“Ok, good. That’s good. People are doing good things to help. Where’s my phone?”
After finding it, he called Malinda.
“I can see you. I’m like, a few hundred feet behind you on a side street. You’re on course for the farm, like you wanted,” she said to him.
“Malinda they’re dead,” Tim said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say to her.
“What?” she replied, shocked. “Who? Your passengers? What happened?”
“Lucas died. The bite he got killed him. An infection maybe. Awful fast. I tried to tie him up, but then he attacked me, and wound up biting my leg, and then bit Julie. She died.”
“You… got bitten?” The sound of Malinda’s voice faded into oblivion. Her whole life just disappeared for her. Tim’s heart broke.
“It didn’t break skin. Just real bad bruising. Might be sprained. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
“Oh God, Dad. I thought, I mean. Wow. Can’t do that to me. I’m too old for it.”
He chuckled. “I’m sorry. I’m out of sorts. It’s been a pretty unique ride up here. Not one I’m going to repeat anytime soon. I’ll be okay. Are you okay?”
“For now, yeah,” she said, but Tim wasn’t convinced. “Another car accident. I think I might’ve seen two assholes robbing the bank here. For sure saw someone looting a few stores. No one makes their purchase and runs out the door with it tucked under both arms, dropping shit as they go. I’ve heard several gunshots.”
“You need to get out of town,” Tim said, looking over the side to look for her. He saw their Silverado just where she said she was. He waved down at her.
“Hi, Dad,” she said back.
“I love you, Malinda. Whatever’s going on, whatever happened in the past, whatever happened to your mom and I, I love you. Always have, and always will.”
“I know, Daddy. I love you too.”
“We’ll get through this. I’ll get this big golden turd on the ground, and we’ll head out. North. To the mountains. Uncle Mike’s cabin in the woods. Get away from the city, and all the craziness. We’ll make it. I promise you.”
“I know, Daddy. Just get on the ground first. Jump into a pond if you have to. What did you do with Lucas and Julie? Did you destroy the brain?”
“So clichéd. I stuck my knife in Lucas’ eye after he bit me and Julie.”
“Oh my God. Seriously? That’s so hardcore. Did you scream Worldstar when you did it?”
“What? Did I scream what?”
“Not important. You gotta take care of the woman. If she’s dead, and you haven’t stuck a knife in her eye too, then you gotta do the deed. Throw her overboard if you can’t manage that. The fall is guaranteed to split her gourd. Don’t wait, hang up and do it now.”
“Malinda, I can’t. That’s not, I mean, she’s dead. I can’t mutilate a dead girl. What will the police say?”
“How about, ‘Good job, sir.’ Or maybe, ‘Only stabbed her once? Were you tired?’ Do it, Dad. Do it right now.”
Tim looked over at the dead women and wondered how long it’d be before she sat up and tried to kill him like Lucas had. Not long, Tim bet. He looked at the yellow rope and its silent failure. It had been a bad day for ropes in Tim’s world.
“Malinda, you still can’t through to 911?”
“I haven’t tried since we last talked, but I couldn’t then. I can try again if you want.”
“Might as well. Look, if they’re getting overloaded with calls, then the whole network might be too. We could lose the ability to call entirely. If that happens, just be where I’m going, and we’ll figure it out. And get gas. Get it right now. If I wind up not making it down… then you find friends. Patty and her family, like I said. That or head north, someplace rural. Play it safe.”
“Shut up with that.”
“Did you hear me? Promise me if anything happens to me, you’ll do as I say. Promise.”
“Fine, whatever, I promise. Just land the balloon, Dad. And first, stab that dead chick in the head. I’m not losing my dad to her.”
“I will. I love you. I’ll call if I need to tell you anything. You do the same.”
“I will.”
“See you on the ground.”
They ended the call.
Tim looked at his bunched pants around his ankles, his skinny, pasty legs and dark socks, and allowed himself the luxury of a laugh.
- Part Nine -
It’s Not the Fall that Gets You. It’s the Sudden Stop at the End. Usually.
