Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  “Like it wasn’t already?” Vance asked.

  “No, I mean seriously real. You might regret being in Texas.”

  “No one can regret being in Texas, lol,” Vance replied, laughing. Tim and Harry watched him type over his shoulder.

  “Snapshot,” Harry said, “I’ve heard of him. I think he’s in military intelligence.”

  “Right in one,” Vance confirmed, then returned to typing. “Dude, I need more than hints. What do you mean about getting real, and why would I regret being in Texas?”

  “Pull up Google and type in Monterrey.”

  Vance did as instructed, and nothing came up. He checked his spelling, it was correct. He tried making it Monterrey, Mexico and got a few hits for a vacation blog and some restaurants. Nothing else. “What the fuck?” he typed in the chat window. “How can it disappear from the net?”

  “Government controls it all, remember? Net neutrality?” Snapshot reminded him.

  “Sure, okay, but why?” Vance shuddered. “Is it to do with the cannibals? Is it in Monterrey?”

  “It was.”

  Vance stared at the screen for a while. Harry’s silence told him Tim had already briefed their new member. He typed again. “Still, why remove a city from the Internet?”

  “Because it isn’t there anymore.”

  Vance read the words, trying to understand what Snapshot meant. Realization came like a tidal wave, making his head swim.

  “Don’t type it,” Snapshot said, “some words have triggers, even on these kinds of links. Before long we won’t be able to type Monterrey without drawing attention.”

  “They nuked a city,” Tim said behind him. The room fell silent; only the sound of a dog chewing a bone broke it.

  “Why would they nuke a city for some crazy cult?” Ann asked.

  “What if it wasn’t a cult?” Belinda asked. “What if it was a plague?”

  “What kind of a fucking plague makes people into cannibals?” Tim demanded.

  “Zombie plague,” Harry said.

  Ann and Nicole let out a little laugh, then stopped when they remembered one of their most reliable intel sources had just told them a city had been destroyed with nuclear weapons.

  Everyone in the prepper movement liked to joke that prepping for a ZA, or zombie apocalypse, was one of their contingencies. Hell, some companies even sold special ammo and weapons. They were usually just low-velocity bullets, so they wouldn’t over-penetrate a zombie skull, or cheap machetes and hatchets with “Zombie Killer” logos, or weird laser cuts in the metal. Pure crap.

  They all talked about it, but on a scale of one to ten of the things serious preppers prepped for, a ZA was about #85. They were ready for all kinds of possible plagues, from bird flu to bio weapons to a return of smallpox, but a zombie plague? The walking dead eating brains? One of the inside jokes was that the hardest thing about a zombie apocalypse would be pretending you weren’t having fun. They said that, because the very idea was fucking ludicrous. Yet, here they were.

  Vance remembered the scene of the man eating the baby. The look in his eyes hadn’t been human. “Oh, fuck me,” he moaned. He looked at the screen. Snapshot hadn’t typed anything more, he was waiting for Vance.

  “What should we do?”

  “Run.”

  “We can’t. Not part of our plan.”

  “Then be ready for Hell.” The chat window told them Snapshot was no longer on the other end.

  Vance turned to his friends. “We better get to work.”

  * * *

  Andrew woke up, then wished he hadn’t. Buzzers sounded from the control panel, and he was having a hard time focusing with his right eye. He put a hand up to the right side of his face, which was throbbing. When he pulled it away, he could see there was blood on his fingertips. “Oh crap,” he said. One of the dead control screens was fairly reflective, and he could see a jagged cut on his forehead that bled down his face and into his eye.

  He looked around the cockpit and found an unopened bottle of water in a cubby. He took it, popped it open, and poured the liquid over the right side of his face, hissing as it hit the cut. He alternated between pouring water from the bottle and wiping with his flight jacket sleeve, before he’d removed enough of the dried-on blood that he could open his eye again. Luckily, it seemed to be working just fine. He drank the rest of the bottle, then took stock of his situation.

  The plane had stopped and rested at a slight angle. They were facing a taxiway, roughly perpendicular to the runway. It looked like they’d skidded to a stop in the dirt just past the end of the runway. It was a miracle nothing had caught fire. With empty tanks, the plane was a huge fume-filled bomb.

