by Glynn James
“What do you think that place is?”
Derwin followed his gaze, and frowned.
“No idea. No tarmac up to it so it’s unlikely anything flies out of there.”
Wesley was silent for a moment. “I think we should check it out.”
Derwin sighed. “Okay. Looks like a dud to me, all the way out there. But you’re the boss on this one.”
The building was farther away than they had thought, and after over ten minutes of trudging through the overgrown grass and across broken roadway, they finally stood outside the main doors.
“Well it’s got something like hangar doors,” said Wesley.
“Yep. But look at the place. It probably hadn’t been actively used for years before the ZA.” Derwin rubbed at one of the panel windows that were coated with grime and dirt. The dirt didn’t come off.
The main doors wouldn’t open even with both of them pulling, but they found the entrance to a small office at the side of the building. Inside, desks and a cabinet had been turned over. Paperwork and files lay strewn across the floor, covered in mold. Both men drew their side arms, and Derwin stepped inside first.
“Maybe we should call back and get the others over here?” asked Wesley.
Derwin scanned the office, his handgun pointing at spots that could provide cover. “You want to wait twenty minutes while they saddle up and conduct large-scale maneuvers to this position?”
“No, thanks,” said Wesley, stepping into the doorway and making his way carefully across the floor, avoiding the debris.
The door opposite, which he guessed must lead into the main part of the warehouse, was slightly ajar. Derwin stood to one side as Wesley gave the door a light kick, then stepped back. The warehouse was almost in darkness, with very little light breaking through the dirty windows, but they could see clearly enough to know what was sitting directly in front of them, gathering dust.
The sleek wing of a fighter plane.
“This place still has power,” said Derwin, nodding in the direction of a panel on the support column a few feet inside the building. Wesley peered at it, recognizing that it was an on/off switch. The red button was lit up. He stepped towards it, reached out and pressed the green button, and an audible click echoed across the vast empty space. It was followed by a loud clanging sound as the nearest hangar door clunked to life and started retracting upwards.
“How come it still works?” asked Wesley, frowning.
“There must be a big-ass UPS battery around here somewhere,” said Derwin. “Maybe it was charged up before the power was lost and it’s just been sitting here ever since. I doubt it’ll last long.”
Wesley nodded, and they stood there watching as the massive door rose, sunlight gradually inching into the building – and slowly revealing not one, but a half dozen fighter planes crammed into the space in the middle of the warehouse. They were all covered in thick dust, and obviously had been there for a long time.
“Well,” laughed Derwin, “I don’t think this is quite what we were looking for, and they aren’t a lot of good to us, but at least we can report back that we found aircraft.”
“What are they? Why are they here?” Wesley asked.
“F-14 Tomcats. The whole fleet was retired in 2006, if I recall. Hmm, they are two-seaters… if there were just a few more, actually…”
He turned toward Wesley, and stopped smiling. The other man was now frowning at something, and deep in thought. Then he started walking, heading through the middle aisle of the warehouse, towards the back. Derwin followed, scanning around the edges of the echoing space as they went. In every corner the remnants of stored equipment lay stacked in great piles. From the state of the crates and boxes, it was evident that whatever was stored in them had been there for years – even before living people ceased to tread the grounds of the air station.
“Talk to me buddy,” said Derwin.
“There’s something out the back there.”
They moved slowly past the row of mothballed fighter planes until they reached an archway two-thirds of the way into the warehouse. Behind that another large bay opened up, and this one was almost completely empty – empty apart from one enormous object that sat like an ancient behemoth, some hulking god or idol, dead in the middle of space.
It was a B17 Flying Fortress – the legendary World War II bomber.
Derwin looked over at Wesley.
“Please tell me that you are not thinking what I think you are thinking?”
Wesley just smiled.
