Abram watches the Dead stumble over the corpses littering the tarmac. He looks at the two fresh ones in the helicopter, wearing the same beige jackets he is. He looks at his daughter, sitting eye level with him on the tire, her worried face showing a rare glow of excitement.
“I’ll give it a preflight check,” he says, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
? ? ?
While Abram inspects the plane’s vital organs, M leads me to his secret stash: a pyramid of fuel drums hidden under a tarp, though I doubt it was the tarp that kept his treasure safe. The airport in general has been largely untouched by post-apocalyptic desperation, still lush with low-hanging fruit like solar panels, cars that run, and perhaps a plane that flies. I suspect it was me and my fellow Dead, gathered here in such uncommon density, who kept the looters away all these years. Thousands of security guards working around the clock—with occasional lunch breaks.
We load as many barrels as we can onto a luggage transport and drive them to the plane. Abram is crouched on the wing, inspecting the flaps, and we watch him for a few minutes before he notices us.
“Is it stabilized?” he asks, clearly grasping at straws. The world had decades to prepare for the apocalypse and preserving the fuel was priority one. Finding perishable gas is about as likely as finding whale oil.
M jabs a hand at the label on the barrels: a clock encircled by spinning arrows.
“How many more are there?” Abram says.
M shrugs. “A lot.”
Abram stares at the barrels with his mouth slightly open, searching for an argument. Then he sighs. “Get them. We’ll need every drop.”
The emergency-exit door bursts open and Julie steps out onto the wing. “Does that mean it works? It’ll fly?”
“It’s the 2035 model,” Abram replies wearily, “about as new as airliners get, and it looks like everything important is intact.” He wipes sweat off his forehead. “Needs a little service, but I think I can get it in the air.”
A look comes over Julie that I haven’t seen since that day on the stadium rooftop, when she saw that the corpse she just kissed was alive, and at least one thing in her dark world could change. She doesn’t say anything. She just stands there on the wing, bathing me in a luminous grin, and for a moment, as her hair flutters over her face and the sun turns her skin gold, all her scars and bruises are gone.
“I can get it in the air,” Abram cautions, “but I don’t know how long it’ll stay there.”
Without a word, still grinning, Julie pirouettes back into the plane and slams the door.
“I need about three hours,” he says to M and me, and we both blink away the hypnotic effect of Julie’s happiness. “Which is about how long it’ll take for Axiom to realize their pursuit team failed and send another one. So this might get sticky.”
“How can we help?” I ask, feeling Julie’s excitement and Abram’s fear mixing inside me like a bad drug interaction.
“We’re taking the world’s biggest gas hog on a cross-country joyride,” he says. “We need to lose as much weight as possible.”
M glances down at his massive girth. “I’ll . . . go get those barrels.”
“Take the seats out?” I ask Abram as M lumbers off.
“If we have time. But you can start by clearing all that shit out of the cabin.” He finally looks up from the panel and turns his inspection to me. “So you were a zombie. And you lived in this plane.”
I nod.
“What’s a zombie do with paintbrushes and books?”
I look down. “Didn’t do anything. Just didn’t want to forget.”
“Forget what?”
“That there used to be more than this.”
He looks at me blankly.
“And that maybe there can be again.”
He offers no reply or reaction to this. He turns away and resumes his work. I return to the plane and start cleaning.
? ? ?
I’ve never explained to Julie what all this junk means and she’s never asked, but she doesn’t move to join me as I shove piles of it out the emergency exits and watch it shatter and smash on the tarmac. She watches from a distance, as if afraid of interrupting a personal moment.
“It was an anchor,” I say as I toss an armful of snow globes and watch them burst like big raindrops. “Helped me hold on to the old world.” I pick up a heavy box of comic books, the closest I ever got to reading before I remembered how words work, and I pause to examine the top issue’s cover. A hardy gang of survivors surrounded by a horde of zombies, carelessly drawn ghouls distinguishable only by their wounds. A thousand individuals with histories and families, reduced to props for the dramas of a few attractive humans. I drop the box and watch the pages flutter, comics mixing with newspapers and fashion magazines, muscular men and skeletal women, monsters and heroes and increasingly hopeless headlines. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Julie moves to my side. She turns my face toward her and kisses me. Then she kicks an old computer monitor out the door and hoots “Woo!” as it explodes with a pleasant pop.