by Rand, Thonas
“What is it, sir?” a firefighter asked nervously.
“Their landing gear isn’t down, and they’re going to miss the airport,” the commander said as he looked at the aircraft’s angle of approach. “Quickly, lad, notify the fire departments of West Drayton, Southhall Green, and Hayes Town! Tell them it’s coming their way for sure!”
“Yes, sir!” a firefighter said and dialed his phone.
Three miles…
The few surviving passengers still had the dead at bay, and Paul ran back to a window and looked out—what he saw stretched his eyes wide with dread. “We’re gonna crash!” he mumbled to himself and turned to everyone else. “The plane’s going to crash! Strap yourselves in!” he shouted, and then realized that they couldn’t abandon the barricades or the dead would get in, but some didn’t care. Many left their posts and buckled themselves in seats. The ones that remained at the barricades couldn’t hold the barriers in place and the furious corpses began to break in.
The high-powered whine of the aircraft’s four engines came into range at the airport. The rise of sound filled the area and then took over the hearing of the firefighters. Some covered their ears, but it was inescapable. It grew even louder when the plane reached them. The massive structure streaked over their heads as it flew on its inevitable path. They could see that the plane’s landing gear still wasn’t deployed. The plane was only a hundred feet over them and windows in the terminals shattered and blew glass shards everywhere. The fifteen-ton fire trucks rocked back and forth in the jet’s wake.
Two…
“There are over 500 people aboard that plane,” the commander said direly.
“May God have mercy on their souls.” another firefighter whispered.
One…
Paul watched in frantic horror as the dead got into their haven. They busted through each barricade; like trains that sped out of dark tunnels, the dead came through the aisles and began to kill people at will in their seats. Paul looked out the window—the terrain was almost parallel with the massive wing. He couldn’t do anything else, so he sat down and clicked himself in as he waited to die…
The emergency crews watched the Airbus fly over the airport in a loud wail and continued as if it were the Flying Dutchman on route to the underworld. The plane flew past the outer edge of the airport’s property line and was seconds away from making contact with the ground…
A terrified man sat in the seat next to Paul; he barely got his seat buckle clicked into place when a corpse attacked him, it bit into his neck and tore a large chunk out. Blood was strewn all over Paul as the beast used its hands and dug into the man’s flesh. Paul was scared out of his mind, even though he still had the champagne bottle in his hand; he was too frightened to use it. He trembled uncontrollably as the man seated right next to him was savagely ripped open. The dead thing looked at Paul as it ate, but it didn’t bother to touch him, it had plenty to eat at the moment, but Paul was to be next.
That was sooner than expected as another cannibal saw Paul and came at him from the front; it spider-jumped over two seats until it was looming over Paul. It opened its mouth and exposed it teeth that had human meat stuck in between them. Paul snapped out of his terror-induced coma and hit the thing with the champagne bottle with a rage of survival. The bottle struck the creature’s forehead and shattered upon impact, and $500 champagne sprayed Paul’s face, but it tasted sour for the corpse was still coming at him, the impact stunned it, but didn’t stop it. Its mad face was wet and imbedded with glass shards as it moved for Paul’s life. The dead one eating the man next to Paul was done, and it moved for him as well.
Paul Hubber’s fate was sealed…
Then everything JOLTED violently, the fuselage crumpled in a tectonic effect, all the windows fractured, the entire floor BUCKLED and misshaped, ejecting seats as bolts were snapped and then everything else that wasn’t bolted down was suddenly thrown forward at a blinding speed.
Food carts, seats, luggage and bodies.
The momentum was at a fatal velocity.
