“You can’t do anything for them! You don’t even know how to shoot that!”
I look down and notice that I’m holding M’s AK-47. I must have grabbed it off his chair in an unconscious reflex, and I appear to have chambered a round and switched off the safety. I’m not sure either of us knows what I know how to do. But the tremble in my hands is even more pronounced than usual; I’m practically spasming. I let the gun clatter to the floor and stride into the boarding tunnel.
“R!” she shouts, running after me. “There’s a thousand of them down there. One more isn’t going to make a difference.”
“Joan and Alex,” I say without stopping.
The gunfire is continuous, like a roll of firecrackers, and I imagine each and every shot ending the budding life of one of these potential people.
I hear Julie’s footfalls behind me as I rush down a staircase to the ground level; she has given up arguing and is racing to join me, with M’s rifle like an oversized toy against her tiny frame. I stop at the exit door and turn to her.
“Stay here.”
“Fuck you, you’re not going out there alone.”
Crack. Crack. Crack-crack-crack-crack.
“Please,” I say to her, imagining those shots aimed at her instead of the anonymous mob and feeling my fear spike tenfold. “I’m asking you to stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I don’t wait for her response. She’ll respect my wishes or she won’t. I’ve said everything I can say, short of “good-bye.” I burst through the door into the blinding sun.
? ? ?
It’s not quite the massacre I was anticipating. The soldiers appear to be conserving ammo, taking methodical head shots instead of spraying into the mob. They have the luxury of doing this because the mob is not attacking them. The Dead are agitated, swaying and groaning loudly, but their faces still display recognizable human emotions. Fear, confusion, grief. They seem utterly perplexed by what is happening to them.
But as the trucks slowly advance, as row after row of the Dead drop to the pavement and the rows behind them wipe their friends’ liquefied brains off their faces, something begins to change. So close to the end of their climb, just a few steps from the summit, they stop. They stumble backward. They fall.
The indeterminate hue of their eyes flashes silver, and their faces lock into the murderous blankness of the All Dead.
I want to roar and cry at the same time. The stupidity of it. The relentless razing of every green shoot. As the Dead surge forward in a wave and begin to overrun the trucks, I try not to take pleasure in the soldiers’ shrieks. But I do.
My family is revealed in the rear of the crowd as everyone else advances to attack. I run to their side and grab the kids’ hands. “Come on.”
The nearest truck disappears under a pile of Dead. A few of them pull the gunner out through the sunroof and tear him apart while a few more crawl inside to deal with the driver. What did these men expect? Twenty or thirty of them against several thousand Dead? How can anyone be so fully grafted to a system that they would obey such mad orders?
Their desperate shots shatter windows and kick up puffs of dust on the concrete around my feet. I start to pull the kids toward the terminal door, but when I look back to make sure my wife understands the agenda, she is not there. I glance around the tarmac and find no sign of her. I stand in the shadow of the 747, holding the kids’ hands and staring at the mob, knocked off balance by an emotional sucker punch. It never occurred to me that my wife would relapse with the rest of the horde. I thought she had climbed too high to fall back into this feral frenzy. But more importantly, I thought I didn’t care what happened to that nameless, voiceless woman, and I am dismayed to find that I do.
The Dead set to work on the next truck. The men in the other four jump out and take defensive positions behind their doors. Despite streams of bullets ripping into the Dead from four directions, this venture is going to prove unprofitable for the Axiom Group. The third truck goes under. Then the fourth. But as the horde—reduced by a few hundred but still overwhelming—sweeps over the last two Escalades, I notice a familiar drone in the air. My hair begins to flutter back from my face, and I have just enough time to register dread before a helicopter—not some repurposed local news chopper but an actual military aircraft—swoops over the roof of the terminal building and hovers directly overhead, eclipsing the noonday sun.