by Wood, Gareth
We were scanning the area around the door when some more of them staggered and shuffled towards us. These were wearing civilian clothing, there were probably a dozen of them, and they were moving damned quickly for dead folks. The smell wafted over us as they advanced, and I heard someone retching. Man, there were some ripe ones in this group. I gagged, but fired at the leader as I backed up. One shot in the face, and he went down. The few behind him stepped over or around the body, and reached for us hungrily as they approached. I could see bullets smacking into them now, as the others fired. Several dropped from headshots, and I fired again at one that was missing half its right arm already, a bloody gruesome wound. It was blown backwards by the thunderous impact of the slug, and its skull popped like a balloon.
I was the last one through the door as the six ‘survivors’ grasped at it. I fired once more, and grabbed the handle to pull the door shut when several of them grabbed the door frame and started pulling. They stumbled over each other trying to get at me, so I let the door go and turned and ran. I felt a grasping dead hand snag on my belt at the last second, but I tore free and kept going. At the first intersection I passed Laura and Eric, who fired behind me as soon as I dodged through them. I turned, and we all fell back to the next bend, firing as opportunity presented itself. We killed six more this way, but I noticed there were more of them now. Damn, there must be an open stairwell to the upper levels in there. My team, and the several soldiers who were now with us all retreated to some fire doors. We spread out into the offices, and waited for the undead to approach down the hallway. Once they appeared it was a furious battle. We shot until we ran out of bullets, and the dead piled up high in the hallways. Still they came. I ordered everyone back behind the fire doors and then closed them myself. We braced them with an axe between the handles, and waited a few seconds to see if they’d hold. The undead on the other side pushed hard, and fingers grasped through the gap, but that was all there was. I think we killed over thirty of them, and there were at least that many out there right now. They were hideous. Rotted and hideous, they looked like the caricatures of the people they had been. One soldier had been bitten, a small wound on his hand. We cleaned and wrapped it, but it was sad. He knew he was going to die within the day now. As his friends led him away I watched and wondered if we’d all go that way, if there really was any point to hope now. Sure we had a foothold, but the dead were still there. Every single one of us was on borrowed time.
About this time an officer showed up and told us to head out and grab some food. We were done for a few hours while they brought in fresh troops. I really didn’t feel like eating.
November 7
After days of blood, six hundred undead have been destroyed inside the terminal. I haven’t felt like writing. The carnage has been too much. I find myself thinking of Jess, wanting to call her and go home, but I can’t.
We got that helicopter running, and flew a mission down there to see what was going on with the survivors downtown. The chopper landed on the roof, and we found out what the people inside were fighting off the undead with baseball bats, crowbars, and torches now. They’d run out of bullets ages ago, and had blocked as many of the stairs and halls as they could. A few thousand undead surrounded the building, there were hundreds on the lower three floors, and the twenty survivors were running out of food and water. The major said to hell with it, bring them out a few at a time in the chopper. Getting there with a bus or trucks large enough to get everyone was not possible. So for the last few days we’ve been receiving the survivors a few at a time. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be the last ones there, hoping the avgas lasts in the chopper, that it doesn’t have a mechanical failure or crash before you get out. Because if it does, that’s all there is. You might as well open the doors and let in the undead at that point.
The stench! God the smell is so bad we have to wear masks when we go in to clear out bodies. We are moving everyone into the terminal in a few days, but right now it’s only a few dozen for security. We’ve been clearing the bodies out and burning them in the open landing strips. Great piles of burning bodies. I have nightmares every night now. I have to get back to Jess.
November 10
For the last few days the chopper has brought in survivors from downtown three at a time. The last trips today, three of them, will leave at dawn. There will be over one hundred and twenty of us here now. We are in need of water and food, and other basic supplies. Heat isn’t a problem in some areas of the terminal, since the engineers managed to get the gas powered backup generators in the basement running yesterday. We still don’t run lights at night though. It draws too many of them here.
For two days now there have been teams going through the hotel, clearing it floor by floor, room by room. It was surprisingly unpopulated, and so far there has been only one casualty. My team has not been in on that operation, thank God. Every one of us, myself included, are showing signs of stress and the unit medic told us to take it easy for a few days. I was only too happy to follow those orders.
Tomorrow we head out along Barlow Trail south into the city. We are going on foot before dawn, hopefully under cover of darkness, and we will be looking for supplies. We shouldn’t have to go far. There is a group of stores in this area that we can raid, including a big warehouse-style wholesale grocery place, and several strip malls. There are restaurants too, and I even think there was a police station nearby, but I’ll have to check that on a map before we leave. If it’s close enough, we’ll check it out.
