Zombie Ever After (19 page)

Donovan started connecting a few of the wires that had jostled loose to set the bomb up to blow. Not an easy task, with the zombies getting closer by the second. Then he had a realization: How the hell was he going to get out of there before the bomb exploded?

Shit.
He wasn’t.
 

This required a new game plan. Donovan dashed back to the front of the truck, hopped in, and started her up. He backed the old Ford back up the street, another two blocks away from the zombies. The road, which rose on a slight incline, would to give him a bit more distance from the undead.
 

This would be tricky. Timing would be crucial, and he had no time to lose. He engaged the emergency brake and set the truck in neutral, engine running. Donovan hopped out and ran to the back of the truck.
 

In a few minutes, he had completed the complex wiring, which fortunately for Donovan meant simply connecting a handful of color-coded wires as Tenton had instructed him. The cheap alarm-clock-based mechanism was all that stood between a world filled with zombies and a world filled with blown-up zombie parts. Donovan prayed the damn thing would work and set the alarm for ten minutes ahead.
 

He leaned closer to listen and made sure the clock was ticking. It was. That was the good news. The bad news? He hadn’t noticed the second stream of zombies pouring out from the opposite side of town. Donovan had to give these guys props for waging a smart, two-pronged attack. They were learning. He didn’t have time to analyze their strategy, however, as the first members of the preliminary column of zombies were almost upon him.

That’s when Donovan realized that, in order to make it easier to work on the wiring, he’d put the machete on the ground, back by the public bathrooms.

Double shit.

Donovan managed to slip out of the death grip of the first wave of zombies and hopped into the truck cab. He slowly released the emergency brake, and as the Ford started to roll downhill, he jumped out.
 

Donovan tumbled, then got up and ran like hell.

Up ahead, he spotted the New Earthers, who now trudged along, emotionally defeated. They appeared to be all right physically, though. In a minute or two, Donovan caught up with them.

“We won’t be able to run away from this, the explosion will be too enormous,” he told the women. “We need to find transportation—fast.”
 

“No more working vehicles exist, you know that,” said one of the women, near tears. “No cars, no trucks, no motorcycles. Not even a horse to ride or pull a wagon.”
 

She was right. What they did have was no chance.

This was the end, Donovan thought, they were done. But the funny thing about meeting your Maker was, you had no idea when that moment would be. Only He (or She) did. Donovan’s meeting would need to be rescheduled for a later time, as it turned out. How did he know this? Simple. A vision of wings. Not angel wings, and not in the air.
 

No, the wings were closer to the ground. And attached to a plane.

This plane stood with just one “slice” of it visible through an open garage door. There were three other similar doors along the same wall, but those were all closed. Donovan had no idea how big the plane would prove to be or how many people it could accommodate, but he did understand one thing. That flying machine was going to carry
all
of them the hell away from danger whether it was built to do so or not.

He knew the likelihood of finding any transportation was a thousand-to-one. Of finding a working, fueled plane, more like a million-to-one, or higher. Who had left it? Why hadn’t anyone else found it, especially if it could actually fly? What was a plane doing right in the middle of San Francisco, anyway? In any other circumstance, Donovan would have thought the whole situation was a preposterous
deus ex machina.
But here, now, with the end of the world upon them, he didn’t care about any of that. He’d take whatever life was offering. And right now, it looked to be the best offer he’d ever gotten.

“Follow me,” Donovan shouted, waving them forward. Donovan had faith, though he didn’t know why, that this plane contained fuel. He held the insane idea they’d get the thing off the ground, into the air, and far, far away in the small amount of pre-explosion time remaining. Less time than Donovan would have liked, but again, he’d take it.

