Shelter for Now

by Bob Howard

  A pair of men’s shoes dangled through an opening in the ceiling, and Garrett recognized the feet from spending so many months together. He had a funny revelation about the shoes. He wasn’t entirely sure what day it was, but he knew the shoes belonged to Mike Wood, the male flight attendant.

  Mike dropped onto the cushions that had been placed below the hole and reached back up to take some kind of duffel bag from another flight attendant, Susan Morris. If all had gone well, Anne Hill, the senior flight attendant would be up in the ceiling right behind Susan. As soon as Susan handed the duffel bag to Mike, he reached up to half-catch her as she dropped through the hole. Garrett was relieved to see Anne’s feet come through next.

  None of them spoke as Garrett pointed toward the exit to the corridor that said Gate Four above it. They knew from experience that speaking out loud in the waiting room caused the dead on the other side of the chained doors to become agitated. They all agreed that everyone would remain silent until they were on the other side of the exit.

  How long the dead would remain on the other side of the chained doors had become nothing more than speculation. Every time one of the flight crew members checked to see if they were gone, the doors would start shaking from the impact of several bodies against it.

  The last reports the crew had received before losing all radio contact with the outside world had simply referred to the dead as being infected. It took the seven of them only a short while to figure out that being bitten meant you were infected and going to die, and after you died you were going to get back up and bite living people. There had been some nonsense on the radio about it being a virus that could think, but the small group of survivors couldn’t have cared less. They just wanted to know when someone would be coming to their rescue.

  Garrett nodded to Susan and Anne as they followed Mike through Gate Four. He would wait for the second group to return and then go with them to the plane to see if they had any luck finding supplies.

  A rope ladder hung down through a second hole in the ceiling where an air conditioning return had been. They had quietly worked at the grate covering the opening and then managed to open a hole big enough to climb through.

  They didn’t risk trying to crawl through the ductwork because the thin aluminum would have made far too much noise. Besides, Addison was the only crew member small enough to fit inside comfortably, and she wasn’t about to squeeze into the dark tunnel.

  The ductwork did give them a huge advantage, though. Where the ductwork went was like a map. They could follow its branches and mark it with arrows and directions. Where trunks of ductwork went to new rooms, they wrote in big red letters, ‘DEAD BELOW’ when there were infected. Green arrows pointing downward meant the room was safe.

  Garrett saw the rope ladder twitch and then a pair of legs. His navigator, co-pilot, and last flight attendant came down the rope ladder. Each of them wore a backpack, and judging by the bulging pockets on each one, they had managed to find an untapped source of supplies. They were all smiling, so it must have been good news.

  He walked over and helped Addison get out of her backpack as soon as she had her feet on the floor. She opened her mouth to say something, but all three men put a finger over their mouths at the same time. She was excited and mouthed the words that she was sorry.

  They headed for Gate Four, and as soon as they passed through into the corridor where they couldn’t be heard, Addison blurted out what she had been holding in.

  “I couldn’t believe it.”

  It came out almost as a squeal.

  “Please tell me you found a Star Trek transporter,” said Garrett. “One that can put us anywhere else.”

  Terrance, the former navigator said, “Where would you like for me to beam you, boss? You know there’s no place safer than this.”

  Terrance had started calling Garrett ‘boss’ after they determined they weren’t going anywhere soon. Garrett had told him it made him a little uncomfortable, and that if he called him ‘boss’ again, he’d start calling him Terry. Terrance preferred to go by ‘Sim’ which was short for Simmons, his last name.

  “Anywhere would be better than here, Terry.”

  He managed to put just the smallest amount of sarcasm in his tone so he could make it sound like he had just slipped.

  “Sorry, Sim, you know what I mean.”

  “What did you find, Addison?”

  “It was like someone gave me the keys to a mall,” she beamed.

  Addison still wore her blond hair in a ponytail, but it had gotten so much longer that it swayed with every move.

  Garrett couldn’t believe it, but he found himself trying to gauge how much time had passed since the first day in the airport by remembering how long Addison’s hair had been at the time. She was still good for the morale of the crew because she was as bouncy as her hair.

  “It was the mall,” said the remaining member of the group.

  Jon King had been a co-pilot flying with Garrett for about eight years. He was fifteen years younger than Garrett, but he had always been jealous of Garrett’s hair. Jon had lost enough of his hair that he had started shaving his head, and he wasn’t happy about the way it was growing back on the sides. Addison had volunteered to wax it for him, but he wasn’t sure about the idea.

  “You guys finally found a way into the mall? Did you get into the Starbucks?”

  One of the perks of the airport was the local shopping. It wasn’t a full-sized mall, but it had enough to keep them alive much longer.

  “We brought back a whole backpack full of coffee,” said Jon. “You weren’t the only one dying for a fresh cup of coffee, and if this winter gets as bad as the last one, we’re going to need it.”

  “The others came back just a few minutes ahead of you. I didn’t ask them if they had any success this time, but judging by the expressions on their faces, I think they may have found a way into the security office.”

