by Darst, Matt
“Fucking badass,” Van exclaims. He’s staring toward the nose of the plane.
“What?” And then Ian sees.
Wright stands before them, her face lined with mud, blood splattered on her chest. A pistol sits on her hip, a machete on her thigh.
Ian feels something in his chest, an unfamiliar flutter. Fucking badass? He gulps. Eyes wide, all Ian can do is nod in agreement.
**
They are out, eight of them anyway, scurrying single file, little ants under cover of night. They stay low to the ground amid the brush, halting abruptly when Wright raises a hand. They clamor noisily behind her, wind chimes in a storm. She makes them drop to their bellies, hiding whenever lightning strikes threaten to give up their positions.
Minutes tick by, their chins and waists deep in the mud. Eventually the little ants start their march again, the larger world oblivious to them, the only evidence of their existence a ruined plane and the passengers who chose it as their tomb miles behind. Blind and dripping in the moonless darkness, Ian replays the events of the last hour in his head. The pandemonium reveals itself in fragments like grainy and shaken pieces of a looping Zapruter film.
Wright pulled Heston and Ian aside. “Is anyone hurt?” Wright asked. “It’s hard to say,” the Doctor replied, “but it doesn’t look like it.”
“Good. So these people can travel?”
Heston nodded, “I think so. But there’s a woman with a baby. They’re sleeping now, but she may be suffering from minor shock.”
“Her face was pale,” Ian chimed in. “I raised her feet.”
Wright addressed the other passengers. She asked for their attention, her voice barely cutting through the din. Already they were complaining, bickering amongst themselves. But, soon, whispered hushes spread row by row throughout the cabin, touching each like lice spreading amongst third-graders. Wright finally had their focus. Save for the drumming rain, the cabin was silent.
“My name is Kari Wright,” she began. “I am Flight 183’s Air Marshall.” Protocols required that she inform the passengers that the flight had “landed prematurely.” But Wright was more direct: “Flight 183 has crashed.” The passengers stared, a few openly and deeply sobbing. This displeased Wright. “I am going to need your full cooperation. First and foremost, I need you to remain quiet. Please hold all discussions. I will provide further instructions shortly.”
That wasn’t good enough for one of the passengers, the heavyset man in the third row. He stood and bellowed for the pilot. He said he was owed an explanation.
Wright remained poised. “I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir. Please cooperate and have a seat.”
But the fat man would have none of it. She was full of shit. He demanded the pilot’s presence now. A woman, possibly his wife, put a hand on the man’s waist, a weak effort to calm him. He shook her off.
The rest of their exchange was choppy, bouncing back and forth like a screenplay for a movie.
Wright: Sir, please.
Fat Man: I want to see him, now!
Wright (to the entire cabin): Again, that is impossible. (More subdued) The captain did not survive the landing.
The passengers gasp.
Fat Man: Let me talk to the co-pilot, then.
Wright (sternly): You are now speaking to the ranking officer, Sir.
Fat Man: What, the co-pilot, too?
Wright: The first officer did not survive the landing either. I am now in command of this vessel and flight. We will be disembarking immediately, so I ask that you quickly and quietly change...jeans and trainers, hiking boots if you have them…anything water repellent.
Mr. Phantom Menace: My name is Burt. Burt Feldman. Is there any danger of an explosion?
Wright: No. The captain dumped the fuel before landing, but we remain in danger and must move quickly.
Burt (nodding): Okay, good. By the way, has anyone seen a Spiderman comic about? Numbered 129?
And that’s when the mutiny started.
The Fat Man cajoled the passengers. How could they expect a woman with child to leave the comfort and safety of the plane? Why should any of them, really, be expected to go anywhere? He, for one, was not going. He was going to stay right there, stay right there and wait for help.
Wright hissed at the Fat Man to keep his voice down, but he defied her.
He screamed that none of them would leave at least not until they had received answers.
Wright tried to explain. He didn’t understand the urgency of the situation.
“Then why don’t you tell me?” he countered. “Enlighten us all!”
Wright looked past him, realized the whole cabin was staring at her, even the kid in the punk rock shirt.
She resolved to tell them of their predicament. She told them the truth, or as close to the truth as she could muster. She recapped: things are bad.
One. The plane is down.
Two. The captain and first officer are dead (she allowed the passengers to assume they died upon impact and said nothing to counter that assumption).
Three. The radio is non-responsive.
Four. Supplies are limited.
Five. They had gone down in the wilderness. Down outside of the republic’s territory, outside the protection of human armaments and fortified walls.
They were in the forbidden zone. The wilderness. The dead zone.
Wright’s statement begged the question that a young blonde woman asked: “Are you saying that those things are out there?”
Yes. There were gasps.
The blonde wondered how far they were from the border.
Dozens of miles. Maybe many more. Wright said it was impossible to be sure.
She did not give voice to her true suspicions, however. They were in southern Louisiana—or what was once southern Louisiana—hundreds of miles from both their destination and home.
Then a brunette said what everyone else was thinking: “I’m not going out there with those monsters!”
