“My fault!” Thuy suddenly shrieked, her words smacking hard against the abandoned buildings and coming back to her softer and softer. The pain inside her was like a volcano that threatened to explode. She wanted to scream it out, but Courtney wouldn’t let her.
The one-time dispatcher tackled Thuy, sending her sprawling within inches of the dead baby. Stunned, Thuy found herself on her back with the younger woman straddling her. “Okay, it’s your damn fault,” Courtney yelled. “Who cares? Wallowing in pity isn’t going to fix anything, and you know what? No one wants to hear it. What we want to hear is how you’re going to fix the problem.”
“I can’t fix it,” Thuy answered.
“You can’t or you won’t?” Courtney demanded.
That answer wasn’t so easy. If Thuy could fix the problem that the Com-cells represented, of course she would, but she was stuck in the Zone with no way out…or at least no way they had yet discovered.
“I can’t,” she said. “I would, but I’m stuck here, just like you.”
“You’re not stuck here like me,” Courtney said. “I’m stuck here because I’ve reached my limit. You understand? I think of myself as pretty smart, but that can only get me so far. But you…you haven’t reached your limit yet. I know it. You’ve just got to stop fixating on all of this.” She waved her hand to indicate the neighborhood and the sad house and the heart-breaking pink lump.
“Can you do that?” Courtney asked. “Can you take it one step at a time and get us out of here?”
In the corner of her eyes was the baby, a broken pink horror, while staring down was a living woman. One deserved Thuy’s entire soul in payment for what had happened to her and the other deserved all of Thuy’s mind.
“Yes, I can.”
Courtney helped Thuy to her feet and before she could look one last time at the tiny, broken body, Courtney pulled her away, heading for the car. They got as far as the mailbox when Thuy dug in her heels and stood still.
“No,” she said, shocked. “It can’t be that easy.”
Deckard and Courtney shared a look over Thuy’s head. “What?” Deckard asked. “What’s so easy?” His eyes went to the mailbox, while hers were on the balloons.
Before he knew it, Thuy broke away and raced back to the house with Courtney and Deckard begging in hushed voices for her to come back. She ignored them. Stepping over a pool of blood, she entered, and by instinct, made her way to the kitchen. On a counter, right where she expected it, sat a black, punch-button phone. She left it unperturbed on its cradle and went for the drawer just below it, and, triumphantly, lifted out a phone book.
“Please be a thing. Please be a thing,” she chanted over and over as she flipped through the yellow pages.
It was a thing. The quarter page, color picture was proof. “We can get out,” Thuy said and held up the book.
“By hot air balloon?” Deckard asked, feeling as though he had stepped into some sort of low-tech time warp. “But you can’t steer one of those. They just…they just go where ever the wind takes them. Right?”
“Who cares?” Courtney cried, throwing herself into Thuy’s arms. “They fly and that’s all that matters!”
Chapter 24
1—11:03 p.m.
The Hartford Quarantine Zone
There was an address for Ray & Pearl’s Hot Air Balloon Rides—Open Sundays! staring them right in the face. Deckard tore the page out of the book and took Thuy by the elbow, steering her out of the house before she found another wild hair growing out of her ass.
A hot air balloon? The thought gave him the heebee-jeebees and he knew why: control. Really, it was the lack of control that bothered him. His was a type A personality, and type As didn’t leave their lives in the hand of fate. Really, this was worse than giving control over to the capricious nature of fate. It was far worse. This was him putting his life on the line with only the wind deciding things.
There was one thing he knew for certain, there was nothing more fickle than the wind. And yet, he didn’t have a better plan and so he gunned the car in a U-turn with a hard smile on his face, the stress of the night culminating in this unlikely plan, finally showing through.
