Preservation (4 page)

Chapter Five

Sues Melia was far from fine. Dave was wrong. Her eyes were open, and she was breathing. The zombie bit her shoulder. Shredded cloth and skin flapped in the November breeze. Holding her tight, Dave kept telling me how everything was going to be okay.

“Let’s get her on the plane,” I said. It was against better judgment. Taking a now-infected person onto the plane with us would be foolish, but more than foolish, dangerous. Dave had my back since the start of this thing. I’d watched him bury his brother. I couldn’t tell him to just leave her. Should have, but couldn’t.

“Help me, Chase. Help me.” Dave reminded me of a child. His tears streaked the dirt from his face. His hands covered in blood kept shifting their hold on Sues’ body.

I knelt beside them. “How are you feeling, Sues?”

“I don’t want to turn into one of them.” It was a mere whisper. I heard it, though.

“We’re going to help you,” I said.

The lie was just as bold as it was obvious. Might be the only one who believed it was Dave. The smile he wore was forming on trembling lips. “That’s, right, honey. We’re going to help you. We are. I am.”

I looked back at the plane. I knew
Erway and Palmeri had to be watching. I couldn’t see into the cockpit, but I felt their eyes on me. I could almost feel their thoughts. Feel them.
What’s the hold up? Come on. We have to go.

“Let’s carry her to the plane,” I said, and stood up.

“I’m not going with you, Chase. I’m not going anywhere.” The color in her face drained before my eyes. Her skin clammy, lips grey almost blue.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” Dave said.

Stop the bleeding, I thought. What good would it do? “Let’s just get her to the plane.
Erway can have a closer look.”

Sues grabbed my shirt tight and I was surprised by the strength exhibited when she pulled me close. “I’m not going. You need to take care of Dave. You need to be there for him. He looks up to you
. You know that, don’t you? That he looks up to you?”

“Stop it, honey. We’re going to get you on that plane. Tell her, Chase, Tell her
Erway can help her. We can stop this. Fix it. You, you’re not going to be like one of them. You won’t turn into one of those things,” he said. That smile he’d worn was gone. He ran his hands through his hair, brushing in dirt and sweat, and Sues’ blood. “Chase, man. Chase.”

“Sues,” I said, “let us get you to the plane, okay? We’ll sort this out on the plane. We need to get off the tarmac. No telling how many more of those things are coming this way. And like this--” I looked around, “--we’re sitting ducks. You know? We’re out in the open.”

“Let’s just get you onto the plane,” Dave said.

“Shoot me,” Sues said. “Get it over with. Just end this for me.”

I got under an arm, and lifted Sues up off of Dave. He got under the other, and we hoisted her up onto her feet. “That hurts,” she said, and winced.

“We’re almost to the plane,” Dave said. We weren’t. We shuffled forward, Sues’ feet nearly
toe-dragging on the asphalt.

Allison stood in the doorway at the top of the small set of stairs. “Is she okay?”

“Gonna be fine,” Dave said.

I kept my eyes on Allison’s. She knew better. No one needed to be a zombie apocalyptic expert these days to recognize bad when bad was thrust into your face. And for Sues, this was bad.

Only thing was, it wasn’t Sues I was worried about. A bullet to the head, it didn’t sound like such a bad thing. We were struggling to survive, and I had my daughter to think of, but for what? Why were we doing this? Why were on the go, always moving, trying to get from here to anywhere else? There was no reason. The human race might be just about over, quickly becoming extinct. It could happen. Something wiped out the fucking dinosaurs. Doubt it was a zombie pandemic, but it was something. Their time to rule ended. People came next. Once we were destroyed, you couldn’t help but wonder what would be the next King of the Shit species.

Allison came down the steps. She took Dave’s spot. “Go fix her a spot in back,” she said. “We got her.”

Dave ran up the steps and disappeared into the plane.

“This
is wrong,” Sues said. “Please, with him gone, kill me.”

“We’re not killing you,” Allison said.

Not yet, I thought. The thing was, the time would come. What if it happened in the air and she turned on the plane?