The Fat Man found his entry. “You can’t expect us to trek that distance, not with those dead things out there, not with a baby in tow. It will draw them right to us!”
Now it was the mother’s turn: “I am not going to risk my child out there!”
The Fat Man was now up, giving Wright his back, addressing the cabin: “Look, I was a scout, and when you’re lost, the number one rule is to stay in place. Let help come to you. She’s telling us to do the exact opposite.”
“When you were a scout,” Wright muttered, “the only worry you had was wetting your sleeping bag. No one was exactly handing out merit badges for surviving an assault by the walking dead.”
Another man, bookish and bald, had a question: “Is this plane equipped with a homing beacon?”
Wright stammered. “Yes, but—”
“Was it activated?”
“Yes, but—”
The Fat Man jumped in again: “Well, there you go. We sit back—”
The bald man agreed: “—and wait for the cavalry.”
Wright rested on her military training and flight protocols. No one is going to strike out to rescue them. It’s just not standard operating procedure.
But the passengers felt they knew differently. They felt their leaders were righteous. As righteous men, they would come for them, SOPs be damned. And they trusted them much more than this…woman.
They put the issue to a hand vote. Should we stay or should we go? Ten voted to stay, eleven including the infant, even after being reminded that the crash would draw attention, and that the cabin was breached and wasn’t secure. Eight, mostly kids, voted to go. Ian had to help raise Van’s hand for him. And that was that.
Wright’s shock was momentary. Her jaw resets, strong and square. These ten had chosen their eleven fates, choosing their undoing over the possibility of life. Granted, it was a slim possibility for the eight, but it was a damn shade better than what awaited those left behind. “Let’s go,” Wright spat.
Chapter Four: Knock, Kno
ck…
The plane is dark, silent, save for the steady patter of rain and the slight sucking sounds of an infant at her mother’s breast. Now and then lightning strikes, illuminating the grim faces of the passengers who stayed back. The cabin goes dark again, leaving them to their thoughts and the foreboding rumble of thunder.
Hours pass like this, their hopes falling like the sheets of rain outside. The Fat Man suggests campfire songs.
As morning approaches, their spirits momentarily brighten when they hear a fateful rapping on the hull.
Chapter Five: Vintage Van
Ian is roused in the early morning hours, nudged by the muddy toe of a combat boot. Wright stares down at him. The skies are starting to clear. Shards of light pierce the gray cloak of clouds above her. “Time to move,” she says, her voice a gust amongst the reeds.
Ian rises from his bed of pine needles. His cohorts are busy piling an odd assortment of belongings—perfumes, candies, skirts, shoes, shaving cream, moisturizer, bug repellant—into a stack in the middle of a white bed sheet.
Van approaches the pile with a look of disgust. In his hands is a bottle of cologne and a pair of red Converse. He looks at the shoes, shakes his head from side to side, and tosses just the cologne on the pile. He strokes the canvas of the trainers like a pet cat, then catches Ian’s gaze. He walks over.
“What’s going on?” Ian asks in a hush.
Van sighs. “She’s making me throw away my cologne. And my All-Stars.”
Why?
Van says something about traveling light—“lean and mean or some shit”—and that scents attract them. Only non-scented deodorant or antiperspirant and a few changes of clothes. One pair of shoes. Everything else stays.
Ian shrugs. It makes sense to him, despite Van’s accusations of fascism. Then Ian examines Van’s feet. “But you’re already wearing a good pair of trainers.”
Van explains his conundrum: “Yeah, but these don’t go with my red polo. I’ve got to have the vintage Converse when I rock the red polo.”
Ian has a solution. Leave the polo, too.
Van pleads. He doesn’t have room to hide them in his backpack.
Ian concedes. He might have room in his bag. He takes the shoes.
Van perks up, thanks Ian, but then warns: “Try not to scuff them, though.”
Ian tears through his pack. He settles on a spare pair of jeans, a hoodie, T-shirts, socks, underwear, and toiletries. The rest he discards. Everything, that is, but his father’s necktie. He stands at the edge of the heap, clutching the tie before him.
“Toss it,” Wright commands.
Ian did not see her approach. He shares his reservations: “It was my dad’s.”
“Is he alive?” Wright asks.
“No, he died when I was just a few years old.”
But Wright is preoccupied by a thought. The tie has jogged a memory, a lone moment among thousands during the height of the outbreak. She was twelve. Hundreds of motorists were stuck in traffic on I-65, her family among them, waiting in vain to drive to God-knows-where. Or, God’s nowhere. Because no place was safe, not even your car.
Wright saw one of them, freshly turned and still strong, reach through the driver’s side window of some guy’s car—maybe an attorney or a salesman or something—and grab hold of his necktie. The attorney/salesman hadn’t seen it in the rear view, hadn’t seen it slither from the back of an idling ambulance parked directly behind him. He had been too busy honking and shouting at the cars ahead of him.
