Just like Wendy was doing.
“You’re too goddamned high,” Keith growled, tapping the altimeter with his finger for emphasis.
“We are not,” Chico replied. “You didn’t calibrate anything before we took off.”
“Keep it under five hundred feet,” Keith said.
“We are.”
“The hell we are. Are you fucking nearsighted?”
“Guys, please!” the blond called over them, his eyes closed as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Chico, just nudge us down a few hundred feet, will you? There aren’t any three hundred foot trees around here.”
“Fine,” Chico grumbled, nosing the plane down. Wendy could see the horizon through the front windshield now and marveled at the immensity of things. The curvature of the earth was plainly visible on the horizon. The compass on the plane’s dashboard showed them heading almost perfectly north.
“We’re not heading for Canada, are we?” Wendy shouted to be heard over the engine.
The blond smiled and shook his head. Keith shook his head, too, not looking back.
That was a relief. Just three months ago, the Canadians shot down a small private plane in the no-fly zone along their border. They took things as serious as a heart attack with regard to the zombie plague. Although they didn’t lose any of their cities or towns to the zombie horde, they treated it much more aggressively than the U.S. did. They regularly flew into their side of the Quarantine Zone and massacred anything that moved, just to be sure.
With her luck, today was one of those days.
Sixteen
Wendy sat quietly in the back seat of the Piper Archer for over an hour as they flew north. She didn’t speak to the blond hunter beside her. Instead, she looked out the side window at the endlessly still roads and towns they cruised over. Larissa never stirred. She lay across their laps like dead weight.
Chico and Keith argued about virtually everything, whether it be the appearance of clouds in the distance—avoid that storm front. It’s not a storm front. Yes it is—or the fuel level—is it leaking? I told you it’s not leaking. We’re burning fuel too fast. It’s not leaking. You forgot to reattach a hose, didn’t you? It’s not leaking!
Wendy smelled gasoline, but wasn’t about to get involved in their argument. It could have just as easily been Keith’s clothes. He smelled of stale cigarettes, too, and both smells were better than the body odor of the three men. Worse, someone kept farting. With the engine noise, she couldn’t tell who. It may have even been Larissa. Each time the smell came, though, she sneered at the back of Keith’s head, blaming him simply because he irritated her the most.
“Twenty miles,” Keith said over his shoulder. He held a portable GPS up and waved it for the blond to see.
“Good,” the blond hunter grunted. He turned toward Wendy. “My legs are aching. How about you? Holding up?”
“I’ll be fine,” Wendy replied. She didn’t want to admit that her left leg was asleep. If Larissa would just move a little, she could probably get some circulation back. Leaning to the side, she lifted Larissa’s shoulders, turning the girl a little to move her own leg. A wave of warmth rushed down her leg, and the pins and needles settled in. “What sedative did you give her?”
The blond didn’t answer.
“What was it?”
He sighed. “We gave her a K-Hole.”
Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic for large animals. An elephant tranquilizer, basically, but it was an effective sedative for humans, too, and it left the recipient typically able to breathe just fine.
“You guys use ketamine a lot, don’t you?” Wendy asked sarcastically.
The blond smiled. He seemed to have a sense of humor, at least, but she still had no idea why he seemed so familiar. She had been wracking her brain over it for quite a while now. Everyone she met in residency she could account for. He wasn’t from college, either. It had to have been at Rock Island, or one of the guards who followed the Senator everywhere now that his man Carl was dead.
“You’re too far west,” Keith grumbled.
“I’m going to come around.”
“What the fuck for? Just put this thing down.”
“Hangar’s on the east side. I don’t want to taxi in the snow.”
“Then land northbound straight up the runway!”
“I’m not going to use the runway at all.”
“What?!”
Even Wendy had the same reaction. What the hell was Chico thinking?
“The taxiway is plenty long,” Chico explained to everyone. “In the snow, we’ll slow down twice as fast as normal.”
“In the snow, we’ll slide off the road and crash. The runways are nice and wide so that doesn’t happen.”
“Yeah,” the blond put in. “I’m with Keith on this one. I’m not a big fan of this idea.”
“Look,” Chico said over his shoulder. “They’ve got us under aerial surveillance, right?”
“You and your conspiracies,” Keith said dismissively. “They’re not that observant.”
“Not before, but now, with her….” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, indicating Larissa.
Wendy stiffened.
They weren’t the Senator’s men.
Up until now she hoped this was just some kind of big ruse. Another media ploy, or just some way for the Senator to get around the fourteen-day quarantine Tom had slapped on Larissa when they brought her in. She took a closer look now at the blond, wondering if the reason she recognized him was because he was a wanted criminal, or something worse.
“We can’t leave the plane out,” Chico went on. “They’ll notice an extra bird on the runway.”
“All the more reason not to crash,” Keith argued.
“All the more reason to get as close to the hangar as possible in the first place. The snow’s going to bog us down. Back at Terre Haute we were on two-day-old ice and look how hard it was to get off the ground. We just got snow this morning up here, and a foot of it at that.”
“Shit,” the blond hunter said.
