Hell on Earth

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  One thing about an old family car: there was plenty of room for our family, including Ken propped up between Jill and Arlene in the backseat. I was happy to let Albert drive. I rode shotgun.

  Albert flipped on the lights in the twilight and triumphantly announced, “They work!”

  “Great,” I said. “Now turn them off.”

  “Oh, right,” he said like a little boy caught playing with the wrong toy. We drove along without lights, heading toward the diminished glow of Ellay.

  “Do you have a new plan?” Arlene asked.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw that Jill was sleeping. “Of course,” I said. “Always. I think we should hijack a plane, elude any pursuit—”

  “Yeah,” Albert interrupted. “I wonder if they have any aircraft? I haven’t seen any.”

  “Maybe they’re using zombie pilots,” Arlene commented hopefully. Zombie pilots would not have fast reflexes.

  “So, as I was saying,” I continued, “we take our plane and hot-tail it to Hawaii. There we find the War Technology Center and take them Ken. With help from Jill, we plug Ken into the bionet and crash the whole, friggin’ alien system.”

  “Good plan,” said Albert.

  “Ditto,” said Arlene.

  It was good to be appreciated. With a proper respect for Yours Truly, I might yet help Arlene to find God. I was certain that Albert wouldn’t mind that.

  “Wonder if there’ll be monsters at the city limits,” said Albert at length.

  “Don’t see why they’d have that much organization,” I answered, “after what we’ve seen. What do you think, Arlene?” I asked, glancing into the rear-view mirror again. She’d joined Jill in the Land of Nod. Given the condition of Ken Estes, the backseat had become the sleeping compartment of this particular train.

  “The girls are taking forty,” commented Albert with a touch of envy.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “Driving in the dark without lights keeps the old adrenaline flowing.”

  “I know what you mean. But if you can use some relief, I’ll spell you.”

  He risked taking his eyes off the black spread of road long enough to glance over. “You’re all right, Fly. I see why Arlene respects you so much.”

  “She’s told you that?”

  “Not in so many words. But it’s an easy tell.”

  We both tried to discern something of the road. The horizon was bright, in contrast to the darkness right in front of us. It was that time of day. I rubbed my eyes, suddenly starting to lose it.

  “Why don’t you take a nap?” he suggested.

  “No. Should at least be two of us awake, and I want to make sure you’re one of them.”

  “Right.”

  Exhausted but too wired to sleep, we made it into Los Angeles at night. We didn’t run into any monster patrols on the way. Maybe they were saving up some real doozies for us at the Beverly Center.

  At the outskirts of the city, zombie guards shuffled back and forth in a caricature of military discipline. Even a zombie would have noticed our approach if we’d had the headlights on. Score one for basic procedure.

  Albert took a side road, but we ran into the same problem. “How long do I keep this up?” he asked.

  “All night, I’d say, if I hadn’t prepared for this.”

  “How?”

  “I didn’t throw out the lemons we didn’t get around to using before. I wrapped them in plastic wrap from the MREs. We still have them with us.”

  “To borrow from Jill, ick!” he said. “Who’s been carting around that rotting crap?”

  “You, Bubba!”

  “Just for that, Fly, you get to wake the girls.” The man knew a thing or two about revenge.

  We parked and I woke up Jill first. Then I let Jill risk tapping Arlene on the shoulder. Some tough Marines you wake with kid gloves—or better yet, with a kid. Arlene came to with a start, but she was good. Very good.

  The night air felt pleasantly cool. As we spoiled it with spoiled citrus, Jill asked, “What about Ken?”

  “Lime and lemon him too,” said Arlene. “We’ve all got to be the same to the zombie noses.”

  “So, walk or ride?” asked Albert.

  “Don’t see any reason to give up these wheels before we have to,” I said, amazing myself, considering how I regarded the old Lincoln. “With the windows down, we ought to pass.”

  “I look dead enough to keep driving,” said Albert. We all piled back in, thought rancid, graveyard thoughts, and rolled.

