children’s safety.
We’re back to Michigan and environmental justice. I’m telling you it’s a real thing. If someone’s willing to execute innocent bystanders and crash an entire airplane, you’d better believe it’s a thing.
A very serious thing.
Brown Elementary School. That’s where General’s kids were enrolled. Detroit’s dirty little secret. And by dirty, I mean it in both the literal and nuanced sense of the word.
Dirty because there was arsenic in the soil, which at one point had been a dumping ground for a pharmaceutical tech company. The area was so toxic, grown men on the construction crews were landing in the ER. Now I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you hate environmentalists and think that vegans and Greenpeace are minions of the antichrist. But seriously, who would ever be okay with building an elementary school in a hazardous waste zone?
Now obviously I’m not saying that the answer to this debacle would be to kidnap a girl, knock out an air marshal, and take over a plane. That’s just lunacy. But the inciting event? The anger and the injustice? I’m all over that.
General took his good old time telling the cameras all about how unfair it was, how the superintendent was to blame, how Detroit had miserably and egregiously let down its children. And you know, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d just hijacked our airplane and was waving that gun around, I might have felt more inclined to give him a good old-fashioned amen or two.
But obviously none of that goes through your head when you see a crazy man waving a gun around. You’re not thinking about those poor kids in Detroit whose health is jeopardized on a daily basis just to save the district a couple extra bucks. You’re not feeling the frustration of these parents who are mostly working class, immigrant, and minority families who lack the political clout to stand up for their kids.
No. You’re staring at that gun. Wondering what would happen to the cabin pressure if it went off. Wondering if the metal hull of the airplane was built to be bulletproof. Wondering if it would be scarier to die in a plane crash or by gunshot wounds.
Hoping he doesn’t notice you. And then when you get your wish, that means you’re left to feel both relieved and guilt-ridden for the rest of your life because he’s turned his wrath on someone else.
CHAPTER 9
“What’s your name?” the General asked.
“Tracy,” she answered. And I wanted more than anything to look away, but I was too scared of the uncertainty. I had to watch.
He asked if she had children. That’s how I knew about her two kids even before I saw their family photo in the news.
“Would you like to see your children again?” General asked. Tracy nodded. And in that moment she stopped being a flight attendant. She stopped being an airline employee. This was a woman. A fellow human being. A mother with children she loved, with teeth that rattled, with a voice that cracked as she answered General’s questions.
She could have been any of us.
She could have been me.
General wanted to make sure all the cameras were still rolling, that we were all streaming our images and footage to the news-frenzied masses down on solid ground.
Wanted to be sure that everybody knew the exact reason for this woman’s death.
“It’s the superintendent’s fault,” he said. “He now has two orphans on his conscience.”
And he pulled the trigger.
I don’t remember screaming, but I’m sure I must have. Everyone did. Because even though we saw the gun, even though we identified the crazed rage in General’s eyes, we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe he would actually do it. That he would actually kill that flight attendant.
“You have five more minutes, Mr. Superintendent,” General told the cameras. Five minutes until what? Another one of us died?
If you haven’t been in a cabin full of terrified passengers and a man bent on terrorizing you all, you maybe would expect me to behave differently. To think differently. I already told you I wasn’t a Christian at this point in my life, but I’d lived with one for over a year and kind of knew the basic tenets. Love your neighbors. Pray daily. Ask Jesus to forgive your sins.
And maybe you’ll expect me to jump in now and say that’s just what I did. Dropped to my knees. Told God I was a sinner. All that jazz.
But while General was waving around his gun and pacing up and down the aisles, I wasn’t thinking about God or heaven or my sins or my need of a Savior. Do you know what I was thinking?
That the dead woman lying crumpled in the aisle could have been me.
And that in order to survive, I needed to make myself far more inconspicuous than how I normally appear. For the first time in my life, I cursed my obsession with dying my hair. Who would want to stand out in a situation like this?
But stand out I did. And when General’s five-minute timer buzzed, his eyes locked onto mine, and he strode deliberately toward the back of the cabin and stopped right in front of me.
CHAPTER 10
“Stand up,” he told me, and I obeyed because apparently that’s what your body does when someone’s waving a gun at you. Someone who’s just shot another woman not ten feet away from where you are.
I stood up.
“Come here,” he told me.
So I did.
