“Yup,” the blond said, nodding as he zipped up his jacket. He spoke loud enough to be heard over the droning of the three engines. “They use parachutes. They’re called Paraplanes.”
Larissa didn’t seem affected by the noise of the planes, even as Chico carried her in front of the first one. As he settled her into one of the seats, it was apparent that Larissa was already out cold. Her head lulled to the side and Chico carefully held it while slipping a u-shaped pillow around the front of her neck and using Velcro to keep it there.
Wendy jogged to Larissa’s side and knelt in the snow alongside the paraplane as Chico climbed in beside the girl. As he strapped her in, Wendy felt for a pulse, looked into the girl’s pupils, and held a finger over her nose to feel how well she was breathing. She seemed stable.
“She’s okay,” Chico shouted over the engine noise.
She wanted to ask him how the hell he would know?
“We have to go now, Doctor,” the blond shouted as he pulled Wendy to the next paraplane. She didn’t struggle, letting him slide her into the passenger seat and clip her into a five-point safety harness. She watched Chico care for Larissa, using strips of Velcro to secure her arms to her own harness, and her legs to the frame so they wouldn’t dangle. Wendy looked between her own legs at the snow.
“Are you seriously going to fly this thing?”
The whole paraplane shook suddenly and a loud snap from behind made Wendy look back.
“Shute’s open,” Keith shouted from right behind her. A white and gray parachute, anchored to their frame, blew side to side in the wind created by the idling engine. The pattern of the parachute was like military fatigues for snow maneuvers.
Thanks for the warning, asshole.
Wendy tightened her own seatbelt straps and stuffed her numb fingers into her ski gloves.
The blond sat down next to Wendy and strapped himself in. He put on a pair of goggles and moved the throttle in a quick burst, which jolted the whole frame.
Chico held a thumb up to the blond before revving his engine. It growled and chugged, spitting up whirlwinds of snow behind him that lifted his chute off the ground. The whole frame of his craft broke free of its snow-bound mooring and began to drift forward. He pushed his throttle all the way and it began accelerating into the clearing, his parachute rising straight above, lifting his frame so that it bounced over the rough patches of snow.
Wendy felt nervous. She swallowed a lump in her throat and took in a deep breath in an effort to soothe her own anxiety, but it only made her cough.
“Do you work for the Senator?” Wendy asked between coughs. She was beginning to have doubts about her earlier assessment.
“What?” the blond hunter shouted, leaning closer to her.
For as well-planned as this operation had been so far, the use of paraplanes didn’t seem like the kind of thing that anyone would use for their evacuation plan.
Halfway down the clearing, Chico’s paraplane was fully off the ground now, rising slowly, struggling for altitude as the engine groaned to push his aircraft forward.
“Please tell me you three work for the Senator.”
The blond smiled and revved the engine.
Eleven
Once Wendy got over her fear of being suspended in the air by a bulbous, wide parachute lashed by no more than a dozen cords to what felt like a flimsy aluminum frame, with nothing to keep her from plunging hundreds of feet to her death except a loose, uncomfortable seat and a harness latched at her chest, she began to think through her situation again.
From up here, she understood what the blond hunter meant when he said they wouldn’t get caught for another hour. She couldn’t see the EPS building. The expansive forest hid it from sight. Only the top of the crane was in plain view, off to the right and way behind them. It stood eighty feet high, a full three or four stories above the EPS roofline, and it was getting smaller by the minute.
By the time the crane operator made the long climb up, they would be gone. He only climbed up into the thing’s cockpit after 8:00 AM, and he usually went for a coffee in the kennels first to talk with the handlers and review his paperwork.
Wendy dug between her glove and jacket to see her watch. 7:31 AM.
Even if he was early, he wouldn’t risk the climb with the station on alert. Those zombies her captors dumped had made an excellent distraction, probably good for another fifteen minutes of chaos. The blaring EPS alarms were even helping mask the noise of the paraplane engines as they crept away. Even the chopper would take a half an hour to get airborne. Who knew how far they could travel in that amount of time, and with white camouflage for parachutes, they may not have even been visible from the sky.