  As we approached the first zombie checkpoint, I started worrying. There hadn’t been any other cars around. But we’d seen a fleet of trucks with zombie drivers back in Buckeye. I’d have felt a lot better if we weren’t the only car.

  Suddenly we were rammed from behind. A truck had hit us. It didn’t have lights. One good view in the side mirror revealed a zombie driver. “Don’t react,” I hissed to everyone, fearing a volley of gunfire at the wrong moment. Everyone kept his cool.

  “We weren’t hit very hard,” I said. The truck was barely tooling along, at about the same slow approach speed we were doing. “Everyone all right?” I asked quietly.

  While I received affirmatives, the zombie driver demonstrated some ancient, primitive nerve impulse that had survived from the human days of Los Angeles. The fughead leaned on his horn. All of a sudden, I completely relaxed. Getting past the checkpoint was going to be a cinch.

  “Shall I take us in, Corporal?” asked Albert, obviously on the same wavelength.

  “Hit it, brother,” I said.

  The truck stuck close to our bumper through the totally porous checkpoint. After that, we just drove in typical L.A. style, weaving drunkenly between zombie-driven trucks, leaning on our horn, all the time heading for the ever popular LAX. I wanted to give the airport the biggest laxative it had ever had with Lemon Marine Suppositories. Cleans out those unsightly monsters every time!

  32

  We dumped the car in one of the overcrowded LAX parking lots. Lot C, in fact. There was real joy in not worrying about finding a parking place, and an even greater pleasure in not worrying about remembering it.

  We only had to hop a single fence to get where we were going, in the time-honored tradition of hijackers, and Ken didn’t weigh very much. A thought crossed my mind. “So, uh, one of us knows how to fly a plane, right?”

  “Better than flying it wrong,” Arlene said.

  “No time for jarhead humor,” I said. “Gimmie an answer.”

  “Funny,” said Arlene, quite seriously, “but I was about to ask the same question. Really.”

  We both looked at Albert. “I’d been planning to take lessons, but I never got around to it,” he admitted sadly.

  “How hard can it be?” I asked, recalling the words of an old movie character.

  We infiltrated the refueling area for the big jets, and I found the perfect candidate: an ancient C-5 Air Force transport, which could easily make it all the way to Hawaii. Assuming somebody could drive it.

  Everyone was already doing a good zombie performance, although I still thought Jill was overdoing it. Ken was propped between Albert and me, and we were able to make it look like he was stumbling along with us. We prepared to tramp up the ramp, joining a herd of other zombies.

  A pair of Clydes waited at the entrance. Damn the luck! We could pass for zombies among zombies, but I wasn’t at all sure about these guys.

  They were disarming each zombie as it entered the plane. It was a perfectly reasonable precaution, considering how zombies acted in close quarters when they were jostled, pushed, pulled . . . or damn near anything else. I couldn’t blame the Clydes for not wanting the plane to be suddenly depressurized, but the idea of being disarmed was not at all appealing.

  We did some shifting around, then hit the ramp with myself in the lead, the other four right behind me, four abreast with Jill and Ken on the inside. Jill did as good a job as I had of keeping Ken’s end up. This makeshift plan
could work if the Clydes were bored.

  Sure enough, they barely paid attention as we simply took our heavy artillery and tossed them on the pile outside the plane. Bye-bye, shotgun. This left us with nothing but the pistols hidden inside our jackets.

  We stuck close to each other, lost in the zombie mob, as the plane started to taxi; then we worked our way up front. The Clydes were in the back, huddled and talking about something. By the time the plane lifted off, giving me that rush I always get from takeoff, we were close enough to the front that we could duck behind the curtain leading to the cockpit door. I took it on myself to give it a gentle push.

  The door opened inward, revealing a pair of imps hovering over a strange globe, another product of alien technology, bolted to the floor. The monsters appeared to be driving the plane through the use of this pulsing, humming, buzzing ball. It gave me a headache just looking at it; biotech made me need a Pepto-Bismol. The glistening, sweating device was connected to the instrument panel.

