Shifters (Published-Sample Only)

Chapter 1-Set in Motion

Chapter 1-Set in Motion

My name is Cassie Clark and my family and I moved to Sylvia, Alaska because my father got a job at a pulp mill that was opening there. My father had worked as a Mill Engineer in various areas since I was a small child. The company he worked for had just gone bankrupt and everyone lost their jobs. Before the mill he worked at closed completely his boss had been searching for jobs to help place people in. So when my father received a letter in the mail offering him a job at this new mill open up in Alaska he wasn't completely surprised. He just assumed his boss had come through for him.

At first my mother was very hesitant. She told my father not to take it; that he could find something else within California where we currently resided. He'd done some research on Sylvia to help his argument and found they had a community college. I had graduated High School a little over a year ago at the age of eighteen. Instead of going straight to college I had gotten a job to help out the family financially. With this new job my father would be making enough that they wouldn't need my help. After quite a bit of debating between them, and by debating I mean yelling so loud at each other the neighbors actually came and knocked on the door to make sure everyone was ok, he convinced my mother it would be good for us since she wanted me to be able to go to college.

It was raining as our plane started to land in Sylvia. In his research my father found that Sylvia was in the Tongass National Forest, which is part of a coastal rainforest. Apparently it rains quite a bit there because of that. He was spouting off facts for a week straight after they decided to move in an attempt to get us all excited about going. At first when he told me it was located in a rainforest, I thought he was crazy it's supposed to snow in Alaska, but I could see for myself outside the plane window it looks like more of a rainy place. I was actually grateful for the cooler weather. The California heat was never my thing. I hoped the rain would be a nice change.

My mother was chattering on a mile a minute next to me listing off all the things my sister, Kayla, and I needed to do when we got to the house we would be renting. She was an extremely organized woman and was constantly making lists so I had a tendency to tune her out when she started rambling like this. So it was no shocker that I really wasn't listening to her, but then I realized she'd stopped talking completely. I glanced at her and saw a look of terror on her face.

"Mom, what's wrong?" I asked worriedly. I looked around us to see if somebody was hurt or if somebody had said something to freak her out. It didn't appear that anyone had been talking to her though.

With the look of terror frozen on her face she quietly replied "The plane seems to be going down like we are landing and they just announced we would be landing, but..." She paused clearly having trouble getting the next few words out. She swallowed hard and forced herself to speak. "We are heading straight into the water, look."

I looked across her out the window and sure enough the water below was approaching the plane at an alarming rate. Just then the plane shuddered a bit and I could feel the landing gear coming down. If we were going to land in the water it didn't seem to make sense for them to let down the landing gear. But then again what do I know about emergency water landings? I noticed the oxygen masks hadn't deployed from the ceiling. The flight attendants were sitting calmly strapped in their seats. So we couldn't be crashing, could we?

As if in answer to the question I had just thought to myself the plane hit the ground with a huge thud and started skidding to a stop. My mother let out an earsplitting scream. Everyone in seats around us looked over at her as if she was crazy. Obviously they'd made this landing before and knew we weren't hurdling to our death in the ocean below. My mother had turned bright red from embarrassment, when I looked at her we both started to laugh.