The Last Town (Book 6): Surviving the Dead

by Knight, Stephen

  He turned the jet back toward the airport and reduced power. Lowering the flaps and landing gear, he set up for a visual approach—something that wasn’t usual in a jet. They approached from the seaward side, lining up on runway seven. It was a valid approach, though the slight tailwind was unwelcome. The approach out of the west was a necessity due to the wreckage that covered the runway’s eastern half. Norton knew there was no way they could possibly hope to survive a landing in that debris field, so his only option was to approach from the west and pray he could stop the little jet before it slammed into the twisted remains of the aircraft that had burned in the middle of the strip.

  Lennon stirred in the right seat. “Coming in a little hot, aren’t you?” He tried to keep his tone conversational, but Norton knew the salty Marine was experiencing a sudden and substantial case of pucker factor.

  “Don’t blame me, we have a tailwind. This is as slow as we can go and not stall,” Norton said. “Full flaps, gear down, a hundred twenty-six knots indicated.” Several birds took flight to the right of the runway, but Norton didn’t deviate as they pirouetted in the air and made for the terminal building across the taxiway. At first he thought it was the noise of the jet that had startled them, but then he saw the stench crossing the asphalt taxiway. It was heading right for the runway at a slow shuffle.

  “Stench,” Lennon said, more for the benefit of the men in the back. “We’re going into a hot zone, so get ready for it.”

  Yeah, it’ll be mighty hot if we come to a full and complete stop inside a fireball, Norton thought. The Prodigy avionics system gave audio altitude warnings, starting at fifty feet. Lennon kept his eyes on the zombie stumbling toward the runway, even though the jet would be well past it long before it stepped onto the asphalt.

  “Got more headed our way,” said one of the Marines in the back.

  “More’n a few,” another added.

  “You guys stay in your seats and stay buckled up tight,” Norton advised them. The jet started rocking as it passed through turbulent air. “We’re down in five seconds!”

  He had his eyes rooted on the end of the runway, having already decided that his touchdown point would be right on the big 7 painted at the end of the strip, turbulence be damned. He worked the yoke and rudder pedals, keeping the jet’s pointed nose lined up on his touchdown point. As the aircraft passed over the runway threshold, he pulled back on the power, willing the Phenom to settle to earth. The white runway number had almost slid past, but he felt the main landing gear thump onto the asphalt surface, left wheel first, then right an instant later. He toed the brakes immediately, not waiting for speed to bleed off so the nose gear would lightly come down. The plane’s nose immediately dropped, and the nose gear slammed into the runway with enough force to make Norton wince. He applied full brakes right off the bat, and he felt his shoulder straps bite into him. The anti-lock system kicked in and started vibrating like a jackhammer. The little jet had no thrust reversers, so all Norton had were brakes to get it to stop. Norton knew they’d be glowing by the time the Phenom came to a halt. As the airplane shot down the runway, he could see bits and pieces of debris from the previous crash were strewn across the asphalt, displaced from the main wreckage by either explosion or wind. Some of them were actually quite large, and he heard one whack off the bottom of the jet with a rattling scraping noise. That didn’t bother him as much as the fact the airplane wasn’t slowing fast enough. The remnants of the crashed airline grew larger and larger in the windscreen, and despite the horrendous damage done to it by the crash and fire, there were still structures dense enough to utterly destroy the decelerating Phenom if it plowed into them. Norton considered taking the airplane into the grass on either side of the runway, but there was no guarantee things would be any easier if he did.

  At fifty-eight knots ground speed, the decision was made for him when the left main tire blew. The Phenom yawed to the left almost immediately, and there was nothing Norton could do to stop it.

  “Hold on!” he shouted as the jet departed the runway. It bounced and jolted across the grass, and both Norton and Lennon grabbed onto the instrument panel visor as they were jerked and shaken in their seats. The aircraft was pitching wildly, so much so that Norton couldn’t really read the instrumentation display before him. Were they still going over fifty, or was it thirty?

