“Is he dead?”
It was Ping. She had a hard look on her face, the words coming out in a completely matter-of-fact voice.
“I…I think he’s just out…”
“He may be dead, Captain. People are dying back in coach. I’ve put three bodies in the back of the plane and am out of room. We’re going to have to leave the dead in their seats.
“Dear God, what the fuck is happening?” I whispered.
“Let me handle it,” Ping said. “There are a few healthy passengers. I’m making them help me. You get to the cockpit and land this plane.”
I nodded my head, but my feet didn’t move.
“Go!” Ping shouted.
“Right,” I said.
Sprinting to the cockpit, I had to hurdle a body that had fallen to the floor. I blasted through the hands and bodies reaching out for me like a runner on the football field. At the door to the cockpit, I fumbled for a second with my keys. As I did so, I felt like there were people coming up behind me. I didn’t turn to look. When the door opened, I hustled inside and slammed it shut behind me.
I found First Office Yost hanging sideways out of his seat. Only the lap belt was keeping him in place.
“Yost?”
Thinking of what Ping had told me about dead passengers, I felt on his neck for a pulse. There was none.
I started fiddling with the seat belt, but then I realized I had no place to put his body, so I left him where he was.
People going crazy in the cabin behind me, my first officer dead beside me, I took the captain’s chair of Pacific Air Flight 902, and gave out the Mayday signal.
I got no response. My cry for help was met with complete radio silence.
Timothy
Allow me now to describe for you the most beautiful moment of my life. The sun is rising in the east, casting a golden glow over the tropical foliage of The Mirage and Treasure Island. The Las Vegas Strip, so full of playful bustle six hours before, has become a ghost town, with a hundred giant LED screens blaring their advertisements for no one to see, and the music of a hundred different cities from around the world distilled into one blaring blotch of nonsense, echoing up and down a vacant Las Vegas Avenue.
It is against this backdrop that a bum, who had set up shop right in front of the Treasure Island Pirate Ship the night before, climbs to his feet. This bum fell ill at midnight and died just before sunrise. Now a reanimated version of the bum rises with the sun and goes forth to find food. He stumbles onto the street, paying no mind to the traffic signals all around him.
Across the way, at the Venetian, a girl, no more than twenty steps out through the front door, looking baffled and scared. This girl, whom fate has chosen to be a survivor on this day, is panicked, having watched all her friends go from mildly to deathly ill overnight. She probably called 911 from her hotel room but got no answer. Finding no one at the front desk to help her, she’s run into the street and now intends to confront the first person she sees and beg him to help her get through this.
The first person she sees is the bum. She runs into the street, and now they are like lovers running across the meadow to meet one another in a warm embrace.
The girl asks the man if he can help her. It’s my friend, she says. My friend is sick and needs medicine. The girl doesn’t understand why the man doesn’t respond. She sees the man snarling at her and gets scared. But she hesitates. By the time she makes the decision to turn and run, it’s too late, for across the way, coming at her from a phony mockup of Venetian shores, are two more hungry corpses. She runs right into them, and screams as they tear into her flesh with her teeth.
There, in the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Spring Mountain Road, the traffic lights changing from red to green to yellow to red again, the girl is eaten alive beneath a spray of golden sunlight.
And the giant screens up and down the street continue to dance with color and sound.
Caleb
What was a cold on Monday on Tuesday will become fatal.
Monday night was the first time since our camping excursion began that I felt compelled to use my Truman wood stove. Three hours of frustrated fumbling later, I had the blasted thing set up. It took me another hour to get a fire started. By then, Cori was already asleep. Sabrina was hanging out in the truck, reading news on the iPad.
I looked at the stars for a long time before going to sleep that night. It’s pretty outrageous how much better the night sky looks when you’re far from civilization. All the feelings of insignificance that a good night sky can bring—I was embracing those on Monday night. I had to. It was a way to stave off the panic. Yes, humanity’s reign on earth is coming to an end. Yes, my life is going to take a completely different path than I ever imagined it would take. Yes, everyone I know except for the two ladies here with my right now will be dead soon. Yes, this is the most tragic and momentous event in all of history.
But the world will go on. The stars will continue shining in the sky. The rest of life on earth will keep on living. Hell, to the plants and animals that share this space with us, what’s about to happen tomorrow is a reason to celebrate. The dominant life form, the apex of all food chains, the homo sapien…we’re about to go the way of the dinosaur, and everything else can readjust appropriately.
I joined Cori in the tent at ten o’clock and slept for two hours before Sabrina came in and woke me up.
“The Internet has gone silent,” she whispered.
I sat up and got my bearings.
“What do you mean?”
“CNN, MSNBC…even Planet Gulag. Nobody’s updated their web site in more than an hour.”
I looked down at Cori, who was sleeping soundly. I put my hand on her forehead. Hotter than ever. Why the fuck hadn’t we brought a thermometer?
“She’s burning up,” I said.
“I’ll give her some more Tylenol,” said Sabrina. “I want you to go to the truck and find more news. I’m worried that it may already be over out there.”