  “THUMP, THUMP!” came from behind him. Someone was pounding on the cockpit door. He glanced at the screen to make sure nothing dangerous needed his attention. He had blown tires, failed hydraulics, and a warning he was running on batteries, because the auxiliary power unit wouldn’t start. Probably something to do with the empty fuel tanks, he mused as he unhooked his safety harness.

  His hand was on the latch of the door, before he fully remembered why he’d been flying the A380. He leaned forward and looked out the cockpit’s peephole. There were three people outside, and all looked completely fucking insane. One, a huge guy who could have been a professional wrestler, pounded the door again. Andrew wondered how tough he really was. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to try and get past three of them.

  He grabbed the tablet and turned to the emergency landing section. “How the fuck do I get out of this crate?” he wondered aloud. He found what he was looking for. “You have got to be kidding me.” As a fighter pilot, some part of him had been hoping for an ejection seat or some other fancy way out. Nope, he wasn’t nearly that lucky, not by half.

  Andrew reached over and worked the complicated latch to release the side window. It popped with a whoosh of equalizing pressure, and he pulled. The window opened toward him on a rail and slid backward, revealing a space about a foot and a half high and two feet wide. Above the window, he opened a panel marked “Emergency Use Only.” Inside, held in place by a retaining Velcro strap, was a length of rope with knots tied every foot. “A half-billion-dollar airplane, and this is the best you asshole engineers could do?”

  Hot air wafted in through the window. The air smelled of burning things, bringing his mind instantly back to thoughts of Monterrey. “Fuck! Fallout!” he thought as he saw the cockpit fill quickly with smoky air. There were portable oxygen bottles back in the flight areas, but nothing up here, only tethered oxygen masks. The sound of the window sliding back had been loud as it was a heavy window. The wrestler’s friends had joined him, and the pounding on the door was more intense now. He thought he heard the sounds of distressed steel and plastic.

  Andrew threw the rope through the window and stuck his head out. It was a disturbingly long way to the ground. Cursing engineers, bean counters, and his fate, he shoved his upper torso out of the hole and wrapped the rope around his left hand. Holding the window frame with his right hand, he slowly began to pull his torso through. He thought of how many pilots he’d seen with beer guts, and wondered if the engineers had thought of that. It was a pretty tight fit, even for his lean frame. He was straddling the window frame, one leg out, one in, when the door latch gave way with a crash, and the door flew inward.

  “Son of a bitch!” he yelled as the wrestler fell into the cockpit and landed a few feet from him.

  “Graaahr!” the man growled. He reached for Andrew, who let go of the window frame.

  Some part of his mind remembered his air rescue and evasion class and commanded his right hand to grab the rope, even as his left one let go. He pivoted and fell, his leg only barely escaping the grasp of the insane wrestler. He was a good five feet below the window before his right hand caught the rope. Several inches of it slipped through his fingers, leaving a painful rope burn, before a knot stopped him from sliding any further. He held on like his life depended on it, and since he w
as falling face first, it did.

  Gravity flipped him around into an upright orientation again, the momentum causing his shoulder to scream in protest as he swung madly from the rope. He had enough presence of mind to grab the rope with his left hand as well, before the pain in his right made him let go. His training echoed in his confused brain, and he wrapped a leg around the rope and trapped it between his feet.

  “Christ on a fucking crutch!” he gasped, breathing hard as he swung there, 30 feet in the air. He looked up to see the wrestler snarling at him out the window. A glance at his hand showed the rope burn was minor. Since he wasn’t holding anything in his hand, he flipped the wrestler the bird. His adversary didn’t appear to appreciate the gesture; he grabbed the rope and heaved. “Oh no,” Andrew said and began to descend as fast as he could.

  The wrestler was as strong as he appeared. He began hauling Andrew up almost as fast as he was going down. Andrew didn’t know how much rope he had, but it couldn’t be that much. Ignoring the pain in his right hand, he let go with his legs and went down twice as fast.

