Hauptmann Tank grabbed the receiver, nodded a few times, and hung up with a curt “thank you.”
“The pilot reports that we’ll be on the ground in less than a minute!” He shouted above the roar of the engines. “Our landing may be bumpy, so buckle up!”
I was scared shitless so I pulled my belt as tight as I could. Prit was muttering something in Russian, probably some comment about the pilot’s mother or Tank’s, or maybe he was pissed off he had to sit there, like the rest of us sheep, instead of being at the controls of the Airbus. You never knew with Prit.
“When the plane stops, Team One, take your positions immediately!” Tank shouted in his thick German accent, as he clutched a luggage rack and struggled to stay on his feet. “Sweep the area, check the perimeter. Shoot anything that moves! But if any of those helicopters parked on the runway gets the slightest scratch, I swear to God I’ll rip the guts out of the guy who fired the shot! Got it?”
A grunt of assent rose from twenty throats, while twenty pairs of sweaty hands cocked twenty HKs and strapped on helmets.
A sharp jolt shook us, then the landing gear gave a terrifying shriek. A dull roar rose from the engines as the pilot threw them into reverse at full speed to bring the huge Airbus to a stop in that small space.
“Too fast,” Pritchenko muttered, watching as the runway rushed past us.
Thick black smoke billowed from the wheels. The pilot had locked the wheels in a desperate attempt to slow down the plane. The cabin shook violently, as if the plane were breaking into pieces. The friction was shredding the tires. The smell of burning rubber was overpowering. If we had a blowout at that speed, the plane would likely tip and roll out of control down the runway, becoming a fireball. My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.
The Airbus gradually slowed down, but it still emitted sounds that weren’t very reassuring. Something came loose from the cargo bay and crashed noisily to the floor, but that was it. Finally, with a plaintive screech, the plane came to a complete stop, but its engines still rumbled, exhausted from the strain.
On cue, the legionnaires got to their feet in sync. Two of them manned the door while a third attached a rope ladder that unfurled down to the runway. Before I could blink three times, they’d slithered down onto the cracked pavement.
A few seconds later, we heard the first shot, then a couple of long bursts of machine gunfire and an explosion broke the silence on the runway.
Let the dance begin.
23
Island heat slapped Lucia in the face as she left the apartment building. Out front, a dozen people waited patiently for the bus. Not a single vehicle drove by, except for an occasional bicycle and a beat-up wagon on retreads pulled by a worn-out nag.
Although the hospital was just a few miles away, getting there took a really long time. On account of the strict fuel rationing, there were almost no motor vehicles on the road, aside from the few engaged in essential services. There were very few draft animals and even fewer bicycles. A junk heap with wheels and pedals no one would’ve looked twice at before the Apocalypse was now worth a fortune. Under martial law, bicycle theft was punishable by hard labor. Gasoline theft was worse, punishable by firing squad. Draconian measures, true, but the fragile law and order on the island had to be maintained at all costs or it could collapse.
Lucia joined the line of hopeful people to wait for some kind of transportation that would take her close to downtown. Soon, Fortune smiled on her. A former Coca-Cola delivery truck came limping along, wrapped in a huge cloud of blue smoke produced by the low-grade diesel fuel refined on the island. Because it lacked chemical additives, engines that ran on it broke down from time to time.
She knew all too well that the rumors were true. She and her friends had been the last survivors to reach the Canary Islands from Europe. Behind them was only death, desolation, and millions of Undead wandering around for eternity.
She was glad to have made it there. Life on the island wasn’t paradise, with all the rationing and overcrowding, but at least she could close her eyes at night without worrying that a horde of Undead would break the door down and end her life.
But the situation was far from ideal. Thousands of people suffered from hunger. Despite the government’s best efforts, food supplies were dangerously low. Every day, a fleet of fishing boats went out to sea, hoping to return with their holds full, but catches were meager. And while large areas of the island had been cleared for farming, their output was still very low. Specialists and farmers worked hard to get them going, but the shortage of chemical fertilizers and pesticides prevented a good harvest. The general feeling was that the volcanic soil was too weak to feed the multitude. Fresh meat was available only to a fortunate few. Most people were very thin, their cheekbones jutting out, their eyes shining with hunger. Very few people fared well, but no one said they wanted to leave the relative safety of the island. Not even in jest.
And then there was the matter of the Froilists.
Lucia remembered how confused she and her friends were when they heard people speaking matter-of- factly about “the others,” the Froilists. At first they’d thought that was how people on the Canaries referred to the Undead. They soon realized their mistake.
When survivors first crowded together on the Canaries, they had to face a painful reality: The system they’d known in the old world had gone up in smoke. For a little while, people acted as if nothing had changed.
Most of the government had disappeared in the mayhem before the collapse. Only a handful of ministers and a regional president had reached safety. A rumor went around that the Prime Minister’s motorcade was lost somewhere between his residence in Moncloa Palace, and Torrejon de Ardoz army base, but nobody knew for sure. The head of the opposition party and his family had made it to the islands, thanks to an old friend who owned an airline but, in a cruel twist of Fate, he died a few weeks later in a car wreck. Most of the Royal Family reached the Canaries, except for the king’s son and heir, the Prince of Asturias; the king’s daughter, Cristina; and her husband. Their fate was a mystery, but no one thought they’d survived.
At first King Juan Carlos had tried to form a government, although skeptics pointed out that, since the Peninsula was lost, there wasn’t much left to govern. Things went well for a few months, until one morning the king was found lying on the bathroom floor, dead from a stroke. His Majesty had the dubious honor of having the last state funeral that part of the world would ever see. Then the situation became almost more chaotic than when the Undead had first attacked.
Without a legitimate government, soldiers grew restless, not knowing what authority to obey, overwhelmed by the heavy responsibility of protecting and feeding more than a million people, with little administrative help or a health care system.
Then, a group of generals took the bull by the horns. Since the king’s daughter, Infanta Elena, was next in line, she was crowned Queen of Spain at the town hall in Tenerife in a hasty ceremony few survivors knew about.
It soon became clear that the only goal of that coronation was to legitimize the military junta’s de facto power to govern the two plague-free islands—Gran Canaria Island and Tenerife. Queen Elena was just a puppet in their hands. Just three weeks after she was crowned, Queen Elena I was assassinated during a visit to a communal farm by a member of the Communist Party, or what was left of it.
Chaos erupted. For fourteen days the islands were embroiled in riots between the defenders of the Third
