World of Ashes II (24 page)

              “Jesus.” Daniel looked at the guards, who shrugged and didn’t deny who he was. “Why did you lie to us?”

              Petrov laughed this time. “If you were American officers in enemy lands, and you had chance to hide and escape, would you not take it?”

              “It is the duty of every American serviceman to attempt escape if possible… But that’s only if we’re captured. We didn’t capture you, we
rescued
you.” Daniel was admittedly unhappy about the revelation of Kuzma’s true identity.

              “It is as your cartoon character
Archer
say, ‘little column A, little column B.’” Petrov tried humor. It didn’t work. “If I tell you I am high ranking officer in Russian Navy, would you let me back on
Sonya
? And be honest, Private Sawyer. Be better than me on that at least.”

              “No. We’d have never let you near that ship again.”

              Petrov nodded. “That was only lie, though. I had to protect the boat, try to escape. It was my duty.”

              “Would you have killed us after we helped you get the ship out of King’s Bay?”

              “Nyet. No.” Petrov was adamant. “If we found Russian fleet I would demand you be sent home. We’re not enemies, not in this fight. But I cannot say if a superior officer would have allowed it.”

              Daniel had heard enough. “I hope you’re not lying to me now, whatever your name is. But maybe one day they’ll send you home too.” Before Daniel walked away he had one more question to ask. “Did you know the Cubans were going to invade? Do you know what they were looking for?”

              “Did they ask you to ask me this?”

              “Who’s ‘they’?”

              “Then no. When I leave I thought Cuba would be wiped out. Havannah was gone, burning, the last helicopter out was already over the sea. I hid aboard
Sonya
and left those bastards to die. I swear this, Mr. Sawyer.” Petrov nodded to one of the guards. “I have to piss. Cup your hands.”

              “Fuck you, Ivan.” The MP said, tossing him a piss bottle.

              “I am handcuffed, ass-clown.” Petrov said, repeating a word he had picked up from Daniel cursing at other people. “I piss in your mouth you don’t let me up!” Daniel didn’t get to see how his Russian comrade accomplished the task of urinating, he went to the onboard head and back to his seat to catch some sleep without giving the Russian too much more thought. Jose was already out cold, his head laid precariously on Camilla’s shoulder and threatened to roll into her cleavage at the slightest turbulence.

              Closing his eyes Daniel tried to imagine he was somewhere else, aboard a civilian airliner heading home from England and none of the last six months had ever happened. For a minute it seemed he did drift off, he could smell the freshly cleaned interior of the airliner instead of the motor oil and Simple Green that stained almost all military equipment. The stewardesses were pushing the cart for refreshments and moist towels, the roiling steam from the bowl catching his eyes, and then there she was. Lea for the first time, again.

              Daniel blinked when the C-17 hit a pocket of hot air, rattling everything. Lea was sitting in the vacant seat across the aisle from him, her legs crossed and holding the same small travel bag she’d carried around with her when they’d first met. She smiled at him, not saying anything, he blinked again and she was gone. The same crewman who’d sipped the gin with them walked by and saw Daniel’s face was a white as a ghost.

              “You gonna be airsick?” He handed Daniel a bag. “We’re landing in an hour. Can you hold it till then? I’m tired of cleaning shit, piss and blood off my deck. You missed it though, the MP’s had to put that Ruskie in a full body restraint while you were napping. Seems he pissed on one of ‘em.” The guy chuckled, patting Daniel on the shoulder and walking off to attend his in-flight duties again.

              A smirk crossed Daniel’s face as he looked over at Jose and Camilla, who were both still passed out cold. The change in air pressure as they landed would wake them, no need to bother them now. The white lighting in the cabin suddenly blinked to red and the plane pitched violently to the left, throwing the airsick bag Daniel might now need far off to the right of him. Anything that was loose was now airborne, flying about the cabin like an unguided missile. Jose hadn’t been buckled in and Daniel reached up to catch him just in the nick of time, pulling his panicked friend back down to safety. People started screaming as the plane lost altitude faster than they could pop their ears, the pain becoming more disorienting than anything. A hard roll to starboard and a maneuver that pasted them all to their seats and the massive cargo plane leveled out, the roar of the engines dying down to a methodical hum.

