36 Hours (36 page)

“No,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “No, why would he?”

He assaulted the glass again, but it held. I just watched, not wanting to leave.

“Let’s go,” Hannah said. “Come on.”

I pressed my hand against the glass, felt it shudder with his blows. “Good bye, buddy.”

I don’t remember walking away. I just remember suddenly standing in the bathroom, the three other souls around me.

None of us really wanted to talk. Shelley explained to the others my idea, and knowing our past histories of being overrun, after some dry debate, we finally agreed. I did it first, cupped blood from the corpse’s cavity, splashed it over my body – legs, arms, chest, neck and face. I even cupped some and splashed it on my head, letting it dribble down, a hot shower, a sacrifice. The rest did the same, ‘dressing up’ for the show.

Shelley said, “Just don’t make sudden movements, unless the rest do. Just copy them, I guess. Don’t run, don’t talk. Only make noises if they do. Don’t stand out
in any way
. Don’t cry, either. They don’t cry. The only emotions you should show is blank emotions, or anger. That’s all they really do. We’ll cross Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

223

the parking lot, the lawn, climb the fence – careful around the barbed wire – and together we’ll slowly make our way towards the airfield hangar’s. I’ll get the key, we’ll get in the plane, taxi out to the emergency runway, and get out of here. All right?”

I closed my eyes, lifting up a silent prayer.
Disguise us. Please. Just this one
more thing, okay?

To play-land we ventured.

We all entered play land through the open door. The iron bolts and casts of plastic tubing contorted together in a maze above us. Rain blew in through the hole in the glass, and bloody footprints led up to the hole, disappearing into the parking lot. I looked at the spiraling tubes above, remembered a day when my greatest concern was how to get to the top fastest, and then stepped out into the rain.

Exposed. That’s how I felt as I stumbled past the bushes, through the grass, feet tapping on the sidewalk, clapping in a puddle on the asphalt. Several figures came from the other end of the YMCA, running helter-kilter. My heart flooded. I began walking jagged, eratic, keeping a blank stare. They slowed down and started moving along the sides of the building, pressing at the glass, sniffing, continuing.

Hannah, Ashlie, Shelley followed. For a moment Shelley mingled with the infected moving along the side of the building. They began to sniff him, and sensing disaster, Shelley sniffed them as well. They continued on their way, and Shelley swaggered to join us.

We looked like a motley crew fumbling about between the ghost cars, under the rain, a starless night sky. Hannah’s voice, a bare whisper: “
Austin
.” I didn’t respond, just glanced back; she was looking back to, seeing Les’ decrepit resurrection making its way between the cars, following us. She mouthed at me,
What to do?
I replied,
Follow me.

Zombies milled about the parking lot, dozens of them. A young child missing half his neck, an older man without hands, one covered in bullet holes and strips of flesh. The yellow eyes flashed over us, tearing into us, without direction, hope, resolution. The souls of a consumerist society, left blind and numb, wondering what to do in a world not governed by money and mathematics. Les didn’t stop following us, either. He was actual y gaining, trotting along. Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

224

An ivory fear:
What if he remembered us inside the YMCA? What if he knows
something was up?
Then I reassured myself:
Only short-term memory. Only
short-term memory.

Shelley went past me, reached the ten-foot-tall fence, slick with rain. He started to climb. The other infected turned to watch. I started after him. They kept watching, but resumed their blind wanderings. Hannah and Ash started climbing. Shelley maneuvered around the barbed wire and dropped down, growling as he hit, soaked in muddy water. The barbed wires bit at my clothes, and I careened off the top, sprawling down to make it look like I had no originally human sense of balance. Ashlie and Hannah did the same. Les started to climb.

Hannah mouthed,
He’s following us!

I know!

A shriek blended with thunder. I whipped around, fearing the worst:
impostors
disclosed!
But instead I saw two frail human skeletons yapping and snarling at each other. The creatures around them did it, too. One of the women lashed out at each other and tried to bite; the other grabbed her arm and wrenched it to the side; there was a pop and a spray of blood drenching the fiendish onlookers. The other zombie screeched, maybe feeling pain. The other zombies howled and jumped on top of her, ripping her to shreds, feasting on the carrion.
Eating each
other.

