Project Airborne

by Johnson, Cassandra

  Applying pressure to the gas pedal again, the dodge Ram roared as he surged forward, bouncing over dead bodies that were sprawled all over the parking lot, and the zombies themselves, the ones he’d run over weren’t even dead, they were run over, arms and legs squished with inky black blood gushed out of their wounds or where limbs should have been, but they weren’t dead. Instead, they scrapped, crawled and rolled around on the ground still looking for fresh meat to sink their teeth into. With his heart hammering, he knew what he needed to do, he just hoped that it didn’t get those two girls killed in the process.

  They saw him coming, waving their arms and screaming for help as the truck came closer, but they realized that he wasn’t slowing down, Brian kept a close eye on the speedometer, the distance between his truck and the dumpster closing quickly before he hit the brakes and cut the wheel, the side of his truck crashing into the dead bodies trying to climb the dumpster.

  “Jump! Jump!” He heard one girl scream as their bodies suddenly thumped down hard into the bed of the truck.

  “STAY DOWN!” Brian shouted to them, the two wide eyed girls looking at him through the rear window before their bodies dropped down flat onto the bed of the truck and it accelerated again, he didn’t know where he was going, but he had to get far enough away from here to get them in the truck without those monsters grabbing them and ripping them apart.

  Driving away, the parking lot wasn’t completely clear, there were still dozens of those rotting corpses walking, but he didn’t see anyone else moving, no one living that is. The people in the tents lay strewn on the ground, over cars. There was nowhere for them to run or hide, many of them hadn’t even been able to get away in their cars, not that he had seen. No one survived the attack, but now they were wandering into the street, Brian didn’t bother trying to hit them, he just swerved around them. Some tried to follow, but the vehicle was moving too fast for them to keep up. They were spreading out now, wandering in different directions as Brian kept going, his eyes searching the landscape. He couldn’t see a damned place that didn’t have them wandering. People were trapped in their cars, others weren’t so lucky. Taking one hand off the wheel, he pushed the rear window open, shouting back.

  “Hey! You think you can climb in this way? I can’t stop.”

  Brian didn’t even have to wait for an answer as the brunette girl suddenly pushed her head through the window, wiggling her way inside with her feet kicking out the window from the back as her friend stood up on her knees to push her through before the girl helped pull her friend inside. They couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, tears streaking their cheeks.

  “Thank you, mister. Thank you.” The brunette struggled, but the blonde one couldn’t speak, she just sat in the seat, rocking back and forth crying as Brian kept driving.

  “Where do you two live? Do you know where your parents are?” Brian asked, driving his truck off into the grass on the side of the road to get around the line of traffic as zombies slowly marched up the street, trying to figure out how to get inside the cars.

  “We live on River Birch, it’s in North Little Rock. D-do you know where that is?” The little brown headed girl asked him, her arms moving around her friend, holding onto her.

  “No, but I bet I can find it.” Brian swallowed, he didn’t know what to tell them, there were no words he could think of that would help them. That would save them from the nightmares that were sure to come when they closed their eyes. “Are your parents there?”

  “Yes, o-our aunt bro-brought us to get tested.” The little girl broke then, tears streaming down her face as she tried to reign the tears back to explain but Brian didn’t need to know anymore. He’d seen what they saw, and he knew that he wouldn’t be forgetting it soon.

  “Of course,” Kaige tilted her head. She remembered Brian, his memory was especially burned into her memory from the last day they were all at the office together when all those people died. Brian was one of the few who was able to keep their wits about him. He walked everyone to their vehicles on that last day, they had no idea what was going on or what might happen next. “He’s inside.” Kaige concluded, looking back across the street. Tobey was watching them from the front windows of the apartment, clutching that Bumblebee transformer to his chest with wide frightened eyes.

  Brian glanced off in the direction where Kaige’s eyes traveled and felt the oxygen rush from his lungs seeing the boy. After the second siege as Brian came to call it, he got Blake and Charlie back to their parents, but he never saw them again, or their parents. He only hoped that the family made it out of the city and someplace safe, though where that could be the ex-marine didn’t know.

  “We should get out of the open, there’s no telling how many of those things heard that gun shot. They seem to migrate from one place to another, but I haven’t been able to see any kind of pattern in how they circulate to feed.” Brian informed the group.

  “I’ve had enough of those things for today.” Kaige told him, scrubbing the side of her face with the back of her hand.

  “How did you find us?” Tom asked as the group made their way back into the house and behind the safety of locked doors and above ground level flooring. It would take a pretty tall zombie to break out one of those windows and climb through.

  “Mostly luck,” Brian explained. “Remember that Christmas party a few years back when we had the big ice storm that knocked out the power for some of us for about three days? Well, I drove a couple people home that night, including Kaige. My truck was one of a few that was able to get up and down the hills without skidding off the side of the road. When I made it to the office and saw people had been living there? I figured that I didn’t have anything to lose if I came looking so I started with the closest person I knew of, Kaige. I knew there was someone here when I heard her screaming, then I started running. Whew, I didn’t think I was going to get the gun out of my bag fast enough and I was cursing myself for not keeping it in my hands while I walked. I know better than that.”