The Last Tale of Canterbury
It swept through the southern part of the city before anyone even knew to be afraid. And it didn’t matter that the sirens blared out their ear-piercing wail of warning for the first time since World War II. Most people in Canterbury, even in an age where the rest of the world had fallen because they hadn’t been prepared, still didn’t heed the warnings and follow the procedures that had been drilled into them for two years.
Starting with: stay inside and lock your doors.
At the sound of the siren people came outside, wondering what was wrong. Was it some sort of drill? Was there a fire? That was how a single lightning-fast zombie singlehandedly spread the plague to the point where the balance tipped. It moved amongst them at a speed no one had expected. As far as everyone in the town knew, the creatures didn’t move that fast. But this gray, bedraggled thing almost flew past them in a frenzy, never stopping as it scratched, clawed, and bit its way toward the center of the city.
At the roundabout of Watling Street and Old Dover Road, an ATV sat humming, doors open, parked half off the road and half on. Caulton, Berry, and Wilson, three members of the Royal Anglian Regiment, stood their watch, as they had every day for the last three months since their posting to the south. They could hear the siren blaring, but until the radio buzzed and they got the call to move, they just waited.
Caulton, a tall man, six-foot-six and barrel-chested, sat on a concrete water mains marker a few feet away from the vehicle, smoking a cigarette and listening to his companions debate the football league and its five remaining teams. He wasn’t too bothered about sport, at least not watching it, and in his opinion the downfall of the sport world due to the apocalypse rendering most athletes dead was not a life-threatening issue. His buddies disagreed. They were furiously arguing about the upcoming last match of the season, when the creature came running down Old Dover Road straight toward them.
Wilson saw it first.
“What the fuck is that?” he blurted, football forgotten in an instant. The creature was still two hundred yards away but it was closing damned fast.
Caulton frowned and then dropped his smoke, grabbing as fast as he could for his side arm. Berry still hadn’t spotted the thing, and was still peering out the dirty windscreen with a look of confusion.
Then someone stepped out onto the road between them; an old man, perhaps in his eighties, who also hadn’t seen the creature. He hobbled onto the tarmac and began his slow crossing, not even once looking to his sides for signs of traffic, let alone anything else. In some ways that might have been a blessing, for the Foxtrot was not one to aim or discriminate, and certainly had no concept of respecting its elders.
It passed the man while still in a full-speed gallop toward the ATV, raising its sharp, clawed hand as it went by and tearing out the man’s throat, gouging him deeply and severing his carotid artery. The old man stumbled a short distance further into the road before it even dawned on him that something was wrong. Then he fell forward, hitting the ground hard and knocking himself out instantly.
The fell creature sped onwards toward the Anglians. A hundred and fifty yards, then a hundred.
The soldiers sat in their spots, disbelieving, as the gap between them and their looming deaths shortened with every millisecond. If it hadn’t been for Caulton finally snapping out of his daze it would all have been over in seconds.
The crazed dead thing raced to close the last twenty yards as Caulton hefted his
handgun, raised it to level, and fired. He only had time for one shot, and it had been a long time since he had aimed at anything that ran that fast.
But luck was with him. The bullet hit the creature in the mouth, blowing a spray of flesh and dark liquid in a cloud behind it as it tumbled forward to crash onto the ground just three feet away from him. Caulton lowered his weapon.
The Foxtrot that had crawled out of the Channel Tunnel was now gone, but the infection that it had brought to Canterbury was alive and well, and even now spreading further.
Mission complete.
One for Sorrow
“Sorry,” Sarah said, holding the cabin’s front door open for Handon, then pressing it closed behind them. “The battery’s going to have to charge for a while if it’s going to put out the kind of power needed to reach your ship.”
“Understood,” Handon said.
“We don’t make a lot of long-distance calls lately. We can go in and try again in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, I thought you and I might sit and talk for a bit.”
“Sounds fine,” Handon said. “Here?”