“Shit,” Keith echoed.
“Yeah,” Chico replied, vindicated.
Wendy wasn’t sure what they meant, but she knew what a foot of fresh snow did to her car and quickly translated its effect onto the flimsy wheels of the plane. All she could think of was them touching down, the front wheels digging in, and the plane flipping over in some massive Hollywood style explosion.
“Shit,” she said to herself.
Seventeen
They flew in silence. It was about the only time Chico and Keith hadn’t been bickering or arguing about something since take-off, which would have been a pleasant respite if not for the specter of their impending doom. Wendy stared at the GPS. Keith had put it over the dash so he and Chico could see it. She couldn’t read streets or anything on the small screen from the backseat, so she tried to make out landmarks to find out where they were. Now that she was certain these three weren’t working for the Senator, she needed to start learning everything, just in case. An airport icon appeared in the top left corner of the screen and slowly moved toward the center.
Chico leaned forward to look out the front and side windows. “I’m going to put us down right outside the hangars.” He pointed out the left window as he banked to give everyone a good view of the terrain. A series of hangar buildings fronted a large, wide open expanse covered in snow, with swells and ebbs that outlined a series of north-south and east-west runways. Several snow-covered aircraft—mounds of snow in the shape of planes, really—sagged near the buildings.
They continued their slow, wide bank around the airport as the plane gently descended. Chico straightened out and flew west away from the airport, then banked hard to spin them around.
“Fuck,” Keith grumbled at their sudden plunge, putting a hand on the dash to steady himself.
Wendy’s stomach turned. She felt weightless. They were dropping out of the sky, a maneuver she knew was called crabbing, but Chico was being extreme
ly aggressive about it. She swallowed hard to keep down the bile rising in her throat. She wished she had eaten something for breakfast. At least then it wouldn’t feel so much like dry heaving after a night of binge drinking. She drew Larissa in a little closer, looking the girl over and giving a gentle pat to her cheek to make sure she was still out cold. The last thing Wendy wanted was for Larissa to wake up in the middle of their landing.
The aircraft skimmed over the treetops as they made their approach. Chico relied on the dot on their GPS to guide him toward the runway. He was coming at it from the south-west, and as they drew closer, Wendy made out an access road running from the center of the two runway paths straight toward the hangars. It was half as long as the runways, and looked tiny by comparison.
“Can we land on that?” Wendy asked the blond, pointing ahead.
“Chico can land on a postage stamp,” the blond replied, but his tone suggested otherwise.
“I’ve got this,” Chico said over his shoulder. “I’ve got it.”
“Great,” Wendy said, unconvinced.
Chico flew them lower as soon as they broke past the tree line, backing off on the throttle to drift toward the ground while he corrected their approach over and over. The GPS couldn’t keep up with them accurately, the dot barely moving.
“Zoom it in,” Chico ordered.
Keith did as he was told without argument, tapping the “+” button on the screen to enlarge the runway. Their dot moved smoothly now, but the whole runway wasn’t on the map anymore.
Chico sat up straight to look out the front window, then back-and-forth between the GPS and the window, correcting them repeatedly, giving a little extra throttle, backing it off, sweeping left, then right, then more right.
Out the side window, Wendy saw the land beneath them more clearly. Bulbous mounds of snow-covered stones or bushes, or any of a hundred different obstructions that she knew would destroy them on landing, littered the trough between the two runways. She didn’t see the road beneath them, even though the GPS said they were right on top of it. A long stretch of runway rushed by—the north-south portion—and yet another heading west.
“I got it,” Chico said, pulling back on the throttle so much it felt as though the plane had brakes.
What should have been a few seconds dragged out. Wendy held her breath, expecting the wheels to hit the ground at any moment, but they continued gliding inches off the ground. The hangars were coming at them quickly. She wondered if they had time to even stop, or how Chico would be able to apply brakes at all in the snow. She imagined them sliding out of control into the side of the building.
“I got it,” Chico reiterated, adjusting the plane’s angle a little so that the nose turned northward even as they drifted off target a little to the south.
“I got it,” Chico said once more.
Wham!
The plane hit the ground. Everyone lurched forward from the impact. Wendy clutched Larissa a little tighter, making sure she didn’t roll off the seat.
Thump, thud, and then all Wendy could hear was the rattling of the whole aircraft and a hissing from underneath as though they were dragging something.
Please not the landing gear.
She gnashed her teeth to keep from biting her tongue with each jarring whump that erupted from below. The whole plane shuddered. She braced a hand against the back of Keith’s seat and pulled Larissa tight against her chest with her other arm.
The plane careened this way and that, undecided in which direction it wanted to go, but no matter which way it pointed the plane still slid straight toward a large, snow-covered mound roughly their same size. Another plane, missing a wing by the looks of it. She thought of her childhood, watching old CHIPs television reruns and how cars always slammed into some parked truck and did a wild flying flip.
“I got it,” Chico said loudly. The plane still shook and rattled. The hissing beneath them hadn’t changed, except now Wendy realized it was their wheels carving through the fresh show that made the sound.
