She never slowed, getting to Grace before Neil or I could do anything to stop her, short of shooting.

  Krista ducked behind her mother as the woman stopped close to Grace and stared at her, wide eyed, planting her half-gloved hands gently upon the stranger’s cheeks.

  “Oh, you are so clean,” the woman marveled, gaze gaping through the lenses. “So fresh and clean. And your skin is soft.”

  Rough fingers dragged over Grace’s cheeks, and she reached both hands up, seizing the woman by the wrists, stopping the odd pawing.

  “I’m no trouble to you,” the woman assured once again.

  “Who are you?”

  The woman eased her hands away as Grace released her grip. She tucked the hands together under her chin and looked to each of us, smiling, those balloon eyes seeming perpetually in some state of astonishment behind the lenses.

  “You don’t know just how wonderful it is to see you,” the woman said, almost giddy, her expression, her manner, turning almost child-like in a flash. “Everyone else is dead, you know. Dead and rotting, or dead and in tummies.”

  Krista closed her eyes and slipped fully behind her mother.

  “What is your name?” Neil pressed.

  “My name?” The woman puzzled for a moment at the question, those wide eyes swimming with uncertainty. “Name?”

  Her face tipped toward the overcast sky and, in a flash, her left hand slipped into the pouch slung at her side.

  “Hey!” I shouted, taking direct aim at the woman’s head.

  “Get your hand out where we can see it!” Neil ordered, his shotgun leveled for a clear center mass shot.

  Slowly, her face settled toward us again, but the hand remained in the bag and seemed to clench, squeezing something within. As it did, a spray of thick liquid squirted within the goggles, directed at her unblinking eyes. Clear goo dribbled over the blue pupils and dripped slowly from small drainage holes on the underside of the goggles, rolling down the woman’s reddened cheeks like slow motion tears.

  I grabbed her left wrist and jerked her hand from the bag. In it she held a small, vaguely opaque plastic bladder, tubes jabbed into it like some odd IV bag. The goo within coursed through the tubing with each pump of her fist.

  “What the hell is that?” Neil asked.

  Just behind us, Grace stepped away from Krista, reassuring her daughter with a touch on the shoulder, approaching the woman.

  “Let her go,” Grace said.

  I eased my grip and the woman drew her left hand back, bladder fisted in it, fingers stilled, the stream of tacky liquid no longer being pumped into the goggles.

  “It’s okay,” Grace said to the woman. “I’m a nurse.”

  I glanced to Neil, and could tell from his look that neither of us had any idea what Grace was doing. What had drawn her to the strange woman. Why telling her she was a nurse would matter. Then she took hold of the goggles and gently lifted them, revealing the woman’s eyes, and we knew. We saw.

  Her eyes had no lids. All that remained of those protective flaps of skin were irregular scars above and below the eye where they’d once been attached to both brow and cheek.

  Krista gasped and ran to Neil, huddling behind him.

  “It’s okay,” Grace repeated, examining the healed wounds, smiling softly at the woman. “You have to keep them moist, don’t you?”

  The woman nodded and slipped the bladder back into her pouch.

  “Did you do this?” Grace asked.

  “Of course,” the woman answered, the giddy demeanor she’d arrived with gone now, an embarrassed wariness washed in behind it. “You have to watch for them. Even when you sleep. If you don’t, they’ll get away.”

  Grace’s hands were on the woman’s cheeks, and felt them flush hot just as she drew her hand again from the pouch. A small, sharp knife was fisted in it.

  Neil shoved Krista to the ground as Grace began to stumble back from the woman, blocking his weapon. I was the one with a clear shot as the woman slashed forward with the stubby blade, missing Grace by inches.

  My shots, two of them, did not miss. One drilled through the left side of her chest, and the other the same side of her neck. She fell away from me and backward, tumbling into the gully, blood spraying as she rolled, arms flailing. At the bottom her body came to rest on its back, limbs askew, face smeared red from the arterial spray. She coughed once, then again, and then made no more sounds, her dead, wide eyes fixed on the darkening sky above.

  Krista pulled her knees up and hugged them where she sat on the road near the nose wheel of the plane. Grace scrambled toward her, but Neil grabbed her by the arm and lifted, pulling until she stood, facing him.

  “What the hell was that?” he demanded. “Why did you do that?”

  “I was trying to help her!”

  “You put yourself at risk!” Neil shouted back, then calmed a bit. “You can’t do that. Not anymore. Not in this world.”

  Grace jerked her arm from him, angry and sad all at once.

  “The world’s not turning me cold,” she told Neil. “Not if I can help it.”

  “She was trying to get close,” I told Grace. “To kill you. To kill us.”

  Grace looked down the slope at the woman who’d sliced her own eyelids off.

  “She was crazed,” Grace said.

  “You mean crazy,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “There’s a difference,” Grace said. “Crazy is. Crazed happens. She was driven to this state.”

  Neil shook his head, exasperated, taking a few steps away.

  “You want to treat everyone we come across like a homicidal maniac?!”

  With a sharpness I’d rarely seen in him, Neil whipped around toward Grace, shotgun leaning on his shoulder.

