by Bob Howard
“Let’s get this over with,” said Addison.
Anne took the first watch on the area around the airport while Susan handled the rope that was tied to the bucket of paint.
Addison got down on her knees with her feet facing the ledge and backed up slowly. Once she was completely supported by the rope, she sat back comfortably in the harness and was able to begin using her feet for balance. She reached for the bucket and dipped her brush into the paint.
Oblivious to the big drops and splashes of paint that she didn’t get on the wall, she worked quickly on the message. Below her there were dozens and then hundreds of hands reaching up at her as she moved from the left to the right.
She only looked down again when she had finished the job, and she was surprised by the size of the crowd. Some of them had painted faces, but the crowd was so large that the painted faces were being crushed against the wall the way they had been when Sim had escaped the hangar.
Addison used her feet to push herself out from the wall as if she was in a standing position and inspected her work.
SIM, ALL LADDERS ARE UNLOCKED. EXECUTIVE ONE
It was messy, but it was clear enough to read. She was proud of the finishing touch they had agreed to when Garrett suggested they should put their temporary call sign on the message. After all, the President was responsible for them being stuck in the airport in the first place.
******
Sim didn’t return. As the winter wore on, the snow became deeper and deeper until trams, luggage trains, and the infected dead themselves disappeared under a white blanket. Snow removal equipment that would normally be clearing the runways and taxiways remained parked in their buildings.
After they found the body of a man at the top of a ladder, they began posting watches on the roof of the terminal at the highest points that weren’t buried in snow.
The man had been bitten several times, but what had killed him was the single shot to the side of his head. There was a gun frozen to one hand. It wasn’t hard for them to guess what had happened, but the smart decision of one man didn’t mean everyone would be as smart.
Until the snow began to melt, the days were quiet. The white blanket showed no new signs of movement for months, and the crew of Executive One reached a decision. As much as they hated the cold, if they wanted to live, they would have to go north. They didn’t know if the freezing cold temperatures killed the infected, but they could see for themselves that the infected could be frozen solid.
As the snow melted, they could see the heads appear. It was a really strange sight as they surveyed the tarmac between the buildings and the grounded planes. Dots of dark colors rose above the white blanket, and gradually the faces.
They remained still as the snow melted to their necks, but as the sun warmed their heads, they rotated. They turned left and right as they searched for living flesh, but their bodies remained frozen beneath them.
Jon, Mike, and Garrett stood at the top of the ladder Sim had used when he left. They were watching the heads moving in the deep snow, and Jon had commented that it would be a good time for them to go down and thin the infected population a bit.
As the others pointed out to him, they would be walking on the backs, shoulders, and heads of the ones they couldn’t see yet.
“I know,” said Jon. “It was just wishful thinking. It makes me think of that game where you try to use a big mallet to hit a mole when it sticks its head out of the ground.”
“Wack-a-mole?” asked Garrett.
“That’s the one. I picture myself pushing something like a big mower around on the surface of the snow just mowing over all of those heads,” said Jon.
“If it was only that easy,” said Mike. “I think we could nail a bunch of them after they freeze, but it’s already too late this year. It already feels like we’ve been here for a few years. Would one of you please remind me when it began snowing this year?”
They gave it some thought, and Jon said, “I think it was around the third of January, but I don’t think they seriously froze for a couple of weeks after that. Why?”
Mike said, “We should be ready to move around then next year. We can travel north toward Minnesota until we get to a place where we can survive better than them. Then every winter we can go out and hunt for them while they’re popsicles.”
“Why Minnesota?” asked Jon.
“That’s easy,” said Garrett. “We can’t reach Barrow, Alaska, so we need to go to International Falls, Minnesota.”
“It gets cold there?”
Mike and Garrett couldn’t believe Jon had never heard of the coldest town in the United States.
“They stay below freezing almost nine months out of the year,” said Mike.
“Well, if we can make it here until then, count me in,” said Mike.
That evening the men told the three women what they had discussed. The resignation on Susan’s face was obvious. It meant she had to give up any idea of ever seeing her family again. She had been gradually letting the fact sink in, but going north would make it final.
In the end, it was agreed to by all. They would go to Minnesota as soon as it froze in Ohio. The further they would go, the colder it would get, and if they were right about the infected dead freezing, they could destroy them as they traveled.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY MIGHT HAVE felt differently if they had a clue they would need to survive another year in the airport, but eventually the late night campfire discussions got around to delivering some payback. They felt like getting even with the mindless creatures that were trying to end their lives.
The flight crew of Executive One had survived most of their first winter in John Glenn International Airport. Sim was gone, but the rest of them were determined to stay together.
When they talked about how Sim had slipped away, they had mixed feelings about him. They hoped he had survived, but they felt abandoned by him, too. The rest of the crew made a solemn promise to each other to stay together no matter how long it took for them to either be rescued or find a better place.