  He felt, more than saw, the end of the rope passing his legs. He kept going until he was at the last handhold, paused a second to bend his legs, and let go. There was no reason to look. Had he taken the time, the wrestler would have hauled him higher. It was either face the wrestler and his buddies up there or drop. He chose an uncertain fate over a certain one and let go. He dropped five feet and landed on grass.

  “Ha!” Andrew laughed, and flipped the wrestler the double bird. “Bite me, motherfucker!” The crazed man took him literally and started trying to wedge his large frame out the window.

  Andrew thought the wrestler was going to climb down after him, so he walked a few steps away, and looked around for the first time. Both of the A380’s port outside landing gear assemblies were collapsed, folded under the plane from the power slide into the softer grass. Smoke was curling up from one of the engines, and a liquid dripped from a wingtip to his left. He figured it must be hydraulic fluid.

  A rapidly approaching screech made him turn as the wrestler hit the ground face-first with a sickening CRUNCH! Andrew tried not to puke as the man’s head folded back along his spine. Blood leaked from his mouth and ears as he spasmed on the ground, then fell still.

  “Fuck me!” Andrew said in horror. “Fuck me!” He looked up just in time to step back a few more feet as a woman crashed to the ground, joining the wrestler’s twitching corpse. She came in flatter, having jumped toward Andrew. Still, a 35-foot swan dive onto hard ground was not something you easily shook off. Her bones crunched on impact as well. After a second, she looked up at him and grunted, one arm reaching for him. She coughed blood from lungs punctured by multiple broken ribs.

  She only managed to reach out toward him once, before another zombified passenger landed on her, this one face-first like the wrestler. Neither of them moved afterward.

  Andrew swore and retreated from the area. The last thing he wanted was enough of the deranged bastards jumping out and landing on each other that they started surviving. It wasn’t until then that he looked around and noticed the time of day. It was considerably earlier than he remembered it being when he “landed” the plane. But how was that possible? Had he been out a whole day?

  He put a hand to his head and probed the injury. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t have that squishy feeling of a fracture. He doubted he would have felt up to jumping out the window and rappelling if he’d had a skull fracture. “The other passengers,” he said, remembering all the people he’d left in the aft galley storage. Then he considered how long it had been, and the condition of everyone he’d encountered on the plane. He ground his teeth together.

  Andrew trotted through the torn-up grass toward the tail of the plane, looking up and taking note of the various hatches as he went. “AFT GALLEY STORAGE” was the last one, and it was almost 20 feet over his head.

  “Didn’t think of that,” he mumbled and looked around, instantly feeling foolish for thinking a ladder would be handily sitting there. Those people had been stuck inside, with a plane full of bloodthirsty and suicidal lunatics, for almost a day. He needed to get them out.

  Standing under the plane with nothing but his well-worn flight suit and a few bucks in his pocket, Andrew decided he didn’t have a lot of options. He looked up the runway at the distant, burning hangar and terminal buildings. There were no emergency vehicles. If there were any left, they’d be helping survivors of the nuclear blast that had destroyed Monterrey.

  Andrew looked down at his arm, now covered in a light gray dust. “I have to get out of this,” he spoke aloud. His survival training had included the effects of nuclear weapons. The decision made, he started jogging toward the terminal buildings. There had to be an airport employee who could help, maybe even security. The question was why, in the last 24 hours, had no one come to investigate a crash-landed jumbo jet?

  The day was warm, with the temperature already exceeding 80, and the sun just over the horizon. In the distance, smoke from fires still rose from the ruins of Monterrey. Eerie silence cloaked the scene. There were no fire trucks, no sirens, nothing. The busiest airport in the region might as well have been a ghost town. About 500 meters of jogging brought him to the first facility building. Ironically, it was the airport fire department.

  Andrew found the big outside doors closed and went to the first man-sized door. It was locked. Not being one to delay, he turned around, cocked his leg back, and gave it a solid mule kick. It took two hits for the latch to give and send the door flying back against the inside wall. Inside, it was almost completely dark, but a shelf by the door yielded a mini-Maglight.

