Deadfall: Survivors (8 page)

Entry 18 – Morning
[18]

We’ll  be heading out this morning to make our way up into what used to be a heavily populated city (and therefore zombie central), to get to the airport and reunite with the surviving people at what I jokingly referred to as Fort Airport. In a nice direct route, it’s just over fourteen miles from the park, and were there no threat of undead wanting to eat me, it would be an easy jaunt up one highway to the inner belt of Interstate 485 and right up to the airport. Sadly, we have seen how the interstates have been, and while, that can’t possibly be the truth one hundred percent of the time, the odds are against it. Just being this close to this center of population is a risk onto itself.

And
this time, we would be walking and not “safe” inside our large truck.

This drew quite a bit of criticism from the majority of the group
, but I insisted. If I was going to be “leading” them, then it had to be my way, and my way is walking. Sure, the truck is far faster and it sure seems safer, but what would happen if we got bogged down in any way? That safe truck would turn into a death trap. The overconfidence the vehicle gives makes you think you can get out of any situation on the road, but the simple fact is that any large enough mass can stop the truck, and lately, there are a lot of moving masses around.

Meanwhile, walking sure seems
like the far riskier action to attempt in this situation. It might feel safer to be protected by a layer of steel. But, the added caution one employs while walking in zombie infested areas, usually keeps one out of bad situations. Nearly every time one can almost out walk a zombie. You can duck into buildings or hide in places you simply cannot drive into.

Honestly, I think that most of them simply balked at the idea of walking
fifteen miles, a distance that seemed like  too far to walk in the days before the comet.

Lazy.
I can go with that. I'm the champion of lazy. I'm also the champion at wanting to stay alive.

I'm holding on to the keys to the truck. Well, not on my
body specifically, I'm going to hide them under the wheel well of the truck. This truck might come in handy at some point, and if it doesn’t for me personally, maybe someone who comes along might think to check the wheel well, a common hiding place for keys. There’s  still plenty of fuel left in the tank for anyone who needs it.

Evan’s Notes: I adapted Brian’s philosophy of walking into my hunting groups. It has saved many lives. Walking increases awareness
, and that is the key ingredient for survival in this world.

Entry 19 – Nobody
[19]

The airport is empty.

We made our way up into the airport area without much of an issue. It was a baking hot day for April, and we had to make plenty of stops to drink up, but at least water was easily available. We managed to avoid the zombies we did run across without drawing their attention and we never ran into any masses of them. Even the I
-485 overpass was relatively empty. The highway we followed went over the interstate, and while we saw a few wandering around, we managed to walk across without drawing their attention.

We cut up across into the airport, which we reached by
mid afternoon. I felt so cool busting over the fence of the airport. Of course, everyone looked at me weird as they simply walked by through the broken down sections of it. Just something I had always wanted to do. Seems rather foolish seeing things now, but it was funny to me at the moment. I guess that's the thing with this world now; every time I try to make a joke, it somehow comes to bite me. I don’t even dare make a joke about someone’s father or mother, lest they were killed by zombies.

Well, the group
didn’t  get the homecoming they expected. They had described the approach from the landing strips as the best way because any of the zombies would be more easily avoided, and the group that was fortified within the elevated terminals at the airport would see them coming easier. But, there were no zombies and as we approached the terminals, the huge airplanes stranded at many gates were a silent foreshadowing of what might be on the inside. It took us a while to find a way up into the terminals, since any easy access on the ground levels had been clearly and very effectively blocked. But once inside, we found nothing.

Nobody.
And more importantly, no bodies.

We walked up and down the length of the terminals, eerily and extremely cautiously, without anyone saying anything at all. There were some signs of previous residence, beds and cots out along many of the gates, piles of luggage that wasn’t the remains of previous air
travelers, but probably those belonging to refugees that fled their home in the wave of zombies. But as we got to the end of the terminals, Aaron was the first to speak out.

Aaron:
“What happened?”

Evan:
“They left?”

Aaron:
“Without their things? Without any warning or leaving any messages behind?”

Lucy:
“Maybe the government is back up and running, and they just evacuated everyone from here.”

Aaron:
“Then why not leave someone behind? You remember this place; it was one of the ideal places to hide from the dead.”

I think it was Tague that saw what might have
been blood, very old and very dried up and upon searching other places; we found more of these same “marks”, but still no bodies or body parts, or any sign of a fight. It really took all of us some time to make sense of it, mostly because when we think of a massacre or death, we expect to see the clearest results of those actions; that is, human corpses. I think most of us came to the same conclusion at the same time.

