Shelter for Now

by Bob Howard

  It didn’t take long for them to inspect the other planes to be sure their doors were sealed tight, but they carried every piece of furniture that could be moved from the concourse and blocked the other retractable gateways as well as they could. If something got out of the planes they could meet the threat head on and keep it contained.

  Mike was the one who discovered what they already suspected to be true about the best way to kill the infected. He had been using a pair of binoculars to scan the airport and spotted a man who wasn’t walking like he was infected. The man was carrying something that was shaped like a spear, and he had a variety of weapons on a belt that had most likely come from a hardware store. A hammer and a crowbar weren’t typical weapons.

  The man was pretty far away, and walking parallel to the terminal. Garrett joined Mike at the window, and they watched the man approach a group of infected as if it was an every day thing to him. He used his spear on one, reaching it out toward the face of the nearest infected and then impaling the creature straight through the face.

  Before the first one even reached the ground, the man had pulled the crowbar and hammer free from his belt. He went from one to the other, permanently dropping six more of them.

  “You notice how he’s doing nothing but headshots?” asked Mike.

  “Couldn’t help but notice. You suppose that’s the only way to kill them?”

  “While you and Jon were busy driving the plane around, I had a chance to watch what was going on outside. I saw plenty of them get shot and get back up again, but the ones that took a bullet to the head stayed down.”

  In the evenings before they turned in, they always sat around in a cramped circled and discussed the day. Any ideas, plans, fears, or other emotions were talked out. That way they stayed close, and they stayed sane.

  In one of the first evening meetings they talked about what Mike and Jon had seen. Susan’s first reaction was wanting to know why they hadn’t gotten the man’s attention. Maybe he could have rescued them.

  Garrett had to remind her they had also agreed they weren’t going to count on being rescued. They were going to rely on their own will to live. If the man had been standing right next to the airplane, maybe they would have called out to him, but they couldn’t have even been sure he wasn’t a risk.

  “What if he had already been bitten?” said Anne. “What if he was crazy and tried to kill us? You need to stop thinking that a knight in shining white armor is going to ride in and save us, Susan.”

  Susan had been the last one to mentally accept their situation. She had become quiet and moody. She hadn’t told them her age, but everyone could guess she was in her thirties. She had left behind a husband and a three-year-old boy who was at a day care center when she had gotten onto the 737 at Dulles International Airport. She was surprised when the plane took off without passengers and made a quick trip to Andrews Air Force Base. None of the flight crew knew they were part of a contingency plan to get the President out of the area if he couldn’t board Air Force One. At least two other planes had been redirected to Andrews, but they had drawn the short straw by arriving first.

  They had all lost someone, so they were dependent upon each other to hold themselves together. Garrett and Jon both expected Addison to cave in first, but it had been Susan. Her moody behavior deteriorated into long crying fits, and they had to waste some of their manpower on keeping her under watch. They were sure she would get like the people on the other 737 and simply try to get out of the terminal and run all the way home.

  Her sullen behavior came to an abrupt end when Addison cut her hand on a piece of metal furniture they had dismantled in the concourse. The wound needed a few stitches, and the motherly instinct Susan felt toward her lost child was redirected to Addison. She surprised everyone when she stepped in and took over, cleaning and stitching the cut with expertise. When Garrett designated her as the doctor for their group, Susan immediately set up a first aid center in the plane and did an inventory of their medical supplies. She showed up at the evening meeting as if she had never missed one.

  Garrett studied her neat appearance, her brushed back brown hair and noticed for the first time that she was the living definition of a suburban soccer mom. Even though her son was only a toddler, she had already bought him his first soccer ball. Susan had a future, and she was just starting to live it when the infection took everything away from her. No wonder she had been the last to accept their circumstances.

  The next day they had all gone out to the main concourse with specific goals in mind. They needed to find a way to move throughout the terminal and to locate supplies. The more they brought back, the longer they would survive.

  Sim suggested that they go through the ceilings, which was immediately denounced by the others as a bad idea because airports were made with security in mind. At least that was what they thought until Sim reminded them there was no power to the terminal, and there had been so many major renovations and expansions to the airport that they were bound to find ways to get through the places where the expansions were connected.

  Sim was right. Getting into the ceiling was just a couple of hours of manual labor, and they quickly learned the air conditioning ducts were like a road map. Being a navigator, he was also the one who came up with the idea to mark the ductwork with arrows, directions, and warnings.

  The part that bothered them the most was knowing what was on the other side of each door to the waiting area. There were also big plate glass windows that made them feel exposed. Garrett suggested that they should keep an eye out for paint in the maintenance areas, and maybe they could feel more secure after they painted the glass. He didn’t know it would take almost a year and a half to complete that little chore.

  At first they went as one group, and not everyone went. Garrett, Jon, and Sim told Mike to keep an eye on things while they foraged. They spent most of the day tunneling through firewalls into different sections of the main terminal building, and at first they didn’t really find anything to bring back other than a few personal hygiene items.