Thuy saw the smile and knew that it didn’t stem from an abundance of joy at the plan she had worked up. “It should be just fine,” she said. Hers was also a type A personality, however, she figured she would have enough control of the balloon to get them to safety. “Have you never heard of the ‘prevailing westerlies?’ All we have to do is transport the balloon close to the Massachusetts border, send it up…”
“And hope we don’t get shot down,” Deckard said, interrupting. The eagerness alight in her face darkened and he immediately regretted his words. “Sorry, I’m sure we won’t be shot down. It’s dark and no one’s going to be looking up. Chances are we’re going to float right by the line without a problem.” He gave her a smile that was ninety percent lie. A hot air balloon was such a big fucking target that it hurt to think about how easily it could be shot out of the sky.
Courtney was all for the idea, anything to get away. She asked for the advertisement, saw the little map and the address, and began directing them. Although she had never been to Connecticut, her work with General Collins the day before had given her intimate knowledge of the road system.
“Take a left,” she instructed, squinting out the window at darkened road signs. “We want to head west to Canaan. If you turn on your lights we could be there in half an hour.”
Turning on the lights was the smart, but terrifying way to drive. It was one thing to putt along with the shadows moving in their periphery, it was quite another to light up the undead and see their endless numbers and their grey hungry faces and the ribbons of flesh hanging from their putrid bodies. Next to him, Thuy stiffened and he put a hand on her thigh and squeezed gently.
Her hand covered his and he drove like that down haunted roads, both of them uplifted by the touch. In the back seat Courtney didn’t have the warmth of another person to calm her and she grew increasingly nervous. “Jeeze!” she exclaimed when she saw a hulking zombie that looked as wide as the RAV4, “Fuck,” she whispered when she saw a line of soldiers in helmets and armored vests coming at the car—not one of them had a face left.
When she saw a pack of weasels, their whiskers dripping blood, eating the remains of a toddler, she vomited up a croaking, acid-tasting burp and asked: “Can we turn off the lights? We’re pretty close and there’s no need to attract any more attention, right?”
Deckard snapped them off and drove blind for a while until his night eyes regained their focus.
They were very close at this point. The address was on Copperton Street, which began smooth and paved in a suburb of Canaan. A few miles later they were stuttering along a dirt road that hadn’t been properly leveled in years. The damage to their kidneys was offset by the fact that the zombies were far fewer in number.
As should have been expected for a place where hot air balloons were launched, the land was flat and open. For miles in every direction, the earth had been freshly turned in preparation for a planting that would never occur. In the middle of one field stood a barn, looming like a mountain of shadow. The signs for Ray & Pearl’s pointed them right at it.
“Courtney and I will clear the area first,” Deckard said as he eased up. “Thuy stay here until I tell you to get out. Not before, understood?”
When she nodded he stepped out, his black boots kicking up a bit of dust. It made him think of Chuck and the faded, down in the heel cowboy boots he always wore. Melancholy seized him and he made a wide circuit around the barn with only half his mind on the idea of danger. The other half dwelt on his own guilt.
Thuy hadn’t done anything wrong. Chuck and Stephanie were dead because of him, not her. He was the one who had led them into that house and he was the one who had shot one of the least dangerous zombies he had yet seen. And he was the one who hadn’t said a word when the concept of sacrifice had come up.
D
eckard stopped at the corner of the barn, ran a hand through his dark hair and then spat on the ground. “That’s it,” he whispered, meaning: that was all the time he would waste on guilt. He’d done what he’d done and there was no use beating himself up for it. If he lived, he would deal with the guilt then.
He had led them into the house because Chuck and Stephanie would have died in the backyard if he hadn’t. He had shot that zombie because in the dark there had been no way of knowing how weak it was. And he had not volunteered to die because it didn’t make sense. He was the strongest. In a perfect Darwinesque world, he should be the last to die.
With the guilt pushed back into his subconscious, he moved to the partially open front door of the barn and peered inside. The darkness made the interior seem immense, as if it went on for miles. “Hello?” he called out. “Any zombies in here?” He waited, listening intently. Louder he yelled: “Hello!” After half a minute, he relaxed.
