by Barry Napier
“No. I don’t think so, anyway.”
“We have to get out of here, right? I mean…there has to be someone out there to help us, right?”
“You’d think so,” Ray said. “But if what I saw on TV out of New York is really happening, I’d think if everyone here in the airport is sick, it’s just the same outside.”
“I want to check,” Courtney said.
“Sure. That makes perfect sense.”
Courtney nodded and started walking away from him, headed in the direction of the ticket counters and the entrance. She walked gingerly around a few bodies and then turned back to Ray. She gave him an awkward sort of glance and asked, “Would you come with me?”
“Oh,” Ray said. “Of course.”
He actually felt stupid for not already checking outside. But he really did think they’d find equally bad news out there—maybe even worse. He walked quickly to catch up with her, rather embarrassed at the almost dancelike moves he was making around the bodies in his way.
“How did you stay safe?” she asked as he caught up to her.
“Me? Oh, I ducked down behind the bar of this little restaurant. And then when it all sort of stopped I got distracted, I guess.”
“By what?”
“By drinking.”
Courtney did not say anything in response to this, but she nodded in an eager sort of way that told Ray she thought it was perfectly fine. They walked together towards the ticket counters and Ray was pleased to find that the floors were a bit clearer. Apparently, the bulk of the slaughter and fighting had occurred in the walkways between the stores and gates. Out near the front of the airport and off toward the baggage claims, the scene wasn’t as bad. There were still dead bodies—and plenty of them—but they were able to walk without feeling like they were walking through a field of landmines.
The entrances were a different story, though. Ray recalled watching as the military had set up their little blockades by the front doors just before they’d taken control of the place. Those blockades had been attacked during the melee but now that they were unguarded, Ray finally saw how they had been constructed. There were odd black structures tightly sealed to the sides of the doors. He could see where they had been bolted through the existing construction of the airport. Looking through the clear glass along the airport doors, he could see that the structures looked to be made of some sort of very durable plastic or rubber. It reminded him a bit of the tunnels football teams ran out of before a game, only much shorter and not at all designed to get fans pumped up. There were six of them in all, situated all along the front of the airport. Two of them had been knocked loose, exposing bright afternoon sunlight where the little tunnel had once been. From what Ray could tell, the tunnels led to some sort of platform just a few feet away from the airport doors.
“You think they lead to military vehicles or something?” Courtney asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That or maybe some sort of mobile trailer. I guess all those military guys had some sort of HQ out there, right?”
“If so,” Courtney said, pointing to the sidewalk just beyond the door they were currently standing in front of, “maybe they should have stayed inside.”
Ray followed her finger and saw several men in military fatigues scattered on the sidewalk and in the passenger drop-off lanes. There was vomit splattered all over and he could also see spent rounds from some sort of firefight out there.
“Still want to go out?” Ray asked.
“Yes. I have to know.”
When Courtney did not move right away, Ray figured she was waiting for him to take the lead. He was fine with that but was not the sort of guy that women usually expected to be the strong and daring type. He went to the door closest to them and opened it up. It was hard to get it to move due to the tight seal formed by the tunnel outside. When he did get it open, they were greeted by the smell of stale air and something unmistakably rubber. For one paralyzing moment, Ray could not escape the feeling of having just stepped into the throat of an enormous monster. He felt panic clawing at his nerves for a moment but then saw light fading into the darkness not too far ahead. Within a few steps, he could not only see clear daylight, but the familiar and somehow lighter black of the pick-up lanes.
With that taste of light up ahead, he turned around to see where Courtney was and saw her as nothing more than a murky shape in the darkness behind him. He waited for her to catch up and then walked to the end of the tunnel. When he reached the end, there was a feeling of momentary relief as he breathed in fresh air for the first time in a little over three days. But after one good inhale, he realized the air wasn’t as fresh as he’d thought. There was the faint smell of smoke, a wafting tinge of sickness, and something both sweet and pungent that he could not quite place.
He also realized that the ends of the tunnels were connected to nothing. The exits were only still standing because of what looked like metal rods that helped them to keep their shape at the top and bottom. If they had ever been attached to anything—and Ray thought they likely had been—whatever they’d been attached to had been removed. There were a few industrial-sized silver bolts on the asphalt that bucked up this theory.
Once he’d taken this in, his attention went to the bodies. There weren’t many of them and the ones he saw all seemed to be military. Somehow, though, this didn’t seem nearly as terrible as the line of cars that started a few feet away from where he stood.
“What happened?” Courtney asked.
Ray had been so transfixed by the sight of everything that he’d nearly forgotten she was standing right behind him.
“Not sure,” he said quietly.
They both looked out to what was easily three hundred cars—probably more. Some were pulled tight to the curb, as if still expecting to pick someone up. In the several cars closest to him, Ray saw a few dead people. Most of them, though, seemed to have opted to get out of the car. Many of them had keeled over and died in the road. He saw a few with bullet holes in them and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who had shot them. For those that had died of the virus, they looked almost peacefully at rest on the hoods of cars, or on the road. There was evidence that most of them had thrown up everywhere, though the heat of the summer had dried most of it up.