It was Jon’s crazy idea to try to eliminate some of the infected, and it was just in time. The temperature was still below freezing, but toward the middle of the day it was getting warmer. The ice melted and refroze until there were large patches of ice with body parts sticking out of them.
They had seen a pack of wild dogs, maybe wolves or coyotes, crossing a field at the perimeter of the airport. Whatever they were, they took advantage of the abundance of meat that wasn’t trying to get away from them. They showed up in the morning, fed, and then disappeared again until the next morning.
The crew of Executive One was up on the roof watching for activity, human or otherwise, and the dogs had just appeared for their morning meal.
Jon said, “Maybe they have the right idea. What’s to stop us from disposing of a few of them while it’s still cold?”
“It’s dangerous down there," said Susan.
“It’s dangerous everywhere,” Jon snapped back just a little more forcefully than he intended. “I’m talking about being careful and not overdoing it.”
Garrett said, “I like the idea, but I think we can take it a step further.”
He had the attention of the others, half with interest and half with concern. They all felt like fighting back, but they had become accustomed to the idea of going north next winter, not doing something so soon.
He spoke as if he couldn’t believe what he was suggesting himself, and he grinned just a bit. At another place and time someone might think he was kidding.
“We have all that jet fuel sitting down there in trucks. We could put that to better use.”
Jon said, “Boss, we don’t want to blow the place to pieces.”
Garrett chuckled and said, “I was thinking of something a little more controlled. What if we just got some fuel into smaller containers and went around pouring it on their heads? Then we could set their heads on fire.”
All six of them
surveyed the frozen sheets of ice that still covered the airport. There were very large places that were completely white and dipped downward toward the middle. They knew those were places that were too deep to go near. It would be easy to fall into those drifts and disappear from view.
The other places that were higher, the runways, taxiways, docking areas, maintenance areas, and parking lots near buildings were all peppered with parts of the frozen infected sticking out of the ice.
“Aren’t we too late?” asked Anne. “I mean, isn’t it a bit dangerous now because it’s getting warmer? Sorry Jon, I don’t want to upset you, but if we were going to kill them, we should have started a long time ago.”
“I think I see what he’s getting at,” said Mike. “If we go down there and try to kill them, it will take time, but if we just go down there and put a little fuel on each one, we could cover a lot of ground in a hurry. Then we would just have to light them.”
Garrett added, “We have lots of buckets and lots of cups. What if we just go down and pour a cup of fuel on as many as we can. I’m not talking about trying to do too much, and if we’re careful and don’t spill any on the ground between them we won’t start a wildfire that will spread to the airport or the fuel trucks. We can also just get the ones with their heads poking out of the ice since burning them won’t kill the ones that are buried.”
A couple of hours later, they were standing at the top of a ladder.
“I don’t believe we’re doing this,” said Susan.
“You can stay here with Addison and keep watch if you like,” said Jon.
Susan gave him a withering stare but went down the ladder anyway.
They decided to use a ladder on the opposite side of the building from the one they had originally drawn the infected dead toward on the day Sim made his escape. The bodies were piled so deep around that ladder that many of the infected were already totally dead, but some weren’t, so they wouldn’t know exactly where it was safe to step.
There was also no direct sunlight on the area at the bottom of the second ladder, and there was a beautiful sheet of ice where they wouldn’t run into anything that was likely to bite them.
Garrett tied a couple of ropes to the bottom rung of the ladder and explained that the ice would be too slippery to walk on, so if they had to reach a ladder in a hurry, they should grab a rope and pull themselves to the ladder.
The nearest fuel truck wasn’t far away, and Mike had already filled six buckets. They had considered cups and even paint brushes as the method of distribution, but they were worried about exposure to the fuel. It was toxic to breathe, and if it got on their skin or their clothes, they could be severely burned.
In the end, it was the expensive restaurant that offered the best tools. Long handled soup ladles were sticking out of each bucket. They would allow for safety, and as Mike suggested, maximum and accurate distribution.
It seemed as if the sun was reflecting off of everything, and even though it was still freezing, the sky had never appeared so blue. They wove a path through the body parts that were exposed above the ice and worked their way almost to the hangar where Air Force One served as a daily reminder of how they had come to be abandoned in John Glenn International Airport.
They stayed away from the uncertain shaped drifts that could either be vehicles or solid fixtures they shouldn’t burn. Some of them were also groups of the infected that had been so close to each other that they had remained frozen together all winter.
“Is this far enough?” asked Anne.
Garrett studied their progress and saw that it appeared they could each wet down a large number of heads where they were.
“Yes, this is a good place to start. Remember, it won’t take much, so use about a half ladle for each head.”
To the casual observer, they would have been a strange sight. They resembled farmers going through a white field of crops, each one tending to some unusual plants.
