by Bob Howard
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE EXPERIENCE KATHY and the Chief brought to the group was not so much a greater skill as it was their acceptance of what had to be done. If that meant outrunning a horde of the infected, then that’s what they would do. They had about two or maybe three miles of open ground in front of them, and that would be a piece of cake to the soldiers assigned to Captain Miller’s squad. The last thing Kathy and the Chief wanted to do was slow them down, so they set the pace.
When they started running, the sound of the horde was similar to a train rolling slowly on a set of rusty railroad tracks. The groaning, the dragging of legs, the trampling feet of the infected that were still capable of walking faster than the others all combined into one continuous noise that scraped at the nerves. By the time they had covered a half mile, the sound of the horde was fading, and they could see that the infected had slowed their pace a bit. It wasn’t that they had lost interest. It was more that they were no longer worked into a frenzy.
About a mile into their run they reached the end of the paved runway, and the Captain called for a brief stop for everyone to catch their breath. The horde had tried to funnel itself down a narrow dirt road, so it hadn’t even gone a quarter of a mile yet. Those infected that had chosen to follow by walking into the trees along Dorchester Road had gotten so spread out and tangled up in the uneven brush that they would take a full day just to reach the runway.
“Captain, you still have all of your pilots, right?” asked the Chief.
“That’s affirmative. You have something in mind, Chief?”
“He always has a plan B, remember?” said Kathy.
Kathy was also curious about alternative plans from the start because the Chief hadn’t voiced his thoughts about them.
“I know we talked about trying for one or two of the helicopters, but there’s no reason we can’t try for all three. I’ve been thinking that we might want to take a larger group to Columbus.”
“How large?” asked Kathy.
“Everyone except Molly,” he answered, “and we can drop her off at Fort Sumter. I’m sure she won’t mind spending some time with Whitney.”
“You mean Sam, don’t you?”
They both knew Molly would jump at the opportunity to spend some time around the only eligible boy she knew. They just had to sell Tom on the idea. As for Whitney, she was a typical teenage girl, so she already had a crush on a dozen or more of the young men in Captain Miller’s squad.
“Your plane’s big enough for your crew, isn’t it?” asked Captain Miller.
“It is, but if we take along that many soldiers and the Mud Island gang, we could use the third helicopter for supplies. We may also be coming back with more gear or more people.”
“I get your point,” he said. “Well, first things first. Getting flight crews to the helicopters isn’t going to be much of a problem. It’s getting the helicopters prepped and into the air that should be fun.”
The Chief wasn’t concerned, and Captain Miller had seen that relaxed expression before. It was the one that said he had an ace up his sleeve, he knew something no one else did, or he was going to do something crazy.
Kathy saw it too, and she poked him in the ribs.
“We have to start running again in just a minute. Would you care to show us your hold cards now, or are we going to have to beg you?”
The Chief was the only person Kathy had ever known who could be so cool and calm while a horde of the infected was falling all over itself to gain ground on them.
“I was studying the high resolution pictures back at the shelter, and I think those helicopters have been here long enough to have been prepped already. The rotors need to be extended after they’re rolled out into the open, but face it, that’s a job that can be done with the infected walking around because the work is done high enough above them. You just need to be careful and not drop any tools.”
“Go on,” said Kathy. “I think both of us want to know what you have in mind.”
“It’s simple. I’ll use one of those executive choppers to drop all of the pilots and maintenance people onto the roofs around the three VH92A helicopters. I’ll get someone on the outside of that fenced area who can open the gates. Then I’ll fly over to the flight line and set down. They will definitely follow me. As I draw them out I’ll keep backing away. There’s plenty of room out on the flight line. I can draw out the ones that want to follow. Your guys can get on top of the Sikorsky birds and start working, and a couple of people can secure the doors on the buildings inside the fence.”
“You always make it sound easy,” said Captain Miller.
“This one is easy when you compare it to some of the other dumb things we’ve done,” said Kathy, “or are you forgetting how we met?”
Captain Miller had to admit. When he saw a seaplane circling Fort Jackson and dumping fuel on the heads of thousands of infected dead, he didn’t think he would ever see anything crazier in his lifetime. Compared to that little trick, this plan was like earning a Boy Scout merit badge.
“No, I remember that night quite clearly. If not for you guys, we wouldn’t be out here running from a couple thousand infected dead with one thing on their tiny little minds. As a matter of fact, we could even be back there in that nasty crowd ourselves.”
“Speaking of which,” said Kathy, “when you can smell them, they’re getting too close. We might want to get the rest of this show on the road before they grow new brains and figure out what we’re doing.”
The Captain signaled to his men, and everyone got up for the next leg of the short marathon run. This time they had to run along the stretch of runway that passed within one hundred yards of the main concourse of the Charleston International Airport, and so far they didn’t have a clue if they were going to run into any resistance.