  “You think they had guns in there?” asked Sim.

  “They didn’t have any rifles, but I would bet they gave more consideration to handguns than to rifles. We can always go back for rifles, but they had a heavy duffel bag when they came through the hole.”

  The group walked as they talked, but Addison sprinted ahead to give the others the good news. It was safe for her to be alone in this part of the concourse.

  Their concourse had four more retractable passenger gates extending out from it, and each of them had a plane at the other end. One of the first things the crew of Executive One had done was to ensure those planes were all closed. Unless the infected became smart enough to move the big latches on the inside of the planes, the doors would remain sealed forever. It wasn’t something that could be done by accident.

  From their plane they had watched faces press against the glass leaving smears of blood and saliva on the windows until they were no longer visible. Whatever was left on the windows dried until the glass was opaque with a brown film. Gradually, the faces weren’t pressed against the windows as the infected in the planes could no longer see anything of interest to them through the film. Without light inside the planes, the survivors on Executive One could only imagine what kind of hell existed inside the other planes.

  Despite the fact that nothing was interested in them at the moment, they had drawn the shades down on all of their own windows. During the daylight hours they were able to open one or two windows, but they avoided moving around where something walking outside would see the subtle change inside.

  ******

  After that first time when they had gone into the terminal, they had returned to the plane for the night. The devastation of the 737 that crashed into downtown Columbus was indescribable. They watched the smoke and flames from a distance, and being experts they knew that the explosion had been more than just jet fuel.

  Despondent and totally clueless about what they were going to do, they had returned to familiar territory and sealed themselves inside. Anne, Susan, Mike, and Addison went down the row
s pulling the shades closed on the windows. Garrett, Jon, and Sim went into the flight deck and powered down anything that gave off light with the exception of the radio.

  No one really felt like eating, but the light meal of sandwiches and iced tea turned out to be comforting. Sim had gotten hooked on sweetened iced tea while visiting Charleston, South Carolina, and he always asked the flight attendants to have some ready for him. Being well liked by the people who flew with him, it was a common beverage on his flights, and he’d gotten pilots and co-pilots hooked, too.

  While they took turns on the radio trying to make contact with other survivors, the seven crew members found themselves sitting around the walls of the flight deck talking about what had happened. One thing they all had in common was the short-lived elation of being the official aircraft for the President.

  As it turned out, only Garrett and Jon knew they were designated as Executive One, and Sim didn’t know it until he heard them use the designation on the radio. The flight crew had wondered if they were Air Force One, but they weren’t disappointed that they had written a page into the history books and were given another name.

  They weren’t disappointed until they were left behind by the people they had saved. Each of the seven took a turn at expressing their feelings, and there was one thing they found to be totally frustrating. They didn’t even know where the people on Air Force One went. All they knew was that the plane had tucked its nose inside the big hangar. They speculated that maybe Air Force One was still populated, but they had seen the combat vehicles that had directed them toward the open hangar, and they doubted the military had left POTUS in his plane. They also didn’t think the flight crew of Air Force One would have simply ignored their repeated radio calls.

  When the Strykers came out and tried to clear the infected dead from around their wheels, they thought at first that they were leaving with the military. Then they watched as the military was unable to reduce the numbers of the dead that were walking around the runways, and when they gave up, they only felt hopeless.

  Jon held up one hand to signal that he had something on the radio. He took off his headset and switched to a speaker so everyone could hear. It was a recorded broadcast, and it did very little to lift their spirits.

  The male voice was giving updates from around the country, and although there wasn’t much that they hadn’t already heard, there was nothing said that gave them the slightest hope. They were all holding onto slim hopes to hear something about their home cities so they could believe their loved ones were safe, but one by one they heard the opposite.

  Most of them lived in the eastern part of Virginia, but all of them had relatives across the country. Anne was originally from Oregon, and Sim was from Georgia. The voice said that Portland, home to over three million people was being completely evacuated. Atlanta had almost six million people, and according to the voice, it was already evacuated as much as it could be. The voice didn’t explain what that meant for the people who weren’t evacuated.

  “Where would everyone evacuate to if everywhere was being evacuated?” asked Addison.

  She didn’t realize how rhetorically she had phrased the question, and she thought someone might actually answer. She turned from one face to the next in the dim light, but no one said anything.

  They listened to the radio and talked late into the night, but in the early hours of the morning Garrett suggested that everyone should get some sleep. He told them that he would take the first watch and gave time assignments to the rest of the crew. Everyone got settled in, and despite the tragedies of the day, fatigue took its toll.

  Garrett sat quietly at the radio and listened to several broadcasts. Most were recorded and being broadcast on a loop, but he got a few shortwave operators and was even able to talk with one for a few minutes.

  The man on the radio told him through the static that he was somewhere in Maine, and that he wouldn’t last long where he was. The man told Garrett that he thought he had planned for the apocalypse, but he didn’t plan for this one.

