Milan looked over, and Tevy deliberately looked straight into the man’s sunglasses, hopefully meeting his eyes. When lying, always look them straight in the eye. Elliot had taught him that. He was much better at it than Tevy.
Milan nodded and looked back to his controls, the horizon, and the clouds to the west. “She has no need of worry. They’re one tough crowd up there. They had a very big fight just a couple of days ago and cleared out a ripper hole in Atherley, a big one. Some ripper believed himself a general, I guess, and had built some college into a fort, but they didn’t have any daytime slaves, thank’s God. Word is that they routed the place.”
“Things should be peaceful for a while, then.” Tevy couldn’t decide whether his head was light from the beer or the flying.
“This I doubt. The place was a maze, my friend Jeff told me. Yes, the very Jeff who was one of Bertrand Allan’s Companions through the end.” Milan glanced over, his chest puffed out, but when Tevy didn’t express his wonder that Milan knew someone so famous, he continued. “Anyhow, at least some of those rippers must have found places to hide until dark, and they surely will not spend another day in the college, so that means they’re out in the woods. And they must be very hungry.”
“But they’ll die when the sun rises. It’s all good.”
“You are very much a city man. Rippers can bury themselves very easy, especially in the swamps, if they need to hide from the light.”
In Tevy’s experience rippers always went into basements for the day. That’s why you never went into a house without a gun and some friends. It had never occurred to him that they could shelter anywhere else.
“But how would they breathe?”
“The bugs make them hibernate. They hardly breathe all night, maybe just a few tiny breaths, until the sun goes down. I don’t believe they like this very much, but it works.”
Tevy had to rethink everything he had known about fighting rippers. If they could hide anywhere for the day, it meant even the country side wasn’t safe. It also explained why there were still so many rippers—why they couldn’t seem to get to the end of them with the daytime neighborhood sweeps, clearing them out of the basements block by block. They weren’t all hiding in basements. They could be in parks or backyards. Hell, they could be anywhere. Did Emile know this? Did Bobs?
After a few minutes of silence, Milan turned on some music—heavy, rocking pre-Vlad recorded music—and Tevy lost himself in the miraculous sound, so much better than the choir at St. Mike’s. It passed the time until Duluth.
They landed at the airport, its runway still clear, small and large planes still neatly waiting in rows, but the appearance of normalcy was an illusion. No one met them, and Milan cursed the absence of a promised fuel truck. He got on his radio and started an angry conversation with someone in town, his accent getting thicker in his excitement, but it was obvious they would be delayed.
“Damn them to hell and back!” Milan hammered the mic a couple of times on the dashboard in his frustration. “I don’t want to be landing in the dark with all the rippers running toward the sound of my engine. This could be very bad.”
“That’s enough to just book outta here and refuel in St. John’s, isn’t it?” Tevy pointed to the fuel gauge, the only one he’d been able to understand. It looked halfway to him.
“They have no aviation fuel at St. John’s, none they can spare for my little plane anyway.” Milan opened his door and hauled himself out of the plane, pulling a pipe from his pocket as soon as he was standing on terra firma. “Besides, I have cargo coming that is helping pay for this flight. I shall go for a smoke. You may take a break, but if you hear a truck, come right back.”
Tevy wandered into the little airport building while they waited, and it was like stepping back in time. The place hadn’t been ransacked, and the ticket counters still sat as if just waiting for staff and travelers to arrive. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the terminal building were grimy, yes, but intact. Tevy walked through the security checkpoints just for fun, amusing himself as he remembered the full-body scan on the trip to Disney World. He hadn’t wanted to walk through, because his friends said the staff would take pictures of his penis and put them on the internet, but the guy running the scanner gently assured him that wouldn’t happen.
Tevy snoozed on the seats for a while as if he were a passenger waiting for a connecting flight, but he finally rose to stare out the windows at a line of intact planes, trying to imagine the airport in better times. A question for Milan occurred to Tevy, and he hurried to rejoin him when he noticed a tanker truck was now parked beside their Cessna.
“Why don’t you have a bigger plane?” Tevy said as the truck owner reeled in the hose.
