“Thank God she’s buckled,” she whispered loudly, coughing a bit on the last word.
“Thank God,” I breathed out as the woman continued trying to attack us. And then something caught my eye—a small ring of keys clipped to her waistline. Well, that fucking figures.
*
Rose
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” the American woman asked, her gaze on the charred flesh of the stewardess.
“If you’re talking about the wannabe Hellraiser cast member, then yeah, I’m seeing the same thing.” I grimaced as some of the flesh slid off the stewardess’s cheek.
“I meant the keys.”
My gaze roved over the burnt woman until I caught a glimpse of the shiny keys dangling at her waist. “Oh,” I murmured. I shook my head and looked at the woman next to me, hoping that she had a stronger stomach than I did, but by her pasty complexion I would say not. “We need those keys,” I said matter-of-factly.
“We do,” she replied.
We both stood there, trying to come up with a game plan to get the keys. I searched around us and spotted a prize in a seat not too far way—one recently evacuated by one of our hungry little monster friends, going by the blood and gore all over the white leather. Either way, I retrieved my prize—an umbrella. If it hadn’t been the most atrocious shade of lime green, I’d not have seen it in the dimness of the emergency lights.
“You grab and I’ll hold her back,” I said. “Count of three. One, two…”
“Wait!” she said, placing a hand on my arm.
I froze, my heart seizing in my chest. “What?”
“I’m Sam.”
I blink, confused. “Can we do the happy introductions later? Not to sound mean or anything but there’s a high probability of death right now.” I sounded like a bitch, and I hated that, but the possibility of imminent death will do that to a girl.
She nodded. “I know, that’s why I wanted you to know my name…just in case.”
She gave a little shrug and I nodded, agreeing with her sentiments. I probably would have felt like even more of a bitch but since death was still a high probability I decided to push those emotions to one side and focus on surviving the next few minutes.
“One, two,” I started.
“…three,” we finished together, and I rammed the umbrella against the stewardess’s throat as quick as I could so that her snappy mouth was far away from me. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop her grabby hands from grabbing at me. Her long nails clawed down my arms, making me grunt out against the pain as Sam reached for the keys looped at her belt.
It felt like the longest ten seconds of my life as the stewardess clawed at my arms and the heat trailed over my hands, making my skin burn. Thankfully I was still wearing my hoody, so the nails didn’t do too much damage, but the burns hurt like hell.
“Got them!” Sam called, and I let go immediately.
“Fuck!” I called, gritting my teeth against the pain. “Okay, let’s open that door and get out of this hellhole.”
We tried the emergency exit first, tried every damn key, but it didn’t work. So we charged to the cockpit and Sam fumbled through the keys once more before finding the right one and throwing the door open. The captain was sat in his chair staring out at the airport, and I could see now why he didn’t want to open that door.
In the seat next to him sat the co-pilot, his head now a mushy red pulp.
“Oh my god!” I cried out, pulling up short. “Sam!”
Sam stopped and I reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her back to my side. The captain was sat in his chair, staring out the window at the runway below.
Even from a distance it was clear that something was very, very wrong in the world. The radio crackled static next to him, but it was what was outside the window that was scariest of all.
As we watched, the airport plunged into darkness, but shadows still played in each panel of glass—people running, people fighting, people pounding on the windows to get out. It was horrific and terrifying, and I couldn’t stop staring, and I gasped.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” the captain said, making me jump because I’d forgotten that he was there. I looked down at him, his wide eyes staring up at me. “My passengers…”
“What did the tower say?” my newfound companion asked.
The captain shook his head. “There was an outbreak. CDC had put the airport under quarantine about thirty minutes ago. They never gave me more info than that—only that it was safe to land but don’t let anyone off until they got the okay…but I never expected…this.”
I watched as something or someone ran across the runway, flames licking up their body as they screamed, with a hundred dark shapes following them.
“We need to get people off this plane. There’s a fire and people…” I fumbled for the right words, but couldn’t bring myself to say what my brain was screaming at me. “People are sick. Injured. We need to get off, now! Please, open the doors for us. Give us a chance,” I pleaded.
The captain full-on turned in his seat to stare at me in disbelief. His gray-white hair was stuck to his forehead, beads of sweat trickling through it and into his eyes. He blinked the sweat away. “Are you crazy? Have you seen it out there?”
“Have you seen it in here?” I snapped, jerking a thumb behind us. “People are killing each other. Let us off this damned plane, now!”
The captain sneered. “You’re going to die if you go out there, ma’am. And I have a duty to my—”
“To your passengers? Yes, you do! You have a duty to keep us safe. But it’s not bloody safe in here, now let us out!” I yelled, frustration and desperation churning in my gut like curdled milk. “Please,” I begged, hysteria climbing my throat.
“Fine,” he replied. “I’m leaving, though—taking this plane and my passengers somewhere safe. But if you want to risk it out there, go ahead.” He pressed a button on the control panel and shook his head.
“The plane is on fire! There’s no way it will take off!” I yelled at him. “Come with us. We’ll get help from somewhere.”