Worst still, even the weather was on her abductors’ side. The lead paraplane drove straight toward an embankment of low-hanging clouds creeping down a hillside. Wendy knew the cloud cover meant line-of-sight on them would be impossible, for the crane operator, the chopper, or pretty much anything.
A perfect escape plan. Something the Senator’s people would dream up. A covert military operation or something like it.
Except they were heading in the wrong direction. If they meant to cross over the channel, they should have been heading south, not north-east like they were, heading deeper into biter territory while at the same time reversing the direction they had originally driven—a zig-zag escape pattern.
“Shit,” she said, only loud enough to hear herself. The Senator’s men wouldn’t take them deeper into the quarantine zone.
She looked at the blond again. With his goggles covering half his face and his hat pulled low, the only features she could clearly make out were his cheeks and jaw line. By itself it was unremarkable, and yet she could swear she knew him. It irritated her that she had no idea why. She tried to think of all the people who had come to the Rock Island facility as visitors. Doctor Kennedy regularly led small groups of Eloran executives through to show their progress. Wendy tried not to be involved with those dog-and-pony shows, except to be there in her lab coat trying to look busy. She wasn’t good with dumbing down her research for a marketing blurb, though, so Kennedy never introduced her. Parsing her years of scientific research into a flashy sentence felt like an insult to Wendy. Didn’t they know the importance of what she had been working on? Couldn’t they spend just a few hours of their lives out of common courtesy learning the basics of chemical and biological vocabulary? ReZolv. Demarc. Antisol. Which one of these names sounds most like the curative compound?
Wendy sighed.
No, the blond wasn’t one of them. They weren’t the kinds to get their hands dirty.
The growl of the engine surging rattled her from her thoughts. The blond plied the throttle and they rose to meet the cloud embankment, its misty fog swimming over her exposed skin, stinging her face like sheets of ice dragged across her cheeks. As the cloud darkened her eyes watered from the chill.
The blond hunter eased them higher, lifting them away from the shadowy, snowcapped canopy beneath until they were wholly swallowed by haze. The world seemed to gobble up even the noise of the engine. She wanted to ask the blond how he could even navigate like this, how he knew where the trees were, but his expression said it all. Tight lipped, clenched jaw, piercing eyes focused straight ahead, a rigid hand on the yoke, the other plying the throttle so slowly it seemed he feared there might be an enormous wall ahead of them hidden by the haze.
Wendy looked ahead expectantly. Nothing but haze. Grayness. She blinked at more tears. Her vision shimmered. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again to the sight of something white rushing up at them.
“Shit!”
Wendy gripped the frame above her head and straightened her legs, pressing her feet against the foot rests bolted to the front crossbar. The craft turned, tilting Wendy in her seat, threatening to spill her out the side. She sagged into her harness, which thankfully held.
The white thing swatted the frame between Wendy and the blond. Powdery snow burst and
showered them. Wendy recognized the thing as the top of a tree even as she turned her head and closed her eyes. The cold snow hit her face.
“Fuck!” The blond slammed the throttle forward and the engine roared. Branches raked the underside of the frame, scraping against her pants legs.
Please don’t let me die here.
The paraplane swung from side to side, bouncing and jarring Wendy in her seat, a cold wind rushing over her as the roaring engine sucked in more and more air.
Don’t let me die! Please don’t let me die here.
She said it to herself again and again, straight-legged, hands gripping the frame above and below her, head turned so she wouldn’t have to watch their slow plummet into the trees.
It surprised her when light flickered against her eyes. It surprised her more when it became a steady glow, and the jarring bouncing eased. She chanced a look through one eye. It wasn’t what she expected. Her legs eased and she opened her other eye, relaxing her arms, too.