They were getting hungry and turning on each other.

They hungered.

Pacino was onto something.

Les didn’t join in; he fell over the top and followed us through the muddy field.

Hannah’s heart was pounding. Les was right behind her, breathing down her back. We moved past the burning plane wreckage. It had been a Cessna Citation; the engines were aflame, and the structure was crumpled and shattered. The cockpit glass had fractured and bent outwards; the burnt skeleton, bubbling with human fat, grinned at us from the cockpit.
Someone just trying to survive.
It could be us here in a few moments.

Les reached out and touched Hannah. Hannah made a grunting noise. I stopped moving, knelt down, sniffed to look like the twisted demons. The others all walked past. I stood after Les had passed. He hadn’t paid heed to me. I followed him closely, felt the warmth of the burning jet against my bloodied Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

225

and wet clothes. Several rectangular hangars rose up through the rainy mist, and we passed several aircraft out on the tarmac, a refueling truck, an ambulance lying quiet and desolate, and Shelley moved towards the main building, adorned with bold stenciling:
WRIGHT-BROTHERS AIRFIELD
. He maneuvered us around the side of the building, under blooming spring trees, now hanging with the weight of the rain. There were hardly any vehicles in the lot, mostly just maintenance and management. One of the cars, I assumed, belonged to the corpse in the plane. Shelley stopped beside two large bay windows, a door, the lobby on the other side of the glass. Ash stopped behind him, and so did Hannah. Les ran into her; she shivered. I stepped backwards, kneeling down next to the rain gutter. Rain splashed over my hand, bitingly cold. One of the metal plates had fallen off, rusting and jagged due to time. I wrapped its cold flesh under my fingers and stood. Shelley and Ashlie looked past Hannah, past Les, and saw me, a mere shadow, rising up to glory in the dying throes of a never-ending night. Les touched Hannah’s arm, then sent one around her chest, to her breast. He opened his mouth, tongue flaking out, and he moved closer, squeezing her tight, lips moving for her neck. He seemed to be shaking. I launched forward, driven mad, grabbed his hair, pulled it back. He let out a garbled cry as I slid the jagged edge of metal across his throat. Blood sprayed all over Hannah and she swaggered forward; anger drilled through me and I threw him against the glass; the glass shattered, raining down around him; he fell inside, landing on top of a chair, sprawling on the ground. I jumped through the broken window; he screeched at me, but I drove the steaming blade down into his eye, his body thumped for a few moments then lay still, blood squeezing from his eye socket, pouring from the rip across his jugular.

I stood above his riddled body, breathing deep, energy running through me, a spring of life.

The others just stared at me as hatred washed out through my eyes and took physical form in the body at my feet.

Shelley stepped through, glass breaking at his feet. “Are you okay, man?”

“He was going to rape her,” I growled.

Hannah gaped at me. Ashlie shivered. Shelley said, “What?”

“His corpse was going to rape her. I had to kill him.”

“That’s crazy.”

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

226

“Did you see it?” I turned, staring at them all. “Were you not watching?

They’re driven by primal instinct, right? What’s primal? In psychology class we learned the three things that all animals are driven by, in some way or another: hunger, fear, and lust. We’ve seen the hunger. We’ve seen the fear – they group together. And we’ve seen the lust.”

Hannah swallowed hard. The thought of Les’ cadaver impregnating her made her want to puke.

“Why Hannah?” Ash asked.

“Why? I don’t know. He was attracted to her, I guess.”

My sister looked hurt. Somehow I’d known all along. The way he looked at her, I guess.

Shelley felt the persevering tension. “Let’s get that key, guys, okay?”

He entered the door leading to the closed-off, glass-plated office desk. A large rack on the wall held almost fifty, sixty keys. He searched for his in the darkness, took it off. He said, “The plane is in the hangar. I’ll have to get to it, open the hangar doors, start the engine, taxi out, and take off. This is the tricky part – maneuvering around all the parked planes and helicopters so that we can take off safely. Someone didn’t really look at all the precautions, as we saw.”

Grim faces. “I also need to refuel. I didn’t expect this, and if we’re going West, we’ll need the fuel.”