“There’s no help to be had. We need to get the hell out of here,” he grumbled, and turned back to face the control panel.
“Did you not hear me? The plane is on fire, it’s not going to take off!”
A strange noise that sounded almost animalistic came from somewhere within him and a wretched sob escaped him. “You didn’t hear what I heard coming from the control tower, lady. The, the screams, the…” He shook his head, dragging a hand down his sweaty face. “We just need to sit tight. Help is on the way.”
Sam and I exchanged a worried look. “Listen, sir,” Sam began, “sitting tight isn’t going to help anyone! I’ve had the most awful month of my life, and I’ve survived all that that’s thrown at me, so I’m not about to die on this goddamned plane! So if you want to stay here, then stay here. If you want to try and take off, then do that, but we’re getting the hell off this plane!” she yelled, her own hysteria exploding from her mouth.
He scoffed and opened his mouth to say something, but Sam grabbed my hand and dragged me from the cockpit before I could hear it.
“We need to go, now,” Sam said, and I nodded and followed. I wondered whether we should have said more to him, perhaps tried to convince him some more to come with us, but the moment was lost as we headed back to the emergency exit door, trying to ignore Mrs. BBQ.
She was still strapped into her seat, and regardless of her restraints she was still writhing in her chair as she leaned forwards into view and hungrily reached for us.
The plane had turned eerily silent. I guessed people were either dead or changing into one of those things.
Sam pulled the lever down on the door and, now unlocked, it opened, and the warm night air hit us full force, the smoke from the plane billowing out into the night.
Triggered by the opening of the door, a slide began to inflate, extending and growing in a bright yellow beacon to the tarmac. A beaco
n, because I worried the color would attract trouble.
A scent I didn’t recognize, yet I instantly knew was a bad omen, hung heavily in the air. And like thick tar, it stuck to my tongue and made me grimace.
“You ready for this?” Sam asked, her voice steady and almost eerily calm.
I stared out at the horizon, the orange glow of fires burning across Los Angeles and the scream of fire engines and police cars in the distance, and I pushed my panic attack to the bottom of my gut where it could simmer for a little longer—because if Sam could hold her shit together, then I would too.
“Not really,” I replied honestly.
She laughed bitterly. “Me neither. Everything’s so fucked up.”
And despite the carnage and insanity unfolding all around us, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for myself. “Never thought my gap year would be so much trouble, if I’m honest.” I tried for a joke, but it fell flat. “I thought I could run away from my problems, but it turns out that Mother Nature is an evil bitch and decided to chase me down.”
This time Sam gave a little laugh and I did too. “I was sort of dreading coming back from my honeymoon,” she said. “I dreaded the crash back down to reality, I suppose, but I guess that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
“Well, you did the crashing part,” I replied sarcastically, and she let out a dry, frightened laugh.
“Guess so,” she replied quietly.
We lapsed into silence as the screams from the airport terminal filtered over to us. Dark shapes moved across the runway, but I couldn’t be certain whether they were people running from the horrors or they actually were the horrors. Either way it didn’t bode well for us.
The reality hit me that I had more than likely made the biggest mistake of my life by rebelling against my suffocating parents and running away. Because I might very well die that night. I was, unsurprisingly, not ready to die. I had never had many friends, and our family was small and close-knit, so my whole life had consisted around the same handful of people—people I might never see again due to my own recklessness. It was a damn shame that the one time I acted out, the apocalypse hit.
Just my fucking luck.
“Whatever happens tonight,” I said, looking at Sam and giving her hand a hard squeeze, “let’s stick together, okay?”
Sam didn’t reply, though she squeezed my hand back and I took it to mean that she agreed. Because there was a very high probability that we were going to die, yet neither of us wanted to die alone.
“My name’s Rose, by the way.”
“Hi, Rose,” she said, her chin trembling.
Of all the things I had expected to happen when I booked my trip, I couldn’t ever have imagined this. Yet there was no denying that my heart was pumping, my adrenaline racing, and I felt more alive than I had ever done before.
The world may have come to an end, but I was finally living. At least right up until I died.
“Let’s do this,” Sam said, and I nodded in agreement.
Chapter Six.
Sam
M y heart was pounding as Rose and I stood at the top of the emergency exit, still inside the plane, our fates resting on a cliff’s edge. Behind us, inside the aircraft, the silence was pierced as the sound of jaw snaps and guttural cries echoed out. Nothing sounded human anymore though. I wondered if the captain had shut his door again, hiding like the coward he was.
So we couldn’t stay on the plane. If we did, our fate would be decided. And that fate would be to die, there and then. We were both too young for that. Too damn young. There was still so much I hadn’t done, places I hadn’t seen.
Looking out over the dark tarmac, with the flashing lights of vehicles brightening the night like lighthouses over dark water, I wondered though if it wouldn’t be easier to stay still. A knot of fear in my gut told me that the world outside the plane was going to be worse. Maybe not right then, maybe not a day from then, but eventually…
When I’d said “let’s do this,” I honestly hadn’t meant it. Not one bit. But Rose had nodded. We were holding hands in solidarity, like the coming descent down to the ground was the moment of our reckoning.