The light of morning broke through the mist, or they had risen above it. She couldn’t tell which, but they were now out of the haze and a clear, nearly endless canopy of emptiness filled the miles between her and the high winter clouds etching the stratosphere. The sight actually startled her.
The blond tapped her arm and nudged her, then pointed ahead, nodding and smiling. “Look,” he shouted over the engine noise.
Ahead of them she could barely make out the parachute of Chico’s paraplane, and that was only because they were so close to one another. Given a few miles between them, she may not have been able to spot him at all. His parachute looked so much like the clouds and snowy tops of the trees, the only thing to give him away was the frame of his paraplane shell cruising just beneath the crest of the sea of clouds, appearing and disappearing as he rode through the undulations.
Wendy wondered if the blond meant to impress her with their escape plan, or just get her to enjoy the majestic scenery. It was certainly a magnificent, and frightening, sight, but one that Wendy wished she didn’t have to see. Regardless of how beautiful this sight was, she would have rather had a normal day.
The blond eased the throttle and let them drift closer to the mist.
Twelve
The fog broke.
They followed a highway that carved through the middle of what felt like endlessly flat plains buried in snow. The occasional solemn, decaying farmstead was the only break in scenery for miles. Things cruised by beneath them at a snail’s pace, and after an hour in the sky, Wendy wondered if they would ever find another town or city, but then the monotony of the emptiness suddenly gave way to the outskirts of civilization.
Farmsteads grew closer together by the mile. Old signs rose out of the earth twenty and thirty feet into the sky, proudly sporting symbols of home improvement and warehouse outlets. Wendy recognized stores in the abandoned strip malls, their doors flung open, windows mostly shattered, and the telltale trails of tamped-down, dirty snow that was a clear indicator zombies lurked within, hiding from the sun and inhospitable climate.
A burgeoning city stood before them, but the paraplanes drifted wide of it, circling around the edge rather than committing to the dangers that prowled its congested avenues. Reaching the northern edge, they began to slow, easing the engines to descend over a mostly empty airport. A small, two-story tower stood beside a clutch of single story buildings and a wide hangar. A few snow-covered private airplanes were tied down, their broken or sagging wings proof that they had been here for years. One plane, however, had neither snow covering it, nor the haggard look of age. It stood at the far end of the runway, and the paraplanes angled toward it for a landing.
The blond hunter slowed the engine and they drifted down until they were floating just an arm’s length over the runway. He cut the engine. It sputtered to silence. Only the wind buffeted against Wendy’s ears, then came the thump and hiss of the frame touching down. The paraplane jostled and shook. Wendy grabbed the frame above her head and grimaced. The paraplane spun out, spinning repeatedly until it rolled on its side and tilted back. The engine dug into the snow as they ground to a halt, feet straight up.
“That could have been better,” the blond hunter said, unclasping his harness and rolling out of his seat to the ground.
The paraplane swung away from him, tipping sideways. Wendy cried out as her shoulder slammed into the snow. Her hands still gripped the frame and seat of the craft as though welded on. She blinked at the powdered snow thrown into her face.
The blond hunter straightened and stretched. He looked around. “Come on, Doctor,” he said softly, waving for her to get out of the paraplane. “We need to get moving.”
The smell of cigarette smoke wafted her way in the breeze and she craned her neck to see Keith standing on top of the parachute attached to his paraplane, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He stuffed his lighter into a jacket pocket, smiling toward her with one side of his face, and nodded. She sneered and turned away, trying to unclasp herself from the seat.
The blond hunter scooped up part of the parachute in front of their craft and started bundling it against his chest. “Chico, prep the plane. We’ll get your chute.”
“I need to pee,” Wendy groaned as she crawled out from the boney frame.
“Make it quick,” the blond hunter said, waving at the runway.
“What, out here?”
The blond didn’t answer. He merely raised an eyebrow, which elicited a juvenile snigger from Keith that infuriated her. She glared over her shoulder at him. He took a drag from his cigarette and smiled as the smoke billowed out through his teeth.
