Passengers scrambled on the chute, struggling to halt their slide after seeing what had happened to those who’d reached the ground. But it was to no avail. And by the time they reached the bottom, some of their bloodied fellow passengers were standing to welcome them.
‘Right,’ Sean said, his voice and hands shaking. He took a couple of deep breaths. ‘We wait until those things start climbing the front chute, and when enough of them are distracted, I’ll pull the handle and we go through this exit. And I’ve got an idea of
‘You do?’
‘Yeah.’ And he smiled. There was some measure of control in him again, as if his blood was up and he was now riding the situation. Once again, Jayne promised herself to ask about his scars.
They leaned down to watch from the window. Passengers had stopped sliding down to their doom, and the zombies were beginning to climb the chute. There was screaming from further along the aircraft, and the sound of something ripping and hissing as they tried to dislodge the chute. But even as it deflated and shrank, the bloodied people still clawed their way upward. Some hung on tightly and stayed still while others used them for hand and footholds. A woman fell away, shoved from the aircraft doorway out of Jayne’s view, and her head cracked against the runway concrete.
‘Be lucky like that another fifty times,’ Sean muttered.
The curtain was ripped from its rail and the remaining passengers backed along the aisle, forgetting all about Jayne now that the true infection was among them.
‘The gun!’ someone shouted. ‘The marshal’s at the back of the plane!’
‘You could hold them off,’ Jayne said, and Sean hesitated, his hand still on the door handle.
‘He’s in!’ someone shrieked.
‘Jayne,’ Sean said. He turned the handle and stepped back. The door’s bolts blew and it fell outward, the chute inflating in seconds and before she could say anything Sean had dropped onto his behind and slid down.
Instinct took over and Jayne did the same. If she’d waited a few more seconds she might have been trampled by the panicked passengers, or pulled back from the doorway so that others could escape. Because this was pure panic — screaming, raving, spitting panic.
She slid down the chute and heard the first gunshot.
‘Hand!’ Sean said, holding out his left hand. She took it. ‘Can you run?’
‘Yes.’
He fired again, and a woman wearing a stewardess’s uniform flipped back and down. For a blink, Jayne thought it was their stewardess, but this one was Asian, her tights ripped and her legs pale.
They ran directly away from the aircraft. There were shouts behind them, and Sean turned and fired again. Jayne could not help glancing back.
Three shapes were rushing at them from around the plane’s forward exit, where the collapsed chute was still alive with zombies crawling and scrambling upward into the interior. Jayne hoped that the runners were escaped passengers, but then she saw the fresh blood across their mouths and chins.
Sean paused and let go of her hand, and dropped them all with one shot each to the head.
‘Don’t slow down,’ he said, grabbing her hand again.
Someone had opened the rear door on the opposite side of the aircraft, and that chute too was now down. Several people had made it away and were running. They were being chased — the uninfected were easy to identify because they looked back over their shoulders in sheer terror. One of the men was holding an old woman’s hand and attempting to pull her along. The woman fell, and he knelt by her side, hugging her to his chest and refusing to let go. As the first of the pursuers reached the pair, Jayne looked away.
They crossed a grass verge and headed onto another runway. This one was empty, and beyond it lay several wide taxiing routes where two large aircraft were parked. One of them had a mobile staircase against its side, and the door was open.
Limbs aching, joints screaming at her to slow down, stop, rest, Jayne looked behind her again.
‘Sean, three more!’
‘We’ll outrun them.’
‘They’ll see where we’ve gone — what if they can communicate?’
‘Run on.’ He let go of her hand and Jayne ran on, but then turned and slowed, walking backwards so that she could watch.
Sean shot a woman, used two more bullets to down a teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt and a lipless grin, and when he fired at the last man his gun clicked on empty. He cursed, ducked, and drove his shoulder into the man’s midriff, standing and using the zombie’s momentum to propel him up and over. The zombie landed on his back with a dull thud, and before he could stand again Sean was stomping on his head, crushing it.
Jayne ran towards the aircraft, swallowing down bile. Her vision swam. Smoke stung her throat and nose, and her eyes were watering. There was a bus parked a hundred feet from the plane’s left wing, and she kept a wary eye on it.
‘Let me go first!’ Sean said from behind her. She slowed, he overtook her and grabbed her hand again, and then they were at the foot of the stairs. Panting, he slammed a fresh magazine into his gun and started up the staircase. ‘Wait halfway up. Stay ready to run back down.’
Jayne nodded and sat on a stair, watching him climb and then looking back the way they had come. She hoped there had been more escapees, but she could see none. Scores of frantic figures were gathered around the plane’s exits, climbing the deflated chutes, falling back as those trapped inside struck them with feet or chairs or metal food canisters. A food trolley was shoved from one door, taking several clinging attackers with it. The forward door had been pulled shut again, and she wondered what was happening inside right now. She could see movement through the windows but could make no sense of it.
‘Jayne,’ Sean called from above. ‘Come on.’
She climbed the last few stairs and entered the aircraft, standing beside the marshal where he kept his gun at the ready.
‘Got to shut this door.’ As he did that, Jayne stumbled towards the front and sank into a seat, starting to giggle when she realised this was the first time she’d ever been in First Class. She picked up some cutlery from a seat tray — real stainless steel, not the plastic stuff she was used to — and giggled some more. And when Sean appeared and raised an eyebrow she showed him the knife, and laughed so much that it nearly made her sick.
Sean checked the aircraft three more times before declaring it clear.
They sat together, drinking orange juice and eating cold chicken curry, and then Jayne raided the First Class kitchen and found the drinks store. They cracked open a bottle of wine. They said little, because they could still hear the sounds of chaos from outside. Looking across to the aircraft they had abandoned, they saw that both starboard doors had been closed, and now and then they could make out vague movement inside. ‘Survivors,’ Sean said, but Jayne could only imagine the alternative — that they’d somehow locked all the doors without realising that the contagion was inside, and now it was an aircraft filled with zombies.
Sean tried his cellphone constantly but he could find no signal.
Their aircraft had been stocked and prepped for flight. The seats were neat and tidy, kitchen lockers filled with ready-meals waiting to be warmed, and Sean said the fuel tanks were probably full.
‘Don’t suppose you know how to fly a 757?’ he asked.
They’d finished one bottle of wine and started on a second before Jayne asked him to finish his story.
Sean looked at the gun on the small folding table he’d brought out of his seat. He rubbed his glass back and forth across his lip, then drained the red wine in one swig.
‘Does it matter any more?’ he asked.
‘Sure. You saved me. It matters to me.’
‘But why’d you want to know?’
Jayne shrugged, because there was no clear answer to that. ‘My granny told me never to trust a man with scars.’
Sean touched his cheek. ‘I was a cop in New York,’ he said at last. ‘I saw the towers come down, felt pretty hopeless. I’d put my years in, so I handed in my notice to become a sky marshal. Felt like that was taking action.
