“She can only carry two.”
The weapons raise in his direction with accusations of lies.
“Hey, I’m just telling you the facts. You wanna stuff all four of us in there and try that’s fine, but it’ll be a real short trip, and none of us will hit the ground gracefully. You can pick one person to go or take your chances. Maybe I’m lying, but if I’m not, that’s a big risk.”
He didn’t mention the damage before, fearing it would limit the deal they made. He needed to get these men away from Addition first before letting them know that two will be walkingwhile only one flies. He only hopes the others don’t go back to the house. There is nothing he can do to stop that except hope their desire to reach Sedona overrides all else.
There’s a momentary lull before Vincent turns his weapon on his companions, dropping each with a bullet to the head without so much as a twitch of emotion. “Now we are two.”
That…is not at all what Wyatt expected to happen, but perhaps it should have been, all things considered. He has little care for his own blood, after all. Killing the others must be trivial.
“Do not mourn them.” He urges Wyatt into the plane cabin. “They had time to do the same to me and failed. Their weakness showed through. The new world will have no use for that. Only the strong and the practical will survive the rest of the downfall to rebuild anew.”
Did he ever consider doing the same to his own family once they became a burden? Wyatt has to suppress the urge to vomit as he secures himself into the captain’s chair and begins to wake up this old bird.
Perhaps, he thinks sadly, abandoning his family was a mercy if death was the only other option.
Wyatt could drop his passenger anywhere. It’s not like he would know the difference until he attempted to wander into Sedona, only to find himself several hundred miles in the wrong direction.
Briefly, he considers doing exactly that, but if he manages to survive, then Wyatt knows where he would show up next. Right back to that house to get his revenge. It’s not worth the risk, and so he attempts to fulfill his end of the deal. He flies in the direction of Arizona, watching the ruined landscape below transform from flat grasslands to towering snow-tipped mountains to a red sea of the harsh desert.
There are pockets of destruction along the way that are easy to spot, even from the sky. Larger cities are still burning from some recent altercation. Whole buildings leveled to rubble. The details are sparse from this height, but as they begin to descend and the quietest trip of his life heads toward an end, finally, the smaller aspects pop into view like the loading of a horrific video game.
Flagstaff may as well be wiped off the map for how uninhabitable it looks. Crashed planes along the runway litter the once quaint, if overcrowded, airport, and the freeway is worse than he expected, with a whole section of bridge hanging pitifully from an overpass.
The rumble of his engine must reach the ground as they continue south over more rural areas to crest the red rocks near Sedona, luring a large herd to turn toward the noise like wild horses beneath a helicopter. He’s flying blind with no GPS to guide him. When the edges of Cathedral Rock expand into view, he has to overcompensate to avoid nicking a wing on the jagged edges. The aircraft stutters at the sudden course correction, dropping a few feet to slam Wyatt’s stomach up into his chest cavity before righting itself again.
A few small herds of rotters scatter like sheep down below, trying to pinpoint the sound of his engine, and Wyatt wonders if there really is nowhere else left on this planet that’s safe anymore. Is every city like this now? Dropping this man off exactly where he wants to be may do the work of eliminating the threat all by itself if most of the population has already turned.
They haven’t spoken since they got in the air, and Wyatt is glad for that. Couldn’t stomach trying to have a casual conversation with someone who left his wife and child for dead, only to come crawling back a month later for fear of not finding another living woman to knock up. It’s only when the sound of a failing engine, combined with a telltale sign of smoke puffingoutside their window, brings one of those worst-case scenarios he worried about to life that he speaks to his captor.
“Gonna be a rough landing. Hold on.” If they land at all.
“You said it could make the journey!” Vincent yells, pointing his weapon uselessly, as if that may resolve the mechanical issues plummeting them toward what’s left of the earth.
Wyatt ignores him, knowing he has the advantage.
There’s a grumble before the gun disappears, and Vincent tightens the strap on his seatbelt as the plane nosedives. Wyatt really did think this old girl could get them there. She has come through for him long past what could have been possible. Taken him from Alaska to Wyoming to Denver and then straight to the woman he wishes he could see one last time, on that little farm in Kansas.
Fuck. Addison is going to assume he left her, too, if he can’t get back. Just like her husband did. Just like he admitted he had every intention of doing before she stole his heart.
He has never been afraid of crashing. Not when he first learned to fly. Not when the virus hit and the plane was damaged. Not even during a few close calls afterward. Not much to live for. Not much to fight for. Whatever his fate holds, he’s been ready to accept it. But right now, all that apathy toward his own life that he has grown accustomed to wallowing in vanishes in the wake of his desire to see Addison again.
The nose of the plane is determined to dip. He can’t find a strip or clear patch of land to glide into. It’s all abandoned cars and brittle desert trees down below, mocking him as he struggles to yank the front end back where it belongs. Fear grips him as tight as his hold on the wheel. As they descend closer and closer, his last thought before the ground rises up to meet them is that he should have told Addison he was falling in love with her before he went on a damn cross-country trip with her ex.
Chapter 18
The ache in his chest from the belt that kept him from flying through the busted windshield is what Wyatt feels first. It burns across his ribs and into his hips, and he lets out an undignified half-scream before fumbling for the button that releases him.
The air inside the cockpit smells like fuel and hot metal, all wrapped in melted copper. It makes his stomach turn. Dust hangs thick in the sunlight filtering through the spider-cracked glass.
The noise he makes is answered by the man beside him with a groan of his own. Wyatt watches, disoriented, as Vincent struggles to free himself from his own confines.
His captor is bleeding from a head wound, the crimson of it smashed against the glass beside him and coating his fingers. The gun is gone, likely having flown to some far corner of the mangled plane, and that’s when Wyatt’s attention sharpens through the shock of their ordeal.
The grumbling, pained cries of his forced traveling partner aren’t the only sounds filtering through the haze. When he looks past Vincent, there’s a small herd heading their way, tripping and stumbling over desert rocks and tree roots, teeth already snapping as they follow the commotion of a crashed plane in hopes of a meal.
They move with that familiar, awful persistence. The dead have the kind of patience that’s bound to outlive what’s left of the world.
