I don’t mention my concerns to Warren – we’ve all got enough on our plates without piling more on – but I can’t help but feel a little scared of what that realization means. For the last month I’ve been focused so much on the collapse of my home country that I haven’t given so much as a passing thought to the rest of the world. It never occurred to me. I’d just assumed this was our problem alone. At the back of my mind I think I’d assumed that if we could survive this, if we could somehow stick it out and stay alive until the last infected fell, the governments of the rest of the world would swoop in and save the day. The UN. The Red Cross. Medicine Sans fucking Frontiers.
I imagined the rest of the world waiting in the wings, ready to make airdrops and build refugee camps. In my more pleasant daydreams I imagined a resettlement somewhere warm with its own McDonalds franchise, and I thanked God I was born in a country that had exported its culture to all corners of the world. Even if America was really over, I thought, even if we’d taken a truly killing blow from which we could never hope to recover... well, at least there were people in England who knew the recipe for Big Mac special sauce.
Deep in thought I leave the cockpit and head back to the comfortable, well furnished cabin, planting myself in a generously cushioned chair opposite Kaylee. She casually rolls a joint while barely looking down at her hands, as if she does it so often it’s become muscle memory. In the ashtray beside her lie the crushed butts of another two joints, and the golden sunlight pouring in through the windows picks out the thick smoke hanging in the air.
“It’s called cyclothymia,” she says out of the blue, her voice a little distant and slow now the weed has begun to take effect. She notices my confused look and smiles. “The... y’know, the reason I was acting all weird and spaced out back there. It’s like, I don’t know, like half assed bipolar, y’know? I don’t get the full blown manic episodes and long drawn out depression bipolar sufferers get, but without my medication I can get a little... kooky.” She moistens the rolling paper, smooths out the joint and lights it up, filling the cabin with even more fragrant, dizzying smoke.
“To be honest I don’t really remember much of the last few days. Nothing until the pills kicked in, really. It’s like I was watching a movie from the back of my mind, you know?” She sees my expression, and instantly recognizes me as someone who has no idea about mental illness. “Ah, you don’t know. It’s OK. It’s kinda hard to describe to mentally typical people. I’m OK now, anyway. A joint and my pills usually level me out pretty quickly.” She looks out the window and breaks into a grin. “Fuck, I can’t believe I really took off. Dad never let me do that.”
I can’t help but laugh. No surprise considering Kaylee’s been hot boxing the cabin for the last half hour. I haven’t smoked weed since college, and my head is already swimming. “You mean you’ve never taken off before?”
“No, not solo” she says, smirking. “Dad only let me take the stick when we were at cruising altitude. I didn’t even really know what I was doing, I just copied the shit he always did when he took off.”
I start to chuckle, and it takes a few tries to get the words out. “So you’re telling me the first time you ever piloted a plane you were being chased by zombies? Not bad, Kaylee. Not at all fucking bad.”
Kaylee bursts out laughing, and her laughter sets me off until we’re both giggling uncontrollably. After a minute or so I can’t even remember what we’re laughing about, and I don’t care. After the events of the day it just feels good to cut loose. My ribs hurt by the time Vee loses patience with us and goes to find the air circulation controls in the cockpit. Finally, after several long minutes of laughing at nothing, the fans kick in and start to dissipate the smoke fogging up the cabin.
Vee ducks back into the cabin and takes a seat beside us. “Guys, I hate to be the mom in this little family, but we really need to work out where we’re going. This tin can won’t stay in the air forever, and I’d really prefer it if our pilot isn’t completely baked when we come in to land, OK?”
Kaylee sits up and shakes her head as if to clear the cobwebs, then tamps out the joint in the ashtray in the arm of the chair. “You’re right,” she says, trying to keep a smirk from her face. “Sorry, mom.” That sets us both off giggling again, and Vee sits quietly until we both notice her stern expression. Almost immediately all the humor is sucked out of the cabin along with the smoke.