The aircraft hit an open field with little housing, and its long wings shimmied violently from the impact. The friction from the skidding on the plane’s undercarriage was loud and shrieked as it tore through everything in its path. The M4 Motorway was in its path, and the freeway was full of automobiles that weren’t aware of what was about to happen…
The huge fuselage was God’s fingernail digging into the land as tons of dirt and debris were ejected into the air. When the plane hit the freeway, the Airbus’ nose collided with concrete and steel barriers, destroying it and the cockpit. Dozens of cars were smashed and others were thrown aside. One of the plane’s wings tore from the body, and the two Rolls-Royce 6-ton engines broke off and tumbled away like spinning juggernauts. Thousands of gallons of jet fuel spilled out; a second later, it ignited and a fireball the size of a warehouse exploded. The plane rolled over and the other wing broke off, its fuel ignited, and destroyed the back half of the Airbus, luggage, bodies and pieces of flesh were thrown out of the fiery eruption.
The rest of it kept moving forward…
Directly for a populated area…
People in South Hayes Town saw the destruction of twisted metal and fire that barreled straight at them and they ran in a panic, but they couldn’t outrun the tidal wave of death that was about to break on them. What was left of the plane’s body rolled straight into town and hit the first of the old brick buildings, an apartment building, and it shattered from the collision. Multitudes in the building screamed before they were snuffed out. The ruptured gas mains of building caught fire and added to the ruin.
The plane wreckage center punched a second building before it finally stopped and settled in rubble, blood, flames, and thick black smoke. The air was congested with dust, visibility was almost zero, and there were many spot fires in the wreckage and the two buildings that it destroyed.
The cries and sobs of pain echoed everywhere from the townspeople that were dying or hurt.
Sirens made their presence known as they hurried in from the distance.
The smell of jet fuel and burnt flesh was everywhere, there was movement in the rubble of the final impact zone, lucky citizens rose out of the destruction. They were covered in concrete dust, some were bleeding from debris impact, and others were just bruised, but they were alive.
A twenty-something hipster in a trench coat got up and looked at the carnage before him. “Bloody fucking hell!” he said in shock.
He dusted himself off and then rubbed his dust-filled eyes for a better look, what was left of the plane was burning a couple hundred feet from him, no one could have survived such a thing.
“Poor bastards,” he said to himself.
He then saw movement in the wreckage, he didn’t know what he saw, but something moved in there. A person ran out of the mangled plane and was on fire.
“Oh my God!” the hipster said.
It was a large man burning alive as he ran directionless and the guy took his trench coat off to smother the flames. “Hey! Drop to the ground to kill the flames!” he shouted and moved toward the man.
The man heard him, but he didn’t drop and roll, he saw the guy that wanted to help and he charged at him, ran straight for him.
“Drop to the ground!” the guy shouted again.
The man on fire growled madly with wide eyes and the guy dropped his trench coat when he realized that something wasn’t right, so he moved back, but it was too late. The fiery creature jumped him, and they tumbled to the ground. The thing bit into the guy viciously and ripped out some flesh.
Dozens more ran out of the plane and attacked anyone they saw.
The feast was on.
Over the entire wreckage, from the point of impact at the freeway to where the crash ended, a couple hundred dead passengers began to move.
Then they all got up…
Some were mangled corpses so they crawled or limped away, other were intact and fast movers that ran off
in every direction. One survivor, a man that was still buckled into his seat torn from the plane, had a severed right leg at the knee. He struggled to get his seatbelt off, but it was damaged and locked in place. He began to lose consciousness from blood loss of his leg, so he took off his belt from his pants and began to wrap it around his thigh to stop the bleeding. A walking corpse came upon him from behind and bit into his shoulder. The man shouted in agony, but he was in obvious shock as he kept trying to tie off his missing leg, instead of dealing with his attacker. A corpse with no legs arm-crawled up to him faster than if it had all its limbs and bit into his crotch. The man tried to scream, but the ghoul behind him tore out his throat and consumed his flesh. More staggered in and took part.
