Sneak Peek Saturday: Trapped

Trapped

By: Michael Northrop

Pub date: January 1st, 2011

The day the blizzard started, no one knew that it was going to keep snowing for a week. That for those in its path, it would become not just a matter of keeping warm, but of staying alive....

Scotty and his friends Pete and Jason are among the last seven kids at their high school waiting to get picked up that day, and they soon realize that no one is coming for them. Still, it doesn't seem so bad to spend the night at school, especially when distractingly hot Krista and Julie are sleeping just down the hall. But then the power goes out, then the heat. The pipes freeze, and the roof shudders. As the days add up, the snow piles higher, and the empty halls grow colder and darker, the mounting pressure forces a devastating decision....
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One

We were the last seven kids waiting around to get picked up from Tattawa Regional High School. It sounds like an everyday thing, but this wasn’t an ordinary day. It was one of those bull’s-eyes in history, one of those points where everything comes together, where, if you were at that place at that time, you were part of something big. It meant that we weren’t going to get picked up, not on that day and maybe not ever.

It was the day the blizzard started, and it didn’t stop for nearly a week. No one had seen anything like it. It was a natural disaster in the way that earthquakes and tidal waves are natural disasters. It wasn’t a storm; it was whatever comes after that.

The power lines came down, and the airports closed. The snow was so strong that it seemed to hit the ground in drifts. The roads shut down completely. The plows ground to a halt and stranded themselves, overmatched up front and the snow behind already too deep for them to back up. Really, if you want one quick indicator of what kind of storm it was: Drivers froze in their snowplows...
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Loving the concept of this one. Having the characters trapped someplace really makes things quite interesting. To read the remainder of the above excerpt you can do so here. For more on Michael and his novels you can visit his website/blog.