Project Airborne

By Cassandra Johnson

Mass deaths consumed the country, spreading far and wide like a wild fire after a global pandemic brought the population to its knees. 

On August 8th, 2019 something happened - though the answers as to what it was or why it happened no one had a chance to answer. Men, women and children simply dropped in the street, driving their cars, or grabbing themselves a cup of coffee to help them get through the last grind of their busy day.

Was this a bold new terrorist attack formulated by a foreign enemy or was it something domestic that no one saw coming? Whatever the case, those who found a means to survive had a new threat to worry about.

The dead, did not stay dead.

Kaige Banks found herself alone in a world that she did not recognize and she didn't know what was worse - to be the last living human and die alone or be consumed by the living dead that now roamed the streets in feral packs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cassandra Johnson
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393524885

Cassandra Johnson

Growing up in the deep south I was taught some precious life lessons; you should always answer with Ma'am or Sir, tea that isn't sweet and iced is blasphemy, and that you catch a lot more flies with sugar than you do with vinegar. I was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas but I was raised in the small town of Marion, Arkansas a short fifteen-minute drive from Memphis, the birthplace of rock and roll. While it may not seem like an accomplishment to some, I am proud to say that I was a published author before the age of thirty and I have many more books left in my head to share with the world. My first novel, LRR Hood is a twist on the classic Little Red Riding Hood fable, and I currently have two more books lined up for a trilogy series of the main character, Elle Marshal's dramatic encounter with werewolves, one of my favorite mythical creatures. My writing continued to evolve from the time I was a teenager, getting involved in text-based roleplay games where my friends and I would create storyboards where we each contributed to the story through the eyes of the character's we chose to write for. I also love fan-fiction and was an avid reader and still am to this day. I decided to throw my hat in the ring and write some of my own fanfictions until eventually, I wanted to work with characters that were my own. From those days I continued to write short stories that never reached the public until I was introduced to Kindle Direct Publishing because while I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to publish my work, I never truly believed that anyone would publish my writing and I now have a work in progress list as long as my arm, and it continues to grow every day, LRR Hood won't be the last you hear from me.

Book preview

1.

The light was slowly filtering into the room from the small holes and cracks in the cheap plywood and boards that covered the windows from the inside of the small apartment. Kaige hung the curtains backup for the sake of normalcy in a world so dramatically changed.

The cold was what pulled Kaige from her dark dream world. Even in her sleep, she couldn’t escape the nightmarish events. Kaige’s plants didn’t have a fighting chance against the freezing temperature and the fire had gone out hours ago while she slept.

Rolling over with a muffled groan of pain, the mornings were always the worst part of the day. Kaige fully understood the days when the pain was so severe that her mother couldn’t get out of bed. Patsy always said she hoped that Kaige didn’t develop lupus too, but Kaige knew without a doubt that she had, in the early years, many researchers said that it wasn’t hereditary, but that changed.

Feeling around on the bedside table, she picked up her watch and pressed the button that lit up the face. It was 6:24 AM.

Positioning herself so that she was leaning on her elbow, Kaige opened the bottle of Percocet and dug one pill out. Swallowing it with the water from her water bottle she laid back down and closed her eyes, praying that the pain went away soon and again thought of how smart it was when she raided that Walgreen's pharmacy before the world went completely down the shit can. There was no way for her to loot without being attacked, because back then, it wasn’t the cops you were afraid of, in fact, they didn’t even care what you were doing if you stayed out of their way.

The only way to adequately describe what the pain felt like, was like being wrapped in barb wire. Lying in bed, thirty minutes passed before the pain began to subside and she was able to push her blankets away.

These days Kaige got into bed with as many layers of clothes and blankets as possible because while the room was warm from the fire, eventually the flames died down and the cold began to creep in and take hold.