Inside the wreckage, Paul was still strapped in his seat, and he was alive, unconscious, but still alive and not infected. There was a three-inch gash on his forehead that was bleeding mildly, but it was a shallow, cleanly cut wound from a piece of flying debris and not a bite. Consciousness whispered to him, and he began to rise. He moaned from pain and slowly opened his eyes, but his vision was extremely impaired from the crash and his hearing was nothing but a deep ringing that distorted his equilibrium. He felt a strong pressure at his waist, but wasn’t concerned with that as much as he was with his sight, everything was a blur. He looked up and saw what had to be the sky, because it was moving; the ceiling of the plane was ripped open and dark clouds were moving overhead. The ringing in his ears began to subside, and he could hear some thunder from the skies above, but it was so dark. He wiped his eyes and looked again—he saw dark patches of clouds, but they were moving too fast and then his hearing improved and the thunder turned to growling. His head throbbed, so he touched it and saw the blood on his fingertips, which explained why his head ached so badly, he felt all the blood that had rushed to his head and the pressure wouldn’t go away. He rubbed his eyes again and they finally focused, he looked up at the sky again—
The dark clouds were the undead.
About thirty-five of them were gathered and reaching down trying to get at him and he thought, How are they standing on the ceiling?
His mind cleared and he realized that he was upside-down, and being held in place by the seatbelt, which explained the pressure on his waist and his throbbing head. The dead wanted Paul badly and his blood that dripped from his forehead agitated them, they jumped and clawed at the air because he was out of their reach, but it was a short reach of only about four feet or so. Paul looked and saw that the dead man next to him was still in his seat as well; he saw his dead, dangling face looking at him—it was still attached to the body, but only by a couple threads of flesh—his spinal cord was severed, so he was not coming back as the dead.
Paul was given a reprieve from the crash and the undead, but now he wondered if it would have been better if he had died in the crash, not just die, but to have been totally vaporized, because he definitely didn’t want to come back as one of them. His current situation was worse than he could have ever imagined and he had no idea what he could possibly do to survive this.
His life hanged in the balance…
Police and fire crews arrived and they didn’t understand what was happening as the people that they were there to rescue—began to attack them.
The dead were in the U.K. and that would lead to the rest of Europe…
DAY 28:
OUT of CONTROL
Los Angeles was in a downward spiral. The sky was dark from more than a dozen fires that burned out of control throughout the city, and black smoke stretched up like veils. The streets of downtown were decimated and empty of life. There were many military checkpoints at major street intersections, but there were no soldiers posted, only abandoned vehicles covered in ash and old brown bloodstains. The buildings and stores were all riddled with bullet holes and shattered glass was everywhere, along with trash and all sorts of paper debris that swayed with the wind of death.
In an alley behind a five-star hotel, a huge mural was painted on the hotel’s wall, done by a talented tagger. The mural was over forty-feet long and stood almost seven feet tall, and it consisted of every color of the rainbow. The letters were bigger than life and had precise angles and soft edges. Classic street art that said: “THE DEAD LOVE L.A.!”
But it wasn’t finished; the tail end of it was still just the black outline and not too far from that, was the reason—what was left of the tagger’s body was lying in the middle of the alley, the dead had their way with him. They tore him completely open and consumed all of his vital organs; his ribs were the broken bars of an empty cage. His lifeless, glazed-over eyes were just visible under the blood-soaked hoodie and his stiff hand held a can of spray-paint.
He wasn’t alone.
Hundreds of dead bodies were everywhere. Most were just hollow carcasses that had been eaten to the bone.
A few helicopters were in the air, but they weren’t in a search or rescue pattern; they were leaving the area.
Random gunshots rang out from all directions and echoed thinly until new ones replaced them, single shots and the occasional fully automatic fire, tat, tat, tat, tat that stitched the horizon. And then there was them—the long screeches of the dead slithered along the walls and alleyways, marking this land as theirs. A few of them ran across streets, in and out of buildings, parking garages, over some of the many abandoned and burned out cars that were everywhere. Some just lurched along or crawled if they were missing limbs. A distance away, an Army personnel carrier truck, sped by an intersection in a hurry. The five soldiers in the back were firing their automatic weapons at something chasing them. The truck was gone and a moment later, what was after them arrived…
A horde of the dead.