“This must have been from when they shut the airport down,” Courtney said. “From when they locked us all up in there. All these people, coming to get their loved ones…I mean, my God. They had no idea.”
Ray actually found himself standing on tiptoe like a child, trying to get a better idea of how far back this stream of cars went. And as he looked, he also saw a portion of Philadelphia just off to the right, tucked away behind the looping roads of the airport. He saw smoke rising into the air in several places—thin wisps of it here and there but also two large and billowing grey clouds rising upwards. Even worse, though, was the silence. He had never heard any city so quiet.
“It’s like time is standing still,” Courtney said, stepping just slightly beyond him. She cringed at the sight of a man who had fallen out at the front of his car. He’d landed in a pool of his own sick and had hit his head hard on the way down, creating a pool of blood around it all.
“You from Philly?” Ray asked.
“No. I’m from Ohio. You?”
“Florida.”
“So what now, then?” she asked. “I’m not about to go walking around a city I don’t know when it’s in that sort of shape. I mean, I don’t…”
She stopped here and they stood in the silence for a moment. He could tell she was crying and really, he wanted to as well. The afternoon sun glittering off of the cars was blinding, as if God Himself were doing everything he could to not have them look toward the city. Ray wanted to put an arm around her or just to take her hand, but that would be weird. He just so hated to see a woman cry.
“If you need anything,” he said, his voice soft and uncertain, “just let me—”
“Where were you drinking?” she
asked. She turned to him so quickly that he thought she was going to attack him, maybe punch him for not being able to come up with a plan to get away from the horrors in front of them.
“I don’t recall the name. It’s the little pub and burger place over near the back.”
“Lead the way,” she said, nodding back towards the airport.
“Back inside?” he said. “Are you sure?”
“No. But if I have to deal with all of that right now,” she said, waving her arm aimlessly behind her, “I’m going to lose my mind. So…yeah, a drink might help.”
Ray did not like the idea of willingly going back into the presence of so much death, but he thought she might be right. Walking out into that numbing silence and uncertainty was probably just as bad as wading through the dead inside the airport. So without any argument, he started back through the tunnel. This time, getting the door open to get back inside wasn’t nearly as hard. And though he found himself craving the fresh air right away in the presence of so many corpses, he made his way back to his little hiding spot with the speed of a man who was anxious to help.
***
It was easily the most surreal and morbid experience of Ray’s life. As Courtney fruitlessly tried getting a call out with her cellphone, Ray stood behind the bar of the burger pub and poured another glass of beer. He’d already made Courtney’s drink—a Rum and Coke—and she had only barely sipped it. Judging from the grimace on her face, he’d either made it too strong or she was also not a very big drinker.
He was still trying to properly gauge the woman sitting in front of him. He supposed in a world where people were dying on the streets by the tens of thousands, it was pretty much impossible to properly judge someone on a first impression. Ray knew that he was in a strange state of shock—a state he’d managed to process and get a light grip on while cowering behind the bar when everything had gone to hell. He still felt himself wanting to collapse and scream his head off, but his ability to keep that urge at bay was stronger than anything else. He wondered if it would be considered his “will to survive.” He’d read about something like that in a few books during his years as a voracious reader, especially in non-fiction books featuring wilderness adventures and true-crime scenarios.
“You okay back there?”
Courtney’s voice jarred him and he shook his head, trying to shake away those random thoughts.
“Yeah, just zoning out.” He sipped from his refilled beer and found that his hands were trembling. Maybe he was closer to that state of collapsing in on himself and falling apart than he thought.
“I wonder what it says about us that we aren’t cowering messes right now,” Courtney said. “Like, if I’m being honest, everything within me wants to scream my head off. I could curl into the fetal position and cry for days on end. But there’s this tiny thread that’s holding me together. I can almost feel it, like that one filament on a spider web that takes all the weight when something big hits it.”
“Well, I was a cowering mess back here,” he said, nodding to the corner he’d nearly blacked out in. He could still hear that doomed man’s voice singing that oldies song.
“Oh, same for me in the restroom. I don’t know how long I was sobbing. I just don’t…I mean, how the hell are we supposed to move on from all of that?”
She tossed her head slightly to the left as she said this. Her blonde hair fell in her eyes and he was once again reminded how attractive she was. It was in a plain sort of way; she seemed to be the sort of woman that wouldn’t need any makeup to go out for a night on the town in order to feel good about herself. He also saw the little splatters of blood in her hair he’d noticed when they’d first run into one another.
One more thing he noticed was that she had not once looked in the direction of the walkway or all of the bodies back there since she’d sat down at the bar. He figured it was the smart play, so he did the same. He exited the back of the bar and took a seat next to her.
“If you can find some burgers and chicken wings back in the supply room, I say we just camp out here until the calvary arrives.”
