Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages

by Неизвестный

  But George wasn’t scared no more.

  Not even when Lenny’s teeth ripped through his stomach to what lay beneath.

  George had always told Lenny that someday his friend would be living off the fat of the land.

  As his life seeped from him, as he began to lose consciousness, he managed in his last moments to be strangely comforted by the sudden awareness that even though the alfalfa and chickens and rabbits would now be forever out of reach, even though he had fulfilled no other promise on this Earth, he had at least fulfilled that one.

  The Fated Sky

  Aimee Payne

  Amelia Earhart never meant for any of it to happen. The newspapers, the endorsements, that Lady Lindy nonsense, she could have done without it. All she ever wanted to do was fly. It was the only thing that mattered to her.

  She scanned the eternity of water in front of her. It looked different than it had from the air. Up there, she still felt like she could get beyond it. From the ground, it was impassable. If she got out of this—and she fully expected to—that’s exactly what she’d tell the press.

  She rested her hand on the Lockheed Electra’s bright aluminum skin. Setting down on the reef had ripped the right landing gear free so the plane canted to that side. It hurt her to see that damage done to the most beautiful plane she’d ever owned, but she hadn’t dumped it in the drink. And as long as it sat on the left gear, she could run that engine. And if she could run that engine, she could work the radio. And if she could work the radio . . .

  A groan sounded from inside the plane. Amelia’s train of thought chugged to a halt. She never should have hired Fred Noonan. She knew better. Best navigator in the world or not, the man was a drunk.

  She shielded her eyes and turned toward the island. More like a tiny ring of coral around a shallow lagoon. The noise of the bickering frigate birds grated on her already raw nerves. From above, the island had looked like a scythe blade. Not the best of omens.

  She pushed the thought away. “Not time for that, yet.” But they were words and the wind took them to a place with only water and storms to hear.

  From the back of the plane, Noonan called out for his mother, his wife, and finally Amelia. Amelia cursed as she climbed onto the wing. Stupid man. His wife wasn’t so important when the British girl with skin so white she looked grey had been nuzzling his neck in that bar in Lae.

  The smell inside the Electra knocked her back onto the wing. Noonan lay draped over the extra fuel tanks. They were bone dry, as he should have been more than a day after his bender.

  “For heaven’s sake, Fred. How much did you drink?”

  He lifted his head. Amelia took a step back. The whites of his eyes were red. Not bloodshot but bloody. “Not drunk. Sick.” His voice could have rubbed rust off the plane.

  “And how.” She climbed through the cockpit and into the cargo area. Hot air stung her face. Sitting in the sun, the Electra hoarded heat like an oven. “We have to get you out of here. Or you’ll broil.”

  He shifted onto his side. Amelia covered her mouth with her hand. She knew she wasn’t the sweetest smelling flower in the bunch, but good lord, the man smelled rotten.

  He sat up. Amelia squelched the urge to gag. She would have to touch him, put her arm around him, let him lean against her. She squared her shoulders. Her father hadn’t raised to her be a jittery Jane.

  Maybe the ocean would rinse some of the stench off him.

  Noonan allowed her to pull him to his feet. Good lord, the smell, she thought as she led him to the plane’s side hatch. But she didn’t vomit.

  She shouldered the hatch open. The saltwater breeze cleared some of Noonan’s miasma. Amelia hopped out first, then helped him down onto the reef. They faced the island. The shore seemed farther than it had been before.

  I’m going to die here, she thought.

  This time she didn’t push it away. Know your opponent, her husband always said. On a deserted atoll in the Pacific Ocean, she could take her pick: the ocean, the weather, the island . . . the whole world. But she was no shrinking violet. And she wasn’t alone.

  “Let’s go, Fred.”

  He groaned an answer. The shore wasn’t far, maybe a hundred yards or so, but Noonan’s weight made every step a hard landing. By the time they’d covered half that, Amelia’s legs shook and sweat streamed down her back.

