Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘Honey, we’ve come all this way,’ Vic said. He meant from Cincinnati, but when Lucy smiled he thought back to the very first time he had set eyes on her, when he had fallen for that smile.

‘I’ll go in upwind, from the south,’ Gary said. ‘But it’s still going to be bad. I’ll do a flyover. You all need to be looking, because I’m going in low and all my attention will be focused on not hitting anything.’

‘What are we looking for?’ Lucy asked.

‘Anyone alive.’ Marc had produced a gun from his bag and placed it casually across his lap. Vic saw Olivia’s eyes straying that way. They went wide.

‘Where’s your gun, Daddy?’ she asked.

He thought of every way he could answer that: how to protect her, to shield her. But he realised that he was still thinking safe thoughts, from a time when safety was a very different thing. Baseball matches were cancelled, Oprah was not on air, and the schools were closed today.

‘It’s here,’ he said, pulling the M1911 from his belt. ‘And Daddy uses this to make sure that no one ever, ever hurts you.’

Olivia nodded, her eyes still wide.

Gary flew them in at about five hundred feet, curving across the southern part of the airport and keeping away from the blazing terminal buildings. Small explosions were erupting in there all the time, terrible flowers of flame and smoke, and the eastern concourse was also ablaze. Several large airliners burned fiercely in islands of fire and wrecked fuselages. Vic hoped they had been empty when they’d exploded but realised that it probably didn’t matter.

‘If they were trapped in a plane they might have left by now,’ Vic said. ‘Who’d want to stay here?’

‘Someone who had to,’ Lucy said. ‘Gary, swing around again, take a wider sweep further from the fires.’

Vic raised his eyebrows at Lucy, surprised at her sudden involvement. She offered him a nervous smile, resting a protective hand on Olivia’s leg.

‘Further from fire sounds good to me.’ The helicopter banked and curved around to the south.

‘What did you see?’ Vic asked. But Lucy was frowning, shaking her head.

‘Something that didn’t register,’ she said. ‘But it’s bugging me.’

The stench of smoke already filled the cabin. Olivia coughed. She seemed more scared than before, and Vic guessed it was to do with the sudden flurry of activity. Until now the little girl had been sitting with her parents on a long helicopter ride, and maybe it had even been exciting for her. Now there was smoke and fire, and a burning airport.

‘It’s okay,’ Vic said, pressing his mouth to her ear.

‘There,’ Lucy said. ‘That plane down there, close to the grass verge. Furthest one. See it? Do you see?’

‘I see it,’ Marc said. ‘But what am I looking at’

‘Not the plane,’ Vic said, understanding at once. ‘Gary, take us lower.’

‘Oh, shit,’ the pilot whispered. He had seen it as well.

They hovered two hundred feet away, maybe a hundred feet off the ground, and countless eyes turned their way.

‘Must be a thousand of them down there,’ Vic said.

They surrounded the aircraft, most of them motionless, a few sitting or lying down because of the damage done to their bodies. They all turned their heads to watch the helicopter, and some were now walking their way, a few of them running.

Though they were well off the ground Gary took them a little higher.

Vic saw a couple of battered police vehicles and noticed that one of those running at them was a big man wearing a torn uniform. His face had gone, replaced with a dark mask of dried blood.

Olivia had pressed her face against Vic’s side and he held one hand to the side of her head, just in case she peeked. He wished someone would screen his eyes from the view as well.

‘They’re just waiting there,’ Lucy said.

‘Maybe they’ve got nowhere else to go,’ Gary suggested.

‘Or maybe they know that someone’s alive in there,’ Marc said. ‘Look!’ He pointed, and Vic saw the faint flicker of a weak light being turned on and off inside the plane. ‘Gary, any way we can signal them?’ Marc asked, and Gary swung the helicopter left and right three times.

‘Okay,’ Lucy said. ‘So.’

Many of the shapes were below them now, looking but not reaching up, aware in some animal way that they could not touch the helicopter yet knowing that there were people inside. Vic could see their faces, devoid of emotion. He could see the dried blood. They were dead but walking, and they wanted to bite his family.

‘Fuck them,’ Vic said, his voice shaking. ‘Fuck them all. We put down and shoot them, and then get to the plane and-’

‘How many bullets do you think we have?’ Marc asked him, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

Gary lifted them a little higher and swung in a circle around the besieged jet. The zombies watched.

‘What if we land a few hundred feet away?’ Vic said. ‘Sit there, wait for them to come at us. Then take off and land back here.’

‘No,’ Marc said. ‘We can’t assume that whoever’s inside will know what we’re doing. We don’t know if they’re hurt. And if it is the girl we’re after and she has been bitten. .’

‘Are we just going to let her on board?’ Lucy asked. ‘Without checking?’

‘No,’ Vic said. ‘No way.’ He stared at Marc when the tall man looked back. He squeezed Olivia tighter.

‘Fine,’ Marc said. ‘Gary, got a rope or a ladder in this thing?’

‘Yeah.’

Vic swallowed hard. What the fuck? But something had to be done. His legs ached from inaction, and his heart throbbed with the need to make amends. To Lucy and his daughter, for deeds unspoken; and to everyone else. I’d be dead if I’d stayed in Coldbrook , he thought, but ‘if’ was no defence.

‘Where is it?’ Vic asked.

Vic sat in the helicopter’s open doorway, gripping the door’s handle with both hands while Gary manoeuvred closer and lower. Beneath them the hordes were stirring, some of them now even reaching up, unlike before, as though to snatch the helicopter from the sky.

‘This is as low as I go,’ Gary said in his earpiece, and Vic took a look down. They were hovering above the aircraft’s wide wing, and either side of the wing he could see what awaited him if he slipped and fell. The zombies’ hands, clawed and ready to rip and tear. Their open mouths, showing expression only with the bloodied teeth they contained. Marc was strapped safely into the seat beside him, ready to lean from the doorway and give him covering fire with his rifle. Shoot me if I fall , he wanted to say, but Lucy still had her headpiece on, sitting behind him in the cabin and shielding Olivia from the roaring, smoke-laden wind.

‘Won’t be long,’ he said instead, and he and Marc locked stares. Marc nodded once. Maybe he already knew what his responsibilities were.

Vic kicked the coiled rope ladder from the door. It unfurled and landed on the wing, much of it still rolled up. He looked at the aircraft again, and at the faces watching from the window of the emergency door leading onto the wing. They looked as nervous as he felt.

He turned around onto his belly and eased himself out of the door. As his feet found the ladder Lucy’s words surprised him, soft as a breeze in this storm.

‘Come back to us.’

‘Put the coffee on,’ he said, but he could not look at his wife and child again. Not until he was back.

Vic started to climb down. When he was a kid he’d had a tree house in his grandparents’ garden. Something straight out of Huckleberry Finn , his grandfather had claimed, but Vic had always seen himself as Calvin and the tall childhood friend he hadn’t thought about in thirty years had been Hobbes. ‘If you could see me now,’ he said, and he wondered what had become of Hobbes and where he was. As kids, they had both negotiated the rope ladder up to the tree house with ease, and his grandfather had said that such a thing was like riding a bike. All about balance and confidence. But they hadn’t had a buffeting wind to contend with, nor a motor roaring so loud that the noise felt like a physical impact. And if they’d fallen there’d only have been cuts and bruises, and fallen leaves clinging to their clothes.