Tim’s first order of business was managing the flight of his balloon.
Near the center of Westfield as he slid north over the town he caught a strong gust a hundred feet lower. The steady and gentle decline in elevation was good for landing, though it meant he was only a hundred feet or so above the tops of the city’s brick downtown. The lucky shift in wind direction would put him straight on course for the farm he wanted to land at.
“Lucky break,” Tim said out loud. He felt absurd, and laughed. “Who am I talking to, Timmy?” He looked down at the dead body of Lucas, then over at the slightly less dead body of Julie. She hadn’t moved an inch since her chin hit her chest, but Tim could feel the menace coming from her idleness. His stomach itched with anxiety, knowing that she might stand up, and try to take a chunk out of him like Lucas had. He felt pure, unadulterated fear.
“What am I going to do about you?” He asked her corpse. “I can barely stomach the idea of getting my knife out of Lucas, let alone sticking it in your eye after.” He sighed. “And tossing you overboard isn’t an option. What if you don’t break your neck when you land? The way today is going you’d bounce off a stack of hay bales and get up to go bite someone else.”
He leaned over the side of the basket and looked down. They were in the suburbs of the city, spilling north out of the cluttered brick center of Westfield. Streets ran north and south, forming a homogenous grid packed with 3 bedroom houses, reasonable back yard, used cars and plush shrubbery. The bastion of the middle class. Tim lived in a small, two-bedroom home on the south side of the city. His neighborhood wasn’t quite as nice as this, but after a divorce, you do the best you can. Besides, chasing a large house didn’t have the payoff spending time with Malinda did. She’s all that mattered.
Most of the houses looked empty; no cars visible, no one in the yards. Some houses did have vehicles, some had cars with adults frantically loading their life possessions in their open doors. A small number had armed men sitting in lawn chairs on decks or patios, protecting their homes from a threat they hadn’t seen in person yet.
A man with a bolt-action rifle across his lap watched Tim drift by overhead, and the seated stranger waved up at him with a lethargic hand. Tim waved down with a smile out of reflex. The man tipped his Giants hat and returned his attention to the dead streets in front of the home he defended.
“I wonder if he could see the blood on my arm? I bet he would’ve shot at me he if he had.” Tim mused as he too saw the dried blood that covered his arm from wrist to armpit. He laughed. “What’s happening to the world? This is a nightmare. I gotta get out of this damn balloon.”
Tim returned his attention to the two corpses in that balloon. Lucas still lay on his back with a knife in his eye, and…
Tim looked at Julie’s feet.
Not her legs as she sat on the floor, covered in her own blood, but her reddened boots, and then her blood-soaked pants, then her ratty fair t-shirt and toothy, angry face.
“Oh no,” Tim said, and she launched at him.
A part of Tim’s brain told his body to go for the knife in Lucas’ head. Drop low, yank it out, use it. The knife was his only weapon, if you discounted the rope, which wasn’t a weapon because you can’t strangle a dead body.
A different part of Tim’s brain wanted him to punch the young–dead–lady right square in the jaw.
Another part of Tim’s brain wondered in an instant if punching her and cutting his knuckles on her teeth would transmit enough
of the infection to kill him.
A fifth part of Tim’s brain wanted to use some undiscovered judo skills to use her momentum and fling her over the side of the basket to her doom a hundred empty feet below.
The next part of Tim’s brain reminded him he didn’t know Judo, or Aikido to do anything even close to that, and that he wouldn’t be discovering them in the balloon, in a split second.
The end result was that Tim stood there, paralyzed by indecision as the dead woman plowed into his chest like a starving dog with a busted chain. His shirt tore apart as she dug her manicured nails into the fabric–and his skin beneath–and ripped downward. Buttons popped and flew away into the wind between her face and his, and Tim laughed out loud.
Complete, abject horror coupled with excruciating pain makes you do crazy shit.