  It got only worse when the nose gear collapsed. The composite nose cone shattered and sheared away, allowing the expensive weather radar behind it to be destroyed a fraction of a second later. Bits and pieces of the plane’s forward fuselage bounced off the windshield as it began to break up. Norton struggled to shut off the fuel to the idling engines and managed to hit the cutoff just before a great gout of earth exploded over the windscreen. Even though the engines started spooling down as soon as the fuel was shut off, the fans were still whirling fast enough to suck something in. Not that a destroyed turbine first stage weighed heavily on Norton’s mind at the moment. The entire airplane was now effectively destroyed.

  With a lurch, the jet came to an unceremonious halt. The two engines were still winding down, but Norton heard that one of them was definitely grinding away, likely after having ingested something. He hit the fire extinguishers just to be safe, then switched off the batteries.

  “Get out!” he shouted. “Everybody out!”

  Lennon was already unfastening his harness. He pulled himself out of the copilot’s seat and reached for the door release. “Check both sides, tell me if I’m clear to open the door!”

  “Clear left!”

  “Clear right!”

  Norton heard Lennon cranking open the door. It opened with a loud squeal. He verified all the important switches were in the off position, then unfastened his harness. He had shoved the H&K 416 behind the pilot seat, and it was still there. His backpack was in the small closet behind the copilot’s seat. He yanked it open and grabbed the bag while the men in the passenger compartment humped their bags out the door. The guy who had been riding in the bathroom came out with a bloody lip; the covered toilet acted as a belted seat, but he had been sitting sideways whereas the others had been sitting in the front and rear facing club seats. Aside from that, they all looked fine. The man’s lip didn’t seem to slow him in the slightest.

  “You good, guy?” Norton asked anyway. If he wasn’t, he didn’t know what he was going to be able to do about it.

  “Stellar,” he said. He was a small, wiry guy, probably much older than he looked. “Just bit my lip during the crash. But hey, any landing you can walk away from, right?”

  Lennon appeared at the open door. “Okay, all gear is clear?”

  “Roger that,” said one of his men.

  “Then let’s hump out of here, we’ve got about two hundred meters of open space to cross to get to the truck. Let’s roll!”

  The men piled out of the dead Phenom, carrying their weapons with them. Norton was the last one out. Before crawling out through the half-opened doorway, he took a look around the interior of the jet. His last look.

  “See ya, babe,” he said, then pushed himself through the doorway. It was awkward not climbing down the stairs built into the door’s interior wall, as the air stair was barely extended more than fifty percent. He wound up crawling across them instead, and he felt foolish and clumsy.

  Dude, you just crashed a jet and lived to tell the story. Don’t sweat it.

  “Everybody do a buddy check,” Lennon said. He turned and looked Norton over. “Everything okay with you, Norton? You’re the man of the hour. You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Norton said. He swung into his pack, not mentioning that his shoulders hurt a bit from being thrown against the straps. One of the men had hit his head against the window combing next to his seat, and had a scrape to show for it. Other than that and the man with the bloodied lip, everyone seemed good to go. Norton wasn’t about to play the part of the pussy at the moment.

  “All right, let’s hit it,” Lennon said. He picked up one of the r
ucksacks and pulled it on. Everyone was armed, and rifles were brought into position. Lennon led the way, heading north, away from the runway and the airport. Norton followed, turning once to look at his jet. It was still resting on the main landing gear, shattered nose in the dirt. It listed to the left due to the blown tire, and the wing on that side was almost resting on the ground. The white aeronautical paint was scratched and pitted, and the leading edges of the wing had been dented and dinged. The little Embraer had flown its last mission.

  “Gotta keep moving, sir,” one of the former Marines said. It was Mendoza, the man who had accompanied Norton on his inspection of the jet back in Single Tree. “Zed is coming.”

  Norton looked past the plane and saw dozens of zombies emerging from around the parked airplanes and the shattered windows of the executive jet terminal. They all hurried as fast as they could toward the men.

