Run (Book 2): The Crossing by Rich Restucci Page B

staggered toward the men on foot. One of the glass windows on the lower level of the terminal gave way as well, and the dead emptied out and began the slow chase.
    Seyfert opened up on the few creatures in front of the LAV, but couldn’t get a shot at anything behind him as the plane was in the way. The three men on foot slowed to a trot as the immediate danger was behind them. They caught up with their friends as Boone, Anna, and Chris unhooked the tow strap from the plane. “Now what?” demanded a huffing Dallas as they all surveyed their surroundings.
    “Now we go to that hangar and pull that mobile stairway over here,” said Boone pointing.
    A hundred feet away was the hangar with the doors wide open. Just outside was the stairway on wheels, used to enter and exit aircraft not at a terminal. “We would have pulled the plane all the way, but the front strut got caught when we went over that embankment.” Here Boone pointed again, this time to the strut that held the two front tires of the plane. It was stuck on a foot-high curb. “This is as far as she will go. Anna, you and Chris back in the LAV with Stark, the rest are with me. Stark, get the LAV to the staircase and we’ll hook it up so you can pull it to the plane.”
    Everyone did as they were told, but Rick grabbed Boone by the shoulder when they reached the stairs. “Been doing the math here, Boone. We can’t possibly hook up the stairs and get the meds before they get here.” He pointed to the growing horde two hundred meters away and closing.
    “Agreed. We’ll need bait.” He looked right at Rick and Dallas. “Androwski and I will herd them off, you two get on the plane and get the materials we need.”
    Rick was dubious. “Can’t we just all leave and come back when they’ve dispersed?”
    “You willing to bet Martinez’s life that we can get back quickly, or that the Limas will just move on?”
    “Dammit!” Rick yelled, but their vehicle arrived and he got to work without further objection. He and Dallas hooked up the set of steps while Boone and Androwski started toward the horde. With help from the LAV, Rick and Dallas maneuvered the mobile stairway so that it was in front of the open door of the airliner. Dallas was armed with a SPAS12 combat shotgun that he had appropriated from Rick, and Rick had his M4. “After you, Hoss,” Dallas told him, and they hurried up the steps.
    Rick switched on his tactical flashlight as he took a tentative step toward the dark opening in the side of the plane. He pinched his throat mic. “Stark, do you read?”
    “Loud and clear.”
    “Pull the stairs five feet back from the plane.”
    “We just put the damn thing next to it! What the hell do—?”
    “Because if this thing is full of dead folks, or if they come in behind us, I don’t want them to be able get on or off the plane! I don’t think they can jump the gap!”
    “Actually, that’s fucking brilliant. Hang on.”
    Dallas and Rick grabbed the railing as the stairs jerked slightly then moved a few feet back.
    Chris and Anna jumped from the back of the LAV to unhook it from the stairs.
    “Stark, pull off about two hundred feet, I don’t want a crowd out here if we need to get out in a hurry.”
    Dallas looked at the gap. “More like seven feet.”
    “What? You can’t make it, fatty?”
    “Rick, I gots me a shotgun, and I’m sensitive about m’ figure.”
    Rick smiled then focused on the door. He shook his head. “Jesus…” He jumped the gap with ease, spinning first right, then left, then right again, and motioning to Dallas, who quickly followed. The tac-lights on their weapons illuminated a torn curtain to the right, and a stairway leading up to the left, with another curtain pulled all the way open past the stairs.
    There was blood everywhere.
     
     
    “Thank you for taking me along, sir, this is the best outing I’ve had since training.”
    “Secure that shit, sailor,” Boone said with a grimace, “this is about to get