by Welker, Wick
“Let’s go,” barked Ortega.
The Humvee lurched forward and then sped off down a gully and back up a long hill. The road led through a pleasant wooded area without any signs of people or buildings. Dave looked over at Layton again. He had his rifle propped up on the window seal of the door.
“Hey…” He timidly touched his jacket.
Layton looked over at him through his goggles. “Yeah?”
“Why are you guys called Medora One?”
“You ever heard of it?”
“Of what? Medora?”
“Yeah. It’s a small town in North Dakota.”
“No, never heard of it.”
“Well, you definitely won’t hear about it any more. That place is burned off the map. There’s nothing there anymore. We made sure of that.”
“What happened?”
“I definitely shouldn’t tell you any of this but the Captain doesn’t seem to give a shit about you having a gun and riding along with us so I’m not going to care either.” Layton took off his goggles and rubbed the sides of his nose. “Two weeks ago, this same shit happened there. People infected with this same exact thing. Mothers started eating their kids right there in the middle of damn dinner. Everything went crazy in a matter of hours. Our team didn’t show up until late in the night after the outbreak and there was pretty much nothing anyone could do. We got special authority from the government to contain the infection by any means necessary and we had to pretty much mow down the entire town.”
“Wow, how did it happen? Where did the outbreak happen?”
“The shit if I know. They don’t tell us anything about that. Captain Ortega knows everything though. He was in every inch of that town. We all spent most of our time sweeping out a hospital.”
“How did all of this stay out of the news?”
“Ha! You’d be surprised, my friend, what our government can keep a secret. You think they can’t wipe an entire town off the map and have no one question it? They sure as hell can and did. I’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq but I never had to shoot down a bunch of crazy civilians who are all eating each other. Now this shit doesn’t even faze me. I’ll put a bullet in any one of these infected bastards in an instant. Makes no difference to me. They aren’t human once they’re bitten and turned into the dead.”
“They are dead, right?”
“Man! The hell if I know, I’m not a freaking philosopher.” Layton took off his helmet momentarily to scratch his hair. “Anyway, they eventually bombed that town; an air raid right on American soil. This thing, this virus or whatever scared the hell out of the government and it’s scaring them now. I don’t think any of them know what in the hell they are doing. New York City is… it’s gone. It’s just gone.”
“It’s hard to understand right now. Can’t even wrap my mind around it.”
“By the way, how did you make it out of there alive anyway? Everyone in that street was dead. Where did you even come from?”
“One of the buildings right where you found me. I worked there at a marketing firm. I managed to barricade myself in a room and found my way down.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess after that avalanche of bodies came down in the street, probably cleared some room up in that building for you to make your way down.”
“Yeah.”
The Humvee came around a final thicket of trees and opened up to a long road that led to a small main street of the town. A pillar of black smoke was trailing from the center of town into the sky, right in front of a hazy sunset. As they approached town, they could finally see the wreckage. The airplane had bulldozed entire buildings as it came down, creating a gigantic wedge of destruction right through the middle of the small collection of houses, shops and gas stations. Scattered chunks of brick and piping lay about the street where small buildings had exploded with the fantastic force from the impact. They drove past a huge crater in the ground where another building had been destroyed, probably the spot where the plane made contact with the ground. The plane lay sideways across the main street and towered over the small one-story buildings of the small town. There were no people around, no police cars, no fire trucks and no traffic.
Anderson wound around debris in the road until they saw an entire detached wing of the airplane leaning on a building. The turbine engine had settled on top of a car, crushing in the roof. In front of them, the plane had come to rest with the nose buried in the building and most of the body lying across the street. The once shiny metallic white of the fuselage was now charred with a gaping scar running the length of the plane, exposing the main cabin floor sunken downwards into the electrical compartments below. They could see many bodies sitting silently in their seats, still waiting for the plane to touch down on a tarmac somewhere, uneventfully.
Dave let out a long and nervous breath, “Wow, they’re just sitting in those seats there like nothing happened to them.”
The men stepped out of the Humvee, their boots crunching on glass and gravel.
Ortega spoke softly to the group huddled next the Humvee, “I want Clarence, Layton, and Clinton to set up a perimeter around the plane. Anderson, Jeremy and I are going into the plane to retrieve the passenger manifest. I’m not sure how much time we will have on the plane. It might be full of infected civilians. Whatever happens, we must retrieve the flight manifest from the cockpit. Everything else is only secondary to the flight manifest, got it?”
“Yes, sir!” The unit responded.
“Good.” He pulled out a magazine clip from a backpack and slipped it into a front pocket in his jacket. “Boomtown, I want you to stay at the Humvee, standing outside with your gun drawn. I want you to defend the Humvee and alert the perimeter team by walkie-talkie if you see any infected approaching. Do not be afraid to shoot.” He looked around the area. It had a quiet calm considering that a commercial airliner had just crash-landed in the middle of town. “There’s not a lot of movement around right now, but we all know just how quickly that can change with the infected.”
