quick!"
It was true. There were more of them. They were converging on them from multiple directions.
Walking fast, Frank went over to the end of the airplane wing and motioned for Todd. Todd came. In a low voice, Frank said, "We start shooting now, they're liable to start running. How long you think we have if they do that?"
"I dunno - thirty seconds?"
"Yeah," said Frank. "We're not fucking with two airplanes. Kelly's getting that Cessna started and we're all piling in."
"What if she doesn't get it started?" said Todd.
"Save a bullet for yourself and two for the kids. I'll take care of myself and Kelly."
"Shit Frank. That's cold."
"You want to turn into one of them?" Frank looked at the horde coming up the road and the swarm staggering from behind the house. They were converging on the barn with a slow, hungry movement. The moaning was rising and falling like one long Satanic chant.
Frank went back to Kelly and said, "Any progress?"
"I'm going to try something," said Kelly. She pulled the throttle back to idle and cranked the engine; it started to catch. It coughed like it wasn't sure if it wanted to start or not. Kelly held the starter and pressed in a little throttle. Then it fired up.
"Sweet!" said Pete. "I get to fly."
Frank said, "Not today, kid. Change of plans. We're piling in."
Kelly said, "Pete's right. If we all get in this airplane it might not even get off the ground."
Frank looked over at the zombies. They were rambling faster. It felt like an evil cloud with teeth coming at them. He asked Kelly, "How long to start the Supercub?"
She saw the horde of freaks too. She said, "Shit, Frank. This might kill us. Okay. Everyone in. Frank, you get up front. Todd and the kids in back. This is crazy. I don't know if it's going to work."
They all piled into the Cessna. Kelly slammed her door shut and advanced the throttle. The noise was loud in the tin-can cabin and the engine was just above idle. With Ray, she'd borrowed a Lightspeed noise-canceling headset. This was going to do some hearing damage; she knew it.
She started to taxi away from the barn toward the field. It was bumpy. She held the yoke back to keep weight off the nose wheel. There was no lighting out. She had a hard time figuring out where the grass strip was in the dark. They had to find the strip. Every bump on the ground was something that would rob the speed they needed to get in the air when they started their takeoff run.
Then she saw it. It was a long, darker patch cutting through the field. There was a good chance the strip had its fair share of holes and bumps, but it was better than trying to fight the furrows in a field. She taxied toward it.
"I need the landing light," she said out loud. She flicked it on. It was an LED model and it lit up the ground in front of them. She advanced the throttle a little more. She put in ten degrees of flaps. She could already feel that the center of gravity was off. The plane was tail-heavy. Shit like that got people killed. She hadn't been kidding when she told Frank what a risk it was.
One thing did go through Kelly's mind, on the subject of death: Crashing and burning was better than getting eaten, right?
Josie was looking out the back window. She said, "They're running. They're coming at us. Please get us up in the air. Please." Her voice was tight. Afraid.
Frank opened the passenger window. He realized there was no room to stick the gun out and shoot. He unlatched his door. He saw what Josie was talking about. The zombies were running. Even over the engine he thought he could hear them moaning.
An advance pack of six was closing on the airplane. Zombie cavalry. They looked even more like monsters now, with the way the skin was stretched over the bones of their faces. They were running fast. One of them was going for the open door. Its fingers closed around the wing strut by Frank's door and the plane started to swerve to the right.
Still looking straight ahead, Kelly shouted, "What the fuck, the plane's not staying on course, what's going on Frank?"
Frank didn't have to aim to hit it. He squeezed the trigger and put three holes in its chest, knocking it backward from the kinetic energy of the bullets. He saw it fall. He didn't watch to see if it got back up. He knew it would. But hopefully by then they'd be in the air.
Frank said, "How long until this thing gets airborne?"
"Coming right up," said Kelly. She gritted her teeth. She lined up the plane with the grass runway and took a deep breath. Maybe she even found religion. She pushed in the throttle all the way and the plane started to accelerate. She concentrated on working the rudder with her feet, keeping the nose of the airplane from wandering. She tried to feel the balance of the plane through the yoke. She knew they were way overweight and 'out of the flight envelope' as she'd heard Ray put it.
