A Time to Die (19 page)

His grip made him flip around into an upright orientation again, the momentum caused his back to scream in protest and to swing madly from the rope. He had enough presence of mind to grab the rope with his left arm as well before the pain in his right made him let go. That same training echoed in his confused brain, and he wrapped a leg around the rope and trapped it against one foot with the other.

“Christ on a fucking crutch!” he gasped, breathing hard as he swung there, still almost thirty feet in the air. He looked up to see the wrestler snarling at him out of the window. A glance at his hand showed just a minor rope burn. Since the hand wasn’t holding anything, he flipped the wrestler the bird. His adversary didn’t appear to appreciate that, he grabbed the rope and heaved. “Oh no,” Andrew said and began to descend as fast as he could.

The wrestler was as strong as he appeared. He bodily began hauling Andrew up almost as fast as he was going down. Andrew didn’t know how much rope he had, but it couldn’t be that much. Ignoring the pain in his right hand, he let go with his legs and went down twice as fast.

He felt more than saw the end of the rope passing his legs. He kept going until he was at the last handhold, paused a second to bend his legs, and let go. There had been no reason to look. That would have meant being hauled higher, and it was either face Rowdy Roddy Piper and his buddies up there, or drop. He chose an uncertain fate over a certain one and let go. He dropped maybe two feet and landed on grass.

“Ha!” Andrew laughed and flipped Roddy the double bird. “Bite me, mother fucker!” The crazed man took him literally and started to climb out the window.

Andrew thought the wrestler was going to climb down after him and took a few steps away, looking around for the first time. The A380’s port outside landing gear was half collapsed, folded under the plane from the power slide into the softer grass. Smoke was curling up from one of the engines and liquid dripped from a wingtip to his left. He figured it must be hydraulic fluid. If there wasn’t a nuked city a few miles away and a plane full of insane cannibals, including one climbing down to eat him just then, he might have figured the airline would be royally pissed for fucking up their plane.

The sound of a rapidly approaching screech made him turn just as Roddy hit the ground face first with a sickening CRUNCH! Andrew looked at the man’s head folded back along his spine and tried not to puke. Blood was leaking out of his mouth and ears as the body spasmed on the ground then fell still.

“Fuck me!” he said, “Fuck me!” He looked up just in time to step back a few more feet as a woman crashed to the ground, joining the wrestler’s twitching corpse. She came in more flat, having jumped towards him. Still, a thirty-five foot swan drive onto hard ground was not something you easily shook off. Bones crunched on her impact as well. Though after a second she looked up at him and grunted, one arm reached for him. It was the only one still connected by a spinal cord. She coughed blood from lungs punctured by multiple broken ribs.

She only managed to reach out towards him before another landed on her, this one face first like Roddy. Neither of them moved.

Andrew swore and retreated away from the area. The last thing he wanted was enough of the deranged bastards to jump out so that they started surviving. It wasn’t until then that he looked around and really noticed the time of the day. It was considerably earlier than he remembered it being when he had ‘landed’ the plane. But how was that possible? He glanced down at his watch and realized. It had been almost twenty-two hours since he hit the ground.

He put a hand to his head and probed the injury. It hurt like hell, but didn’t have that squishy feeling of a fracture. He also doubted he would have been up to a jump out the window and rappel if he’d had a skull fracture. “The other passengers,” he said, remembering all the people he’d left in the aft galley storage.

Andrew trotted through the torn-up grass aft near the tail, looking up and taking note of the various hatches as he went. “AFT GALLEY STORAGE” was the last one, and it was almost twenty feet over his head.

“Didn’t think of that,” he mumbled and looked around, instantly feeling the fool for thinking a handy ladder would just be sitting there. Still, those people had been stuck in there for almost a day, with a plane full of apparently blood-thirsty and suicidal lunatics. He needed to get them out.