It wasn’t hard work, but it was nerve wracking. As the fuel was poured across each icy head, ice melted away, and more than one of the infected twitched. If they had started this project a week or two later, it would have been too late.
Their buckets went empty at about the same time, and they each returned for refills. When they returned to where they had left off, there was some satisfaction in seeing how many of the frozen infected had wet heads.
Within no time they had each been able to douse about fifty or sixty heads each, and they stood in a small circle at the bottom of the ladder.
“Okay, now comes the fun part,” said Garrett.
They unpacked a bag of flares, and Jon passed them out.
“Let’s see who has a good arm,” he said when he was done.
Jon lit his first flare and lobbed it almost all the way to the back row of heads. The flare bounced neatly off the top of one head and hit another. From there it rolled and bounced to a stop in the snow.
Anne gave Jon a scowl normally reserved for juvenile delinquents, and Jon got the message. If the best he could do was light two heads with one flare, they would be at it all day, and they would need a few hundred flares.
They all made their way back out to the last row of heads and began systematically lighting them with their flares. As they did, they worked their rows so they would be back at the ladder before the last ones were lit.
It was a spectacular sight, and Addison was waving for them to get back up the ladder. At first they thought it was because she wanted them to see what the view was like from above, but then they noticed her movements were just a bit more frantic than normal.
They used the ropes to pull themselves across the slippery ice to the ladder and started climbing. Anne and Susan went up first with Jon, Garrett, and Mike trailing behind.
When they reached the roof, Addison was pointing excitedly beyond the cloud of smoke that was coming from the hundreds of burning heads.
Even though Addison was trying to get their attention, they couldn’t tear their eyes from what they had done. Across the white, shining surface of snow and ice, flames shot up from row after row of burning heads that were moving forward, backward, and side to side. The infected were still trapped in the ice, but their burning heads flailed wildly. The smoke came together above them and rose into one massive column.
Addison started screaming, and the others finally understood that she was pointing at something beyond the smoke and fire.
When they saw what she was pointing at, they were glad to be back on the roof of the terminal.
The horde of infected moving their way was beyond anything they had seen so far. The crowd they had drawn to the side of the building on the night when Sim had escaped from the hangar was a handful of stragglers compared to what was moving their way now. They stretched from the horizon on the right to where the buildings blocked their view on the left.
Jon said, “I think this is one of those times when you just have to say it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“But where are they all coming from if these are all frozen around here?” asked Garrett.
“The city,” said Anne. “We waited too long, but this is something we need to remember when we head north to Minnesota. If they get caught out in the open when it freezes, they’ll stay frozen, but if they get inside a building before they freeze, they may stay mobile all winter.”
“I guess we learned something even if it didn’t work out the way we planned,” said Garrett. “We destroyed several hundred of them even if it attracted more to the area.”
The horde had reached the other side of the column of smoke and was disappearing behind it when Anne realized they had made another mistake. It wasn’t too late to fix this one, though.
Anne began dragging at the rest of them and screaming to get down.
“They can’t see us up here yet. They’re being drawn to the fire and smoke.”
Everyone dropped flat to the roof and then eased forward toward the edge of the building. It was too fascinating not
to watch.
The column of smoke was gray and black, and the jet fuel gave it a greasy, oily appearance. At the base of the smoke, heads were snapping back and forth so hard they could have broken off at the neck. Beyond the smoke they could see patches of the horde, and it was so immense that it was approaching from the sides.
Within minutes there were bodies stumbling around in the smoke, falling over on the burning heads and catching their own ragged clothing on fire. Then the smell blew over the top of the terminal.
It smelled like someone was roasting fatty, greasy pork. Gagging was unavoidable, and they all started pulling scarfs over their faces. Their eyes were watering, but they couldn’t take their eyes away from the spectacle.
Throughout the smoke there were flare-ups as new bodies caught fire. There would be a bright flash of yellow and orange, and then the smoke would close in to hide the rest of the scene. A short distance away there would be another burst of color, and it would happen again. Sometimes there were several new fires at the same time, and it was just like the 4th of July with fireworks when the audience just had to make exclamations out loud to show its appreciation.
“I keep expecting a finale,” whispered Jon.
“I have an idea,” said Garrett as he crawled backward from the edge. “Jon just said what we’re all thinking. We need to see this from another angle so we can get an idea about how long it will go on.”
Garrett got close to the center of the roof and ran back toward the main terminal. He kept going until he was able to cross over onto a wing that was roughly ninety degrees to the position of the rest of the group. When he was sure he could see the other side of the column of smoke, he got low to the roof again and crawled forward.
Anne reached for her radio when Garrett keyed his microphone. The batteries would need to be charged again, but as long as the plane had enough power left, they would have the radios as one of the luxuries.