They had all died somehow, but mostly without clear resistance, and had
themselves been turned. Aaron and the others had been gone from the airport for almost a month and a half, maybe two months, I don’t think he knows for sure, but, if this disaster happened shortly after they left, the zombies could have easily have wandered off.

Or
they’re  all still here, somewhere.

That
makes me really nervous.

I want to get out of here and go home.

The rest of the group is in a bit of shock. Second time I have seen them like this. It wasn’t just a few days ago I had saved them from what they thought was their end, given them some hope, and now I see them with their hopes dashed again. I know what I should do, but I'm not sure it’s  what I want to.

I must admit, I had hoped to drop them off here
, and then head back to my safe house in the mountains. It was one of the reasons I kept track of the truck and its keys. While the human contact was nice, and deep down I probably craved it, they were still strangers to me, even if these past couple of days have removed a little bit of that “strangeness”. I still don’t know if it’s  in my best interest to take them back with me.

Now, that might be the only choice I have. What will they think of me and my secret hideout? What if they prove the better part of human nature
, and attempt to remove my house and safety from me? They seem like “decent” people, but, they are the only people around.

They
’ve  been looking at me lately, and I know what’s going on. They’re  waiting for me to invite them to come to my house. I’ve  given a few hints about it and of course, the news that the zombies very rarely go up into the mountains sounds like sweet relief to this group that now has lost a large portion of the hope they had in surviving in this world. I’ll  first see what tomorrow brings. Maybe they’ll  decide something on their own, or maybe I’ll  warm up to the idea of others at my house. Or, something will decide for us.

I
’ve  walked through many terminals in my life time, and I have, in fact, walked through the terminals here at the Charlotte airport many times, as well. There’s  one thing that’s  common to any large airport, and that is the hustle and bustle. While deep down I knew that the zombies had wiped out the people here and that was unnerving, still, the old world kept a hold on me. See, it was also peculiar being here and it being entirely empty, with not another soul in sight.

It’s
just one of those many things that cling on to me from the old world. Driving yesterday, I found myself using turn signals. You know, so that the zombies know which way I'm turning, or stopping at lighted intersections, even though there were no lit lights. One would think that having lived up in the mountains away from everything would have tuned a few of those old world habits out of me. I guess, that's the issue; I’ve  been safe and tucked away in my shelter, all comfortable and safe.

Food for thought.

I suggested, and the group seemed to quickly agree with me, that instead of finding a spot in the terminal to camp for the night, that instead, we find an airplane that was still attached to the gate and camp in there.
We’d  be able to close the plane up to ensure we didn’t have any unwelcomed guests during the middle of the night, and that would help us sleep a little easier. I was still very uneasy about the absolute lack of zombies anywhere. While I want to always avoid them, I think it would have put me at ease to at least see some and either get rid of them or leave. Instead, I'm left with this great unease, as if they were hiding somewhere, just waiting for me to turn the corner into a large batch of them.

Well, so much for sleeping easy.

Hotel Delta Airlines this evening. Wonder if I can find any peanuts? Probably cost me a lot for a little bag. Bad post apocalyptic humor.

Evan’s Notes: That was a bad day for all of us. Aaron took it especially hard. Aaron was one of those men who had a deep down
, good belief in the goodness of men. He was one of those guys who believe the government and its politicians actually looked out for their people. I think he had really hoped that Charlotte would turn out to be the beginning of something new, and that maybe he might even be a part of it. Instead, it was the scene of just more death.

Entry 20 – Three Days Later
[20]

I think I have a lot to cover, and I think I need to tell it all in order, or even I will get confused by all the details. As I write this, the group and I, along with two new additions, are camped out in a place called Mountain Bridge Wilderness Area, which is actually in South Carolina, right on the border. We plan to drive up into North Carolina tomorrow, up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then hike up to my house.

That...is where we are now. How we got here is a whole story unto itself.

Three days ago, we had just seen the bad news of the emptied, and most likely, destroyed, survivor camp/fort at the Charlotte Airport. We had found no traces of survivors that first night we got there and no traces of zombies either. We closed ourselves within one of the airplanes attached to the terminal gates, a Delta Airlines airplane, and actually slept in relative comfort that night. We had of course, scoured the airplane out before taking residence for the evening, but it was one of those smaller airplanes used for short trips, so there was nowhere really for zombies to hide, and generally speaking, zombies don’t hide.