He looked to a rough wooden bench on the porch. But as he did so, the front door opened again and Mark Cameron emerged – holding an axe. He paused, nodded at Handon, looked at his wife, and adjusted his grip on the axe handle. “Could use some firewood,” he said, then stepped off and moved toward what Handon could see was a woodpile nearby. As he left, Handon could now also see a conspicuous bald patch on the back of his head – and also noticed the cable-knit sweater the man wore.
Sarah looked around. “We get our water from a stream nearby,” she said. “It’s nice to sit by the banks.”
Handon gestured. “Lead on.”
* * *
“Christ, mate,” Henno said, looking over at Juice. “You trumped again, didn’t you?”
Juice, used by now to Henno’s exotic Yorkshire-speak, knew what that meant – he’d just been accused of farting. “Screw you, man. I’m innocent.” Everyone there also knew that Juice had on many previous occasions been guilty.
“Well, summint cleared the room. Everyone’s skived off.”
And this was true, even if somewhat garbled. Handon had left with the woman. Ali and Homer were on the porch, probably cuddling. The scientist was in isolation in the parents’ bedroom – frantically reviewing his research notes, now that it looked like saving humanity was back in play – and the boy was off sulking in his. God knew where the husband was.
Only Predator, Juice, and Henno remained in the main room of the cabin.
“May as well use the time for weapons maintenance,” Juice said. He pulled a cleaning kit out of his ruck and started to break down his baby – a Swiss Arms SG 553 assault rifle. Since its last cleaning, it had been frozen in the upper atmosphere, pawed at by jackrabbit zombies, dunked in the lake – and, moreover, had put out nearly a thousand rounds of high-velocity 5.56mm. In fact, none of that was likely to slow it down, much less jam it.
But Juice couldn’t have it thinking he didn’t love it.
He briefly eyed Predator. “Don’t give me that look,” Pred snapped. “I’m going to use the time for sitting still for just five fucking minutes. For once.”
“Aye,” Henno agreed, nodding. “Doing fuck-all is the way forward.”
Juice shrugged. He couldn’t fault them. It had been non-stop and a thousand-miles-an-hour lately. And while Tier-1 guys weren’t known for sitting on their asses, still it was a military axiom that one ought to rest when one may. Because the opportunity may not come again soon.
Or at all.
* * *
“One for sorrow,” Homer said, pointing up and to the west.
Ali followed the ray of his finger, but didn’t see it. “What am I looking at?”
“A magpie,” Homer said. “See the black and white? With the flash of iridescent blue?”
“Got it. Beautiful bird.”
“Smart, too. They’re of the corvid family, with ravens and crows. Very clever creatures.”
The two warriors sat now on the bench on the front porch, having landed on it a few minutes after Handon and Sarah passed it up for more privacy. For these two, though, it was enough. Any more would draw comment.
The sun was fully up now, though the sky was mostly cloudy, and the air very cool. They had been getting more northerly, starting from Chicago – which was already no beach holiday in November. And both the lateness of the season and the increasing latitude meant that the days were getting very short, and the sun hugging the horizon.
“Why sorrow?” Ali asked, squeezing Homer’s hand.
“What?”
“You said, ‘One for sorrow’.”
“Oh. It’s an English nursery rhyme. Henno taught it to me, somewhere along the way. There’s an omen associated with whatever number of magpies you might see. Unfortunately…”
An easy and peaceful half-smile lingered on Ali’s face now. She was feeling alive and whole, and more so with every moment Homer was back. Though this good feeling was not totally without reservations. She had absolutely zero desire to feel that much dependency on another person. She had certainly never been that way before – and it was especially dodgy now, when other people could be, and often were, taken away from you at a second’s notice.
The ZA had not been good for human intimacy.
“Unfortunately what?” Ali said, prompting Homer after he trailed off.
He looked up at her, and slowly recalled what he’d been saying. “Unfortunately… magpies are very solitary. So it’s most often just one you see. One for sorrow.”
Ali laughed. “Good thing we don’t believe in omens. What are the others?”
