Somewhere inside its cockpit, a soldier swivels the nose-mounted chain gun and begins to cut splattering swaths through the mob. He is too late to save the men in the trucks, but with all the airport’s inhabitants gathered in the open with no way to fight back, he can at least take this opportunity to clear out this hive. One less unknown to threaten the natural order.
The Dead make a noble effort. They climb onto the roof of the nearest vehicle and swipe for the chopper’s landing gear. Some of them even attempt to jump. But the pilot keeps it hovering just out of reach, lower than he actually needs to, perhaps taking pleasure in their desperate efforts as his gunner mows them down. I catch his face in the windshield, the sadistic smirk of a child burning ants.
A higher pitched rattle of gunfire joins the heavy thump of the chain gun and I see Julie standing behind a second-floor window, firing M’s AK-47 through the glass. She probably knows this is useless against an armored attack chopper, but these are the gestures we make when useful actions run out. Her bullets chip the chopper’s paint and make white spots on the windshield, damaging its resale value but little else. The gunner ignores her until she manages to ping a shot off a rotor blade, then the chain gun rises and Julie runs for cover as it strafes across her floor, filling the air with broken glass and upholstery fluff. Satisfied that he’s made his point, the gunner returns his attention to the Dead.
I drag my kids toward the safety of the terminal door, determined to save at least these two, and just as I’m reaching out to open it, I hear a cry. A raw, plaintive noise almost like the howl of a dog, inarticulate but trembling with emotion. I look up.
My wife is on the control tower balcony, directly above the helicopter, leaning against the railing. Her eyes are on me, and I realize the noise I heard was her calling to me, the sound of a person trying to reach another person without words or a name. But she doesn’t need words now. She cries out again, and the anguish in it makes the meaning clear.
Good-bye.
She jumps off the tower. She falls facedown, arms spread wide, hair fluttering up toward the clear summer sky, and when she hits the blurring disc of the rotors, she vanishes. Lukewarm liquid sprays across my face. I hear the wet slap of heavier bits raining down all over the tarmac, but the sound is mercifully muffled by the screech of the helicopter tearing itself apart. Its bent rotor rattles horribly for an instant, then something snaps. The chopper flips and twists and flings itself into the concrete base of the terminal building. It doesn’t explode. Its impact is less than satisfying. It hits the wall with a dull crunch, then falls to the pavement in a mangled heap.
Everything goes silent. The fury abruptly drains out of the remaining Dead, their shoulders falling back into their customary slouch. But while their rage sags, mine swells, stretching my seams to bursting. My eyes take in the carnage around me, flicking from corpse to corpse, their gazes fixed on the dreaded mouth of the sky as their brains ooze through the backs of their heads. All their struggles disregarded, all forward steps ignored, erased in a few minutes by a few little bits of lead. And scattered all around them, on the ground and on my clothes and in my eyes, the remains of a woman who never told me her name. A woman I bumped into in a dream and married without ever exchanging a word, paired as a unit by the decree of a formula that neither of us understood. She should mean nothing to me. I knew nothing about who she was behind her blank stare or who she would have become if given the chance. And perhaps that’s it. She was trying to become something beautiful, and these cruel and stupid children have cut open her chrysalis simply because they could.
I run to the helicopter. I wrench open the cockpit door and seize the pilot by his jacket, pulling him against his seat straps. “Why?” I growl, inches from his face.
His eyes take a moment to focus on me. In my periphery I see a twisted piece of steel sticking out of his side and his copilot dead in the other seat, but I’m focused on the pilot’s face, mostly blank now but still retaining the lines of that smirk I saw through the windshield as he savored the killing of weaker things.
“Why are you doing this?” I say from some hot, dark boiler room in my mind. “Why won’t you stop?”
He opens his mouth. A ragged wheeze comes out. His eyes seem to be looking past me.
“Why?” I shout, shaking him against the seat. “What’s your goal? Who are your leaders?”
I feel something beyond rage thrumming inside me. The noise from the basement. The rattling door.
“Where is Atvist?” I scream into his face and grab the piece of steel and rip it out of his chest. The door in me is straining against its locks, and through the crack I can see fire and burnt flesh and squirming masses of worms.
I thrust my hand into his gaping wound and dig until I find his lung. “Tell me!”
I squeeze his lung, forcing puffs of air through his throat.
“Tell me!”