by M. D. Massey
The door began to shut, just as one of the beasts reached out.
Its hand got caught, keeping the door from closing all the way. Melissa screamed.
Drawing the gun up to her face, Jessica pulled the trigger and heard the thing yelp as its hand fell to the elevator floor, and the door shut.
They watched the fingers of the hand move in their last reflex, the wiggling becoming gentle, as the elevator sent them down to the parking garage.
When they arrived at the Kesslers’ minivan in the parking garage, Jessica and Melissa helped Walt into the backseat. Melissa sat in the back with him, taking the keys from his pocket and handing them to Jessica, who had made her way to the driver’s seat. She cranked the van and adjusted the mirror so that she could see outside, but also keep an eye on Walt behind her.
Jessica backed the van out of the spot and drove toward the garage’s exit.
They made the two-tiered climb to the ground level, and Jessica saw two sick people coming toward the truck wearing the uniforms of the valet boys. Being a front desk clerk, she knew them; it was John and Doyle, two friends of hers who played in a heavy metal band together when they weren’t parking cars. Jessica hit the brakes.
Melissa looked up.
“Why did you stop? Drive,” she said.
“I can’t,” Jessica responded.
She looked into their eyes. Her friends’ eyes. Where had those eyes gone? But the closer they got to the van, the more she realized they were no longer her friends.
Melissa was crying. “Please, drive! He needs help,” she pleaded.
“I’m sorry,” Jessica mumbled.
She eased off the brake and pressed the gas, watching the two boys reach towards her as she ran them over, hearing the two thuds of their bodies as the van moved toward the sunlight shining into the garage exit.
7
Gabriel
Just west of Nashville, open fields lay for miles across the long stretches of highway. Many of them, with grass so green from thriving in the rich soil of the delicate earth, housed acres of farmland and produced crops and food to feed the population. With many foods now being made in science labs and packaging plants, the land represented a dying art, one of the last memories of the blue-collar foundation of America. Out there, farmers could live off the land and sustain independence from the convenience of supermarkets and chemistry-created foods.
But everything had changed.
The Jacobsons owned the farm and, like the world, they too had changed. Left with no conscious minds to parade the sea of thought, they now stood in the open pasture, living off the land in a different way. Satisfying a new need.
They were a large family; nine of them to be exact, headed by the man of the house, Ron, and his wife, Rose. They had seven children, five girls and two boys. The second oldest girl, Rosa, was the one responsible for sending the house down in flames. When she rose from the ground following her sudden and fatal fall, she knocked a candle off of her nightstand, sending it onto the floor by her bed and catching the edges of her comforter on fire.
Three of the other children fell too, before resurrecting. The confused and mourning family never stood a chance. Not from the flames or from their dead children.
Now, the Jacobsons were nothing but frail minds moving aimlessly through a dead pasture.
The empty body of Ron Jacobson turned and looked up, growling as his attention was caught by the plane falling through the sky overhead. The carcass of the cow beneath him, lying motionless on its side, wouldn’t be going anywhere. He had time—not that his vacant mind understood the perception any longer.
The plane continued its descent toward the field. An open flame shot off the rear tail and warmed the pale autumn air.
The other members of the Jacobson family looked up, each leaving the remains of the dead livestock they had slaughtered in the field. Roger, the younger of the two boys at eight years old, hobbled away from the carcass, attracted by the sound of the falling aircraft.
The scream of the plane heightened as it came down into the field, plowing over the Jacobsons’ bodies and leaving nothing left to eat of the livestock, except perhaps scattered pieces of muscle, bone, and flesh.
On the other side of the field, where the tree line began, the plane finally came to a halt, having put the stolen minds of an American family out of their misery.
Gabriel opened his eyes and shook his head, letting his lips flap and making the sound of a horse carrying a shiver. He looked over to Dylan and saw the boy’s eyes were shut, and he wasn’t moving.
Gabriel quickly unfastened his belt and reached over, shaking the child.
“Dylan,” he called.
The boy didn’t move. Gabriel grabbed Dylan’s thin wrist and checked for a pulse. Blood still flowed through his veins and the drum of the heart sounded through his body.
He looked around the plane and saw no movement. The only sound he heard was that of the engines failing and the gentle hiss of the flames flapping through the wind at the back of the plane.
Gabriel was scared to move Dylan in case he had sustained any injuries in the crash, but with the back of the plane on fire and not being sure if any of the sick people had survived, he saw little choice. He reached over and unbuckled the strap on Dylan’s lap. Then he stood and leaned down, grabbing the dead weight of the child and throwing him over his shoulder. Dylan’s arms dangled to the small of Gabriel’s back.
He walked into the aisle and assessed the scene around him. Everyone and everything was dead. Bodies, or at least parts of them, lay all over the plane. All over the floor and all over the seats. The power was out, leaving the sunlight as the only illumination for the interior of the plane. Oxygen masks swung from above each seat. Aside from him and Dylan, no one had ever had a chance to even put one on. They were either ravaged and eaten by the undead, or left to be tossed around the plane like dirty clothes in an industrial dryer.