  “I see ’em,” he said, and he took off after the other men without another look at the plane. It was history, and unless he moved, so was he. They hurried across the airfield to the perimeter fence. There was a chain-link fence there that separated the airfield from what looked like a construction company. That puzzled Norton, but when three of the men went right over the fence without even slowing down, he figured they knew what they were doing. Lennon and two other men, who were humping rucks, tossed them over. Lennon motioned toward Norton.

  “All right, Norton. Toss over your bag and get on the other side.”

  Norton did what he was told, though he wasn’t as graceful at climbing over the fence as he could have been. The cinches at the top of the fence bit into his skin and tore his jeans as he groped his way across. He made it and didn’t need any help. Looking back through the fence, he saw the zombies had almost reached the plane. They kept their flat gazes locked on the men.

  Lennon and the others scaled the fence effortlessly, then struck off into what seemed to be a quarry or something. Norton had no idea what they were doing here, but he was happy to have at least a fence separating him from the zombies. Even though he’d seen what they did back at Single Tree, the ones on the airfield weren’t a gigantic horde numbering in the thousands. It would take a bit for them to overcome the obstacle and continue their pursuit.

  At least, he hoped it would.

  “Truck’s dead ahead,” Lennon said. “Eyes out, Marines. Keep Norton secure, Mendoza—you’re the designated babysitter.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Lennon led the men past an open warehouse. Beyond it was a parking lot, then Teal Club Road, if Norton remembered correctly. He heard a dry moan and saw a zombie emerge from a pile of what seemed to be masonry materials. It had dusty coveralls and a bloodied jaw. He slowed momentarily, trying to figure out if he should shoot it. Mendoza tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Keep going, sir. No shooting unless you have to. Gotta practice noise discipline.”

  “We just crashed a very loud jet airplane,” Norton said. “I think they know we’re here.”

  Lennon led them to a dusty gray Ford van. It was bulkier than what Norton would have expected, though he had always considered vans to be graceless constructs regardless. Lennon hurried to the driver’s door and unlocked it with a key while the rest of the Marines set up a perimeter. Lennon unlocked the rest of the doors from the inside, and Mendoza grabbed Norton and led him to the right side of the vehicle. There was a large, vault-like door in the side of the van. Mendoza tugged it open. Norton saw it was quite thick.

  “Class II armor,” Mendoza said. “Get inside, sir. Hurry.”

  The interior of the van was dark and very stuffy. There were two vinyl-covered bench seats facing each other there, so Norton pushed to the back and sat on one. The vinyl was hot.

  The rest of the Marines piled in, tossing their gear up front. The driver’s compartment was totally separated from the cargo area by a metal partition. The only opening was a small window that looked out past the driver. Once the Marines were in and the modular door in the side of the van was slammed closed, one of them slapped the partition.

  “All aboard, good to go!” he yelled.

  Lennon must have been sitting up front. The van came alive with a diesel rattle, and it started to move. Norton heard a vague thumping from outside, and he looked out the small windows in the van’s rear clam shell doors. The zombie in overalls was there, peering in stupidly through the small aperture as it flailed against it in a bid to get at the men inside. It suddenly disappeared as the van backed up right over it. Norton felt only a small bounce.

  “How much does this thing weigh?” he asked.

  “About four tons,” Mendoza said. “It’s gonna take a lot of stenches to stop this thing, sir.”

  Norton nodded slowly, thinking about the hordes that surrounded Single Tree. “Yeah, well. Let’s hope we don’t run into a lot of stenches, then.”

  The Channel Islands Yacht Club’s marina was only a few miles away from the airport. Ordinarily, it was a six- or eight-minute drive that Norton had done many times in the past, so long as he managed to arrive or depart before the local rush hours started. And this trip wouldn’t have been any different, if it weren’t for all the damn zombies.

