Dead Things (5 page)

“Damn it!” she cries, tears now running down her cheeks, a hand at her brow.

But then a noise, a soft crackling, like dry leaves…

She is taking too long. She gathers her composure lest she be interrupted or lose her resolve altogether. She wipes her face, leaving dark, raccoon-like streaks about her eyes. With a final and hearty sniff, she brings the weapon above her head once more. She steadies herself, switching her weight from foot to foot. Her countenance goes cold, her strength returns.

She thinks she sees a twitch, maybe a slight change in the reflection off the whites of his eyes.

Now.

She severs his head at the line of his jaw, through his brain stem, the part of his brain housing his motor cortex, connecting his forebrain and cerebrum. His head spins away like a demented dreidel. She wipes the blade on his chest, and her hands on her shirt. The machete slips into the sheath at her hip. She gathers her gear. “Rest in peace.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

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, Knock…

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.

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 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.

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.

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.