Things began to get incredibly wild, dangerous and potentially fatal that next morning
. Living in a world infested by dead human bodies that want to kill you, usually puts a person under so much stress that when they find themselves in a situation where they can unwind and rest without stress, they tend to lose a little of that focus that has kept them alive. That morning, without thinking much, we packed up our belongings, and were intending on searching the terminals one more time, before heading back to find the truck we had used to get to Charlotte in the first place, and then decide from there what to do. The group was still undecided as to where they wanted to go, or what they wanted to do and I had, at that point, not “officially” invited them to my house.

(I call it my house a lot.
Kind of weird.)

Evan
walked up to the airplane hatch, and we were all actually smiling and someone was saying something I really don’t remember, but it had us laughing. He opened the hatch and there, to our terrified shock, were two zombies, as if waiting for breakfast. Evan was so shocked that he didn’t close the hatch fast enough before one of the zombies lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm. Evan snatched his arm back through the hatch opening, drawing the zombie in with him, but closing the hatch at the same time, trapping the zombies arm in the opening. I remember we couldn’t close the hatch, and a few more zombie hands appeared through the frame, trying to pry the door open. Aaron and I were simultaneously trying to free the grip the zombie had on Evan’s arm, while at the same time trying to keep the hatch shut. Someone behind me, I think Dawn, was yelling that she could see more of them through the cracks. Tague told me later that as he was looking out the windows, he saw zombies in one of the airplanes next to us, giving us deathly stares out through the windows.

We managed to get the zombie off of Evan and close the hatch, but a quick look through the cockpit into the terminal areas clearly showed that the zombies that may have
wiped out the survival group here were back. That or it was the survivors themselves. Or both. In either case, our exit off the plane had been blocked off. We quickly began to think of ways to get off the plane. We thought about busting out windows, but even if we managed to do that, the windows were simply too small for most of us. It would have been a good plan, too; a quick look outside the windows revealed to us that the zombies were contained to the inside of the terminals. But who knew how long that would last. Where a group of zombies was, moaning and making their noises, many were soon to follow.

I
then suggested that we could be able to exit from the airplane through the luggage hatches, but it took us over an hour of digging around (almost literally), to find any access from the passenger seating down into the very cramped, but ultimately, freeing luggage storage area. Under any other circumstance, say, not being within a hundred feet of flesh eating zombies, I would have loved to rummage through the luggage there to see what useful items I might have found, but, our sole mission there was to get out of that plane, and to get as far away from the airport as possible.

We bolted across the airport runways
, down the way we had come the day before. Dawn’s ankle seemed a lot better and for an older woman, I remember thinking she was really moving fast. Then again, we had good motivation behind us. Thankfully, most of them had been contained within the terminals, and only a few stragglers had tried to follow us, but we soon outdistanced them and got out of the airport fields, and back down into that part of Charlotte, attempting to retrace our steps back to the park.

In some ways, it was good how everything had gone down. Had we seen the
zombies right when we got up, we might have panicked then, and maybe left many of our things behind, but as fate would play out, we were entirely packed up when panic mode hit us and made us flee.

Odd things went through my head as I was running across those runway fields.

I remember thinking it would be really wild if an airplane landed at just that moment, or that maybe I’d get arrested for a being a terrorist. Then at one point, I tried remembering if I had packed my journal from the night before, and thinking that it would have been horrible if I had lost it, not because of the lost information, but because I really hated to write, and would have given up writing anymore if I had lost all of that.

Our trek back to the park would have been mundane
, and that would have been great after that morning’s near death excitement. The rest of the day, though, would turn out to be stock full of excitement, the near death kind again, but I really need to focus on a few things that I clearly remember from the walk back.

Maybe because they had lost their hope, or people they knew, or because death seemed that much closer to them, but the group I had rescued
; Aaron, Evan, Lucy, Dawn and Tague, really began to open up. They talked about themselves, their lives before the comet and how they had survived up to this point. As I'm writing this tonight, I’m  asking them again about what we had talked about, just to make sure I get everything right. I found it a little odd at first that they didn’t ask much about me, but, I found it a little heartening to hear about them. It made my new companions more, human, to me, which makes no sense, because they already were, human. Am I still not making sense? Being in a new world where most humans you met were no longer human, took away the humanity of those that had remained human. I am thankful for knowing them a little more.

To those who read this in the future, here is what I have found out about these fellow walkers.