I thrust my hand into his gaping wound and dig until I find his lung. “Tell me!”
I squeeze his lung, forcing puffs of air through his throat.
“Tell me!”
I hear footsteps behind me, and the burning red murk clears from my vision. I become aware that I am screaming at a dead man, and my fist is inside his chest, and my friends are watching in horrified silence.
I drive the piece of steel into the dead man’s skull, then slowly stand up and turn around, wiping my hand on my pants. Julie, M, and Nora stare at me with wide eyes. Abram waits in the terminal doorway with his daughter, looking more impressed than disturbed. I feel an urge to apologize, to offer some unlikely excuse for what they just witnessed, but I’m too full of disgust. Some for myself, but more for everything else. My disgust for the world is so deep, my own portion sinks into it with barely a ripple.
“We need to go,” I say, staring at the ground.
There is a long silence, broken only by the soft groans of the Dead. They shuffle around like sleepwalkers, eyes on the pavement and the carpet of corpses that covers it, seemingly unaware of our presence, stuffed back into some deep hole where not even the smell of life can reach them.
“Go where?” Julie asks quietly.
“Out into the world. There’s nothing left here.”
“What’s out in the world?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we need to go.”
Without meeting their eyes, I push past my friends and stop in front of Abram. “Axiom owns the coasts. What’s in between?”
He looks me up and down for a moment as if debating how seriously to take me. “Not much,” he says. “Exed cities. Empty territories. A few struggling enclaves, probably.”
“Probably?”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve heard any reports. Axiom mostly sticks to the coasts these days. But everyone knows—”
“No one knows anything,” I snap. “The world has grown. A city’s a country and a country’s a planet. There has to be something out there.”
They all watch me, taken aback by my sudden verbosity, but I’m so focused I forget to feel self-conscious.
“Something like what, exactly?” Nora says.
“People.” I finally allow myself to make eye contact, first with her, then Julie, then Abram. “Help. Maybe even answers.”
Julie begins to nod. “Axiom has our home and everything around it. They plan to keep spreading, and we can’t stop them ourselves.”
“I wasn’t planning on stopping them,” Abram says.
“Oh right, your cabin.” She holds his gaze with that eerily mature steel that lurks beneath her youthful flippancy. I feel a little thrill whenever it emerges. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe if you hide out long enough, Axiom will burn itself out. But my guess is they’ll burn the rest of the continent first. Is that what you want to give Sprout for her eighteenth birthday when you finally come out of your bunker? A scorched Earth run by madmen?”
“I’m not seeing many alternatives,” he says under his breath.
“Are you looking for them? There could be rebel armies, thriving enclaves, people spreading the cure . . . We have no idea what’s out there.”
Abram meets her steel with his own. He is looking at her so intently that he doesn’t notice Sprout wandering off.
“Daddy,” she says, climbing onto the 747’s tire. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Mura, get down!” He rushes over and pulls her off. My own kids stare at the young girl, recognizing one of their own, though their eyes are still wide with the shock of seeing their mother aerosolized in front of them. I note with another pang of sadness that the blood spattered across their faces is red. Dark red, almost purple, but not black. She was so close.
“What are you even proposing?” Abram says without turning around. “Go exploring? Take a road trip? Are you forgetting that Axiom is right behind you? You got lucky twice but the minute we find out—” He stops, releases a weary breath. “The minute they find out what happened here, they’re going to get a lot more serious. We can’t run much longer.”
“Need to run faster,” I say.
He points to the wreck of the chopper. “That’s one of maybe ten helicopters remaining in America, and you know who has the rest.”
“How about a jet?”
He opens his mouth to scoff at this, then glances back at the enormous tire that his daughter is climbing again.
“You said you were a ‘large transport pilot,’ ” Julie says. “Can you fly a 747?”
His eyes travel up the landing gear and over the clownishly bulbous nose of one of the largest commercial airliners ever built. He chuckles. “Fucking thing’s so big I forgot it was a plane.”
“Can you fly it?”
He studies it for a moment, mumbling to himself. “Looks like civil-military . . . late model . . . probably close enough to the C-17 . . .” He glances sideways at Julie. “I can fly it if it flies, but that’s a big ‘if.’ Everything else here is wrecked or gutted.”
“It has power,” I offer.
“There’s fuel in the Iceland Air hangar,” M says, then puts a hand to the side of his mouth and whispers to Nora, “I used to huff it.”
Nora smiles. “Good shit?”
“Good shit.”
Abram watches the Dead stumble over the corpses littering the tarmac. He looks at the two fresh ones in the helicopter, wearing the same beige jackets he is. He looks at his daughter, sitting eye level with him on the tire, her worried face showing a rare glow of excitement.
“I’ll give it a preflight check,” he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
• • •
While Abram inspects the plane’s vital organs, M leads me to his secret stash: a pyramid of fuel drums hidden under a tarp, though I doubt it was the tarp that kept his treasure safe. The airport in general has been largely untouched by post-apocalyptic desperation, still lush with low-hanging fruit like solar panels, cars that run, and perhaps a plane that flies. I suspect it was me and my fellow Dead, gathered here in such uncommon density, who kept the looters away all these years. Thousands of security guards working around the clock—with occasional lunch breaks.