“Don’t worry,” Kaylee says. “I’ll be straight by the time we land. Sorry about the way I’ve been acting, and thanks for, y’know, saving my life and everything. I wasn’t really thinking clearly until now.” She slaps her hands on her thighs and lifts herself out of her chair. “OK, where are we headed?”
Vee turns to me. “Tom? What’s the address?”
I reach into my jacket and pull out Lewis’ notebook, focusing for a moment on the bloody fingerprints before flipping to the back page. “Ummm, it says the facility is just outside Railroad Pass, Nevada. Off the 515 between Vegas and Lake Mead.”
Kaylee pulls herself up from her chair, walks to the back of the cabin and settles herself down by the pile of maps and charts Vee carried on board. “Could be cutting it fine,” she says, frowning. She rifles through the pile until she finds a map of the US, flattens it out on the floor and uses her index finger to measure out the route between Harrisburg and Las Vegas. “Hmmm. Damn, the scale is in kilometers, Anyone know how to convert to miles?”
“Divide by eight then multiply by five,” I say immediately. I’ve spent so much time traveling in countries that use the metric system that I can do rough conversions in my sleep. “What’s the distance?”
“3,400 kilometers”
I close my eyes and do the sum with the same speed I used to convert speed limits as soon as I spotted a cop in the distance. “That’s... about 2,100 miles, give or take a few.”
Kaylee grabs a thick binder beside the maps and starts flipping the pages. “Huh. OK, let’s see... 2,100 miles is around 1,800 nautical miles, and the Spectrum can fly... ummm... OK, cool, this bird can fly 2,000 without refueling” She looks up at Vee. “It’s all good. There’s not a huge margin of error but we had a full tank at takeoff. So long as we stay on course and maintain speed we should make it to Vegas with plenty of fuel to spare. I just hope the runway’s clear, because I don’t have local maps for smaller airfields and I don’t think I could find one by sight. If we can’t land at McCarran we’ll be looking at a highway touchdown, and...” she sees the color drain from Vee’s cheeks. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll be fine.”
Vee stands up without another word and stiffly returns to the cockpit. I almost feel another attack of the giggles come on, but my sense of humor vanishes when I start thinking about the fact that I’m thousands of feet in the air with a pilot who’s never landed a plane before. I look out the window to distract myself from the sudden attack of nerves.
On the other side of the plane the sun is dipping towards the horizon, casting golden ovals of warm light against the wall of the cabin, and out the window the sky is already darkening while the ground below fades in the half light. In the crystal clear, unpolluted air it seems like I can see to the ends of the earth, and as I gaze down at Illinois I’m reminded of just how little of my country is really built up.
Down on the ground it’s easy to forget. Before the infection arrived most of us were firmly tethered to towns and cities. They were the core of our civilization, shaping our lives, their gravity influencing the very structure of our country like lead weights on a rubber sheet. Even now, a month after the collapse of society, I can’t help but think of our journey as a series of stepping stones, hopping from one city to the next until we finally reach Las Vegas. It makes little sense. There’s little awaiting us in the cities but the promise of a quicker death, but despite everything I still I think of them as oases of civilization
If you stick to the roads you could cross entire states without seeing anything but towns, cities, sprawling suburbs and the endles
s strip malls, fast food joints and gas stations that seem to fill every available inch between them. You might be forgiven for thinking that America had long ago lost the war with concrete and asphalt, but from up here it’s clear that the country is, more than anything else, still an unspoiled land. Far below us the ground is a patchwork of every imaginable shade of green. Orderly rectangles of farmland give way to dense, sprawling forests, which themselves give way to broad, lazy rivers that trace serpentine tracks between rolling hills and through deep valleys. The towns and cities that weigh so heavily on the landscape at ground level appear few and far between from up here, mere islands of gray ugliness amidst a sea of green.