              A voice came over a loudspeaker in the aircraft, “This is Major Holmes, please remain seated and buckled in. We have detected active radar from an unknown source in the area, fighters and AWACs are already tracking and we should be out of harm’s way in a few minutes.”

              It wasn’t true. Whoever was tracking the massive, slow moving cargo plane was still there, a new active radar lock sounded in the cockpit before the pilots could turn the intercom off and panic spread throughout the cabin again, this time because they could all hear the pilot’s avoiding incoming fire. They banked sharply, the entire ride felt like a blind nosedive over a roller coaster in a storm and threw everyone’s heads from one side to the other so violently nobody could have looked around. The plane screamed toward the earth, pulled up again and then dove one more time, everything and everyone aboard completely weightless when the explosion occurred. Daniel didn’t see which side they were hit on, or even any fire, just bodies being sucked out a massive void that had once been the hull of the aircraft. He could see the ground, trees and buildings flying by like a scale model landscape. This was worse than the DC landing by magnitudes, only there was no false hope the ambulance would meet them at the scene of the crash this time. They were just going to go down, and for a brief moment Daniel felt himself skip the many stages of death and fall straight into acceptance. Had he more time, he may have decided to enjoy his last roller coaster ride before the end, but this was only the hundredth time he’d faced impending doom this year. There’s only so many times you can scream
Oh no!
before you just start abbreviating it all as
Fuck it
.

              The noise was so cacophonous he didn’t hear the screaming of the others, nor the engines struggle to keep the wounded bird in the air. He did, however, hear the bone shattering boom that was the plane striking ground. Then came a grinding that must have been the last thing a lot of airmen over the decades had heard. The plane bounced off of something incredibly solid, Daniel hit his head and-

black.

Chapter 10

“…and crown thy good with brotherhood…”

Daniel had the eerie impression he was dead, the silence so piercing his ears rang. He opened his eyes, unsure how to perceive the stillness until the first drop of rain fell between them. There probably wasn’t rain in Hell, which was what made Daniel curious enough to look around. First he looked over to Daniel and Camilla and their seats weren’t even there anymore. Of the entire row of twenty or so people he’d been seated in, nobody to his right was still there. The two uniformed Sailors who’d been riding to his left were also dead, one’s neck was snapped and the other was sporting a piece of metal through his chest like a Ridley Scott movie prop. Anywhere rain couldn’t reach seemed to be repainted in blood.

              Daniel puked, it stank of liquor and cheese snacks and he knew now for sure he wasn’t dead. Neither Heaven nor Hell was traditionally thought to have tequila flavored vomit as part of their lore. Daring to look down, Daniel realized he was covered in more blood, his tan uniform now a soggy maroon and gathering flies. Taking a deep breath he felt himself for wounds he might be in too much shock to know about outright. When he’d fingered himself long enough, he looked up and lost his meal again. He’d found Jose and Camilla and most everyone who’d been seated to the right of him.

              Clawing at his seatbelt until he could find the latch to escape, Daniel fought to get away from the fowl stench of jet fuel and death, ripping his bloodied clothing off in the now pouring rain. In a scene from the
Shawshank Redemption
he laid in a puddle that didn’t glitter of rainbow oil and tried to wash the blood from his pours. He wasn’t worried about the virus, or any sickness, he just couldn’t stand to wear what had drained from Jose’s body, down Camilla’s and into her hair and then down onto him. Now shivering in the cold and caring about none of it, Daniel looked back at the plane, or what parts might have been identifiable. The nose, where the cockpit and latrines were located, had broken free and rolled to some bizarre angle, bodies hanging from it on all sides. The rest of the plane was collapsed in on itself, now more resembling a crushed tin can than a cargo jet the size of a Boeing 747. The wings and engines were a twisted mess that could have been confused with a tornado ravaged trailer part.