  The imps’ backs were to us. They were so preoccupied with their task, they didn’t even turn around when we entered. I closed the door quietly and locked it.

  From the cockpit I saw Venus . . . we were going the wrong way, due east!

  This simply would not do. I pointed at the imps, and then at Arlene. She nodded. We stepped forward, pistols in hand, and the barrels of our guns touched the back of imp heads at exactly the same instant.

  The little voice in the back of my head chose that instant to open its fat yap and suggest that Arlene and I should say something to the imps, on the order of, “We’re hijacking this plane to Hawaii. We never did have a proper honeymoon!”

  But there was no way to give an imp orders, other than Fall down, you’re dead! We’d simply take over the plane. After we killed the imps.

  I’m certain that Arlene and I fired at the same moment. The idle thoughts passing through my mind couldn’t have affected the results.

  But something went wrong.

  The imp Arlene tapped went down and stayed down. She put two more bullets in him, almost by reflex, to make certain that the job was good and done. I should have been able to take care of one lousy imp, after the way we’d exterminated ridiculous numbers of zombies, demons, ghosts, and pumpkins..

  One lousy imp! At the closest possible range! The head turned ever so slightly as I squeezed the trigger. Somehow the bullet went in at an angle that didn’t put the imp down.

  Turning around, screaming, it flung one flaming snotball. One lousy snotball. I dived to the left. Arlene was already out of the line of fire, on the right, taking care of the other one. Jill crouched, fingers stuck in her ears, trying to keep out the loud reverberations of the shots in the enclosed space. Albert could have done the same.

  But Albert froze. As much of a pro as he was, he stood there with the dumb expression of a deer caught in the headlights, right before road kill. Maybe Albert had a little voice in the back of his head, and it had chosen that moment to bug him. Or maybe it was such a foregone conclusion that these imps were toast, he’d let down his guard, taking a brief mental rest at precisely the wrong moment.

  The fireball struck him dead-center in the face.

  I remembered losing Bill Ritch that way.

  It didn’t seem right to survive all the firepower this side of the goddamned sun, and then cash in on something so trivial. It made me so mad, the cockpit vanished in a haze of red. It was like I’d mainlined another dose of that epinephrine stuff from Deimos.

  I dropped my gun and jumped on the imp, beating at it with my fists, tearing at it with my teeth. I was screaming louder than poor Albert, writhing on the floor holding his face.

  Hands were on me from behind, trying to pull me off, little hands. Jill was behind me, yelling something in my ear I couldn’t understand; but the part of me that didn’t want to hurt Jill won out over the part that wanted to rip the imp apart with my fingernails.

  Letting go seemed a bad idea, though: there’d be nothing stopping it from tossing the fireballs to fry us all. Then I heard Arlene shouting something about a “clear shot,” and I suddenly remembered the invention of firearms.

  The caveman jumped out of the way to give Cockpit Annie the target she wanted. She pumped round after round into the imp’s open mouth. He never closed it. He never raised his claw hands again.

  Of course, while we were encountering these difficulties, there was a commotion outside. I guess we had made a bit of noise.

  One of the zombies tried the door. The lock held for now. Sanity returned, and I helped the blinded Albert get up, casually noticing that he hadn’t taken any of the flaming stuff down his throat or nose. He might live.

  In the distance we heard gunshots and curses. The Clydes must have been forcing their way forward, shooting any zombies in their way. Suddenly, I was grateful that the plane was a sardine can of solid, reworked flesh.

  “Okay, moment of truth,” said Arlene, the mantle of command falling on her there and then. It’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. “Who’s going to fly this damned thing?” she asked in the tones of a demand, not a question.

  The gunshots crept close. We had perhaps a minute.

  “I will,” said Jill in a small voice; but with confidence. I remembered her stint in the truck with some trepidation. Then I remembered how she stayed behind the wheel after a missile tried to take her head off.

  “You didn’t tell us you could fly one of these,” I said, getting my voice back.