Why couldn’t the weather be sixty for a day, that was the norm that Kaige knew growing up in Arkansas. She was used to it being cold for a couple of days, and then it would warm up to the point that she and her mother had to turn on the air conditioner, but thus far, this year it hadn’t been that way. Maybe climate had something to do with the problems they were having now?

One thing Kaige still wasn’t used to in this new world where she was all alone, was the silence. It was like someone hit the mute button and turned all the sound on the planet off. No tenants in the other apartments starting their day. No dogs barking or a bird chirping. No traffic on the street, horns honking as they tried to get to work on time. Just the deafening silence that swallowed the world.

Wrapped in her fleece robe, Kaige shuffled from her bedroom into the living room of the two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment and turned on her flashlight, letting the tiny bulb illuminate the living room in a ghostly blue glow.

First things first she needed to light the fire. Four years ago, when Kaige and her mother moved into the place she never thought that she would be using the fireplace and why would she when there was warm, delicious, central heating? Kaige never imagined the events that would take place in the world for her to cherish the light and warmth of those flickering flames.

Tossing three logs into the grate, she packed in a piece of magazine paper, good luck sending a collection agency after her for those payments now. Scooting closer to the hearth, Kaige lit the paper on fire with her mom’s old zippo lighter knowing full well that one of these days she just might accidentally light herself on fire. Shivering, Kaige sat back and watched the flames grow and lick up the dry wood.

Once the room began to come to a comfortable temperature, Kaige started to think about what she wanted for breakfast. Coffee was absolutely a must, so while she thought about what she could use to nourish her body further, she put the kettle on. Filling it with water before using a fireplace poker to push it into the flames.

It wouldn’t be long now, and she would have hot water for her coffee and a bath.

Going to the kitchen, she got her mug and inspected the supply of powder creamer. There were only three left and Kaige didn’t like seeing her supply getting so low. She would need to leave the safety of the apartment today, something she didn’t like doing. Hugging herself, she went back to the fire and took the kettle out, using a mitten to pick up the handle and pour the steaming water into the mug with a Folgers Single coffee bag, Kaige had found them invaluable in these times. Dunking it around, she poured the rest of the hot water into a five-gallon jug that initially was intended for spraying weed killer, she found it in the storage room of the maintenance shed. It was empty when she saw it, but she cleaned it anyway, and now it was a part of her morning routine, the zombie apocalypse was bad enough with the sickening stench of the dead roaming the streets without adding your own body odor into the mixture. Kaige didn’t relish the thought of walking around smelling like a Rotter. They were the worst smelling by far because of their festering, puss filled sores. You knew when one of the rotten ones had been nearby just by the smell alone.

Before the water could get too cold on her, Kaige drug the storage tub that she used as her bath in front of the fireplace and stripped her clothes off.

Kaige was aware that by bathing every day she was probably making herself a prime target to the zombies if she could smell them, what if they could smell her? It was merely a theory that she had that crossed her mind every time she pumped water from the spray nozzle, but wasn’t she allowed to keep small luxuries, especially when they came so rarely?

Drying off quickly, Kaige climbed out of the storage tub and poured creamer into her coffee mug, drinking the piping hot liquid to help warm her as she got dressed.

Emptying the washtub out she then sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, wondering what happened, why did it happen, was it like this everywhere and not for the first time she found herself wondering if she was the last living person left in the world.

2.

With her morning routine finished, Kaige sat in front of the fire, letting her spaghetti-o’s digest. The order of the day was scouting for supplies. Lighting a cigarette there were two left in the pack, that would need to go on the list of supplies. Kaige needed to find another store that she hadn’t depleted of resources.

Taking the notepad and pen from the coffee table, she opened it to a fresh page. After a near scrape with one of the rabid zombies Kaige was prepared not to put herself in that situation again, she didn’t know if any, way to describe them from other zombies than they were like rabid dogs, they didn’t stop for anything unless you put them down. It was like they got your scent up their noses and it drove him wild until they had a taste of you –or more accurately, until they ripped you apart.