  Noonan muttered the whole way. Most of the time it was gibberish too mushy to understand. But every so often, he’d speak clearly—strange words that didn’t mean anything together. They were almost to the beach, when he finally made sense.

  “Bit me,” he said.

  Amelia’s feet shuffled from the clean coral shelf onto beach sand. Her balance threatened to desert her. She gritted her teeth and steadied her screaming muscles.

  “What’s that?”

  “That dame,” he said, his voice clearer. “She bit me.” He pulled Amelia to a stop. “The crazy twist bit me.”

  “We have to get further up, under the trees.” Amelia braced herself against him and stepped forward. Noonan didn’t budge.

  “What the Sam hell are you playing at, Fred Noonan?” She slipped out from under his arm, fully expecting him to topple into the surf. He stood steady as granite.

  “You ain’t listening, Mary Bea. That girl bit me.” He threw out his arm. Right above his wrist, far enough under his cuff she would never have seen it if he hadn’t showed her, was a red and purple bite. There was a good chunk taken out of the flesh, too.

  But what truly worried Amelia was the fact that he’d just called her Mary Bea. Mary Bea was his wife, number two from what Amelia heard. And if he couldn’t tell the difference between them, his condition was very bad indeed.

  “Are you trying to tell me you haven’t been hitting the sauce?” She goaded him, hoping he’d follow her into the shade of the jungle.

  He stared at her. After a few seconds, his eyes cleared. “Amelia?”

  “That’s right, Fred.”

  “I didn’t have a drop.”

  “We were in a bar.”

  “Not a drop since Delhi. Even then it was just a sip with dinner.”

  When she thought back to it, she didn’t remember him drinking anything. She remembered the girl, though.

  “Why did she bite you, Fred?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t know. One minute we were talking about my ma’s people in London, the next her teeth are buried gum deep in my arm.” He held it up again. It looked even worse than it had the first time, with a greenish pus clinging to perfect little tooth marks. Good lord, could it really have gotten that much worse that quickly?

  Infection, she thought. And us hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. For the third time since landing the plane safe and sound on the reef, she thought of Death.

  Noonan stared down at the bite. “I’m going to die here.”

  “You see that?” She pointed down the reef to the hulk of an old steam freighter run aground. “That means the island isn’t uncharted. Someone will think to look sooner or later. All we have to do hang in there and keep sending out distress signals. They’ll find us.”

  He stared at the wreck. “That’s the Norwich City. Ran aground on Gardner back in ’29.”

  “Gardner. That puts us in the Phoenix Islands.” She smiled with as much cheer as she could muster. “Phoenix is a good sign, right?”

  The corners of Noonan’s lips stretched the tiniest bit. Close enough. Amelia gestured toward the edge of the jungle. “You think you can make it to the trees on your own?”

  He stared up the beach like a man at the end of a long journey. “I think I can. Where you going?”

  “Back out to the plane.” She gestured over her shoulder. “We’ll need supplies.”

  They both knew the “supplies” on the Electra didn’t amount to much. They were never in flight long enough to need much more than a sandwich or two and water. But there was a first aid kit, and a few things they could use to build a makeshift shelter.
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br />   Noonan nodded. Amelia left him to make his own way up the beach. She waded out to the plane. Before she crawled inside, she scanned the water. Tides were probably low this time of day. The water would get deeper. Whether it was deep enough to lift the plane and wash it out to sea, she could only wait and see.

  She crawled inside and scavenged anything that would be useful and stowed it in a pack, including a pocketknife, hammer, and long screwdriver. Water was the main thing. They didn’t have much, but until they could find fresh water they’d need every drop. That meant two half-empty canteens. A little bag from New Guinea contained some bread, cheese, and meat. Under it sat a rather large bottle of Kentucky bourbon. She took that, too. As she climbed out, she grabbed the first aid kit mounted near Fred’s navigation station.

  When she got back to the beach, Noonan lay face down in the sand not twenty feet from where she had left him.

  “Noonan!” She dropped their provisions. Kneeling next to him, she rested her hand on his side, her breath backing up in her chest. He couldn’t be dead. What would she say to his wife? And the newspapers . . . Amelia could see the headline now: Lady Lindy Loses Luck, Costs Navigator’s Life.

