“Come on!” Neil shouted.

  Grace took hold of my hand next and I pulled, dragging her onto the wing. She climbed in back next to her daughter and wedged the gear bags and weapons between them as best she could.

  “Close the door!” Neil said, the engines already revving.

  I slipped into the right seat and pulled the door shut as my friend firewalled the throttle. Looking past him I saw the truck slide sideways a hundred yards from us, tipping almost over as half of its wheels slipped into a drainage culvert masked by snow. A handful of the people in its back tumbled out as the vehicle bogged down abruptly.

  “This is going to be a short takeoff!” Neil shouted. “I don’t want to pass over them!”

  He sped the plane onto the taxiway, retracing the now faint tire impressions that Jack Miner had made when landing some days ago. At the intersection with the wider runway he swung the plane hard right, aiming us southeast.

  “Here we go!”

  I looked over the seat. Grace was buckling Krista in, her fingers fumbling with the belt latch. Past the child and through the left side window I could see the truck in the distance, and the now dismounted troops, which is what they clearly were. And from the group of identically uniformed fighters I began to see flashes.

  “They’re shooting!” I said loudly to Neil, leaning close.

  Ahead of us, puffs of snow erupted into the air as rounds impacted the runway. The instinct was to swerve, but Neil kept us straight, accelerating along the slushy pavement.

  “Faster, baby,” Neil urged the aircraft. “Come on. Go. Go.”

  The landing gear churned through the snow, spinning faster, the speed increasing. But the end of the runway was racing at us. Fast. And rounds from the troops behind were still slicing past the aircraft, maybe even into it, a possibility that we might only discover too late.

  “Fifty five knots,” Neil said, reading out the speed. “Sixty. Come on.”

  There was no more time. Even skimmed with snow, the end of the runway was plain and abrupt, a ground level cliff that we were about to plunge off of.

  “Sixty-five...”

  “Neil...”

  He drew the yoke back, gently, the nose shuddering as it lifted, then the rest of the aircraft rose from solid ground into the air. What shaking there had been subsided as we climbed. I looked to the instrument panel and found the speed indicator, passing ninety now, and climbing steadily. One hundred. One hundred and five.

  We were on our way.

  Twenty

  We continued to gain altitude, rising into low, broken clouds, the clear blue sky above them warmed by the morning sun.

  “We’re okay,” Neil said, glancing back to Grace, his chest still heaving, heart pounding. “We’re okay.”

  She might not have heard him over the engine noise, but she smiled. She knew. Neil had saved us.

  “Fletch,” he said. “There are headsets back there, and one at your feet.”

  I nodded and leaned over the seat, fishing the items from the floor beneath the gear we’d had to quickly stow.

  “Put these on,” I told her.

  There was a cord running from each, and jacks to plug them into so we could all hear one another over the constant drone of the engine. Grace slipped a headset over her daughter’s ears and tipped the boom mike up, out of position. She looked at me as she tucked the end of the cord between the seats, and I understood—there might be things said that little ears need not hear.

  I slipped into my headset, and Grace hers, Neil maneuvering his on as he maintained control of the aircraft. He looked over the instruments carefully, checking each.

  “Gear is up, we’re in good trim. Everything looks good. It looks really good.”

  From the seat behind me, Grace reached forward and across, putting a hand to Neil’s shoulder. He acknowledged it with a soft smile at first, the expression for only himself. Grace could not see it, but I could.

  I also saw what Neil did next, taking one hand from the yoke and reaching up to lay it atop Grace’s. The contact was unsolicited, and likely unexpected. Had the barrier between them begun to crack? Maybe. But the divide wouldn’t fully resolve itself in the skies over western Montana.

  Grace slipped her hand from Neil’s shoulder, letting him have full focus on the aircraft.

  “This is so odd,” Neil said, his words clear through the headsets.

  “What?”

  He replied to my question with a gesture to one of the small display screens on the instrument panel.

