“Roger!” Elliott called over his right shoulder. He wasn’t there. He looked over his left and saw Roger, still running pell- mell forward and firing at anything that shambled.
“What?” he bellowed back.
Elliott backhanded a zombie and winced at the sickening splat it made. It left goo on his hands too, but amazingly that was the least of his worries. They were getting too close for comfort.
“Rog, do you not see what I don’t see?”
Even in the midst of fighting for their lives he cast a sardonic look at Elliott. “Do I not understand a word you just said?”
“Rog,” Elliott growled.
“If you mean there’s no plane, my boy, then yes, I’m well aware.”
“What do we do?” Junie asked, jogging up beside him. Sweat was dripping off her brow but she was still be going strong, her arms pumping as she ran.
“What we do not do, is stop running!” The shout came from behind them. McNabb was head down and barreling forward like a bull, and he blew past them, firing his pistol and re-loading on the fly. Fipps gawped at him.
“How the hell…?”
“Ran track!” McNabb called back, throwing an elbow and knocking a zombie off to the side.
“With a pistol?”
“Just keep running!”
“General,” Elliott panted. He was running out of breath, a painful stitch growing in his side and a burning in his lungs. However he didn’t stop, fear forcing him onward. “General, there’s no plane! What do we do?”
General McNabb fired his pistol with one hand, each one eliminating an enemy with prejudice. With his other hand he pointed at a building near the airfield. It was about three hundred yards away. “Get to the other side of that building. There might be something back there!”
“Something?” Fipps questioned again. He pumped his long legs and nearly caught up with the sprinting general. “Something that flies? Something that explodes? Could you be more specific?” The tall man didn’t seem to be winded at all.
As Fipps came abreast of the general, casting him a disparaging look as he did, the general cocked out an elbow. It was a well-directed blow, nudging Fipps’ hip just enough to knock him a little sideways but not off his feet.
“First and only warning, kid,” the general said. “Lay off. Now isn’t the time.”
Elliott was surprised to see the glint of true fury in Fipps’ normally placid eyes.
He put his head down and focused on the building McNabb had indicated. There was no guarantee that anything they could use would be there but they were quickly running out of options. Spot and Pat seemed to agree with McNabb as well, heading the pack dodging and ducking through undead legs.
In the back of his mind, a shadow of fear still lurked. Was Shavian still alive? He’d left her no more than half an hour ago but in zombie apocalypse time was eternity. Anything could have happened by now. Though he ran towards escape, he knew he still wouldn’t willingly leave without her. He would get her back to safety, where ever that was, if it was the last thing he did.
Too busy with his thoughts, he almost didn’t notice their path had cleared. The zombies were many but they’d broken through. They’d run straight through the crowd and they weren’t fast enough to catch them. He glanced behind them at the horrible, blundering, mass; if they tired, they’d be dead.
“Don’t slow down,” Roger called to him. “We have to keep going, my boy!” Elliott hadn’t even realized he had slowed his pace; he pushed himself forward striving to keep up with McNabb.
As they passed the corner of the building, Elliott reached out a hand and tagged it like he’d reached base in tag. They rounded the building and then pulled up short on the other side, staring at their salvation.
There was a helicopter there, untouched and ready to go… they hoped.