Project Airborne

by Johnson, Cassandra

  “Sam, if all of this is true, why are you telling me this? I mean, you said it yourself why didn’t you go to the press when you got home?” Brian asked, but even while he was looking at Sam the old man seemed so weathered from carrying this secret for more than forty years, a strong wind could have blown him away.

  “It was March of 1973 when the US pulled out of Vietnam, it wasn’t because we’d made some big difference, it’s because the experiment was over, they had what they wanted and those of us who came home, well, we all knew what would happen to us if we talked. I’m telling you this now because I’m an old man. I don’t have many years left in me. You seem like one of the good ones. I tried to tell my boys, but maybe they were too close to the situation to take my word for it, but you? You can prepare yourself. I see all this bullshit on the news about that little Korean fella’h over there and I can see it all happening right in front of us and no one else but me seems to see it. One of these days, they’re gonna initiate chemical warfare and all we’re gonna be able to do is put our heads between our legs and kiss our sweet asses goodbye, because it ain’t gonna be pretty, I can tell you that for damn sure.” Tossing his rag on top of the bottles of cleaning solution Sam turned back towards the stairwell. “Come with me, I want to show you something.” Shuffling down the hall, Sam waved for Brian to follow him.

  “SAM TOOK ME INTO THE storage room in the stairwell, most people forgot that it was even there.” Brian explained, finishing his coffee. “Sam had been stockpiling supplies back there for years, guns, ammo, food, you’d be surprised how much that old codger had back there.” Brian laughed, shaking his head somewhat. “He told me about his cellar, he’d built it out behind his house. It ran about eight feet under the ground and then another thirteen once you got into the living space he built down there. As soon as the zombies started roaming the streets I went straight to my sisters, but she wasn’t there, I couldn’t find my nieces. I waited for, I can’t even remember how many days, but... they never came home. When I finally convinced myself that they weren’t coming back, I stocked up as much as I could. I took my gun and I knew that I needed to get to the office and then I needed to get to Sam’s. Both of his sons, John and David new about the cellar and I was sure when I got there that they’d be shocked to see me, but it’s just been me all this time, I didn’t even have Sam to keep me company. He passed away last December if you remember.”

  “I remember that.” Tom looked up with a nod, getting up and grabbing the coffee pot, refilling everyone’s cup.

  “So, you’ve just been down there this whole time?” Kaige asked.

  “For the most part, I came up now and then just to see what the outside world was looking like, it wasn’t until now that the zombies started to slow down. I don’t think whatever this virus is, can spread as fast in the cold because I noticed they’re getting slower and they aren’t migrating as quickly anymore.” Brian explained, grabbing one of the duffle bags and pulling something from inside. “I’ve been tracking them with this.” He said, taking out a drone. “It has a camera, so I can fly it overhead and see what’s on the ground below without putting myself in any danger, but obviously the range isn’t that far on this thing, but it’s been invaluable to me, especially since I left my hidey hole.”

  “Cool.” Tobey looked at the drone, he loved remote control anything and he had a couple remote control cars and helicopters back home that he flew around the back yard, but his parents had never gotten him one of these things before.

  “Careful, Tobey that isn’t a toy.” Tom cautioned the boy.

  “Oh, he’s fine. This thing is military grade, I’ve dropped it thirty feet out of the sky and it hasn’t broken, not that I meant to.” Brian laughed.

  “Do you think Sam was right?” Kaige asked, changing the subject. “Was this something that happened because of an attack on the US? I mean, if the British government was working on something like this back in the day and then we got a hold of the technology who’s to say other countries weren’t doing the same thing. Sam wasn’t wrong about Korea they’ve been a major threat to us for a while.”

  “I do. At least about certain things, Sam was right. The shit has hit the fan, he wasn’t wrong about that, but if it was another country, they screwed the pooch on the formula. It should have killed all of us and not just most of us and the zombies?” Brian brows arched up suddenly. “That couldn’t have been planned.”

  The group agreed unanimously, a few small snorts of derision accompanying their nods.

  “Sam was always telling me about the government experimenting on us, using the media to influence our thinking, using our smart phones to listen in on our conversations, hell even Apple came right out and said that they were doing it. Something else Sam talked about was that, the government didn’t have any use for those of us who couldn’t work anymore. People who were on food stamps, that were disabled and got a check each month, even people who worked their whole lives and eventually retired, he said they were called them ‘useless eaters’ because they were now at a time in their lives where they didn’t hold regular jobs and weren’t paying into the system anymore. Sam’s theory was that they were poisoning our water supply to make us weaker, so we would get sick easier and die faster, therefore removing the drain on society and they didn’t have to cut those monthly checks anymore. Now, I don’t know how much of that I believe, but it does make a lot of sense. How can someone whose retired and never had any health complications suddenly almost as if overnight be ill and now they must go to the doctor a lot more, they pay pricey insurance premiums every month, medicine isn’t cheap. They are literally sucking every dollar that they can out of that person before they finally stop breathing.”

  Everyone sat back, thinking about the repercussions of what Brian told them what if Sam was right?