“I have many planes—many, many planes, but I don’t have much fuel, and we’re a little short on aircraft mechanics.” He walked around the Cessna, doing his pre-flight check, and Tevy followed him to hear more. “I had a bit of fun at first when everything went to bad,” Milan said. “I started flying a Herc, even though I have no license for those big babies, but people cared little anymore as long as you could get them where they wanted to go. Some of my clients were even government, not that I knew at the time, or I’d never have given those traitorous bastards the time of day.”
“But you ran out of fuel for it?”
Milan stopped in front of the single propeller and ran a hand along one blade. “No, but fuel is expensive and this little plane does not use much. Ran out of many other things, though. Patience for one and a mechanic for another—anything as big as a Herc is much more complicated to keep in the air. Then the airports became a problem.” He waved at the clear runway. “We are very lucky here, but most airports got bombed by one side or another, depending on who was winning and who was losing. I chose a little Cargomaster until a couple of weeks ago, but it wouldn’t start one morning. I have no idea why.” Something near the terminal building caught his attention. “Ah, finally, here’s the mail. Grab the bag and let’s go. We are just going to beat sunset to St. John’s. I hate cutting it very close.”
A man about Tevy’s age bicycled up in a big hurry, sweating and out of breath.
“Thanks for waiting.” He passed Tevy the heavy pack. “Good flying.”
“I can’t believe people will pay for mail,” Tevy said after they were airborne and back at their cruising altitude.
Milan’s head turned, the sunglasses hiding his expression. “You’re old enough to remember the internet. You must have used a phone now and then—watched TV.”
“Of course!” But Tevy knew he sounded defensive. He vaguely remembered talking to his Grandma once via Skype, and he liked to play Halo with other kids online. His dad and mom had watched the news on their big flat screen, but he had usually just watched movies—a magic that was only available on Saturday night at St. Mike’s, and only if Emile felt there was plenty of fuel for the generator.
“People still need to keep in touch. They are mad to know how their family members are doing, and crazier still to know what’s going on in the world. Maybe you’re too young to remember, but we used to know everything that happened everywhere in seconds.”
“I’m not too young.” But Tevy only remembered his dad talking about the economy, house prices, and politics in impossibly far away places like Washington. Tevy had followed basketball but never really thought about the cities the other teams were from. They were just names.
He hoped that would all come back. There was talk that they might start up a power station and light up the city, making it easier to hunt rippers at night. Then they could expand out, doing the same thing in other towns. If they killed enough rippers, maybe things could get back to normal again, and Tevy could live in a house with a wife and kids like his parents’ generation. Maybe even Amanda would marry him, although he knew if she favored anyone it was Elliot. Tevy entertained himself with these happy thoughts until he dozed off, still exhausted from his night in the Loop.
*
T
he change in engine note, a stutter that wasn’t right, woke him. Tevy sat up straight and looked over at Milan to see whether this was normal. The set of Milan’s jaw said it wasn’t, and Tevy’s heart rate picked up. There was nothing he could do but watch. There was no ripper to fight, nowhere to hide or run. The sun hung so low on the horizon that it was obscured by low cloud.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Milan shook his head as he struggled with the yoke. “No. This is very bad. I cannot climb. We’re losing power. This could be bad fuel, or maybe the timing chain is stretched. I really don’t know, but you are about to be very glad we’re in a small plane. Get on the radio and start calling Mayday.”
Tevy picked up the microphone for the radio, remembering that he had to push the button before speaking. “Anyone out there? We’re in trouble.” He tried not to let the panic, the sense of helplessness, flow through his voice.
“Wrong. Give me that.” Milan snatched the mic away. “Mayday, Mayday. This is Milan Novak. Mayday. Mayday. St John’s come back.” He passed the microphone to Tevy. “Keep saying that, but let go of the key after every repeat and give them a chance to respond.”
Tevy continued, trying not to exclaim in surprise every time the seat dropped out from under him only to press back up when the engine stabilized for a few moments. They passed through a gray cloud and dropped again, and now an evergreen forest stretched below them, only broken by rocky hills and narrow lakes.