I put on my shoes and coat and headed to the truck. I found the iPad on the dash, its battery gauge less than a quarter full. I turned the ignition to get the iPad charging off the truck’s battery, then I turned on the radio.
Ten of the twenty stations we had come to know up here, including all the news and talk outlets, were running on pure static. The rest of the dial, the portion that pre-recorded all its programming and let a computer run the show, was blaring away with music, commercials, and even DJ’s bantering as if nothing in the world had changed. The classical music station was particularly creepy, playing quiet piano pieces suitable for night owls and insomniacs, interspersed with commercials for antique shops and fine dining in Boise.
I gave up on the radio after ten minutes and went to the iPad. I found the Internet to be a barren and frightening place.
It’s funny how much the Web has become a part of who we are. It’s so much more than a bunch of words, pictures, and sounds—you don’t give a lot of thought to the people on the other side of all that data, you just accept them. But when they’re gone….imagine that right now, with a snap of the fingers, the Internet goes static. What it is at this moment is what it will be forever more. No new blog posts. No new emails. YouTube is frozen in time like a movie reel. Facebook has become a funeral registry.
That’s what I was looking at when I surfed around the net. CNN was up. MSNBC was up. Yahoo, Reddit, Tumblr…they were all there.
With yesterday’s news.
It was as if the world had frozen in time, and we would forever be stuck on Monday the 14th of April, the day everyone caught a cold.
Google was silent. Facebook was silent. The live feed on PlanetGulag.com had gone silent since Elvis’s last post more than six hours ago, a post that read, “Suddenly feel much, much worse.”
And then I went to Twitter.
Holy Shit.
For the rest of the night, first alone, and then with Sabrina next to me, first on the iPad, then on my phone, I watched
the world come unglued in a stream of 140-character dispatches.
It started quietly, when the trending topics of Pandemic and Everybody Sick morphed into Feel Like Crap, Getting Worse, and End of Humanity.
The tweets themselves took my breath away.
Last hour has been so much worse. Barely have the strength to sit up.
Does everyone feel worse? I’m getting really scared.
Started vomiting twenty minutes ago and can hardly stop. Dear God this is awful.
Need to go to the hospital. Dialed 911 and nobody answered. Somebody help me!
There aren’t enough toilets in my house for what is happening to us and I am literally puking in my back yard.
We’re all going to die. Aren’t we?
The pace of tweets began to slow dramatically at one in the morning.
“Too sick to tweet, or already dead,” Sabrina said to me. “We’re only hearing from survivors now.”
I’m thirteen years old and both my parents just died. Help me!
Our whole neighborhood is gone this morning. I went house to house…all dying or dead.
Hospital packed and no doctors to treat anyone.
Is anybody else alive?
At two, the tweets slowed to a trickle. The word “zombie” made its first appearance on my screen at 2:23 Mountain Standard Time.
Holy fuck! Is this for real? Locked in my apartment. Zombies in the hallway! #ZombieApocalypse
Then the letter from Frye, still sitting as a PDF on the Planet Gulag web site, went around the world on a wave of bit.ly’s and TinyURL’s.
Get someplace safe and READ THIS! Actual fucking zombies. Shoot them in the head. Game on mother fuckers! http://bit.ly/JPFuXd
Yes, it’s all for real. World is coming to an end. http://tinyurl.com/2eah76e
From 3:00 to 4:00, the world was a mess of confusion.
Does it really turn you into a zombie? My husband’s got it. I can’t just leave him. Can I?
Don’t go to any hospitals. Overrun with zombies. For real!
I just locked my mom in the bathroom. She’s gone out of her mind. She bit me like dog.
My daughter died this morning, and then she woke up again. It’s a miracle! But she’s not herself.
By 4:00, Twitter was a full-on S.O.S. machine.
Trapped on the roof of the Bently Building at 34th and Grand. Zombies in the stairwell. Please help!
Houston, Austin, Dallas survivors. Gather all you can and hit Highway 285 before everyone wakes up and the shit hits the fan!
A shovel with a long handle is a good weapon. Took out four of them already.
Much safer out of the cities. Don’t stop for supplies. Just get out, and if you see survivors, pick them up!
Our farm on Highway 78 is safe. Come seek shelter and God Bless.
“Should we tweet something?” Sabrina asked me.
“No,” I said. “We should try to get some sleep. It’s safe here right now, but in a few hours, we’re going to have to start keeping watch.”
Rachel
Ten healthy people were on the plane. Two hundred and eleven were sick .
Ping and I were it for the crew. Everyone else was bedridden in the cocoon, or, in Captain Jenner’s case, dead in the galley.
Of the passengers, Ping counted eight who weren’t sick. Of those eight, only two were helping her, despite her frequent pleas over the intercom for anyone who could get up and help to do so.
I didn’t blame the others. Honestly, if you were in their shoes, would you be up? Would you be walking up and down the aisles with a plastic sack to collect used barf bags? Would you be stocking the food service tray with new barf bags rather than peanuts? Would you be handing out little cups of water?
Would you be pushing the dead off the living?