“You can’t let this happen,” Sues said. She felt frail and weak. Allison and I supported all of her weight. “You can’t put everyone else in danger. I saw what happened to that guy on the boat, on the Coast Guard vessel. He’d been
bitten, and tried to hide it, but it caught up to him. When he turned, that was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.”

I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t going to happen to her. She knew it was going to happen. She knew she was on borrowed time, especially with how much blood she’d lost. And I remembered it, too. Nick
Dentino. He’d been with two other civilian survivors rescued by Palmeri and the military. They’d all watched him go from human to fucking zombie right before their eyes. Then they shot him. They could have shot him first, saved him the agony and the suffering, maybe even the humiliation of the transformation. Instead, we’d all watched. Waited and watched. When it was complete, the military shot him.

The plane’s engine started, and I nearly jumped back. I didn’t expect it to whine so loudly.
It startled me. I almost needed my hands to cover my ears. The twin propellers spun slowly, gained momentum and then were twirled so fast I couldn’t see the spinning blades.

The decision to kill Sues before getting on the plane was past. Dave was back at the doorway.
“Hurry. We’ve got zombies coming out of the woods. The sound of the engine must be drawing them.”

Allison and Dave got Sues up the stairs and into the plane. I climbed into the plane, and then on my belly
, reached down and brought the rolling stairs into the plane with us before closing and locking the door.

We were as safe as we could be in the plane. “Everyone
buckle in,” I said.

Allison helped Dave get Sues situated. They sat her in a seat toward the tail of the plane. At least she was away from my daughter. I hated to think that way
, but I was a parent. What other way could I look at it?

I made the motion of pulling the seat belt tight. Charlene gave me
a thumbs up. I smiled, and returned the gesture. I stuck my head into the cockpit. “Tell me you can do this, Palmeri?”

“I can do this,” she said. “We’ve mapped out some airports and coordinates. No GPS, so kind of flying blind.
Got an idea of a best-route. Like I said, we should make it to the western part of Pennsylvania. Won’t make it even halfway to Texas, but we’ll be a few hundred miles closer.”

“Okay, okay, that’s good,” I said.

“Now go get strapped in. Take-offs are hard as shit!”

She didn’t laugh. I wish she had. Then I could have convinced myself she was just kidding.

“What’s the deal with Sues?” Erway had a paper map unfolded on her lap. There was a math protractor and some pencils on the console between the pilot chairs.

“Bit,” I said. “Bad.”

“Come here,” Palmeri said. She kept her hands on the controls. They both wore headphones, with radios wired to each other so that if nothing else, they could talk easily to each other.

I got as close as I could. I couldn’t help
staring at all the dials and knobs and switches. They weren’t just in front of the pilots. They were above them as well. They were everywhere. There were so many gauges, I wondered how much help Erway could be, having never been a co-pilot before.

“The plane is not pressurized,”
Palemri said, and then nodded, like that made sense to me.

“You told us. It’s going to be cold. Thought I saw a tarp or two back there. We’ll use them as blankets. I think we’ll manage the cold for a few hours.”

“In a regular plane, you know Delta or something, you fire a gun in a pressurized plane you risk killing everyone on board. A gunshot can really fuck things up. Back there, you can fire a shot or two and as long as you don’t shoot fuel tanks or some shit like that, it isn’t going to mess much up. You see what I’m saying there?”

I saw what she was saying.
If Sues became a threat. I could shoot her.

Chapter Six

1702 hours

Allison sat next to Charlene. They were buckled in. I looked at Dave. He wasn’t looking at me. He was seated next to Sues, holding her hand. He was talking to her. Whispering. I couldn’t hear a single word, but could imagine what was said. He was soothing her, telling her over and over that things would work out, and that she wouldn’t turn into a zombie.

I joined my daughter and girlfriend. They saved me the seat between them. I buckled in, and placed a hand on Charlene’s leg. “You okay, honey?”

She nodded.

I stared across the narrow aisle.
Couldn’t take my eyes off Dave and Sues. Her eyes were closed. From where I was it didn’t seem like she was breathing. The blood seemed to have stopped flowing from the bite on her shoulder. The raw meat that was exposed looked wet, gooey.

