In the distance, hovering at maybe one hundred feet above a small park, we watched as the chopper started to spin completely out of control. The tail hit first, flinging the rotor directly through a small yellow slide nearby. The nose came crashing down, crumpling under the force of its own weight. The two blades on top smashed into the grass at the same time, sending the entire thing hurtling into the rest of a nearby wooden playground.
I braked the Hummer just as a massive cloud of dust and debris rocketed into the air. The ground was consumed by thick black smoke. I wouldn’t think that anyone could have lived through that.
There are moments in our lives when time is divided into two parts. Before an incident, and after. These moments are usually life changing, and you can always look back on them, knowing that they existed. Very rarely do you know they are happening at the time.
My parents dying when I was in grade school, meeting Jenn, finding out we were pregnant – all significant moments, and each of them propelling me off into a different direction. Later, I would realize that this was one of those moments. This was one of those times where the pot would get stirred once again, and it all started with a scream.
The moment we opened our doors, we heard someone frantically calling from inside the downed chopper. Kyle and I made our way as close as we could, but the fumes from the leaking fuel filled the air. The twisted metal body was sitting on its side.
Kyle ran up a small wooden ladder that led him to the top of the broken playground. He was just high enough to look down through the open door that now faced the sky.
“He’s alive!” he said, shielding his eyes to see better.
I darted over to the front of the chopper, where the blood soaked windshield lay shattered. The copilot was missing his head, and his body was badly mangled. I could see movement in the midsection of the chopper, but could not make out exactly what was happening.
Kyle’s vantage point was better, and I could hear him yelling down to the person trapped inside
“We’ll get you out. Don’t panic!”
“Don’t panic my ass! I’m trapped in here with one of them!” came the frantic yet pain filled reply.
“Where?” Kyle demanded.
“It’s pinned between one of the seats and a wall, but it’s getting loose!” the guy yelled breathlessly.
I made my way up beside Kyle. The platform we stood on was actually part of a pretend pirate ship, complete with a skull and crossbones flag waving in the air. Quite fitting, if not a bit ironic.
Peering in, I could see the zombie pilot, still wearing his helmet, pinned at the front of the chopper. His arms were just inches from the guy, who appeared to have a gut wound. He had one bloody hand on his stomach, and the other on a metal case.
I looked nervously around the park. The crash had been loud, too loud. The sun was just peeking up over a large hill and I could see a bunch of the undead’s silhouettes moving towards us as they came charging over the hill along with it.
“Now or never,” I muttered. Kyle dropped in through the open side door. The pilot had his hands clutched around his would-be victim’s shoe when Kyle kicked the thing in the face, knocking the zombie’s helmet off.
After unlocking the guy’s shoulder strap, Kyle lifted him up to me. I reached down and hefted him through the side door. Trying to stand at the top of the play set, the man’s legs buckled causing him to collapse to the wood. Just as I started to pull Kyle up, the dead pilot ripped his own leg off in an effort to get at him. Kyle gave several hard kicks as his eyes urged me to hurry. I gave a final heave just as he hooked his foot on the edge. We slammed back against the play set, scrambling to get away. I didn’t know how long that thing would stay in there, but I certainly wasn’t going to find out.
With a grunt, Kyle slung the man, still clutching his metal briefcase over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Down the stairs, and around a tire swing, we made it to the Hummer just as the horde of creatures began to close in around the chopper.
I opened the back door, and Kyle threw him in. We both climbed into the front seats just as the first zombie reached us. It was dressed in a suit, not unlike the one I was wearing. We felt the front and back tires sequentially bump up into the air as I drove over Mr. Suit.
We traveled a number of miles, passing various groups of zombies; some of which had a couple dozen; others we passed only had a two or three. Knowing that we would not be able to stop for any real length of time, we tried to put as much distance between the last one we saw and ourselves before we pulled over to tend to our passengers wound. In the meantime, I had handed him my boss’s old coat, and Kyle applied as much pressure as possible to his stomach to slow the bleeding. I wondered how long it would take him to change from human to zombie. I couldn’t shake that thought.
A mile or so in, the guy stopped screaming. I glanced back, sure that he was dead. He was an older gentleman, still in great shape for his age, and had a full head of silver hair. He lay bleeding all over the back seat, clutching his briefcase as if his life depended on it. Kyle and I were discussing where to head when the man began to speak.
“Water. Do you have any water?” he croaked.
I looked back at him, and saw blood pooling on the floorboards, as Kyle reached into the small cooler and pulled out one of the bottles we scavenged the day before.
Twisting off the cap, he tried to hand it to him, but the old man couldn’t lift his hand to grab it. Instead, Kyle reached over and poured some into his mouth. He tried to swallow, immediately choking on the liquid, and shot blood splatter across the back of the front passenger seat.
Minutes later, he passed out from shock.
Kyle and I drove for twenty minutes or so in silence. We passed a number of wrecked cars, a downed power line and the remains of a small house that had burned to the ground.
When we were convinced that we had taken enough turns and detours to shake even the smartest zombie, we began looking for a place to pull over. We finally found a small bridge that had an access road, which twisted down to a sewer drainage system below. Agreeing that it would be a good place to hide, we parked under the bridge and positioned the Hummer so we could see one hundred yards or so in both east and west directions.
We pulled the old man out of the back of the vehicle, and laid him down on the concrete floor of the bridge. He was breathing, but just barely.
Kyle tore open his shirt, and we saw that there was something lodged in the right hand side of the old man’s stomach, keeping the wound open, allowing the precious red-black liquid to pour from his body.
Kyle pulled out the less than adequate emergency kit that we had scavenged, and rummaged through the Band-Aids and Neosporin before he found a small needle and thread.
Taking a nearby stick, and shoving it sideways into the old man’s mouth, he asked me to put my hands over the guy’s face to keep him from screaming too loud and alerting any nearby creatures.
The gentleman’s eyes went wide, as he woke up in that instant, and realized what we were about to do. Kyle reached down, and grabbed the end of the metal object in his gut and carefully pulled it out. The man’s eyes closed hard, and he tried to scream through the stick and my hands, his entire body tensing and arching into the air.
Kyle fell back before he regained his balance and began sewing up the wound with the needle and thread. Still trying to scream, the man’s face was bright red, and had a mix of tears and sweat running down to the pavement, when he finally passed out again.
Kyle was no expert, and this guy was going to have a nasty scar, but he was able to close up the hole. Only time would tell if we did it soon enough.