Julie physically launched into the air to get at his face and throat; to better maul and murder him. This wasn’t a slow, lumbering creature. With his blood in the air it had found a malicious vigor to rip him apart.
Tim got his hands up just in time to deflect her momentum the tiniest bit. In effect, he punched her almost where Lucas had, adding more insult to her earlier injury. The slight blow bought him an inch of space between her incisors and canines and his throat, and that space and momentum allowed him to twist away from her.
He used his much larger body and arms to shove away, breaking her nails off in his shirt or chest, and throw her to the bottom of the confined basket. She landed on Lucas, cutting Tim off from the weapon lodged in the head of his former passenger. Even the two asshole ropes were underneath her.
He had few options.
Without making a noise, she clumsily clawed her way back to standing. Tim tried to figure out what to do next. When she turned, and flashed her fingers open as wide as her snarling face, Tim still had no idea what to do. He never learned how to deal with this kind of situation during his banking career.
She took two steps, and was on him.
He was ready. Tim grabbed her wrists with all the strength he could muster and held her at arm’s length. He used her momentum, and lack of coordination to wobble her limbs back and forth, crossing the hands and keeping her off balance as she tried to bite him, then his arms, then his hands ineffectually.
He had her under control.
For the moment. Not for much longer than a moment.
“Now what?” Tim pleaded to the world around him. He couldn’t hold her forever. He could start to feel his fortitude waning as hers didn’t falter, or pause. She had time on her side. She could fight him with all her power and savagery until he felt asleep, or died of a heart attack standing there in the balloon, high in the sky.
Or when the balloon smashed into a power line. Like it absolutely would if they kept their current rate of descent.
Tim doubled his focus, tightened his grip and looked her in the white, dead eyes. He prayed in his mind for her soul, and for the forgiveness that he knew he would need in a few seconds. Once he found a tiny morsel of peace about the immediate future, he dug his heels into the corner of the floor and basket wall, and drove his weight forward.
Julie almost fell back from his shove. Her dead legs tripped on Lucas’ body and her upper back slammed into the basket wall opposite. She didn’t grunt in pain, or even acknowledge that she’d been slammed into a hard surface by a grown man. An hour earlier she would’ve screamed out in pain as her muscles were bruised to black.
Tim pushed harder. He lowered his aging, sore back and bent his knees–the good one, and the bad–and put his shoulder up under her armpit, and lifted with all his drained might. She clubbed down and bit hard at the air between the two of them as Tim lifted her weight up, over, and beyond the rim of the basket.
Then, suddenly, her weight was gone from his shoulder, and Tim felt the balloon bounce slightly up from the loss of weight. He leaned over the edge of the basket and watched as she fell like dead wood straight to the ground of the suburbs they flew over. She watched his face the entire time, looking up, serene, until she smashed into the hood of a parked car in a driveway, and rolled off onto the pavement.
Tim could almost hear the screams of the mother, father, and two kids as they watched a woman fall from the sky onto their station wagon, then get up.
“NOOOO!!!” he bellowed into the wind, but the sound of his alarm didn’t reach the family far below.
The father went to Julie’s aid, and Tim lost the scene behind the leaves of a massive maple. He couldn’t hear screams, and he couldn’t see blood, but…
Julie would find that malicious vigor again.
He might’ve just killed that family.
Good thing he already prayed for forgiveness.
He stood up straight, then collapsed to the floor of the basket as his damaged knee gave out. The failed pilot started his grief process with some good old fashioned hyperventilating, and transitioned smoothly into sobbing into his blood-stained hands.
The balloon drifted downward and northward, aiming its giant, golden mass towards a power transformer at a street corner, right near a few houses that would certainly suffer the consequences.
Tim didn’t have long to pull himself together before something dire happened to his giant golden turd.
- Part Ten -
Worst Case Scenario
Worst case scenario for most hot air balloon rides is being pushed off course by errant winds, or bad piloting sending the balloon into a live power line. The power of the electricity would set fire to the flammable canvas of the balloon in a flash, and with the multiple tanks of propane just hanging out in the basket, things would go from bad to worse real fast.