The plane had made a fairly clean landing, leaving Gabriel to wonder if the pilot was alive in the cockpit. He made his way there, stepping over parts of bodies in the process.
He reached for the door leading into the cockpit. It was locked. Gabriel put his ear to the door and heard a muted moan on the other side.
“Hello,” he said.
He heard the groan again.
“Open the door. I can help you,” Gabriel said.
He heard the muttered words but couldn’t make them out.
One of the passenger seats near him was empty, and he sat Dylan down in it. The boy slumped over in the seat.
He stood back a few feet from the door and gave it a swift kick. To his surprise, the door opened on the first attempt, having likely been weakened during the pre-landing chaos and the crash itself.
With no weapon in hand, he crept toward the door, not sure what would lie on the other side.
Gabriel looked inside the cockpit to see the pilot still in his chair, leaned back with blood covering his uniform. Beside him, a body lay wearing the same uniform, face-first on the ground with a hole in the back of his head, and parts of his skull and brain scattered on the windows.
Gabriel moved to where he could see the face of the pilot, who jumped slightly as he looked to him.
“Did you land this plane?” Gabriel asked.
The pilot gave a slight nod.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said simply.
A small laugh came out of the mouth of the pilot and was joined by blood.
Gabriel looked down and saw the missing square of flesh from the pilot’s neck. Blood seeped from the wound, and it looked alive as it pulsated. The hand of the pilot hit against Gabriel’s left arm a few times and he felt something cold touch the skin on his hand. He looked down and saw the grip of the hand gun nudging at his palm. The pilot was nodding for him to take it.
Gabriel took the gun from the pilot and it felt even colder in his hand.
The pilot muttered something that Gabriel couldn’t understand.
�
��What?” Gabriel asked, moving his ear closer.
“Me,” the pilot mumbled. “Kill me.”
Gabriel shook his head. He couldn’t kill the man, even if it meant the pilot would be put out of his misery.
The pilot coughed and blood danced with saliva from his mouth.
His head turned and, eyes wide open, he was gone.
Gabriel looked down to the man’s shirt and saw his name badge near a gold pendant that was in the shape of wings.
“Savage,” Gabriel said to himself, mumbling the dead pilot’s name.
He took the pendant off the pilot’s white shirt and held it in his palm, wondering what kind of life this man had lived and who he had left behind.
Gabriel slipped the wings into his pocket and walked back through the door into the main concourse of the plane.
When he looked down at Dylan, Gabriel saw the boy’s small left hand begin to twitch. He rushed to Dylan’s side and put his hand on his forehead, running fingers through his bangs and checking him for a fever. For a moment, he felt like he was back home with his daughter, Sarah. His paternal instincts had kicked in with the young, abandoned boy, and Gabriel was treating him as if he was his own. But he was still left to wonder about the condition of his own wife and daughter.
“You alright, kid?” Gabriel asked.
Dylan’s eyes began to open, fluttering. He took his hand and put his palm to the boy’s forehead, the veins inside thrumming through his skull.
“Am I alive?” Dylan asked.
Gabriel laughed and smiled at the boy. “I think so.”
He turned back quickly as he heard the growl come from the cockpit. Again, instinct kicked in, and Gabriel pulled the newly acquired gun from the waistband of his slacks. The weapon was still cold to the touch as he gripped the handle.
Gabriel stood, signaling to Dylan to stay put, and walked back to the cockpit.
He jumped back as he arrived at the doorway. Savage, the fearless pilot who had landed the plane and saved both him and the boy, was brave no more. He was dead, yet so alive. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin had gone pale. No words spewed from his mouth, only spitting growls. Still strapped securely into the seat, his arms were outstretched in a hopeless attempt to break free and devour the lives he’d saved.
Gabriel watched him from out of sight. No life remained in the man; he was a monster. Gabriel looked out the window and saw the endless trees just beyond where the plane had landed. In his mind, he was pretty sure that Captain Savage was dead—left only as a mindless creature aching to be released from the chair and wreak havoc. But another part of Gabriel Alexander wondered if the pilot could see the beauty in the trees in front of him. If he could treat them like a sort of gateway into an afterlife.
Gabriel pointed the gun at the back of Savage’s head, cocked back, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger, leaving the promising scenery of nature covered by a sea of red on the window.
8
Jessica
“How is he doing?” Jessica asked, looking in the mirror and watching the tensed face of Walt Kessler.
Melissa had taken one of the extra shirts out of the duffle bag and created a makeshift tourniquet for his arm. The once white shirt was now forever stained crimson.
“I’m fine,” Walt said before Melissa could answer, speaking in a way that tried to reassure the two women, but, to his wife, he’d come off more stubborn than sincere.
“Fine? Look at your arm, Walt!”
The fact that Walt even had an arm was a miracle. Jessica had gotten the bachelorette off of him just in time, before the sick girl had more critically injured him. A patch of flesh across his forearm, about the size of a post-it note, had been completely ripped off, exposing the tissue below but not quite down to the bone. When he twitched and his bicep flexed, you could see the muscle move through the wound.
“Really. I’m fine. You’ve stopped most of the bleeding, just keep pressure on it.”
