Worst case scenario, p.1
Worst Case Scenario, page 1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2024 by T.J. Newman
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph by Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2024 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
littlebrown.com
X.com/littlebrown
Facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
Instagram.com/littlebrown
First ebook edition: August 2024
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or email hachettespeakers@hbgusa.com.
Little, Brown and Company books may be purchased in bulk for business, educational, or promotional use. For information, please contact your local bookseller or the Hachette Book Group Special Markets Department at special.markets@hbgusa.com.
Book interior design by Marie Mundaca
ISBN 9780316577878
E3-20240619-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Coda
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by T.J. Newman
Praise for T.J. Newman
For Grandaddy and GPa, Marion Newman and Tim J. Mullet—the original T.J.
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE IDEA FOR my first novel—Falling—came to me when I was working as a flight attendant and I asked a pilot I was flying with: “What if your family was taken and you were told to crash the plane or they would die? What would you do?” The look on his face terrified me. I knew he didn’t have an answer. And I knew I had the makings of my first book.
While writing that book, I had many conversations with pilots about the nuts and bolts of flying procedures and protocols—and also about the emotional and psychological side of being a pilot. What is your biggest fear as a pilot? That’s the one question I kept asking.
Pilots told me that they feared uncontrolled fires in the cabin or cargo bays. Getting hooked in power lines. Making the wrong call in an emergency. Freezing up and not being able to make any call at all. They worried about turning their spouses into widows or widowers.
The answers started to blur together. I kept hearing the same things over and over until I finally got a response that stopped me in my tracks:
“My biggest fear is a commercial jet slamming into a nuclear power plant.”
I wasn’t sure if this pilot was being serious. I sort of laughed it off, saying that nuclear power plants—like dams, like any critical infrastructure—were safe in a post-9/11 world. Officials had already worked this out. They had already done whatever was needed to ensure that all nuclear power plants were safe from attack.
As I said this, the pilot just listened. When I finished, he smiled and replied: “And that’s exactly what they want you to believe.”
T.J. Newman
The International Nuclear Event Scale has seven levels.
Level 1: Anomaly
Level 2: Incident
Level 3: Serious incident
Level 4: Accident with local consequences
Level 5: Accident with wider consequences
Level 6: Serious accident
Level 7: Major accident
There are only two INES level 7s on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a level 8.
Yet.
TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE lives were in the hands of a pilot who was having a widow-maker heart attack at 35,000 feet.
There was no time to tell his copilot to get out of the bathroom and come fly the plane. No time to teach the flight attendant standing at the back of the cockpit how to work the radio. No time to declare an emergency to air traffic control. No time to warn the passengers and crew in the cabin to hang on. There was no time to do anything because he never even realized what was happening. He simply felt a sudden tightness in his chest—and a split second later, his dead body slumped forward on the yoke, and the plane went into an uncontrolled nosedive.
Instantly, everything in the cabin shifted forward. Sodas and bags of pretzels slid off tray tables. Cell phones flew out of hands. Passengers in line for the bathroom fell into one another. And anyone not buckled in found they were no longer in their seats.
Doors to the carts and carriers stretched across the back galley swung open in unison. Sleeves of cups, packets of sugar, plastic-wrapped cookies, pots of hot coffee, heavy pallets of soda—everything was dumped out, crashing onto the floor and spilling out into the plane.
The flight attendant mid-cabin lunged after the cart, but the aisle was clear for the fully stocked beverage trolley to barrel toward the front of the plane. Eight rows up, the four-hundred-pound cart ran over a man’s foot, crushing his bones, before lodging itself tenuously between rows.
Every seat in the plane was filled. But in that first moment, that first drop, the cabin was completely silent. No one screamed. No one made a sound. There was no fear, only surprise. Because just like the pilot—unaware of what the pain in his chest meant—the two hundred and ninety-four other souls on board Coastal Airways Flight 235 hadn’t figured it out yet either.
Moments later, once they realized they were about to die, the screaming began.
Push the yoke forward, the plane goes down. Pull the yoke back, the plane goes up.