“Let’s see… ‘One for sorrow / Two for mirth / Three for a wedding / Four for a birth..’. Though some say ‘Four for death’. I gather there are different versions of it. I forget the rest.”
Homer paused and pointed again. Sure enough, a second bird had appeared, striking and sleek, both of them swooping to the ground, and closer to the cabin now.
“Two for mirth,” Ali said.
And as she said it, deep and raucous laughter erupted right behind them, muted by the thick wood walls, but still very audible. Homer twisted to face Ali, and gave her a look that she wanted to find smug… but it just seemed cute to her. She laughed, reluctantly. Now was probably not the time to give Homer the lecture about coincidences – and about humankind’s troublesome propensity to find cosmic significance every time two events in the world matched up in any way whatsoever.
It was certainly luck that they were both still alive – as their friends Pope and Ainsley were not. And that they were still together. Ali imputed no cosmic significance to these facts – they were just random outcomes of contingent fate in an arbitrary and uncaring universe.
But, while their survival, their finding of each other, had no cosmic meaning… still it held a hell of a lot of meaning for her.
And that was enough.
* * *
“We reserve use of the generator for really critical things, and of course for emergencies,” Sarah said, from ahead of Handon. The two walked now down an overgrown trail, blanketed with damp leaves, and menaced by hanging branches above and undergrowth below. If it had once been a deer run, the deer had abandoned it. Visibility was about fifteen feet. Handon touched his side arm. He’d left his rifle inside, as had his guide.
But she, too, wore a handgun.
“And it’s just gotten too dangerous going out to siphon fuel,” Sarah said. “Takes too long, makes too much noise. And at this point, we’ve used every drop to be had in the village. So now it means a trip further afield.”
“I know just how you feel,” Handon said. “Our missions keep stretching further and further out. And the risks mount. I see you’ve got the generator and fuel tank positioned away from the house, up against the fence. Smart.”
“Yes, even with the dead running around, fire safety is important. More important, come to think of it. And I real
ly try not to let the fuel tank get below half empty. The last thing we need is to have to stage a scavenging mission right in the middle of an emergency – a medical crisis, or if we need the radio for some reason.”
Handon smiled. “Once again, welcome to our world. Military provisions and planning – with scare quotes around the ‘planning’ part.”
Watching her walk ahead of him, he also noted that Sarah had left her hunting jacket off, revealing a long-sleeve synthetic T-shirt with the sleeves pushed up. The cold air didn’t seem to bother her. And Handon could see better now that she was slim, or slender – though by no means petite, or vanishing. Mainly, she looked healthy, and extremely functional.
She also looks pretty damned good, Handon couldn’t stop himself thinking.
But very quickly, and luckily to his way of thinking, the two emerged into the open, on the banks of a small stream. It tumbled quietly over smooth stones as it wound its way back toward the town, and down into the lake. Sarah led him to a fallen tree, perfectly positioned for a view of the water, and the top of which someone had carved into a wide flat section.
A bench seat, for two. They sat.
Sarah looked across at Handon levelly. “Okay,” she said. “Now why don’t you tell me why you’re here. Or, at least, whatever of it you can tell me.”
Handon nodded. He appreciated her acknowledgement of their need for operational security, or OPSEC. He certainly wanted to tell her what he could. And something about the way she made him feel had him wanting to tell her everything.
Though, like most temptations, he reminded himself, that one is to be resisted.
While he was still planning his answer, she said, “You already said you’re based in the UK.”
“Yes,” Handon said. “And, from your guess, I figured you must have picked up one of the beacons.”
Shortly after Britain had stabilized its borders and tamped down internal outbreaks – and also figured out no other country in the world had done so – they had started broadcasting worldwide on a variety of radio frequencies. The messages repeated day and night, on a loop, explaining that there were survivors in Britain – and that humankind was still in the fight. It also listed frequencies that they monitored, which other survivors could use to make contact.
