Coldbrook(72)

There’s love, she thought. Unselfish, unconditional. I’ve had love like that. The idea filled her with a brief, irrational sense of elation, and she squeezed Sean’s hand. He squeezed back.

They crossed a grass verge and headed onto another runway. This one was empty, and beyond it lay several wide taxiing routes where two large aircraft were parked. One of them had a mobile staircase against its side, and the door was open.

Limbs aching, joints screaming at her to slow down, stop, rest, Jayne looked behind her again.

‘Sean, three more!’

‘We’ll outrun them.’

‘They’ll see where we’ve gone – what if they can communicate?’

‘Run on.’ He let go of her hand and Jayne ran on, but then turned and slowed, walking backwards so that she could watch.

Sean shot a woman, used two more bullets to down a teenager wearing a Ramones T-shirt and a lipless grin, and when he fired at the last man his gun clicked on empty. He cursed, ducked, and drove his shoulder into the man’s midriff, standing and using the zombie’s momentum to propel him up and over. The zombie landed on his back with a dull thud, and before he could stand again Sean was stomping on his head, crushing it.

Jayne ran towards the aircraft, swallowing down bile. Her vision swam. Smoke stung her throat and nose, and her eyes were watering. There was a bus parked a hundred feet from the plane’s left wing, and she kept a wary eye on it.

‘Let me go first!’ Sean said from behind her. She slowed, he overtook her and grabbed her hand again, and then they were at the foot of the stairs. Panting, he slammed a fresh magazine into his gun and started up the staircase. ‘Wait halfway up. Stay ready to run back down.’

Jayne nodded and sat on a stair, watching him climb and then looking back the way they had come. She hoped there had been more escapees, but she could see none. Scores of frantic figures were gathered around the plane’s exits, climbing the deflated chutes, falling back as those trapped inside struck them with feet or chairs or metal food canisters. A food trolley was shoved from one door, taking several clinging attackers with it. The forward door had been pulled shut again, and she wondered what was happening inside right now. She could see movement through the windows but could make no sense of it. Fighting to the last.

‘Jayne,’ Sean called from above. ‘Come on.’

She climbed the last few stairs and entered the aircraft, standing beside the marshal where he kept his gun at the ready.

‘Got to shut this door.’ As he did that, Jayne stumbled towards the front and sank into a seat, starting to giggle when she realised this was the first time she’d ever been in First Class. She picked up some cutlery from a seat tray – real stainless steel, not the plastic stuff she was used to – and giggled some more. And when Sean appeared and raised an eyebrow she showed him the knife, and laughed so much that it nearly made her sick.

Sean checked the aircraft three more times before declaring it clear.

They sat together, drinking orange juice and eating cold chicken curry, and then Jayne raided the First Class kitchen and found the drinks store. They cracked open a bottle of wine. They said little, because they could still hear the sounds of chaos from outside. Looking across to the aircraft they had abandoned, they saw that both starboard doors had been closed, and now and then they could make out vague movement inside. ‘Survivors,’ Sean said, but Jayne could only imagine the alternative – that they’d somehow locked all the doors without realising that the contagion was inside, and now it was an aircraft filled with zombies.

Sean tried his cellphone constantly but he could find no signal.

Their aircraft had been stocked and prepped for flight. The seats were neat and tidy, kitchen lockers filled with ready-meals waiting to be warmed, and Sean said the fuel tanks were probably full.

‘Don’t suppose you know how to fly a 757?’ he asked.

They’d finished one bottle of wine and started on a second before Jayne asked him to finish his story.

Sean looked at the gun on the small folding table he’d brought out of his seat. He rubbed his glass back and forth across his lip, then drained the red wine in one swig.

‘Does it matter any more?’ he asked.

‘Sure. You saved me. It matters to me.’

‘But why’d you want to know?’

Jayne shrugged, because there was no clear answer to that. ‘My granny told me never to trust a man with scars.’

Sean touched his cheek. ‘I was a cop in New York,’ he said at last. ‘I saw the towers come down, felt pretty hopeless. I’d put my years in, so I handed in my notice to become a sky marshal. Felt like that was taking action. Stupid, maybe.’

‘Not stupid,’ Jayne said. ‘So is that how you got . . .?’ She touched her own cheek.

Sean snorted softly. ‘Last week on the job, some drunk in a Greenwich Village bar took a swing at me. Still holding his glass.’

Jayne couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Shitty luck, pure and simple.

Sean glanced around for the wine bottle, poured some more, and then paused. In the distance an aircraft’s jets roared.

All the time they’d been hidden away no other aircraft had landed. Last one out of Knoxville, last one back to Hell, Jayne had quipped. They had seen fires in the distance, watched blood-covered people rushing across the airfield, and there had been a series of explosions from the main terminal.