  He flicked it to life and played it around the interior of the building. The huge, squat fire trucks used at airports sat in their spaces and showed no signs of recent use. “Damn,” he said, his voice echoing through the cavernous building.

  “Graag!” came an answer.

  “Shit,” Andrew hissed, and jerked the door closed with a creak and a bang. With the latch broken, though, it slowly began to swing inward again as footsteps came running in his direction. Whoever approached sounded like the sick people on the plane! Was the same sickness here in Monterrey, too? Slowly a corner of his mind started assembling the pieces of the puzzle. A road in Mexico choked with thousands of refugees. Sick people on the plane. Sick people here. Was this a global pandemic?

  He looked around, his fight-or-flight instinct pumping adrenalin into his bloodstream, making his eyes open wide. The next closest building was more than 200 meters away, and all he had to protect himself was the little Maglite. Whoever or whatever it was, the sound of footfalls was only a few feet away when he had an idea.

  Someone jerked the door open from inside, and a figure in firefighter Nomex raced out and into Andrew’s outstretched leg. “Gaarch!” the fireman growled and crashed to the ground face-first. Andrew saw his attire and was afraid he’d just injured an honest-to-God fireman. Then the man rolled over, and he got a look at the person’s face, caked with dried blood. Several recently-shattered teeth dangled from his torn lips, and a huge flap of skin had been torn from his chin. His menacing eyes fixed Andrew with a look of pure evil.

  “Goddamn!” Andrew cursed and quickly went through the door. The fireman was on his feet faster than Andrew would have thought possible, and he slammed into the door before Andrew could get it fully closed. He glanced down at the rock in his right hand that he’d grabbed to bash in the thing’s head, now wishing he hadn’t hesitated. He tossed it aside, and retrieved the still-lit flashlight, looking around him. There, on the wall a couple of feet away, was a huge crowbar, the kind firemen used to pry someone out of a wrecked car.

  With all this weight, Andrew slammed the door back against its hinges, temporarily pushing the nut job on the other side away. In one swift motion he stepped forward, snatched the pry bar from its rack, spun, and jammed it under the metal door, hitting the concrete floor so hard, sparks flew. The fireman outside c
rashed back into the door, which thumped, but didn’t move.

  “Damn freak!” Andrew yelled through the door.

  “Shaaargak!” the fireman yelled back, crashing into the door with even more intensity.

  Andrew drew back, deciding he’d best not antagonize the thing, and turned to look around with his flashlight. He glanced once more at the pry bar, wishing he had another, then had a thought, and went to the wall where he’d found the first one.

  Sure enough, under a line of heavy leather firefighting jackets, there were several more. He took one and tested its heft. One end had a flat claw foot, the other had a slightly curved, pointed edge. It would make a formidable hand-to-hand weapon. It was almost as long as the pugil sticks from basic training, and reminded him of the Halligan tools he’d seen on Navy ships. He kept it in his right hand as he explored.

  The fire entry area ran along the huge open bay where they stored two of the fire trucks. He found a power switch and flicked it. No joy. Without another thought, he continued on. The first place he came to was a meeting room, dominated by a large conference table with many office chairs. It looked like it was prepared for a meeting as there were notepads, pencils, and bottled water in front of each chair. He liberated a couple, putting one bottle in his pants pocket and twisting the top off another. It was warm but delicious.

  The next room was a kitchen, and as empty as the conference room. Mexican food lined the shelves. He realized he was hungry and checked the fridge. The power was off, but it was still cool inside. He found a tray with wraps, and grabbed several. They were chicken with a spicy salsa, and tasted phenomenal. He took a can of orange juice as well, and he continued his exploration while munching sandwiches and sipping juice.

  He passed through a dining room, another meeting room, and an equipment room. He considered taking one of the heavy axes from the equipment room, before opting to stick with the pry bar. Adjacent to the equipment room were a locker room and shower. As the Maglite beam played across the floor, he suddenly stopped and panned back. He saw a huge smear of dark red blood. He swallowed the last of the sandwich and gulped the remainder of the OJ, dropping the empty wrapper and can into a trashcan at his feet. The can hit with a loud metallic “Clang!” and he cursed his own stupidity.