  “That’s fucked up.” Kaige suddenly blurted out, looking at Tobey for a moment. “Don’t ever say curse words like that little dude.” But she barely felt ashamed of it, sometimes there were no other words that could describe the situation and fucked seemed to sum up everything that had happened since that day in August.

  Scratching the back of her neck, Kaige looked at Brian, watching him smoking his cigarette for a moment. She didn’t know how much of her theory fit in with what happened, but he’d spent a lot of time with someone who obviously believed that the government was out to get them.

  “I actually have a theory of my own.” Kaige said finally. “The main gist of it is that we’re all smokers and somehow we survived. It’s not so much a theory as it’s probably just a huge coincidence, but it’s really had me thinking a lot and that day, when everyone suddenly died, I noticed that there were a lot of planes in the sky that morning leaving those long white trails of exhaust. I mean a lot of them, more than normal, they were literally all over the place and going in every direction.” Kaige said, the index fingers of both hands pointing all over the air, creating invisible contrails that no one could see.

  “You saw the exhaust trails, I saw the helicopters in the sky after everyone dropped.” Brian said, smoke flaring from his nostrils as he looked at Kaige. “And they weren’t there to report what was happening.”

  “You mean?” Tom looked at Brian quizzically.

  “Black helicopters.” Brian replied.

  15.

  With Brian’s arrival the winter months closed in on the group quickly, leaving them to do no more than staying inside, huddled around their fireplaces and wonder what the spring would bring them. If the zombies were dying off due to the cold, Kaige prayed that they didn’t ramp back up when the warm months came back.

  The sound of Brian’s rifle on that fateful day brought a new hoard of the dead with it back into their quiet little neighborhood but they didn’t stick around for very long. Day’s passed and one by one the numbers dwindled until the streets were empty again. Brian climbed out of one of the attic windows with his drone, taking it up into the sky looking for any remaining zombies that migh
t have still been lingering close by. Together they were and always would be lethal, but they were indeed getting slower, clinging to whatever was left that kept them animated for as long as it was possible.

  “I hate sounding ungrateful, but I’d give my left arm for electricity again and some central heat.” Megan said one day as she and Kaige brought laundry back up to her apartment and huddling around the fireplace holding their frozen hands out to the flames until the blood began to flow again.

  “No, I miss it too.” Kaige replied through chattering teeth. “But I think the thing that I miss the most are hot baths. I would run the water so hot that my skin turned red.” Sniffing, Kaige rubbed her hands together before placing the iron inside of the coals.

  “Oh, shut up and get out of town. You’re torturing me.” Meg said, laughing feebly from the cold. “Going to bed and not waking up in the middle of the night because the fire died.” Megan ran her tongue over her lips quickly setting up the ironing board.

  “I wonder if there is such a thing as an electric heater that is solar powered?” Kaige wondered aloud. It seemed like something that camping enthusiasts should have invented, there surely was a demand for something like that.

  Many times, she’d fallen asleep thinking about generators, but even if they were to find one, Kaige wasn’t sure how they were supposed to get it back to the house without a truck. Even though she’d never seen one before, something about the idea made her think that they needed to be rather large to power electricity through a whole house, but then she recalled the stories of people dying due to carbon dioxide poisoning. During hurricane Sandy there was a lot of that, people had brought in generators to keep their power on, but when they went to sleep the gas ran out and the died in their sleep. It was terrifying for her to think that something like that could happen, plus it wasn’t as if they could just hop into the car and ride down to the local Shell station and buy more gas.

  “Then we could put it outside during the day to let the sun recharge them.” Meg added, already fantasizing about such a luxury as an electric heater to keep their bedrooms warm through the freezing cold nights.

  “That would be nice.” Kaige lamented softly, shaking out a pair of frost coated jeans and passing them up to Meg as Tom and Tobey came back inside the apartment from carrying more wood up from the basement.

  Unfortunately, no matter how well prepared you thought you were, it wasn’t always the case once you started dipping into that stash daily without refilling it regularly.

  “We’ll have to start chopping more wood soon,” Tom said, tossing an extra log into the fire while Tobey kept himself busy by stacking the logs neatly against the wall.

  “Can I help, Dad?” Tobey was stripping his beanie off his head, hanging his coat back up.

  “No, buddy. I think it’s best if you stay inside with your mother. It’s too cold outside and we don’t want you getting sick.” Tom replied, knowing that the boy missed playing outside, but there were far too many things that could go wrong. With the dead of winter upon them now, his biggest concern was if someone got sick, there were no doctors. The common cold could literally be the end of them.

  Upstairs they all heard Logan and Brian moving around in the apartment above theirs. Since there were two bedrooms in each apartment and they’d taken advantage of the space, Brian and Logan were roommates, but access to the attic was in the empty apartment.

  Kaige never quite understood that, it seemed it should have been in the second story stairwell, but she also knew that probably a hundred years ago or whenever the house was built that it was a single-family home and a large one at that. It wasn’t until later, when the neighborhood began to decline that some of the houses were renovated allowing the owners to make a profit off their houses to pay off their mortgage faster.

  Lifting her head, Kaige looked up at the ceiling, listening to the muted voices of Logan and Brian as they moved about the apartment, their footsteps on the stairs as they came down.