  Garrett asked him if that’s what this was, the apocalypse. The man had laughed at the question and only said Garrett could make up his own mind.

  That was the first night, and the crew of Executive One met on the flight deck every night for three days to listen for new information on the radio. When even the loops stopped broadcasting, they started settling in for the night without much discussion at all.

  They snapped out of their daze at the end of the first week when Sim said something to Jon and Mike that made complete sense. He said it was a miracle that they were alive. It was so obvious that they were all sitting around licking their wounds when there were so many people who didn’t have that luxury.

  “Sim is right,” said Mike. “All we have to do is check through the window across the runway. That 737 full of passengers must have found food and water somewhere to have made it this long.”

  As if on cue, they saw the door was opening again. They weren’t the only ones who noticed. Every infected dead at the airport seemed to notice, and those that could move began stumbling toward the plane.

  Someone dropped from the plane and tried to run through the least populated area, but he didn’t make it too far before he seemed to just disappear. He was probably weak from hunger and dehydration and had very little awareness of what was happening to him. A second passenger, possibly thinking the first jumper had distracted enough of the infected, tried to hang from the open door before dropping to the ground. The passenger didn’t even get to run because the infected were holding onto his legs before he let go of the door.

  The crew of Executive One watched in stunned horror as passenger after passenger tried to jump from the plane and run. If the plane was at capacity, there were around two hundred people inside, and it must have been near capacity judging by the sudden flow of jumpers.

  They didn’t think that it could get more awful, but it did. The escape slide inflated from the bottom of the door and shot outward from the plane. Because the front wheel strut had collapsed, the nose of the plane was lower than it should have been, and it would have been easier to walk down the slide standing up than it was to slide down it.

  The first passenger tried to slide and came to a stop only halfway to the bottom. There was a pileup of passengers as people kept coming through the door, and people began falling off the slide into the waiting arms of the infected.

  “There’s only one thing that could be making everyone jump from the plane like that,” said Garrett. “Someone on board had the infection and just died.”

  When they pulled themselves away from the windows, they saw their situation in a new light. Sim was right. They were alive, and not everyone could make that claim.

  “We have to pull ourselves together,” said Garrett. “We’ve been crying about POTUS and the military leaving us out here to die. Who’s to say they’re doing any better? If we’re going to live through this, we’re the ones who have to make it happen.”

  “Good speech,” said Mike. “What have you got in mind?”

  Anne stepped forward and asked, “Are we going to leave here?”

  Garrett shook his head from side to side.

  “And go where? I think the only way we’re going to stay alive is to dig in. Everyone else tried to escape to somewhere else. When you think about it, while we were coming here, people were escaping from here. Nowhere is safe, so the only way to stay alive is to stay put.”

  “Where do we start?” asked Susan.

  “We start by making our immediate area safe, and then we’ll expand outward. Our supplies can’t last forever, so we have to find other sources. We’ll forage during the day, and we’ll seal ourselves into the plane at night. That way we’ll get a good night sleep and be ready to work again the next day.”

  “I think we’re all in agreement with you,” said Jon. “As the pilot of this flight, you’re still in charge as far as I’m concerned.”

  ******

  That
discussion had been over a year ago, and Garrett thought it was closer to eighteen months instead of twelve. Now he found himself inspecting the precious packages of coffee that had been brought back by Addison. Anne was already heating up the water as Garrett held his nose over an open bag and savored the aroma of the fresh, bold roast coffee.

  He lifted his face from the bag and smiled at the rest of them. He hadn’t been aware that they were all watching him expectantly.

  “What?” asked Garrett.

  “Nothing,” said Jon, “but Addison did the same thing when we found the coffee, and we agreed to let you open the next one. It’s my turn after that.”

  “What happened to ladies first?” asked Anne with a mock scowl on her face. “Have we become uncivilized?”

  Mike said, “A lady did go first, but to answer your question, just take Garrett, Jon, Sim, and me, for example. Our grooming is getting more uncivilized every day, and I’ll bet you ladies are wishing you could shave your legs at least once.”

  Susan popped Mike on the back of the head, but he still laughed. Out off reflex everyone put a finger to their mouths and made a shhhh sound to remind them to keep the noise down.

  One of the worst scares they had gotten was when they realized their walking in the retractable passageway could be heard below them. Infected dead were gathering there and hanging around for hours until the crew figured out that they were making too much noise. Even Addison running ahead of them to the plane had been different. Instead of running as if she was ‘pounding the pavement’ she ran as quietly as she could.

  Over the months they had established routines and took nothing for granted. They always sealed themselves in the plane at night, just as they had decided at the beginning, but there were some drawbacks. The air in the plane had become a bit stale, and the chemicals in the sanitation tank had overwhelmed them by leaking into the plane through the toilets. The smells outside the plane weren’t much better, but at least the air moved, so they posted a guard at the entrance to the gateway and left the plane open on the door during the daytime.