  “You didn’t ask,” she said. It sounded like one of those old comedy routines, but without a laugh track. It wasn’t funny.

  “Jill,” I said, “have you ever flown a plane before?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of? What the hell does that mean?”

  A zombie threw itself against the door, where Albert still moaned. He braced himself, still fighting, still a part of the team.

  She sighed. “Okay, I haven’t really flown; but I’m a wizard at all the different flight simulators!”

  Arlene and I stared at each other with mounting horror. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but my experience bringing down the mail rocket—with a high-tech program helping every mile of the way—probably qualified me less to fly the C-5 than Jill with her simulators.

  “All right?” I said to Arlene.

  “Right,” she answered, shrugging, then went to hook up Ken.

  I helped Jill look for jacks on the glistening biotech. She was more willing to touch it than I was. She found what she needed and plugged Ken into the system. The operation went smoothly; he’d been designed for the purpose.

  Jill called up SimFlight on her CompMac and tapped furiously, connecting it to Ken, then to the actual plane. A moment later she spoke with that triumphant tone of voice that rarely let us down: “Got it! We have control!”

  The gunshots suggested the Clydes were getting closer, and more heavy bodies were beginning to throw themselves against the cockpit door. I was about to make a suggestion when Albert beat me to it. He was down but not out.

  “Godspeed,” whispered Albert, still covering his eyes. “Now, why don’t you purge all the air from the cabin, daughter?”

  Raising my eyebrows, I silently mouthed “daughter” to Arlene, but she shook her head. Albert obviously meant it generically. He was much too young to be her real father.

  Faster and faster, Jill typed away . . . then the raging, surging sounds behind the door grew dimmer and dimmer, finally fading away to nothing. Modern death by keyboard. We were already at forty thousand feet and climbing; up there, there was too little air to sustain even zombies. And Clydes, human-real or human-fake, had a human need for plenty of O2.

  “Well done, daughter,” said Albert. He could hear just fine.

  Having come this close to buying it, I could hardly believe we were safe again. A coughing fit came out of nowhere and grabbed my heart. Arlene put her arm around me and said, “Your turn to sleep again.” I didn’t argue. I noticed t
hat Albert was already snoozing.

  Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care . . .

  I felt too lousy, and too guilty somehow, to stay under for long. Less than a half hour later I was awake again. Jill had turned around, crossed the coastline, and was over the ocean. All was well with the world . . . for a few seconds longer.

  “Holy hell, we’re losing airspeed!” she suddenly screamed, jerking us all awake. “We’re losing altitude!”

  It’s always something.

  The engines strained and whined, making the noises they would if headed into a ferocious head wind. But there was no wind. With a big fooooomp, one engine flamed out. Jill wasn’t kidding about the quality of her simulator exercises; she instantly dived the plane to restart it. Then she headed back, circling around to try again.

  “Stupid monster mechanics,” I yelled. “Dumb-ass demon dildo ground crew! How the hell do these idiots intend to conquer the world when they can’t even—”

  “Shut up!” Jill shouted. I shut up. She was right. I could be pissed off all I wanted after she saved our collective ass.

  Two more tries and she was white-faced. “It’s some kind of field,” she said. “We can’t go west.”

  “So that’s how they’re conquering the world,” said Arlene calmly. I took my medicine like a good boy.

  33

  Jill set the auto-pilot to continue circling, hoping no one had noticed the deviation yet. She typed away, accessing the biotech nav-com aboard. Then she smiled grimly. “Listen up,” she said.

  We sure as hell did; the mantle of command was hers while we were in the air. “Guys, we’re going to have to dump you off at Burbank.” She said it like Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell where the devil himself is imprisoned in ice, spending eternity chewing on Judas like a piece of tough caramel. I’d made good grades in my lit. courses.

  “What? Why?” demanded Arlene.

  “The force-field switch is located in the old Disney tower, near the studio.”

  “Is nothing sacred to these devils?” I asked.

  “Night on Bald Mountain,” said Arlene, “part deux.”