“Look for the highway,” shouted Milan. “It should be close. Look for any landmark.”
Tevy turned to look east through his window, and the plane banked for a moment, giving him a good view down. Trees and unforgiving rock were spilt by a deep gorge with a foaming river, but otherwise it looked hopeless: there was nowhere to land.
A man’s voice crackled over the radio. “Go for St. John’s. Is that you Milan?”
“It’s Tevy. I mean, yes, it’s Milan. I’m just using the radio for him.”
“Are you putting down on the highway? Where are you?”
“Tell them we should be close.” Milan squinted north through the windshield and through his side window to the west, where the sun hung low and red on the horizon. “Where the hell are we?”
“You don’t know?”
“We had some headwinds pushing us around, so I was planning to find the tower. It is not like I have a GPS anymore.”
Tevy keyed the microphone. “We should be close. Can you see us?”
“Not that close!”
The plane dropped again and stabilized. Tevy, still desperately scanning the trees, caught his breath. “Look, over there. I think it’s a bridge.”
Now Milan banked the little plane sharply, and, sure enough, a gray curve of steel rose up above the trees. “Thanks God. Good eye. Give me this.” He snatched the microphone back. “St John’s, we’re just passing the Mattagami River Bridge. I must put down soon, so we will only make it to a couple of miles north. Come get us, ASAP. I have brought Jeff some NATO ammo.”
The engine went dead, and the rushing wind under the wings emphasized the silence. Milan dropped the microphone and took the yoke firmly in both hands. “Oh, my little baby. Just a little farther. Come on, please, just a little farther.”
Pine and spruce trees raced under them, and Tevy could have jumped to a rock hill that swept below if they weren’t going so fast. He even thought about it, anything to take control, to be the master of his fate instead of sitting there, helplessly waiting for the end, his heart pounding to get out of his chest
The rocky hill dropped away to reveal the gray line of the highway. Milan banked left as gently as he could, but the maneuver cost them precious height. A bough from a particularly tall spruce slashed their underside, pitching the plane forward, but Milan managed to pull them to level.
They were too low and too far from the highway. The top of another tree slammed the wing strut on Milan’s side, ripping it away, but the wing held in place, giving him a fighting chance.
“Time is now to pray!” shouted Milan.
They almost overshot the highway, but a sharp twist on the yoke banked them north. It proved too sudden a maneuver for the left wing, which tore away from the craft but not off. The plane rolled sharply to Milan’s side as they lost lift, and the left wheel hit the ground first and hard.
Pink granite and green spruce spun by so fast that they meshed into a blur. Tevy fought to maintain some sense of direction, holding onto the side of the plane and the roof as if he could stop them from crushing in as the plane flipped and turned and smashed. Sky, asphalt, shattering glass, more sky and asphalt that didn’t flip from view. The plane came to a stop with a screech of metal.
Tevy stopped screaming, and took several choking breaths of smoke and fumes, relishing in the fact that, even though he was upside down and hanging from his seat belt, he was alive. But the shadows warned that the sun hung low, and he had no idea how far it was to St. John’s Keep.
They were down in the wilderness at sunset—a wilderness full of recently displaced and starving rippers.
Five - What Comes Out at Night
Tevy succeeded in releasing his seat belt and dropping onto the crumpled ceiling, twisting so that he could kick out the remains of the windshield for an exit. It would be impossible to open the crushed passenger door.
“Good idea,” Milan said, also hanging upside down. His sunglasses were gone and his face was bloody. “Quick! Please, help me out of here. I smell gas.”
Tevy twisted around and fought to release Milan’s seat belt, but the buckle was jammed. He got his switchblade from his back pocket and flicked it open, sawing through the tough material of the belt near the seat. Milan dropped heavily to the roof with a cry. “My ribs! Fuck! Let us get out of here.”
