The guards at the front doors still make no attempt to stop us. Still a few bugs in the “process.” Abram juts his elbows to shield his daughter as he carries her like a baby, ignoring the agony of his injuries, but we brush past the guards without resistance. And then the All Dead swarm over them, uninterested in their flesh but killing them all the same in their mindless stampede.
We take the bridge and the scenario repeats with the bridge guards, but this time we’re farther away. Starvation has a way of rousing the Dead from their apathy, quickening their pace from shamble to jog, but a rotting corpse, no matter how motivated, will never be a sprinter. By the time we’re over the river we’ve put a safe distance between us and them, and we slow down to catch our breath.
“Fuck you, Archie,” M gasps, leaning against his knees. “And fuck running. And fuck”—he sucks in a deep breath—“needing to breathe.”
“Abram,” Julie says. “What’s Regional Security?”
Abram is gazing at downtown Pittsburgh with that glassy distance in his eyes.
“Hey!” Julie says, snapping her fingers at him. “What are we dealing with? Where will they be coming from?”
“I don’t know,” he murmurs without looking at her. “Everything’s different.”
I glance back at the bridge and find the Dead already uncomfortably close. In what felt like a few seconds, they have devoured most of our distance. This is, of course, the unique danger of the Dead. Their slowness lulls you. You think you’re safe. You stop to rest, maybe start arguing, lost in some heated personal drama, and while your complex minds are weaving their tangled threads, the Dead are just walking, slow and steady and unconflicted.
“Keep moving,” I say, already moving.
? ? ?
Our careful creep from the airfield to the city took over an hour. We make the return trip in twenty minutes. The plane’s cargo ramp closes behind us with a solid clack, but I don’t allow myself to feel safe. The image of the guards disappearing under a tide of corpses plays again in my head, and I keep it playing.
Abram heads for the cockpit and Julie and I go aft to check on our familial remains, but already I see trouble. There are dents and scratches all over the cabin, as if it recently housed a wild animal. My kids are peeking out from the restroom with fear in their eyes, and the object of this fear seems to be Julie’s mother, who sits cross-legged on the carpet, glowering at us.
“Mom,” Julie says, trying to keep her voice steady, “what did you do?”
Audrey is still chained to her chair, but the chair lies on its side next to her, detached from the floor. Her hands are a mess of dark blood, all the nails gone and much of the skin, her fingertips peeled to the bone.
Scattered on the carpet around her is a sizable collection of airplane parts.
Abram shouts something incoherent and I hear rapid footsteps from the front of the plane. Julie readies her pistol, but Abram ignores her and starts gathering the parts off the floor. Audrey lunges at him and Julie yanks her back by the collar.
“Chain that thing to something structural,” Abram says with controlled rage, “or I’ll debrain it with my bare hands.”
“What did she do?” Julie asks, wide-eyed.
“Tore apart the cockpit. Ripped the controls right off the rod.” He scoops as many parts as he can into his shirt and rushes back to the front.
“Mom,” Julie says miserably, holding tight to the cable leash. “Why would you do that?”
It’s impossible to decode the emotion on Audrey’s face, if it’s emotion at all. It looks like anger and defiance, and then with a slight change of angle, it becomes grief. Or it could be none of those. Just the random movements of a face with no one behind it.
Julie runs the cable directly through the floor hook where the chair latches in and cinches it short so that Audrey can just barely stand. Audrey watches impassively as her daughter locks her up, but Julie looks agonized. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she mumbles as if her mother is howling accusations. “I’m sorry.”
I decide to give them a moment. M and Nora are hovering over Abram, watching him reattach whatever can be reattached, mending snapped wires with electrical tape and broken parts with duct tape.
“Can we . . . help?” M offers.
Abram ignores him. The speed of his movements suggests the danger of our situation, and it occurs to me that every part of it was caused by two soft hearts: Julie’s and mine. Two long-shot bets against the hardness of reality. Should we feel foolish for this? For taking life-threatening risks for things more important than life?
I wander back to the center of the plane. Down the staircase. Out the cargo door. I walk along the towering behemoth that was once my home and emerge from the shadow of the wing into the orange evening sun. I lean my back against the nose wheel, watching the swarm of the Dead filter out of the streets and converge into one mass on the runway ahead. Perhaps they will answer the question for me.
“R!” Julie shouts down from the cockpit window. “What are you doing? Get back in!”
“Is it ready?” I call up to her. “Can we fly?”