That was the extent of what the flight attendant in the cockpit for the bathroom-break security procedure knew about the controls. That and if she didn’t pull the pilot back off the yoke, he would send them straight into the ground.
Her positioning could not have been worse. She was five one and barely a hundred pounds; the captain was well over six feet, pushing three hundred, and she had no leverage. She could only reach him at an awkward angle from behind and to the side of the chair.
Stepping into a wide straddle between the seat and the center control panel, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled back with a grunt.
His body barely moved. The yoke stayed pushed forward as far as it would go.
At the front of the plane, the flight attendant on the floor in the forward galley crawled toward the lavatory. Breakfast entrées squished under her hands as broken first-class china bloodied her knees. Reaching the bathroom, she pounded on the door.
“Greg,” she cried, her voice barely audible over the passengers’ screaming. She stopped to listen for a response from the copilot inside—but there was nothing.
When the plane first dove, she’d heard a loud slam in the lav, followed by breaking glass. Since then—nothing. The flight attendant didn’t know what was happening in the cockpit, but she did know the only other person on board who knew how to fly the plane needed to get out of the bathroom and back up there.
“Greg, please! Help!” she pleaded, pounding the door with both fists.
There was no response.
The arms of the flight attendant in the cockpit were shaking. Her hold on the dead pilot was weaken
The plane was headed straight down.
“Good morning, Minneapolis center. Delta heavy two-two-four, checking in at flight level three-four-zero.”
The routine squawk from a pilot talking to air traffic control coming in over the cockpit speaker startled the flight attendant—but then it hit her.
Air traffic control…
Air traffic control!
“Good morning, Delta heavy. Maintain three-four-zero.”
If she could talk to ATC, they could tell her what buttons to push to give the first officer’s side control. Then she could pull up on the yoke on that side, the right side. She could get the plane out of its nosedive, and from there, ATC could talk her through what to do.
The plane’s cabin shook violently as the uncontrolled free fall stressed the airframe. Passengers got out their phones to record the moment or send messages to their loved ones. The lead flight attendant pretended she didn’t hear the crying babies or the loud praying as she reached up and lifted the silver placard labeled LAVATORY to expose the door’s hidden locking mechanism. She slid the lever to the right; it unlocked.
“Greg,” she called, pushing in on the center of the folding door—but it barely budged, stopped by something wedged against it from the inside. “Greg!” she said, pushing harder.
Angling her head at the opening, she pressed on the door and peered with one eye through the crack into the lav.
The copilot was crumpled on the floor. Eyes closed, unmoving. Bright red blood streaked down his face from a gash on his forehead. Broken shards of the shattered mirror covered his body.
She couldn’t tell if he was alive or not.
If he wasn’t, then they were already dead.
“Greg,” she barked, her mouth pressed against the crack in the door. “Greg, get up.”
Up front, the flight attendant reached around the far side of the captain’s seat, feeling for the radio. Panic began to take over when she couldn’t find it—until her fingers touched a plastic spiral cord.
Heart thumping, she snagged the cord, pulled it up, and took hold of the mic she’d seen the pilots use countless times. Deep breath. She pushed the button.
“It’s Coastal… we… please help,” she stammered in a rush, not knowing what to say. “He’s dead. The captain’s dead. He had a medical, I think a heart attack. The FO’s in the lav. He’s not here. He’s… the pilots are gone! We’re going down. Please help us!”
Her voice was loud and trembling and for the first time the fear was coupled with emotion as she stifled a sob… at hearing the sound of her own voice echoing out in the cabin.
It wasn’t the radio.
It was the PA system.
The lead flight attendant stared at the locked cockpit door as the sound of her colleague’s ragged breathing continued over the plane’s speakers.
So that was it. The captain was dead. They were going down.
As she kicked at the lav door, her own tear-soaked sobs joined the passengers’. “Get up! Get up!”
Greg’s eyes fluttered open to a hazy view of… where was he?
Everything hurt. Nothing made sense. It was all fuzzy—until he saw the broken mirror.
Woozily scrambling to his feet, he heard someone shrieking his name. He opened the door and found the lead flight attendant on the ground, covered in blood and food.