Standing under the plane with nothing but his now well-worn flight suit and a few bucks in his pocket, Andrew didn’t consider he had a lot of options. He looked back up the runway to the distant burning hangar and terminal buildings. Of course there were no emergency vehicles. If there were any left they’d be helping survivors of the nuclear blast that had destroyed Monterrey.

He looked down at his arm, now covered in a light gray dust. “I have to get out of this,” he decided, and started to jog towards the terminal buildings. He remembered as he landed that there were people there. Someone had to be an airport employee who could help him. The question was why no one at all had come to investigate a badly landed jumbo jet almost a day ago?

The day was already warm, passing eighty even as the sun was just over the horizon. Smoke from fires still rose in the distance from the ruins of Monterrey, but the scene was one of eerie silence. No fire trucks, no sirens, nothing. The busiest airport in the region might as well have been a ghost town. About five hundred meters of jogging brought him to the first facility building. Ironically, it was the airport fire department.

Andrew found the big outside doors closed and went to the first man sized door. It was locked. Not being one to delay, he cocked back and kicked with a booted foot. It took two hits for the latch to give and send the door flying back against the inside wall. Inside it was nearly completely dark.

He checked his flight suit, never thinking to see if they had left any of his gear. Sure enough, in a thigh holster was his trusty mini-Maglite. He flicked it to life and played it around the interior of the building. The huge, squat firetrucks used at airports were all lined up in their spaces and showed no signs of having been recently used. “Damn,” he said, his voice echoing through the cavernous building.

“Graag!” came an answer.

“Shit,” Andrew hissed and jerked the door closed with a creak and a bang. Of course, with the latch broken, it slowly began to swing inward again just as footsteps came running in his direction. That sounded just like the half-intelligent sounds the sick people made on the plane! There were sick people here in Monterrey too? Slowly a corner of his mind started assembling pieces of a puzzle. A road in Mexico choked with thousands of refugees. Sick people in his plane. Sick people here. Was this a global pandemic?

He looked around, fight-or-flight instinct pumping adrenalin into his bloodstream and making is eyes wide. The next closest building was more than two hundred meters away and all he had was the little Maglite. Whoever or whatever it was, the sound of footfalls was only a few feet away when he had an idea.

The door was jerked the rest of the way open from the inside and a figure in firefighter Nomex raced out, and ran into Andrew’s outstretched leg. “Gaarch!” the fireman growled can crashed to the ground face first. Andrew saw the dress and was immediately afraid he’d just injured an honest to God fireman. Then the man rolled over and he got a look at the persons face. It was caked with dried blood now mixed with fresh. Several recently shattered teeth dribbled form its torn lips and a huge flap of skin was now torn from his chin. He took notice as he fixed Andrew with a look of pure evil intent.

“God damn!” Andrew cursed and quickly went through the door. The fireman was on his feet faster than he thought possible and slammed into the door even before Andrew could get it fully closed. He glanced down in the twilight of the barely illuminated building at the rock he’d held in his right hand to bash in the… thing’s head, now wishing he hadn’t hesitated. He tossed it aside and retrieved the still lit flashlight, looking around him. There, on the wall just a couple feet away was a huge crowbar, the kind firemen use to get someone out of a wrecked car.

With all this weight, Andrew slammed the door back against its hinges, temporarily pushing the nutjob on the other side away. In one swift motion he stepped forward, snatched the pry bar from its rack, spun and jammed it under the metal door and the concrete floor so hard sparks flew. The fireman outside crashed back into the door, which only thumped and didn’t move an inch.

“Damn freak!” Andrew yelled through the door.

“Shaaargak!” the fireman yelled back, crashing into the door with even more intensity.

Andrew drew back, deciding he’d best not antagonize the thing, and turned to look around again with his flashlight. He glanced once more at the pry bar, wishing he had another. Then had a thought and went to the wall where he’d found that one.

Sure enough, under a line of heavy leather firefighting jackets were several more. He took one and tested its heft. Once end had a flat claw foot, the other end a slightly curved, pointed edge. It would make a formidable close in hand-to-hand weapon. It was almost as long as the pugil sticks from basic training and reminded him of the Halligan tools he’d seen on Navy ships. He kept it slung in his left hand as he explored.