Melissa pulled the shirt around his arm tighter and he grimaced. It was almost more than she could bear to see her husband like this. She hadn’t seen Walt hurt this way since he had come back from the first war in Iraq. Melissa rubbed his shirt in the spot where the scar from the shrapnel of a grenade sat on his stomach. Now, he would have a scar from a different kind of battle.
“Okay,” Melissa said. “We are going to get you some real help as soon as we can.”
But there was another problem.
The hotel was a mountain resort surrounded by nothing. There wasn’t a gas station for ten miles down a winding road, much less a hospital.
And more than that, Jessica saw dark clouds in the distance. They were headed toward a storm. Rain would be no issue, but they were at a high enough elevation where sleet or even snow would be a possibility. The daylight was dying fast and, though the road had been safe and clear so far, they had no idea what could lie ahead of them.
Jessica eased the van down the curved mountain road, doing her best not to let her nerves veer them off the path and through the railing as the cold rain began to fall.
It took just over half an hour, but they reached a gas station. Jessica turned the wheel to her right and drove through the parking lot, stopping in front of the door.
“I’m going to go inside and see if I can get us help,” she told Melissa.
Jessica opened the door and stepped out of the van. Dust kicked up beneath her feet as her soles slid across the dirt. She hurried around the hood of the vehicle and ran to the front door of the gas station as the rain began to fall harder.
The door swung open, sending the metal bells on the inside of the door clanking together in a fury of rings. It startled Jessica, the sense of abandonment instantly hitting her.
From the outside, the gas station had looked old and empty. There were only four gas pumps, and the signs looked like they would have only powered halfway on if there was power going to them. Jessica almost hadn’t stopped at all, but the old pickup parked next to the store gave her hope that someone may be inside. And inside the store, the shelves were still stacked with product, and the floors, while not shining, were mostly clean.
“Hello,” Jessica called out to the dead air. “Is anybody in here? We need help. There’s a man outside badly injured.”
Jessica waited for a few moments for somebody to call back, but it never came.
She walked down one of the aisles and found a small array of medical supplies. The gauze, tape, anti-bacterial, and mobile first-aid kits wouldn’t do much, if anything, to heal Walt’s wound with its severity, but it was better than what they had: a t-shirt.
Near the counter, a variety of tourist swag hung on a display rack, and Jessica saw tote bags with a cheesy picture of mountains screened on them, and text that read “Welcome to the Smokies”. She grabbed four of the bags and began to fill them with as much stuff as she could. In addition to the medical supplies, she grabbed beef jerky, sports drinks, and bananas and apples from a basket near the front register even though they were starting to brown, and topped it off with various types of chips.
Before she walked away from the front counter, she reached next to the register and picked up the headset to the telephone. She let out a sigh and put the headset back down on the receiver as the line was dead.
She took the bags outside, placing them in the small storage area behind the back seat. Jessica then went back inside and, one at a time, took three cases of water bottles to the van, her hair becoming more cold and wet with every trip.
Melissa looked at her in confusion.
Jessica shrugged. “Place is empty. Don’t think they’ll miss this stuff.”
She finished loading everything, then jumped into the back, sitting next to the cases of water. Melissa sat in front of her, behind the driver’s seat, next to Walt’s head as he slept. His breathing was steady, but he would gasp now and then, without waking himself.
Melissa pressed the buttons on her cell phone, disappointment mixed with panic acro
ss her cracked face.
“Are you getting a signal?” Jessica asked.
Melissa nodded. “Barely. Just not an answer.”
“Who are you calling?”
“I tried calling 911 and I keep getting a busy signal. Just now I tried to call my son. He lives in Nashville. We were planning on going to visit him once we spent a few days here in the mountains.” Melissa put her hand to her head and began to sob. Not only was her husband hurting in the back seat of their mini-van, but her son wasn’t picking up his phone, leaving her with no confirmation if he was alive or dead.
“Do you mind if I try calling my parents?” Jessica asked. Her cell phone was sitting behind the front desk at the hotel, and she had no plans to go back and get it anytime soon.
Melissa wiped her nose with her forearm and reached over to Jessica, handing her the phone.
Jessica dialed her parents phone number, the only one besides her best friend Meghan’s, that she knew by heart. It rang once, making her smile, before the three frantic ascending beeps led to the operator telling Jessica that the phone was disconnected. She looked down at the small screen and saw that the signal had disappeared.
Jessica grabbed the bag of medical supplies across from her, as well as a bottle of water for each of them. She reached over the seat to hand Melissa her phone.
“No luck?” Melissa asked.
Jessica shook her head and passed the bag and two water bottles over the seat to Melissa.
“Thank you.”
“The only medical stuff I could find inside is in that bag,” Jessica began. “I’ve got a little bit of food in the back, if you want to call it that. I also grabbed some sports drinks. Might be a good idea, if he will take it, to have him drink some to try to replenish some energy.” Jessica squinted her eyes as she looked out to the open road.
“My parents live outside Knoxville which is on the way to Nashville. I say we head that way. You guys can drop me off there and then go look for your son.”