The two groups split up with three spreading out around the crash site and Ortega leading the rest towards the plane. Dave stayed at the Humvee putting his back against the door with his handgun drawn. The sun was beginning to sink in the sky and the summer day began to cool off. Dave wondered why there wasn’t anybody on the street. It was as if the whole town froze in place once the plane came down.
Ortega approached the plane first and put his foot up into the long scar in the main cabin. He put the end of his boot on a woman’s naked foot that was still buckled into her seat and tapped it up and down. He waited for a response and got nothing. Walking over to another passenger, he tapped a man’s hand with the muzzle of his gun and waited again, no response.
“Alright, I’m sure as hell not stepping into that plane until I’m sure that none of these people are going to get and up and corner us in the cockpit. Anderson, you know what I’m thinking?”
Anderson shook another passenger’s leg. “Yes sir, I think we need a bullet for every person as we walk down the aisle.”
“Read my mind. Okay, I want you to crawl up into that hole… there. You see it?” Ortega pointed with his gun at a small hole that was torn next to the plane’s airlock. “Think you can crawl right up into there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alright, you get on up there and open the airlock for us once you’re in. We can cover you from out here if any of them start waking up.”
Anderson stuck his head and neck inside the side of the plane through a large hole, hoisted himself up with his arms and disappeared into the plane’s main cabin. “Oh man,” he yelled from within, “these people did not do well. I’m seeing a lot of body parts… and… holy shit.”
“What is it? Do you think they’ve been infected?”
“No, no, these people definitely died from high impact trauma. It’s just pretty bad in here.” Anderson made a grunting sound followed by a mechanical sound of metal hitting metal and the airlock suddenly fell from its
place in the doorframe and dropped to the asphalt of the street, hitting a parking meter.
“You’re up.” Ortega grabbed Jeremy’s bulky arm and pushed him towards the door where Anderson grabbed his arm and helped him up with Ortega following.
The inside of the plane was dimly lit with orange sunlight streaking through the tiny oval windows of the passenger deck. They looked down the doomed aisle and saw a body sitting in almost every seat. They seemed alive with their heads facing forward, getting ready for takeoff, but the cabin was too quiet and too dark to maintain the illusion that this was a normal flight. The occasional severed arm and leg cluttering the isle also took away from any semblance of a normal flight.
The three men were crammed into the flight attendant area, their gear bouncing off one another. “Alright, alright,” Ortega paused as he looked down the other end of the plane. It was mangled with wires and charred walls where the tail had been blown off. A few spots of sunlight shot through the blackened mess of hanging cords and melted plastic. “I’ll walk first down the aisle. Anderson follows behind me as we both put one bullet into every head that we see. Jeremy, you cover our six.”
Ortega slowly stepped forward down the aisle toward the cockpit and stopped at the first row on his right, looked at the faces of the three men sitting there, and putting his handgun to each of their heads, pulled the trigger jolting their lifeless bodies from the impact of the bullet. He turned to the next row over, inspected their faces and did the same. Advancing one row up, he looked at the passenger’s faces and even turned one of their heads toward him when he couldn’t see it.
Anderson leaned over the other side of Ortega and brought his gun up to the head of woman who was slumped forward in her seat, with both of her white femur bones sticking out through her kneecaps.
“Hey!” Ortega yelled at him, “Just wait for me to have a look first and then shoot.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said softly, taking his gun back.
Ortega continued walking down the crooked aisle but stopped at each row to inspect every person in every chair with Anderson doing the shooting afterward. They quickly developed a system of Ortega checking three people at a time with Anderson following him with three rapid shots. Anderson sighed in silent frustration at the time Ortega seemed to be taking with each body. He turned back to Jeremy who looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders.
From the Humvee, Dave could hear the three gunshots followed by a small moment of silence and then three more shots. He was continually looking over his shoulder; behind the Humvee and down whatever small alleyways he could see from where he was stationed. They’re somewhere, he thought, they are out there right now. Walking slowly away from the Humvee, he approached a small alley in between two one-story brick buildings and could see stretching green farmland that ran into a distant tuft of trees. He jumped a little at the next three pops coming from the airplane.
Back on the plane, Anderson watched Ortega as he continued down the aisle inspecting every passenger. He spoke up, “Hey, Captain, where do they usually keep the passenger manifest?”
“It’s usually somewhere in the cockpit, so go look for it.” He had stopped at a bald man dressed in a dark suit who was severely doubled over his seat belt, positioned unnaturally from a broken spine. Ortega looked down at him and lifted his bearded chin upwards to get a look on his face. The man’s eyes slowly opened and his mouth fell open, releasing a round collection of coagulated blood that fell on his suit and slowly slid down his shirt. The man lifted his arms and ineptly grabbed for Ortega’s neck. Ortega quickly backed away from him, put his gun to the side of his face and pulled the trigger. The bullet left out the man’s opposite cheekbone, taking his nose and upper half of his face with it leaving behind a blackened crater with two eyes resting loosely above.
Ortega looked up above at the overhead compartment and tried opening it, but the latch was stuck. The entire bulkhead had crumpled together and changed shape from the impact of the crash. Taking a long serrated blade from his side, he firmly stabbed it into the thin plastic compartment and started using it as a saw to create an opening. “You two get to the cockpit and look for the flight manifest.”