I think back to the last time I flew across the country, a late night flight from La Guardia to a friend’s wedding in some nothing little town an hour or so south of Atlanta, and I remember gazing out the window and seeing nothing but light all the way to the distant horizon. Each road was a glowing ribbon, a narrow filament connecting one sprawling mass of light to the next. It seemed as if there was nowhere you could stand on the east coast without seeing an artificial light. I’d found the sight oddly comforting.
Soon after college I’d spent a year living in Mongolia, a country the size of western Europe with a population just a little larger than that of Chicago, and I’d quickly grown wary of the vast, unimaginably empty steppe. Once, while on a horse trek up near the Russian border, my horse had thrown me and bolted with most of my kit, leaving me with a broken wrist and a two day hike back to the nearest road. Winter was closing in and the temperature wasn’t far above zero, but it wasn’t the cold that got to me. It was the sounds I heard after dark, rustling and chattering from all directions, with no way of knowing what was making the noise. The experience had taught me to embrace the light. Light meant safety. It meant heat, and food, and help. More than anything else, light meant that there was someone there to switch it on.
Looking out the window now as the sun dips beneath the horizon I feel a chill pass through me. The setting sun used to bring with it the flickering of lights. Rows of streetlights would power up, connecting towns and cities that would glow in an almost joyous celebration of our dominion over nature. Each little comforting pinpoint would keep away the monsters that lurked in the dark, primal corners of our minds, keeping us safe until the sun once again returned.
But now there’s nothing. Not even any fires large enough to see at this altitude. Now the people below know that light doesn’t repel the monsters. It attracts them. Now there’s no escape. The setting sun can’t be fought. We’re no longer the masters of nature, and the only thing we can do now we’re just another link on the food chain is hide in the darkness and pray for the sun’s return.
I shiver again, suddenly cold, and when I turn back to the warm light of the cabin I realize that Kaylee has returned to the cockpit to pilot the plane through the darkness. Warren gives up the seat and balls his hands into fists to hide the fact that they’re shaking, but not before I notice.
“That was.... interesting,” he says as he walks back to the cabin, a nervous grin on his face. “Never thought I’d get to fly a plane.” We suddenly pulls into a climb, no doubt to avoid any sudden mountains we might slam into in the darkness, and Warren falls into the chair facing me. He looks back to the cockpit. “Vee’s up there trying to learn the ropes. She says she’s just interested, but I got fifty bucks that says she’s terrified Kaylee’s gonna space out on us before we reach Vegas.” He looks around at the ashtray and open lunch box overflowing with pill bottles. “What do you think?”
I pull myself away from my thoughts of the darkness below with a start. “Hmm? Oh, you mean about Kaylee? She seems OK to me, but I’ll be damned if I know. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
Warren pulls out his cigarettes, lights two and passes one forward to me. For some reason it feels wrong – but a little thrilling – to light up in the cabin. Smoking on planes went the way of the dodo years before I took my first flight, and I’ve spent all my life staring up at the no smoking sign next to the fasten seat belt light wondering why the warning is even necessary. The idea of smoking on a plane has always seemed as ridiculous as lighting up in the middle of a wedding service, but now? Jesus H Christ, it feels good. I can’t imagine how shitty passengers must have felt during that first long haul flight after they outlawed in-flight smoking. This is just the best.
“Oh wow,” I grin, blowing a cloud of smoke through my teeth, “I’d pay any amount of money to be able to do this on a regular flight.”
Warren chuckles. “Tell me about it. I managed to sneak a cigarette a couple of times on military flights, and it always felt like Christmas had come early. Did you know the air was actually cleaner on commercial flights back when smoking was allowed?” I shake my head. “Yeah, it’s all a big damned con. The airlines just used the ban as an excuse to recycle the air less often because they didn’t have to extract the smoke. They saved millions every year, and all we got in return was air rage and that shitty stale smell.”
For a few minutes we sit in silence and enjoy our cigarettes, both of us gazing out the window at the dark landscape passing far below. Eventually Warren stubs his out and speaks. “You’ve been around a little, right? I mean, you spent a few years traveling?”
