by Mark Tufo
“No time to go through the list anyway,” John said as he powered the copter on. “Might want to duck and get in.” The blades began to whir to life. He tapped lightly on his instrument panel. “Hey do you know what that one checks?” he asked.
“I have no fucking idea, Trip, except it looks like it’s in the red.” I had been in the middle of getting in and was now in the middle of getting out.
“I wouldn’t,” John said to me, never looking past his instruments.
“Huh?” I asked. I should have known better.
He pointed back and to the right of our present location, zombies were flooding in our direction.
“Oh shit!” I said as I saw the swarm. “How long until we’re airborne?”
“I don’t know, man, I’ve never seen the reason to time it. Sure could go for a little Mary Jane.”
“Task at hand first, buddy, task at hand,” I said to him, trying to gauge how much time we had before we were engaged with the zombies. “More than half a minute?” I asked, trying to press him for information he didn’t have.
“Time is just something the man made to keep us all in line,” he said as he pressed more buttons on his console.
“Trip, I understand your frustration with the mythical man.”
“Oh, he isn’t mythical.”
“Okay, sorry, but we may need to ditch the copter.”
“Almost there,” he said.
“The zombies or being in the air?”
He didn’t elaborate. I started to get back out.
“Where you going?” John asked.
I had sarcasm all lined up, but I knew John wouldn’t catch it and I didn’t have time for an explanation.
“Zombies, Trip, I have to slow them down.”
“Whoa,” he said as he looked back. “Where’d they come from?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was the one that had pointed them out to me.
“You should make them into mannequins.”
“What?” I asked looking at the approaching horde and the blades that were lazily spinning, more from the breeze it appeared than any mechanical function.
“Like at the motel.”
Why in the hell was I having John the Tripper tell me how to get out of situations? This was like having a dog (not Henry) help me with algebra. (Who am I kidding? The dog could probably do it better.)
I no sooner took my tin foil hat off, when my head was blinded with white noise to the point where I was placing my hands over my ears in a desperate attempt to keep the noise out. On the periphery of my vision I could hear John telling me to put the hat back on, but it wasn’t registering as a cognitive thought. I was hearing the words, but could not associate them with a meaning. I was falling out of the copter. John grabbed me and placed the hat back in place; blissful, beautiful silence filled the void of confusion. That was ultimately replaced with the slap of feet on pavement, and with that thought came the realization that we were still under attack. John was busy reaching over me and putting on the flight harness so that I wouldn’t swoon out again.
The blades of the copter had picked up speed, we weren’t moving yet, though. And the zombies were a football throw away and not an Eli Manning heaving toss it up type of pass, but more the workings of something I’d let loose. I undid my buckle.
“Where you going, man? We’re almost up,” John said.
“No time, my friend. I just want to say thank you.”
John’s eyebrows were pulled tight as he tried to figure out what I was talking about. The blades of the copter reached terminal velocity as the small craft bucked forward. “You should get in,” he said as he placed his hand over the yolk.
I took one quick glance at the zombies, confident in the fact that we weren’t going to make it and still I jumped in the craft, my weight pushing it back down. It made another hop when the lead zombie ran headfirst into the spinning blade—blood sprayed in a complete three-sixty around the craft as the zombie’s force pushed us forward.
“How many more of those can we take?” I asked John as another zombie ran into the tail; the smaller rear rotor caught it underneath the chin and split its head in two from bottom to top. Why I felt the need to watch was beyond me. I hadn’t thought that there was anything left on the planet which could gross me out. I was woefully wrong.
The copter was being pushed forward from the assault; blood and brain matter was falling like a soft rain all around us. If a zombie came from the side, I was fairly certain it would knock us over. At that point I was hoping for death by scalping. The bottom of my stomach dropped out as we briefly popped into the air. John was stirring the yolk like he was churning butter.
“Hold on!” John whooped. He was laughing crazily.
I didn’t have time to stripe my pants as we once again popped up, this time a good five feet. But we had a stowaway and she was threatening to pull us back down to her brethren. John made the necessary correction to keep us level even with our hitcher, but her added weight was keeping us dangerously close to terra firma. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, she was probably doing us a favor.
John had turned the helicopter around and we were now heading back towards the majority of zombies and the hangar. I was gripping my seat hard enough to make my hands hurt. John had tears running down his face he was laughing so hard. Our unwanted passenger’s feet were slamming off the faces and heads of the zombies below us. I was involuntarily pulling my legs closer to my body. All it would take would be a zombie with enough dexterity to reach up and grab our clinger and we would plummet like a kamikaze. John was just thinking this was the funniest thing since just about ever.
“The hangar,” I said softly, pointing at the giant looming metallic structure.
“That might be a problem,” John said, taking one of his hands off the controls to wipe his eyes. I was eyeing the stick and wondering when he would take the other hand off of it.