“What’s your name?”
It’s funny because as he was asking me all these questions, I could only think about one thing. Kennedy will be traumatized if she has to watch me die. Of course, any and every one of us on that flight were already traumatized. You don’t have to know a murder victim to feel terrified in a situation like this.
But my mind was on Kennedy. On how goodie-goodie she always was, and look where it got her. On a doomed flight, forced to watch while her blue-haired roommate got executed.
General was still talking to the video cameras. Going on and on about how none of this wa
s his fault, how he didn’t want to hurt anybody but this was the only way he could get the people of Detroit to take him seriously.
And I think I prayed. I say I think I prayed because it wasn’t anything formal. It didn’t start with Dear Jesus and end with Amen. In fact, if I had to relive that moment in pristine detail, I’m pretty sure my prayer only consisted of one single word.
Please.
“You don’t want to die, do you?” General asked me. I assume I shook my head or gave him some sort of response because he frowned as if he actually felt sorry for me. He let out his breath. “I wish I didn’t have to kill you.” Somehow as I stared at the tip of his gun pointed straight at me, I had a hard time believing him.
“Your hair’s blue,” he told me, as if I might not have realized.
“I know.”
“You some kind of punk girl?” General asked.
“No.” And unless you’ve had a conversation with a terrorist holding a gun at you with dozens of cameras recording your upcoming execution, you have no right to tell me that hair color is a strange topic of conversation when you’re about to literally get blown to hell. To me, it felt just as natural as standing there waiting to die.
“You know those dyes have chemicals in them,” he told me.
“I only use all natural.” Looking back, I too can see the absurdity of the conversation, but when I mentioned all-natural, he locked eyes with me. And for a second, I saw a man and not my own executioner.
Then the moment passed.
“I’m sorry about what I have to do,” he said, except he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the cameras. The cameras all pointed at me waiting to record my death.
I hoped my parents weren’t watching.
When I relive this event, why I try to get to that state where I can recreate the moment when General decided it was time to pull the trigger, I picture a lot of different plausible scenarios, all of which result in my survival.
Of course there’s Math Babe rushing up from behind, tackling my assailant, and saving the day. I’m a self-proclaimed pacifist, but more often than not, this scenario ends with Raul (aka Math Babe) shooting General square in the head. Often I stick around to watch an epilogue, and sometimes it involves a doctor jumping up and declaring Tracy the slain flight attendant was still alive, thank God, and sometimes it involves Raul and me walking hand in hand beneath a gorgeous Detroit sunset after a lovely evening of tapas.
One of my personal favorites is when I stretch out my hand, and with some super skilled ninja moves, I disarm my would-be assailant to the sound of thunderous applause from the rest of the cabin. I never actually kill General in this particular daydream of mine, but I like to remind him that I’d be well within my rights if I did.
We land in Detroit, and an army of hot twenty- and thirty-year-old SWAT men in super tight combat gear showing off each and every one of their well-defined muscles barges in, congratulates me on saving the flight, and holds a celebration on the ground that more often than not involves more tapas.
But it’s only in my daydreams where I’m saved by myself, a handsome math teacher whose name is possibly Raul, or a couple dozen SWAT men. The true story is that I was saved by a little old granny lady with a head of white hair and enough courage to put all the heroes of the Bible combined to shame.
CHAPTER 11
General had just apologized to the cameras, regretting that he had to shoot me, when this little old lady stood up and told him, “Put that gun down, sonny.” And it wasn’t so much that she dared to talk back to General, who probably weighed three times as much as she did, but it was the boldness with which she addressed him that seemed to tilt the entire axis of power in the cabin.
General gave a little chuckle, but I could tell by his face he was thrown off. “Who are you?” he demanded, and she smiled at him sweetly and answered, “You can call me Grandma Lucy. And I’m here to save this young woman’s life.”
I’d never been at the wrong end of a handgun before, and I’d certainly never witnessed some ninety-year-old grandma try to talk down a raving terrorist, but sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
“If you need a hostage,” Grandma Lucy said, her voice as calm and patient as if she’d been discussing the roses in her garden, “why don’t you take me instead?”
I hadn’t expected General to look even more thrown off than he already did, but his expression at Grandma Lucy’s words proved me wrong.