  “Yes! Yes I do! Because that is what the world is now!”

  I holstered my pistol and went to Krista, sitting next to her on the cold roadway and pulling her close. She slid her arms around my neck and sobbed dryly.

  “We might want to tone it down a bit,” I suggested.

  Neil turned away again and stomped down the road, then down the far embankment and into a dirty field. He stopped halfway across it, chain link fence beyond, airport runway past that.

  “He’s wound too tight,” Grace said, watching him. “I’m afraid he’s going to snap.”

  “He’ll be okay.”

  She looked down to me where I sat with her daughter, unconvinced.

  “I’ve known him a long time,” I assured her.

  “He sees danger everywhere,” she said.

  “There is,” I reminded her.

  She quieted for a moment, a sullen truth seeming to weigh upon her.

  “Then why are we even trying?” she asked. “And don’t feed me that line about hope.”

  I studied her for a moment, my concern shattering the sudden aura of defeat that had enveloped her. She turned back toward Neil as Krista stood and joined her mother.

  “He’s so busy worrying about saving us that he’s losing himself,” Grace told me. “He can’t go on like this. He can’t.”

  She drew a breath, then looked to her daughter.

  “Stay with Eric, sweetie,” Grace said.

  Krista nodded and shifted her position closer to me as her mother walked away from us and off the road, crossing into the wasted field where Neil stood. She approached him and stopped close, saying something too far away to hear.

  “My mom really likes Neil,” Krista said.

  “He feels the same,” I told her.

  Then we watched without saying anything as Neil tried to turn away from Grace, but she would not let him. She took his face in her hands, palms to his cheeks, and held him as she spoke, still more words known only to them. His head bowed a bit, inching toward her. She brought her face up to meet his and they kissed.

  “Finally,” Krista said, tipping her head against my shoulder where we sat.

  I had to agree, watching as the kiss, which lasted but a second or two, ended, my friend and Grace embracing once it was done. Holding each other, alone together as a cold wind blew.

  Twenty Two

  Neil and I found fuel at the airport. More than enough stored in a tanker that had been used to ram through a back gate by someone in a failed attempt at stealing the beast. Tires had blown in the process, leaving the beefy vehicle a useless wreck. Except for our purposes.

  In a mechanics’ bay we located a hand pump and filled a pair of empty drums pulled from one of the makeshift barriers blocking the runway, rolling them on their bottom edges a mile to where Grace and Krista waited for us at the aircraft. When we neared them, I could see that Grace had driven a small cross fashioned from fallen branches into the soft side of the roadway just above where the crazed woman had fallen.

  The both of us stopped, taking in the sight of the simple memorial, mother and daughter standing near it, holding each other.

  “Thank you, Fletch.”

  I looked to my friend, unsure of what his appreciation was offered for.

  “For what?”

  He never took his eyes off her as he told me, smiling soft and true through the answer.

  “For knowing.”

  It was more the sentiment in what he was saying than the words that made me understand. I had nudged him to accept his feelings toward Grace. There was no belief on my part that what I’d said before we’d fled my refuge had brought them finally together. What was in their hearts had done that. My friend was simply glad that I had been there for him, even when he hadn’t wanted me to be.

  We continued on to the plane, placing the barrels near the wings and getting to the laborious process of hand pumping the fuel into the plane’s tanks. By the time we’d topped them off, and Neil had fired up the engine, running it for the intended ten minutes to ensure its viability with the aged gas, we’d been on the ground for just over four hours.

  “How long to Seattle?” Grace asked as we buckled into the Pipe and donned our headsets, the engine idling loud and perfect.

  “Hour and a half,” I said, assuming my position of navigator once again, map for the next and, hopefully, final leg of our journey open on my lap.

  “Let’s get there,” Neil said, and throttled the engine up.

  The Piper picked up speed along the roadway, the knots of dead trees that had encroached on the right side thinning out until the minor plot of woods was nothing more than a few toppled trunks taken down by wind and weather.

  “How’s it feel?” I asked.

  “Good,” Neil said, glancing at the speed indicator, the number climbing steadily. “I think we’re okay, Fletch.”

  The road bumped beneath us, the aircraft riding over the slightly uneven surface without trouble, hardly jostling us within as Neil eased the yoke back again and took us into the air. The Piper climbed steadily, leveling off at a thousand feet above ground level, the interstate visible below, a building ceiling of clouds above.

  “We might get some weather,” I said.

  “No,” Neil countered. “No weather.”

  “You see what’s above us, right?”

  He did. It couldn’t be missed.

  “No weather,” he repeated. “We’re going to get there. Nothing’s going to stop us. Not now.”

  It was more than determination driving my friend, I sensed. It was purpose. I looked to the back seat, meeting Grace’s gaze, seeing Krista’s smile, and the reason for his certainty was clear.

  I turned back toward the windshield and flattened the map on my lap, working with my friend to get us to our destination.

  * * *

  Mt. Rainier rose into the afternoon sky to our left, and ahead, beyond the city coming into view, a collection of moonscape islands filled the sound. Once lush, they now lay there, dead and ashen.

  But what I really noticed was what lay below us, four lanes of blacktop cutting through the wasting woods, the altitude not enough to obscure what stretched across it at varying intervals.