“He’s dead,” she said, sobbing. “The captain’s dead. Do something.”
Shock froze him in place. As he blinked, a noise in the cabin grew louder and closer until—bam—the cart rammed into the flight attendant, pinning her against the cockpit door and snapping him back to reality.
If he didn’t get back in the cockpit, they were all going to die.
Now barricaded in the bathroom, Greg clambered to the top of the cart, spilling cups and napkins and stir sticks into the lav. He pounded on the cockpit door.
“Tim!” he called out. “Open up! Tim, open up!”
As blood poured from her facial gashes, the flight attendant moaned in pain, still pinned between the cart and the door. Greg looked around from his perch atop the cart, trying to figure out what else he could do. He glanced over his shoulder back into the plane—and regretted it instantly.
There were two hundred and ninety-five souls on board. Nearly three hundred lives he was responsible for.
And they were all looking at him.
“Tim! Open the fucking—”
The cockpit door flew open.
In that split second, the image in front of him was frozen in time. The wide-eyed terror of the flight attendant inside who was about to be crushed by a four-hundred-pound cart. The body of the captain slumped forward in his seat. The flashing buttons on every panel in the flight deck. The incessant, robotic voice warning them: Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.
And beyond all that…
Was the ground.
CHAPTER ONE
COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR
16 HOURS AND 38 MINUTES
UNITED GRACE CHURCH served not only as a community center, but as the center of community for Waketa, Minnesota.
“You belong to each other, and you are responsible for each other. That is what community means. And that is what Waketa is about.”
The congregation nodded.
“We are always told that family is everything,” Reverend Michaels continued. “But family’s not just your blood. Family is your friends. Your neighbors. Family’s your coworkers. And family is everyone in this church today. We are family.”
In the last pew at the back of the small church, Steve Tostig listened without hearing.
If Reverend Michaels was responsible for safeguarding Waketa’s soul, Steve was responsible for protecting its body. He was the guy who’d be on the town’s postcard if there were one: tall, broad chest, flannel shirt, five-o’clock shadow. The type of guy who was popular in high school, mainly because he stood up to the bullies. The kind of person who you hope your child will one day end up with.
Steve sat alone in “widowers’ row,” as he’d taken to thinking of it, staring out the stained-glass windows at the cemetery down the hill. He’d brought carnations this time, blue ones. At least, the little sign on the bucket at the grocery store said they were carnations.
Claire Jean Tostig
1975–2023
Beloved teacher, daughter, wife, mother.
It wasn’t long enough, but it never is.
He hadn’t wanted that last part on there. It felt too… woo-woo. Too kumbaya and circle of life. Claire would have liked it. But to Steve, it should have said: It wasn’t long enough—period.
No acceptance, no meaning. Only injustice. Just sheer, unfair bullshit.
“You know,” continued the reverend, “I couldn’t help but notice the parking lot has a lot of open spots today.”
The sparse congregation mumbled in agreement.
“I’m not concerned,” he said. “People are at work. Kids are in school. And Good Friday, the day when we mark the Lord’s crucifixion… well, it’s not exactly a real crowd-pleaser.”
The congregation gave a collective chuckle.
“But you better show up early on Sunday,” he continued, wagging his finger. “Boy, that parking lot will be full then. Because on Easter, we celebrate! Sunday we will come together as a community in a moment of joy and light to declare as one: He lives! We live.”
Reverend Michaels paused. That perfect length of a pause that’s not taught in seminary but discovered Sunday after Sunday, season after season, year after year, as you feel out the needs of your flock. Those aching, human souls that once a week came to this place to ponder or discover or wrestle with or be reminded of the whys and hows and whats of existence.
“But you’re here today.”
He paused again, looking around the chapel, holding eye contact with members of his congregation. When his gaze reached the back of the church, Steve looked away. He had come in after the service started; he would slip out before it ended, and he would not be here on Sunday. Reverend Michaels knew Steve came only on the days when the congregation was light because that meant there wouldn’t be as many people asking him how he was doing and if he and his son, Matt, needed anything.
