Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 16 HOURS AND 36 MINUTES

FIVE-YEAR-OLD CONNOR HAYS was belted into his car seat in the middle row of the minivan playing on his iPad. In the far back row, his thirteen-year-old sister, Caity, was glued to her phone, bobbing her head along to whatever music was blaring through her hot-pink headphones. The teenager completely ignored her father.

“Call her phone,” Valerie Hays said, looking over at her husband behind the wheel. “We might actually get a conversation with her that way.”

Paul shook his head, glancing up at their daughter in the rearview mirror. “She wouldn’t pick up.” Both parents laughed, knowing it was true. “What about you, bud?” he asked Connor. “You wouldn’t send us to voicemail, would you?”

Connor looked up from his iPad. “What’s voicemail?” he asked.

“Speaking of electronics,” said Valerie. “We need to set limits on screen time for the weekend. We only see your parents a couple times a year and they aren’t going to want to just watch them—”

The road beneath the minivan shook with a distant boom . Both kids looked up, eyes wide. Valerie reached for her husband as the van momentarily veered. Paul gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

“Dad, what was that?” Caity said.

Valerie spun in her seat, looking out the back. “Paul, we didn’t hit something, did we?”

“No…” he muttered, checking the dash.

“Dad, what was that?” Caity’s voice was pinched with fear.

“I don’t know,” Paul said, still trying to figure out what was going on. He looked at the Waketa fields and woodlands that surrounded the two-lane country road. They were rounding a bend, headed down the hill toward a bridge. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

“But Dad, are we okay ?”

“We’re fine!” Paul snapped. “I don’t know what that was!”

Connor started to cry.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Paul said, turning around to face the kids. “Caity, I’m sorry. We’re fine. It was probably just—”

“Paul. Paul !”

He spun forward at his wife’s screams. Ahead, coming up over the tops of the trees, was an enormous slab of gray metal. It was so large and moved so fast, it was hard to tell if it would sail right over their heads or veer to the side or pound straight into them. By the time he realized it was the wing of an aircraft and that the wing was going to land right in front of them, it was too late. The van was already on the bridge.

The wing smashed into the ground with such force, the trees shook. Birds flew up into the air as the whole family screamed. Valerie threw her hands out in front of her to brace for impact while Paul gripped the wheel tight. He slammed on the brakes, but in the middle of the tight two-lane bridge, swerving wasn’t an option. The minivan’s brakes locked with a screech as the vehicle nosed down, trying to come to a stop.

Opposite the van, facing them head-on, the wing tore deep divots into the grass as its momentum sent it sliding up onto the bridge. It twisted as it kept moving, blocking the entire roadway until it was on the bridge, coming right at the van with a horrible scrape of metal and concrete. Everything went silent as the family waited for impact.

And then they hit.

The family was thrust forward violently, arms and heads jutting out unnaturally far from the intense force. The front windshield shattered; the airbags exploded in a flash of white. The thick, sturdy metal of the hood and front end of the van crumpled like foil. The front tires blew, pinched in the impact, as the wheel-hubs assembly left a trail of sparks on the ground.

The incoming wing was ten times the van’s size and weight. The metal slab rode up effortlessly onto the bumper, hood, and front two wheels, smashing it completely flat in an instant. Pinned underneath, the van was pushed backward.

The family’s bodies whiplashed, their heads smacking into seat backs, breaking bones and lacerating internal organs. The steering column rammed into Paul’s torso and the crumpling door frame crushed Valerie’s skull. The back of the van sustained the least structural damage but got the worst of the whiplashing force. Caity’s spinal column absorbed the brunt of it. Connor, in the middle, strapped tightly into his car seat, could do nothing but hold on.

The wing pushed the van backward on the bridge, and the car twisted, its rear bumper bursting through the metal guardrail. With the wing pinning the front end of the van down so it scraped along the asphalt in a blaze of sparking metal, the back end of the vehicle hung out over the edge, dangling off the side of the bridge, with a thirty-foot drop to the icy Mississippi River below.

The wing’s momentum began to slow. Riding up, it came to a stop covering the entire bridge. The massive portion of aircraft that only minutes earlier had been miles high in the air traveling hundreds of miles an hour was now battered and beaten, fractured to expose its own internal organs—including the massive tanks where hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet fuel were stored.

It might have been the friction as the metal dragged on the ground; it might have been a spark from the van. The start was unimportant. The end was inevitable. A massive fireball erupted, mushrooming up into the air in a ball of hot orange flames. As the fuel vapors were consumed, the initial blast receded in a thick cloud of dense black smoke, leaving below a steady burn-off of what fuel remained in the tanks.

Everything around them stilled. The birds were gone. The wing was stationary. And the van had come to a stop hanging out over the river. The only things moving were the flames across the wing and the car’s spinning rear tires. The only sounds came from the radio playing through the shattered front windows.

Connor looked around, too stunned to cry, too scared to move. His little hands clutched the sides of his car seat, one tiny scrape on his forehead the only visible indication that anything had happened. He waited for someone to help him, someone to come get him, someone to tell him what to do. But no one came; no one said a thing.

“Mommy?” he said quietly.

There was no response.

His chest fluttered up and down as the tears began to well and his heart began to pound.

“Mommy!”