Kaige didn’t even have a gun, she had to fight her way out of that bathroom at Papi’s Corner Store with nothing but her baseball bat after being stuck there for six hours while that rabid beast tried to find a way inside, and after all that she didn’t even come to the right place. She was searching for canned goods and she had cleaned the store out months ago.

Now, Kaige kept a list of all the stores in the surrounding area that she’d gotten all the resources she could from.

Smoke slowly flared from her nostrils as she trained the spotlight of her flashlight onto the paper, reading her scribbled handwriting. Papi’s was empty for food and cigarettes, the reason being was because it was the closest store to her apartment and for the longest time that was the only place, she felt safe going.

Okay, stop wasting day light. Kaige told herself and crawled off the floor.

Standing, she went to the living room window, peeking through some of the cracks in the boards, a ritual that occurred several times a day. Kaige looked outside to see what the street looked like, which wasn’t always easy. Her apartment was at the back of the building with the landlord’s unit in front of hers, facing the street. From Kaige’s apartment she could see the shrubs, sidewalk and the chain link fence that went around the front of the building. Kaige could even see the cars parked out on the shoulder of the road, but beyond that she couldn’t detect any movement and that was the most important part of whether she left her home or not.

After the first couple of months she started to see the differences between the lame brains, the infected ones that she called the Rotter’s and the rabid zombies.

The rotten ones seemed to roam around on their own, for the most part lame brains were just generic zombies, they were usually in packs which made them dangerous in their own right because if you got caught in a pack of them, there was nowhere else to go once they surrounded you –the odds of being able to fight your way out were slim to none, and surprisingly for such slow moving creatures when they locked onto a target that could surround you pretty quick. Rabid zombies seemed to stay close to the pack’s and Kaige had seen them attack other zombies before.

Kaige was lucky there wasn’t a whole pack of the normal ones around when she encountered that rabid one at Papi’s, otherwise she was sure she wouldn’t have survived.

The fact that the street looked relatively empty from her windows was a good sign because if she saw too many roaming around, Kaige was screwed for leaving the apartment.

Putting on her jacket, hat and scarf Kaige strapped her backpack on and put her keys in her pocket before unlocking the back door and stepped across the hallway, using her keys to unlock her landlord’s apartment. Since their passing Kaige hadn’t changed anything after they were put under the ground. It was all left as if the unit was waiting for them to come home from a day of shopping at the market.

Walking through the kitchen, she went into the bedroom and looked out of the window, the street was clear.

Leaving their apartment Kaige locked the door on her way out just out of habit and went down the six steps to the ground level door.

Arming herself with her trusty baseball bat Kaige heaved the heavy exterior door open and stuck her head out looking around.

With no signs of life, Kaige cautiously slipped outside.

To her strained ears hearing her boots scraping on the sidewalk pavement was so disturbing, only second to the discomfort she felt when examining how thick and heavy the clouds looked overhead.

Snow’s coming. Kaige murmured, perching at the front gate and looked left and right again. Still no signs of movement, but when she considered it, the activity had slowed down to a trickle since the cold months began, but Kaige still couldn’t bring herself to throw caution to the window. That was just asking for trouble. Like being trapped in Papi’s bathroom while a rabid zombie tried to break down the door trouble.

Lifting the gate latch Kaige stepped out onto the sidewalk and closed the gate, once more her eyes scanned the street looking for something that might be a danger to her, but she saw no one. No birds, no stray dogs or cats, Kaige couldn’t even remember the last time she killed a spider. It was like every living creature from humans to creepy crawly things knew that something was amiss in this world and they wanted to part of it.

Kaige knew that there were several stores on the same street as her old office building, but she hadn’t gone to the office or even in that general direction in months. She could stock up as much as her backpack could carry and hopefully get back home before the snow started coming down.

She hadn’t considered going in that direction solely because there were so many packs swarming the streets.