The fire entry area ran along the huge open bay where two of the fire trucks were stored. He found a power switch and flicked it. No joy. Without another thought, he continued on. The first place he came to was a meeting room dominated by a large conference table with many office chairs. It looked like it was prepared for a meeting with notepads, pencils and even bottled water in front of each chair. He moved in and liberated a couple of those, putting one bottle in a cargo pocket and twisting the top off another. It was warm, but delicious.

The next room was a kitchen and as empty as the conference room. The shelves were well stocked with all manner of food, mostly Hispanic of course. He realized he was hungry and checked the fridge. The power was off but it was still cool inside. He found a tray with sandwiches and grabbed several. It was chicken with some kind of spicy salsa, and tasted great. A bottle of orange juice joined them in and he continued his exploration while munching the sandwiches and sipping the OJ.

Several more rooms went by. A dining room, another meeting room, and equipment room. He considered one of the heavy axes in the equipment room before sticking with the pry bar. Adjacent to the equipment room was a locker room and shower. As the bigger Maglite beam played across the floor he suddenly stopped and panned back. There was a huge smear of dark red blood. He swallowed the last of the sandwich and gulped the remainder of the OJ, dropping the empty wrapper and jar into a trashcan at his feet. The jar hit with a loud metallic “Clang!” and he cursed his own stupidity.

Unlike by the door, there was no sound of a crazed person here. Distantly he could still hear the sound of the fireman banging on the door, wanting back into his home, or just to kill and eat Andrew. He chuckled at that, then stopped laughing. There was dark humor, then there was this.

The blood-smeared locker room tiles ended in a clear drag mark. There was a lot of dried and partially dried blood. As in enough to fill a man. He searched ahead with the Maglite’s power beam. The drag marks led through a tiled and open doorway into the showers. The food in his stomach felt like lead as he slowly stepped around the blood and to the shower door. He found out why there were no other firemen.

The chicken sandwiches and orange juice hit the tile in a technicolor chunky stream as Andrew emptied his stomach. In one corner of the shower was a scene from Dante. Piled bodies, many disemboweled, some with throats ripped out. There were gouts of bloods dripping from the walls and the ceiling of the carnal slaughterhouse. The fireman he’d locked out had apparently ambushed his fellows one by one and then dragged them into the shower to kill them. He could see chunks of their flesh torn out, almost worried from their bones. He’d been eating them. “Oh my fucking god,” he said and heaved what little remained in his stomach onto the floor.

Andrew went just around the corner and dropped to the floor, rolling back onto his rear, back against the locker room wall separating him from the murder scene. At least nine bodies were in there. His breath was coming in short gasps and he realized he was about to pass out; he was hyperventilating.

Putting his head between his knees, he forced his breathing under control through the sheer force of his will. You don’t get to be a fighter pilot by freaking out and huffing yourself unconscious. “You just pulled off a fucking dead-stick in a jumbo jet,” he admonished himself. “You’ve played plenty of video games. What’s a few zombies?”

He sat up and back, the tiles cool against the back of his neck. Zombies? Could he be in the middle of a damned zombie apocalypse? He almost laughed again, but he was afraid if he started he’d never stop. He’d spent his life in the United States military, defending his nation from her enemies. The thought that zombies were being made by, what, food? Biting each other. It was worse that ludicrous and he suddenly wished he was just back in his bunk at Riyadh.

Whatever the fuck was going on, he needed to keep his shit together and work the problem. There were people stuck in the bottom of that plane that sure as hell weren’t going to get themselves out of trouble without his help. He finished searching the fire station, finding two more caches of bodies just like the one in the shower, though quite a bit smaller. One was in the Chief’s office, the other in a bathroom. By the time he found the one in the bathroom he was used to the horrific scene enough that he could stop and wash his mouth out and throw some water on his face. He began to develop a plan.