The Jack Dixon Casefiles

I'm not sure if you'll guess this from reading this entry, so I'll make it easy and spill the beans up front. I was addicted to the Hardy Boys books growing up. I did start to write some stories as a kid (including one that was heavily influenced by Brian Jacques' Redwall series) but they never really went anywhere unless they were also school projects. That is where the genesis of my sci-fi universe lays, in a short-story project in my junior year of high school. Sadly that remains one of only two short stories that I've completed (though it desperately needs reworking).

Here I'll start to share some stories that were written all of the way back in 1994! Yep, it has been nearly (they were written in September if the date labels are to be believed) a baker's dozen of years since these were written, but I thought they might provide some ammusement


The first offering I give you is Jack and the Alaska Trip - Wilderness Crash I hope you enjoy reading this lite fare.

It was the first day of Christmas vacation for Jack. He decided to go backpacking in the mountains. Since he lived on an island with no mountains, he planned to fly to Alaska. So he bought plane tickets, but he found out at the last minute that he had been given tickets to China. What was he going to do?? He could not get a refund, the airline would not allow that now. Neither would they admit that they had made a mistake by giving Jack the wrong tickets. He also did not have enough money to buy other tickets. So he decided to go to China.

In the morning he drove to the airport and boarded his plane. He found out that there was to be an overnight refueling stop in Alaska. When the plane took off, however, he learned from the pilot that they were flying over but not landing in Alaska. Jack was crestfallen.

Just then a terrorist stood up and demanded to see the pilot. He was refused. So he took out of his suitcase four sticks of dynamite. He said that he would set them off if he was not allowed to talk to the captain. So a stewardess took him to the cockpit. He told the pilot to reroute the flight north-west to Russia. The pilot agreed, of course.

Then the pilot looked at the gas gauge. He screamed “We’re out of gas!!!!!!” Then the engines coughed and spluttered. With a sudden explosion the plane began to descent rapidly. That was when everybody realized that the plane was going to crash.

They crashed right in the middle of Alaska, where there were no people for eight hundred miles in any direction. The pilot and everyone in the cockpit were killed. So Jack and the other passengers were on their own. Luckily there was a nurse on board. She treated the stewardess for minor injuries. Since it was in the middle of winter the plane had become everyone’s home. The first thing Jack did was to get his dog out of the baggage compartment of the plane. The dog was a purebred Doberman Pincer, named Wayne. Jack and a man named Shaw, who lived on the same island got everyone’s luggage for them. Then Shaw, Jack, and a native Alaskan named Joe hunted for food. They borrowed rifles from three of the five soldiers on board to guard against terrorists. The soldiers had not had time enough to get their guns out before the terrorist was killed in the crash. When the three boys went hunting they shot and killed one moose, three deer, and three elk. They went hunting every other day after that. They went on like that for two weeks. Then a plane flew over the wreck and spotted them. Within two days all the passengers had been picked up and flown back home

~Matt

PS Oh, the two dogs were based off the two dogs that I had growing up, if only in species.