“Anything?” Courtney asked, creeping to the doors. She had her rifle pointed uncomfortably close to his midsection. Easing out a hand, he pushed the tip away.
“We’re clear, at least for now. Get Thuy, I’m going to find the lights.” The barn was “newish” and windowless. When he found the switch for the lights, they blinded him and he was quick to shut them off again.
In that fraction of a second, he had seen enough. A flatbed truck sat directly in front of him, while arranged along one wall were the gondolas that hung suspended from the bottom of the various balloons. Sitting in folded piles were great lengths of multi-colored fabric—these could be none other than the balloons themselves.
Thuy came in with a flashlight that seemed like a candle in comparison to the large overhead arrays. She hauled the main doors shut behind her and then proceeded to go around the room cataloguing everything and making little noises in her throat.
She didn’t want to admit it, but hot air balloons were a little more complicated than she had reckoned. To start with, there were two massive gondolas made of a light wood and two smaller “baskets” made of wicker. These would have to be attached to one of the six immense balloons that were folded and set on wooden tables that were sturdy enough to bear the weight of a car.
Next, there were the sandbags that would assist in moving along the vertical plane—how many should be carried aloft with them? And how many tanks of fuel? And which of the four “burners” was to be used in conjunction with which basket or gondola and with which balloon?
Needless to say there weren’t any instructions sitting about for her to peruse. She had to settle for something far simpler: pictures. On the walls of an office were dozens of poster-sized pictures of the balloons in action. Although two dimensional, she was able to extrapolate the number of tanks and sandbags to be used with the smallest of the wicker baskets.
Since all of the balloons were striped in red, white and blue, it was hard to tell which of them was the smallest. She walked around them for a few minutes before she threw out a guess.
“This is the one,” she said, feigning confidence. “Okay, first things first. Ms. Shaw, I need you to check the fuel status of that truck and find us the keys. Deckard, I will need the truck loaded with six sandbags, two fuel tanks, the smallest of the baskets, the burner on the far left and this balloon.” She tapped an arrangement of nylon that weighed five hundred pounds.
“Is that all?” Deckard asked, under his breath as Thuy went back into the office to look for more pictures. She needed close-up pictures in order to figure out how to get the balloon up in one go. With the zombie menace so unpredictable, they weren’t going to have time for second or third attempts.
Luckily, she found a scrapbook that showed a balloon stretched out on the ground with the basket tilted on its side. If she hadn’t seen the picture, she would have attempted some sort standing arrangement and likely torched the balloon in the process.
While she was doing her research, Deckard found a pulley and winch system attached to an overhead beam and was able to move everything onto the flatbed except the balloon itself. It was trussed up like a seventy foot burrito. “Court, I need your help,” he said when she had come back from scrounging up the keys to the truck.
The two of them manhandled the balloon up into the back of the truck, only to have it slither off the side. It took two more tries before they had it in place and strapped down.
“Pretty easy so far,” Thuy said, not noticing the sweat glistening on Deckard’s and Courtney’s foreheads. She laid out the scrapbook on the hood of the truck and showed them the steps that would need to happen. “When we get to the launch point, the first thing we need to do is prepare the balloon. It needs to be spread out completely flat with the top pointing away. Next we need to attach the burner to the basket and attach the gas tank to the burner. We turn this conglomeration of parts on its side and, as one of us gets the fan going, the others begin attaching the hang ropes using the carabiners. Total inflate time should be about five minutes.”
Deckard’s frown deepened as her explanation went on. “That’s going to be a long five minutes. We’re going to be out in the open, and we’re going to make a lot of noise and the flame is going to attract every zombie within miles.”
A nod from Thuy. “For these reasons, I will be taking the smaller vehicle and will act as interference if we run into any zombies.”
“I don’t know,” Courtney said. “What if we come across a problem with the balloon?”