  “You came just in time too. I don’t know how much longer I could have held that thing off.” Kaige said as they locked the house down and went to Tom and Megan’s apartment.

  “I didn’t even know you went back out until I heard Tobey start screaming from my bedroom window.” The guilt in her voice was thick, but no one seemed to understand why. Maybe because she hadn’t believed Kaige in the first place?

  As they entered the apartment Tobey came to peek his head into the room, shyly inspecting the new comer that saved Kaige’s life. To the little boy, Brian looked like a super hero. This giant of a man with big muscles and a big bag full of weapons, like Batman only he didn’t know that Brian was a real-life superhero.

  “Hi.” Tobey lurked in the hallway, still looking at Brian with a certain kind of awe in his eyes.

  “I think this belongs to you.” Brian said by way of greeting as he took the Ironman doll from Tom and held it out to the little boy.

  “My Tony.” Tobey stared at the stuffed doll for a few seconds before taking it and holding it close to him as if he was never ever going to let it go again. “Thank you.” Tobey didn’t need to question where how or why the man brought it back to him or knew that it was him. The seven-year-old was merely grateful that he had his Tony back in the first place. Parting the group with his toy he then hung one arm around Kaige’s waist, breathing in quickly her scent as he hugged her.

  Running her hands through his dark brown hair, Kaige looked at him, no one so young should look so much like a little old man in the eyes, yet Tobey did.

  “I thought you were going to get eaten.” Tobey mumbled, his cheeks still wet from his tears as he hung on Kaige’s waist and she bent down, picking him up quickly.

  “For a minute I feared the same thing, but Brian saved me. I’m okay, Tobey.” Tobey stared into her eyes before he squeezed her neck so hard Kaige had difficulty breathing before he finally loosened his grip on her. “See, I’m alright.” Kaige nodded gently before
lowering him back down onto his feet. “I’m gonna go get this zombie gook washed off my face.” Kaige told them disappearing into their bathroom for a minute, using the bottled water on a rag to wipe her face clean before she shed her jacket. She wasn’t sure if washing it was an option. Brain matter was splattered all over it as she pulled it off and tossed it down into the floor. Kaige would go through some of the bags and see if she could find something else to wear for the time being because she couldn’t see herself putting that jacket back on unless she absolutely had no other choice.

  In the living room, she could hear the group moving around, she found some place comfortable to sit when she came back out, rolling the sleeves of her shirt up to her forearms and taking a seat on the floor near the fire as Megan played the part of the hostess to their new neighbor.

  Wrapping her arms around Tobey, Kaige kissed the top of his head, gently wiping any remaining tears from his cheeks with his fingers as Megan made them some coffee, hot chocolate for Tobey as Brian took his jacket off and laid it against the arm of the sofa.

  “So, where were you hiding out all this time?” Megan asked, holding out a hot mug to him.

  “Are there others?” Logan asked, his fingers brushing over the stubble on his chin.

  “No others that I’ve found,” Brian began. “Except for you guys.” He clarified, taking a drink from the mug and letting out a sigh. “You guys remember our janitor? Sam Burgess?” Brian asked them. Kaige and Logan nodded that they remembered the old man. Whenever they were at the office late, they usually saw Sam and would distract him from his work by making conversation, not that the older man ever seemed to mind, Sam was a talker. He could talk about anything if you got the conversation started for him.

  “Sam had, theories.” Brian said, shaking his head somewhat as he took another drink of his coffee and retrieved the last cigarette from his pack and lit it, the pure bliss of coffee and a cigarette evident in his face as he remembered meeting Vietnam vet Sam Burgess for the first time.

  14.

  “Y’see son, when I came home from Vietnam in nineteen seventy-three, I wasn’t a hero. Not like a lott’a you Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans are now days. Even the boys who made it home from Desert Storm were heroes, but not us, not those of us who made it back home from Vietnam.” A seventy-four-year-old Sam Burgess said to Brian, leaning against the podium where Brian’s desk sat, a small fan whirling to keep the air circulating in the stuffy space between the entrance and the elevators.

  “How do you mean?” Brian asked, not sure what Sam was getting at. It was his first day here as a security agent with the Changes Recovery Center and Sam immediately recognized the young man as ex-military, it was something that the two men, despite the gap in their ages, immediately bonded over.