  “Look,” I said.

  Neil glanced out his side of the plane, flying parallel to the interstate beneath us.

  “Those aren’t just random wrecks,” he commented.

  “Roadblocks,” I said, looking out again. “That at least means there are people.”

  “Who might not be amenable to visitors,” he said.

  Grace leaned forward, trying to pick up on our conversation.

  “Are we close?”

  I nodded at her. We’d made it. Seattle was a building vision in the near distance.

  “You want to try for King County Airport?” I asked Neil. “Closer to the city center than SeaTac.”

  Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was larger, but size mattered little now. We simply needed a runway that was clear of obstructions.

  “King County it is,” Neil said.

  We left our direct adherence to following Interstate 90 and turned southwest, cruising over Lake Washington, crossing the southern tip of Mercer Island, the long runway we were shooting for just beyond the wide expanse of Interstate 5. In five minutes we would be on the ground, that much closer to finding Eagle One.

  Then we saw the bright flashes on the ground near southern and western shore of the lake.

  Twenty Three

  The first burst blossomed in the air ahead of us like a black rose, expanding until it dissolved into the low, wispy clouds. Except for the concussion of its blast wave jolting the plane, the obvious shot of anti-aircraft fire was mesmerizing.

  “They’re shooting at us!” Grace shouted.

  Another shell exploded to our right, then another, shaking the aircraft with a double punch as compressed atmosphere slammed into us.

  But they weren’t the explosions of movie familiarity. They were bursting in shades of coal black, and bright blue, with sparkles of yellow and orange and red spreading across the sky ahead.

  “They’re fireworks,” I said. “Just fireworks.”

  “I don’t care what they are,” Neil said. “Any one of those hitting the right place can take us out.”

  We’d already taken fire when taking off from Kalispell, and been lucky that the hits we’d discovered later hadn’t caused any serious damage. Counting on good fortune continually was far from a smart course of action to take.

  “Get out of here!” Grace almost begged, Krista latched onto her, terrified. “Please!”

  “I’m trying!”

  He turned left, the plane banking sharply, a wall of clouds ahead. I looked out the right window as the aircraft leveled out and could see the ground below still erupting, rising from rooftops, from between buildings, streaks of fire rocketing skyward before blossoming, bright and dangerous.

  “I guess that means we’re not welcome,” I said.

  Behind, the last few blasts of aerial mortars faded, just distant thuds as we plunged into the clouds.

  “Was that Eagle One doing that?” Krista asked, her petrified voice bleeding through the microphone on her mother’s headset.

  “No, sweetie,” Grace said. “They wouldn’t do that.”

  The child is a liar...

  The promise I’d made myself to give those words no place in my waking moments was shattered by what had just happened, and by Krista’s innocent wondering. Still, there was no obvious, or even logical link between our ultimate destination and the attack that we’d just evaded. We’d only hoped that reaching Seattle would lead us to Eagle One. There was no guarantee that it, whatever it was, would be there. West was the only direction of certainty we had to go on, and that had been offered to me by a dead man.

  Del...

  West, he’d said. That was where the broadcasts from Eagle One were coming from. I wondered what Del Drake would do now, if he was here, with us, flying blind toward an unknown. An unmarked place on the map.

  Wait...

  What would he do? It was a simple question, with a blindingly simple answer. He would do what he did—reach out to them. As they had to us.

  “The radio,” I said, turning to Neil. “Does the radio work on amateur frequencies?”

  “Ham bands?” Neil said more than asked. “No. Aircraft frequencies are separate to avoid interference.”

  It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. We needed some way, some chance, to reach out to Eagle One again. Just like Krista had from my refuge.

  “There’s no way to just broadcast into the open, hoping someone will hear?”

  Neil shook his head at my suggestion. Just ahead, the clouds parted for a moment, a hint of terrain far below, highways snaking south, choked with wrecks.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Just like a ham radio you have to be dialed into a specific frequency. Something someone would be...”

  In an instant my friend’s demeanor changed, from resistant to energized.

  “...listening to.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Neil reached to the radio and turned it on before adjusting the frequency.

  “One-twenty-one point five,” he said. “International air distress frequency. Every airport monitors that.”

  “They’re not an airport,” I said.

  “We don’t know that,” he countered. “And you don’t have to be an airport. You can monitor aircraft frequencies on different radios.”

  Neil had a point. One that I hoped was more than just a shot in the dark.

  “Eagle One, Eagle One, come in,” Neil called out, pressing the transmit button on the yoke. “If you hear us, please come in.”

  My headset plugged into the co-pilot’s jack, I could hear any reply that came. All I heard was the hush below static. White noise.

  He put out the same call, with varying levels of pleading, but still received no response. To extend the range of the radio transmission, Neil climbed, taking the Piper up to near 10,000 feet, calling out again and again, listening and hoping.

  “Nothing,” he said, glancing back to Grace and Krista. “They’re not answering us.”

  Us...

  The thought struck me. His characterization of the failed attempt at communication was too broad. Eagle One, if they were listening, hadn’t neglected to answer us—they’d simply not answered him.

 

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