  “The GPS is registering no satellites,” he said. “None.”

  “Jack told us that,” I reminded my friend.

  “I know. I’m just trying to wrap my head around a complete shutdown of the system. Would they really do that just to keep people from reaching a place where a kid broadcasts over ham bands?”

  It was a question with larger implications than might seem apparent. For one particular reason.

  “I guess it depends on who ‘they’ are,” I told my friend.

  The child is a liar...

  The phrase rose again, without desire on my part. I had to remind myself that they were spoken by a man, a foreigner, who’d tried to kill us all. Men, woman, and child. Even if they were true, I had no way of knowing what the lie was. And I told myself, sailing through the clear air above my home state, that I would no longer entertain thoughts of it. Not until there was reason to.

  “Can you get the maps from my pack?” Neil asked.

  Hearing the request, Grace dug into his gear and had the small collection of atlases out almost before I reached back.

  “I’m going to take us south over Flathead Lake until we pick up the interstate,” Neil said.

  I opened the large softcover book that was a compilation of maps covering the Pacific Northwest and most of the Rocky Mountain states, essentially the upper left corner of the continental United States.

  “Once we reach that, we’re going to follow it,” Neil said. “We’re back to the days of barnstorming. Flying by looking down. Following highways. Towns and cities are landmarks that take us west. I’m going to need you to keep me updated on what’s ahead of us. Especially terrain.”

  The relevant map page was open on my lap. So was another. A larger representation of the route we’d be taking, with a scale at the lower right. I used that to estimate the distance we’d be covering following the route Neil had decided upon.

  “How far did Jack say we could go with the fuel onboard?” I asked.

  Before Neil answered he checked his fuel readout.

  “He thought two or three hundred,” Neil said. “I think it’s closer to three.”

  “How far will we get on that?” Grace asked. “I mean, where will that get us?”

  I used my thumb to transfer the scale approximation to the route that lay ahead of us.

  “If we stay following I Ninety we’ll make it past Spokane, Washington,” I said. “But not by much.”

  “What do we have there, Fletch? If we make it past the city?”

  I looked. In the old world there would have been two perfectly acceptable places to land. In the new world, we wouldn’t know until we got there.

  “We’ve got an Air Force Base, and before that, Spokane International Airport.”

  Neil seemed to chew on the information I’d just given him for a moment. Beyond the time it should take to pick one or the other.

  “There’s a chance,” he began, “that we might be able to take this plane more than three hundred miles.”

  His suggestion led to only one possibility.

  “You think we can refuel,” I said.

  ‘I think it’s a chance we take,” Neil said. “If we find fuel, we try it. Either the engine works, or it won’t.”

  “What if it works for a while?” Grace asked. “Then stops once we’re in the air because the fuel is bad?”

  That, too, was a possibility that had to be considered. But in my friend’s mind, it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle.

  “If we refuel, we run the engine for ten minutes on the ground,” he said. “If there’s going to be an issue because of what we put in the tank, it’ll happen by then.”

  Neil quieted for a moment, then gave a quick look to Grace and me.

  “Of course, this all depends on me landing this thing.”

  There was a hint of humor in his words, but it was gallows humor, just enough potential truth in it to make outright laughter inappropriate.

  * * *

  For the next two and a half hours we flew. South, then west, finding the interstate and following it between and over mountains. The whitish winter landscape turned grey brown as the aircraft carried us out of Montana and over northern Idaho, then into the extreme east of Washington State. The season was not yet in full force, the moist air rolling in from the Pacific fighting with the chilled air, dropping more rain than snow, the Spokane River raging as we flew over its namesake city, mudflows from denuded slopes upstream choking the tributary.

  “The city’s half flooded,” I said, looking below at inundated streets. “This shouldn’t happen at this time of year.”

  “Welcome to the new normal,” Neil said.