  Tom and Meg’s had become the center of the house. Whiling away the hours of the day waiting for some change in the world. When they were living what little lives they had left? They were here. It felt warm and maybe that was just the fact that there were more warm bodies in the room, but Kaige liked to think it was something more sentimental than that.

  Entering, Logan and Brian immediately came to warm themselves by the fire. Every day since his arrival, Brian had gone up onto the roof and taken the drone into the sky, surveying the perimeter of the neighborhood looking for signs of any movement once the zombies had all cleared out, going where ever it was they went. Brian couldn’t imagine there were many left now that the cold had really crept in and sunk its teeth into their bones. Logan had shared with him what happened at the store the first time he and Kaige went scouting. The cold affected them, and as much as they all hated the cold, Brian was sure that they hated the living dead even more so.

  “Brian?” Megan asked, wrapping her rag around the iron from the fire, carefully moving it over the clothes on the ironing board as Kaige took each item and carefully folded it. “Have you ever heard of solar powered electric heaters?”

  Brian was bent over the fire, placing the coffee kettle next to the fire, but he straightened when his name was called, politely turning to give Megan his attention to show that he was listening before he shook his head.

  “No, ma’am.” He told her watching as Megan’s face gently fell, her hopes of warmth were completely dashed then and there. “But I do know that they made solar powered generators that don’t require any gasoline to power them. Solar panels included, I never had a need for one, but I’ve seen them before at Lowe’s and Home Depot.” At that moment he understood what she was asking him before he scrubbed his hands together for a second and looked back at Logan.

  “There’s a Lowe’s nearby.” Kaige spoke up, almost leaping out of her seat. “We could go there and look for them.”

  “If they have any,” Tom remarked shedding his jacket now that he was inside the slightly warmer apartment.

  “It won’t hurt to see.” Megan conjectured, cutting her eyes at him.

  Kaige got the distinct feeling that lately things hadn’t been going so well in their marriage. Once she heard them in the stairwell arguing, but she hoped that things got better. It was a difficult time that they were all going through so it wasn’t unusual for people to get a little snippy with each other, although right now the look on Megan’s face said she would slap the piss out of Tom if he tried to kill her fantasy.

  “I’m down to go. Who wants to come along?” Brian asked. He as well as Logan and Kaige could sense the tension in the room and Kaige honestly felt bad for Tobey because they weren’t taking him anywhere with them when they left the house and she was sure that the boy could use a little bit of a break from his parents right now.

  “I will,” Logan and Kaige both replied simultaneously to Brian’s invitation.

  “I’ll go get my stuff.” Kaige said afterward, folding the last article of clothing and separating her things from the rest of the group as she quickly got up and went to her apartment, Logan and Brian were right behind her.

  When Tom and Megan came to the new apartment, at first things seemed ok between them, but lately about the last month or so, Kaige had noticed that they were being short with each other, although Kaige wasn’t sure if there was a direct cause for the animosity or if it was just the stress of the winter months hitting them where they couldn’t step outside and smoke a cigarette and catch their breath. Kaige was afraid of how ugly things could get and if for no one else she hoped that Tom and Megan got it together for Tobey’s sake. It wasn’t like they could get divorced and move to separate houses and share custody. They were living in a completely different world now.

  Throwing a hoodie and a jacket on for an extra layer, Kaige got her backpack and her duffle and met Logan and Brian outside, safely securing the keys into her pocket as they grabbed the carts and began their way out the ga
te.

  “Guys, I know this is none of my business, but do you think they are okay?” Kaige asked. Looking at Logan and then Brian as they pushed their carts down the sidewalk. The trio quickly walked to keep their blood pumping so that they didn’t freeze to death just getting to the Lowe’s.

  Admittedly, Tom was right, maybe they wouldn’t have generators or maybe they did. But in the day and time they were living in all the had to get them through the day was hope. They also needed to be a little more understanding of one another, they were all in this together, but they coped in completely different ways.

  “Cabin fever.” Brian said, pushing his cart next to Logan’s while they kept Kaige between them, both men keeping an eye on their surroundings as they made it to the bottom of the hill. While the streets looked clear, Brian knew that could be deceiving and he was armed to eliminate any danger that came near them. “I saw it all the time with my troop. It’s natural, and once winter is over and it begins to warm up again, when we can spread out a little, even get a little time to ourselves that will all change.” Brian explained.

  Kaige listened, her eyes bouncing from abandoned cars to dilapidated buildings, it was strange how quickly things could fall into disrepair when there weren’t enough people around to help with upkeep.

  “You really think so?” Kaige asked. Glancing at Brian for a second, a gust of cold wind hitting her in the face. Kaige really wished she had a scarf right about now. Every time they’d gone out in the last two weeks when she got back to the apartment her throat was so raw she could barely speak above a whisper, but that didn’t seem to stop the young woman from speaking now.

  “I might know why Tom and Megan had been so cranky with each other lately.” Logan spoke up, scrubbing the back of his hand under his nose quickly before Kaige pulled a Kleenex from her pocket and gave it to him to wipe his running nose.