Right after I got in the cockpit, we landed in an intense air pocket, one of the worst I’ve ever been through. Figures. Half the plane is barfing and I need everyone’s seat belt fastened. Ping and her two helpers raced up and down the aisles, yelling at people to do their belts, securing the belts for them in some cases because the passengers were so weak. Three times the turbulence sent Ping and her helpers tumbling. We were lucky we didn’t hit the really big drop until the entire plane was secure. Had Ping and her helpers not been strapped in for that one, they would have crashed into the ceiling.
Just like all the hundreds of bags of vomit.
My view from the cockpit was limited, but I saw enough to know that the cabin had turned into a new level of hell. In the back of the cockpit was a single black and white screen that gave me a view from four different security cameras located throughout the plane. Every time I turned to look at that screen, I saw someone barfing, or collapsing off to the side. After the big drop, I saw vomit dripping from the ceiling. I saw bodies hanging in the aisle, lifeless and limp but strapped in place, like old helium balloons tethered to a fence long after the party is over.
I had my own dead balloon here in the cockpit. If there had been any doubt as to Officer Yost’s status, it couldn’t be denied now. His body had been flopping around in his chair for thirty minutes, bouncing left and right with each air pocket, like some mannequin in a captain’s suit.
I can’t tell you how creepy it was to sit next to a corpse.
Thirty minutes passed with no word from Honolulu, despite my regular distress calls. Oddly enough, the silence from Honolulu made me relaxed.
“When they get back to me…that’s when I’ll be scared,” I muttered.
When Honolulu got back to me, I’d have to accept that I just might live through this. So long as they were silent, I fully expected to die, and thoughts of death were a comfort. Death was an escape from this nightmare. Death was the only solution I could imagine that solved all the problems. Even if I successfully landed this plane, I still had to get all the living out of here and into the hands of medical staff, even though we clearly would be in quarantine, every last one of us. If Honolulu would just answer, I could give that problem to them to solve. I could tell them to prepare a triage station and bring out the men in space suits.
But they weren’t answering. They were leaving this all up to me.
Me and Ping.
I was terrified that we were going to land this plane only to find that the authorities demanded that we all stay on board while they figured out what to do. When that happened, I’d be with Ping in the back, wading my way through all the sickness. At least when we were in the air, I could hide out in the cockpit.
I might rather crash this jet in the sea than get locked inside on the tarmac. If Honolulu didn’t start talking soon….
I shook my head, aware that my thoughts were no different than Captain Jenner’s crazy rant. Captain Jenner lost it. He was too weak to see this through to the end. I needed to be better than that.
I needed to be like Ping, who, at that moment, was slapping away a crazed passenger’s reaching hands. Tough as nails that woman was. I took a deep breath, telling myself if she could do it, then so could I. I picked up the radio again and made another distress call to Honolulu.
Again, I got no answer.
“Shit! Shit! Shit….Rachel!”
It was Ping, screaming at me over the private line to the cockpit.
“What is it?” I said.
“The woman in 18D bit me. She latched onto my forearm with her teeth and ripped out the skin. I need help wrapping this up.”
“Here I come,” I said. I engaged the autopilot. We had about ten minutes before I needed to begin the descent into Honolulu.
Into silent, invisible Honolulu.
Opening the door to exit the cockpit, the stench hit me immediately. Sour, rancid, foul—we were a flying tube of filth. I thought it had been bad in the cockpit, but it was far, far worse in the cabin.
The noise they made was even more unnerving than the smell. On top of the hum of the engines was a chorus of whines and moans, the sounds of sickness and fear personified. The visual to go with tho
se sounds, just in first class alone, where every seat was filled with a clammy ghost of what was once a person, people who belonged in intensive care with tubes down their throats and calming drugs pumped into their bloodstreams, but instead were here, in my plane, all of them dying together.
And then there was Ping. My poor, beautiful Ping, her shiny black hair still pulled back in a tight bun, her cheeks still vibrant with color and life, her eyes sitting atop a well of inner strength. I was standing with Ping before an audience of death. There was nothing romantic about the moment, but it made me love her anyway. In the past hour, this woman had proven herself as heroic and strong as any person I’d ever met.
“Let me see it,” I said.
Ping held up her left arm. A patch of skin was mangled and torn half-way between her wrist and elbow.
“Good Lord,” I said.
“The fever is getting to them,” said Ping. “They are going crazy, I think. That one in 18D—I actually thought she was dead. She’d been out for more than an hour.”
Ping had already opened the first aid cabinet in the galley and pulled out some supplies. I helped her tend to the wound. We started with alcohol swabs. She grimaced at the pain, but held strong. Then I took her to the sink and ran some water over her arm. I dried it with a towel and went over it with another swab, then I wrapped it in gauze.
“We’ll be on the ground in forty minutes,” I said.
“Then what?” Ping said.
“I don’t know.”
“What has Honolulu said?”
“Nothing. They’re not answering my distress call.”
Ping wrinkled her forehead, and her perfectly plucked eyebrows came together.
Zombie Apocalypse Serial #2 Page 7