  Gthunk—

  The sound reverberated through the aircraft. It was akin to hitting a speed bump in the air, an instantaneous deceleration followed by an acceleration.

  “What was that?” Grace asked, leaning forward.

  Neil eyed the instruments, and as he did the sound repeated. It was coming from the front of the aircraft. I recognized it, or its earthbound twin, as something between and backfire and an engine not firing on all cylinders.

  “Fletch, find me the airport,” Neil said.

  I’d been practicing my navigational skills as we progressed west and was ready. A quick look at the map on my lap, and an even quicker scan of the terrain below gave me the answer my friend needed.

  “Left, heading two-fifty degrees.”

  Neil turned the aircraft, lining up on the bearing I’d given him. The engine sputtered again, louder this time. He lowered the landing gear, struts folding and wheels folding open beneath us.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Krista’s worry sounded small through her mother’s microphone, her own purposely left unplugged.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Grace said. “Neil’s going to land soon.”

  The engine coughed loudly, three times, the nose beginning to dip.

  “There it is,” I said, instinctively pointing forward toward the flat expanse beyond the city.

  “Thank God,” Neil said.

  The relief he expressed lasted just a moment as the airport, once a minor hub of international traffic, came into clearer view.

  “No...”

  Neil’s soft exasperation made me lean forward, closer to the windshield. Past the stuttering propeller I saw the runways, two of them, the length of each, and the taxiways that paralleled them, strewn with overturned cars, trucks, buses. Barriers were scattered about the lengths of concrete every hundred feet, creating an unusable patchwork of pavement.

  I thought quickly, glancing down at the map.

  “Fairchild Air Force Base, due west, four miles,” I said, my heart throttling up.

  “We can’t make that,” Neil said.

  As if to emphasize the point Neil had made, the engine cut out completely, prop spinning down, coming to a stop, just a flat, still blade on the nose of the aircraft.

  “We’re going down!” Neil shouted.

  Grace grabbed Krista and pulled her close. I braced myself, feet against the firewall, as the plane banked hard and nosed toward the earth.

  Twenty One

  “There!”

  Neil didn’t point as he yelled in the suddenly quiet aircraft cabin. But I tracked his gaze, finding a strip of roadway adjacent to the airport. It was long and straight, free of obstacles except for a string of power poles to one side.

  “Can you make that? Look at the poles.”

  “No choice,” he said.

  He turned the aircraft, fighting the controls, lining up for a dead stick landing, adjusting the Piper left, then right, wingtips dipping in either direction before leveling out.

  “Straight, baby, straight,” Neil willed the plane.

  The power poles drifted away from the roadway on the left, but a stand of dead trees encroached on the right.

  “Trees,” I said.

  “Got ‘em.”

  The aircraft wobbled, falling, nose aimed at asphalt, a double yellow line our centerline.

  “Here we go,” Neil said.

  I stayed focused forward, but reached back between the front seats toward Krista. She took my hand and squeezed tight as her mother held onto her.

  “You got this,” I told my friend.

  “Let’s hope so,” he said.

  We were there. Lined up. Almost on terra firma. Just a fast, expensive glider now as Neil pulled the nose up, flaring the aircraft just an instant before the main gear touched down, hard but not harsh. A few seconds later the nose wheel slapped asphalt.

  “Watch it!” I warned. “Watch it!”

  To the right, the clearance was inches. The tip of the wing skimmed past the thick, grey trunks of barren fir trees. Neil steered left just a hair, keeping us clear of any disastrous contact, the Piper rolling silently down the road, dead center, brakes slowing us finally to a gentle stop.

  The breath Neil let out was deep and loud, a lifetime he’d choked off in the last few minutes.

  “I’d like to not do that again,” he said, slipping his headset off.

  “I’m glad you did, though,” I said.

  I shed my headset and leaned across the seat, giving my friend a fast shoulder hug. He looked to the back seat. Grace and Krista both flashed relieved, appreciative smiles at him.