“Yes, sir.” They squeezed past him and kicked in the narrow cockpit door that was already ajar. The cockpit was empty and the windshield had been shattered inward with black blood that had dripped down the glass and had dried in place. “Cockpit has no bodies,” Jeremy yelled back to Ortega who was now busy sawing a large hole in the thin plastic of the luggage compartment.
“Just get the items,” he yelled back. He was now spilling small bags of luggage out of the hole he had made. Bending down, he inspected a small leather bag. “Did you find the flight manifest?” He opened the small bag and produced a metal canister from it.
Jeremy came back into the main cabin, “Yes sir, and the black box. Sir, would you like us to finish making sure each of the bodies are dead? Some of them still might wake up on us.”
“Yes, finish them up.” He stood up and placed the small canister in his pack, “You say there are no pilots up there? I haven’t seen any pilots back here either.” He looked out a small oval passenger window and saw Layton standing still with his back against the plane wreckage.
“Hey, hand me that manifest.” He took the loose papers from Jeremy and read it over, and then bent over and searched the bald man that he had just shot and found his wallet, which he inspected and put into his pack.
Anderson stopped shooting the passengers and looked at Ortega for a moment. Ortega stared right back at him and the two men paused in silence.
“Who is he?” Anderson asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
Anderson put his gun down to his side. “Yes, sir. Do you want me to keep shooting these bodies?”
“No, no, in fact, forget it. Let’s get off the plane, because with all this noise we’re making, I have a feeling we’re about to be surrounded.” He turned back towards the tail end of the plane and walked up the slanted aisle, his boots stomping on the hollow floor.
Out in the alley, Dave made his way to the end and stepped out to the back end of a small shop. He looked to his left out into the open fields and saw a crowd of dozens of people walking toward him. “
Oh, shit!” he yelled. He picked up his walkie-talkie. “Hey, I see them out here outside of the main street behind the buildings. They hear us and they’re coming in!”
Without any obstacles of the city, the sick moved swiftly across the open field, guided by each other’s movements like a flock of geese in the sky. It appeared that they earlier had knocked down a wooden fence surrounding a cow pasture and had been chasing a few cows around a small farm. Dave lifted his gun, thought about firing and then decided to run back towards the Humvee where the rest of the unit was gathering. Ortega and the others were jumping down from the airlock of the plane.
“Hey, hey, Boomtown, get your ass over here!” Clarence yelled at him, holding his rifle outward towards the alley. Dave came running down the small alleyway with the horde now slowly following. He looked over his shoulder and could see their light shadows from the low laying sun coming around the corner.
Ortega stomped down the quiet street and joined the unit at the Humvee.
“Boomtown, how many do you see out here?”
“I don’t know. There’s a whole herd of them out there. Maybe fifty or a hundred, it’s hard to tell.”
“Well, how many, fifty or one hundred?”
“Closer to one hundred. They’re coming. They hear us and they know we’re here.”
“Coming where, right down that alley you just came from?”
“Yes, I, I think so.”
Ortega glanced over towards the empty alley, his large black eyebrows furrowing beneath his helmet. “Clarence, go get the flamer and position just outside the alleyway by the wall of the building.” Clarence quickly disappeared to the back of the Humvee.
“I want Layton, Anderson and Jeremy s
tanding directly in front of the alleyway. When you’re in place, wait for my word and I want you to fire your guns in the air at about thirty-second intervals to draw them down the alley. Now it’s safe to assume that there are other infected people walking around not just coming down through that alley. Clinton and I are going to stay back, covering your asses from any other of the infected that are going to hear the shit storm that we’re about to make.”
Clarence now had the tank on his back, was waddling up to a brown-bricked building, and leaned against the wall in place around the corner from the alley. Anderson, Layton and Jeremy ran into the middle of the street a few hundred yards from the plane on their left and were standing directly in front of the alley with Clarence on their front right flank positioned at the mouth of the alley.
Ortega looked at Dave. “Get in the truck.”
Dave silently opened the door to the Humvee, slammed it shut and looked out the window towards the alley with his gun pointing out.
The group of men stood still, as a warm wind swept through the main street, whipping brown dust up around them. A silence descended on them as they waited for the horde to come. Dave looked out the window at Clarence, with his thick-rimmed glasses staring down as he leaned against the building behind him. Anderson stood with his rifle pointed upwards, staring straight down the dirty alleyway that led to the open sky behind. He could see shadowy figures and a few bobbing heads beginning to stumble down the shallow corridor.
“Alright, aim up and fire,” Ortega yelled.
The three men simultaneously unleashed a frenzy of fire and bullets into the air with continuous loud cracking with each burst of the triggers. The figures swarmed in the alley, picking up movement, organizing into streaming rows of bodies as they could all detect the sound and movement, each instinctually drawn in by the cacophony of gunfire.
“Keep firing! Clarence, get ready for the torch!”
Clarence wrapped a large pair of black rubber goggles around his glasses and dropped them over his eyes. Pumping the nozzle of the flamethrower once, he let out a shot of liquid fire onto the sidewalk, ensuring that the flamethrower was primed.