“If you shoot me,” Grandma Lucy explained as if she were reciting Bible stories to a class of first-graders, “you’ll still get your point across, and you won’t have to worry about murdering someone so young and scared. As for me, I’ve been ready to see my Jesus for the past fifty years.”
She stood squarely between me and the gun, stuck out her chest, and waited.
I’d like to tell you about how I came to my senses, realized how selfish it would be to let this tiny four-foot-tall grandma take a bullet for me, but I was too stunned. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t talk.
Surprisingly, Grandma Lucy suffered from none of these problems.
“But before you kill me,” she began, “there’s something I’d like to tell you. Something your audience might be interested in hearing.”
He sneered at her. “Yeah? What’s that?” I could tell he was growing impatient.
Grandma Lucy’s voice rose in both volume and conviction. “That Jesus Christ is the risen Savior of the world. He is my shepherd, my redeemer, my healer, and my coming king. If you kill me, my soul will leave this broken jar of clay and enter into the presence of God. And since you’re doing me such a great honor, I want to return the favor.”
What was going on? Was she just stalling? And how in the world was it working? Who was this old white-haired lady? Was she a martyr, some kind of miracle worker, or was she just insane?
And then, believe it or not (did I mention before that truth is stranger than fiction?), this Grandma Lucy lady stretched out her hand, raised it to General’s forehead (I’m surprised she could actually reach that high), and she started to pray for him.
After everything happened, once the plane crash-landed and we all got evacuated, I looked for Grandma Lucy. Nobody was supposed to leave triage. Once we got our injuries taken care of, we had to answer all kinds of questions from the authorities.
But nobody knew where Grandma Lucy went.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I’ll just go ahead and come right out and say it. Sometimes I’ve wondered if she was really some sort of angel sent to distract General. Because while she was praying and General was focused on her, Raul (remember Math Babe?) and a couple other passengers managed to rush him from behind. I swore to the feds doing the interviews later that I heard the gun go off, but apparently my mind must be filling in blanks because nobody else recalls anything like that, and there were no stray bullets anywhere in the cabin.
Go figure.
It just goes to show that I really can’t trust my memory at this point in the story because what I remember most vividly is a gunshot, a whole bunch of screams, and a scuffle that was over before I even realized I was still alive. General was subdued. The captain came on and assured us we were just a few minutes away from landing.
The nightmare was over.
That’s what we all wanted to believe at least.
But really the terror was just beginning.
CHAPTER 12
You ever known one of those people who just always seem to have bad luck? Or maybe now that I’m a Christian I shouldn’t attribute it to luck, but I think you probably get what I’m saying. People who have one bad thing happen to them after another until you want to scream to the universe on their behalf, “Haven’t they been through enough?”
I’ve met quite a few people like that in my day. Kennedy’s one of them, actually. It seems like at least once a semester she’s getting into some kind of terrible trouble or danger. For
being the kid of such a safety-paranoid father, she sure has managed to find herself at the wrong place at the wrong time more often than I would care to count.
Well, that’s how I’m guessing we all felt on the plane after Raul and a few other brawny passengers managed to get General and his Hawaiian-shirted partner subdued. You’d think by that point, with the hijackers bound and the plane just minutes away from touching down, we could start to let out our breaths. Thank God (or the universe or luck or whatever) that we were safe.
Except we weren’t.
Because General and Hawaiian Shirt weren’t exactly working alone. And that dude who kept making a nuisance of himself in the back lavatories all through the flight was a Detroit electrician with just enough skill to know how to cause some major damage. This is another case where memories fail, because I’m certain the shouting came first, but others insist it started with the fire alarm going off.
Either way, the back of the cabin was on fire. Smoke began pouring out of the lavatories.
While General had been marching around the cabin with that gun of his, the passengers had remained eerily silent. Now, all that terror we’d been bottling up snapped, and it was complete chaos. I heard later that the paramedics had to treat more people for injuries related to trampling than smoke inhalation.
It was madness. Madness and unceasing terror as everyone raced to the front of the cabin.
I would have joined them. I tried to join them. But someone knocked me down from behind. I have no idea who it was. By this point, the smoke had grown so dense so quickly I could scarcely see anything. I was relying entirely on feel.
And then I stumbled. A woman’s high heel stomped on my hand. I cried out, but there was no way to hear anything over the screams of the passengers and the drone of the fire alarm.