Us For Them

by Will Schifrin

Nacio Duran, 17, is the only passenger to return from a missing commercial airplane flight. He is met by his grieving mother and younger brother, who assumed Nacio died in a plane crash, since the jet has completely vanished and no other passenger has returned. Scared, confused, and unable to explain what happened to him, Nacio experiences delusions – at one point seeing passengers from the plane and even his brother, who died three years earlier. Aviation experts are convinced Nacio was never on the missing plane, and psychiatrists diagnose him as schizophrenic. Nacio is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he soon gets a vision that an alien ship captured the missing plane, and the alien aboard is going to kill every one of the plane’s passengers -- unless the government releases the crew of another alien space ship that was shot down three weeks earlier. It’s up to Nacio, whose sanity is in question, to negotiate a humans-for-aliens hostage exchange, and thereby save hundreds of lives.

Kindle Edition

Published July 5, 2022