by Bryan James
Another shot echoed in the cabin, and the field exploded fifty feet further down the runway. The concussions and the shock waves blasted bodies back from the concrete strip, flinging them into the waiting corn.
The nose pushed up slightly as the last shot fired, and Granger fell back heavily, taken off balance by the sudden change in attitude.
The final round flew wide, landing thirty feet into the field and cratering the dark farmland. Hundreds of bodies flew apart and into the air, as the errant shot hit pay dirt, destroying hundreds of creatures in their hidden respite, among the dying corn.
“Holy shit,” I breathed heavily, leaning back against the door.
From somewhere on my right, I heard Ky’s soft voice.
“That’s what she said?”
I laughed as I heard Kate say in a clinical voice.
“Nope. Not even close, kiddo.”
“Crap in a bag,” said Ky despondently.
TEN
We flew on, following increasingly poor weather across the nation. Turbulence tossed the plane around as we tried to stay stationary. We occupied the few seats in the command and control center, after Granger very prudently deactivated many of the controls, fearing that we would hit something that would cause a big boom.
I caught some more sleep with Kate, next to one another in large chairs designed to monitor sophisticated electronics. Ky was still wired from the last stop, and amused herself by playing some sort of handheld video game she had picked up from one of the kids back in D.C.
When I woke up, darkness had fallen, and the world outside was black. No lights from small towns, or streetlights. Not even a fire or an explosion. Totally dark.
“ETA?” I asked Rhodes, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“About an hour and a half. We’re over Idaho now,” he said, looking up from a book he had found somewhere. “Talk to Granger, he’s got the nav display up now.”
I nodded, and saw the young man staring at a map.
He looked up as I approached.
“Rhodes is right—about an hour and a half at present speed. We’ve been having to divert all over the damn map the entire flight due to this nasty weather. We’ve had thunderstorms almost the entire way. They usually drop off once we get past the Tetons in Wyoming, but we hit a new front. We’re having to stay south on this route to avoid more nasty crap up north, so we’re going to head over southern Idaho, then tack back up through Oregon and come at Seattle from the southeast. Hopefully the mountains will scrape off some of the weather.”
I didn’t bother visiting the flight deck as I took my chair back, putting a hand on Kate’s thigh as she opened her eyes. She smiled softly and I stuck my tongue out at her, making her chuckle.
She blinked sleepily.
“I’m not even that tired, but the sound of the propellers and the vibrations just put me right out every time,” she said, stretching languidly. I watched her dark hair fall back and hang down over the edge of the seat and her arms pushed out over her head.
“The vibrations, huh?”
She smirked.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she admonished, eyes automatically searching for Ky.
“Where’s the kid?”
“Over there, rotting her brain.”
She stared at me.
“Oh, sorry. No pun intended.”
Ky saw us staring at her and walked over, sticking the game into her pocket. I heard a loud electronic blip as it disappeared into one of the large cargo pockets in her stolen fatigues.
“What are you playing?”
“Happy Cows,” she said, quite seriously.
“What’s that?”
“A game.”
“I know that, but what the hell kind of game is about cows?”
“A good one. You have to fire these chickens at these cows, and the cows have to eat the chickens to get points, and…”
“Wait, what? How long was I in the looney bin? Cows eating chickens?”
“Uh, yeah… Humans eating humans?”
Fair point.
“Hey Mike, how come the zombies don’t eat Romeo?”
I had thought about that. I didn’t know. In fact, there was no real rhyme or reason. We had seen them eat other animals, but they had never shown an interest in the dog, and we’d never seen them take down a live animal. Just road kill.
“I don’t know. Maybe something in the disease makes them look for other humans. We don’t know. Why?”
“Just wondering,” she said, shrugging. “I like dogs, and I hope more survived.”
“Well,” I said carefully, “there were a lot of people affected by this thing. If their owners died and… well, walked away… then they would have to find their own food. Some of them might have gotten lucky, or been big enough to catch mice or something, but some of them might have been locked inside a house, or a car, you know? It’s tough for everyone down there.”
She nodded seriously, understanding.
“What about cows? Do you think any of them survived?”
I paused, ready to lighten the mood.
“Possibly, if they kept moo-ving.”
“Oh groan, seriously?”
“Yeah, no bull.”
“Christ. Stop. Please.”
“Fine, you won’t hereford me again.”
“What? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Sure it does, it’s a type of cow.”
“You’re a type of cow.”
“Ouch. That was udderly hurtful.”
“Oh for the love of…”
She made a tactical retreat as Kate collapsed in a fit of laughter against the console.
Suddenly, a red light lit up on ceiling and Granger cursed.
“What? I totally didn’t touch anything!” Kate yelled, sitting up straight and staring at the console.
But I could hear the warning sound from Granger’s console.
“Proximity alert. Proximity alert,” it sounded in a loud metallic, computerized voice. Then the cabin lurched to the side, and the plane dropped like a rock.
“Proximity alert?” I yelled, but Granger was busy working the controls of the master panel.