  Lennon kept driving into packs of the shambling dead, and while they weren’t able to overpower the van, they certainly slowed down its progress. Norton wasn’t surprised that enough biological mass could inconvenience even a four-ton vehicle, and the Marines riding in the back with him didn’t seem to be unduly concerned by it. When the packs got too thick and they threatened to actually mound over the van, the men simply opened fire on the masses through their firing ports. They all wore Peltor headsets, so the noise of firing in an enclosed space didn’t really inconvenience them. Norton was a different matter. His noise cancelling capabilities consisted of him holding his hands over his ears and opening his mouth.

  More worrisome for him was when he looked out the van’s small rear windows and saw a long conga line of ghouls shuffling along after the vehicle as it drove away. That bothered him quite a bit, because it would take a good thirty minutes to get the Argosy underway. In half an hour, a thousand stenches could show up and walk right up the dock to where the boat was tied up.

  He mentioned it to Mendoza in between rounds of combat. Mendoza passed that on to Lennon through his headset, and said, “We’ll just have to deal with that when it comes, sir.”

  “Guys, my boat has a swim platform that leads right to the aft deck. It’s designed to be accessible,” Norton said.

  Mendoza looked at the other men on his team, then turned back to Norton. “What about the sides? And the bow?”

  “They’d have a tough time coming aboard. The boat’s tied up on the starboard side only—port side is facing water. Bow would be too high for anyone to climb over, and the swim platform is like two and a half feet above the waterline at rest.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Mendoza said, with a shrug. “How deep is the harbor where your boat’s docked?”

  “About seven feet at low tide. Boat drafts five.”

  Mendoza shrugged again. “All right. Don’t sweat it, sir. You let us defend the boat, you just get her ready. You need any help with that, we all know our way around boats a bit, so we might be able to help out.”

  “Thanks,” Norton said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Another wave,” one of the other Marines said, and the men went back to their firing ports. Norton covered his ears and waited for the racket to start again. The interior of the armored van already smelled like a gun range, and there was enough brass rolling around to make moving about downright treacherous if one had to. Thankfully, that wasn’t on the menu just yet, so Norton kept his seat.

  The men started firing again, hammering out single shots as the van crashed through another pack of the dead. The vehicle bounced up and down on its suspension and swayed back and forth like a vessel in a heavy sea, and for a brief time, Norton feared he might upchuck all over the place. Looking out the re
ar windows didn’t help much, but he did see that several dozen ghouls had been run over. They writhed in the street. Others had obvious gunfire wounds, but few had been killed. The gunfire was more to try and hold them back than to kill them, though no one would shed a tear if that was the end result.

  Almost an hour after leaving the quarry parking lot, Norton was notified they were approaching the marina.

  “How’s it look?” Norton asked. He tried to peer through the small window in the partition at the front of the compartment, but he was too far away to see much through the comparatively small aperture. Mendoza held up his hand, beckoning him to wait. Norton presumed he was receiving a briefing from Lennon up front.

  “Okay, this is how it’s going to work,” Mendoza said after a minute. “We do have stenches in the area. They’re orienting on the van, which we would expect. Lennon is going to drive us right to the entrance and slow down, not stop. We’ll exit on the roll. Once we’re out, Lennon will keep going and try to draw them away from us. We’ll keep you protected long enough to get us into the marina, and then two men will precede you to the boat to ensure the path is clear, while the rest of us provide security from the rear. I’ll be with you the whole time, Mister Norton, so don’t worry about anything.” Mendoza motioned to Norton’s rifle. “You can handle that, right?”

  “You know it,” Norton said. Though in truth, he hadn’t had to in real life, only at the range. He didn’t mention that.

  “Good. If you have to shoot, go ahead and shoot. Protect yourself, don’t wait for us. Got that?”

  “Good copy,” Norton said. He’d been told by several military advisers on shoots that was the usual rejoinder when asked if something was understood.

  It satisfied Mendoza. “Okay, then. We’re going to jump off in maybe two minutes. Get all your shit together and follow me out that door when I go. Don’t wait, just follow. All right?”