Project Airborne 3

So, currently Patreon is down for maintenance so readers are unable to go to the site to read the 3rd installment of Project Airborne the first draft and I am not sure when the site will be back up.

As a treat I will be posting the third chapter here in my blog.

Pedaling as hard as she could Kaige could barely breath as she saw her old office building coming into view, seeing it now made that day in August seem like a hundred years ago. Daring to look back there was nothing following her, running into that one corpse, it felt so bizarre to see just the one, not that Kaige didn’t feel grateful, normally the zombies moved in packs, like cattle grazing in the open, if she had run into more than just the one, Kaige knew that she wouldn’t have gotten away.

Slowing the back down Kaige looked up at the building that Chances was housed in, she remembered that day so clearly in her mind. When Kaige went to the main floor, she was afraid of what she would find. It was bedlam. Stephen was on the floor behind reception like he had just fallen out of his chair and gone to sleep on the floor. Pateints were laid out on the floor while others had been gathered into Miake’s office so that therapists could try to keep them calm. Megan and Tom were in her office. Tom holding her while she cried, a patient laid on the couch, they were right in the middle of a session.

Kaige remembered hearing her sobbing, “She was just here,” Over and over again, like Lauren had just disappeared in front of Megan, but her body staid behind. Then they were gone, Megan and Tom had a little boy, they had to get to her, that was the last time Kaige saw any of them.

Getting off the bicycle, she walked up to the bike racks and even in the post cataclysmic world she lived in, Kaige felt herself almost hesitate to park the bike out in the open. ‘Who’s going to steal it? You haven’t seen another human being in months.’ The sad face of the matter was that Kaige was beginning to believe that she might be the only one left.

Swallowing those bitter tears, if that was the case she wished she’d been taken during the first stage of deaths instead of living to see it all happen and the end of the world wasn’t at all the way that Kaige was brought up to believe. That day, when Kaige reached her apartment she turned on the news and watched in horror, so many survivors were sending in video footage of the moment when everyone just dropped on film. It was the rapture, Kaige was sure of it. Maybe they had just misinterpreted it all these years. God took their souls all at once, not their bodies.

She’d fallen onto her knees, praying as the tears spilled from her eyes, laying crumpled on the floor. In the blink of an eye God had just snatched them all up and those of them that hadn’t believed were left on earth to watch the rise of the anti-christ.

The news reporters were questioning if this was some kind of mass terror attack, but the government had no answers, but then, almost twenty-four hours later the same thing started happening in Canada, whatever it was, it was rapidly spreading across the globe and no one could prepare for it.

Pop up clinics opened all over the country in every city and every American citizen had to be tested, but no one knew what for and they were never given any answers to what the government was looking for. Seventy-two hours after the first stage of deaths the bodies began to rise and the hoards of corpses that woke were just too large to fight, they couldn’t be out run and the more people that survived the attacks, the virus or whatever caused the flesh craving undead spread further. It took less than a week for the fall of humanity to come to completion. They were out-numbered. People barricaded themselves into their houses, some tried to make a run for it, but there was simply too many of them. For every human, there were thirty of them, Kaige had seen it herself, the swarm of bodies looked like they were all caving in on one focal point in the center while the feeding frenzy took place right in front of you.

Mass suicides came as people lost hope, mothers and fathers poisoning their children and themselves, praying for peaceful deaths and for forgiveness from whatever was waiting for them on the other side. Kaige couldn’t say that she blamed them, children didn’t belong in this world, we were supposed to protect them from the horrors that literally roamed the streets and didn’t care if you were a kid. They just saw food.

Securing the bike so it didn’t fall and make a loud noise to attract one of the others Kaige cautiously went across the street, weaving through the abandoned cars to the Family Dollar store where she knew that they sold cigarettes because Kaige had bought packs there before. Taking out her flashlight Kaige pushed the door open and stepped inside headed straight for the cigarette carousel behind the counter, scanning the beam of her flashlight over the shelves noticing something that she hadn’t before at any of the other stores she got supplies from. People had been here before.

Maybe the store had been raided before, Kaige couldn’t say for sure, it didn’t look like anyone had been here very recently, that just meant she would need go scout another store. Using her light to see what she was doing Kaige grabbed the rest of the regulars knowing that they would taste hold, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Going down the rest of the isles she picked up canned goods from the shelves, those feminine necessities that no one liked to talk about, nor did they think about who much they took them for granted when they needed them and didn’t have them. She also found a Stephen King paperback novel that was added to her backpack as well before she made her return back to the bike parked in front of the Maple Street Market place and stopped, catching her reflection in the dirty glass.