Kathy nudged the Chief and said in a low voice, “You’re up to something. I can tell.”
He tried to act innocent at first, but she was staring him down.
“Okay, I’m up to something, but I’m not ready to tell you what.”
“I don’t care if you’re ready or not. You’re going to do something crazy, and I want to know what it is.”
“It’s not too crazy,” he said.
He tried to come across as reassuring, but it wasn’t working any better than acting innocent.
The Chief sighed.
“How about letting me tell you about it right before I do it? I want to test a theory.”
“You mean you’ll tell me what it is when it’s too late to stop you.”
“Something like that, but I’ll promise you this much. If you really don’t think my theory will work when I test it, I’ll stop.”
“Why doesn’t that make me feel any better?”
The soldiers had all passed them, and they found themselves alone for a minute. Face to face at the end of the runway, in a wide open field, about to do something crazy again, Kathy had that feeling she sometimes got when she was with the Chief. The Chief was like her father, and she had some strong feelings for Tom, but she couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if the Chief was a few years younger. Of course it was just possible that she wished he had someone significant in his life, too.
The Chief would never hear it from her, but she had often wished she could risk the radiation around Lake Norman just to bring Iris Mason back to Mud Island. She could really see Iris and the Chief as a couple.
Of the four shelters they had been to so far, the one at Lake Norman was the one they wouldn’t be able to go back to until the radiation covering it had a chance to dissipate. Of course that would all depend upon whether or not the Oconee Nuclear Plant was still leaking radiation, and how much of it had been deposited over Lake Norman.
Kathy doubted they would be going to the shelter in the Gulf of Mexico anytime soon, but she also doubted there was a woman in that shelter who was right for the Chief, either.
“What?” asked the Chief. “Why’re you looking at me like tha
t?”
Kathy opened her mouth to say one thing, but something entirely different came out.
“Ever think about settling down, Chief?”
He gave her a little bit of a chuckle, but he knew her well enough to know there was something else being left unsaid.
“You might want to save that topic for a better time, like when we aren’t on the menu.”
He hooked a thumb back toward Dorchester Road for emphasis. Kathy glanced back that way out of reflex, and it might as well have been every infected dead in South Carolina coming after them.
“Point taken,” she said.
They both started trotting to catch up with Captain Miller’s men, and it didn’t take them long to see why the soldiers were running faster than they had been before. The airport was far from deserted.
It hadn’t surprised them at all to see the wreckage of planes at the airport. As a matter of fact they had ignored the debris for the most part because they knew what the first days had been like. It only took a moment for them to admit it was bad enough to be on a cruise ship, but being at an airport was no better than being at a hospital on the first day. As much control as they thought they had at airports, they had no control over people trying to escape who had already been bitten.
Airports were where people expected protection, but even more importantly they expected to escape. People who got onto airplanes to get away from the spread of the infection didn’t understand there was nowhere to go even if their plane did take off. Ironically, some of the wreckage was from planes that had landed at the airport. They had arrived despite the warnings from the control tower that the place they were trying to land was no better than the place they had come from.
There was also no way to leave the infection behind when you were traveling with hundreds of strangers. Even if a pilot listened to all of the airport control towers that were shouting their warnings and landed in a remote, isolated place, the odds were good that they had already brought the infection with them.
The infected that had managed to pick their damaged bodies up from the rubble along the runway had long since wandered away in search of the living. Where they had gone was anybody’s guess, but there were more living people inside the airport than anywhere else nearby, so that was where most of the infected dead had gone.
People inside the airport felt like there had to be a way to keep the infected from getting inside, and wherever they could they had blocked doors and stairwells. For a while at least, they survived, but it was only a matter of time. In the end, the places they barricaded the most were the places where they died because they had barricaded bite victims inside with them, and the places where they died became the places they would remain forever.
The airport terminal was filled with the infected. Every square inch of glass shorter than six feet high had a body pressed against it. Whether it was a hand or a face, there was an infected pushing at it with one goal in mind, and the urge to reach a living person was the strongest incentive to break out that they had experienced since that first day.
The Chief and Kathy had experienced something similar when they had flown to Guntersville, Alabama. They had discovered a country club full of the infected, but the infected had been unable to escape because they didn’t have the incentive to break the big glass windows.
Spider webs of cracks were climbing up the glass where the weight of bodies was the greatest. Fortunately, the waiting areas and concourses in airports are seldom at ground level, and it was obvious that there was going to be a little extra time to get by the airport if the glass broke too soon.
As expected, the first window shattered quickly, and the horde of infected pushing on the glass fell in great heaps of bodies at the base of the building. Those on the bottom were crushed and would never be a danger again. Those on the top of the pile were so tangled with the rest of the infected that fell with them, that it would be a long time before they began pursuing the living who were now sprinting past them.