“It means strap in,” said Rhodes, working the straps around the young comatose sailor who was curled in the fetal position.
My eyes suddenly burned, and from either side of the plane an explosion of light flared out into the night sky. Then another. And another.
A dull thump followed by a loud and bright explosion echoed in the small space from behind the plane.
The colonel was on the comms, voice tight.
“That was a missile, folks. Strap in.”
Granger’s hands were working on the controls, and as a loud, shrill beep sounded through the cabin again, he cursed and slammed another button. Another volley of flares spat out of the sides of the plane, lighting the sky like horizontal lightning.
“Ky, belt, now!” She was leaning forward, trying to watch the show.
Kate’s voice was a bullhorn and she slammed her rear into the seat and pulled the chest harness down. Rhodes finished with his job and sat down in the jump seat next to the young sailor.
I turned toward Kate and froze. Behind her, out the small window, a streak of light was rising from the abyss of darkness outside.
“Granger!” I yelled, but it was too late. As I watched, the streak of light that was moving vertically turned horizontal, and was a dot of light blazing for us. The plane banked hard to the left, and the missile exploded outside the fuselage, near the tip of the right wing.
The steady drone of the four engines became a struggling hum of three. A quarter of the right wing was missing, and the engine nearest the tip of the wing was in flames.
“Colonel,” he said over the mic, “Shut down number four, she’s flaming.”
“Copy that. Take crash positions, folks. We’re going down.”
His voice was preternaturally calm, and I wondered if the man had ice in his veins.
&nb
sp; Kate’s hand tightened on my own, and I ventured a glance out the window. No more missile streaks in the sky, and I thought I saw lights below.
“Granger, where are we?” I asked.
He didn’t look up as he glanced once to his left and back to the monitors.
“We’re over Boise. We’re turning toward the airport now.”
Boise.
A city.
A city in Idaho, which barely qualified as a State, but still a city. A place with hundreds of thousands of people.
And we were like a big, flaming, screaming torch, landing in the dark.
Just awesome sauce.
ELEVEN
The AC-130 cruises at a lower altitude than a commercial jet, and to avoid a significant layer of cloud cover, our ride had been spiriting along at just under 20,000 feet when some ass-wipe shot it up with a missile. That meant that we had a lot shorter distance to fall.
“Strap in, folks. You heard the colonel. We are losing hydraulic fluid. We can fly on three engines, but with that wing tip missing and the loss of pressure in the lines, we can’t control this thing. We need to get on the ground and try to buy some times to repair that leak. But this is going to be a hard landing.”
The plane banked hard as it circled.
“Can we fire back? Do we know where that shot came from?”
He shook his head.
“Three different locations, all in the dark. I’ve got thermal signatures, but if we moved back around into firing position, we’d probably drop out of the sky before we reached the landing strip. We’re lucky we were over Boise when this happened. Otherwise, we’d be in the river.”
I looked out the window, my eyes picking up the meandering dark line of the Snake River.
The engines hummed and the flaps lowered as the bank ended, and we dropped quickly. I noticed the lights go out on the wingtips and in the cabin, and I saw the night vision goggles pop on to the helmets of the pilots.
Smart, I thought. At least remove the light, and make the zombies track the noise.
The flat land around the airport slipped beneath the plane, and the terminal came into view. Nothing moved in or near the airport as we coasted above the runway. Then my jaw slammed shut as the plane hit the pavement, jarring my entire body and making me bite my tongue.
Ky screamed and Kate gasped, as the plane’s nose slammed into the ground hard enough to pop some electronics from an upper storage bin. We lurched to the left and I heard the ailerons whine as they adjusted, extending slightly. The plane whipped back into the center of the runway and stopped. The engines shut down immediately, and the blades slowed to an airy whirling. As they slowed, I looked out the window, my night vision having sharpened so acutely that I didn’t need more than the faint light of the half-moon above. The clouds had cleared, with a stiff wind coming from the west.
No bodies outside.
Yet.
Kate released the straps around her chest, and moved over to help Ky. Beside Ky, in the adjacent seat, Romeo whined once as Ky removed the strap she had put around his thick chest. He wagged his stump of a tail and jumped down.
Rhodes’ voice was unconcerned as he spoke, already standing in front of the door.
“I think this kid needs some help,” he said, looking at the young sailor. He was shaking in his restraints, eyes rolling back in his head.
“He’s turning!” yelled Granger, reaching for his side arm.
“Hold on!” Kate said, grabbing Granger’s wrist. I smirked as I saw the young airman grimace at her strength. He struggled, but it was clearly an iron hold. She released him after staring at him for a moment. Then she was rushing to the man’s side, holding her hand to his neck and checking the pulse.
“He’s convulsing, he needs a sedative. His heart rate is off the chart. If we don’t get him something to calm him down, he’s going to have a heart attack.” She looked up at Granger. “Do you have anything on board, in the med kit?”
He looked doubtful.
“No, we just have first aid stuff. We have the small painkiller injectors, but a sedative? No, we don’t carry that kind of stuff.”
I knew where this was heading.