They got to the hangar and stepped inside. The interior was immense, much wider, higher, and longer than Donovan had imagined when he’d spotted it from the outside. The place was clearly a tinkerer’s delight. Along with thousands of parts in open containers and boxes filling metal shelves, the workshop held vintage cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and this one plane. This one giant, rusty, ancient old plane, its sides tarnished and faded. It filled the rest of the available space. The words,
Dragon Rapide,
were stamped on the fuselage, below the cockpit window. Donovan strode up to the craft. He grabbed a wing strut and swung himself onto the wing to peer inside. Everything was as expected, and in good shape. The chrome logo on the wood-grained dash read
“de Havilland.”
He’d never heard of the thing, but it would do in a pinch.

Donovan’s natural inclination was to start up the plane right then. A rotten idea, though. He didn’t want to alert the undead about the escape plan until everything was ready to go. A roaring plane inside a building with no way to maneuver it out was not a viable strategy.
 

He signaled to the group, and they opened wide the remaining doors. When they were done pulling them to the side, there was an opening about fifty feet across. This was one amazing little hangar someone had created for themselves underneath the colorful houses of San Francisco.
 

They took the chucks out from behind the two wheels and had to push with all of their strength just to get the heavy, blue, 1930s-era biplane rolling out of the barn. Fortunately, the hangar was perched at the top of a small hill and the plane, with a little persuasion, pretty much rolled itself slowly down the short driveway and out into the street. It came to a stop with its nose pointed down the hill slightly, not enough that it continued to roll, but enough so that it would be easy to straighten out once (and if) the engine started. Donovan hopped into the cockpit and hoped for the best. Five flying lessons a few years ago had better prove to be enough.
 

The dashboard appeared both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Donovan had learned on a modern aircraft. This baby was vintage. He recognized the stick, the starter, and the rudder pedals, as well as the altimeter. He’d have to trust that his limited knowledge of flying would transfer somehow to these rudimentary controls. He cranked the propeller, calling out “contact!” while letting out the throttle.

The plane sputtered, then nothing. They were either out of gas or out of luck. Probably both. They had probably less than five minutes to take off and get away. Otherwise, they’d be toast (or some other zombie-preferred breakfast food). Tenton had told him the bomb his people created would blow up a three-block range.
If
the thing worked. And here they were, sitting ducks less than two blocks from ground zero. The debris would fly for another mile or more outside this radius, Tenton had said, including straight up into the air.

“I’m going to try again,” Donovan shouted. The women didn’t respond. Instead, they stared down the road, bodies and eyes frozen. Donovan swiveled in his seat to see what was going on.
Zombies.
These damn things 1) didn’t ever give up and 2) travelled much faster than folks gave them credit for.
 

“Get in!” Donovan hollered. The New Earth women were awakened from their trances by Donovan’s holler. After first giving him some uncalled-for dirty looks, they scurried toward the plane, children in tow or following closely, depending on their ages. Donovan pulled the throttle again. The engine sputtered, coughed, hiccupped, burped, and farted. Nothing. The machine went dead. Donovan slapped his hand to his head. So much for postponing the meeting with his Maker.

Then the impossible happened. Courtesy of that Maker or perhaps courtesy of dumb luck, the plane’s engine let out a loud cough. Black plumes of smoke billowed out of the two prop engines on each wing as if they were barbecuing ribs.

Then the engine started. And ran.

And
stayed
running.

“Time to go!” Donovan bellowed above the joyous rumble of the engine. He left the cockpit and ran to the side door, reaching down to help folks get onto the wing and onboard.

Passengers sat in every available seat in the eight-seater, the littlest of the children sitting on laps, the biggest of the kids sitting in the aisle between the seats. The only available seats were the pilot’s and the copilot’s up in the cockpit. The copilot’s seat was filled with tools. Donovan buckled in and started the plane rolling down the hill toward the zombie horde. Both the plane and the horde gained terrifying speed by the minute.

The big biplane, built for the British RAF, taxied along down the street, hell-bent for zombies. Once Donovan determined they had gained enough momentum, he eased back on the stick.
 