About 300 strong tore through the intersection, running as fast as they could to catch the truck. They were gone and the eeriness returned as it goose bumped the streets. Los Angeles was a graveyard that still had plenty of room for people to hide as they tried to get away. An old newspaper flew in the breeze and smacked against a car grill, the headline read: “BY PRESIDENTIAL ORDER, GOVERNOR CALLS FOR EVACUATION OF ALL MAJOR CALIFORNIA CITIES!”
Another newspaper, still in a badly damaged dispenser, had a newer headline: “GOVERNOR AND ACCOMPANYING STAFF KILLED IN MOTORCADE BY ATTACK OF THE DEAD!”
That newspaper didn’t even have full stories on the front page; it was slapped together in a hurry and had empty sections, a last attempt to report the news to the very end.
The Los Angeles suburbs were no different—the streets were empty of anything living, school playgrounds were desolate—trash gently danced at the foot of a tetherball pole from the wind’s touch and the ball slowly circled the pole, mimicking the sway of the children that once thrived here but were now ghostly echoes of a time gone, now a time all wrong. Nothing remained, except for abandoned vehicles and bodies.
And the dead…
They wandered the streets aimlessly, some walked, some ran if they heard or saw something that could be a meal. People who were sick or elderly in life emulated their physical condition in death. If a person was active and fit while they were alive, then they were fast movers as the dead. And fast movers usually formed groups, hordes, working together to find food, prey, and when they did, the strongest always ate first, while the weakest were left with scraps, if anything at all.
All of the undead had battle scars and damage from when and after they were infected and turned. Many had kitchen knives and forks stuck in various parts of their bodies, except the head, which was the sweet spot. Some had crowbars impaled into their guts, others had garden tools stuck in them, including machetes. All one had to do was run around and pluck items out of the walking corpses and they would have a complete kitchen and gardening set.
It was the jungle of the undead.
And they were everywhere.
All the homes were deserted, some were burned out shells, and some houses had bashed in front doors, windows busted in, entire walls that looked like a car had cr
ashed through, but it was all destroyed by the dead that got in to kill and eat. Children’s toys; some smeared with old blood, littered dead lawns. There were baby seats that had been torn to shreds. A school bus was flipped on its side in the middle of an intersection and the windows were all shattered, some caked in flesh and smeared excrement from children who were pulled out by them.
There were backyard pools with water that had turned black, mixed with bodies and dead pets, carcasses of the unknown. The houses were like gravestones for this dead part of town, but there was no caretaker here, no flowers, nothing, only the memory of the life that once flourished here.
Except for one two-story home.
This one was intact, besides random scratches on the doors and walls, the structure was still sound. All the windows were broken, but nothing entered the premises, because all the windows had metal security shutters that were locked tight. There was an RV in the driveway, but it was smashed up and inoperable, so it left the question—what happened to the family?
Inside, the house was quiet. A layer of dust coated the air and everything else in this place that was once a loving home. The pictures on the walls told the story of happiness that this family of five shared; the joyous couple had one son in his twenties and two teenage daughters. Their bliss caught forever in glossy photo paper and a legacy to whoever would visit their home in the future, if there was one.
A weak noise broke the silence, a very slow sound that had caution in its meaning. Underneath the staircase of the second floor was the door to the basement, and it was the source of the noise. It had opened to reveal that it wasn’t your typical basement door that’s usually about an inch and a half thick. This door was six inches thick and composed of steel plating topped off with soundproofing material on the inside. The open crack was barely an inch wide, and it was pitch black beyond that, and then a snake spy camera slowly came out at floor level. It angled to the left for a view of the kitchen down the hall, which was clear, it then angled the other way for a view of the front door, and that was clear as well. It appeared that the house’s integrity was intact. The camera quietly retreated into the darkness, and the door stayed open.