Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

A few more miles passed underneath their tires.

“I miss you. Mike,” BT said almost silently as they passed out of North Carolina and into Virginia.

“Me too,” Gary said even quieter. The first words he had uttered in an hour.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mike Journal Entry 6

I honestly thought John was full of shit, right until we pulled up to the gates of the municipal airport. He made me take a right towards one of the smaller hangars; once we stopped, he grabbed the keys out of the ignition and walked over to the hangar where he opened up a door to the corrugated steel building.

It was darker inside, but the windows high up in the building let in sufficient light. There it was, a helicopter that wasn’t much bigger than some of the ones I’d seen hobby enthusiasts remote pilot. John went over to it and began to lock the props in place—they had been folded in for storage.

“I’ll be honest, John, this seemed like a much better idea when we were underground.” I was having serious reservations. Here was a guy that said he couldn’t get his shit together enough to drive a van, but could apparently pilot a toy helicopter.

“It’s perfectly safe,” John told me as he almost took off the top of his head with the blade, by walking into it. “Help me wheel it out.”

Me helping ended up, me doing, as he went over to the large hangar door and began to pull it open. It was surprisingly easy to move, but I don’t know why I would be expecting anything else from a helicopter made from spare Erector Set parts. I pushed it some twenty feet away from the building thinking that was plenty of clearance, then I went another fifty.

“You see the checklist?” John asked me.

I shook my head.

“Doesn’t matter,” he told me as he climbed in.

“Trip, I beg to differ. They have those checklists for a reason, like for checking the fuel level or ice on the wings or shit, man, like a bunch of other stuff.” I was stalling, because all of a sudden, the tunnel looked welcoming. Well not really…but at this point it was like splitting very fine hairs.

“No time to go through the list anyway,” John said as he powered the copter on. “Might want to duck and get in.” The blades began to whir to life. He tapped lightly on his instrument panel. “Hey do you know what that one checks?” he asked.

“I have no fucking idea, Trip, except it looks like it’s in the red.” I had been in the middle of getting in and was now in the middle of getting out.

“I wouldn’t,” John said to me, never looking past his instruments.

“Huh?” I asked. I should have known better.

He pointed back and to the right of our present location, zombies were flooding in our direction.

“Oh shit!” I said as I saw the swarm. “How long until we’re airborne?”

“I don’t know, man, I’ve never seen the reason to time it. Sure could go for a little Mary Jane.”

“Task at hand first, buddy, task at hand,” I said to him, trying to gauge how much time we had before we were engaged with the zombies. “More than half a minute?” I asked, trying to press him for information he didn’t have.

“Time is just something the man made to keep us all in line,” he said as he pressed more buttons on his console.

“Trip, I understand your frustration with the mythical man .”

“Oh, he isn’t mythical.”

“Okay, sorry, but we may need to ditch the copter.”

“Almost there,” he said.

“The zombies or being in the air?”

He didn’t elaborate. I started to get back out.

“Where you going?” John asked.

I had sarcasm all lined up, but I knew John wouldn’t catch it and I didn’t have time for an explanation.

“Zombies, Trip, I have to slow them down.”

“Whoa,” he said as he looked back. “Where’d they come from?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was the one that had pointed them out to me.

“You should make them into mannequins.”

“What?” I asked looking at the approaching horde and the blades that were lazily spinning, more from the breeze it appeared than any mechanical function.

“Like at the motel.”

Why in the hell was I having John the Tripper tell me how to get out of situations? This was like having a dog (not Henry) help me with algebra. (Who am I kidding? The dog could probably do it better.)

I no sooner took my tin foil hat off, when my head was blinded with white noise to the point where I was placing my hands over my ears in a desperate attempt to keep the noise out. On the periphery of my vision I could hear John telling me to put the hat back on, but it wasn’t registering as a cognitive thought. I was hearing the words, but could not associate them with a meaning. I was falling out of the copter. John grabbed me and placed the hat back in place; blissful, beautiful silence filled the void of confusion. That was ultimately replaced with the slap of feet on pavement, and with that thought came the realization that we were still under attack. John was busy reaching over me and putting on the flight harness so that I wouldn’t swoon out again.

The blades of the copter had picked up speed, we weren’t moving yet, though. And the zombies were a football throw away and not an Eli Manning heaving toss it up type of pass, but more the workings of something I’d let loose. I undid my buckle.

“Where you going, man? We’re almost up,” John said.

“No time, my friend. I just want to say thank you.”

John’s eyebrows were pulled tight as he tried to figure out what I was talking about. The blades of the copter reached terminal velocity as the small craft bucked forward. “You should get in,” he said as he placed his hand over the yolk.

I took one quick glance at the zombies, confident in the fact that we weren’t going to make it and still I jumped in the craft, my weight pushing it back down. It made another hop when the lead zombie ran headfirst into the spinning blade—blood sprayed in a complete three-sixty around the craft as the zombie’s force pushed us forward.

“How many more of those can we take?” I asked John as another zombie ran into the tail; the smaller rear rotor caught it underneath the chin and split its head in two from bottom to top. Why I felt the need to watch was beyond me. I hadn’t thought that there was anything left on the planet which could gross me out. I was woefully wrong.

The copter was being pushed forward from the assault; blood and brain matter was falling like a soft rain all around us. If a zombie came from the side, I was fairly certain it would knock us over. At that point I was hoping for death by scalping. The bottom of my stomach dropped out as we briefly popped into the air. John was stirring the yolk like he was churning butter.

“Hold on!” John whooped. He was laughing crazily.

I didn’t have time to stripe my pants as we once again popped up, this time a good five feet. But we had a stowaway and she was threatening to pull us back down to her brethren. John made the necessary correction to keep us level even with our hitcher, but her added weight was keeping us dangerously close to terra firma. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, she was probably doing us a favor.

John had turned the helicopter around and we were now heading back towards the majority of zombies and the hangar. I was gripping my seat hard enough to make my hands hurt. John had tears running down his face he was laughing so hard. Our unwanted passenger’s feet were slamming off the faces and heads of the zombies below us. I was involuntarily pulling my legs closer to my body. All it would take would be a zombie with enough dexterity to reach up and grab our clinger and we would plummet like a kamikaze. John was just thinking this was the funniest thing since just about ever.