“I’m ready,” Bill said, his voice coming through loud and clear through my headset.
Jase was still adjusting his boom. “Let’s rock and roll,” he said.
I smirked and then turned my focus onto the road in front of me. I pushed the throttle full forward, and the plane rolled ahead, slowly at first, and then passing each yellow divided highway line faster and faster. I tugged back on the yoke, and the plane lifted off the ground gently, the smoothness of the air instead of tires against rough concrete was the only sense of transition from the ground to the sky. As the plane climbed, I turned toward north on my compass heading.
I set the stopwatch taped on the panel, a backup to help remind me how much fuel I had remaining. I looked at Clutch. “While you look for herds, keep an eye out for landmarks and let me know if we start to veer off our flight path.”
“Got it,” he replied, all business.
“If I have to ride backseat, I call dibs on the music,” Jase said, and I found an iPod dropped onto my lap.
With a chuckle, I plugged his MP3 into the audio input and kicked off the playlist he always listened to on our scouting runs. Flying was one of the few times we could listen to music without fear of zeds, and we always played rock-paper-scissors to see whose music would be played. Though, listening to any music was nice. Pop music filtered through our headsets, and I turned up the volume.
We flew for an hour, everyone given the same task: search for herds. I kept the plane three thousand feet off the ground so that any herds would be easier to spot. Bill nervously chattered, his voice cutting over the music. Once I threated to pull the plug on his headset, he was a better passenger.
The air was smooth and cool, and the sky was clear. It was an absolutely perfect flying day, and I found myself feeling lighter and breathing easier. There was something surreal about being in the sky, removed from the death and destruction below. It was the only time I could still feel completely at peace. After all, the sky was the only place left without man-eating predators.
“There’s one! Down there, below!” Bill exclaimed.
“Down where?” I cranked my head around to see him pointing out the window to my right. I looked, searching for zeds. My gaze narrowed on a field of dirt that seemed to go on forever in the distance, and I turned the plane in that direction. As we approached, the dirt morphed into what looked like a giant, flat anthill. Chills covered my body because this was no anthill.
“Holy bejeezus,” Jase said. “That’s no herd. That’s…that’s…”
“Fuck,” Clutch muttered.
“Yeah,” I added, my jaws lax. As we drew closer, the movement began to split into individual humanoid shapes all moving together like fans at a music concert, only far bigger than any concert or sporting event could be. The herd was larger than I could’ve possibly imagined. Hell had opened up and spurted forth millions of demons from its gorge.
“I told you guys these herds were huge. And it looks like another one in the distance out there,” Bill said from the backseat. “Now that you’ve seen it, can we check on my family?”
“Hold on,” I said, as I continued to stare at the mass of zeds below us.
“I wasn’t expecting a herd like that,” Jase said. “What could we possibly do if it found the park?”
After a tense moment of silence, I pulled off to return to our flight path.
A heavy stone was already growing in my gut. I found it hard to breathe, and my chest pounded like I was about to have a heart attack. I could already guess their trajectory from seeing the relatively straight trodden path over a half-mile wide that went on for as far as I could see. Camp Fox didn’t stand a chance.