It wasn’t a pleasant walk, even aside from the need to defend ourselves.
There’d been corpses on the ground even inside the lobby. More littered the road and sidewalk in front of the airport, but at least the cars in the area were all empty of human beings. Anyone who’d been within sight of the terminal doors had made a break for them - successfully or not. Our group avoided the bodies when we could, but it wasn’t always feasible. I covered my mouth when I had to pass close, trying not to breathe in the scent of sour meat and sewage.
We’d peeked into the cars as we went, pausing to smash their windows if anything inside looked useful. That had scored our group a few flats of water bottles, a bag of golf clubs, and three locked gun cases. The locks had succumbed to Kurt’s power and opened up… but disappointingly, the guns weren’t firing.
“They can’t all be busted!” John said in dismay.
A muscular-looking young man had one of the guns apart in minutes. “Don’t think it’s the guns. This one’s been well-maintained and nothing looks warped or busted. I think the bullets are hosed.”
Disappointment and disbelief delayed us for only a little while. We brought the guns along - some people hoped we could get them working later - but the visible monsters in the distance discouraged us from dawdling.
The road sloped downward a little ways after it left the terminal, meeting up with the rising hill of the ground beneath us. We started seeing cars that weren’t empty, where people hadn’t made a break for the safety of the airport.
Most of them were dead.
It was weird seeing them. The other corpses I’d seen recently had clear, visible injuries. Some had been mangled to the point where they looked more like ground beef than a person.
These… didn’t. They looked almost normal. You could tell the skin tones were off on some, especially on people with the palest skin - they looked too white, or flushed, or mottled with heat rash - but it was wrong in a way that said “really sick” rather than “obviously dead.” Blacks or Asians? Some had faces drawn tightly in pain or discomfort, but many just appeared to be sleeping. If their windows were shut tight - keeping in any bad smells - it was easy to believe they weren’t dead at all, and some people refused to go on until we’d opened doors or broken windows to check.
A severe-looking woman threw a fit the fifth time this happened. “This is a waste of time and energy. These people died of heatstroke; I’m a doctor, and I’m certain! Everyone still in their cars died of heatstroke. There is no way anyone could have survived a full day inside a car in the summer heat without air conditioning.”
This set off a loud argument that only stopped when a door opened on a car fifty feet down the road and a man stumbled out. Immediately, two monsters from farther off beelined for him, and our people quickly gunned them down.
“See?” yelled John, triumphantly. “We can’t just abandon people. Some of them lived!”
The doctor paled. “No… it’s impossible. Everyone would have died.”
“Is he a zombie?” someone asked.
I wasn’t the only person to shake my head in irritation… then pause to give the figure stumbling toward us a second look. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing to have happened in the past day.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Are you alive?”
“Yes.” His voice was weak, almost inaudible.
“That’s impossible!” the doctor snapped. She strode forward, away from the group. “You should be dead. The heat should have killed you. How did you survive?”
I hoped that whatever job the doctor had, it didn’t involve a lot of patient-to-physician interaction. Bedside manner clearly wasn’t her strong point. The tired man didn’t seem to mind her sharp tone, wrapping his arms around her in a hug that was clearly half relief, half need for support. “Took… an ability. Got any water?”
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Grimacing, the doctor shifted the man’s arm across her shoulder and supported him as they crossed the rest of the distance. One of the water bottles we’d rescued from a vehicle was passed forward, and the man took it gratefully, taking the lid off and clearly getting ready to chug.
The doctor grabbed his arm. “Small sips. I don’t know what this ability is, but normal humans must drink very slowly when dehydrated.”
The man took a small sip, cowed by the doctor’s stern gaze. “Probably me too, then. I still need water, I just handle the heat much better. That’s what I took. Biological Augment: Temperature Tolerance.”
After that, we broke open every car, but the man we’d found was the exception, rather than the rule. He wasn’t the only exception - we found two others who’d adapted their bodies in a similar way, and a woman who’d survived by blocking off all her windows with towels and a solar shield, then using an ability to lower the temperature - but the majority of the people we found were, uh, post-vital.
It was a relief when the time came to turn away from the road and trek across the fields. To take a deep breath and smell only grass. To look around and see clearly in all directions, with no vehicles for monsters to hide under or behind.
I lifted my hand to shade my eyes. In the distance was the building we were heading for, but a sprawling parking lot stood in our path.
Detouring around it would be trivial. It wouldn’t even add much time to our journey… but I’d seen how much water we’d snagged so far; not enough. Not close to enough. Maybe one bottle for every five people?
There might be ample water in the building ahead, but if there wasn’t, I doubted we’d be able to get people back here, in the “wrong direction.” And who knew what the next building would hold, or the one after? The ValuCo building was our holy grail, but I only had the word of a few locals that it even existed. There was no way of telling how long it would take us to get there.
It would have been nice if we could have gotten the giant mass of people to safety and gone back out with a more disciplined, competent team. Davi, Byron, and all of TAF seemed to be able to handle themselves well. I’d spotted a few others that were moving with more confidence and competence than the average chump in the crowd…
But there were too many enemies.
Even if most of those with us were useless schlubs, we needed the numbers they provided. I was already soaked in sweat and feeling tired; if I’d had to fight constantly, I’d have been exhausted. The onslaught we’d faced when we first stepped outdoors would have overwhelmed a smaller group. Maybe it took twenty incompetent mooks to take down one of these overgrown tailless rats, but we had hundreds of incompetent mooks.
What’s the quote? “Quantity has a quality all its own.” Not a very American idea - we think a hundred million is a reasonable price for a fighter plane - but it’s not wrong, I guess.
So when someone raised the idea of dodging around the parking lot, I was ready.
“Nope!” I sang out loudly. I didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even look back. Kept marching. “Stick to the plan.”
People around me had paused when the question was raised, but as a gap opened up between me and them, they scurried to fill it. The front line changed shape slightly as I took the lead, but no one was willing to be left behind.
Twinkles nodded. “I’m sure there’s water in some of those cars. We need that. We found some, but not even close to what we need for hundreds of people. Unless we get more abilities and turn ourselves into camels or some shit, we’re gonna need hydration.”
One of Twinkles’ teammates shoved him. “That wouldn’t help, you dope. Camels store water, they don’t make it. They still gotta drink it.”
"There might be people alive in those cars, who still need our help, too," Davi said.
Maybe I’m an asshole, but Davi’s point seemed kind of dumb. We’d left thousands behind in the airport, and we’d turned away from who-knows-how-many-more when we left the road.
I didn’t let any of those thoughts show, taking my hand off my staff to flash them a thumbs-up. “Absolutely. We shouldn’t change the plan now.”
Not everyone agreed. I could hear arguments starting up, but they started up behind me. I kept moving. Davi kept moving. TAF kept moving. Even the people complaining kept moving, not willing to be left behind.
They argued every step of the way, but the whole group followed us into the parking lot.