We went through the large hangar door, my breath caught in my throat. I was so scared, I was having trouble breathing. I was beginning to wonder if it was possible to choke on air. John was rapidly flying to the other end of the hangar where the door was not—and I REPEAT not—open. We had lost a little of our hard fought altitude and our zombie flight attendant got one of her feet caught up in what looked like arc welder cables, but I was too busy caressing my terror to take much notice. The nose of the copter dipped down and then shot forward and up as we lost our only other passenger. It looked like it was going to be pretty close as to which part of the hangar was going to be our ultimate demise. The far side or the ceiling…I was actually rooting for the ceiling at least that way I wouldn’t see it coming.
Then at the point where we couldn’t fit Calista Flockhart between our rotor and the wall we stopped. We were hovering perfectly still like the world’s biggest hummingbird.
“Whoa you did awesome, man!” John said to me excitedly.
Well if he was talking about hyperventilating and damn near crapping my pants, then yes I had done one hell of a job. “You should probably get us out of here,” I said to him as I watched zombies start to come into the hangar and we were close enough to the wall that we would be peeling paint soon.
“Right! Off to see the wizard!”
“Fuck I’d take flying monkeys right now.”
“Monkeys don’t fly, man,” John said, looking over at me.
I waited until we were out of the hangar before I began to speak, I didn’t want him to have any huge revelations while we were confined like that. “You know, Wizard of Oz, Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy all that shit?”
He was still looking over at me like I had lost my damn mind. No wonder psychiatrists were batty as shit. How could you not catch some crazy when you were around it all day?
“All I know is that monkeys don’t fly,” he said as he set his jaw. He looked like I had just insulted his mother. The one thing I could be certain of, though, was that he’d forget soon enough. “So where we headed?�
� he asked after a few moments of silence.
“Your wife, Trip.”
“Oh yeah,” he said as he brought his hand to his forehead.
We were a couple of hundred feet off the ground and I was not at all comfortable with the machine I was riding in. It felt as safe as a flying blender. The view, however, gave me an appreciation of the new world we found ourselves in. The roads were deserted and devoid of all human activity…scratch that…all forms of life. The zombies had proved that, in a bind, they will hunt down anything, and with the absence of food they would even go into a stasis. We had long since got past the airport and I had to hope the zombies had forgotten about us. My heart panged as I realized we were heading in a northerly route only with a slant to the east.
I was going to make it home. I just didn’t know when and what was I going to tell my father about Gary. He had entrusted me with my brother’s safety and I had failed miserably, I could only hope that BT had picked up the torch I had dropped. Conversation was difficult over the chopping of the air, but after the day we had been having—well at least that I was having—I wasn’t sure how much if any that John remembered or what his particular take on it could be. For all I knew he probably thought this was a big amusement park ride.
“How much longer?” I shouted. I was expecting the standard, ‘time is the enemy of man’ or ‘til when?’ or something equally as inane so I was surprised when he answered in all business tone.
“We’ll be there before nightfall.”
I hoped so, because now I had another huge fear, when the sun went down, there would be absolutely no manmade markers to help guide us in.
We flew in silence (conversational silence, the chopper was loud as hell) for a few hours. My body ached to flush out the adrenaline high I had been on since this morning had started. The human body is not meant to be juiced up for that long. I had burned through vast stores of the drug and did not think I would be able to manufacture a new supply for quite some time.
Then I looked over at my pilot.
I sat and looked at John’s face for a while, worry which had not been there earlier (and Lord knows it should have been) was now creasing his forehead. I desperately wanted to tell him everything would be alright, but how the hell would I know? I did it anyway because that’s what people do. We want to believe that everything is alright and maybe by voicing it, we hope to somehow influence the fates. But they don’t give a shit, the fates I mean. No matter what we want, what we hope, what we wish for…with one fell swoop, fate will come in and smash it like a man dressed in a Godzilla suit will do on a miniaturized city set.
“You think?” John asked solemnly.
I had already tempted catastrophe once, I wouldn’t do it twice, I avoided answering. “What’s that blinking red light, Trip?” I asked, pointing to his instrument panel.
“Oil pressure,” he said as easily as if he was talking about the weather.
“Is that important?” I asked, because it seemed important, but he appeared so completely easy going about it.
“Oh…extremely,” he answered without elaborating.
“Trip, John, John the Tripper.”
He finally looked over at me.
“We’re not going to make it there any faster if we’re dead.”
“You think I should land?”
“You tell me.”
And he did, by pitching the copter down at a steep angle. I was thinking we were already in crash mode as my balls sought residency in my lower belly. An alarm over our head began to blare, either from our rapid descent or the oil pressure.
“Wonder how long that thing has been going off?” John asked as he toggled the switch back to ‘silent’ mode. “Coming in hot!” he shouted.
“What the fuck does that mean?!”
“Hold on.”