Looking at the sky, Kaige felt her stomach begin to knot with anxiety as she started walking, her blue eyes darting cautiously over the road ahead of her. Kaige decided to take the back road, the last time she saw the interstate it was on the news and it was bumper to bumper traffic with people trying to get out of the city –the news reports kept Kaige inside her apartment. The epidemic was global, what good would it do for her to try to run? Little Rock was a disaster area. Just trying to get through the traffic in town would have been hopeless much less the interstate, and what if her car broke down?

She would have been a perfect target.

There were just so many of them that law enforcement was completely overwhelmed, there were no safe places anymore, better to just hole-up where you were and hope for the best or a quick death.

The back roads seemed like the best option now, but Kaige was still apprehensive. What if she was wrong?

Swallowing her fear, Kaige forced herself to keep walking and be extra observant to her surroundings. Listening, she heard nothing, and she smelled nothing which she took as a good omen.

Within the residential areas of metropolitan Little Rock, Kaige lived on the ghetto side, her old office building was somewhere in the middle. It wasn’t in a bad area, but it was no way near the posher side of town either. Where Kaige lived there were mostly multi-family homes that scaled three hills, Kaige’s neighborhood was at the very bottom of the third hill and just over the crest of the hill where she lived, there was a park the size of Central Park in New York. This would have been easier if she had a way to get her car out of the garage, but four other cars blocked the garage and people had parked in front of the driveway blocking access to the street. Kaige reminded herself as she stopped to rest for a second, that even if she could get her car out of the garage, she hadn’t started it in months and the battery was probably dead, much less the conditions of the road were probably impossible to drive through, especially in her tiny car.

Now days, Kaige tried not to worry about things that she couldn’t control. Reaching the top of the hill, for as far as Kaige could see the park was clear, but a lone bicycle was abandoned on the bike trail that went around the city. Coming closer, the only thing she could safely assume was that there were brown, dried blood stains on the seat and the rider was long gone.

I hope God protects you, where ever you are. Kaige whispered. Offering up a small prayer that maybe the rider was somewhere better than this place.

Lifting it onto its wheels, Kaige tested they tires and they seemed to be in decent condition given that she didn’t know how long the bike had been laying there. Climbing aloft the seat, her toes barely touched the ground and she realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she rode a bike, she had to have been a kid. Moving the left pedal into position she started out wobbly, gaining her footing as she pedaled forward and straightened out as she rode into the street and picked up some speed, quickly leaving the park behind as she weaved through abandoned cars that dotted the winding, curving road that ran through the woods.

Kaige remembered taking this road to work every day and being terrified of the cars in the other line because they came around the curves in the road going sixty miles per hour taking up half the road. She would scream at other drivers to slow down and stay in their lane at least twenty times every morning before she made it to work. Even now, knowing that there were no cars coming, Kaige felt that fear bubbling up. Something about going around all the abandoned cars and riding through the woods not hearing any traffic or birds chirping made it even creepier when she was riding a bicycle. More so, having no answers was the worst part. As frightening as the world had become, not knowing why, it was enough to drive someone insane. What started all of this, and was this merely the first wave?

Rounding the corner Kaige screamed as a figure lurched out of the trees and onto the road, for a split second Kaige forgot how to use the hand breaks and she flung her legs out trying to stop herself before she lost control of the bike and crashed. The front tire of the bike slammed into the rear bumper of a car, throwing her forward into the back window of an old Camry.

Before Kaige could register the pain in her knee where she smashed into the handlebars of the bike, she heard it.

Scrambling, Kaige turned over and he was right there. Terror ceased her lungs as her heart began to beat faster. Ice surging through her veins, seeing the grayish-green rotting skin just hanging from the bone, puss and coagulated blood seeping from the bite and scratch marks around the neck and part of the jaw. Lunging at her, Kaige rolled, pulling the handle of her bat free from the inside of her backpack. Zombie Eye Joe stumbled, his head bouncing off the trunk of the car before Kaige swung with all her strength, cracking the bat across the back of the skull of the living dead man. Keeping him down, she kept wailing at its head until stinking black blood pooled out onto the ground. That was the first time she’d seen a rotter in a long time. If that thing had bitten her, she would have been done for.