The few that were immediately dangerous were the ones that fell on top then rolled down the sloping piles of bodies. Some even rolled until their momentum practically stood them up on the concrete loading zones.
“Keep going,” yelled Captain Miller. “They won’t be able to catch up with us.”
A second window shattered with a high pitched wail as stress caused the glass to explode outward. It was almost worth stopping to watch because it was directly above a small horde of infected that had broken away from the pile under the first window. The infected that were already eagerly groaning and walking toward the soldiers just disappeared under the new avalanche of bodies.
The smell was awful. The airport must have been filled to capacity when everyone inside died. Without air circulating through the building and decay happening twenty-four hours a day, the gases had built up to a staggering level. It was probably close to blowing out the windows without any help from the infected. When the windows finally shattered, the invisible burst of wind from the building felt almost like being punched with a solid wall of air.
No one laughed at the soldiers who gagged. To do so meant opening your mouth, and no one wanted to get a taste of what the wind carried. A glance toward the building was enough for everyone to know they needed to run faster.
One plane was still attached to a retractable loading platform, and a baggage cart was underneath the plane. Even as the population of the world was dying, people were still trying to check baggage through security.
A second plane had backed a few feet away after loading, but someone had driven a baggage cart straight into the path of the starboard side landing gear. The plane had continued to back away from the terminal, and the tires had blown.
The people on that plane must have thought they weren’t going to survive because of the careless baggage cart driver, but judging from the devastated faces pressed against the windows, they were already going to die. Someone on the plane had been bitten.
The third plane at the terminal had given its occupants a more certain death. Professionalism had unraveled due to the panic of the airport maintenance crews, and fuel had ignited everything around the plane. It had burned furiously until everyone inside had died, and then it had burned a while longer.
“We need to move,” yelled the Captain, and everyone picked up speed.
The helicopter landing area was about two hundred yards past the terminal, and everyone knew it would take time for the infected to cross that distance, but they didn’t know how much time they would need to get one of the executive helicopters into the air. There was always the possibility that the reason they hadn’t been used to escape was because they needed lengthy maintenance.
If that turned out to be the case, they had two choices. They could abort the mission and begin trying to circle back to the railroad tracks where they had left the Cormorant, or they could continue on foot across the Air Force Base and try to liberate the Navy helicopters by force.
The Chief and Kathy pulled up even with Captain Miller.
“We thought we would have more time to get a bird in the air,” said the Chief. “Those infected are going to be on us before we can even warm one up. Any ideas?”
“That’s been on my mind the whole time. If we don’t need to get inside the building, what are the chances we can get on it?” asked Captain Miller.
The building they were heading for had a flat roof and was only one floor.
“I agree with what you’re thinking, Captain. Get everyone on the roof and have them start eliminating the infected that are the closest. Leave four on the ground with me, and they can join you guys if it gets too busy on the ground.”
“I’ll go to the roof,” said Kathy. “I don’t know anything about helicopters, but I can shoot.”
They crossed a short stretch of overgrown grass and ran up onto a concrete landing area. Two small taxiways for private planes led to the landing area, and both had the evidence of failed escape attempts parked half on and half o
ff of the concrete.
Most of the planes were intact, but aside from the fact that the Chief didn’t have any stick time in a jet plane, there weren’t many places to land them. He had no doubt that every airport in the country was like this one, and he didn’t want to get one of the planes into the air if he didn’t have a place to set it back down.
The squad split into two groups as they approached the building. The Chief ran straight for the nearer helicopter of the two and quickly inspected the inside. There were no signs that there had been an infected trapped inside. He pulled the pilot’s door open and climbed into the seat. As he expected, the helicopter must have been in the process of getting ready to escape when something had happened to the owners. The bird was ready, but the people who planned to use it didn’t make it.
One of the soldiers wheeled a cart up to the side of the helicopter while a second opened the battery well. The Chief eyed the electronics and let out a low whistle. The only thing he had ever flown was a really basic two seat bird that was nothing special. This thing was as foreign as the space shuttle to him.
He turned in the seat and surveyed the passenger area. Wide brown leather seats, deep carpeting, rich wood trim on everything, a TV, and what had to be a bar stocked with a variety of liquors.
“Probably got delayed because there wasn’t any ice,” he said out loud.
Outside the popping of M4’s had started. It was a bit sporadic, which meant they were only shooting at the infected that had crossed an invisible line. The Chief started locating the buttons and switches for everything he recognized and would worry about the rest later.
He found what he figured was the power switch and was rewarded by more indicator lights than he could believe. One of them was the ignition, and when he started the engine he also felt more at home behind the controls. He had something on his mind that he had read about a year or so before the infection, and he didn’t know if it would work, but he had to try.