Chaos Theory: A Zombie Novel by Rich Restucci Page B

adept at removing the living dead from runways.
    Ship took care of all the dead people from the southern end of the runway, and the ones near the plane. There were more coming, but from angles that wouldn’t affect us if we got going soon. The big guy parked the plow off to the side of the plane, but was doing something inside the vehicle that we couldn’t see. A guy in jeans and a red t-shirt was high-stepping through the unplowed snow from around one of the hangars. He was moving at top speed toward the plow. Even from a couple hundred feet away, I could tell he was infected. Something about the way they carry themselves and the way they move just isn’t…human.
    It was then that I found out planes don’t have horns, or if they did I had no effing idea where it was in the copiousness of dials and switches. I wanted to beep a warning, but I couldn’t. I struggled with the door to the plane, and Kat demanded to know what the hell I was doing. I informed her that our pilot was about to get jumped by a Runner, at which point she demanded to know what a Runner is. I pointed to the infected guy and told her they looked like him. I got the door open and stood on the stairs with my .357. There was no way I could hit the target from here. I started yelling, and popped off a round at the truck, which missed wildly and threw my shoulder into total rebellion.
    Ship got the message when he heard the gunfire and got out of the truck wary with rifle raised. He couldn’t see the infected from his vantage, and I began gesturing wildly with the magnum in the direction of his impending doom. Standing on the snow-dusted tarmac now, I took aim again and heard the gun fire before I pulled the trigger. It had been from above and behind me. The guy in the red T-shirt spun and fell to the ground. I looked back up at the plane, and sure enough, Kat was scanning the area with my M4. She had put down the bad guy with one round.
    Ship made it to the plane and we all got back in. He made it to the cockpit and took the left side chair, strapping himself in and indicating I should do the same. Kat was behind us in another chair, holding on to my M4 like it was a new born baby. Ship looked like an elephant on a stool sitting there checking things and flipping switches. The plane started, and so did I when a thump came from outside followed by another. The dead had reached us.
    The plane lurched forward a couple of times, then got into a rhythm, and moved down the tarmac gradually picking up speed. I didn’t want to think of what would happen if we hit one of the zombies while screwing down the runway at a hundred miles per hour. As luck would have it we didn’t, and I felt the wheels leave the ground in just a few moments, leaving those pus sacks behind. I felt euphoric at being away from a zombie plague, at least for a while. We could finally relax.
    Of course had we known what we were flying into, we would have headed north instead of south, but hey, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

16
     
    I’m not crazy about flying. I thought it was a control thing, you know, you’re not in control of the plane so somebody else has your life in their hands? That’s bullshit. Ship taught me the ins and outs of flying that thing in ten minutes. Now, I’m not saying I could fly by myself, but I had the basics about what does what and why, and I got used to making small corrections quickly.
    I was still scared. Something about being up so high and looking down on the world was unnerving. Especially when the world had totally gone to Hell. We were only about five hundred feet up, but I could see that entire towns were on fire or just gone. There were traffic jams as far as I could see on the big roads, all the vehicles abandoned. Several bridges blown up and streets destroyed. A downed airliner, which seemed to have caused a raging fire, chasing infected out of the woods, all of them reaching up to grab us as we sped off overhead.
    Town after town moved by