“I think she’s dying,” Allison said.

I hoped Dave couldn’t hear her. The engines were loud, but when something was loud, people tended to whisper that much louder.

Before I could respond, the plane rolled forward. Allison grabbed my hand, my whole arm, actually. “I don’t like this. I’m not going to like this.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said, and wondered how different was my statement from the one Dave kept promising Sues. Would we be fine, or was Palmeri going to crash us from a ten thousand feet?

The plane picked up speed. The whining got louder and louder. There were no windows back here. We couldn’t see outside of the plane at all. That might be a good thing. We wouldn’t see the zombies lining the runway. We wouldn’t see the end of the tarmac as the plane accelerated. We wouldn’t see the treetops or mountains or road, or river should we crash into them.

Time moved at an irrationally slow speed. The runway had not seemed long at all, and yet, we were still on it, going faster and faster. If we didn’t lift off the ground soon, we’d surely run out of asphalt. How fast did we need to be going before flight was possible? Were all planes different? This box of a plane didn’t seem aerodynamic at all. Maybe I’d said that already. My fear wasn’t much different from Allison’s in this particular situation. Give me JetBlue any day. But a military person with a private license did absolutely nothing to ease my…uneasiness.

The plane left the runway
and the nose angle upward. We were up and flying, rising into the sky. I closed my eyes and tried to picture it. I wanted to be up front in the cockpit. I did not like not having control of the situation. Our souls were in Palmeri’s hands. Despite the steady drone from the engines, I heard a “woot, woot” from the cockpit.

Would she risk all of our lives if she didn’t feel somewhat confident
that she could do this? Did we really have any other choice?

We did. We had another choice. We’d left a pretty safe Humvee by the hangar. We could have taken roads and back roads and driven through New York, and Pennsylvania and made our way west, toward the Mississippi, across it and eventually further south to Texas, and eventually reached the Mexican border. The walls I felt sure would protect non-infected humans from the
spreading virus that plagued our country, and other countries as well.

The plane tilted to the left, a hard turn in the sky. There
were no ground control or radio towers to assist with navigation. Erway used the maps that must have been in compartments or drawers. They were all Palmeri had to rely on to get us as far south-west as we could go before this thing used up the last of its fuel.

“How are you doing?” I said.

Allison tried to smile. She squeezed my hand harder than Julie had during child labor. “I just want to get this flight out of the way.”

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Try to sleep.”

She grunted.

I looked at my daughter. “You okay?”

“Not at all,” she said.

I pursed my lips into a thin smile. It was an honest answer.
Raw and open and honest. If she’d said she was fine, she’d of been lying. I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head.

She rested it against my chest as best she could,
straining slightly against the seatbelts restraints.

#  #  #

I had arrived to work early, was having coffee in the break room with Allison. A few other people were in there as well. Outside, a blizzard raged. The snow accumulated several inches an hour for the last seven hours. Snow plows and salt trucks couldn’t keep up and were running out of places to push the snow.

The supervisor,
Milzy, came off the work floor and into the break room. “Guys want some overtime?”

I looked at Allison. She shrugged. She held up her coffee, a way of saying no.

“Sure,” I said.

“Grab a phone,” he said. “We’re like twenty calls in queue.”

I’m not exactly sure what people thought. When it was busy, there were only so many telecommunicators to answer calls. Once all lines were tied up, callers waited for the next available person to answer. There were not countless people sitting around waiting to answer ringing phones. So pissed off people often contacted reporters for interviews to express their dissatisfaction with the city. Wouldn’t change anything. Let them complain.

As I plugged in my headset jack and began logging onto the various systems and terminals, I remembered the tiny earthquake we had once. We were backed up over a hundred calls. People were calling us from all over the county.

“Nine-one-one center,” I’d said.

“I think we just had an earthquake.”

“Do you need police, fire or ambulance?”

“Me? No. I don’t. But I’m pretty sure we just had an earthquake.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, yes.”

“Ma’am, why are you calling nine-one-one?”

“Because, I told you, I think we just had an earthquake.”

“If you’re all set, ma’am, I have to answer more emergency calls. Are you all set, ma’am?”