We load as many barrels as we can onto a luggage transport and drive them to the plane. Abram is crouched on the wing, inspecting the flaps, and we watch him for a few minutes before he notices us.
“Is it stabilized?” he asks, clearly grasping at straws. The world had decades to prepare for the apocalypse and preserving the fuel was priority one. Finding perishable gas is about as likely as finding whale oil.
M jabs a hand at the label on the barrels: a clock encircled by spinning arrows.
“How many more are there?” Abram says.
M shrugs. “A lot.”
Abram stares at the barrels with his mouth slightly open, searching for an argument. Then he sighs. “Get them. We’ll need every drop.”
The emergency-exit door bursts open and Julie steps out onto the wing. “Does that mean it works? It’ll fly?”
“It’s the 2035 model,” Abram replies wearily, “about as new as airliners get, and it looks like everything important is intact.” He wipes sweat off his forehead. “Needs a little service, but I think I can get it in the air.”
A look comes over Julie that I haven’t seen since that day on the stadium rooftop, when she saw that the corpse she just kissed was alive, and at least one thing in her dark world could change. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there on the wing, bathing me in a luminous grin, and for a moment, as her hair flutters over her face and the sun turns her skin gold, all her scars and bruises are gone.
“I can get it in the air,” Abram cautions, “but I don’t know how long it’ll stay there.”
Without a word, still grinning, Julie pirouettes back into the plane and slams the door.
“I need about three hours,” he says to M and me, and we both blink awa
y the hypnotic effect of Julie’s happiness. “Which is about how long it’ll take for Axiom to realize their pursuit team failed and send another one. So this might get sticky.”
“How can we help?” I ask, feeling Julie’s excitement and Abram’s fear mixing inside me like a bad drug interaction.
“We’re taking the world’s biggest gas hog on a cross-country joyride,” he says. “We need to lose as much weight as possible.”
M glances down at his massive girth. “I’ll . . . go get those barrels.”
“Take the seats out?” I ask Abram as M lumbers off.
“If we have time. But you can start by clearing all that shit out of the cabin.” He finally looks up from the panel and turns his inspection to me. “So you were a zombie. And you lived in this plane.”
I nod.
“What’s a zombie do with paintbrushes and books?”
I look down. “Didn’t do anything. Just didn’t want to forget.”
“Forget what?”
“That there used to be more than this.”
He looks at me blankly.
“And that maybe there can be again.”
He offers no reply or reaction to this. He turns away and resumes his work. I return to the plane and start cleaning.
• • •
I’ve never explained to Julie what all this junk means and she’s never asked, but she doesn’t move to join me as I shove piles of it out the emergency exits and watch it shatter and smash on the tarmac. She watches from a distance, as if afraid of interrupting a personal moment.
“It was an anchor,” I say as I toss an armful of snow globes and watch them burst like big raindrops. “Helped me hold on to the old world.” I pick up a heavy box of comic books, the closest I ever got to reading before I remembered how words work, and I pause to examine the top issue’s cover. A hardy gang of survivors surrounded by a horde of zombies, carelessly drawn ghouls distinguishable only by their wounds. A thousand individuals with histories and families, reduced to props for the dramas of a few attractive humans. I drop the box and watch the pages flutter, comics mixing with newspapers and fashion magazines, muscular men and skeletal women, monsters and heroes and increasingly hopeless headlines. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Julie moves to my side. She turns my face toward her and kisses me. Then she kicks an old computer monitor out the door and hoots “Woo!” as it explodes with a pleasant pop.
• • •
Nora offers to help us but I politely decline. Clearing out my former home is an emotional process and Julie is the only one I trust to treat my trash with respect. Nora shrugs and takes Sprout outside to watch her father while we dig through my surrogate memories, placeholders for my absent past.
We attack the mess with an everything-must-go gusto, but when I pick up the record player, Julie slaps the back of my head. “Are you crazy? Put that down and turn it on.”
“It’s heavy.”
“We’ve spent the last five days listening to nothing but military strategy, gunfire, and our own screams. I want to hear some music.” She puts on a record from the overhead bin. The opening horns of Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” burst onto the speakers and Julie beams. “I never thought we’d get to play this unironically.”
She DJs with dedication while we work, doing her best to keep things upbeat despite the general joylessness of my record collection. Without being conscious of it, I seem to have gathered two distinct genres in my musical salvages: warm, comforting relics from a simpler time, and bittersweet melancholia from the edge of the end. And since most of the classics are unplayably scratched, we quickly exhaust my supply of house-cleaning jams.
“I guess it’s back to Sinatra,” she says when Sgt. Pepper slips into its inner groove loop, howling its indecipherable incantations.
“Wait,” I say as she stops the record. I pull one of my old favorites from the pile and hand the sleeve to her as I slide the record onto the turntable.