Now he was tethered, and he couldn’t escape. The thing pulled itself into the car through the open window, climbing the tie like a rope. They struggled, the guy nearly choking to death before he emerged, bloody, from the passenger side. He sprinted full out down the median, screaming.
He would have been better off being strangled to death by that tie.
“Toss the necktie,” she repeats. “They don’t call those things ‘nooses’ for nothing.”
Ian miserably complies.
Van rests against a tree, watching the seven other castaways scamper about. They are a motley group, bound together by their confusion, discomfort, and anonymity.
He spies Ian talking to the air marshal, a bearded guy sneaking off for a piss behind a pine, a middle-aged couple bickering in whispers. They are the oldest here, the doctor and his wife. Though it’s obvious she’s had some work, she is still a MILF.
More importantly, there are a couple of chicks. Sisters, maybe? Van guesses one is a year or two younger than him. And, man, is she on point. She bends over her duffle. Dibs, he thinks.
The other is a few years older. Maybe she’s already served if she hasn’t received a deferral. She’s cute, too, just a little heavier, with glasses, but nice still.
The girls introduce themselves to each other. They smile at each other, shaking hands. No, not sisters after all. Van looks forward to getting to know them.
It’s like a modern day Canterbury Tales. Traveling with them will be a character study, with one significant difference: Chaucer’s troop wasn’t in danger of being devoured, at least not by the undead.
Van resolves to get to know these girls sooner rather than later.
Wright orders them all to fall in.
“Fall in what?” the younger girl asks. She’s already braiding the other’s hair, like this is summer camp.
The couple is squabbling over whose decision it was to put their car—they are obviously wealthy—in short-term parking. The bearded guy named Burt pays attention to Wright, but not to his surroundings. He is knee-deep in a patch of poison oak.
Wright’s going to have to start at the top.
“Lean” they are. “Mean?” Unlikely. And a “fighting machine?” Never. Regardless, they will take and obey commands just like any military operation. They cannot afford to be sloppy. Carelessness will not be tolerated. Be vigilant, she instructs, or be prepared for death…or worse. She is not about to become an entrée because someone can’t hold his or her shit together.
They are scared. Good. Fear keeps soldiers on their toes. Fear motivates and guards against complacency. But fear, eventually, paralyzes, and that outcome is always lethal. She will need to be careful with this group, walking the tightrope and hoping for the best.
This and every morning before they move out, they will secure the campsite. Leave no traces. Today it is Van’s turn to discard the debris. Wright instructs him to tie their belongings in the bed sheet, and scale a nearby tree. They hand the bundle up to him, and he secures it in a cradle created by a fork in the branches, approximately 20 feet or so off the ground. They must also bury their waste.
They will follow her in groups of twos, each pair ten paces behind the preceding pair. No more, no less. Wright is first. In time, they will each learn to “take point.” For now, they will watch her and follow her every move. If she halts, they halt. If she hides, they hide. And if she runs…
One person takes up the rear. Today it is Ian. If the person manning the rear notices anything, anything, strange or out of the ordinary, he or she must sprint to the front to alert the point.
Conversation and noise will be kept to a minimum, or, if Wright dictates, prohibited entirely. “They” do not lose their ability to hear upon death—at least not immediately—and, although no official study has been released, Wright believes their faculties to be as acute, perhaps better, as when they lived. At any rate, now is not the time to play the part of the control in an experiment. As she did with Captain Richard King, once her lover, she will continue to assume the worst.
She stops them just an hour past noon. A quick head count, and she distributes packets of freeze-dried meat and vegetables. They are hungry and eagerly tear into their rations.
Van gags. “What is this? It tastes like shoe leather.”
Wright sits on the roots of an upended tree, about six feet in the air, where she has a view in all directions, and where she considers that Van probably isn’t far off. She hops down from her roost
. “This…would be beef,” she says, taking the morsel from Van. She tosses it back. “The chicken is more of an orange color.”
“That explains what I’m eating, then,” Ian offers, holding up a pumpkin-colored stick of chalk.
Burt is sitting at the base of a tree. He raises his hand for acknowledgement, as if he’s in grade school. Wright nods. “How much of this do we have?” he asks.
Unfortunately, they don’t have much. Most of it was left to those remaining on the plane. They will be happy to know, though, that Wright left them most of liver-flavored rations.
Their laughter is nervous and stunted, but it is also a sign that a shared identity may be forming amongst this band of strangers.
And what will they do after that? This is the question from the young brunette.
“Jessica, is it?” Wright asks, and Jessica nods. Things get considerably harder after that. For what they lack in taste, the rations make up for in vitamins, minerals, and carbs.
The rations are basically the same stuff the U.N. airdropped to starving countries in the early 2000s. They haven’t been improved upon too much. They are freeze-dried, so there’s very little scent. The wrapper is biodegradable, but no longer reflective. Once the rations are gone, safely feeding the passengers becomes much more difficult. But there are ways, and Wright will show them.
With that, Wright stands up, checks her compass. She looks over her shoulder, toward a cluster of trees that, apparently, represent “north.” She turns to the passengers. “Mr. Feldman—”