  “Son, back then a whole new world was opening up to us, people didn’t like something they’d march in the streets, we were discovering that instead of just saying, ‘Well, that’s the way it is’ we actually had the power to do something about it, to fight injustices, to right wrongs from our past as a country. The war had no clear goals that helped the people back home understand why we were there.” Sam took a tissue from his pocket and wiped at the corner of his mouth. “No communist had led attacks on American soil, and thousands of us were drafted into that war, we didn’t just enlist, our own government picked us up out of our day-to-day lives and good ole Uncle Sam said, ‘Son, you’re going to war,’ and we went, or we ran.” Sam’s wizened face was a shocking contrast to the paralleled features of his younger counterpart. “I remember one of my commanding officers telling me not to go through the Airport in my uniform because people were protesting American soldiers coming home from Vietnam. I was spat at, called a baby killer, a warmonger and all because I was doing what I thought was the right thing to do for my country. Now, officers are applauded in US airports, shaken hands with, they’re greeted with honor and respect but, I can’t entirely say that I blame anyone for the way they felt when we came home from Vietnam. If I’d known what I would find when I went there?” Sam snorted, phlegm getting caught in his throat causing the older man to go into a coughing fit and the tissue from his pocket appeared again as he spit the snot and saliva out into the Kleenex and chucked it towards the waste can nearby. “Draft dodger is the least horrible thing I can imagine being called when I remember the alternative.”

  It was only Brian’s first day and he’d already broken up two fights that started when the female patients came down from therapy to smoke, so the conversation with Sam was very much welcomed, only he hadn’t expected they would be talking about the Vietnam war.

  Sam Burgess was seventy-four years old and he had no savings, no four-oh-one-kay plan and there were no disillusions in his mind, he knew he would be working until the day he died.

  “I’ve heard some horror stories from Veterans about what the Vietcong did to war prisoners back then.” Brian said, while he’d spent his time overseas he was fighting a different enemy, but in his mind at times they were all the same and the stories he’d heard, well if he had listened to them, he didn’t think he ever would have enlisted in the Marines when he turned eighteen.

  “Son, I’m not talking about what the enemy did,” Sam’s voice lowered as if he were afraid that someone other than Brian were listening. “I’m talking about what our military did to its own people.”

  Brian stared at the old man as Sam turned from him, replacing the trash can liner that was next to the elevator doors.

  “I don’t understand.” Brian said, glancing at the monitors, there was one monitor with four pictures in all, the second, third and fourth floors and one of himself and Sam talking in the lobby.

  “I wouldn’t expect someone your age to know much about the Vietnam war, except for maybe what you were taught in school.” Sam said spraying window cleaner onto a rag and began to polish the hand prints off the steel faced elevator doors.

  “I remember reading about it in social studies.” Brian supplied. “We were trying to keep communism out of Vietnam.”

  “South Vietnam,” Sam corrected him. “North Vietnam was already a communist government and communism, is supposed to take away the social classes that keep us separated. It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, does it? At least until someone comes along and uses that ideology to further their own agenda. It was the perfect reason to place in front of the American public, so they would back this war, but then, the first images reached home and people were so used to what they saw from World War two, but Vietnam was nothing like that, they were no threat to the United States. They were a goddamn developing country for Christ’s sake and more so after what our government did to them.” Sam shook his head, stepping away from the elevator doors as Mike stepped out.

  “Have a good night you two.” Mike called to the two men as he headed for the exit, the doors swinging open and closed behind him.

  “Night.” Brian raised a hand to wave goodbye, but Mike was already long gone. Standing, Brian moved around his desk, walking up to the front door and making sure that it was locked before he came back, arms folding over his chest as Sam shook out a fresh trash can liner. “So, if keeping communism out of South Vietnam wasn’t what the war was about, then what was it?” He asked, Brian had his suspicions that Sam was just pulling his leg, but either way he had Brian’s attention and the young man wanted to know more.

  “It was all one big experiment. Yes, it’s undeniable all the things that the Vietcong did, that’s all true, but what better way to have the American public fund and support their experimentation, than to say that we were fighting a foreign threat?” Sam’s bushy white eyebrows shot up. “Of course, it didn’t go that way, at least the way they wanted it to. See, by the sixties and seventies we were starting to think for ourselves, we didn’t just blindly take what the government said and believe it anymore, we had our own resources. It was a magnificent time to be in the journalism field.”

  “What experiment?” Brian asked, straighteni
ng his desk in order to look like he was doing something for the cameras other than distracting their janitor from performing his duties, more so Brian just didn’t want to get Sam in any kind of trouble.

  “Agent Orange.” Sam’s eyes widened for emphasis.

  “You’re messing with me. Everyone knows about that.” Brian exclaimed, a little disappointed that it wasn’t some huge revelation. Now he was sure that Sam was just screwing with him.

  “Now listen,” Sam stopped him, waving off Brian’s look of disbelief. “Between 1948 and 1960 the British government was already developing and using herbicides and defoliants to kill off crops so that their enemies wouldn’t have a food source, the removal of forests and plant life so that they couldn’t be used as coverage. Then, in 1960 the US government decided that the chemical compound could be used as a viable weapon in chemical warfare. They weren’t just using it on the Vietcong son. They were using it on us too, the vets that breathed it in and came home got off easy compare to the soldiers who were directly experimented on. I know, because I was there, and I saw it all happen. I was one of them.”

  Brian was again left staring at Sam for a long time, not sure if the man was telling him the truth or just seeing if he could get a rise out of the young man by telling him some cock and bull story, but the way that Sam’s words hit him, the conviction on them it made him think of so many of his buddies who’d gotten sick while they were out on a mission and how when they came back from the medic tents they never really got better, they never fully recovered.