  At the evening meeting, Anne had led the women in a rebellion, giving the cockpit crew an earful. She told them they would have rather faced the infected if the men had come back with a tub for the women to wash their clothes in.

  From that day on they had gone out in groups, often rotating the members so everyone got to work together. Their goal had become a food court in the middle of a mall that had been renovated into the terminal during the last expansion. They knew most of the food would be spoiled, but the canned and packaged food could be rationed for a couple of years.

  They had finally reached the Starbucks in the food court and Addison had gone straight for the coffee storeroom.

  The coffee had been the icing on the cake, but over the last eighteen or so months they had other milestones. When Jon had returned with the news that he had found the Security office, and there were likely to be guns, Garrett felt like they were actually going to live through this ordeal. Of course, there was some bad news. The office was occupied by an unknown number of the infected.

  Garrett and Anne climbed into the ceiling and made the long trip to the Security office with Jon. They each carried a piece of long metal pipe with sharpened points on the end. Most of the way they had to walk stooped over with their feet placed carefully on supports no more than two inches wide. It was tough on their backs and on the muscles in their legs, but they had long since given up on complaining.

  When they reached places where they could walk upright, they took a few minutes to stretch out the aches that came from going so far bent over at the waist.

  “This is the worst part up here,” said Jon.

  They could see where Jon had widened a hole above an aluminum duct that went through a wall and then downward at a forty-five degree angle.

  “I went around the ductwork on the side like we always do, but I noticed the duct took a dive so I made the hole on top. It’s hard to go down it without making noise.”r />
  “Is it occupied in the room below it?” asked Anne.

  “Yeah, it got kind of noisy in there when I slid down to the next level. I pulled a light fixture out of the ceiling to see how many of those infected I woke up and had one staring straight up at me.”

  Garrett asked, “How many do you figure?”

  “No way to tell. It wasn’t a security officer, so my guess is that security was trying to protect some people by bringing them into their office.”

  “You said it was right under the hole?” asked Anne. “Was it close enough for you to stick him? Did you give away your position to the others?”

  Jon couldn’t make eye contact with them at first, and both Anne and Garrett wondered what she had said that made Jon act like he had done something wrong.

  “I sort of reacted since he was so close to the hole, and I was practically on top of him.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Anne.

  Garrett suddenly understood, and he had to suppress a laugh. He managed to keep himself quiet, but he couldn’t hide the big smile even in the gloomy light of the ceiling.

  Anne didn’t get it yet and swiveled her head from Garrett to Jon and back again for a straight answer.

  “I sort of yelled,” said Jon.

  Garrett interpreted for Anne.

  “He means he screamed like a little girl. Yes, he gave away his position when he peed in his pants.”

  Jon started to say something, but Anne stopped him.

  “You did what any of us would have done. The screaming part I mean, not the peeing part.”

  Garrett tried not to laugh but failed miserably. When it came out, it was the release he had needed for a long time. Needless to say, they could hear the responding moans up ahead. There was no reason to stay quiet anymore, so they followed Jon as he climbed on top of the ductwork and slid feet first through the hole.

  Garrett watched Anne as she went through and thought about how far she had come in such a short amount of time. She had always been dependable as a member of his flight crew, but it had become more than that. She had adapted to her new role as a member of a team in which one person was no more dependent on someone else, nor was any one person more capable than another. On the plane, Garrett and Jon were the only ones who could fly the thing, so their jobs had been more important. Now that it was survival, Garrett was still in charge, but everyone had to pull their weight.

  Garrett also saw that Anne had become more agile in her new role. Either that or she was just letting other skills show more. He wasn’t sure of her age, but he was guessing she was a little over fifty years old. Of course if she ever asked him to guess out loud, he would say forty-nine. When he thought about it a moment longer, he settled on answering forty-six. It would be safer.

  When he went through the hole the aluminum ductwork made enough racket to wake the dead, and it certainly did. He didn’t know how many were in the Security office below his feet, but he hoped the ceiling was stronger than it felt under him.

  When he slid down the sloping ductwork he was surprised to find they were no longer in a dark space above a ceiling. The section they were over was one of the renovations that had been done in the last few years, and they were under some sort of glass enclosure. He could tilt his head upward and see the sky over him, but there was a brick wall around the entire area that kept the general public from being able to see the ductwork and air conditioning units that were scattered around the enclosure. Glass walls rose above the brick until they met with a glass roof. Modern architecture had to hide the ugly machinery somehow.

  Jon and Anne were already standing on either side of a hole that was only about six inches wide, and there were snarling faces a couple of feet below it.

  “You just pulled up a light fixture and found this?” asked Garrett.

  Jon nodded as if to say he didn’t believe it either. The contractors must have cut some corners when they upgraded the terminal.