“Elbow?” Her grin fades as she reads the back of the sleeve. “I remember them. One of my mom’s favorites.” I hesitate with the needle hovering over the groove, but she waves away my concern. “It’s fine. Play it.”
I lower the needle. The song is gentle and full of yearning, and it drastically alters the mood. I give her a tentative smile, hoping this is okay. “Wanted to hear something new.”
She reads the fine print on the sleeve. “2008? That’s not new, R. I’m newer than this.”
I shrug. “I’m . . . a little delayed.”
She smirks, then looks at the ceiling as the first verse begins.
We had the drive and the time on our hands
One little room and the biggest of plans
The days were shaping up frosty and bright
Perfect weather to fly
Perfect weather to fly
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Okay, this is good.”
A throat clears behind us.
“Sorry to interrupt your little listening party,” Abram says, standing in the doorway, “but I did mention that people are coming to kill us, right?”
Julie looks around at the cabin, empty except for a few baseball cards and worthless dollar bills under the seats. “We’re done.”
“That turntable looks heavy.”
“If it comes down to a few pounds, Abram, I’ll cut off my arm. Deal?” She closes her eyes and sways to the music. “God, this is pretty.”
Abram gives her a thoroughly unenthused stare and slips into the cockpit to begin powering up the plane. No sooner has he left the doorway than Nora steps into it. “R?” she whispers, glancing after Abram to make sure he’s not listening. “You might want to come up here.”
I follow her through the boarding tunnel into the waiting area of Gate 12. Several carry-ons lie open and emptied on the floor, and while the toiletries and computer gear have been ignored, the clothes have been put to use. Between two rows of seats is a huge fort made of dresses and robes draped over mop handles. The engineering is impressive.
“We need more mops,” says a small voice from inside. “Go get some mops.”
Julie and I exchange a glance. We duck down to peek through the entrance. Abram’s daughter appears to be having a tea party with my two Dead children, still sticky with their mother’s blood.
Sprout turns, grins, waves. “Hi! We’re building a building!”
I realize that the items on the floor between them are not plates and silverware but notepads and compasses. Sprout seems to have found an architect’s drafting kit. But I’m less concerned about the girl’s impractical career goals than I am about her choice of friends. Joan and Alex kneel under the fort’s colorful ceiling of luminous cotton, staring at Sprout with a dreamy disorientation in their dull gray eyes. I see no signs of hunger or aggression. They seem to have witnessed both the massacre of their neighbors and the liquefaction of their mother without succumbing to relapse, but I remember them running through the airport, laughing and playing like something very close to normal children, and I also remember them picking up a man’s severed arm and sharing it between them like a jumbo hot dog. The plague is uncertain of its welcome. It circles their hearts, tapping on windows. I can’t trust it or them.
“Come out,” I tell Sprout, and her smile fades.
“Why?”
“You can’t be around those kids.”
“Why?”
Behind us, the plane’s engines sputter to life. They rev and chug for a moment, then settle into a steady hum.
“Sprout, honey,” Julie says, “it’s time to go. But Joan and Alex can come with us.”
I look at her sharply. “They can?”
She looks back even more sharply. “Were you planning on leaving them here?”
“Well, I—”
“R,” she says, horrified. “Axiom’s going to cut through this whole hive looking for us. You want to leave your kids to be mowed down with the others?”
“No, but . . . they’re dangerous.”<
br />
“Who’s dangerous?” Abram says, stepping out of the boarding tunnel. “What’s going on?”
Sprout peeks shyly from under a silk negligee. “Hi, Daddy.”
Abram crouches down. He sees my kids staring at his daughter. “Jesus,” he spits and knocks the roof off the fort, grabs Sprout and carries her clear while my kids watch mutely.
“You broke it!” Sprout cries. “You broke my building!”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he says, glaring at all the adults in the room.
“We were watching them,” Nora says. “They weren’t doing anything.”
“They’re fucking zombies, for Christ’s sake.”
Julie stands up. The steel returns. “They’re coming with us.”
“You are out of your fucking mind.”
“We’ll tie them up and keep them in the back of the plane. They won’t be able to hurt anyone. They’re the closest thing R has to a family and we’re not leaving them here for your friends to butcher.”
I hear a new tone mixing into the hum of the engines. A lower-pitched drone like an ugly harmony.
“Using a jumbo jet as a getaway car is already the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Abram says. “If you expect me to—”
“Quiet,” I snap, holding up a hand and tilting my head, listening.
Abram looks like he’s about to hit me, then he hears it too. He runs to the window and peers out at the northern horizon. Two black specks mar the blue sky. Three. Four.
The argument is over. Without further comment, Abram carries his daughter into the boarding tunnel. Julie and Nora look at me with wide eyes.
“Go,” I tell them. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Nora runs into the tunnel and pokes her head through a broken window. “Marcus! Get your beefy butt up here! Flight six-six-six is now boarding!”
Julie hesitates just a moment, then follows Nora.
I look at Joan and Alex. They look at me. I hope what I see stirring behind the dullness in their eyes is understanding, maybe even forgiveness, as I tie belts around their wrists.
• • •