November 17
14:32 hours. Memory failed on the laptop. It took until today to find more. I looted it out of another laptop I found in the baggage area. It actually doubled my RAM, so I now have 512 Megs inside this beast.
We are about to take off for Cold Lake in a 12-seater passenger jet that came in from Comox. I don’t know the pilot or co-pilot, Terry and Keith, but they seem nice. They are taking us (us being my team and four of the engineers) back to Cold Lake. It’s our time to go back home and relax. The last weeks have been hell, and I missed Jess so much that I thought I was going to go insane. Darren and I have been talking too. We are hoping that the area around Cold Lake is clear enough that we can get out for a boat trip and go fishing.
Our gear is in the cargo bay except for side arms. We carry those everywhere, even the pilots. Firearms are an essential tool these days. Kim found a relatively decent sword on the last trip out. It looks like a broadsword. Not a real medieval one, but a decent knock-off. She wears it over her shoulder, and has honed it to a nice razor sharpness. It’s anachronistic, but it seems to please her. I have to shut this off now. We are about to take off, and I want to be secured for travel.
19:46 hours. Fifteen minutes after take-off we lost power in the right engine. We had turned from the southern heading we were on and had leveled out at around 15,000 feet, heading north or northeast, I’m not sure, when the pilot came on the intercom and said there was a problem. Then a sound like a basketball being sucked through a turbine came from our right and the plane lurched. Things went flying everywhere, mostly pens and coffee cups, but the laptop went sliding down my legs and I pinned it to the seat ahead of me with my left foot. Within two minutes the plane was only a few hundred feet up. I looked out and we could see houses, farmland, more houses, passing very fast. Terry came on the intercom and said to hang on to something. I looked down and saw pavement. He was trying to land us on a stretch of highway. We passed many cars, parked or crashed or abandoned, and then lurched downwards. The lights flickered, and then we crashed.
We hit something hard after sliding along for a good while. It felt like forever, but was probably about six seconds. The landing gear worked, I know that, since I heard the skid as they touched down. Then came the bang of the front gear exploding as it smashed into some obstruction, and we slewed sideways. Whatever we hit, a car or a pile of cars, we hit hard. Everything went black right about then.
When I came to there was smoke in the air, and
I coughed, then threw up. I was still in my seat, there was a gaping opening in the aircraft’s hull to my left that arched up overhead. The seat ahead of me was missing, and I couldn’t see anything for the smoke. I gasped in some smoke-filled air, and tried to get free of my seat belt. The floor was at an angle, and I could hear someone moaning in the wreckage. Darren had been to my right, and I turned that way to look for him once I had the seatbelt undone. A gust of wind blew the smoke away momentarily, and I saw Darren struggling with his belt as well. He looked dazed, there was a big swelling bruise on his face, and he was bleeding from his nose, which I suspected was broken. I struggled over a seat that was now in the aisle, and grabbed Darren’s arm, realising then that I couldn’t feel my left arm very well. It was numb from the elbow down, and when I looked there was a small sliver of metal sticking out of it. I pulled it out and it turned out to be about 5 centimeters long. I didn’t feel any pain, but it started bleeding right away, so I clamped my hand on it to stop the flow.
Darren got free, and we went looking for the others. We found Todd slumped in his chair with a chunk of the hull in his chest. I checked for vitals, but he was gone. Damnit. I sent Darren towards the back, and I moved forwards. He called up to me that he’d found Laura, and she was unconscious. In the next seat forward I found Kim, looking dazed, but awake and not panicking. She had a burn on her face from something, but I don’t know what, there was nothing on fire nearby. I asked her if she was okay, and she said yes, but winced when she spoke. I helped her unbuckle, and she reached for her sword and gun. I moved toward the pilot’s cabin, and was unable to open the door. It was jammed on something, and was hot to the touch. I could hear crackling and sizzling through the door, and I knew this must be the source of the fire and smoke.
Getting Kim standing with me, we moved back towards Darren. He was unhooking Laura from her seat with the help of Eric, who looked less beat up than the rest of us. I didn’t see Jim anywhere, and when I asked, Eric pointed to the spot on the floor where Jim’s seat had been. It was right by the open gash in the hull, and I could see the ripped steel where his chair had been torn away. He was probably outside somewhere behind us on the highway.
The thought of outside reminded me it was cold. I grabbed my parka and motioned for everyone else to do the same. I then checked my weapon, grabbed my bag with the laptop in it, and began to gather what supplies I could. I found two C7A1’s, a shotgun, our pistols, and found our emergency bags, which I slung on my shoulder. I found my radio, and tried to raise Calgary with it, but there was no response.