There weren’t many instances where she looked in the mirror any more, why would she? Kaige looked at her face, it was somewhat thinner, but she wasn’t starving herself even though she tried to conserve her food supply as much as possible, more so it was the tense lines that made up the contour of her jaw and her cheek bones that changed her features. Her blue eyes were tired, red hair that was visible from beneath her cap looked like it had grown significantly longer, the last time Kaige noticed it, her hair was around the top of her shoulders and now it sat closer to chest level. Things like looks and appearance were no longer of importance, the order of the day was just to survive.

No longer looking at herself, Kaige tested the weight of her backpack on her shoulders thinking that she could probably get a little more inside of it before she went home she realized that there was a face staring at her in the windows reflection.

Gasping, Kaige’s facial expression must have started who ever it was because she jumped in surprise and turned around quickly and caught the flash of a person’s profile and shoulder as they darted out of sight. Kaige had been so preoccupied she hadn’t seen the small figure of a boy standing inside the building next door, her office building and there was someone alive inside, a living human.

Aside from the front entrance, when you went around the building there was a back door that was glassed in, normally when Kaige came in to work and she was alone she walked straight out of the market to the backdoor, which you needed a key to get inside of, and Kaige had a key.

Looking up at the windows, she knew exactly which windows belonged, and she’d never seen the blinds raised in the kitchen of Changes main floor and today, they were but she couldn’t see any movement from inside where she was on the ground. Getting her keys from her pocket, she picked out the largest one and hurried over to the door, looking in the window but it was too dark to see anyone inside, all she saw was the hallway that lead up to the elevators and the door that went into the stair well. Jamming her key into the lock it turned and she pulled the door open.

“Hello? Is someone there?” Kaige listened, but she couldn’t hear anything.

Stepping inside she made sure that the door secured shut behind her and turned her flash light on again, sweeping the beam in front of her path as she followed the hallway up to the elevator and then the front door that was locked and barricaded from the inside. If Kaige hadn’t believe it before, she knew for sure that there were people here.

Her boots sounded too loud as she ran back down the hall to the door that went into the stair well, once the light from the window outside was gone it was pitch black and she had no idea how anyone would be able to make it up or down these stairs without falling, Kaige had tripped and nearly fallen going down them many times and that was with lights on.

“Hello?” Kaige’s voice echoed in the stair well and carried her voice back to her but there was no other sound.

Beginning the ascent up the stairs Kaige reached the second floor and checked the door, it was locked.

When Kaige started working at Changes, Mike gave her a master key to every door so that if she was every working late or came in early she would be able to get into any part of the building that she needed to, most of the keys she’d never needed to use except for the back door, and in the light of her flash light she thumbed through the keys on her keyring looking for the one Mike had shown her so long ago. Eventually Kaige resorted to testing the keys in the door until she found the right one. After the fourth key the door unlocked, and she cautiously opened it, listening as the old hinges creaked and she softened her voice.

“Is anyone here?” Kaige asked, seeing sunlight pouring in from the windows she crept inside and began to look around. Yes, people were absolutely staying here because there were sleeping bags and pillows on the floor. Old food wrappers but no actual people. Maybe they were on another floor? Kaige went back out into the stair well and climbed up to the third floor, Changes finance team worked here, but it was empty with no evidence of people hanging around there. The room looked oddly empty and sad, waiting for its people to return and bring life into those walls again.

If there were people here, they had to be on the fourth floor. Suddenly, the thought occurred to her that what if the little boy she saw was the only one left and he was here all alone and hiding because he was scared. Surely, he’d know that the zombies didn’t talk, they couldn’t form sentences, they weren’t intelligent creatures. They held vague memories of their human life, Kaige knew that much, because before all of the people that lived next door, one of her neighbors had become infected and his corpse kept returning every day, aimlessly wandering around the building and in the street. But they couldn’t comprehend more than that, at least she thought.

Returning to the stair well, Kaige began to climb them, and stopped at the landing when she saw the door to the fourth floor. She needed to be cautious, if the boy was afraid he might hide from her and if there were others there, they also might attack her. Kaige had seen end of the world movies where they didn’t like new comers, it didn’t matter that humans were dying out, you were encroaching on their territory and they would do whatever it took to protect it.

Kaige really hoped that this wasn’t the case with whatever was waiting for her behind that door as she stuck the key inside and turned the knob, holding her breath she pushed the door open and looked around. Seeing the lobby was such a surreal sensation, it didn’t look any different than it had on any other regular day, but its appearance didn’t tell the viewer anything about what the world had gone through. It was almost heartbreakingly dull.

“Is anyone up here?” Kaige slowly stepped inside, her hand gripping the handle of her bat out of instinct as the door clicked shut behind her and as the silence filled her ears, suddenly, she heard whispers.

[There we have it, chapter three of the first draft of my new work in progress zombie conspiracy novel. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you want to catch up the last two previous chapters, just click that Patreon button at the top of my navigation bar and you will instantly be transported to my patreon page. Remember to like and share and support if you can.]

XX Cassandra