  Garrett peered down through the hole in time to see the infected dead get jostled out of the way by another infected. A third, fourth, and fifth infected all pushed the others trying to get a bite from the living meat standing above them.

  “You were right about the pipes,” said Garrett. “Try not to get the tips stuck too deep in a skull, and try not to let any of them get too good of a grip, either.”

  Jon put one foot on either side of the hole, took aim, and let the heavy pipe go like a spear. He immediately jerked it back up and took aim at a second infected. After spearing a few more he started having trouble hitting his targets because of the pile of bodies around the area under the hole.

  “This is like ice fishing,” he said. “We need to find a new hole.”

  When they were finally done and didn’t hear snarling under them, they had pulled up four light fixtures. There were at least thirty bodies under them, and they hoped there was no way for more infected to get into the area below.

  Garrett found the air conditioning return and practically destroyed it to get it out of the way. He stuck his whole upper body down through the opening and turned in every direction to make sure it was safe.

  Satisfied that they had disposed of every infected in Security, he swung his feet around and dropped through the hole. Anne and Jon were right behind him. They spread out to check the bodies of the infected to be sure they were no longer a threat, and then began searching for things they needed.

  They found more than they could carry, but it wasn’t going anywhere, and they could come back for the rest. They loaded up the handguns first. Whoever was in charge of arming the security force had a thing for the Beretta APX, but they weren’t going to complain. They were semiautomatic and each held a fifteen round magazine of nine millimeter shells. There was also enough ammunition in the storeroom for a war.

  They pushed bags of guns and ammunition up through the hole, and then they worked the rest of the day to get it back to the plane. It took two more trips to get everything hauled from one place to the other, but when they were done they felt like they were ready to take on the world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE TARMAC WHERE planes were usually lined up at the Charleston Air Force Base was like a war zone. Hundreds of bodies covered the pavement, mostly in pieces. The same couldn’t be said for the far end of the runway.

  From the rooftops of the buildings around the three US Navy VH92A’s, the Chief and Kathy were watching the advancing horde of the infected. Now that they had reached the wide open fields around that end of the airport, their numbers could be more fully appreciated.

  When they had crossed the highway in front of the leading edge of the horde, they had no idea that they were about to be pursued by thousands of the infected.

  “What do you think?” asked the Chief. “Should I gas up the weed-whacker?”

  Kathy lowered her binoculars and glared at the Chief. When no answer was heard, he lowered his and saw the way she was frowning at him.

  “What?”

  “You know what,” she answered. “Just because it worked this time doesn’t mean it will work again. You mowed down a couple hundred of infected. There are thousands in that horde. All it would take is one time going too deep into the crowd with your rotors for you to lose control. You said it yourself, the blades could go too low and hit the pavement, or the impacts could drive you over at an angle.”

  “But it worked.”

  The Chief sounded like a little kid who wanted to go on the ride at the circus just one more time.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Kathy. “I’ll tell Captain Miller and ask his men to restrain you.”

  “You’ll tell me what?”

  Captain Miller had come up behind them just in time to hear his own name.

  “He wants to do it again with that big horde.”

  Kathy gestured toward the wall of ragged creatures that were slowly covering the airport runways and encroaching onto the military base.

  Jim Miller had learned to enjoy
these humorous moments with the Chief. Tension was high every day, so he welcomed the Chief’s smile. It made his men relax, too.

  He leaned over the edge of the building and caught the attention of one of his snipers.

  “If you see this man climbing into the pilot seat of a helicopter without hearing from me first, shoot him.”

  “Sir?”

  The young man with the sniper rifle rotated his head back and forth between his commanding officer and the Chief, unsure if the Captain was kidding. The Chief was smiling, but the Captain wasn’t.

  Captain Miller saw the confusion and said, “I didn’t say to kill him. Just shoot him in the leg.”

  For a fraction of a second, the soldier appeared to be relieved to have gotten clarification, but then the confused face came back.

  “Your men aren’t trained to kid around,” said the Chief. “Maybe you need to tell him.”

  “Chief, if you try that again, I’ll shoot you myself. If helicopters were meant for mowing down people, they’d have sharp blades. Do you seriously not know that?”

  The Captain’s choice of words only served to make the Chief smile grow even wider, and Kathy had to turn away to keep from laughing.

  “How long before your men will be able to spin up these birds?” asked the Chief.

  “Any minute now. As a matter of fact, I think they’re going to roll the first one out to have room for the rotors to turn.”

  They watched as the efficient soldiers hooked a small towing cart to the front of the first helicopter and began rotating it away from the place where it had been hidden under a tarp.

  The blades were fully extended and locked into place, so wing-walkers positioned themselves to the left and right of the craft as the soldier towing it turned onto the paved surface leading to the gate. It appeared that the gate was wide enough for the blades to clear both sides, but they wanted to be sure. The wing-walkers were good at their jobs as they rotated the blades just slightly to clear the gate.