I hear footsteps behind me, and the burning red murk clears from my vision. I become aware that I am screaming at a dead man, and my fist is inside his chest, and my friends are watching in horrified silence.
I drive the piece of steel into the dead man’s skull, then slowly stand up and turn around, wiping my hand on my pants. Julie, M, and Nora stare at me with wide eyes. Abram waits in the terminal doorway with his daughter, looking more impressed than disturbed. I feel an urge to apologize, to offer some unlikely excuse for what they just witnessed, but I’m too full of disgust. Some for myself, but more for everything else. My disgust for the world is so deep, my own portion sinks into it with barely a ripple.
“We need to go,” I say, staring at the ground.
There is a long silence, broken only by the soft groans of the Dead. They shuffle around like sleepwalkers, eyes on the pavement and the carpet of corpses that covers it, seemingly unaware of our presence, stuffed back into some deep hole where not even the smell of life can reach them.
“Go where?” Julie asks quietly.
“Out into the world. There’s nothing left here.”
“What’s out in the world?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we need to go.”
Without meeting their eyes, I push past my friends and stop in front of Abram. “Axiom owns the coasts. What’s in between?”
He looks me up and down for a moment as if debating how seriously to take me. “Not much,” he says. “Exed cities. Empty territories. A few struggling enclaves, probably.”
“Probably?”
“It’s been a few years since I’ve heard any reports. Axiom mostly sticks to the coasts these days. But everyone knows—”
“No one knows anything,” I snap. “The world has grown. A city’s a country and a country’s a planet. There has to be something out there.”
They all watch me, taken aback by my sudden verbosity, but I’m so focused I forget to feel self-conscious.
“Something like what, exactly?” Nora says.
“People.” I finally allow myself to make eye contact, first with her, then Julie, then Abram. “Help. Maybe even answers.”
Julie begins to nod. “Axiom has our home and everything around it. They plan to keep spreading, and we can’t stop them ourselves.”
“I wasn’t planning on stopping them,” Abram says.
“Oh right, your cabin.” She holds his gaze with that eerily mature steel that lurks beneath her youthful flippancy. I feel a little thrill whenever it emerges. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe if you hide out long enough, Axiom will burn itself out. But my guess is they’ll burn the rest of the continent first. Is that what you want to give Sprout for her eighteenth birthday when you finally come out of your bunker? A scorched Earth run by madmen?”
“I’m not seeing many alternatives,” he says under his breath.
“Are you looking for them? There could be rebel armies, thriving enclaves, people spreading the cure . . . We have no idea what’s out there.”
Abram meets her steel with his own. He is looking at her so intently that he doesn’t notice Sprout wandering off.
“Daddy,” she says, climbing onto the 747’s tire. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Mura, get down!” He rushes over and pulls her off. My own kids stare at the young girl, recognizing one of their own, though their eyes are still wide with the shock of seeing their mother aerosolized in front of them. I note with another pang of sadness that the blood spattered across their faces is red. Dark red, almost purple, but not black. She was so close.
“What are you even proposing?” Abram says without turning around. “Go exploring? Take a road trip? Are you forgetting that Axiom is right behind you? You got lucky twice but the minute we find out—” He stops, releases a weary breath. “The minute they find out what happened here, they’re going to get a lot more serious. We can’t run much longer.”
“Need to run faster,” I say.
He points to the wreck of the chopper. “That’s one of maybe ten helicopters remaining in America, and you know who has the rest.”
“How about a jet?”
He opens his mouth to scoff at this, then glances back at the enormous tire that his daughter is climbing again.
“You said you were a ‘large transport pilot,’?” Julie says. “Can you fly a 747?”
His eyes travel up the landing gear and over the clownishly bulbous nose of one of the largest commercial airliners ever built. He chuckles. “Fucking thing’s so big I forgot it was a plane.”
“Can you fly it?”
He studies it for a moment, mumbling to himself. “Looks like civil-military . . . late model . . . probably close enough to the C-17 . . .” He glances sideways at Julie. “I can fly it if it flies, but that’s a big ‘if.’ Everything else here is wrecked or gutted.”
“It has power,” I offer.
“There’s fuel in the Iceland Air hangar,” M says, then puts a hand to the side of his mouth and whispers to Nora, “I used to huff it.”
Nora smiles. “Good shit?”
“Good shit.”