              Smoke poured from a building in the debris trail, it was only a matter of time before the rain stopped and the fire caught up to the rest of the wreck. A pile of duffle bags that had come loose from a cargo pallet was lying next to harvesting combine the plane had dragged with it some distance. Wearing only his skivvies in the now worsening storm, Daniel found a shard of metal and began tearing duffle bags open along their sides. The first one was a woman’s, a pile of neatly rolled pink panties and one alarmingly large dildo with a suction cup under the balls fell out on his lap. The idea of slapping a zombie with it made him laugh and want to share the joke with Jose. But Jose wasn’t here, and he never would be again. Daniel had to focus. Warm clothes, preferably ones that fit, though beggars couldn’t be choosers. The next two bags were filled with chemical gear that would do him no good, but finally as the first thunderclaps filled the sky Daniel found the luggage of some poor bastard who wasn’t going to need it anymore. He wrapped himself in the dead man’s wet weather poncho and carried the rest of the gear in the split open bag, running for his life before the rain and bloody mud swallowed him whole.

              Just on the other side of the trees Daniel tripped over a leaf strewn road he simply didn’t see coming and landed hard on his right shoulder. More of his blood seeped out into the slopping wet leaves, but he wasn’t too badly hurt. Cursing and shivering, fearing he would soon go into shock or hypothermia, Daniel recollected the bag and followed the road to his right for no apparent reason. He didn’t know where he was or what was out there, or even if this was the best direction to choose. Left might have been a better choice, but he’d never know.

              At the first bend in the road Daniel ran into what was left of one of the plane’s engines. A twisted clusterfuck of metal and gears, the turbo fans had a mutilated zombies wrapped up in them as well as having dragged a few hundred feet of a nearby power line along with it. The lines were stretched through the middle of the fans, and had this all been a cartoon the setup would have been perfect for Wile E. Coyote to injure himself in some hilarious manner. Daniel walked silently past the macabre scene and found a mailbox near an overgrown driveway. This was the best chance he had of finding a structure to hide in, and he desperately needed to recollect himself and find out what exactly he had to survive with.

              The driveway seemed like it was a mile long, though it couldn’t have been more than five minutes before Daniel found the house in a clearing he’d have never seen from the road. With no weapons our hero had no way of defending against living or undead residents of the house, but nonetheless he plowed through the back door with all his weight and collapsed on the cat piss smelling blue carpet. A cheap wooden table next to him was knocked over by the duffle bag and an ash tray filled with ashes and cigarette butts landed on Daniel’s wet face.

              Coughing a plume of ash and cotton shit, Daniel rolled over and wiped his face on the already gross carpet. He came up with not only ash clinging to his cheeks, lips and eyelids, but now a full mask of animal hair that made him look like a crackhead wearing a Santa Claus mask of pubes, glue and mud. Deciding to stay silent in case someone was still home, Daniel found the cheap brown Army issue towels in the duffel and started cleaning himself off. Once satisfied that he resembled a human being again, he discovered the clothes he’d made off with were about two sizes too big, but at least he finally looked right in a modern U.S. Army uniform, a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia he hadn’t felt since a lifetime ago washed over him. The boots were too big too, but a couple extra socks in the toes and Daniel was able to make them work. Anything was better than nothing, but unfortunately the previous owner, an E5 whose last name was Buckle, had not been a believer in using elastic blousing straps to blouse his boots. He was a
tucker
, someone who believed it didn’t look sloppy and stupid to tightly tuck your trousers into your boots. Daniel had always felt a slim measure of pride in that he wasn’t too stupid to do it right, and in times of crisis having two elastic bands with hooks on them could be used for everything tourniquets to Field Expedient Happy Sacks*. Now he just looked slovenly, but at least he felt like a fucking Soldier again, and you can’t put a price on that.