No wonder his teeth are yellow.
She stomped toward Chico’s paraplane and lifted his parachute, diving beneath it and hauling it down over her like a tent. She knelt in the snow while yanking off her gloves, throwing them on the ground out of frustration. “Asshole,” she hissed as she wiggled her pants around her hips. Urinating in the snow was nothing new to her, but she’d never had to do it in front of a bunch of men. The idea of them watching her, even under the canopy of the parachute, made it difficult to get started, and the cold air rising from the snow to chill her sensitive skin froze that earlier feeling of urgency. She concentrated, trying not to think of the men or elements around her…or the thought of a breeze lifting her parachute.
“Any time, Doctor,” the blond hunter called out. “We need to stow the gear.”
“Fuck off!”
Keith giggled again, coughing as he laughed.
“You too,” she said under her breath.
She finally managed to urinate and yanked her pants back on as she knelt in the snow. Her fingers shook as she stuffed them back into her gloves. The air against her exposed skin felt as invasive as the eyes of those outside her makeshift tent, sending a shiver of uneasiness up her spine. She didn’t want to crawl out, and she was self-conscious about the yellow stain in the snow so she started covering it as best she could.
An aircraft engine began to whir and sputter, choking on its own attempt to start. It wheezed to a halt. The sound of it pierced the eerie silence surrounding them. She threw the parachute off. After everything that had happened recently, she expected to see a horde of zombies shambling out of the hangar and tree line surrounding the runway. It wouldn’t take long for them to surround the airstrip. There would be lots of gunfire as the three men tried to set up some kind of perimeter. Everything that could go wrong, would, because that’s how her luck had been lately.
But there was nothing.
She took a deep breath and tried to relax, but only coughed. The cold and snow and time of day seemed to be enough of a deterrent for the zombies. Either that or this area simply didn’t have any zombies left.
The plane engine spat and warbled again, the propeller spinning to the high-pitched whirr of the starting motor. It chugged and caught, backfiring as though a shotgun had been fired into the air. The engine died with the echoing noise.
“Goddammit, Chico,
” Keith yelled out the side of his mouth. The cigarette dangled from the other side. He was kneeling over his rolled-up parachute, trying to stuff it into a pack, but now glared toward the aircraft. “Did you forget to prime it?”
“Fucking engine’s cold as ice,” Chico shouted back through the open door of the small airplane. “I gave the prop four turns already.”
“Don’t flood it!”
“Shut the fuck up, I know what I’m doing.”
“You shut the—!”
“Hey!” The blond roared, glowering toward Keith. “Chico, give it another go. Keith, stow the chutes.”
Keith held his hands out plaintively, pointing toward the chute in front of him. “I’m already—”
“And let him do his job. He knows how to start the engine.”
“I’m just saying, is all,” Keith complained, waving dismissively toward the plane. “If he floods it….”
“I’ll be sure to let him know you told him so.”
“By then the damned biters’ll start coming….”
“We’ve got guns.”
“And we’ll have ourselves a shootout…all I’m saying is he gets forgetful sometimes from all that radioactive shit. It can’t be good for the head, man. Sooner or later, it’s gonna get someone killed.”
The plane’s starter whined. The engine wheezed and sputtered, shuddering as it rattled out one ka-choonk after another. The propeller spun freely, neither dying nor taking hold. It just spun and spun as the engine continued its monotonous ka-choonk, ka-choonk, ka-choonk.
Keith rolled his eyes.
“Duly noted,” the blond said through clenched teeth. He didn’t look happy.
Thirteen
The blond hunter sat with his legs across both front seats of the airplane, his head against the door, his eyes closed. Wendy sat in one of the back seats with Larissa curled up beside her, the girl’s head in her lap. It wasn’t much warmer inside the plane, but in here she at least had a blanket and was out of the wind. Chico and Keith worked on the engine out in the freezing cold, trying to get it to turn over from time to time in between their constant arguments.
Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment Page 5