  Noonan’s ribcage expanded almost too slowly to feel, then gradually deflated. She fell back onto the sand, her relief whooshing out of her with her held breath. Still alive. How much longer, though?

  She walked back down the beach and retrieved the things she’d gathered from the plane. She got the provisions back to shore. She thought Noonan was sleeping when she got back, but his eyes opened when she drank from the canteen.

  “Water?”

  She trickled some into his open mouth, careful not to let the canteen touch his lip. She offered him a piece of the bread, but he shook his head.

  She washed Noonan’s bite wound with seawater, then smeared it with the analgesic balm from the first aid kit. She would have bandaged it, but the only spare fabric was their grubby clothes. Besides, she thought, the air might do it some good.

  Through the rest of the day, she offered Noonan bits of bread but he always shook his head. He accepted water—as much as she would give him—but it made little difference. By the time the tide went out again, he refused a drop.

  Sometime in the late afternoon, Amelia drifted off. She dreamt about the little house in California. When she woke, only the top rim of the sun still shone over the horizon. The constant squawking of the birds had lulled to an occasional brief squabble.

  Sweat ran off her in streams. Her throat felt like she’d swallowed half the beach. She swished water from the canteen around her mouth. “Sorry I conked out, Fred. I bet you’re thirsty.”

  She cupped her hand around his chin to steady him. In spite of the heat, his skin felt clammy and loose. She recoiled. Not good, she thought. Not good at all.

  She snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Fred!”

  He didn’t move.

  She took notice of the dried blood and pus that caked the shirt cuff over Noonan’s wound. Amelia fetched seawater with the tin first aid kit container. She poured water over the cuff to loosen the crust then pulled it back.

  She gasped, and reared back. The flesh around the bite had turned grey. Black lines radiated up to his elbow and down to his palm. It smelled even worse than before, like a dinner plate left in the sink to rot. Her gorge rose.

  No. You will not disgrace yourself. She’d heard the little voice before. It was the one that kept her in the air when everyone told her the sky was a man’s domain. It was the voice that never let her quit. For the first time, she noticed how much it sounded like her mother.

  Noonan smacked his cracked lips. Relief washed through her. She drizzled water from the lighter of the two canteens into his mouth. She’d done the same for her father when she was a girl. He might have drunk too much, but Edwin Earhart was a good man. He loved his family and did the best he could under the circumstances. He was the one who took her to the airfield for her first flight. Noonan got her lost out here, but he found this island. Somewhere in the Phoenix Group, he said. She owed him.

  When Amelia had gotten all the water she could into him, she chewed on bread crust and watched the waves hit the reef’s edge, then slide over its flat top and back again. The plane wasn’t far from that edge. At high tide, a wave with a strong enough backwash would pull the Electra right over. Only God knew how deep the Pacific was out here. If she couldn’t hail someone, they’d never find her.

  Noonan moaned, so she gave him more water. When he settled again, she lay back on the sand and stared up at the sky. She knew she should start searching for a source of fresh water, but her body refused to cooperate. Even with the nap, it wasn’t enough. Before landing on this deserted rock, she’d spent twenty hours in the air. Dragging Noonan’s sorry ass onto shore had sapped the last of her strength.

  She closed her eyes. The island was the altar of a vast, empty cathedral, abandoned by its congregation and god. Amelia wasn’t sure she believed in God anymore, not after nursing the boys sent home from the war. Or maybe there was a god, and he’d gotten tired of all her silly exploits. Her persistent bending of his rules about which creatures ruled the sky angered him. He laughed and plunked her down on this little speck of nothing to die, her feet firmly planted on the ground.

  After a while the roaring lullaby of wind and sea soothed her mind into sleep. She dreamed of the world consumed by storms of fire and water and air. She stood on a flat rock the size of a tabletop with no way to fight.