A groaning noise rose from beneath them. The plane shook and tried to turn one direction, then the next as Chico plied the brakes in a desperate effort to keep the plane straight.
“I got it.”
“Shut up,” Keith growled.
“I got it!”
“Stop saying that!”
“I got it.”
The plane straightened out and shuddered as Chico stood on the pedals, causing the brakes to lock up. The wheels stopped spinning and instead bounded over the chunks of hard-packed snow being pushed in front of them from the snowplowing effect. Whump, whump, whump went the wheels and Wendy’s teeth felt every jarring bump.
Then the shuddering eased. The plane slowed, the hissing beneath them sighing to a halt only a wing’s length from the obstruction ahead of them. The engine continued to sputter and growl, making the only noise for some time.
Keith took a deep breath and pried his hands off the dashboard of the cockpit. “Jesus H. Christ! You just about knocked my teeth out with that shit show of a landing!”
“Fuck you,” Chico replied.
Eighteen
Wendy let out her breath, and coughed. She had to admit that Keith was right. That landing was awful. Chico didn’t argue the fact, either. He sat facing straight ahead, taking several deep breaths, then eased the throttle to its lowest speed.
“Come on,” the blond hunter said, reaching forward and slapping Keith on the shoulder. “We need to turn this thing and get it into the hangar.”
Keith spun in his seat without a word and kicked the passenger door open. Cold wind poured in through the open door, blown by the idling engine’s propellers. Keith slammed the door shut behind him, zipping up his jacket as he marched toward the rear of the plane with his head low. The blond hunter slid Larissa’s legs off his lap and climbed over into the empty seat to follow Keith out.
When the door shut, Chico turned around in his seat and watched the blond walk toward the back of the plane.
“Let me ask you something, doc,” Chico said. He didn’t wait for her to respond. “Do you think Keith is gay?”
“What?!”
“Well, he’s on my ass enough, don’t you think?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
The plane lurched, its nose tipping back. Wendy reached for the grab handle above her head. Chico spun around in his seat and put his hand on the throttle. The plane began to turn on its two rear wheels, spinning in place to face away from the snow-covered aircraft blocking their way, and instead toward the empty parking area outside the hangars. Once the plane could easily clear the obstruction, two loud thumps resounded on the hull behind her and the rear of the plane settled onto the ground again.
Chico gave the plane a little throttle and the engine growled. They didn’t move. He gave it more power, but it still remained stuck. He backed off the throttle and opened his door, shouting out behind him. “Rock it! We’re stuck.” He closed the door and rubbed his hands together. “Man, it’s fucking cold.”
Wendy scanned the buildings and clearings around them for movement, expecting zombies to come lurching out the same way they did back at the airport in Terre Haute, but there was thankfully nothing…yet.
The plane began to rock forward a little, then backwards, then forward hard. Chico tried to time his use of the throttle in sync to the rocking to help get a little extra speed. They did this several times before the plane suddenly surged forward. Wendy’s head rolled back a little. Twenty feet later the plane dug in again and came to a grinding halt, throwing her head forward.
Chico raced the engine, but they didn’t move again. “Shit,” he said, easing back on the throttle to let it idle.
Wendy looked around as they waited for Keith and the blond to trudge through the snow behind them. Still no sign of zombies.
Chico turned in his seat and pointed a finger at Larissa. “She should be waking up soon. We didn’t give her that much.”
Wendy nodded, avoiding looking at him by staring out the window beside her.
“You nervous?”
Wendy shrugged.
“The terminal building to the south is where all the biters hole up.” He looked past Wendy, nodding with his chin in that direction. “We’ll be out of here before any of ‘em perk up.”
“Great,” Wendy said cynically.
“The cold makes them real hesitant to come out, even for a meal. When the wind dies down in the evening….” Chico didn’t finish the thought. He just shook his head.
The plane began to rock again and Chico went back to throttling the engine to help. They broke free and this time Chico gave the plane a full burst of throttle. The craft lunged forward as though it had lifted off the ground completely, picking up enough speed to force its way through the mounting snow being piled up in front of the wheels. He kept the throttle on full even as they started to slow, the open hangar doors creeping closer. She wasn’t sure if they would make it in one go, but found herself rooting for Chico.
Just get me the hell out of this plane!
The contents of the hangar stood out now that she concentrated so much on their destination. Another airplane just like the one they were flying stared back at them, a fuel tanker truck off to one side, and several work benches lining the walls would greet them when they eventually rolled into the empty slot. Beside that was another sight that surprised her more than anything she had seen today.
Twin parked cars, one in front of the other, their noses pointing out. Wendy recognized the make and model and just about laughed. She pointed ahead, blurting out, “What the hell are those?”
There were all kinds of hunting rigs in the Quarantine Zone, but they were usually built for the rigors of harsh climates and unreliable terrain. Vehicles made for ordinary city life were completely unsuitable here, with maybe the exception of Tom’s Subaru back at the EPS. At least his car could handle this kind of inclement weather, but a pair of Priuses?
Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment Page 7