“I, um.
Yes. I guess I am.”

Call after call came in like that.
Eventually, we answered them all, and called back all the people who called in, but hung-up. It goes like that all the time. That doesn’t stop squeaky wheels from demanding their oil.

Once logged in, I glanced at the prompter. We were now thirty calls in queue. I went
Ready. Phone rang. I answered it. “Nine-one-one center?”

“There’s been an accident, a car rolled over. It’s off the expressway. I didn’t see anyone get out. No one got out.”

“Sir, where did this happen?”

“On the expressway,” the caller said.

“Sir, there are three different expressways.”

“It’s right here
on the expressway I’m on. It’s…four-ninety,” he said.

I-490 ran east and west, from
LeRoy to Victor. “Sir, four-ninety is 37 miles long. Can you be more specific? Which direction are you traveling?”

“I’m headed toward the city
. I can see the city from where I am.”

“Sir, this is very important. Whether you are going east or west, you will be headed toward the city. What is the exit you just passed, or the exit you are coming to?”

“I don’t see an exit. We’re between exits,” he said.

I kept re-bidding his cell phone, trying to triangulate the location to as close as possible to where he was. When I tried pulling up the information, all I was saw was a single cell tower, which told me absolutely nothing. “Sir, what was the last exit you passed?”

“It was snowing too hard, I’m not sure. I couldn’t see.”

I muted my headset.
“Supervisor!”

Milzy
came over to my pod of telecommunicators. “What have you got, McKinney?”

“Caller witnessed a rollover somewhere on four-ninety. He has no clue where he is, which direction, and--”

“Rebid the call?”

“--re-bidding isn’t finding him.”

Milzy called out, “Anyone have a vehicle rollover on four-ninety?”

“Event thirty-seven-twenty-eight,” someone said.

I looked at that event, nodded at Milzy that I was all set, and un-muted my headset, “Sir, what color was the vehicle that rolled?”

“Ah, it was a red SUV. I pulled over. I don’t feel safe though. Cars are sliding all over the place.”

I read through the job. Saw that one of the other telecommunicators who took the call indicated a red SUV had rolled off onto the median, people trapped. Fire, police and ambulances were already on the way.

“Sir, I want you to do what is safest for you. If you don’t want to remain pulled over, then don’t,” I said.

“So I should leave?”

“I’m saying it’s up to
you
, sir. Whatever you feel safest doing, you should do,” I said, and asked him his name and then for his phone number.

“I’m calling from my cell phone.”

“I understand that. What is the
phone
number?” I verified with him that the location for the event was near the same location where he was initially pulled over.

I disconnected that call, and was about to go available for the next call, when sitting up at
the supervisor pod, Milzy called my name. “Can you come up here for a second?”

I removed my headset, stood and glanced around the room. Still in queue, I wondered what was up. Supervisors listened in on some calls.
Quality control and all of that. They had to grade a number of calls per employee each month. I’d been here minutes, we were busy, and on overtime. Milzy wouldn’t call me up to the pod unless it had to do with something else, something more substantial.

“What’s up?” I said
, taking the two steps up to enter the pod. The telecommunicator, fire and EMS and police dispatchers encircled the supervisors who sat in the center of the operations floor. 

“Come here,” he said. He motioned with a finger, and pulled out the chair next to him. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”

Sit down?
I tried to swallow, couldn’t. “What’s going on?”

“It’s about you,” he said. I stared at his face
, looking for any hint of a smile that this was all a gag.

“Me?”

“I hate to tell you this. There’s no easy way to say it,” he said.

“
Milzy, just cut the shit. What’s going on?”

“
Your daughter has something to tell you,” Milzy said, and looked across the small table. I followed his gaze.

Charlene wore a 9-1-1 uniform. That powder blue shirt, the collar brass complete w
ith a badge and a nameplate with my dead son’s name on it that simply read: CASH MCKINNEY.

“Char, what--
Milzy, what’s she doing here?”

Charlene reached across the table and set her hand on top of mine. “Daddy, you’re dead
…Daddy. You’re dead. Daddy! Daddy!”