Thuy’s brow creased. “Then I expect you will fix it. Courtney, I may have more book smarts in certain fields than you, but you have a fine mind. There is nothing concerning a hot air balloon that is truly mysterious. Hot air rises. Trap it within a balloon and the balloon rises as well. It’s pretty simple. I will be the distraction because I am smaller and weaker than either of you. The balloon will call for a certain amount of muscle, of which I have very little.”
Courtney saw the wisdom in Thuy’s words and after a single nod, went to the passenger side of the truck.
“I’ll get the door,” Thuy said.
“Not yet.” Deckard grabbed her around her slim waist and pulled her close. He didn’t try to kiss her. He wanted to breathe her in and stare into her eyes, afraid that there weren’t going to be many more opportunities to do either. “I hate the idea of you in another car. I hate the idea of us being separated.”
“Hey!” she said, punching him in the chest and forcing a grin onto her face. “Aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me? I’m the damsel here.”
He chuckled at the idea. “You? A damsel? That’ll be a cold day in hell.” Perhaps it was the reference to hell or the doom hanging over their heads, but either way, their smiles faltered and when they did kiss it was with surprising force rather than subtle intimacy.
Neither wanted to end the kiss. However, with her guilt still heavy on her, making her feel as if she didn’t deserve Deckard, Thuy pulled away first. “I’ll get the door,” she repeated.
“And then stay right on my ass. If we get separated, we meet back here.” Thuy answered him with a thumbs up and then pulled back the sliding door. He drove through, stopped and tossed something that glinted in the night. “You aren’t going to get too far without keys.” He grinned at her, wanting to say the words: I love you, but fearing to as well.
They almost felt like cursed words, as if there was a horrible finality to them. In his mind, saying I love you was equivalent to saying good bye—forever.
“Thanks,” she said and her throat constricted down on her own words of love. When we’re safe, I’ll tell him, she thoughtand ran for the RAV4.
A twenty minute drive west along deserted roads brought them to the New York State border. From there they went north for a while until Massachusetts sat a few miles to the east. Then it was just a matter of finding a deserted farm, blowing up the balloon and floating west.
Of farms, there were many. Of deserted farms, there were none.
Zombies seemed to be drawn to the humanity
beyond the border and many could be seen traipsing through fields, heading east. Deckard was getting frustrated when Courtney suddenly said: “The Titans!” He gave her a quizzical look and she went on, quickly: “The Taconic Titans. It’s a high school a few miles from here. I’ve been there for a football game. They have a great stadium. It’s kinda new and completely fenced off, we should be fine.”
She pointed the way and the miles slipped quickly by. When they got close, Deckard turned off his lights. It was just as she had said: a wide open and empty area completely surrounded by a ten foot fence. The only hole in the fence was where Deckard plowed down the gate. Once in the stadium, he chugged the flatbed truck straight to the fifty yard line and leapt out with Courtney right behind him.
Instead of untying the ropes, he slashed them with his knife and then began grunting the immense nylon balloon down to the ground. Thuy joined them seconds later, and with all three hauling, the balloon came off the truck with much more ease than it had going on. “Courtney and I will get this,” Thuy said. “You get the basket ready.”
Like old hands, the three carried out their duties with amazing speed. The balloon was unrolled and stretched, the burner and the gas tank were fixed to the basket and then the hang ropes were attached.
In two minutes, Deckard had the burner going on low heat and maximum fan. The air spewing from it was hot, but not blistering, and quickly the nylon began to inflate.
Thuy and Courtney grinned at each other from opposite sides of the balloon—then Courtney’s grin dimmed when she saw a halting parade of creatures stumbling in their direction. Zombies were at the gate in platoon size. “Thuy!”
Thuy ran for the RAV4, but as she passed Deckard who was hefting a fifty pound sandbag, she slowed and said: “Don’t leave without me!”
“I won’t,” he called after her. “Be back in three minutes.”
The Apocalypse Crusade 3: War of the Undead Day 3 Page 38