Would we live?
Would we die?
Would we break our necks just sliding down the bouncy-looking yellow rubber that terminated against the tarmac that was waiting to splash our brains across its hard surface?
“You ready?” Rose squeezed my hand again.
“Not even a little bit,” I responded, but then, as if we had both mentally engaged in a countdown towards death, we jumped.
We jumped simultaneously, positioning our legs beneath us, our backs slamming into the slide, our hands clinging onto one another for dear fucking life. It was the longest ride of my life and, Christ, I’d been down the Torpedo at the State Fair years ago. That thing was at least six stories high. They’d had four people seriously injured before they’d decided to add the plexiglass half-circle casing to keep folks from slipping over the sides.
Hitting the hard earth was painful as hell, because we’d bounced at the end of the deployed slide, flying several feet through the air until we’d landed in a heap, our fingers finally unclasping from one another. I instantly felt alone when we weren’t touching, like this girl was now my safety line to life, the thing that was keeping my ass tethered to a rock wall rather than plummeting into the rocky earth below.
“Shit,” Rose wheezed out, holding her side. Her already-wounded arms were looking even worse from asphalt abrasions. For my part, my shoulder was stinging where the ground had torn at my skin and I could feel an unwelcome breeze across my backside. I’d ripped my dress, the whole side a jagged mess that flapped open as I stood, revealing my full-coverage nylon panties and a nasty-looking scrape on my upper thigh.
“Great,” I grimaced, reaching down and offering Rose my hand to help her stand.
“I don’t think a peep show’s going to get us out of this,” she quipped with a forced smile.
A growling in the distance, followed by a dual set of screams like concussive blows against our bodies, made her fake grin disappear and my stomach churn.
“We’ve got to go.” Rose had a steel grip on my hand again, and she started running in the opposite direction of the yells. As we moved down the body of the plane, toward the tail, one of the engines exploded in a great fountain of sparks.
Sparks that lit the river of fuel that was wetting the ground.
Rose jumped away from the newly formed wall of fire. “Shit!” she screamed, yanking me back the way we’d come.
The sounds of shuffling feet seemed close. Hopefully they weren’t.
God, I hoped they weren’t.
We were about to round the nose of the plane when I realized an emergency vehicle was closer than it once had been. The oscillating, mesmerizing colors filled my vision and brought back the horrible day when I’d had to call an ambulance for my dad. My last text to him had been angry; I’ll always regret that. The EMT response time had been too slow. He was DOA. And, in an instant, my life had felt DOA. Until Travis.
Fuck Travis! I screamed inside my head, and yelled something different aloud: “Look!” I lifted my free hand and pointed at the emergency vehicle in the near distance; despite the shitty memory, its flashing lights kindled a modicum of hope to untie the fear knot still resting in my belly. “It’s closer than the others. We can make that. Either there’s help, or we take the damn thing and drive.”
Rose simply said “go.” Neither of us considered why the ambulance had moved closer and then stopped. Surely they’d seen the emergency exit deployed on our plane and they’d been trying to get to us to help.
We ran, full-out, my sandals slapping against the ground too loudly for comfort. It would be so easy for someone to follow that slap, slap, slap against the pavement. Rose ran beside me and I could tell she wasn’t as used to pushing her body as I was. I’d practiced routines sometimes for days, with only short breaks for water. I’d wanted to be the b
est, and I’d pushed my body over and over to that breaking point. My feet were a ruin at one time, gnarled and scarred and often bloody from being shoved too long into pointe shoes.
Even though my feet were in better shape at the moment—still warped, but not wounded and sickly—I only ever picked shoes that covered the front part of my feet. Like the leather sandals with the full-coverage basket-weave design across the toes that were hitting the tarmac like sonic booms.
Matching the rhythm of my still-pounding heart. I could hear my damn pulse in my ears, a thunderous rushing of blood.
“Hurry, we’re almost there!” Rose shouted beside me. And we were.
So close. So freaking close. I didn’t curse a whole lot—it just didn’t feel like me—but holy hell was I cursing inside right now.
A hundred feet or less from the emergency vehicle and its emergency personnel. They would help us.
They had to fucking help us!
“Please,” I started yelling when we were about fifty feet away. “Please, we need help!”
Beside me, Rose yelled something too, but I was too lost in my own need and desperation to make out what she was saying.
Twenty feet away. In a moment, I’d be able to touch the back of the buttercup yellow response vehicle branded with LAX in cobalt blue. It looked like a mutated fire truck, with a giant windshield and a rigging on the top that looked like some sort of stiff fire hose support. I didn’t care what it looked like though. I only cared how far away it was.
Ten feet.
“Is anyone in there?” I shouted again.
Five feet.
It was Rose that stopped first, yanking me to a halt in turn because she was still holding tightly onto my hand. I probably would have kept racing until my body slammed into the large truck.
“Rose, stop. What the hell?”
Red Eye | Season 1 | Episode 1 Page 5
