“Okay, okay, that’s good,” I said.

“Now go get strapped in. Take-offs are hard as shit!”

She didn’t laugh. I wish she had. Then I could have convinced myself she was just kidding.

“What’s the deal with Sues?” Erway had a paper map unfolded on her lap. There was a math protractor and some pencils on the console between the pilot chairs.

“Bit,” I said. “Bad.”

“Come here,” Palmeri said. She kept her hands on the controls. They both wore headphones, with radios wired to each other so that if nothing else, they could talk easily to each other.

I got as close as I could. I couldn’t help staring at all the dials and knobs and switches. They weren’t just in front of the pilots. They were above them as well. They were everywhere. There were so many gauges, I wondered how much help Erway could be, having never been a co-pilot before.

“The plane is not pressurized,” Palemri said, and then nodded, like that made sense to me.

“You told us. It’s going to be cold. Thought I saw a tarp or two back there. We’ll use them as blankets. I think we’ll manage the cold for a few hours.”

“In a regular plane, you know Delta or something, you fire a gun in a pressurized plane you risk killing everyone on board. A gunshot can really fuck things up. Back there, you can fire a shot or two and as long as you don’t shoot fuel tanks or some shit like that, it isn’t going to mess much up. You see what I’m saying there?”

I saw what she was saying. If Sues became a threat. I could shoot her.

Chapter Six

1702 hours

Allison sat next to Charlene. They were buckled in. I looked at Dave. He wasn’t looking at me. He was seated next to Sues, holding her hand. He was talking to her. Whispering. I couldn’t hear a single word, but could imagine what was said. He was soothing her, telling her over and over that things would work out, and that she wouldn’t turn into a zombie.

I joined my daughter and girlfriend. They saved me the seat between them. I buckled in, and placed a hand on Charlene’s leg. “You okay, honey?”

She nodded.

I stared across the narrow aisle. Couldn’t take my eyes off Dave and Sues. Her eyes were closed. From where I was it didn’t seem like she was breathing. The blood seemed to have stopped flowing from the bite on her shoulder. The raw meat that was exposed looked wet, gooey.

“I think she’s dying,” Allison said.

I hoped Dave couldn’t hear her. The engines were loud, but when something was loud, people tended to whisper that much louder.

Before I could respond, the plane rolled forward. Allison grabbed my hand, my whole arm, actually. “I don’t like this. I’m not going to like this.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said, and wondered how different was my statement from the one Dave kept promising Sues. Would we be fine, or was Palmeri going to crash us from a ten thousand feet?

The plane picked up speed. The whining got louder and louder. There were no windows back here. We couldn’t see outside of the plane at all. That might be a good thing. We wouldn’t see the zombies lining the runway. We wouldn’t see the end of the tarmac as the plane accelerated. We wouldn’t see the treetops or mountains or road, or river should we crash into them.

Time moved at an irrationally slow speed. The runway had not seemed long at all, and yet, we were still on it, going faster and faster. If we didn’t lift off the ground soon, we’d surely run out of asphalt. How fast did we need to be going before flight was possible? Were all planes different? This box of a plane didn’t seem aerodynamic at all. Maybe I’d said that already. My fear wasn’t much different from Allison’s in this particular situation. Give me JetBlue any day. But a military person with a private license did absolutely nothing to ease my…uneasiness.

The plane left the runway and the nose angle upward. We were up and flying, rising into the sky. I closed my eyes and tried to picture it. I wanted to be up front in the cockpit. I did not like not having control of the situation. Our souls were in Palmeri’s hands. Despite the steady drone from the engines, I heard a “woot, woot” from the cockpit.

Would she risk all of our lives if she didn’t feel somewhat confident that she could do this? Did we really have any other choice?

We did. We had another choice. We’d left a pretty safe Humvee by the hangar. We could have taken roads and back roads and driven through New York, and Pennsylvania and made our way west, toward the Mississippi, across it and eventually further south to Texas, and eventually reached the Mexican border. The walls I felt sure would protect non-infected humans from the spreading virus that plagued our country, and other countries as well.

The plane tilted to the left, a hard turn in the sky. There were no ground control or radio towers to assist with navigation. Erway used the maps that must have been in compartments or drawers. They were all Palmeri had to rely on to get us as far south-west as we could go before this thing used up the last of its fuel.

“How are you doing?” I said.

Allison tried to smile. She squeezed my hand harder than Julie had during child labor. “I just want to get this flight out of the way.”

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Try to sleep.”

She grunted.

I looked at my daughter. “You okay?”

“Not at all,” she said.

I pursed my lips into a thin smile. It was an honest answer. Raw and open and honest. If she’d said she was fine, she’d of been lying. I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head.

She rested it against my chest as best she could, straining slightly against the seatbelts restraints.

#  #  #

I had arrived to work early, was having coffee in the break room with Allison. A few other people were in there as well. Outside, a blizzard raged. The snow accumulated several inches an hour for the last seven hours. Snow plows and salt trucks couldn’t keep up and were running out of places to push the snow.

The supervisor, Milzy, came off the work floor and into the break room. “Guys want some overtime?”

I looked at Allison. She shrugged. She held up her coffee, a way of saying no.

“Sure,” I said.

“Grab a phone,” he said. “We’re like twenty calls in queue.”

I’m not exactly sure what people thought. When it was busy, there were only so many telecommunicators to answer calls. Once all lines were tied up, callers waited for the next available person to answer. There were not countless people sitting around waiting to answer ringing phones. So pissed off people often contacted reporters for interviews to express their dissatisfaction with the city. Wouldn’t change anything. Let them complain.

As I plugged in my headset jack and began logging onto the various systems and terminals, I remembered the tiny earthquake we had once. We were backed up over a hundred calls. People were calling us from all over the county.

“Nine-one-one center,” I’d said.

“I think we just had an earthquake.”

“Do you need police, fire or ambulance?”

“Me? No. I don’t. But I’m pretty sure we just had an earthquake.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, yes.”

“Ma’am, why are you calling nine-one-one?”

“Because, I told you, I think we just had an earthquake.”

“If you’re all set, ma’am, I have to answer more emergency calls. Are you all set, ma’am?”

“I, um. Yes. I guess I am.”

Call after call came in like that. Eventually, we answered them all, and called back all the people who called in, but hung-up. It goes like that all the time. That doesn’t stop squeaky wheels from demanding their oil.

Once logged in, I glanced at the prompter. We were now thirty calls in queue. I went Ready. Phone rang. I answered it. “Nine-one-one center?”