Laura had been removed from her seat by now, but she was still out cold. I left her to Eric and Darren, and Kim and I took a look out through the gap in the hull. I remembered passing houses just before we crashed, so we were near a town. And that meant the walking dead. God damn it! I did not want to deal with this shit! Outside it was cold, and my breath was visible in the air. I looked in all directions and saw that we had slid off the highway and collided with two trucks and a car. Wreckage was spread out over a large area. Flames were coming from the cockpit, and any hope of the pilots’ survival instantly vanished. It was only a matter of minutes before the gas leaking from the wings caught fire, so I leaned back in and told Darren and Eric to get Laura out of there. Kim walked over to the tail section, and said she could see undead coming, fifteen or so, but spread out and a ways off yet.
We hauled Laura out as gently as we could. She had a big swelling on the left side of her head above her eye, and was bleeding from a deep cut on her shoulder, but it wasn’t gushing so we put a bandage on it as quickly as we could and looked around for something to carry her with. We ended up with a door off the wrecked car. Her feet hung off the end, but she was movable.
Kim fired two shots, and I turned to check on that situation. She had shot a zombie that was about 25 feet away from the tail. I could see a lot more coming across fields, and from the nearby town. The road to the town was bare of everything but bits of plane and walking corpses, about twenty now. We had to get out of here right away. If we stayed near the plane we’d die, either when it blew up, or when several dozen hungry dead things descended upon us in a horde. Darren pointed to a car nearby that hadn’t been hit in the collision, and ran over to check it out. He said there were keys in it, but it was locked up. I yelled back at him to smash the passenger window and try it. He used the butt of the shotgun to smash the glass, and climbed in. A few tense moments later the car reluctantly sputtered to life, and we all carried Laura on the makeshift litter towards it. We arrived in time to see three undead attempting to navigate the debris behind the tail, and we all piled into the Honda Civic (a hybrid, I noticed) and lay Laura across Eric and Kim in the back seat. I threw the bags into the back, and climbed in the passenger seat. As we backed up along the highway I saw two of the undead climb into the plane, and I remembered that Todd’s body was in there. They were going to feed. Fuck.
We were in a car with a quarter tank of gas, on a road somewhere in southern Alberta, with a few weapons, limited food, and five injured people. We had no idea if help was coming, our gear was buried in the storage area of the plane (which was on fire), and zombies had arrived looking for a BBQ. Just swell. We drove, hoping to see a highway sign so we could figure out where we were.
About ten minutes later Laura began having seizures in the back seat. We had to pull over to treat her, but by the time we stopped she had settled back down. Her breathing was shaky and shallow, so Eric took her pulse, but could barely find it. We talked about what to do, argued about it actually, all of us yelling and shouting on the side of the road. Eric held onto Laura the whole time in case she started seizing again, and within ten minutes she stopped breathing. There was nothing we could do for her. We had no medical supplies but the few things in our emergency bags, and nowhere to take her for treatment. When she stopped breathing we all just sat down with her, and everyone was quiet for a while.
Eventually, the reality of the situation surfaced again. We had to get moving. I stood, letting go of Laura’s hand, and took a few deep breaths. As I looked around I could see the smoke rising from the plane in the distance, a lot more now. The wing tanks must have caught fire. Hopefully the zombies I had seen going to take a bite out of Todd were roasted now. Hopefully…
God, what a fucked up world.
November 18
We’re near Carbon, a small town near the badlands. We found a highway sign last night right before we came into the yard of the house we are in. It’s an empty two story farmhouse. There were no undead inside, and we’ve been careful to hide the car in the barn. Laura’s body we put out there as well, under a tarp. When we leave we’ll set a pyre. All of us wanted to be cremated if we died.
We are staying on the top floor of the house, have barricaded the lower floor as well as possible, and have moved all the essentials we could find upstairs. It’s cold in here, so we moved blankets, food, what water we could coax out of the well pump, and the few things we had up here this afternoon. We are all huddled together for warmth, everyone is sore or has a headache, and we are all sporting bandages. My arm hurts like hell where the steel sliver went in, but I got the feeling back a few hours later.
We got lucky and found some gas in a truck out back. We couldn’t start the truck, so we siphoned into milk jugs and poured what we could into the Civic. We spilled a fair bit of it, but ended up with nearly a tank full.
I interrupted Kim and Darren talking earlier. They were talking about Laura and Todd and Jim, and if we’d make it back to Cold Lake okay. I walked in at that point and told them yes, we would. It’s important now to keep a positive attitude. We have to be sure of it. If we slip and get depressed or fatalistic, we might as well kill ourselves and save the undead the effort.