She thought, This is how you die. And she was doing it on purpose. A light plane that was heavy and loaded too far aft could pitch up on takeoff, then stall and spin in. Kelly knew that if you flew like this, you were rolling the dice.
Frank saw three more zombies racing toward them. He couldn't believe his eyes, but they were running up to the plane, even as it was gaining speed. One of them jumped. It landed on the aft portion of the fuselage and pounded on the plane. The plane pitched up and started to leave the ground before coming back down hard on the nosewheel and porpoising.
"What the fuck is that?" said Kelly. She fought to get them back under control. She was close to losing it. The hit on the nosewheel might have already cracked the firewall or the engine mounts. She said, "Get those fuckers off or we're gonna die." It was hard enough flying this thing as it was; she hadn't flown with Ray in over six months. But they'd crash for sure if a zombie was hanging from the outside of the overloaded little airplane.
"My problem," said Frank. He aimed under the flap for the zombie's head. The thing grimaced at Frank. It was about to jump to the wing. Frank put three rounds in its mouth and then its head was just a bloody stump. The freak let go, bumping against the vertical stabilizer with an arm as it flew off the back.
The plane was gaining speed, but not fast enough. They were at forty knots. They could rotate more at fifty. Climb out at fifty-five if they had to. Kelly saw the end of the runway was coming up. The weight was coming off the main gear but that wasn't going to help them clear the ditch and the road in front of them. This wasn't the Portland Jetport. This was a grass field and the plane was not fit to fly.
Kelly prayed it would. She didn't want to kill everyone on board. She didn't want the kids to die. She saw the airspeed needle edge past fifty. She brought the nose a little higher. The trim was off. She was flying on instinct, no longer thinking, just trying to coax the plane off the ground.
A feeling of lightness. A slight rock of the wings. They were off the ground, but not climbing yet. They were in ground effect, where the drag is lower less than a quarter wingspan from the ground.
The end of the runway was looming. The main gear was still brushing the tall grass. Kelly saw a fence up ahead, a dark line in the night. But the part that worried her was that she saw power poles following the road that sliced in front of them. That meant invisible steel wires were waiting to cut them down if they didn't get high enough in time. She cursed under her breath and white-knuckled the yoke.
She was still careful not to raise the nose too high. She knew that could be death too. Stall and spin, no one wins. She let the airspeed build. She saw fifty-seven knots and she held the speed. The plane was nose-high but now it was climbing out of ground effect.
Barely.
The plane got closer to the wires. Electrical wires would stop them cold. They'd crash in a fireball with a plane full of fuel and people. It would kill them all for sure.
Now it was just a matter of seconds. Kelly looked at Frank and he still had the door open, hunting for zombies from the air. She yelled at him: "Close the motherfucking door, Frank!"
Frank tucked the gun between his legs and slammed the door shut. The reductio
n in drag gave them a little extra performance. They needed just a little more height to make it over those wires. A little more height or they were all dead.
13
Nine and a half inches.
That was how high they were over the wires when they crossed them. Less than a foot between life and death. Kelly didn't know the measurement, not exactly, but she knew it had been tight. She thought it was a miracle. The others didn't know how close they'd come, except maybe Frank. He was sitting up front and could see same as her how close it was.
Kelly was careful now that they were up. She barely moved the controls. A stall at low altitude was fatal. She kept the climb going. The night still had the red orange glow to it. It gave her a visual horizon, which was good. She wanted to get as far away from here as she could. For now she concentrated on straight ahead. Keeping her climb up. The altimeter showed them closing in on two hundred feet.
"What are you doing?" said Frank to Kelly. "You want to get us killed?"
"I'm saving your ass," said Kelly. She only glanced at Frank before scanning the panel and making sure the gauges were in the green. Her eyes went back outside like Ray had taught her.
Frank said, "You keep flying up over town the Army's bound to paint us with ground-based radar and blast our asses out of the sky. We gotta stay low."
Frank was pissing her off but Kelly could buy it. If the town was quarantined, they probably didn't