“So we just fill it up, right?”

“It works on power, on a pump. This isn’t a big airfield, so there aren’t any emergency generators.”

“We have to do it by hand,” I muttered.

“Exactly. Kind of like emptying a water bed, except with oil. We siphon it out of the tanks and into my plane.”

“How long will that take?”

“Maybe five, ten minutes. We can do it in the hangar, so we’re not seen.”

“Ash, Hannah, don’t swallow the oil. If it doesn’t kill you, it’ll shred your vocal chords.”

Hannah, whose biggest aspiration was to be the next Christian Brittany Spears

– ick – hated that.

“They won’t have to worry about it. It only takes one person to get it going.”

Shelley said, “For right now, here’s what we’ll do. Austin, you come with me. We’ll get into the hangar, open up the fuel lines, gather all the tubes. We’ll return for the girls. Girls, you need to look around and see if you can find any Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

227

food anywhere. Also blankets, medical supplies, anything for an emergency. I don’t know what to expect. All right?”

The girls nodded.

Shelley opened a cabinet on the floor, drew out two radios. He took one, handed the other to the girls. “Channel Seven. Only talk if you have to. I’ll have mine on, you have yours on. Press the red button to talk.”

They nodded. “Okay,” Ash said.

Shelley and I left through a back door, out into the rain. We moved between the shadowy bulks of a news helicopter and several airplanes, even an old World War II vintage P-47. I’d seen it flying over Clearcreek once or twice. I used to be real y big into that stuff. Shelley led us to two hangars down, and we entered through a side door. It was completely black, but dry, and all we heard was the roaring of the rain on the metal roof, drumming like a million tropical banjos.

There were several wooden crates everywhere, completely empty, some strewn tools here and there, but the room was otherwise bare, except for the large Cessna Caravan. The three-propped propellers were nearly touching the hangar door, and the four side windows on either side were tinted blue. Streaks of brown and black ran down the side of the aircraft, and we could walk underneath the wings. Shelley walked over to the tail of the aircraft, knelt down, loosed a hatch, swung it open.

“This is the gas line,” he said. “We can shove four tubes down there and start pumping.”

“Where are the tubes?”

“There’s a supplies room in each hangar. I’l get the tubes. Just stay here.” He headed for the door.

“Give me the radio,” I said.

He tossed it over.

“What about the fuel?”

He pointed to some 100-gallon drums hidden in the shadows. I’d missed them. He saluted and left.

I slid the radio into my pocket and tried to open the Cessna’s door. It wouldn’t. I tried again. It opened. I lifted myself inside. There were five seats leading to the cockpit, where two seats were surrounded by an endless assortment of readings, dials, buttons, joystick and shifting gear. So confusing. I prayed nothing would happen to Shelley. All the seats were spacious and Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

228

comfortable, leather interior, vanilla carpet. It was warm, too. I couldn’t wait to be three thousand feet above all this. A small storage room rested in the back, stuffed with ten life jackets and parachutes. It was otherwise empty. I wondered how a janitor could afford this. Maybe it was a gift, or a time-share or something. Or maybe it wasn’t even his, just a friend’s. Hopefully he could fly. Small panics rippled through me.

Someone entered below. “Shelley?” I hopped down. He had returned with four tubes, and was shoving them into the fuel lines.

“Why didn’t you drag the drums over there?”

“You didn’t tell me to.”

“Well, can you do it?”

I walked over and tried to push the barrels. My bones cracked. “Gosh. It’s heavy.”

“See those dollies? Push it on top of that. That’s how I do it.”

That way was much easier. I pushed it over to him; he popped open the lid and shoved the tubes inside, started sucking, and one-by-one, sent gasoline down into the belly of the plane. He spit out a dribble of gas and said, “Go get the girls. It’ll be about seven minutes, I’m thinking.”

I ran out into the rain, past several dark hangars, hiding myself under the silent aircraft, and entered through the back door of the main building. Silence.

“Ashlie?” I called out, voice surprisingly loud. “Hannah?” I moved through the rooms, discovering no one. It was completely empty. “Ashlie? Hannah? Hello!”