I nod. “Yeah, I guess so. I left the States for Asia not long after college, and I only came back a couple of times since then. Why?”
Warren pulls out another cigarette, looks at it for a few moments then thinks better of it. He sighs. “I’ve just been wondering how we fucked up so bad. I mean, I spent more time than I care to remember in the Middle East, and it was a fucking mess. If the infection arrived in Damascus they wouldn’t last two days. Same goes for Baghdad and Kabul. Even without the wars they were a disaster, but Thailand? They were hit with this shit without any warning at all. No fucker knew what the hell was happening until Bangkok had been wiped off the map, but they managed to contain it. The country survived, and I’m trying to figure out where we went wrong and they went right. Any ideas?”
I don’t say anything for a moment. I’d spent a lot of the last month wondering the same thing, and I could only really come up with one idea that sounded half way believable. “Honestly? I think it’s because we have a... let’s call it a healthy disrespect for authority.”
Warren frowns. “How do you mean?”
“Well, I didn’t spent all that long in Thailand before all the shit went down, but what I know is that it’s far from the tourist paradise you’ll see in the ads. I don’t know the figures, but there were a couple dozen military coups in the last century alone. Every five or ten years the country goes to hell for a little while. Some faction isn’t happy with the government for one reason or another, and ten minutes later there are tanks on the streets. The most recent coup was in 2014 when the army dissolved the government and took control. Curfew, martial law, press censorship, the works. They even banned that three fingered salute from the Hunger Games movies.” I remember reading about that in the papers and laughing at the absurdity of the law.
“Eight years before that there was another coup. Exact same deal. The army rolled in, deposed the Prime Minister and installed a new interim government with some bullshit name. Campaign for Democratic Reform. National Council for Peace and Order. It’s all the same shit. The entire country is like a game of musical chairs, but the army controls the chairs and the music.” I light up another cigarette while I think. “Anyway, an old journalist friend of mine lived in Bangkok through both of these shitstorms, and he used to be amazed at the reaction from the Thais. They were so obedient it was untrue. I mean sure, you’d get the occasional protest every now and then, but for the most part when the soldiers came out on the streets everyone would just go indoors and wait quietly until they left. They were used to it, you see. They knew governments come and go like the seasons, and they knew the safest thing to do was just follow instructions from whoever seemed to be in charge on the day. You could have
marched those people into the sea and they wouldn’t start complaining until they were neck deep.”
Warren laughs. “Not really our style, right?”
“No, not our style at all. We’ve got civil disobedience baked right into us. It’s part of who we are as a people, and it always has been. We’re never happier than when we’re telling the government to go fuck itself, and I think that’s always served us pretty well. We have a talent for protest and we’re not afraid to make our voices heard, and in peacetime that’s fine, but what happens when the war comes to our doorstep without any warning? What happens when the enemy is approaching, and the government finds itself trying to protect people who don’t trust a word that comes out of Washington? They never had a chance. They had the infected on one side and armed citizens on the other who already had plenty of reasons not to trust them. Evacuating free people is like herding cats.”
Warren nods. “You know who really would have come out of this without a scratch? The North Koreans.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “You know what, though? I spent a month locked in a box, and as far as I knew the government was protecting me from the infection. After living through that there’s not a doubt in my mind that I’d take freedom over safety every time. Kim Jong whatever he’s called might have the power to hide his people behind a million strong army, but given the choice I’d prefer the freedom to fuck up and make bad decisions. Without that it’s not really freedom, know what I mean?”
“Damn right,” Warren smiles, lighting another cigarette and blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. “God bless America.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard those words in a month. Actually, now I think about it it may be the first time I’ve heard them in person, earnestly – rather than spoken by some politician because a pollster said it would give him a two point swing with soccer moms in the Midwest – in years, ever since I left the US. I look out the window and watch the blackness below, praying there are still some people surviving down there.
Last Man Standing Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 34
