Low Pressure
Deadline
Mean Streak
Friction
Sting
Seeing Red
Continue reading to enjoy an excerpt from TWO ALONE by Sandra Brown, on Sale December 5, 2017.
Chapter 1
They were all dead.
All except her.
She was sure of that.
She didn’t know how long it had been since the impact or how long she’d remained bent over with her head in her lap. It could have been seconds, minutes, light-years. Time could stand still.
Endlessly, it seemed, torn metal had shifted before settling with a groan. The dismembered trees—innocent victims of the crash—had ceased to quiver. Hardly a leaf was stirring now. Everything was frightfully still. There was no sound.
Absurdly she thought of the question about a tree falling in the woods. Would it make a sound? It did. She’d heard it. So she must be alive.
She raised her head. Her hair and shoulders and back were littered with chips of shattered plastic—what had previously been the window next to her seat. She shook her head slightly and the chips rained off her, making tinkling, pinging little noises in the quiet. Slowly she forced herself to open her eyes.
A scream rose in her throat, but she couldn’t utter it. Her vocal cords froze. She was too terrified to scream. The carnage was worse than an air-traffic controller’s nightmare.
The two men sitting in the seats directly in front of hers—good friends, judging by their loud and rambunctious bantering with each other—were now dead, their joking and laughter forever silenced. One’s head had gone through the window. That fact registered with her, but she didn’t look too closely. There was a sea of blood. She slammed her eyes shut and didn’t open them until after she’d averted her head.
Across the aisle, another man lay dead, his head thrown back against the cushion as though he’d been sleeping when the plane went down. The Loner. She had mentally tagged him with that name before takeoff. Because the plane was small, there were strict regulations about weight. While the passengers and their luggage were being weighed before boarding, the Loner had stood apart from the group, his attitude superior and hostile. His unfriendliness hadn’t invited conversation with any of the other passengers, who were all boisterously bragging about their kills. His aloofness had segregated him—just as her sex had isolated her. She was the only woman on board.
Now, the only survivor.
Looking toward the front of the cabin, she could see that the cockpit had been severed from the fuselage like a bottle cap that had been twisted off. It had come to rest several feet away. The pilot and copilot, both jovial and joking young men, were obviously, bloodily, dead.
She swallowed the
bile that filled the back of her throat. The robust, bearded copilot had helped her on board, flirting, saying he rarely had women passengers on his airplane and when he did, they didn’t look like fashion models.
The other two passengers, middle-aged brothers, were still strapped into their seats in the front row. They’d been killed by the jagged tree trunk that had cut into the cabin like a can opener. Their families would feel the tragedy with double intensity.
She began to cry. Hopelessness and fear overwhelmed her. She was afraid she would faint. She was afraid she would die. And she was afraid she wouldn’t.
The deaths of her fellow passengers had been swift and painless. They had probably been killed on impact. They were better off. Her death would be long in coming because as far as she could tell, she was miraculously uninjured. She would die slowly of thirst, starvation, exposure.
She wondered why she was still alive. The only explanation was that she was sitting in the last row. Unlike the rest of the passengers, she had left someone behind at the lodge on Great Bear Lake. Her goodbye had been drawn out, so she was the last one to board the aircraft. All the seats had been taken except that one in the last row.
When the copilot assisted her aboard, the rowdy dialogues had ceased abruptly. Bent at an angle because of the low ceiling, she had moved to the only available seat. She had felt distinctly uncomfortable, being the only woman on board. It was like walking into a smoke-filled room where a heated poker game was in progress. Some things were innately, exclusively male, and no amount of sexual equality was ever going to change that. Just as some things were innately, exclusively female.
An airplane leaving a hunting and fishing lodge in the Northwest Territories was one of those masculine things. She had tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible, saying nothing, settling in her seat and staring out the window. Once, just after takeoff, she had turned her head and inadvertently made eye contact with the man sitting across the aisle. He had looked at her with such apparent disfavor that she had returned her gaze to the window and kept it there.
Besides the pilots, she was probably the first one to notice the storm. Accompanied by dense fog, the torrential rain had made her nervous. Soon the others began to notice the jouncy flight. Their braggadocio was replaced with uneasy quips about riding this one out and being glad the pilot was “driving” instead of one of them.
But the pilots were having a difficult time. That soon became apparent to all of them. Eventually they fell silent and kept their eyes trained on the men in the cockpit. Tension inside the aircraft increased when the two-man crew lost radio contact with the ground. The plane’s instruments could no longer be depended upon because the readings they were giving out were apparently inaccurate. Because of the impenetrable cloud cover, they hadn’t seen the ground since takeoff.