  “Let’s get out of this thing,” Neil said.

  * * *

  It was cold outside, not quite the chill we’d left in Montana, but close. We gathered near the front of the plane, taking in the landscape that surrounded us.

  “I still can’t get used to the quiet,” Grace said.

  Quiet wasn’t quite the word. Where once we would have heard the roar of jet engines pushing planes into the air, there was hardly more than silence. Even the chirp of a bird would have been welcome to erase the hollow reminder of death. Or the bark of a dog. The honk of a horn.

  There was none of that. Just the hush. The ever present scream of aloneness.

  Neil and I did a walk around of the Piper, weapons slung. Grace had left Del’s rifle—now hers—inside the plane, just a pistol on her hip as she watched over Krista, the little girl picking through colorful stones where the edge of the road dropped down into a gully.

  “You didn’t break it on landing,” I said to Neil.

  He gave no reply to my joke of admiration. I moved around to the side of the plane he was on and found him standing near the tail, gaze fixed on the vertical stabilizer.

  “Look.”

  Even if my friend hadn’t pointed a finger to direct me, I would have been able to see what he was—a trio of holes in the tail, closely spaced.

  “They got us,” I said, thankful that the damage, sustained during the volley of fire during takeoff, hadn’t stopped us. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Neil put a hand to the punctured metal skin, testing the damage and shaking his head.

  “It’s clear of the rudder,” he said. “I didn’t notice any vibrations or control issues.”

  So we’d dodged a bullet while not dodging three of them. We could do with a continuation of luck of that sort.

  “All we need now is fuel,” Neil said, looking across the field toward the airport complex, easily half a mile to the nearest perimeter fence.

  “You still want to try flying all the way?”

  He scanned the road up and down, appraising the makeshift runway.

  “Only thing stopping us is seventy-two gallons of fuel,” he said.

  “Barrel and a half,” I estimated. “Piece of cake, right? Find the fuel, a couple empty drums, fill ‘em, and edge roll ‘em over here.”

  “With a hand pump,” he added.

  “Of course,” I said. “Every post-apocalyptic flight across the country requires a hand pump.”

  My friend chuckled. It felt good to laugh, for both of us.

  But ours was not the only expression of glee cutting through the quiet right then.

  “Hehehehehehe...”

  We heard the woman before we saw her. Laughing in the dead woods alongside the highway.

  “Mom...”

  Grace stepped toward Krista and pulled her daughter close with one arm, her free hand coming to grip her holstered pistol.

  More laughter chattered, like a crazed bird. Neil and I came around the plane. He swung his shotgun around from where it was slung across his back. I took my pistol in hand.

  “Just one?” I asked.

  Neil nodded and brought his weapon up, tracking it toward the cackle growing louder. Drawing closer. Closer.

  Then she appeared, stepping from between withered trees, long flowery skirt over thick work jeans and mismatched boots. Her upper body was thickened by three layers of coats. A long knit cap dragged behind her head and down her back like some misplaced tail. Those were obvious features to notice, though not as notable as the pair of clear ski goggles she wore, a trio of thin clear tubes penetrating the gasket that sealed it to her face, each disappearing into a gaudy orange and purple pouch slung on her left side.

  “Hello!” she shouted, laughing again after the greeting, hands waving, boots clawing for purchase as she came out of the woods and worked her way toward us up the gully at the side of the road. “Hello!”

  Neil kept his shotgun low and ready. I held my pistol at my side and kept an eye on the woman’s hands. They were empty, just fingerless gloves, one black and one red, giving some protection against the cool morning. As she reached the crest of the roadway and scrambled to stand upright, I held a hand out toward her, palm flat, signaling her to keep her distance.

  She ignored it and headed right for Grace.

  “Hey!” I said, bringing my pistol up now. “Stop!”

  “Oh, I’m no trouble to you,” the woman said.

 

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