Milan twisted around and crawled along the roof and through opening left after Tevy had kicked out the windshield. Tevy followed, smoke stinging his eyes and gas dripping on him from the engine housing. He wanted to lurch up and run once he was clear of the plane, but Milan was having trouble getting out, so Tevy repressed the desire to escape and turned to help. Milan crawled on his forearms, his left leg dragging, and for a moment Tevy thought it was caught in the wreckage until he realized that it was injured. He reached back under the engine housing and took Milan’s hands, standing to drag him clear of the plane. Milan tried to get up, but when his left ankle took weight he gasped and would have fallen but for his left arm around Tevy’s shoulders. Together, they staggered away from the plane, Milan hopping on his right foot.
When Tevy stopped and sat heavily on the asphalt, Milan turned to look back at the crumpled little plane. He held his side and looked pale with shock. “You feeling lucky, young man?”
“Dude, I’m still alive, ain’t I.”
“There are four boxes of fifty-cal ammunition in the back of that plane, and another of 5.56 NATO rounds. It’s worth very much to me and the good people of St. John’s. Would you wish to make some friends very fast?” He turned to look Tevy in the eye. “Climb back in there quick and get it out. It is in the cargo compartment.”
Tevy had to guess whether Milan was joking or not. Go back in the plane? “Don’t those things blow up?”
“Not like in the movies. It may catch fire any second now though. Go! Quick!”
Tevy went, crawling over the asphalt and broken glass, ignoring the pain from cuts to his hands and knees, holding his breath as he got close to the wreckage. With the plane upside down, it was actually easier to squeeze under the seats and get into the back, and sure enough, when he wrenched open the cargo compartment, he found five military-grade metal boxes with convenient handles. He grabbed two of them and hauled them along as he backed out of the plane. He dragged them over near Milan.
“Dude, these are heavy.”
“Go! Go! Very quick!”
Tevy obeyed the imperative, crawling frantically back into the plane, snatching the handles of two more boxes and heaving them out of the mess,
gasping and choking as he crawled back out of the plane. He set them just clear of the wreckage and went after the last box, holding his breath against more fumes as he pulled it free.
He found Milan had dragged himself through the ditch at the edge of the road so that he could sit up with his back to a tree, comfortably far from the wreck. Tevy stood and hurried to carry the ammunition boxes across the street, making three trips.
“Don’t put them near me, young man. The rippers must not find them. Hide them back in the forest and then get back to here.” Milan pulled a large revolver from under his jacket.
“My shotgun!” Tevy ran for the plane but didn’t need to crawl back in. The rear window on the Milan’s side had popped out, and Tevy was able to reach in and grab the shotgun and his pack from the back, but the mailbag was out of reach. He considered crawling in when a wump and rush of heat pushed him away. Orange flames enveloped the engine housing. Tevy ran.
“I thought you said these things didn’t blow up.” Tevy said as he slumped down near Milan, resting his back on another tree and uncontrollably trembling. The plane burned, the fire accelerating with frightening speed. Before Milan could even answer, the entire plane was engulfed.
“I said they don’t blow up like in the movies. But they burn very well.” Milan opened the chamber on his revolver to check that it was loaded and slapped it closed. “I thought since the engine was already stopped that maybe it would not catch, but I guessed wrong.”
Tevy nodded and let his breathing slow. He was safe. He was on the ground. “How long till the St. John’s people get here?”
“Depends on whether the rippers have felled any trees across the road in the last few days.”
“Why would they do that?”
Milan looked over in the gathering dusk, the flames lighting his weathered face and giving it a reddish hue. “Of course because they like to try and catch people driving up the highway close to sunset. This is most unfortunate.” He took a deep breath. “Fuck. Listen, young man, my ankle is hurt somehow, not broken I think because I can move it, but I can’t be sure. I can maybe limp but I can’t get far and that is going to attract rippers like moths to the flame.” He pointed with his revolver at the burning wreck. “Save yourself. Run up the road for St. John’s, travel like a mouse, very quiet, and when you see headlights, drop your shotgun and put your hands on your head so that they know you’re surrendering. They will probably put you in a cell overnight till the sun can prove you, but I promise you will be okay.”
The 1000 Souls (Book 2): Generation Apocalypse Page 6