  A sudden stillness woke her sometime in the fuzzy hours between midnight and morning. She sat up, not sure where she was or how she got to be there. Her hand knocked against Noonan’s canteen, the one with only a drop or two left inside. She remembered. Yes, I am stranded.

  She scooted across the sand. Her hand reached for Noonan’s chin to steady him while she trickled water onto his lips. His flesh was cold and oddly rigid, like a thing instead of a man.

  “Fred?”

  She patted his cheek. He didn’t respond. She laid her head against his chest. Nothing. She jerked up, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. “Fred!”

  He didn’t move.

  When Amelia realized that he was no longer with her, she dropped him and shoved backward like a crab until her legs gave out. “You’re not dead, Fred Noonan. Not from a ridiculous bite. They’re coming for us any minute now.”

  She repeated, “They’re coming,” until her throat hurt. Even after she couldn’t say it anymore, it bounced around the inside of her skull.

  She didn’t know how long this went on, but by the time she came out of it the moon had dove from its perch high in the heavens to skim along the black horizon. The ghost of the plane rested out on the reef. Further? She couldn’t tell.

  You need to pick yourself up by the bootstraps, Meeley.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  It wasn’t really her mother. She wasn’t that far gone, yet. The part of her that would not—could not—wallow in self-pity needed a voice. Amy Otis Earhart’s was a good one, no nonsense and impossible to ignore.

  Amelia needed to get back to the plane.

  The water was higher now. First it wet her to the knee, then the thigh, and finally the waist. She’d left the side hatch open when she pulled Noonan out, and water had filled the half with the broken landing gear.

  She climbed up through the cabin to the cockpit, then crawled out onto the wing. She was afraid to look at the propeller. If even the tip dipped into the water, it wouldn’t turn. No turn, no power for the radio.

  The prop cleared the water by inches, but clear was clear. Before Amelia settled into the cockpit, she traced out the edge of the reef. It was closer than she remembered. She rocked back and forth. Beneath her the Electra shifted.

  Dear God.

  She didn’t have the energy to deal with that now. Losing the plane would break her heart, but she could get another. Lockheed wasn’t going anywhere, and damn it, neither was she.

  She climbed into t
he pilot’s seat and started up the engine. For the next four hours, she broadcast her name, rough coordinates, call letters . . . anything that might tell the Itasca where she was. The outgoing tide pulled her closer to the reef’s edge.

  No one answered.

  When she started fumbling the numbers, she turned off the plane’s engine. “I can sleep, then start again later,” she told herself. She settled into the seat. Her mind drifted back to the house in California. G.P.’s house. Her husband. Even after six years, the word still seemed strange to her . . . hollow. She drifted off to sleep thinking of the little carob tree in the back yard.

  This time when Amelia dreamed, the world was a wasteland. Flat grey earth stretched in every direction with nothing green or alive to break the desolation. Noonan stood next to her, staring out at the waste. “I burned her,” he said.

  Amelia’s feet rooted to the ground. Then, instead of barren land, a black ocean surrounded the little plot of earth where they stood. Noonan grabbed her wrist. His skin felt cold and loose. He lifted her hand to his mouth, like he was going to kiss it. She tried to pull away, but it was too late. His teeth sank into her wrist.

  She woke screaming, but the pain didn’t go away. She glanced down at her wrist and screamed again. A brownish-red pincer clamped down on her wrist. She jerked sideways, pulling the monster half into the cockpit.

  That’s when she saw it was a crab. One of the biggest goddamned crabs she’d ever seen, but a crab just the same.

  She pried the pincer open. Not an easy task considering the creature was the size of a terrier and pretty intent on carrying her away.

  As soon as she was free, she squirmed out through the hatch onto the wing. The sun-scorched aluminum warmed the soles of her shoes as the climbed back into the water. In the shade of the wing, she caught her breath . . . let her heart settle back into its normal rhythm.

  “Jesus,” she said, her voice shaking. First that dream, then the crab: she was lucky she hadn’t had a coronary right then and there.

  Still alive, Meeley.

  “Yes, Mama,” she mumbled, breathing deep.