Gasping for breath, the stench alone was enough to make her gag and she stumbled back a few steps trying to catch her breath, but the putrid stink followed her, wafting up from the corpse as its blood oozed like melted Jell-O from its broken skull. Cold sweat soaked through her clothes, it wasn’t moving and that was all she asked for. Shivering, even the thought that it had touched her made Kaige do the spastic heebie-jeebies dance.

Jumping back onto the bike Kaige pedaled as hard as she could.

3.

J esus! Slow down you moron! Kaige shouted over the morning news filling the cabin of her battered 2003 Ford Focus. Good old Bessie was still running on a wish and a promise after sixteen years and Kaige did baby the car as much as she possibly could.

It was 7:45 AM and she had fifteen minutes to get to work and once again, Kaige was almost side swiped by some shit hook who was speeding down the road that wound through and around the Pinnacle Mountain Park.

Shaking her head, Kaige hated this road for two reasons, one other driver seemed to get lead foot and jammed through it like they were on the interstate and two because some of the potholes were literally big enough to swallow her car. Seriously, where were all her cigarette taxes going? Because they damn sure weren’t being used to fix the roads. But, Kaige also hated sitting in traffic on the interstate, so for the three to five minutes she had to be on this road, she tightened her grip on the steering wheel and just deal with it while her butt was sewing button holes in the seat the whole time.

Turning off the road, the next seventeen traffic lights between her and the parking garage of her office building laid straight ahead of her. Kaige stopped at the first red light, watching as the middle school kids hustled across the street, their random happy chatter lost in the overhead drone of aircraft carriers.

Tilting her head up to see the sky, Kaige noticed there were a lot of planes in the sky this morning while she didn’t actually see the planes themselves, they left evidence of their flight pattern behind in the form of those white exhaust trails in the clouds running parallel to each other, streaking the horizon for as far as her eyes could see.

Wonder where they are all going? Kaige asked herself, she’d never been on a plane before, Kaige never flew anywhere because she had never been on a vacation, thus she always made up stories in her head about the exotic locations that the people on the planes were headed to.

New and strange places like Florida, where the bugs were the size of cows, or so she’d heard. Or Salem, Massachusetts.

Kaige remembered saving once as a kid to go to Disney in Florida and her mom had saved around two thousand dollars by putting up twenty dollars every week into their piggy bank, but then the truck broke down and they had to use all the money they saved and then some. As a kid, Kaige didn’t understand, but now as an adult she got it.

Maybe she could start saving for a nice trip now? Barring that nothing happened, one of those Murphy’s law things.

Kaige had a decent job and she got two weeks of paid vacation time every year. Plus, ten sick days that didn’t cut into her vacation time, so she never used that two weeks. She came to work, and she went home, that was her normal. Kaige could go somewhere that she and her mom always talked about, but just never really had the money to do.

From behind, a car horn sounded signaling Kaige that the light had turned green and it was time to stop day dreaming.

Giving the driver behind her a little wave, Kaige drove on, still thinking about the planes as the traffic on a Tuesday morning flowed, taking people to their jobs.

Reaching the office, Kaige was ten minutes early, she always was. The mere suggestion of being late gave her anxiety, which to hear some of her co-workers tell it, that was normal. Not the fear of being late, but the anxiety was a natural part of the human experience. A normal amount of anxiety was a great motivator.

Morning, Zach. Kaige was hurrying up the steps right behind one of the therapists. He was an older, slightly eccentric man, but always friendly, if he though even for a second that you hesitated in your reply, he would make time in his day to check up on you. Something Kaige fought both endearing and embarrassing because there were some personal issues you didn’t always want to talk about.

Good morning, Miss Banks. Zach always reminded Kaige of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.