Most “bad” hot air balloon rides wouldn’t include a pair of passengers that died and transformed into murderous, mindless, savage undead monsters.
Only the tiniest of number of hot air balloon rides would be overtaken and ruined by zombies, then hit a power line. Tim would likely be the first, and last hot air balloon pilot to suffer such a rare and horrible experience.
Tim saw the green leaves of a tree peeking over the top of the basket edge. You should never see leaves there, unless you were in the middle of landing a balloon under control. Grabbing the edge of his basket, he hauled his entire weight up and got to one good foot after wiping the tears out of his eyes.
Crying, aching in pain all over, Tim was not in control of his balloon.
The bottom of the basket collided with the upper leaves and limbs of the gargantuan sugar maple he just saw, snapping several of the long branches off and tossing him about. He fell, grunted in pain and got to his feet again. He snatched at the burner cord as it swung back and forth like a crazy pendulum while trying to assess where the balloon would come to a stop.
Just beyond the tree he saw a street running east-west, and hanging along its length was strung power lines. Blossoming away from each pole was another line going to each home.
Tim’s hand clutched the burner cord and he yanked on it. Burn equaled elevation, and it was his only salvation. He pulled the cord down harder than he ever had, wishing that his strength would somehow make the fire hotter.
The roar of the propane heaters aimed into the center of the balloon floating above his head sounded like a jet engine taking off. His head warmed like he’d stepped into the sunshine and the balloon’s forward movement slowed, then halted as he kept the corded pulled down with all his weight.
“Come on, you big golden turd! Come on! Up up and away!” Tim yelled, coaxing the balloon to a safer path. He looked from tree to burner, burner to balloon and back again.
The balloon didn’t listen. At least, the previously helpful wind blowing him north didn’t. The top of the stalled balloon swung forward but the basket stayed still, and the whole airborne vehicle started to shit the bed on Tim. He felt his feet rise up as the whole basket tilted up, and started to throw him forward into the crown of the leafy maple, and then the electricity lines just beyond.
He saw the tree, and knew he had
two options; jump into the limbs, and pray to hit a few on the way down to the hard sidewalk or street below or; wait for the balloon to tear free from the tree, and pray that it didn’t touch the lines that would fry it, and him like chicken in a pot of bubbling oil.
Easy choice.
He jumped.
If photos were taken of the moment, it would look more like a wounded albatross plummeting from the clouds, arms and wings cart wheeling, covered in its own blood and the blood of unexpected enemies. Tim screamed and willed his stiff, hurt body to fall towards a thick branch that he could grab onto.
His will didn’t work. He snapped through 20 feet of thinner branches, puncturing his legs in several places as his weight bent or broke the tree limbs into shards. A stick of wood lacerated his cheek and tore a flap of skin off, exposing the teeth and gums beneath. Something caught his right leg and spun him ass over tea kettle–head down––––and he smacked his forehead into a branch that would’ve been strong enough to support his weight.
Feel the tree, with Tim Feely.
He didn’t feel the ground when his body hit it.
Tim wasn’t aware of the moment when his balloon hit the power line, or the exploding boom of the electricity arcing from the line. He didn’t hear the propane tanks catch, or explode, and he certainly didn’t see the maple erupt into fuel-enraged flames above him, as his body decided to give dying a shot on him.
- Part Eleven -
Why You Have a Ground Crew
Malinda lost her mind when she saw the woman go overboard. Part of it came from the complete shock of knowing that her dad–a banker by trade, a peaceful, loving man in all walks of life–had just tossed someone out, a hundred plus feet above the earth.
Knowing that the plummeting body was already dead didn’t really help her sanity.
Her misplaced sanity took another hit when she saw the basket brush into a few trees, then snag on a giant leafy monster at the end of the street she’d just turned onto. She gunned the Silverado as the balloon tipped over at the top, buffeted by another powerful wind.
An Ill Wind: Tales from the world of Adrian's Undead Diary Volume Five Page 5