The colonel emerged from the flight deck, checking the clip in his sidearm. Behind him, the co-pilot was flipping through a manual.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked, seeming indifferent to the answer.
“Shock,” she said shortly, checking his pupils.
“Can we do anything about it?”
“Not right now,” she said. He nodded, turning to the rest of us.
“Okay, so here’s the score. We need to repair that hydraulic leak and refill the fluid. The closest hangar should have what we need. We can fly with three engines, but we will need the whole runway to takeoff. Luckily, we still have plenty of fuel. But since we don’t know where those shots came from and, more importantly, who fired them and why, we can’t be sure we’re not going to get hit again when we take off. So,” he said curtly, “that’s the order of the night. We need to get out there and start working before we have company.”
He turned to me and to Kate, glancing at Rhodes as well.
“We need someone to cover us here and keep a lookout, and we need to look in the hangar for the hydraulic fluid. I’ll go to the hangar, but I need cover.”
“Here, sir,” said Rhodes, stepping forward.
The colonel, I read his nametag finally—Drexel—shook his head.
“Sorry son, I need you with the plane. Quite frankly, I’d prefer taking someone who isn’t going to turn if we run into those godless shits. Mr. McKnight, you’re with me.”
Kate stood suddenly, voice calm and serious.
“Colonel, we are going to need to find this man some sedatives, or he’s going to die,” she said clinically.
The officer looked down at the young man almost dismissively.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we have certain priorities on this mission. I am happy to have saved his ass in D.C., but we need to get off the ground ASAP. You are welcome to accompany us inside, but we are not stalling to look for medicine. Understood?”
He didn’t wait for an answer as he moved past me toward the rear of the plane. Lt. Col Crawford shrugged once from the cockpit as he looked at Watts curled up on the floor. There was no pity there. In a world taken by the dead, the living had two choices: face life, or lose it. These men had seen the new reality. They had lived it. This man—this kid—had not.
“Come with me and cuddly bear,” I said to Kate, “we’ll check the offices inside. It’s not like he can wrestle us back to the plane.”
Drexel checked his sidearm as Rhodes stood by the door. Granger checked the windows and nodded shortly, and the door swung down slowly, Rhodes holding it back so it wouldn’t slam into the ground.
The air was crisp and clean, and it flooded into the cabin in a wave of nostalgia and relief. I remembered spring days and summer nights and the way it was before. Then, Rhodes grunted under his breath.
“Let’s go, ladies. I’d prefer not to end up at the losing end of a zombie ass tonight.”
Yes.
That was the world now.
Thanks for the memories, Rhodes.
TWELVE
Drexel had found a crowbar, and he was carrying it tightly in one hand as we walked quickly across the tarmac. My eyes were perfectly adjusted to the dark, and I took the lead, scanning ahead for movement. Heavy gunfire sounded from the distance, and I caught the sulfurous hint of gunpowder in the air. Smoke was there too, a current of destruction on the cool night air. A breeze caught the windsock at the far end of the airfield, and I snapped my head up before realizing it was nothing. Drexel caught my movement and stared, trying to see what I had seen.
“Mike,” said Kate softly, and I followed her hand.
We were halfway to the hangar and the large plane sat quietly on the runway behind us, the silent form of Granger moving on the wing with as much stealth as he could muster. The commercial
hangar in front of us was open at the front, but only at waist level, the large metal roll-down door oddly angled; behind that, a chain link fence separated the airfield from an access road. A large truck was parked near the open door to the hangar, and the driver’s door was ajar, moving in the breeze.
“I see it,” I said, and motioned for them to stop.
Inside the hangar, a slow form was shambling out, coveralls crusted over with blood. I scanned to the sides and saw nothing else, but wanted to make sure before I brought them forward. Gripping the Pathfinder with both hands, I walked directly to the creature, trying to mask the sound of my heavy boots hitting the tarmac.
It had been a mechanic, I noted, as I took its head. In a moment of caution, I reached out my left hand as the head dropped to the ground, and caught the front of the thing’s uniform, easing the body to the ground slowly to keep the noise down.
The cavernous space was a tomb. Bodies lay strewn about with abandon, and crusted blood was thick on the cement slab floor. I looked to the side and realized that the hangar hadn’t been abandoned and left open to the elements. It had been forced open. Bloody handprints matted the lower edge, and bent metal near the edge of the door in multiple places was a testament to the forced opening.
Several touring helicopters sat in the large bay, amid a wreckage of bloody carnage and debris. Suitcases that had clearly been salvaged from the wasted airport were strewn across the floor, and pathetic bedding material—in some cases just extra clothing and towels—lay in clumps around the room, grouped as it might be if families had sought to sleep close to one another. A brief scan of the leftovers in the room revealed that there had been families here. Women, children and the elderly.
They were still here.
But they were all the same, now. Identical in blessed, permanent death.
The only open doors were the ones through which I had entered, and I did a quick circle of the interior to be sure. Grimacing, I tried to avoid the larger areas of destruction, and quickly realized nothing alive was left here.