The plane struggled. The ancient craft had not been as well taken care of as Donovan had first thought. It seemed it hadn’t seen much use in a long while, either. An abandoned pet project, perhaps. Donovan wouldn’t be too surprised if they couldn’t even get off the ground. The problem with that, however, was that the behemoth took up most of the road, the tip of one wing or the other scraping the telephone poles or trees on each side. If the road got any more cramped, the wings could get crushed and the plane might wedge to a stop.

Despite those facts, at least they had relatively fast transportation, and one in which they all, pretty much, fit. Even if they did stay on the roads and not in the air, they had a slightly better chance now of getting away with their lives.
 

The bomb was due to go off any minute. In fact, Donovan was surprised the device hadn’t already gone off, blowing them all up with it. The clock might be running slow. Perhaps the gears had stopped ticking. Maybe he rigged the whole thing wrong. Tenton had only given him a quick lesson. Donovan was supposed to be Plan B, not the go-to guy. At this point, though, Donovan was grateful something
had
gone awry. Whatever the issue, it granted them a chance to get away and fight another day.
 

Donovan pulled up on the stick and to his shock and the roar of approval from the group inside, they started to lift up into the air. Then, with a hard hit, they touched back down. The peanut gallery barely had time to shout out a collective
“Nooo!”
before they were up again.

They bounced along, the engine struggling to produce enough “oomph,” the plane fighting to get airborne. Little by little, as each hop got higher, they gained altitude until they floated up into the sky at last. More cheers from behind Donovan rose to a crescendo above the roar of the engine.
 

Donovan pulled back further on the stick and gave the engine as much power as he and it could muster. They continued to rise up into the pale gray, birdless skies.

That’s when he saw her.

At the front of the zombie pack, against all reason: Cathren.

Sprinting while waving furiously at the plane.

Donovan had managed to rescue a bunch of strangers, which was nice. Meanwhile, he also somehow earned the right to watch his sweetheart be torn apart in front of his eyes. Which was not so nice. The worst of it was she hadn’t morphed, not even a little. She was all human, the Cathren he loved, running for her life.

Donovan banked the biplane and circled around, heading back for a landing despite protests from his passengers. As he did so, the zombies fell upon Cathren. They smothered her with their zombie corpses like ants on sugar. Cathren disappeared from view, a small dot in an undead sea.
 

“All right, you mother
fuckers,”
Donovan said, addressing the undead below him. “You wanna dance? Well, you’re going
down!”

While shouting these affirmations gave him a burst of confidence, Donovan knew deep inside the zombies wouldn’t actually be going down. He had no weapons, no way to help. Filled with despair, he glanced down one last time into the roiling ocean of zombies.

Suddenly, there she stood, emerging from the center of the battlefield. Cathren, victorious.

*
 
*
 
*

Alive and kicking and all half-zombied up, as only Cathren could be. She had embraced the fear. She had morphed into the zombie-killing machine
they
should have feared. She proceeded to break arms, legs, necks. She threw body parts around in the air as if she were tossing necklaces at Mardi Gras.

The undead attacked with newly-focused viciousness, landing bites here and there and even in a few cases tearing off sections of her skin. She bled, hard, but she didn’t seem to weaken. Just one more oozing, bloody scar on her half-zombie body. For every one of the undead that got a bite in, she dispatched—or more accurately, dismembered—a dozen of the nasty creatures.

Her remarkable body chemistry—the DNA of an undead egghead mixed with her unique healthy, human DNA—made her invulnerable to zombie attacks. This mix also made her, as Donovan had witnessed on previous occasions, almost superhuman. Certainly, her strength and stamina approached Amazonian.
 

Cathren dominated this fight, destroying any and all stupid enough to get in her path. Nevertheless, with the odds stacked against her roughly a hundred-to-one, Donovan recognized even Cathren didn’t stand a chance. Not against the hordes, the armies—the totality—of the Zombie Nation advancing in her direction.

Donovan landed the plane with a spine-compressing jolt, his passengers flapping in their seats like fish in a net, those on the floor sliding back into a pile of bodies in the rear. He somehow managed to bring the biplane to a stop.