Like that needed to be voiced, might as well have said ‘Evacuate your bladder now!’ We were probably still a good thirty or forty feet up when the blades seized. One second they were whirring along and the next it sounded like someone had thrown rocks inside a dryer, then they just stopped, not even lazily spinning, just complete stoppage. We went from ‘Coming in hot’ to ‘Sinking stone’ in a matter of milliseconds. John was able to do some piloting magic to get us to coast a bit, it wasn’t much, but I think it was just enough. My spine felt like it compressed to half its length when we slammed into the ground. What air I had been holding onto because I couldn’t breathe was punched out of me from the impact. The undercarriage of the copter had completely caved in on itself. The glass bubble we were sitting in had shattered much like a car windshield.
Then we were airborne again as the chopper bounced, my guesstimate later would be somewhere in the eight or nine foot range, but I didn’t even realize it was happening at the time. Except for the list to my side, I almost stuck my hand out to the side to brace for impact. I’m glad I was too petrified to peel them away from my seat I would have shattered my arm in a dozen places. The glass shell completely dissolved as we again became earth bound. I was completely on my side strapped in to the seat; my face was mere inches from the grass. An ant carrying what looked like a cricket leg walked right under my watchful gaze. The only noise was the knocking of the cooling engine, the slamming of my blood through my arteries and John the Tripper moaning.
I scrambled with my harness and finally found the release button I fell the rest of the way to the ground. My body ached, I felt like a giant baby had used me as a rattle. I couldn’t get my equilibrium to come back to center for long moments. When I could finally get my feet underneath me with some semblance of balance I went back to the copter, blood was pouring from John’s head.
“Fuck,” I said as I cradled him in one arm and released his harness with the other. I put him as gently to the ground as I could. “John, you alright?” I asked as I gingerly moved his tin foil hat and his hair to the side to assess what kind of damage he had incurred.
He started to move his hand up to his head. At first I figured to hold his aching head, but it was actually to put his hat back on. The cut was on the top of his forehead right below the hairline. The pale white of his skull shone through dully as blood filled in the void. His skull looked intact and his head was bleeding like all head wounds do: profusely. But he was in no danger. He’d have a killer headache, but I figured he had enough self-medication to take care of that anyway.
I would have taken my shirt off and used it as a bandage, but between the dirt and my earlier vomit, he was more likely to catch a staph infection and die from my ministrations than anything from the head wound. I started rooting around in our destroyed flying machine until I found what I was looking for, a small first aid kit tucked under the pilot’s seat. Although, on further reflection, I had to wonder what the makers of this craft were thinking when they put that there. I mean really, would you be in this little flying beer can and realize you needed a Band-Aid or what? That this little pack of bandages was really going to come in handy during a crash?
Then, yup, it dawned on me…it was coming in handy during a full scale crash. I did a small ‘hat’s off’ gesture to the brilliant engineers.
“Oh, flying monkeys…I get it,” John said as I had propped him up against the wreckage and was finishing dressing his wound.
“We should get going,” I told him. The noise of the crash was going to attract attention, whether zombie or human didn’t matter, both were to be feared equally. “Can you walk?”
“Been doing it since I was a baby, I don’t know why that would change now.”
I helped him up. He wobbled for a moment. “Nice! Cheap buzz. My head is killing me.”
“I can’t imagine why.” I looked one last time at the copter; it now resembled something more along the lines of what some modern artist would make with scrap metal. God had again shown his hand, we should not have survived that crash. “Listen, I’m starting to understand that whole ‘I am your instrument’ thing,” I said to the heavens. “But is there any chance I coul
d get some upgrades? Like maybe laser beam eyes, or the ability to fly? No, wait, I take that last one back. How about some wicked strong telekinesis so I could push things out of my way.”
A slight breeze that sounded awfully close to a slight sigh wisped past us.
“Who are you talking to?” John asked as he was fishing around in his pockets to light the joint he now had in his mouth. “That’s much better,” he said with a sloppy smile as he took a big hit from the herbal medication.
“Do you mind?” I asked as I reached over. We walked away from that field, I was happy to be alive. I had survived being under the ground and then being above it. I was content to be right where I was for the moment.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Maine
“Mom, the baby kicked!” Nicole said excitedly. She had been sitting on the couch pretending to read a story, but in reality she had been daydreaming about Brendon and what could have been.
Tracy was in the kitchen washing up. She had just come in from the garden in the back. When she was confident her hands were clean and dry enough, she went over to feel her daughter’s belly. Nicole shifted her mother’s hand around to the ‘sweet’ spot.
“There! Did you feel that?” Nicole asked, her cheeks flushed with excitement.
Tracy was about to respond when a dirty, sweat-riddled Justin walked in. “Wow, when’d you get so big?” he asked his sister as he brought his bottle of water up to his lips.
“Justin!” Tracy exclaimed. “You can’t say stuff like that.”
“Why not? She’s like double her size.”
“Mom,” Nicole wailed on the verge of tears.
“Even I know better than that,” Travis said, coming in after his brother. “That’s like poking a killer whale.”
“Mom!” Nicole wailed again.
“Why are you boys in the house?” Tracy said, standing up and facing them.
“Lunch, and Uncle Ronnie didn’t want us around while they were laying the explosives. He said we were distracting,” Travis explained.