He chuckled, but it was in that comment that he could see how broken and terrified she was. She was using her nonchalance and humor as a way to keep away the wretched facts that were staring them in the face just ten feet behind them. He wondered what she could see in him. What defenses was he throwing up? He would actually love to know because he had no earthly idea how he was holding on. What he thought, but did not dare say to her face, was that he did not think the calvary would arrive. He thought what they needed to do was to try to find some way to get to some sort of news feed. They needed to know what was going on out in the world because if what had happened in this airport had indeed spread through Philadelphia and any immediate areas, he had no idea how they were going to get anywhere. He was not the most resourceful person in the world and as far he could tell, Courtney was about one more traumatic moment away from losing her mind.
“Where are you from?” he asked, hoping basic conversation might help her come around a bit more.
“Ohio. A little town called Brewster. You?”
“Jacksonville, Florida.”
“And were you going home or going somewhere else when all of this happened?” Courtney asked him. She sipped from her drink again and it seemed to go down pretty smooth this time.
“Going home. I missed the craziness in New York by about a day. I was there for a meeting and then decided to stop in Philly to take in some of the sights.”
“Not a good decision.”
“No, it was not. How about you. Where were you headed?”
“I was here for a layover. Trying to save a few dollars. I was heading to South Carolina to visit an old college girlfriend; she’s going through a rough divorce. And I just want to get back home. I think about my parents—they live like ten miles away from my apartment—and I just…I don’t know. I want to go, but I don’t. I’m afraid of what I’ll find.”
“Same here,” he said quickly, trying to interrupt before she broke down. He was sure there was probably some sort of therapeutic release in letting out emotion (especially in a godforsaken time like this) but selfishly, he did not want to see her crying. If she started crying, he would not know how to handle it and then he’d probably follow suit…especially if he kept drinking.
“Before the TVs went off, did you hear about Richmond?” Courtney said.
“Yeah. They think it was a nuke.”
“On the heels of the explosions in New York and Texas. But those were smaller, right?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Ray said. “I never saw anyone come out and say it on TV or any of the articles I read, but it all seems sort of planned if you ask me. Those small blasts seem to have been the catalyst for the virus. And then the big one just to make sure we were paying attention.”
Courtney drank down about a quarter of what was left in her glass as she nodded. “The day before the crap hit the fan here, there was this guy over in Gate B7 who used to work for some sort of company in DC that researched nuclear stuff. He said he doubts the explosion in Richmond could have spread the virus. He said if the blast was nuclear, it would be a bad way to distribute the virus because the heat would kill it.”
“Well, do we know for sure the virus is even in Virginia?” Ray asked.
“It made its way from New York to Philadelphia in less than two days,” she said. “Add another three days to that and that’s where we are now. So yeah…I think it’s probably in Virginia one way or the other.” She shuddered here and a tear trailed down from her eye as she added; “Probably Ohio, too.”
He waited to see if she was going to have a full-on breakdown and was relieved when she managed to swallow it down. She gulped down the remainder of her drink, looked to the empty glass, and then went behind the bar herself this time. As she poured her next Rum and Coke, she said, “Do me a favor. Don’t let me have more than three of these. More than that and I’ll just be one more problem for you to de
al with.”
“I promise,” he said. Then, sipping from his own drink, he thought of how to ask the next question. He went for the simplest way he could think of. “So what do we do from here?”
She shrugged and showed him her now-full glass. “Once I get a good enough buzz to not care that I’m walking around countless dead people, I guess I want to figure out how to get to Ohio. But that stream of cars out there doesn’t make that seem like a reality. And, God…did you see the shots coming out of New York? All that traffic…”
“So…do we walk?” Ray asked, realizing after it was out of his mouth that it was a stupid question.
“I think we have to for a while. That is, of course, unless the military sends some sort of reinforcement. But…I don’t know. Based on how this whole thing went down here, they might want to stay as far away from here as they can.”
Ray took his phone out of his pocket and saw two things at once: his battery was in the red, and it was 3:58. “I’d really rather not go walking out in that mess this close to dark,” he said.
“Same. But I also don’t want to sleep in this crypt. Maybe we can walk to a hotel near the airport?”
“Maybe,” Ray said. “Or…what about the first class lounge? Aren’t there comfortable chairs and things like that in there?”
“Don’t know,” Courtney said. “I’ve never flown first class. But I like the way you think, Ray.”
It was painfully apparent that she was doing everything she could to not break down and cry. It was like watching a well-meaning child with absolutely no acting ability take the lead in an elementary school play. He wondered how long she’d be able to keep it up.
“So that’s the plan then?” he said, again trying to keep her mind on anything other than the thousands of dead bodies just behind them. “Find the first class lounge and hunker down for the night?”
“And then we head out tomorrow,” she said. Her bottom lip quivered and she let out a little gasp. She was crying before he knew it and then throwing the remainder of her drink against the wall. The glass shattered and the dark liquid went trickling down the walls.
